Anticipating Healthful Changes

Carly Simon sang: “Anticipation, anticipation is makin' me late; is keepin' me waitin.'   Being late and waiting, however, are only two of many possible effects of anticipation.  Anticipation can work for or against your desired healthful lifestyle changes.  So understanding your anticipatory style can empower you more successfully to execute changes that otherwise would be elusive.

Anticipation can occur before or during an activity.  Negative anticipation before a healthful lifestyle behavior militates against your initiating effort, and negative anticipation during the behavior causes you to perform hurriedly, half-heartedly, or in a manner that leads to premature withdrawal. 

How about after you have performed a healthful activity?  Are there personality features important during that time frame?  Of course.  Your post-activity reaction—reactive mood— will bias you toward returning to the healthful activity in the future or toward resisting or even totally abandoning it.

Suppose you decide that it would be better for you to cut your own lawn every Saturday rather than to pay someone to do it.  You reason that cutting the lawn would give you some exercise, get you outside in the fresh air, provide a sense of self-sufficiency and accomplishment, and save you a few bucks.  That reasoning, if maintained, presumably would create in you a sense of positive anticipation.

Manuel C. Voelkle and his colleagues (2013) studied the anticipatory and reactive mood responses of younger and older adults, ranging from 20 to 81 years-of-age.  Their research disclosed three main findings.  First, they clearly demonstrated that many people do in fact experience both anticipatory and reactive mood changes regarding their recurrent activities.  Second, either the anticipatory or reactive response can be so intense that one almost totally determines the other.  And, third, in young adulthood we tend more toward adjusting our anticipatory mood and in older adulthood, to maintaining a positive mood.

Applied to our lawn-cutting example, the Voelkle findings suggest some possible scenarios.  Friday night you might look forward to or dread Saturday.  Positive anticipation could cause you to get right to work early Saturday morning.  Negative anticipation could prompt you to wait “a couple more days” before cutting.  If your positive anticipation is intense, it might produce so strong a positive feeling that it carries all through the cutting and into the subsequent reaction to the completed event, setting up a positive anticipation for next Saturday’s mowing.  The opposite also could occur if your negative anticipation is especially strong.  Younger adults might be inclined to adjust their anticipatory mood in order to facilitate lawn-cutting while older adults might decide to begin their lawn-cutting activity only when they are in a “good mood” to begin with.

The take-away:  pay attention to the quality of your anticipation when you think about initiating or maintaining a healthful lifestyle behavior.  Use that insight to time when you start and stop any enactment of the behavior.   

Reference:  Voelkle, Manuel C.; Ebner, Natalie C.; Lindenberger, Ulman; & Riediger, Michaela. (2013).  Here we go again: Anticipatory and reactive mood responses to recurring unpleasant situations throughout adulthood.  Emotion, 13, 3, 424-433.