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Anticipation or Apprehension?

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In his bestselling book Behave, Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsy says that anticipation requires learning. (That appears to be more the case for some personality types than others, but casual observation suggests that quite a few people have some degree of difficulty with anticipation.)

I think the learning needs to begin with making a distinction between anticipation and expectation, two states that are oriented toward a future event and tend to be used interchangeably, thus muddying the waters considerably.

Expectation is the sense that something is about to happen. We can expect positive, negative, or neutral things to occur. The unconscious part of our brain, System 1, is continuously predicting the immediate future so it can determine what actions we should take next, and those predictions sometimes give rise to conscious, System 2, expectations. Of course sometimes the predictions bypass consciousness and go directly to motor neurons that control movement.

For our purposes, it makes sense to view expectation as essentially a functional process.

Anticipation, on the other hand, is a feeling of excitement and pleasure about something we expect will occur, especially in the near future.

The opposite of anticipation would be apprehension, also a feeling, but one of fear, anxiety, unease—even dread—about something we expect will occur in the future.

Anticipation is associated with excitement; apprehension is associated with anxiety. While excitement has positive connotations and anxiety has negative connotations, these two states are not as different from each other as they might appear. In fact, the difference is primarily a matter of interpretation.

Name that Emotion!

Both excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states with similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. Certainly context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) contributes to our interpretation of it. But some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

So the first thing to focus on in learning how to anticipate is your experience of this emotional state and your interpretation of it.

Central to both experience and interpretation is the concept of emotional granularity, which means putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity. But as psychology professor Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who coined the term, says:

Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely. 

The more precisely we can identify and recognize our emotions, the faster and more accurate our brain will be in assessing circumstances to determine the most appropriate response. The payoff for the brain (System 1) is efficiency. The payoffs for us (System 2) are numerous, including more nuanced interpretations of our feeling states, greater ability to identify our desired outcomes, enhanced experience, and improved critical thinking and decision-making.

Your Mental (Conceptual) Model

How does the brain figure out what any collection of bodily sensations means? Most likely it does the same thing with internal sensations that it does with external sensations: it makes something up, i.e. it constructs. The brain is continually constructing our experience in—and of—the world based on our mental model, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and what it all means.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. —Lisa Feldman Barrett

Although we operate under an assumption that emotions have some sort of independent existence and are “triggered” by events and experiences, this does not appear to be the case. The brain, which always goes for the path of least resistance, is merely making the easiest and fastest interpretation it can make so it can determine what action to take. We are not passive experiencers of our emotions even though we may believe ourselves to be. In actuality, the more often we interpret a set of bodily sensations as a particular emotion, the likelier we are to keep interpreting it that way.

Get Granular

I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. In addition to her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett has a great article and TED talk on how to increase emotional granularity, which I highly recommend.

But as a quick example of the concept, here’s an excerpt from a 2018 article in lucidwaking that involves moving from the non-granular general feeling bad to the first distinction of angry/mad (as opposed to sad or anxious, for example), and then fine-tuning that feeling to a permutation of angry/mad, such as:

resistant … belligerent … offended … agitated …  indignant … resentful … irritated … furious … cranky … annoyed … perturbed … enraged … hostile … huffy … wrathful

You can also check out this feeling vocabulary chart to train yourself to detect more nuanced emotions.

The bottom line is that you aren’t entirely at the effect of your brain’s habitual interpretations of your emotional state. Sometimes apprehension is an apt emotional interpretation of a situation or set of circumstances. But if apprehension is always your interpretation of that set of sensations, you are letting your brain off easy, which may feel comforting but limits your options and your possibilities. (Bad brain!)

OK, one more post on anticipation and delayed gratification.View the previous two posts here and here.

More Is Definitely More

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In April, I abruptly decided to re-start my strength training program. It turned into a series of intentions with a nearly perfect reward structure that includes craving, anticipation, and more-ness, for lack of a better word. I’d like to say it was all on-purpose, but some of it was accidental.

My initial intention was to complete three sessions a week for three weeks, and to get a reward for doing precisely that. If I failed to get three sessions in during any of those weeks, my three week period would start over. I don’t watch much TV, but I recently discovered a show I liked that was cancelled but had 10 seasons on DVD. So I set the season one DVD as my reward. The whole thing was more an experiment than anything else.

Craving

It turned out I really wanted that first DVD! One day when I felt I might be better off not exercising, I considered the possibility of having to start the three weeks over, thus delaying the reward, and decided I wasn’t willing to take that chance. I ended up doing fine, which was informative and gratifying.

I also really like how I feel when I’m doing strength training, and I began to crave that sense of energy and wellbeing, which started paying dividends in other areas.

When I got the first reward, it was more enjoyable than I expected. That’s what’s known technically as a reward prediction error, and it releases even more dopamine.

