What Your Future Self Can Teach You

Boost your rational thinking

“There’s an element here that’s fuzzy,” says Chicago Booth’s Ed O’Brien. “What does it mean to feel connected to our future selves? If I said I felt connected to some public figure, you’d have a tangible sense of what I meant—the looks, traits, or values I share with this other person. But what about my future self? Who is that person?”

O’Brien became interested in the future self from a psychological perspective. Studies have found that people spend a lot of mental time somewhere other than in the present—“Whether time is running short, or we’re planning future events, or thinking back on old memories, we’re often jumping around in time,” he says. “It seems like most of our time is spent thinking of things that aren’t actually in front of us.”

Whatever or whoever we’re thinking of, O’Brien concluded, we tend to take a rosy view. From the ancient Greeks forward, philosophers have observed that most people are indelible optimists who think they’ll improve with time, becoming smarter and more rational. In fact, Plato and Aristotle wrote about reason being the defining characteristic of humanness, whereas emotions were a disruptive part of the human experience. According to O’Brien, a lot of people today would say the same. “The future self we picture is the economist’s dream: ‘I won’t eat cake. I’ll always eat salad. I’ll use reason!’ We think we’re going to turn into clear thinkers who are largely rational and unmoved by emotions.”

O’Brien’s research has found that as people believe they’ll be more rational in the future, it’s possible to use that belief to improve someone’s self-discipline. O’Brien asked people to rate how they thought they would react to various emotionally charged situations—ranging from being stung by a bee to craving favorite foods to fighting with a friend—in the past and the future. He also asked people how they would react to more rational situations. As Aristotle might have predicted, respondents reported they would have reacted more powerfully to emotional situations in the past, whereas they would expect to react more strongly to rational situations in the future.

“Responses to emotional events, from being stung by a bee to enjoying leisure, seem more intense if we imagine them happening to our past self than to our future self,” says O’Brien, “but responses to rational pursuits, like needing to exhibit self-control, seem better handled by our future self than our past self.”

O’Brien was able to play around with the effect. When people role-played either their past or their future selves, those playing their past selves became more interested in seeing emotional movies, while those playing their future selves preferred more rational movies, such as documentaries. He was also able to use the future-self phenomenon to actually boost performance on tasks involving cognition and self-control. In one experiment, he asked study participants to persist in a taxing task for as long as they could, which involved making a number of short but strenuous calculations one by one. Participants who were instructed to use their future selves as a role model proved able to persist longer. In another experiment, participants were asked to immerse their hands in painful ice-cold water for as long as possible, a classic measure of willpower. Again, participants who first thought about their future selves were able to immerse their hands for longer.

You should, however, harness the influence of the future self with some caution. The future self can help you be more rational, and perhaps increase your self-discipline while you are preparing a big project at work or trying to stick diligently to a diet. (You might ask, “What would my future self do?”) But it can also have an impact on your ability to appreciate emotional experiences. “Enjoying these emotional experiences is not what that rational future person does. He doesn’t take time to smell roses,” says O’Brien. But sometimes we need to stop and smell the roses, he adds. (“What would my past self do?”) Perhaps the Greek philosophers, though wise, should have given a little more credit to the emotional side of the psyche, and spent some more time wandering through the garden.

Motivate yourself to be healthier

Urminsky is doing work that further highlights pursuits involving the kind of self-discipline many people lack, especially when it comes to diet and exercise. Urminsky and Bartels find that when people are prompted to care about their future selves and think about present-future trade-offs, they’re also likely to choose and stick to long-term New Year’s resolutions and make smart health choices whose results may be felt only later.

In one study, the researchers asked visitors at a museum to fill out a survey into which were embedded unrelated questions designed to remind them about the future consequences of unhealthy eating. The survey also asked for each participant’s height and weight. Afterward, the participants were offered a choice between two snacks as a thank-you for participating. People who had been prompted to think about being connected to their future selves and reminded to consider the repercussions of unhealthy eating chose the healthier snack option. But it was only the overweight people who were affected. Those who were not overweight were more likely to choose the less healthy option, regardless of connectedness or healthy-eating reminders.

The fact that only overweight people were affected by the prompts suggests that when we know something needs to change, such as body weight, being nudged to simultaneously think about it and care about the future self can make a difference in these moment-to-moment choices. Similarly, Bartels and Urminsky found that overweight undergraduates who naturally felt more connected to their future selves frequented the gym more often throughout the academic year than those who felt less connected.

The future itself could also help, in a different way. Chicago Booth’s Eugene M. Caruso has found that people perceive the future differently from the past. In a series of studies published in 2013, he and his co-researchers had participants rate whether a given distance in time (one week, one month, or one year) seemed closer in the past or the future—and the future, approaching days always seemed closer than the past, receding ones.

Just as you can connect with your future self, you can also distance yourself from your past self and an undesirable side of you. Want to quit smoking? Focus on this, says Caruso: your fast-approaching future self is smoke-free, while your increasingly remote past self is the one with blackened lungs. “It’s helpful to see that past me as ancient history,” says Caruso. “Distancing yourself from undesirable past selves can be motivating in the present, too.”