Anticipation, the most stimulating and longest-lasting drug of all

A very long time ago, when I was a child and our family was about to set off on a holiday that included what would be my first plane flight, sleep evaded me for long nights.

The excited anticipation of such an adventure was electrifying.

The imagining of what flight might feel like set fire to the mind and stretched my young nerves to quivering. What would the other side of a cloud look like?

The flight itself has left not much of a residual memory, beyond a comforting pleasure in the knowledge that it occurred.

But those thrilling days and nights between learning of the coming trip and ascending the steps to the big passenger plane that would take us aloft remain vivid in the mind.

They set a pattern of forever seeking the joy of looking forward.

Looking out from the South Rim at the Grand Canyon, Arizona.Credit: AP

All these decades later, within my iPad’s digital memory is a largish corner, ever-growing, crammed with maps and travel tips, plane and train schedules and links to websites about roads not yet taken in far-off lands.

It has been expanding for more than three years. It was already a thing of depth and size by the first month of 2020, when the plans there were about to transform into actual airline and fast-train tickets and hotel reservations in distant places.

Then came a virus that made a rotten joke of any map or ticket to anywhere.

And yet, the virus and all the postponed plans it brought with it made that corner of my iPad a thing of heightening bliss, the repository of intense dreaming.

It became, and remains, a long holiday while going nowhere, an anticipation of wanderlust to be satisfied when life returned to some form of normality.

Night after night I still wander virtually, adding places newly discovered to the collection of wonders residing in my iPad’s memory. Soon enough now, I will trim it all down to a manageable timetable, renew my passport and begin booking those long-deferred plane tickets.

Will the actual expedition, though, be quite as fulfilling as the years of late nights visiting the far regions of the internet for images of cobbled streets and high alpine meadows, majestic avenues in famed cities and islands floating within their own legends?

You’d certainly hope so.

There is among Australians a holiday stampede under way following what we might call the COVID years. As I write, social media is filling with words and photos filed by friends and acquaintances trekking to exotic places, dining on alluring fare, marvelling at the magnificence of medieval cathedrals and castles, swimming in the summer-touched oceans of another hemisphere …

Lake Bled, Slovenia.Credit: Remedios

No holiday, however, is likely to last as long as the months or even years during which we content ourselves with the imagining of it all. The inescapable truth is that every trip will end, and the memories will fade.

Happily, however, there is a large volume of studies showing the psychological and other health benefits of merely looking forward to things like holidays and travel – and many other enjoyable pursuits.

Among the academic work is an intriguing report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (2007) by Leaf Van Boven, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado, and his collaborator Laurence Ashworth.

They tested a theory that anticipation arouses more intense emotion than retrospection. Their question: do people enjoy looking forward to things perceived as positive more than looking back on them afterwards?

After a series of experiments, they discovered that the most intense feelings of pleasure are indeed experienced before events – like, say, a ski trip – actually happen.

These feelings turned out to be noticeably stronger even than the replaying of memories that are left after the holiday or whatever positive experience was undertaken.

The idea is not new, of course. Swiss-born British writer and philosopher Alain de Botton explored this very phenomenon, among other wonders, in his 2002 collection of essays called The Art of Travel.

Most of us go on holiday believing, or hoping, that when it is over, we will have built a store of happy memories to sustain us for months and years. In other words, the pleasure can be extended and revisited whenever we feel the need for a mood lift.

But to know that the pleasure is greatest before the cheering event has even occurred, more even than in the aftermath, means that the whole carefree period has no particular time limit. It can start whenever you wish.

The Taj Mahal in Agra, India, built for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his wife.Credit: iStock

Those who run lotteries clearly know this. The anticipation of sudden riches and all the earthly delights that may be unlocked, however unlikely, moves the masses to line up week after week, outlaying their cash. Call it a down payment on dreams.

It is the anticipation, beyond the serious hope of attainment, that stirs the molecules that deliver both short-term (dopamine) and long-lasting (serotonin) feelings of pleasure and happiness.

Right now, as I prepare to flip open the iPad again and search out those roads not yet taken, I’m on a holiday that began years ago without taking a step. My brain, just as it was in the days and nights before that first flight as a child, is flooding with serotonin.

Anticipation. What a wonder to turn to in the down times.