Anticipation

I look forward to tracking my progress each session, to completing another series of exercises, and to getting closer to my reward. During my second three-week period, I saw that the season two DVD might not be available on the day I completed the 9th session. I could have ordered it then to be “safe,” and put it away until I’d earned it. I have enough willpower to resist. But I realized I would miss out on the anticipation—and that would have felt like a deprivation.

Right now, I’ve finished watching season one and am awaiting the arrival of season two, which I’m really anticipating due to the cliffhanger ending of the last episode!

When you enjoy anticipation, the waiting provides a cascade of feel-good neurochemicals. Of course, while I’m anticipating receipt of the second season, I’ve begun working toward the third.

More

Well, obviously I want all the seasons of this TV show. The best case scenario is that I complete 30 consecutive weeks of three sessions per week, so that’s what I’m aiming for. (Since I recently hit my 1,000th consecutive day of walking, this new intention seems more doable than it might have previously.) I doubt I will become habituated to this reward because there’s always something new going on in the show. Each season is different. Plus I don’t binge-watch the episodes but enjoy one or two at a time.

And there’s more involved in the strength training as I move up to heavier weights and more reps. There’s even more in being able to get (by which I mean righteously justify the purchase of) the next set of weights. And of course, there’s more in continuing to feel better and have more energy.

The Alternate Route

I could watch this show on Netflix, if I still had Netflix, whenever I want to. But that isn’t even remotely appealing to me. By connecting the show with something I want to do and having to wait to enjoy it until I’ve completed the actions, ordered the DVD, and collected it from my mailbox, it has a much bigger impact than it would if all I had to do was turn on the TV. [fyi, I can state this as a fact because I’ve had both experiences, and there’s no contest.] And since I am collecting the DVDs, I’ll not only be able to watch them in the future, I’ll also be reminded of what I achieved in order to earn them. That reinforces the sense of accomplishment and personal agency

Some Unexpected Outcomes

I said I don’t watch much TV, but since undertaking this experiment I don’t watch any TV at all.

The two physical activities I haven’t been able to engage in during the past 5+ years of multiple heart conditions are hiking and dancing. Last year, just before Covid restrictions were put into place, I set up a program to see if I could get myself into shape to hike. But hiking was not in the cards last year, and without that to look forward to, I let the program slide.

Dancing is something I used to do in between sets of strength training exercises, before and after classes, or just spontaneously whenever. Every time I tried it the past few years, I immediately got out of breath, so I stopped trying. But now…I can dance!  And it occurs to me that the dancing might be a better means of getting in shape for hiking than anything else.

I see that I’m getting different rewards for different aspects of this program, which makes it more interesting and compelling to my brain.

Motivation

I actually enjoy strength training, appreciate the increase in vitality and wellbeing I get from it, and understand and value the benefits (mental, physical, and emotional). There are a lot of good reasons to do it. But it’s anticipation of the rewards that increases the likelihood I’ll continue with this program instead of letting other things get in the way.

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine “binds” the value of a reward to the resulting work. —Robert Sapolsky

And that makes all the difference in the world!

Coming up next: an investigation into learning how to anticipate.

Double Your Pleasure…
by Waiting for It

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The most interesting and frustrating encounters I have with people tend to be based on their reaction to the implications of the brain’s reward system. Regardless of anyone’s individual attitude about it, though, the reward system is a biological fact. So we can either learn how to use it or we can let it use us.

It’s true that some personality types have an easier time with rewards than others. But in addition to that, let’s face it: Homo sapiens is a jaded lot these days. When we can get what we want when we want it—and do so regularly—waiting any amount of time for something can feel painful, like deprivation. We expect, and even require, immediate gratification.

In Behave, the Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky talks about the conundrum we’re in as a result of having access to stimulation of the brain’s reward circuitry, some of which is “at least a thousandfold higher” than anything previous humans experienced. Sure that includes drugs like fentanyl and cocaine, but it also includes processed sugar, which wasn’t readily available until the 18th Century.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top non-natural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task [emphasis mine]. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger.

The Molecule of More

Well, the brain has been referred to as an insatiable wanting machine, and dopamine—the primary agent of the brain’s reward system—isn’t called “the molecule of more” for nothing.

I’ve written and talked a lot about rewards and dopamine already, including the important role of craving in creating desirable habits or pursuing juicy desired outcomes. But it appears there’s a state to be mastered before craving can be put into play. That state is anticipation.

While craving is a powerful desire for something, anticipation is the condition of looking forward to it, especially with eagerness. Without the ability to anticipate, a craving will take you directly and immediately to the object or sensation. You will experience pleasure, but pleasure (aka liking) neurochemicals fade quickly, and then you’re right back to wanting.

