Right now, there’s a graveyard of trip itineraries in my Google Docs. Japan, Canada, the Maldives, a small island called Holbox, and at least six others I’ve forgotten about.
I planned all of them. Not casually, thoroughly. Hotels compared across three neighborhoods. Flights priced on different days of the week.
Attractions ranked, restaurants bookmarked, the ones with bad reviews flagged so I’d know to skip them. I mapped the walk from the airport hotel to the train station. I knew which subway line to take.
And I loved doing it. The planning wasn’t the chore before the trip. It was the thing I looked forward to at the end of a long day.
An hour with thirty tabs open, building a version of my life where I’m eating ramen in Tokyo at a counter with six seats and no English menu.
I could feel the trip while I planned it. The buzz of being somewhere unfamiliar, the looseness of having nowhere specific to be.
I haven’t taken any of these trips. And for a long time I felt guilty about that, like I was good enough to do the planning but not motivated enough to follow through.
Turns out psychology has something to say about the planning-and-not-going, and it’s not what I expected.
The brain doesn’t know you’re not going, it just knows something good is coming
When you’re deep in a trip itinerary at midnight, reading about a ryokan in Kyoto, imagining the wooden bath, picturing yourself walking through a market with no destination, your brain is running a simulation of a future experience.
A 2020 study in Science Advances actually watched this happen in the brain. When people anticipate something good, the prefrontal cortex lights up, tracking the reward before it arrives, and the more detail you feed it, the more it responds.
The researchers put it plainly: anticipation of a future reward, like an upcoming vacation, can be more gratifying than the experience itself.
Your chest does a little lift. Your shoulders drop. You feel something that’s hard to name, not excitement exactly, more like the pleasure of knowing something good is on its way.
That feeling is real. It’s not a preview of the happiness you’ll get on the trip. It is the happiness, arriving early, generated entirely by the act of imagining.
This is why planning feels so good even when nothing gets booked. The brain doesn’t need the trip to happen. It just needs the possibility to be vivid enough to simulate, and the simulation does most of the work on its own.
The planning gave you weeks of happiness, the trip barely moved the needle
Jeroen Nawijn, a tourism researcher at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, studied 1,530 people and found that vacationers were happier before their trips than people who weren’t going anywhere.
The happiness boost showed up well before departure, just from having something to look forward to.
After the trip? There was almost no difference. Vacationers returned to baseline almost immediately. The only exception was people whose trips were very relaxed, and even their slight boost faded within weeks.
A separate study by Terence Mitchell and Leigh Thompson, psychologists at the University of Washington and Northwestern, found something even more specific.
They tracked people through three different types of vacations, measuring how they felt before, during, and after. In all three cases, the real-time experience was the lowest-rated version of the trip.
People were happier in anticipation, and they remembered it more fondly afterward. The version that actually happened was the worst of the three.
Part of this makes sense when you think about what a real trip involves. It’s Wednesday and you’re leaving Friday and the temple you most wanted to see was closed on Tuesdays and nobody mentioned that anywhere.
The hotel room looked different in the photos. You’re tired in a way vacation isn’t supposed to make you, and part of your brain is already doing the math on how many emails are waiting.
The planned version of the trip had none of this. It was all possibility and no friction. And the brain had been enjoying that frictionless version for weeks before the real one started competing with it.
Which raises a question the research doesn’t ask directly, but the answer is sitting right there: if the brain is already collecting the reward during the planning phase, why would it push you to act?
Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen found something that explains the not-going part.
When people imagine a future they want, really imagine it, the kind of planning where you can almost feel the weather, their bodies don’t gear up to chase it. They relax. The energy to act goes down, not up.
The simulation isn’t just delivering the happiness early. It’s quietly satisfying the urge that would have gotten you to the airport.
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Twelve unbooked itineraries aren’t a failure to follow through, they’re proof the system worked
So the twelve itineraries sitting in my Google Docs aren’t what I thought they were. I treated them like evidence that I start things and don’t finish them.
But if the research is right, if the happiness does live in the anticipation and not the arrival, then those documents did exactly what they were supposed to do.
Each one gave me weeks of something to look forward to, something to build, something that made a regular evening feel like it had a point.
That doesn’t mean trips aren’t worth taking. They are, for the memories, the novelty, the physical experience of standing somewhere you’ve only seen in photos.
But the guilt about the ones I didn’t take? That part doesn’t hold up. The planning gave me what the trip was promising. It just did it earlier and without the luggage.
And I want to be clear: nobody’s saying plan vacations instead of taking them. If you can go, go.
But if you’re someone who plans and doesn’t always follow through, you’re not lazy or flaky. You’re getting more out of the planning phase than most people realize, and the science backs that up.
Minds that wander like this tend to score higher on intelligence, and there’s a reason for that
The kind of brain that builds elaborate plans for things that may never happen turns out to have a specific profile.
Eric Schumacher, a psychologist at Georgia Tech, put 112 people through MRI scans and cognitive testing and found that people who reported more frequent mind-wandering scored higher on measures of fluid intelligence and creativity.
Their brains showed more efficient connectivity between regions, meaning they processed routine tasks faster and had cognitive room left over.
That leftover room is where the wandering happens. And for people who plan trips they never take, the wandering is doing something specific. You’re not just zoning out.
You’re integrating geography, time zones, currency, cultural norms, transportation logistics, and personal preferences into a single plan. That takes real cognitive work, working memory, flexibility, abstract reasoning, even though it feels like wasting time on the internet.
Schumacher compared it to the absent-minded professor: someone brilliant, off in their own world, oblivious to their surroundings, but doing more cognitive work in the background than anyone around them realizes.
So the next time you catch yourself forty-five minutes into comparing ferry schedules to an island you’ll probably never visit, consider the possibility that your brain isn’t avoiding the things it’s supposed to be doing.
It’s doing exactly what a brain with room to spare does when nothing else requires its full attention.
And the fact that it chose to build something, a plan, a simulation, a little future, says more about how it works than about whether you’ll ever use the boarding pass.
