21 Jul A psychologist explains how you can train your brain to improve your future self now
There’s no doubt we can enjoy happiness now.
And there’s also no doubt we can glean happiness from looking back, and positively reminiscing.
But much of happiness is also future focused, so hope and optimism, a belief that we and things can be better, is crucial.
Happiness, therefore, is at least in part about imagining a future self, a better future self and a better future world. And if that’s something of interest to you then read on …
via Fast Company
Hal Hershfield is a professor of Marketing, Behavioral Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and holds the UCLA Anderson Board of Advisors Term Chair in Management. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. Hershfield publishes in top academic journals and also contributes op-eds to the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. He consults with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and many financial services firms such as Fidelity, First Republic, Prudential, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Avantis.
Below, Hershfield shares five key insights from his new book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. Listen to the audio version—read by Hershfield himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. WE MAY THINK OF OUR FUTURE SELVES AS IF THEY ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE.
Emily Pronin, a psychology professor from Princeton, has conducted a research study where student participants were asked to describe a meal that they were eating at that moment. Most people described it through what’s known as a first-person perspective, how they saw the meal in front of them. Then the same students were asked to imagine a meal that they would eat in the distant future, sometime after they were 40 years old. In this activity, they were about four times as likely to use the third-person perspective, seeing themselves as if they were another person in the scene. What is interesting about this is that it suggests that, in our mind’s eye, our future self looks like another person.
In my own research, I have also found the same results. My colleagues and I found that by using neuroimaging methods, the brain activity that arises when we think about our future selves is more on par with the brain activity that arises when we think about another person. As an analogy, we may imagine our future selves as another person…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE