16 Aug The Dutch secret to boosting joy every day
via Fast Company by Martha Tesema-Shine
Whenever there’s something exciting happening in my life—be it a birthday celebration, a holiday, or a Zoom chat with those I love—I write it on my calendar way in advance.
I’m not just talking on my iPhone calendar. I’m talking on the calendar in my room, in my planner—and if the occasion is that exciting, I may or may not be that friend who sends out a link to a countdown website that screams “6 weeks, 56 hours, 13 minutes until the Big Day.”
I wasn’t always like this, though.
I used to never look forward to things, fearing that the actual event wouldn’t meet the expectations that I built up. Those disappointments were few and far between, though, so as I’ve grown older I’ve embraced my giddy pre-event delight.
There’s a Dutch word for this, and it’s just as exciting to say as it is to feel: voorpret.
It’s the “joy or pleasure ahead and in anticipation of the actual fun event,” and it essentially sums up all the feels that creep up before an actual experience.
There’s proof that adapting a voorpret mindset can actually improve our happiness.
Research shows that we gain a lot more before a big event, rather than after. Professors and psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Laurence Ashworth studied the impact anticipation has on our feels and found the connection to be a lot stronger than retrospection—so much more so that it can impact our overall well-being.
In their research, Van Boven and Ashworth conducted five different studies to measure emotional reactions to various events, including everything from Thanksgiving Day to imaginary ski trips. Participants found the events in the future, whether or not they were real, were more exciting than real experiences that have happened in the past.
“Our research suggests that the enjoyment people glean from anticipation might also be an important component of life satisfaction: one’s satisfaction with life is influenced both by looking backward and by looking forward,” they wrote in their report.
Here, some ways to tap into voorpret…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE