The Health Benefit of Having Something to Look Forward To – How positive anticipation can lift mood, motivation and wellbeing before the experience even begins.
There is a particular pleasure in knowing that something good is coming. It might be a holiday booked for October, dinner with friends next Friday, tickets for a concert, a weekend walk somewhere beautiful or simply the promise of coffee with somebody whose company always leaves you feeling better. The event occupies a small space in the calendar and can begin influencing life days or weeks before it happens.
Psychologists describe part of this experience as anticipatory pleasure, the positive feeling generated by imagining a future experience that we expect to enjoy. Research connects this capacity with subjective wellbeing, motivation and positive affect, and experimental studies suggest that deliberately imagining positive future events can strengthen the pleasure associated with looking forward to them.
A better life is shaped partly by what we experience today and partly by the future experiences already beginning to brighten it.
Top Tips for Having Something to Look Forward To
- Keep something enjoyable on the horizon. A small plan for next week can create anticipation just as effectively as a major annual event.
- Make plans specific enough to imagine. A date, place and person give the future more psychological texture.
- Include other people. Research into anticipated positive experiences frequently highlights relationships as a major source of wellbeing.
- Allow yourself to think about the experience beforehand. Looking at the menu, planning a route or talking about the trip can become part of the enjoyment.
- Choose experiences with genuine personal value. Anticipation grows more naturally around things you actually care about.
- Create variety across the calendar. Small social, physical, cultural and outdoor experiences can give different parts of life something positive to move towards.
- Share good plans with people who respond warmly. Sharing positive events is associated with greater positive affect and relationship wellbeing.
- Leave some space for spontaneity. A good life can contain plans and pleasant surprises together.
The Better Life Perspective
A great deal of personal development focuses on improving what is happening now: better sleep, stronger relationships, more energy, greater fitness and calmer days. Future experiences can contribute to that same quality of life before they arrive.
Think about the emotional difference between two equally busy weeks. One contains meetings, errands, deadlines and the normal logistics of life. The other contains exactly the same responsibilities plus a Saturday morning coastal walk with friends that you have already agreed, a restaurant booking on Thursday or tickets sitting in your phone for something you have wanted to see for months.
The calendar has barely changed, but the emotional landscape can feel noticeably different. It’s the anticipation that gives the mind somewhere enjoyable to travel before the body gets there.
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Pleasure Can Begin Before the Event
Researchers distinguish between anticipatory pleasure, generated as we look forward to an experience, and the pleasure experienced during the event itself. This distinction has become particularly interesting within the study of motivation. In two experiments, researchers asked participants to imagine personally relevant positive future events in vivid detail. The exercise increased anticipatory pleasure, vividness and mental imagery, and those increases were generally associated with stronger behavioural intention to pursue the future experiences.
Brain-imaging research adds another layer. In a study of 40 participants imagining positive future events, anticipation activated areas of the medial prefrontal cortex involved in future thinking and valuation, with stronger activation associated with higher reported wellbeing.
These findings describe part of the architecture behind a familiar experience. Booking something enjoyable changes the future from an abstract stretch of time into a place containing something emotionally valuable; The pleasure starts accumulating early.
Holidays Offer a Useful Clue
Travel research provides some of the clearest everyday evidence for anticipation.
A Dutch study involving 1,530 adults found that people preparing for a holiday reported greater pre-trip happiness. Another longitudinal study of 225 travellers found that wellbeing began rising around 15 days before travel and remained elevated for a period after the trip. A much larger survey involving more than 72,000 people also found a positive relationship between pre-travel anticipation and reported happiness.
A holiday gives anticipation plenty of material. There is somewhere new to imagine, plans to discuss, food to consider, places to explore and freedom from normal routines to picture in advance.
The same psychological process can operate on a smaller scale. You can look forward to Sunday breakfast, tomorrow’s workout, Friday evening with friends, a morning surf, an exhibition, a new book arriving or an hour in the garden when the weather clears.
The size of the event and the value of the anticipation do not need to rise together.
Connection Gives the Future Extra Weight
When researchers have asked people what makes anticipated positive events valuable, relationships appear repeatedly.
In one study examining future positive experiences and psychological wellbeing, positive relationships with other people were the most frequently identified source of value in the events participants were looking forward to.
Separate research into what psychologists call capitalisation, sharing good news and positive experiences with other people, found that talking about positive events was associated with increased daily positive affect and wellbeing. Enthusiastic responses from close others were also associated with greater intimacy and relationship satisfaction.
This helps explain why anticipation often grows through conversation. A weekend away acquires emotional life as people discuss where they will eat. A planned walk becomes more vivid as somebody sends the route. A concert starts earlier when the playlist goes on in the car. Connection stretches the experience beyond the hours written in the diary.
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You Can Practise Positive Future Thinking
Some people naturally create a busy horizon of enjoyable plans. Others allow the diary to fill primarily with obligations and wait for pleasure to appear in whatever gaps survive.
Future thinking itself appears to be somewhat trainable; Research asking people to imagine upcoming positive events in greater detail found that vivid mental imagery increased the anticipated pleasure associated with those events. A community study also found that people who anticipated more positive future experiences reported greater subjective wellbeing, with social networks and the ability to make detailed plans both associated with this capacity.
This provides a simple Better Life exercise:
- Look at the next four weeks and identify three things you are genuinely pleased are coming.
- Then add one.
- Make it specific enough to feel real.
- Decide who will be there, where you will go and roughly when it will happen.
- Give yourself permission to enjoy the planning as part of the experience.
- The aim is to make the future feel inhabited.
Life Feels Different When It Contains Points of Light
Many adults become highly skilled at planning responsibilities. Work deadlines appear months ahead, appointments enter the calendar automatically and family logistics receive impressive levels of coordination.
Enjoyment can benefit from some of the same intentionality. Putting something positive into the future creates a small psychological asset in the present. It gives attention somewhere pleasant to land and creates motivation to move towards an experience that has personal meaning.
Over time, these plans can create a pattern in which the calendar represents more than obligation. It begins to reflect relationships, curiosity, movement, adventure, culture, rest and the things that make life feel distinctly yours.
Having something to look forward to is a modest form of life design but its value begins long before the date arrives.
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