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Your Brain Needs a Party
Anticipating fun events is a key element of well-being
This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.
My fiancé and I started planning our wedding last weekend. (Don’t worry, it’s many months away and will be small, outdoors, and masked.) It feels a little crazy to think about throwing a party while the pandemic is embarking on its third wave, and we’ll undoubtedly have to change our plans at many points along the way, but after postponing for 10 months I figured it was time to at least start thinking about it. Plus, I really, really wanted — nay, needed — something to look forward to.
It turns out anticipating future fun events is a powerful mood booster, and a lack of things to look forward to is likely contributing to our national state of melancholy.
Psychological research suggests that your brain evolved to prioritize future events so that you could appropriately prepare for them and increase your odds of survival. If humans weren’t forward-looking, our ancestors wouldn’t have made it through cold winters, food shortages, or potential enemy attacks. But the future isn’t…
