Make Friends With Your Future to Better Plan for the Future.
How many times in your adult life have you cursed a younger one? “Damn it past Eric, why didn’t you start training sooner?” Many bad habits arise from the fact that you and your future are not very close. If you want to improve these habits, get closer to yourself in the future.
As the news site Vox explains, current research into how the human brain perceives long-term habits, that the more you look at the future self , the more likely you are to engage in better habits. However, many of us actually see ourselves as strangers in the future. Literally. If you have bad long-term habits, your brain is as active when it thinks about your future self as it does when it thinks about a completely different person:
Hershfield also confirmed this with brain imaging. When people are on an fMRI scanner, their rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which usually exhibits high levels of activity when people think about themselves, calms down when people are told to think about themselves 10 years from now. In fact, our brain activity when we think about ourselves in the future looks remarkably similar to what happens when participants are asked to think about other people in general.
So what’s the solution? Start thinking about yourself in the long term, regardless of your habits. You don’t have to start with a savings plan or exercise regimen. Just start thinking about how you connect with your future.
Ann Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, suggests using a timeline . By tracing current events in your life and linking them to near future events (such as deadlines or events), she found that students were more likely to feel connected to their future selves and thus make better decisions. However, no matter how you choose to connect, the more you think of yourself in the future as the same person, the easier it will be to internally justify helping them.