Increase fun: excavate past pleasures when you have extra time
But beware: your memory famously wears sizable rose-colored glasses
For whatever reason, you have more time than you had.1
You’re itching to fill it with what you enjoyed in times gone by. Because you want something to do, something to while away some hours that you’d otherwise spent on chores or busy-work (which can both wait!). And you can quite literally taste the pleasure in anticipation of enjoying them again.
However, picking a past pleasure to reinstate based on your memory of it, is likely to lead to frustration or disappointment.
That’s because your memory wears rose-colored glasses.
And that will lead to mistakes that are entirely avoidable with some little known but proven memory excavation exercises that are fun to do as well.
I’ll tell you about both. And give you a tangible way to pick the one activity that you you enjoyed that you can now enjoy again.
Your memory’s rose-colored glasses mislead you
Our memory isn’t as accurate as we like to think. Several biases are at work that will happily mislead you when you’re thinking of past hobbies to reinstate.
If you let them.
Because you can avoid the mistakes you’d make as a result of them during a past pleasure excavation.
Mistake 1: Trusting memory predicts the future
Your memory (and mine) wears rose-colored glasses2. Meaning that uncomfortable (“negative”) emotions fade faster than the pleasurable (“positive”) ones.
There’s a well known pattern at work.
Like going on a holiday for example:
you’ll likely anticipate a positive experience (why else would you go?);
you’ll likely have in-the-moment mildly disappointing experiences and even documented hardships like delays and bad weather;
you’ll still remember the experience rosier than the reality was.
I definitely remembered my “horse-girl” teenage-hood as a lot more fun than the day-to-day and the week-to-week actually was. The tedium got edited out. I only narrowly escaped getting all of it, including the less-than-fun stuff, back when I was looking into getting my own horse somewhere in my fifties.
Mistake 2: Overestimating intensity and duration of future pleasure
We all overestimate how intensely and for how long a future event will make us feel. And it goes both ways: it holds true whether we expect unwelcome experiences or pleasurable ones.3
When I considered getting my own horse, I predicted that I’d return to my uninhibited self, the connection with the horse, and enjoy the long rides through the woods I’d experienced as a teenager. And that I’d feel alive again (after various challenging mental and emotional episodes).
Reality wouldn’t have complied with that dream. I was overweighing the activity (its pleasurable parts) and underweighting, even ignoring the less-than-pleasurable parts and everything else in my life that would still be there.
When you do this, you set a bar the activity can’t clear. And very likely you’ll blame the activity for not living up to your expectations.
Mistake 3: Skill-challenge mismatch
To experience flow (where you forget everything around you) and experience an activity as pleasurable, skill and challenge need to be roughly matched. And it collapses faster when the challenge exceeds skill level.
The longer you haven’t done an activity, the more your skills will have faded — gotten rusty so to speak.
Like I need two days in France (or a good bottle of white wine4) to get back to speaking French with some measure of the fluency I had when I lived there.
When you pick up an activity again and try to do it at the level you were at before, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. You’ll feel like a beginner. You’ll be frustrated. You may give up within two weeks, because it’s way harder than you expected it to be.
I probably have said this before: expectations are delayed disappointments. Do without them or set the bar a lot lower so you can experience a “win”.
Mistake 4: What you remember isn’t even how you experienced it
Your remembering self and your experiencing self bicker over your past.
Your remembering self over-emphasizes the peak and the end of an experience. That’s where the rose-colored glasses come from.
Your experiencing self knows what every moment actually felt like.
More often than not your remembering self wins the argument in making decisions about the future. (Does that say we prefer to delude ourselves?)
No wonder I wanted to get my own horse. I remembered the perfect rides through the woods, the birds singing, the sunlight exquisitely filtered through the leaves. I’m lucky, I remembered the other sides of horse riding in time and that 80% of horse riding is nowhere near that.
Eye-opening, battle tested excavation exercises that won’t entomb you
If you now have the impression that you can’t trust much of what your memory tells you, you’d be right.
Every time you remember an event, you also edit that memory…
Bummer. Right?
Not necessarily. There are ways to circumvent the storytelling/inventing part of your brain and go straight for what matters: the experience as you lived and felt it.
Exercise 1: Cue word retrieval
This is a technique to retrieve positive memories of events. And it works just as fine for unearthing forgotten pleasures without the rosy glasses.
