Stop dilly-dallying away your joy

My mother raised me to embrace and indulge in joy – right when it comes – because obstacles across life’s mountains and valleys are unpredictable but certain, and joy is what makes living worth it. Joy invigorates necessary hope in the face of relentless evil, like the genocide facing residents of Gaza, or the ongoing extermination of human rights for millions of Americans. But Mama wasn’t always that way. Tragedy changed her. A few years before I was born, her older sister died at age 31. At the time of her death, my aunt had been planning to move into a new home. She’d spent years stockpiling treasures she bought to incite joy, but never got to relish any of them.

It turns out, lots of people are like my aunt – to their detriment. As science sets out to explore why so many of us delay our pleasure, researchers are learning how and why those who put off joy are at risk of tabling it indefinitely. A recent study on procrastination’s other side discovered as much, The Washington Post reports.

The “psychological drama” manufactured by anticipating and delaying joy is a mental trap that means “people are missing out on lots of immediate happiness and lots of immediate enjoyment,” study author Ed O’Brien told The Washington Post. We overwhelm ourselves with the idea that wearing the sparkles or reconnecting with a friend “shouldn’t be wasted. It should be kind of momentous and important and really matter to me,” he said. But focusing so much on maximizing eventual pleasure can cause one to unintentionally prevent oneself from experiencing the good thing.

For the study, which researchers admit they procrastinated in starting, 500 adults were initially surveyed about their participation in the following enjoyable activities: travel, visiting family and going to restaurants, theaters and parties. The COVID pandemic provided a ripe environment for the experiment: On pause from such face-to-face interactions, the researchers could easily record how long it took people to return to the fun. Participants were asked how much time had passed since they’d been able to enjoy each of the activities, and how quickly they returned to the activity once it was deemed safe.

Across that survey and subsequent experiments, researchers found that the longer participants weren’t able to do something, the more time passed before they decided to return to it, including things like reaching out to a friend – even within friend pairings in which both parties felt equally close and there was no fear of social rejection.

“Once restaurants were back open and they felt safe and comfortable … they actually waited even longer because they didn’t want their first time back to a restaurant to just be on a random Tuesday without a good crowd,” O’Brien said. “They were waiting for the perfect time to celebrate that coming back moment. So, ironically, they waited even longer.”

The intention is to wait for an occasion to match the anticipated joy, and “‘right now’ always feels insufficiently special compared to any better moment in the future,” said O’Brien, who works at the University of Chicago. People also tend to believe the future holds more energy and time for the things they want to experience. Akira Miyake, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder, agrees that the tendency is “important and interesting,” but added that he believes the reasons people put off joy are “much more complex” and worthy of further study.

In the meantime, experts encourage pushing yourself to indulge in the joy you’ve been putting off. “Think about how any moment can be made to feel extra special from the right perspective,” O’Brien said. “You can make any random Tuesday feel extra special if you really think about it.” Literally, lock it into your calendar and tell yourself to show up. That way, you’ll know the special moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived.