Your Trip Started Before You Left

[0:00] I want to start with something that sounds backwards. So stay with me for a second. If you've got a trip coming up right now, even a small one, pay attention to how often it shows up in your head on a day that has nothing to do with travel.

[0:15] You may be doing the dishes or walking the dog or... paying half attention during a work meeting. Maybe even lying in bed trying to fall asleep. And out of nowhere, you're thinking about your upcoming trip. And in those moments, you feel an uptick of your mood. Maybe begin to smile or even feel a small burst of energy.

[0:38] In these moments, we believe that what we're experiencing is a preview of what's to come and that the happiness starts once the trip actually begins. However, the moment of smiles and energy isn't a daydream or fantasizing of your trip. It's your planned vacation already working months before you've packed a bag.

[1:01] I'm Kiara and this is Put the Guidebook Down. As a society, we talk about travel like the waiting up to the trip doesn't count. That it's not part of a case. Booking the flight starts a countdown and everything between that moment and the day that you actually leave gets treated as dead time.

[1:22] Something to get through before the real thing actually starts. You know those feelings, the whole I can't wait or it's so far away. The whole way we talk about anticipation treats it like a toll you have to pay to eventually get the experience that you were working your butt off to pay for. Here's the problem with that.

[1:43] There's a specific measurable body of research on what's happening in your head during that stretch of time. And it says the waiting is not neutral at all. It's doing real emotional work during that time. While you're sitting in traffic with the trip four months out, and researchers have gotten precise about it, that they can compare

[2:06] that work directly to what you feel once you're actually on the vacation, which means there's a decent So what we're going to talk about first is this whole why looking forward to a trip is its own source of happiness, and it's called anticipatory savoring. In 2014, a researcher named Amit Kumar, along with Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich,

[2:40] ran a study that didn't wait for people to come into a lab and report their feelings after the fact, nor before. They pinged people throughout actual days of their actual lives, random points, and asked, right then, how are you feeling and what's on your mind? Some of those check-ins caught people mid-thought about something they'd booked

[3:00] that they hadn't have happened yet. A trip, a concert, versus a material purchase that they were waiting on. Maybe a new phone, a piece of furniture, and the difference showed up immediately. People thinking about an upcoming experience were measurably happier in that exact moment than people thinking about an upcoming purchase of an item.

[3:23] Not happier once they had it. Happier while they were just sitting there thinking about it. Nowhere near the departure gate. There was a second part of the finding that matters just as much. Waiting for a material purchase usually came with a little bit more friction,

[3:40] such as when things ran out of stock or delays in making the purchase, people became more easily frustrated. Whereas waiting for an experience, people mostly didn't. People weren't enduring the wait, they were actually enjoying it in real time, which is the part researchers now call anticipatory savoring. So that flight you booked that's

[4:02] in six months isn't just sitting there doing nothing for six months. Every time it crosses your mind on an ordinary Tuesday uninvited, that's just not your imagination getting ahead of itself. That's the actual mechanism this research is describing. And this is actually one of the techniques that I use for myself on purpose.

[4:24] It's one of my go-to strategies for staying motivated and keeping a positive mindset on a daily basis. I make sure I always have something to look forward to every single week and I try to build some kind of adventure at least once a month. That sounds like a lot, but it usually isn't.

[4:43] It can be as simple as setting aside time to try a new cafe, a new restaurant, or to go hiking somewhere that I've never been. They're all mini-adventures and side quests in their own way. It doesn't need to be exotic. It just needs to be new because that's what actually creates the anticipation.

[5:01] An unfamiliar experience gives you something to genuinely look forward to, and that's what keeps the excitement and the motivation going. I mean, obviously, don't get me wrong, we'd all love for that thing to be a big international trip, and honestly, saving up to travel internationally every year is one of my biggest personal drivers.

[5:22] But in the general sense, it does not have to be a big international trip to have this anticipatory savoring. You can build your own version of this out of whatever you're actually interested in and it becomes its own source of excitement. This is all anticipatory savoring doing exactly what the research says it does.

[5:41] You're just building it into your calendar with a purpose instead of just waiting for everything to keep happening. We're reframing our mindsets and capitalizing on what actually occurs on our mind on a natural physiological level. But transitioning a little bit more into the whole memory side

[6:01] and how this plays out into the whole grand scheme of your vacation. So why the memory of waiting can actually mean a lot more than the memory of the trip or be more easy to recall after the trip. So talking about anticipation versus retrospection. So now this second piece of research that explains this second framework is why

[6:24] the memory of waiting for a trip can end up feeling more intense than the memory of the trip once it's over. In 2007, researchers Leaf Van Boven and Laurence Ashworth asked people to rate how emotionally intense a range of events felt both before and afterward, once those events were over and filed away as memories,

[6:45] such as maybe Thanksgiving and an all expenses paid ski trip, vacation, other things that people look forward to or maybe even dread. I know I used the example of a colonoscopy in my last episode. That's still got some anticipation to it, right? Across every category, the anticipation rated higher than the memory did.