Create a list of 8-10 words (cues) that give you a positive feeling. Not generic ones. Specific words, sensory and emotional ones and ones about your environment that evoke them: free, absorbed, warm, alive, alone, hidden, bare-feet, dusk, dawn, freshly-mown grass, etc.
For each, write down a memory.
Again, avoid the abstract and generic like “I always loved to spend my summer holidays at the stables.” Be specific. “The summer day in 1978 when I chased off a couple of rowdy men trying to intimidate a teenager by steering the horse I was on straight at them.”
The specificity is the point. It’s where the pleasure lives.5
Exercise 2: Embodied memory (caveat!)
Your body remembers. Even when your brain doesn’t.
Caveat: this exercise is an application of embodied memory theory, not a validated6 protocol.
Still worth a try, I’d say, because your body can produce memories that talking can’t reach. At least, not by itself. The way I explain it: your body produces a sensation that then prompts your brain to retrieve the memory it couldn’t reach through words.
The techniques works through a body scan and asking about actions that felt good. You’re after positive memories after all, no use dredging up memories that aren’t.
You lie down and scan your body slowly from feet to head. At each part ask: what did this part of me do that felt good, that I’ve forgotten. Ankles: balancing in gymnastics class. Knees: sitting cross-legged sharing stories around a campfire. Hands: holding a shiny black and gold fountain pen you got for your 21st birthday. Tongue: tasting strawberry ice cream for the first time.
Exercise 3: Reminiscence-bump
The reminiscence bump says that older adults remember more events from when they were between age 10 to 30 than from other periods of your life.
Use it to your advantage: don’t trawl your whole life for past pleasures. Focus on that age range. Officially, you’re supposed to pick 3 specific years within it, for example 14, 22, and 28.
The point of picking specific years is to bypass the cultural script of your life (school, university, career, life partner, etc.) and recover what you actually did that year. Especially when no one was watching.
For each year, ask questions like:
who where your closest 3 friends
what did your bedroom look like
what did you do on a day off without any money
what made you laugh that year
Add your own!
Use photos, songs, scents, major public events as external anchors to get your memories flowing, and write down the memories of activities that come up as you answer the questions.
Then, list the 5 to 10 peak positive activities, your most positive past pleasures.
Set yourself up for genuine fun and pleasure
When you have a list of past pleasures that’s free of any rose-coloring, you may be raring to go.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have a favorite and you can’t wait to find where you can sign up for it.
But hold your horses a minute longer, please.
You’ve changed. Your life’s circumstances have changed.
What comes with and goes into an activity may no longer evoke the same joy.
So before you dive headlong into any of them, give yourself a chance to figure out which ones you still enjoy right now.
In other words: experiment with each.
Suspend expectations, go in with curiosity.
Do a test-drive in the smallest possible dose (and a skill level that makes sense for you now) that will give you a good taste of it: a trial session, one hour, a single class.
Note what happens. In the moment. Note the emotions that come up with them.
Right after the activity write all that down, so you can refresh your memory with what you actually experienced.
After you’ve worked through your list like this, I bet you’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt, probably even without consulting your notes, which activity to reinstate.
Rediscover activities you actually still find insanely pleasurable
Everyone’s memory is a fickle thing. It edits, it distorts, it skews.
Relying on it to pick a past pleasure to enjoy again, is likely to lead to frustration or disappointment.
But that won’t happen to you anymore. Because you now know which mistakes to avoid and how to work around our fickle memory.
So take that first step: use one or more of the exercises to create your candidate list.
And: enjoy the process of rediscovery before committing to any one of them.
You can’t have more time. Time’s the one big equalizer. We all have/get the same amount of time. It’s what we do with it that creates differences: the choices you make about how you spend your 24 hours a day.
Fading affect bias and rosy retrospection
Impact bias and durability bias are two of the most robust findings in affective forecasting research. They show people overestimate how intensely and how long a future event will make them feel something.
Red wine gives me migraines 100% of the time.
Decades of memory research shows that depressed and stressed people lose access to specific positive memories first.
Recent reviews of embodied memory frame autobiographical memory as being partial sensorimotor re-enactment. Simply put: the body holds memories the verbal system doesn’t index.