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Your future self feels like a stranger. That's fixable.

Why the person you'll be in ten years feels like someone else, what research says about it, and a ten-minute practice to close the gap.

By Calibra · · 4 min read

You know you should save more, move more, start the thing you keep postponing. You even know who benefits: you, a few years from now. And yet tonight's version of you wins almost every time.

That isn't a lack of willpower. For most of us, the person we'll be in ten years doesn't feel like us. They feel like someone else, a polite acquaintance we wish well but don't quite act for.

Your brain files your future self under "other people"

In a 2009 study, researchers at Stanford scanned people's brains while they rated how well certain traits described them now, described them ten years from now, and described other people, including well-known actors. Thinking about the present self lit up regions linked to self-reflection. Thinking about the future self looked, for many people, more like thinking about someone else.

The size of that gap mattered. Participants whose future self looked most like a stranger in the scanner were more likely to choose smaller rewards now over larger rewards later in a separate task.1

Behavior shows the same pattern. In one set of experiments, people asked to decide how much of an unpleasant liquid to drink "for science" signed up for much more when the drinking would happen in a future session than right now. The amount they assigned to their future self was close to the amount they assigned to another participant.2

Psychologist Hal Hershfield, who has studied this for nearly two decades, calls the sense of connection to who you will become future self-continuity. People who feel more similar to their future selves tend to make more patient choices, and in one long-term study, people who felt more similar to their future selves reported higher life satisfaction ten years later.3

Making the future self vivid works, within limits

If the future self is a stranger, one way forward is to meet them. In a well-known experiment, participants who saw a digitally aged image of their own face in virtual reality put more money into a hypothetical retirement account than participants who saw their current face.4

There is an important limit. Simply daydreaming about a perfect future can backfire. In studies by Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen, people who indulged in idealized fantasies showed less energy afterward, measured by lower systolic blood pressure, than people who imagined the future more realistically.5 A pleasant picture can feel like a reward already received.

So the useful version is specific and honest: vivid enough to feel real, grounded enough to point at the next step.

A ten-minute practice to meet your future self

Pick one area of life you care about: home, work, a relationship, your body. Then:

  1. Choose a date. One to three years out is close enough to feel real and far enough for change.
  2. Write or say it in the present tense. Not "I want to live by the sea" but "I live in a small flat by the sea. In the mornings I walk to the bakery." The present tense asks your mind to inhabit the scene, not to wish for it.
  3. Add sensory detail. What do you see when you wake up? What does a normal Tuesday sound like? Specifics are what make a future feel like yours.
  4. Notice how it feels. Calm? Proud? Lighter? Name the feeling in one word. Feelings are what your present self can actually connect with.
  5. Name one obstacle. What in you or in your life is most likely to get in the way? This is the realistic contrast that keeps the vision from becoming a sedative.
  6. Decide one small step. Make it concrete: "When I finish work on Thursday, I'll look at two listings." Plans with a when and a where, which researchers call implementation intentions, are reliably more likely to be carried out than general goals.6

Then come back to it. One vivid session helps; returning to the same picture again and again is what makes it familiar.

Why your own voice helps

Writing it down is a good start. Speaking it aloud adds something: you hear the sentence in the voice your future self will actually have. Saying "I live by the sea" out loud may feel awkward the first few times. Keep going. When the words start to sound ordinary, the future has started to sound like yours rather than a stranger's story.

The takeaway

Your future self isn't a stranger by nature, just by default. A few minutes of specific, present-tense imagining, an honest look at what's in the way, and one small next step each time you return. That is enough to start acting for someone who already feels like you.

Sources

  1. Ersner-Hershfield, H., Wimmer, G. E., & Knutson, B. (2009). Saving for the future self: Neural measures of future self-continuity predict temporal discounting. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4(1), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn042 ↩
  2. Pronin, E., Olivola, C. Y., & Kennedy, K. A. (2008). Doing unto future selves as you would do unto others: Psychological distance and decision making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(2), 224–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167207310023 ↩
  3. Reiff, J. S., Hershfield, H. E., & Quoidbach, J. (2020). Identity over time: Perceived similarity between selves predicts well-being 10 years later. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(2), 160–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619843931 ↩
  4. Hershfield, H. E., Goldstein, D. G., Sharpe, W. F., Fox, J., Yeykelis, L., Carstensen, L. L., & Bailenson, J. N. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23–S37. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.48.SPL.S23 ↩
  5. Kappes, H. B., & Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(4), 719–729. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.02.003 ↩
  6. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1 ↩