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- Living for the future means you have a clear vision of what needs to be done today in order to be the person who achieves your short-term goals and long-term dreams. Living in the future means you already feel like you’ve made it and thus have nowhere else to go.
medium.com/change-your-mind/are-you-living-in-the-future-or-for-the-future-and-why-it-matters-1a81937631e6Are You Living In The Future or For The Future? (And Why It ...
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How thinking about 'future you' can build a happier life. Getty Images. We should think more about whom we'll be in the future – because doing so has profound consequences for our health,...
Oct 9, 2023 · Living for your future describes the complex relationship between your past, present, and future. It emphasizes the relationship between your present and your future more than...
- Overview
- Positive Psychology
- How Future Thinking Helps You
- Managing Mental Health Challenges
- How to Use Future Thinking
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How you think about your future is bound up with your well-being. Positive future thinking (PFT) is an important component of healthy cognitive functioning. When people can’t imagine a positive future, that negative view often becomes a central feature of anxiety and depression.
Positive psychology is a branch of psychology focused on the positive events and influences in life. By focusing on positives, people find a life of meaning and purpose. The goal: you don’t just survive, you thrive.
Using what’s called prospection, you can think about and stimulate your possible future. This may include planning, predicting, and using hypothetical scenarios about future events. Seeing if you can find a way to set your mind on optimism and an abundant future despite the hurdles you face can prove beneficial.
Motivation and Expectation
When you are motivated to do something and also have the expectation something will happen in the future, you are more likely to succeed. Note, future thinking is different from fantasizing. With fantasizing, people might feel good and as if they already met their goals in the moment, so they don’t work or strategize for future success. With future thinking, people come to expect to reach a goal. So, they often plan, make efforts, and work around obstacles in order to achieve it.
Visualization
When you hold a picture in your mind and energize it, you are visualizing. Decades of studies have shown that athletes who rehearse by mentally visualizing and imagining successful performances in the future do perform better. Remarkably, you are stimulating the same part of the brain as you do when you actually play the sport. Using visualization techniques can empower you to a better future.
Delay Discounting
Delay discounting is a psychological term that describes how people usually choose smaller awards that they can obtain sooner over long-term rewards, thus discounting the delay. For example, you might choose to spend your money on a new tech device now, rather than saving it for a larger goal, such as your retirement fund. When you imagine a future retirement in which you are traveling and excited, however, you connect more to that future version of yourself. It becomes more real and possible. You’ll therefore be more likely to invest in that future retirement and overcome delay discounting.
Reduce Stress
It might be hard nowadays to find anyone who isn’t stressed in some way. Haley Neidich, LCSW, a mental health professional, says, “Individuals who naturally have vivid imaginations and are optimistic tend to have better skills in managing life's stressors and dealing with triggering events.” She says when people are in positive future thinking mode, their body is relaxed. Therefore a stressor simply will not register as a massive issue.
Haley Neidich
Folks who are in a negative thought experience and struggle to forward-think will often catastrophize smaller stressors. — Haley Neidich
Anxiety
“Interestingly,” Neidich comments, “I also find that successful individuals who have anxiety disorders and are naturally "future thinkers" tend to credit their anxiety for their success. This can be problematic as this reinforces that it's the anxiety and not a thought habit that brings them success. "Since I work with a lot of high-achieving folks, I am often exploring with them how to tease out their anxiety from their natural-given gifts of imagination," says Neidich.
Anticipatory Savoring
To improve your psychological health, luxuriate in thinking about a future event. Anticipatory savoring is when you are enjoying an event that hasn’t happened. You benefit in many ways: by imagining it, by finally experiencing it, and then by remembering it.
Practice
Take an inventory. See if you’re obsessing about the past or mired in your current problems. Pivot to thoughts about what you’re looking forward to. Give attention to future-oriented positive ideas.
Future Directed Therapy
If you are still struggling, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you think about the future and improve prospection. This form of therapy changes your automatic negative response and helps you replace negative thinking with more objective, clear-eyed thinking. This can help you move forward into your future in a healthy manner. Or you might opt directly for Future Directed Therapy. In this form of therapy, you don’t dwell on the past or your present-day problems. Rather, you spend time imagining what you desire in the future and learn how to meet those future goals.
- Barbara Field
May 1, 2019 · Research suggests that thinking about the future—a process known as prospection—can help us lead more generous and fulfilled lives.
- To improve your performance, stop thinking about it (unselfconsciousness). I've never felt comfortable on a dance floor. My movements feel awkward. I feel like people are judging me.
- To avoid worrying about the future, focus on the present (savoring). In her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about a friend who, whenever she sees a beautiful place, exclaims in a near panic, "It's so beautiful here!
- If you want a future with your significant other, inhabit the present (breathe). Living consciously with alert interest has a powerful effect on interpersonal life.
- To make the most of time, lose track of it (flow). Perhaps the most complete way of living in the moment is the state of total absorption psychologists call flow.
Nov 9, 2020 · This article explores an approach called ‘solutions-focused thinking’ to develop a vision for your future “best life”. The aim is to explore positive experiences, strengths, values, and resources to help you set goals and build on what motivates, matters most to you and works for you. Once the vision is clarified, then you can take ...
Sep 3, 2020 · Is it being future-oriented and optimistic? Or is it being focused on the here and now? These are seemingly paradoxical processes and yet each has been proposed and studied as being the key to a...
