4 Tips to Empathize with "Future You"

By: Shahram Heshmat Ph.D. 

Being kind to yourself when you are pregnant, in postpartum, or a parent in general is vital to your wellbeing.

Many of our everyday choices require making tradeoffs between the present and the future. These choices tend to have delayed consequences. In general, we want things now rather than later. This tendency is known as present bias. Present bias occurs when individuals place extra weight on more immediate rewards than future rewards. The more we disregard our longer-term interests in favor of immediate gratification, the more likely we will have an overspending problem.

The present bias is partially attributed to judgments of connectedness between the present and future self (Hershfield, 2018). We tend to think about our future selves as if they are someone else, wholly different from who we are today. If we view our distant self as another person who is more of a stranger to us, then the future selves’ well-being is none of our concern.

Feeling psychologically close to one’s distant self motivates more farsighted decisions that could lead to better outcomes in the future, such as having more money, better health, and fewer regrets. So how do we learn to relate to our future selves?

1. Psychological continuity

2. Imagination

3. Small steps

4. Awareness of opportunity cost