For the record, I hate that Carly Simon song, but as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed anticipation: going to the beach, strawberry shortcake with real whipped cream, the next issue of a particular magazine, a picnic in the backyard, beginning—and finishing—a new piece of writing. When scientists talk about the pleasure evoked by anticipation, I totally get it. As Thomas Hardy wrote in The Return of the Native:

Pleasure not known beforehand is half-wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.

So it surprised me to discover that anticipation can have either neutral or even negative connotations for others. But it’s entirely logical that if you don’t enjoy anticipation, you will probably have a hard time delaying gratification. Sapolsky says that once your brain figures out what it gets rewarded for, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.

The Utility of Anticipation

Temporal discounting suggests that rewards are more attractive when they are imminent as opposed to when they are delayed. But this is not always the case. If you were the recipient of an Easter basket or bag of Halloween candy as a child, did you consume the contents quickly or did you moderate your consumption and delay gratification?

A paper published just last year in Science Advances describes a function called anticipatory utility, which counteracts temporal discounting:

An influential alternative idea in behavioral economics is that people enjoy, or savor, the moments leading up to reward. That is, people experience a positive utility, referred to as the utility of anticipation, which endows with value the time spent waiting for a reward. Anticipatory utility is different from the well-studied expected value of the future reward (i.e., a discounted value of the reward) in standard decision and reinforcement learning theory, where the latter’s utility arises solely from reward and not from its anticipation. Crucially, in the theory of anticipatory utility, the two separate utilities (i.e., anticipation and reward) are added together to construct the total value [emphasis mine]. The added value of anticipatory utility naturally explains why people occasionally prefer to delay reward (e.g., because we can enjoy the anticipation of eating a cake until tomorrow by saving it now), as well as a host of other human behaviors such as information-seeking and addiction.

The paper is a report of cutting-edge research conducted to test how the brain dynamically constructs anticipatory utility. Three different brain regions appear to be involved:

  1. the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which tracks the value of anticipatory utility
  2. the dopaminergic midbrain (DA), which enhances anticipation
  3. the hippocampus, which mediates the functional coupling of the vmPFC and the DA

Researchers suggest that the vmPFC and DA link reward information to the utility of anticipation, while a strong conceptual tie between the hippocampus, memory, and future imagination supports a suggestion from behavioral economics that the utility of anticipation relates to a vivid imagination of future reward [emphasis mine].

And that brings us smack into the arena of personality and personal operating systems. It explains why I find anticipation to be enjoyable and am therefore able to use future rewards effectively to alter my behavior. It’s not a skill I’ve developed. I’m just wired that way!

Coming up next: (1) my personal example of successfully employing and enjoying anticipation; (2) an investigation into learning how to anticipate.

Only Trouble Is Interesting

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If you write fiction, read fiction, or read books about how to write fiction, you know the one thing a story absolutely, positively must include is trouble and plenty of it. If you don’t have trouble—otherwise known as conflict—you don’t have a story. But why is conflict essential for capturing our attention?

This seems like a worthy question to ask given the fact that conflict isn’t something we actively seek out in our daily lives. As Janet Burroway says in Writing Fiction:

In life, conflict often carries a negative connotation, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting.

There’s no denying that trouble interests us. We start looking for it at a very young age—specifically at about one year. Much of children’s play is organized around big trouble, including homicide, kidnapping, and getting lost or trapped. And children’s nursery rhymes are riddled with violence. Many child psychology experts believe children’s play helps them develop social and emotional intelligence. In a sense, children are rehearsing for adult life. (Hopefully their actual adult lives will be a bit sunnier than the danger-filled lives they appear to be rehearsing for.)

That doesn’t exactly explain adults’ continued interest in looking for vicarious trouble, but it does jibe with research indicating that people who read fiction have better social skills than people who read mostly nonfiction.

Looking for Trouble

We humans are, to a great extent, operating with the same brain we had back when we were traversing the savannah—a brain which, as John Medina explains in Brain Rules, “appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment while in nearly constant motion.” Doesn’t that sound like the plot of any number of books, movies, TV shows, and even video games?

It should be noted that many of us aren’t fighting for our survival, don’t spend much time in unstable outdoor environments, and are rarely in nearly constant motion. Of course, we still get into trouble, in spite of or because of our best efforts, but our troubles are of a vastly different nature from the troubles of our distant ancestors. Could it be that we’re so intent on “entertaining” ourselves by stirring up all this harrowing pretend trouble because it simulates the kind—or at least degree—of trouble our brain is used to dealing with?

Everything that Happens Happens to Us

Based on neuroscience advances over the past 20-30 years, we now know that our brain doesn’t distinguish very well between actual experience and vicarious experience. It reacts the same whether we read about or watch something awful happen to a fictional character or actually see that same thing happen to a person in real life. Watching a fictional disaster unfold on the screen or the page elicits the same response in our brain that it would if it were happening to us—even though we know it isn’t actually happening. (First, of course, we have to suspend disbelief, but that isn’t difficult for us to do primarily because we’re prepared to find stories compelling.)

We anticipate how certain types of books or movies will make us feel. That’s why we select particular books to read or movies to watch. We know how we’re likely to react to a story described as a “tearjerker,” for example. Some genres, such as suspense, thriller, action, science fiction, and mystery, make us feel anxious, frightened, uneasy, sometimes even terrified. Yet we keep going back for more.

This is pretty fascinating in light of the fact that the prime directive of the brain is our survival. Why would a brain that is intent on our survival create all these fictional worlds filled with trouble, disaster, loss, horror, and even death—clear threats to survival—for us to experience as if they were actually happening to us?

We All Lived Happily Ever After

Stories are notable for how they help us learn and remember. One reason is that stories include emotion, and we’re more likely to remember something that has a strong emotional impact. The greater the conflict or trouble in a story, the more emotion we feel, and the more emotion we feel, the likelier we are to remember.

But remember what exactly? The ending! All stories have beginnings, middles, and endings, but we don’t remember beginnings and middles nearly as much as we remember endings. If a story has a happy—meaning emotionally satisfying—ending, we experience a burst of feel-good neurochemicals the gives us a rush of pleasure and also ensures that we will remember how things worked out: the dragon was slain, the day was won, the quest was completed, the boy got the girl, the challenges were overcome.

In the end, a problem related to some aspect of survival was solved. Something was learned about the way the world works and how the people in it function. And we survived to get into trouble another day, just like (some of) our distant ancestors.

So one possible answer to the question of what’s so interesting about conflict is that it isn’t the conflict per se that interests us—or interests our brain. It’s the resolution of the conflict. When the hero or heroine of a story faces big trouble and not only survives but even triumphs, we feel as if we did, too. And that feeling is definitely worth the roller-coaster ride it takes to get it.

Pointers for the Unsettled, Unsituated, and Uncertain

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Thanks to our brain we have a sense of a constant, relatively unchanging world. We’re pretty confident we can distinguish reality from unreality. In fact, we’re pretty confident about a lot of things. But neuroscientist Anil Seth refers to our perception of the world as a “controlled hallucination.” And theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser says we can thank our brain for tricking us into building a sense of the “real.”

The universe is in a constant state of flux. Since we are part of the universe, so are we. And just because we’re convinced that we experience reality as it is doesn’t make it so. Our brain regularly makes best guesses about what’s out there, based on its mental model of the world, and we aren’t in the habit of questioning its conclusions.

It’s no wonder we get tripped up by the unexpected, or stuck when we try to pin things down, or flummoxed when we turn out to be wrong. The remedy is to embrace being unsettled, unsituated, and uncertain because doing so is more effective, more powerful, more exciting, more interesting—and it’s actually based in reality.

Unsettled

We have these prior ways of seeing things and the brain likes that, likes closure, likes to be settled, and letting go of that requires a lot of mental energy. —Ray Land

The unconscious part of the brain prefers to make definitive statements and declarations because it wants to cut to the chase. It wants to figure out what’s what, who’s who, what’s going on, and what we should do about it. Any number of cognitive biases—mental shortcuts taken by the brain—are based on this drive to pigeonhole everything so we can move on. So:

  • Remember that life is dynamic and in a constant state of flux, not fixed or static.
  • Generate provisional assessments based on your current perspective, knowledge, and desired outcome, rather than seeking or accepting definitive statements.
  • Recognize that everything is a work-in-progress rather than a finished product.
Unsituated

Wandering aimlessly, trickster regularly bumps into things he did not expect. He therefore seems to have developed an intelligence about contingency, the wit to work with happenstance. —Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

Being situated means being located or established in one place and having a narrow perspective as a result. Being unsituated means putting ourselves in a position to expand our horizons and our understanding. Trickster is a good metaphor for being unsituated, as he can generally be found on the move and often far from home—on the road, at the crossroads, on the border or the boundary—pursuing one thing or another and encountering new sights and sounds. So:

  • Identify and actively pursue what you want as opposed to trying to reduce uncertainty.
  • Spend more time exploring what you don’t know than exploiting what you know.
  • Take on the role of a quester rather than the role of an expert.
Uncertain

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Our brain craves certainty and it really wants to be right—so much so that we can experience feeling uncertain and/or wrong as an actual threat to our survival. But aiming for certainty and being right are not part of the recipe for a satisfying and meaningful life. Certainty is often ephemeral, if not illusory. And being right is the booby prize. The recognition that we could be wrong, on the other hand, is downright liberating. So:

  • Remind yourself that you could be wrong instead of trying to prove that you’re right.
  • Evaluate feedback in terms of actions and outcomes rather than as self-judgment.
  • Always ask questions. Value good questions more than good answers.

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