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!)

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