‘Mental Time Travel’ Can Help You Make Better Decisions
Whether you’re a person who can quickly assess a situation and make a decision, or you carefully weigh the pros and cons before making a choice, your memories of the past are likely to play a big role in your future. than you think. It is not necessarily just a lesson from previous mistakes or a traumatic experience from the past that shapes your outlook on the future. It’s more about our ability to draw on the past to realistically imagine what our potential future might look like. This feature of our brain, also known as “mental time travel,” can also help us make better decisions.
What is mental time travel?
The concept of ” mental time travel ” is used in disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience to describe our human ability to remember and reconstruct past events in our lives, as well as to visualize how different situations and events might play out in the future. In fact, some scientists argue that the main purpose of retaining memories from earlier in our lives is to “provide information from the past as a basis for the future,” as the authors of a 2023 study put it.
Similarly, other researchers describe mental time travel as a survival skill, giving us the ability to think and plan for hypothetical future events. This ability to mentally create a narrative about a situation that is not actually happening can also help us make decisions.
How to Use Mental Time Travel as a Decision-Making Tool
In her 2022 book Imagined: How to Envision the Coming Future and Feel Prepared for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, Jane McGonigal, Ph.D. , futurist, researcher, author, alternate reality game designer, and contributor to Lifehacker’s How ” in 2015 The “I Work ” interview series explains how to use mental time travel in your decision making process.
In short, mental time travel, also called “future thinking” or “episodic future thinking,” is not an escape from reality or a form of daydreaming, but rather “a way of understanding who you are.” today with what you might actually feel and do in the future,” she writes. This is where its role in decision-making comes in: According to McGonigal, it can help us prepare mentally so we can quickly adapt to new challenges as they arise.
Here’s an exercise adapted from an exercise she included in Imaginable (part of which you can read in this excerpt ) if you want to try mental time travel:
1st level
Take 30 seconds to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow morning, mentally describe what you see, and answer the following questions:
-
What room or space are you in?
-
What wakes you up – an alarm clock, sunlight, someone nudging you or calling you?
-
Is it light or still dark?
-
Is there anyone with you?
-
What are you wearing?
-
What’s your mood?
-
And what’s the first thing you do now when you wake up?
Make it a point to continue until you can answer—and clearly visualize—your answers to the questions.
Level 2
Take 30 seconds and imagine waking up a year from now. Once again, mentally describe what you see and answer the following questions:
-
What changed?
-
Are you somewhere else?
-
Have you changed physically?
-
What’s your mood?
-
Do you have another morning habit?
-
What could this new habit be?
Just like last time, continue until you have answered all the questions.
Level 3
One last thing: imagine waking up 10 years from now.
-
Where are you?
-
What’s around you?
-
What do you see, hear, smell and feel?
-
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you wake up?
-
What do you have planned for the day?
-
How are you physically different?
Be realistic: Now is not the time to fantasize or try to live out your dream life. You use your imagination to imagine, in a more neutral way, different options for your future based on how your life has been so far.
Decision time
According to McGonigal, most people have a harder time imagining themselves in 10 years than in a year. This is because when we think about this scenario, our brain intuitively takes into account the fact that in 10 years our life may look very different. “So instead of confidently projecting one possibility, you open up empty space to consider multiple possibilities,” McGonigal writes.
This is where the work comes in: Repeat the last exercise, imagining yourself waking up 10 years from now. For once, don’t worry about trying to come up with a single vision for your future. Instead, let your imagination flesh out the many potential—and yes, still realistic—versions of what your life might look like a decade from now.
It will take time and effort to fill in all the gaps, but McGonigal believes that’s why mental time travel can be so powerful: once your brain creates these potential futures, they become new memories that it can return to and return to. movement. forward. As your brain returns to one of these imaginary scenarios, notice any emotional reactions it evokes.
“ These hunches can help you decide: Should you change what you’re doing today to make that future more or less likely?” McGonigal writes. “And since you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want.”
Since it’s been a few years since McGonigal wrote Imaginary , I asked if she had any new ideas for using mental time travel as a decision-making tool. As it turns out, they are, and they are based on a growing body of research on the use of mental time travel to the future as an intervention for substance use disorders and can be applied to anyone.
One example is a 2023 study that found that when people living with addiction practice future mental time travel techniques at the moment cravings arise, it can help them resist short-term temptations to addictive substances and take more the right decision to abstain from drug use. .
“This finding is really relevant for anyone who wants to motivate themselves to do things that may be difficult in the present but good in the long term,” says McGonigal. “If it can help fight addiction, it can help any of us make better choices not only now, but for our most important long-term goals.”