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Is Santa Claus Coming to Town?

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I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to be ready while mulling over the implications of delayed gratification. But what came to mind was being a child and waiting for Christmas—more particularly, Christmas presents! The weeks leading up involved lots of thinking and dreaming about what I wanted; it was hard to choose from so many possibilities. Then there were the lists, written and rewritten. And once the die was cast, wondering what I would actually get and picturing opening those colorful wrapped packages.

Reminders were everywhere, stoking the imagination: Christmas carols on the radio and in stores, decorations inside and outside houses and other buildings, sending and receiving cards, Christmas trees, sugar cookies and other holiday treats.

Christmas was on December 25th every year; nothing I could do about that. And I would get what I got on that date; nothing I could do about that, either. Until the big day arrived, I was full of eager expectation, aka anticipation. Unlike with the concept of delayed gratification, there was no self-control involved, since I had little to no control over the contours of the holiday.

OK, I have to amend one of those statements. Theoretically, I had some control in that I was supposedly more likely to get what I wanted if I was “nice” than if I was naughty. According to the well-known song:

He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice

He being Santa Claus, of course. I don’t recall paying a price for not being “nice,” even though that word was probably not in my vocabulary. In any case, we could look at Christmas presents as rewards for good behavior, which is the way we use them now to get the brain to pay attention to what we want it to pay attention to.

No Stanford Marshmallow Experimenters Need Apply

Kiyohito Iigaya, the lead author of the paper published last year in Science Advances on the brain regions associated with anticipation (mentioned in this blog post) says:

Anticipation can probably drive us to prepare better for actual reward consumption so that we can get the most out of it. It’s also healthy—good for our mental health—to have something to look forward to. The reward is not physically here yet, but the brain somehow manages to create it in our mind.

When I hit upon a really good reward for myself, delaying getting it or consuming it is an entirely enjoyable experience that doesn’t involve any amount of self-control whatsoever. This makes sense because, other than the hippocampus—which is more or less keeping track of who we are—the brain regions involved in self-control and anticipation are not the same. (However, it also makes sense to me that having an ability to make use of anticipation might have a spillover effect on impulse control. Something to explore down the road.)

Double Your Pleasure (Redux)

All of this is to say that anticipation is not the same thing as delayed gratification. Although it’s possible the two concepts have become entangled for some, it’s important to recognize they are entirely different.

Anticipation amps up the potential pleasure of a future reward now, while delayed gratification (and self-control) minimize the potential pleasure of a future reward now. So if you want to develop your anticipation skills, focus on the pleasure, not on the delay.

Two experiments you can run (often—not just once):

  1. Think about any situations from the past when you experienced anticipation. Maybe they were like my Christmas example in which I didn’t have control over when I would receive the thing I wanted. That doesn’t matter because the point of the exercise is to recognize the feeling and the experience.
  2. Play with creating anticipation incrementally by waiting to do or get or consume something you want. During that time, think about the thing you want. Imagine doing or getting or consuming it. Focus on the pleasure you expect to feel. You can start with a few minutes and work up to hours or days.

Rewards are an essential component of lasting, significant behavior change. But rewards don’t work if you are unable to anticipate them. A bonus result from these experiments may be that you learn more about what you really derive pleasure from, which will give you good information about future rewards as you develop your anticipation skills.

I’ll leave you with this video of Melissa Hughes, author of Happy Hour with Einstein even though it features that Carly Simon song I hate (however, it was interesting to learn that Simon wrote it about Cat Stevens).

This is the fourth and “final” post on the topic of anticipation.

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.

The Anticipation Machine Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

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anticipationPhilosopher Daniel Dennett describes the human brain as an “anticipation machine.” He says that making future is the most important thing it does.

Most of us do not struggle to think about the future because mental simulations of the future arrive in our consciousness regularly and unbidden, occupying every corner of our mental lives. –Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Unfortunately, the process the brain uses—adding the past to the present to equal (predict) the future—is far from a fail-safe method for figuring out either what actually lies ahead or how we will feel should what we anticipate come to pass. Our “anticipation machine” creates what we experience as expectations: estimates or forecasts of future situations based on present or past experiences. Expectations are beliefs we have about what should happen or about the way things should or will be.

But the future is fundamentally different from the present; therefore, it isn’t something we can accurately imagine. Our images of the future are firmly lodged in the now, in what we already know and are familiar with. Our visions of what may be possible in the future are heavily constrained by what has already been—or rather, by the stories we’ve constructed about it. We’re not influenced by the past as much as we’re influenced by our stories about the past.

Who I am is the habit of what I always was and who I’ll be is the result. –Louise Erdrich

Not only is the future not the same as the present, but according to Daniel Gilbert, our future self is not the same as our present self (nor is our present self the same as our past self). Our future self may want nothing to do with the commitments our present self is busy making for it or the plans our present self is setting into motion at this very moment.

The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change. –Daniel Gilbert

But wait; there’s more.

We try to repeat those experiences that we remember with pleasure and pride, and we try to avoid repeating those that we remember with embarrassment and regret. The trouble is that we often don’t remember them correctly. –Daniel Gilbert

So the bottom line is that we don’t remember the past—which we’re basing quite a few of our expectations on—correctly, we’re no good at imagining what the future is going to be like, and we can’t accurately imagine how we’re going to react to future events when they do occur.

When we spy the future through our prospectiscopes, the clarity of the next hour and the fuzziness of the next year can lead us to make a variety of mistakes. –Daniel Gilbert

But that doesn’t stop us from believing we can predict the future or from feeling certain we know what will make us happy or satisfied once we’re living in it. Our brain, after all, does crave certainty.

We tend to accept the brain’s products uncritically and expect the future to unfold with the details—and with only the details—that the brain has imagined. –Daniel Gilbert

There’s simply no way to guarantee our future happiness. There’s no way to guarantee anything. But quite a bit of research suggests that one of the biggest things that gets in the way of happiness is our firm belief that we know what will make us happy. What would it be like to loosen the reins, to let go of that mistaken notion? What would it be like to allow ourselves to stop trying to guarantee our happiness and allow ourselves to…stumble on it?

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