What a Great Trip! And I’m Not Even There Yet

Wish you were on vacation right now? Don’t. Taking a vacation won’t necessarily make you happier. But anticipating it will.

I first explored this idea while reporting an article about happiness in 2010, the same year that a psychological study about the connection between anticipation and happiness was published online in a journal called Applied Research in Quality of Life. The authors of the study, researchers from the Netherlands, interviewed more than 1,500 people, including 974 vacationers, and found that the vacationers felt most happy before their trips.

As anyone who has taken a vacation knows, they can be rife with complications: flight delays, illness, family squabbles. And when you get home you have to catch up on all the work you missed. That’s not to suggest that vacations don’t bring us joy, but social scientists have been saying for years that we get an extra happiness boost if we consciously delay any type of pleasure — be it booking a trip to Bali months in advance or eating that sliver of chocolate cake tomorrow instead of today. Doing this allows us to build up positive expectations, to relish how enjoyable the experience might be.

But what I really wanted to know was whether the pleasure derived from anticipation is something that just magically happens after you book an airline ticket. Or can it be consciously increased by, for example, talking with friends about the trip, making an iTunes playlist or learning the local language?

Turns out, there is an art to anticipation. Savoring, said Elizabeth Dunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and a leading happiness researcher, is an active, not passive, process. “It’s better to immerse yourself,” she said. Reading novels and poetry, watching films and television programs, browsing fashion and design blogs that are either from or about the place you plan to visit encourages you to not only learn about your destination, but to dream, providing some concrete details for your mind to latch on to. It may sound counterintuitive, but this building up of positive expectations and excitement actually helps our minds smooth over any minor discrepancies if reality doesn’t quite measure up to the fantasy. “We’re less likely to be bothered by these little holes if we build up our expectations ahead of time,” Professor Dunn said. “So go ahead and assume it’s going to be wonderful.”

This advice is problematic only if there is a chasm between expectations and reality. But even then, anticipation is still important — because that’s the part of the vacation that you were free to see however you wanted. Take, for example, the trip Professor Dunn took to Oahu, Hawaii. She spent plenty of time anticipating how wonderful it would be, which was a good thing because when she was at long last in Oahu she was attacked by a 10-foot tiger shark. The shark bit her leg to the bone but not into the bone, leaving her with scars though no physical impairments. It was, to state the obvious, her worst vacation ever. Yet Professor Dunn nonetheless pointed out that, “At least looking forward to it was still great.” Lesson: even if your vacation is terrible, nothing can take away the enjoyment you felt when you were simply fantasizing about it.