Episodic Future Thinking: Imagine

“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

If you’re having difficulty imagining life 10 years from now, write down a description of what you imagine. It can be easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

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The Punchline: Those Feelings Are Real

Crucially, these are real feelings. Studies show that the emotions you experience during EFT can be just as psychologically powerful as emotions experienced in the present. This is one reason why many of us prefer to imagine best-case-scenario futures and avoid imagining the futu...

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Mental Time Travel

When the future seems largely unpredictable, is there anything you can do to prepare for it?

All you need to do is to tap into your imagination and envision all your potential futures - using "futures thinking."

Futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prep...

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Making Sense

There are three major kinds of sense-making that happen when you engage in mental time travel to your future:

First, your brain has to do what cognitive scientists call “scene construction” — mentally building the future world.
After scene construction, your ...

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The 10 Year Challenge

You’ve never been 10 years older than you are now, so your brain doesn’t know what to expect if you try to imagine. Plus, there’s so much opportunity for things to change in a decade — your body, relationships, life circumstances, physical environment.

Your brain intuitively grasps this unk...

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