The Best Part of the Holiday Is Before You’ve Packed a Bag

There is a moment, usually about three weeks before a holiday, when everything is still perfect. The hotel has not yet revealed its suspicious Wi-Fi, the airline has not yet lost your bag, and your travelling companion has not yet eaten the last of the complimentary biscuits in a single sitting at 11pm. The whole thing exists, shimmering and unblemished, in your imagination – and science is increasingly certain that this is actually when you enjoy it most.

Anticipatory Savoring, Briefly

Anticipatory savoring is the formal name for something you have been doing your whole life without realising it had a name. It describes the way the brain's reward circuitry – specifically the dopamine system, which is your head's own enthusiasm engine – fires in response to imagining a future pleasure, often more intensely and for far longer than it fires during the pleasure itself. The wanting is, in a measurable sense, better than the having.

This sounds like bad news. It isn't.

Why Planning Beats Arriving

Psychologists who study wellbeing have found that people who deliberately cultivate anticipatory savoring – who lean into the imagining, who let themselves think ahead in vivid, sensory detail – report significantly higher levels of day-to-day satisfaction than people who either live entirely in the present or, more commonly, spend their future-thinking time worrying. The difference lies in specificity. Vague forward-thinking ("I'm looking forward to Christmas") does barely anything for your dopamine system. But detailed forward-thinking ("I'll be sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea while it's dark outside and everyone else is still asleep") gives the brain something to actually rehearse, and rehearsal is apparently most of what enjoyment is.

The reason this works is slightly strange. Your brain does not distinguish cleanly between vivid imagination and real experience – when you imagine biting into something sour, your mouth waters, and when you imagine an embarrassing memory in enough detail, your face heats up. The neural machinery doesn't care much whether the event is happening or not. Feed it rich, specific detail about something you're looking forward to, and it lights up as though you're already there.

Writing to a Future Self

Which brings us to a genuinely odd little habit that a growing number of people swear by: writing a letter to your future self, timed to arrive – or be opened – at some point ahead. Not a goals list, not a vision board, not a note saying "remember to be happier." A proper letter with sensory predictions in it. What you think the air will smell like. What you imagine you'll feel when you first arrive somewhere new. What you hope will be true by then. What you're slightly nervous about. The act of writing it forces the specificity that vague hoping never achieves, which means you get the full neurological benefit of anticipatory savoring just from composing the thing.

There is something a little strange and affecting about writing to a version of yourself who doesn't exist yet.

A Small but Useful Reframing

The science behind all this suggests a small but not trivial reframing. We tend to think of enjoyment as something that happens to us when circumstances are right – when we're on the holiday, at the dinner, in the moment we've been looking forward to. But the evidence points the other way. Enjoyment is something the brain does in anticipation, and then briefly confirms on arrival, and then quickly converts into nostalgia. The lived experience is almost a formality.

If that sounds deflating, try taking it the other way round. It means you don't have to wait for life to improve to enjoy it more. You just have to spend a bit more time thinking forward in proper, concrete, sensory detail – not vague wishing, but actual imagining. The holiday still three weeks away, the meal you're going to cook on Saturday, the friend you're seeing at the end of the month. None of it needs to change. Just let yourself look forward to it properly.

Your brain will do the rest while you're on the sofa.