Excitement Archives - Farther to Go!

I recently came across a video of a mental health professional disparaging the brain’s default mode network (DMN). The loudest contingent of the DMN-bashing bandwagon tends to be the mindfulness folks, but it’s not an exclusive club.

This particular person cited a study I’m familiar with and have mentioned previously. Researchers contacted study participants at random times to ask them (1) what they were doing right then and (2) how happy they were.

The results supposedly revealed that people were happier when their attention was focused on what they were doing (accessing the brain’s attention network) than they were when their minds were wandering (accessing the brain’s default mode network).

My first question now would be who were these people? Specifically, I would want to know something about their personalities, given that we are all so dissimilar from each other. That is just one of many reasons why you cannot simply lump a group of people together, average their responses to some questions, and come to a sound conclusion about…anything.

Happiness was, in fact, the subject of the research, so I can’t fault the researchers for asking people to evaluate their level of happiness. But I question the ability of people in general to gauge their degree of happiness or of any other emotion. And I definitely can fault the assumption that happiness is a worthy topic of research.

The study in question was really focused on transient happiness—or acute happiness, if you will—which most people experience to a greater or lesser extent, anyway. By that, I mean we don’t all experience an equal amount or intensity of happiness. And who knows if what I label happy is the same emotion you label happy.

An inability to experience any happiness is definitely an indicator of a problem; the inability to be happy all the time—not so much.

The Pursuit of Happiness

A recent Facebook post advertising a Buddhist-oriented program asserted that anger is a “delusion” and it’s bad because it makes us unhappy. This is both simple-minded and wrong. The relentless pursuit of happiness is far more delusional and destructive than the experience of anger.

I have a handout with a list of 136 positive emotions (along with a similar list of negative emotions). Happy is but one of them. Yet somehow people have gotten the idea that it is the best or most important emotion. And somehow people have concluded that a steady state of happiness is both desirable and achievable. (This seems to be a peculiarly American take.)

One of the other emotions on the list is excited, which is far more appealing to me than happy but far less acceptable to pursue. For one thing, people who pursue excitement are often advised that it is just a poor substitute for happiness. Pursuing excitement is also associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking.

In the Five Factor Model of Personality, it’s related to extraversion and openness to experience. (Full disclosure: those are the two factors I always score highest in, in that order.) Introverts and ambiverts tend to view extraverts with some degree of suspicion if not outright aversion, so the negative association to excitement is not surprising.

The short-term side-effects of excitement (acute excitement), however, include anticipation, alertness, increased energy, and motivation. Good stuff! But the side-effects of attempting to maintain a constant state of excitement—chronic excitement—are altogether different: impaired concentration, sleeplessness, restlessness, elevated blood pressure, increased adrenaline and noradrenaline, racing heart. The body would react to a constant state of excitement essentially the same as it would to chronic stress.

Furthermore, one would have to continually up the ante, so to speak (seek more novelty, take greater risks), to maintain the same level of excitement. Someone who was chronically excited would likely become a source of annoyance to friends, family, and coworkers.

Chronic happiness is no better for us than chronic excitement. Here’s why:

Sometimes things are not going well, there is a real threat, and vigilance is required.

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert

Pursuing happiness is likely to keep you stuck on the hedonic treadmill, where you’ll need to keep moving to acquire more and more of the things or experiences you think will bring you pleasure—to each of which you will adapt surprisingly quickly.
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Happiness won’t increase your lifespan. In the final analysis, death comes in equal proportion to the happy and the sad. The result of research conducted by Oxford University with nearly 720,000 women is that “happiness and related measures of wellbeing do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality.”
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If you’re simply here for the party, you should be aware your body processes “empty positive emotions” the same way it processes chronic adversity, which is by activating the pro-inflammatory response to prepare for bacterial threats. (Inflammation is associated with many major and minor diseases, including heart disease, various cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.) A diet of too many empty positive emotions seems to be a lot like a diet of too many empty (sugar-, salt-, alcohol-, or fat-laden) calories.
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Happiness may make you feel good in the moment, but pursuing it by avoiding negative thoughts and feelings and difficult or painful situations can stunt your personal development. That can lead to decreased resilience, greater susceptibility to stress, and reduced creativity and problem-solving abilities.

You’re less likely to become depressed if you regularly experience a range of emotions instead of aiming exclusively for the positive ones.

Research indicates that if you pursue happiness, you may get it (just not all the time), but you’re not likely to feel satisfied. On the other hand, if you focus on meaning, instead, you’re extremely likely to feel satisfied and you may also get happiness as a bonus.

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.

Chronic Happiness
Is Not Good for You

The Pursuit of Happiness

Anticipation or Apprehension?

Name that Emotion!

Your Mental (Conceptual) Model

Get Granular

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