Positive anticipations optimize a future of our own making and our own design. Rather than waiting for an event to unspool in real time, people often enjoy it before they actually experience it. By bringing to mind pleasantly edited images of an activity yet to occur, individuals preview it favorably, pre-sampling the joys the activity is expected to bring. “I’m looking forward to it!” is the well-worn expression used to describe these musings, a hope-filled, unexperienced future that sprinkles a savory seasoning over the current moment, enriching it.
The Chemistry of Waiting
Our moments are always fleeting “passing” ones. But despite their brief mortality, the powerful pleasure hormone dopamine surges to its highest levels in those most critical moments of anticipation when a longed-for future experience is expected to bring big rewards. It’s in the absence of the actual experience that the engine of joyful anticipation roars. Indeed, the most rewarding part of the longed-for experience often comes in a version birthed in the imagination, its anticipated form.
A well-orchestrated effort takes place among the shared neurocircuitries of the prefrontal cortex or the executive brain and the endogenous reward system—called the organs of anticipation. These positively charged anticipations saturate the now moment with a mentally pre-lived, optimized future of our own making, our own design. These fantasized versions of reality then grant every wish indiscriminately. This can drive motivation and even help overcome future obstacles.
When the future does arrive, individuals feel they are on familiar soil, more at home, because they are primed and ready to respond in accordance with prior, positive anticipations. People are therefore predisposed to interpret or shape the meanings of the realities about to unfold. Irony creeps in, however, as there are times we find less joy, even disappointment, in our activities when they are actually lived than when they were merely anticipated or pre-experienced imaginatively. Greater enjoyment came during those coveted moments when longing for the activity heavily invested it with anticipatory excitement and hopefulness.
Pre-Editing Reality
Optimistic expectations pre-edit future activities, crafting them into their ideal form, thus foreclosing upon real-life downsides. Inconveniences, discomforts, and miscellaneous encumbrances typically crop up as we handle the complicated realities that regularly accompany actual life experiences. What often plays out in real life as lackluster, or little more than an ordinary experience, was extraordinary as we imagined how it might be when we pre-lived it idyllically. The optimistic now moment nourished people in a manner that actual experience didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t.
The conventional now moment accessed or achieved by mindfulness and meditation promises science-supported, across-the-board health benefits, stretching broadly from enhanced immune function to heart and brain health. A recent Harvard study found evidence of significant increases in gray matter density and improved cognitive function in those who practiced just eight to 10 minutes of daily mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness helps fasten us to a now moment emptied of unsettling, stress-inducing contaminants, the psychological debris of past worries and future apprehensions. Freed of these, we inhabit a serene, peaceful moment of tranquility unleashed from self-recrimination, judgmentalism, and other non-acceptance.
We find an anchor, typically in focused breathing, that tunes us exquisitely to the sensations arising from within ourselves which imparts a healthy detachment from extraneous, outside preoccupations, thus conferring profound feelings of well-being. Because of these wide-ranging benefits, mindfulness meditation should take its rightful, secured, and well-practiced place within our repertoire of daily self-care habits.
Three months prior to Albert Einstein’s death, he received a letter from a recently deceased friend’s widow. In her letter, the widow made a reference to their past friendship to which Einstein responded with this cryptic, mind-boggling comment, “…the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Unfortunately, Einstein himself died shortly after making his provocative statement and was not able to fully explain what he meant. But if Einstein was right, as he often was, maybe our past, present, and future moments are indistinguishable, the sheer artifact of the brain’s delimited, perceptual apparatus.
Perhaps our now moments can never be fully purged of the influences of our past, present, or future because they are all the same moment. As per Einstein’s postulations, maybe we inhabit an omnipresent moment, one that has no beginning or end. What are your now moments like? What would you like them to be? [1]What We Learned From Our Biggest Fights [2]Sankara Eye Hospital Expands Child Care [3]Medtech braces for shift away from one-and-done products