Whether you’re someone who can quickly assess a situation and come to a decision, or you painstakingly weigh every pro and con before making a choice, your memories of the past probably play a larger role in your future than you think. This isn’t necessarily just a matter of learning from previous mistakes or having traumatic experiences of the past inform your outlook on the future. It’s more about our ability to draw on the past in order to actually picture what our potential futures might look like. This feature of our brains—also known as “mental time travel”—can also help us make better decisions.
What is mental time travel?
The concept of “mental time travel” is used in disciplines like psychology and neuroscience to describe our ability as humans to recall and reconstruct past events from our lives, as well as to visualize how various situations and events might play out in the future. In fact, some scholars argue that the main purpose for having memories from earlier in our lives is “to provide information from the past as the scaffolding of the future,” as the authors of a 2023 study put it.
Similarly, other researchers describe mental time travel as a survival skill, giving us the chance to think about and plan for hypothetical future events. This ability to mentally construct a narrative for a situation that isn’t actually taking place can also help us make decisions.
How to use mental time travel as a decision-making tool
In her 2022 book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, Jane McGonigal, PhD—a futurist, researcher, author, designer of alternate reality games, and 2015 participant in Lifehacker’s “How I Work” interview series—explains how to use mental time travel as part of your decision-making process.
In short, mental time travel—which is also referred to as “futures thinking” or “episodic future thinking”—isn’t a way to escape from reality, or a form of daydreaming, but rather “a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future,” she writes. That’s where its role in decision-making comes in: According to McGonigal, it can help mentally prepare us so we can quickly adapt to new challenges as they arise.
Here’s an exercise adapted from one she includes in Imaginable—a portion of which can be read in this excerpt—if you’d like to give mental time travel a try:
Level 1
Take 30 seconds to imagine waking up tomorrow morning, and mentally describing what you see, and answering these questions:
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What room or space are you in?
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What wakes you up—an alarm, the sunlight, someone nudging you or calling you?
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Is it light out or still dark?
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Is there anyone with you?
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What are you wearing?
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What kind of mood are you in?
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And what’s the very first thing you do now that you’re awake?
Make it a point to keep going until you’re able to answer—and clearly picture—your answers to the questions.
Level 2
Take 30 seconds to imagine yourself waking up one year from now. Once again, mentally describe what you see, and answer these questions:
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What has changed?
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Are you somewhere different?
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Are you physically changed?
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What’s your mood?
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Do you have a different morning habit?
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What might that new habit be?
Like last time, keep going until you’ve answered all of the questions.
Level 3
Last one: Picture yourself waking up 10 years in the future.
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Where are you?
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What’s around you?
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What do you see, hear, smell, and feel?
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What’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up?
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What do you have planned for the day?
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How are you physically different?
Be realistic: This isn’t time for fantasy, or trying to manifest your dream life into existence. You’re using your imagination to picture, in a more neutral capacity, various ways in which your future might unfold based on what your life has been like up until now.
Decision time
According to McGonigal, most people find it more difficult to picture themselves a decade in the future, compared to only a year from now. That’s because as we’re thinking through that scenario, our brain intuitively accounts for the fact that our lives could look very different in 10 years. “So instead of confidently projecting one possibility, it opens up a blank space for you to consider multiple possibilities,” McGonigal writes.
This is where the work comes in: Repeat the final exercise, picturing yourself waking up 10 years from now. This time, don’t worry about trying to come up with a single vision of your future. Instead, allow your imagination to flesh out multiple potential—and yes, still realistic—versions of what your life might look like in a decade.
It will take time and effort to fill in all the blanks, but, according to McGonigal, that’s why mental time travel can be so powerful: Once your brain creates these potential futures, they become new memories that it can revisit and refer back to moving forward. When your brain does make its way back to one of these imagined scenarios, pay attention to any emotional reactions it prompts.
“These pre-feelings can help you decide: Should you change what you’re doing today to make this future more or less likely?” McGonigal writes. “And because you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want.”
Because it’s been a few years since McGonigal wrote Imaginable, I asked if she had any new insights into using mental time travel as a decision-making tool. As it turns out, she does, and they come from the growing body of research on using mental time travel to the future as an intervention for substance use disorders—and can apply to anyone.
One example comes from a 2023 study, which found that when people living with addiction practiced future mental time travel techniques in the moment when a craving arises, it can help them resist short-term temptation for addictive substances, and make the better decision to abstain.
“This finding is relevant to everyone, really, who wants to motivate themselves to do things that may be hard in the present, but good in the long run,” McGonigal says. “If it can work for addiction, it can work for any of us to make better choices not just for right now, but for our most important long-term goals.”
