How visualizing your “future self” can help you be happier and more prosperous

Take a moment to imagine yourself 10 years from now.

Depending on your age, you may have a few more gray hairs and wrinkles and you can also expect some material changes.

But do you feel that the person you imagine is, fundamentally, very similar to the person you are today? Or is she completely different?

According to a plethora of psychological studies conducted in the last decade, people’s responses often vary widely, and their responses reveal surprising things about their behavior.

Some people have a vivid sense of your future selfwho feel very close to their current self.

These people tend to be more responsible with their money and more ethical in their treatment of others. They are eager to act in a way that will make their lives easier for years to come.

Many other people have trouble imagining their future selves as a continuation of the person they are today and tend to be much less responsible in their behaviors.

It’s almost like they see their future selves as a separate person who has little connection to their current identity and, as a result, they are far less concerned about the long-term consequences of their actions.

You could almost think of your future self as a relationship that needs to be nurtured and cultivated.

Fortunately, there are some simple strategies to strengthen your empathy and compassion for the person you will become, with some profound consequences for your health, happiness, and financial security.

philosophical origins

Inspiration for recent psychological research on the future self can be found in the writings of philosophers such as Joseph Butler in the 18th century.

“If the self or person of today and tomorrow are not the same, but only as persons, the person of today is really no more interested in what will happen to the person of tomorrow than in what will happen to anyone else. someone else,” Butler wrote in 1736.

The theory was later extended and defended by the British philosopher Derek Parfit, whose work caught the attention of a young researcher named Hal Hershfield.

“It was a compelling idea,” says Hershfield, an associate professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He suspected that a disconnection from our future selves could explain many irrational elements of human behavior, including our reluctance to save for our retirement.

To find out, Hershfield first had to find a way to measure someone’s “future self-continuity.”

He settled on a simple graph that featured pairs of circles representing the current self and a future self.

The circles overlap to varying degrees, and participants have to identify which pair best describes how similar and how connected they feel to a future self 10 years from now.

He then compared these responses to various measures of financial planning.

In one experiment, participants were presented with various scenarios in which they could receive a smaller reward sooner or a larger reward later.

As expected, the participants who felt a greater connection to the future were much more willing to delay their gratification and wait for the larger sum.

To see if this tendency toward good financial planning correlated with real-life behavior, Hershfield next analyzed the real-life savings of his participants.

Indeed, he found that the more connected the participant felt to their future self, the more money they had already saved.

Return to the future

Hershfield’s subsequent research has examined the phenomenon in many other areas of life.

In 2018, for example, he found that people’s future self-continuity could predict their exercise-related behaviors and overall fitness.

It seems that if you strongly identify with your future self, you are more willing to take care of your body to ensure that it experiences better health for years to come.

Other experiments suggest that people who score high on the Future Self Continuity measure have higher moral standards than people who have trouble identifying with their future self.

Were less likely to cheat on testsfor example.

“If people are better connected to their future selves, they will have a greater ability to recognize the consequences of their current decisions on their future selves,” says Hershfield.

“And that helps them curb these behaviors.”

In 2020, Hershfield confirmed that a person’s (in)ability to identify with their future self can have long-term consequences for their overall well-being.

The study, which followed more than 4,000 participants for a decade, found that someone’s future continuity at the start of the study could predict their life satisfaction 10 years later.

Importantly, this was true even when he controlled for initial well-being.

This eliminated the possibility that people who felt connected to their future selves had simply entered the study with higher life satisfaction and then stayed that way.

Instead, it seems likely that the higher satisfaction at the end of the study was the result of all those positive behaviors, such as financial savings and increased exercise, which together resulted in a more comfortable life.

future vision

In the wake of these results, neuroscientists have begun to take a closer look at the brain processing behind these phenomena and why so many people find it difficult to identify with their future selves.

Meghan Meyer, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, recently asked participants to estimate the future-self continuity overlap at various time points.

In one of these tests, participants had to estimate the similarity in their current and future selves by controlling for the overlap of two circles, much like the Hershfield experiments.

They repeated the task several times, while imagining themselves three months, six months, nine months, and one year in the future.

In line with Hershfield’s results, Meyer found that the average participant’s concept of their future self diverged from their concept of their current self quite rapidly, with a strong sense of disconnection already appearing at the three-month point.

Interestingly, however, this change began to level off when considering later time points.

As such, there was little difference between the nine-month and one-year time pointsand we can assume that the same would have been true if they had considered even later dates.

Meyer suggests that the vision of the future self was becoming “more blurred” and less nuanced.

This was also reflected in the fMRI results, which offered some intriguing evidence that, at the neuronal level, it really is we begin to think of our future selves as a different person.

In addition to considering themselves at various points in the future, participants were also asked to think of a stranger, such as politician Angela Merkel.

As the participants progressed down the timeline, imagining themselves from about six months onward, brain activity related to themselves began to resemble the politician’s thoughts response.

“As you move into the future, the way you represent yourself is not that different from the way you represent Angela Merkel,” says Meyer.

“This is consistent with this philosophical idea that you treat your distant future like a stranger”.

The things I wish I’d known

Given the many benefits imagining our future selves have for our financial security, health, and overall happiness, it’s natural to wonder if we can strengthen our sense of connection with ourselves in the future.

Hershfield’s research offers a couple of suggestions.

In a series of experiments, their participants entered a virtual reality environment with personalized avatars that simulated what they would look like if they were 70 years old.

As expected, they said they felt a greater connection to their future selves and, on later decision-making measures, showed more financial responsibility.

They also reported that they had more likely to set aside money for retirementfor example.

Many photo-editing apps already allow you to prematurely age your selfies, and this type of technology could be incorporated into educational programs that encourage people to think more carefully about their future well-being.

With less technological intervention, you might consider a simple imaginative exercise. You can write a letter to yourself 20 years from now, outlining what is most important to you and your plans for decades to come.

This motivates people to experience a greater sense of connection with their future selves. And as a result, prepares them for positive behavior change.

Hershfield’s studies have shown that this task increases the time people spend exercising in the following week, indicating that they have begun to take their long-term health more seriously.

If you’re interested in trying this out, Hershfield suggests you could amplify the effects by writing a response from the future, as that might force you to take a long-term perspective.

As you might expect, Hershfield applies this research to his own life. When dealing with the stress and frustration of raising children, for example, Hershfield tries to put himself in the shoes of his future self to imagine how you would observe their past behavior.

“I try to think if he will be proud of the way I handled myself,” he says.

It can be eccentric to start a “conversation” with an imaginary entity, but once your future self comes to life in your mind, you may find it easier to make the small sacrifices that are essential to preserving your well-being.

And for years to come, you’ll thank yourself for that forward thinking.