Futures thinking is good for your mental health
We mentally time travel all the time. A large-scale study published in the Harvard Gazette says that people spend 46.9 per cent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing. We spend a significant proportion of our time thinking about the future. Sometimes, we might be planning an activity—something nice, like a holiday—but often, we worry about things that have not happened yet. It might be our job, our family, or things we have read in the news and let’s face it, these days, there are a lot of those things to worry about.
Futures thinking is a way of harnessing the natural tendency to think about the future and doing it in a more structured way—to take control of it and give it purpose.
The mindfulness movement tells us that to be happier, we need to live more in the moment. I am a big fan of mindfulness. There is a lot of scientific evidence to back this up, and it is a strong mental health skill. But it is human to think about the future. We can’t stop doing it. And what is interesting is that – despite the news – future-oriented thoughts are generally rated more positive than past-oriented thoughts. This suggests that thinking about the future may have mood-enhancing effects compared to dwelling on the past.
Scenario planning has been shown to help reduce stress and anxiety by allowing people to anticipate and prepare for different potential futures. By thoughtfully considering various scenarios, individuals can feel more in control and ready for the unknown.
Moreover, optimists tend to report more vivid and positive future-oriented thoughts in daily life. This ability to vividly imagine positive future experiences may provide an adaptive, self-regulatory buffer against stress.
The more vivid and detailed the scenario you imagine, the better you can think about the situation positively – even if that situation is ostensibly bad – like a pandemic or climate change. If and when that scenario arises, the people who have pre-lived the experience in their brain are more able to deal with it emotionally and have strategies to adapt. They have already lived through the difficult emotions – they know what to do, and they are not overwhelmed.
Jane McGonigal, a games designer with the Institute for the Future, ran a global respiratory pandemic scenario with a number of people ten years before the COVID-19 pandemic. The people who had “lived” through the scenario before reported being less stressed when the pandemic actually happened.
Another odd thing about the brain is that fMRI studies show that when we think about ourselves five or ten years into the future, our brains think we are thinking about a stranger. We struggle to empathise with our future selves. This has obvious implications for long-term planning for our own future. You might, for instance, take money now over saving into a pension – literally short changing yourself when you need the money most. Pension savings statistics in the UK prove this by the way.
Vividly visualising yourself in the future, say in ten, twenty, thirty years, vividly imagining the world you will inhabit then – your house, your neighbourhood, your work, is not an idle fantasy. It could literally make the difference between a long and comfortable happy, healthy life and the complete opposite.
If we zoom out beyond ourselves to our family, our friends, our society, the human race, living things on earth – we can see, having a vivid imagination about the future that goes beyond the vaguely apocalyptic might be useful.