[7:06] Looking forward hit harder than looking back. For the exact same event in the exact same people. The likely reason connects to something I actually talked about in my most recent episode on why your best and your worst trips get remembered almost identically regardless of what you may do. Once a trip is over,

[7:26] memory edits it down kind of brutally to basically one peak moment and one end moment. So however it ended, and quietly throws out the majority of what's left over. But looking forward hasn't been edited yet. Nothing's been cut. You get to imagine the whole thing in full without anything that goes wrong later getting the chance to ruin it.

[7:47] One version of the trip has already been trimmed down to almost nothing, the other hasn't been touched, which is a little bit of a weird thing, right? So like this is where we talk about memory in the podcast and we're kind of trying to understand why things happen and occur as is.

[8:03] This is something that's just really fascinating to me because it's like, okay, well, is that then part of the And I guess it made sense a little bit more because this happened in my most recent trip to Greece. It had been my first solo trip since I moved back to the United States

[8:30] and my first one with my first full real nine to five job, which meant there was a lot more to coordinate than I usually had. I had to plan out to a tee everywhere I actually wanted to go, lock in my transportation between cities, and go through all my usual solo and female travel safety prep.

[8:52] On top of the regular scramble of trying to get out of office. Because it's It had been a while since my last solo trip. A lot of my anticipation in the weeks before leaving was tangled up in my reminiscing about earlier solo trips I did, plus genuine excitement for the specific things I had planned in Greece.

[9:12] Now that I've concluded my trip, if you ask me to describe an average afternoon I spent in Greece, I have to think about it. I can explain one to you, but it takes effort. What comes back instantly without me even trying is the week before I left and all of

[9:31] I had handed several new projects at the office that were all high priority and all needed to be wrapped up before I got on the plane. And I spent the entire week cramming, putting out fires, trying to hand off everything cleanly to set up.

[9:45] And it was cut so close that I almost missed my train to the airport and ended up getting to my gate 20 minutes prior to boarding. And this most certainly is not the moment that I'd pick if you asked me for my favorite memory for my entire trip, but it's the one that plays back the clearest,

[10:06] the anticipation window with all of the reminiscing and fantasizing for my trip, including the chaotic tail end of it. Before the departure, and that apparently left a stronger imprint than most of the actual days on the ground did. These two frameworks put together explain that the stretch before

[10:25] a trip isn't empty time you're killing until the real thing starts. It's already producing real happiness on its own terms, and because none of it has been edited down yet, it can end up living louder in your memory than the trip does once the trip is over. Which brings up something worth sitting with.

[10:45] If a real piece of a trip's value happens before you've even left the house or apartment, what are we actually doing when we treat the weeks of planning as something to rush past? Book it, forget about it until it's close, try to make the waiting as short as possible,

[11:00] like it's dead weight you're carrying until the trip starts earning its keep. And as I explained earlier, this is completely backwards. Like it shouldn't be dead weight and I don't think it is. This is time before the trip that's paying out quietly and we're just not giving it credit.

[11:18] It's doing a lot more on the subconscious level and in the background that we just don't acknowledge. And we need to start doing so. Now I do want to be honest about where these frameworks don't apply, because not all waiting works this way. And the second story I gave may make it a little confusing, because

[11:40] the first research is about the anticipatory savoring, the kind where you're letting yourself actually enjoy imagining something good. It's not describing the anxious kind of waiting, which is similar to what I talked about with my whole out of office experience, spiraling about logistics or bracing for what could go wrong. And I want to clarify all of this,

[12:03] but in a later episode, because it's something that a lot of us can relate to. So next time a trip you've got coming up crosses your mind somewhere that has no business crossing your mind, such as at the grocery store, in the middle of a meeting, or you find your mind going off to fantasize

[12:23] about your upcoming trip, don't wave it off as not yet or sighing with regret saying, why didn't I book that trip sooner? That's not your brain getting ahead of itself. That's the trip already working. So instead, appreciate the anticipation and reframe the mindset to being grateful for giving your mind more time to get excited for what's upcoming.

[12:49] Then we'll really start to see the value of the anticipation. Then we'll really find more appreciation for the trip. And we'll find ourselves more motivated and happy looking forward to what's coming.