Thinking about the self typically involves constructing a whole from the sum of past episodes of your life.

In a new study, imagining a future self helped people feel a stronger connection to their values.

By tracing the line of continuity from the past through the future, your life choices can be more fulfilling.

As you think about the person you are now, the chances are you built this from your memories of the past. The camera app on your phone pushes out photos of yourself over past years, sometimes stretching into a couple of decades. You are reminded of past events that you may have let slip away from memory, and as these images flip by, your connection to your former self only gains in strength.

But what about the future? Obviously, you can’t “see into” the future the way you see into the past, but have you ever thought about where life is taking you to get from here to there? You know logically that you will be the same person you are now as you project into the coming years, but this foggier and less certain vision can make this a challenging exercise.

Projection Into the Future and Your Sense of Self

According to new research by Karlstad University’s Jonas Blom and colleagues (2026), the ability to envision the future could be highly valuable as you make important life decisions. Benny is at a choice point in a new relationship where he could either commit to this partner or suggest they take things more slowly. Affecting this decision is his assessment of how things are going now, but as Blom et al. suggest, maybe he should do some crystal ball-gazing to see if he thinks he and his new partner will be as happy in 20 years as they are at the moment.

Complicating this future time projection is the fact that 20 years seems like a lifetime away. In the words of the authors, “When the future self feels distant, long-term goals can seem less personally relevant, and motivation to act based on future consequences may decrease.” Benny won’t know how he’ll be or feel this far into the future. Maybe one way to make the future seem more relevant is to explore not just the details but the feelings associated with the event, suggest Blom et al. This takes an academic exercise into the realm of both seeming and feeling more real.

Preconstructing the Future, One Day at a Time

A thought experiment known as the “day preconstruction method,” or “DPM,” could provide just the right tool to enable Benny to look at his future self. In the DPM, you engage in a writing exercise where you envision an event and how you will feel as a result. The empirical question the Karlstad U. team studied is whether bringing emotions into the future time projection could help people feel a stronger sense of self-continuity.

You can try this experiment on yourself by either writing down or thinking about how you would respond to the prompt the experimenters used in one of their four studies carried out with online participants:

Imagine the situation when you wake up to a day 20 years (vs. 3 months) into the future. Where are you, and how would you describe that place? Are you alone or with someone? How do you feel and why? Try to write so that a reader would see the whole event in front of them. It will help you imagine the day as vividly as possible.

Imagine the situation when you wake up to a day 20 years (vs. 3 months) into the future. Where are you, and how would you describe that place? Are you alone or with someone? How do you feel and why? Try to write so that a reader would see the whole event in front of them. It will help you imagine the day as vividly as possible.

After completing this exercise, participants rated their future self-continuity with both a four-question scale (e.g., how similar and self-connected they felt to their former self) and a specific questionnaire with scales measuring similarity to the future self, vividness, and positive affect toward the future self.

Across the four studies that made up the entire investigation, Blom et al. showed a repeated effect of long-term future projection (20 years) on self-continuity that was greater than the effect of shorter-term DPM’s. What’s more, experiencing positive affect in the future had a more pronounced effect on self-continuity than experiencing negative affect.

The authors next wanted to test the idea that future projections of the self could promote better decision-making in an economic choice task. Theoretically, if people are projecting a stronger version of themselves into the future, they should show greater wisdom toward making a decision that would benefit them in the long run. The results didn't pan out, however, leading the Karlstat U. research team to reason that economic choices depend on more than the ability to project into the future.

But, on the positive side, there was a benefit of engaging in the DPM on a measure of “self-reported valued living,” or acting on core values in daily life. The valued living scale asked participants to rate whether they had stuck to their values in 10 life domains (e.g., family, relationships, work, education) in the one week following the DPM manipulation. Thinking back to Benny, this would suggest that the DPM could help him sort through his own values as he contemplates a future with his relationship partner.

Using Your Future Self to Guide You in the Present

Taken together, these findings suggest that taking a few moments to see yourself in a future event while also generating emotional reactions to that event can help promote a sense of continuity that can guide your current actions. The DPM is in many ways a values clarification exercise, but with the added twist of encouraging you to draw the through line between who you are now and who you will be at a future point. And the longer the time frame, the better.

To sum up, by imagining the distant future, the authors conclude, you can make your future self more “psychologically accessible.” As you do, your sense of fulfillment in living up to the values of the future self will emerge and guide you forward.

Blom, J. H., Wästlund, E., & Kristensson, P. (2026). The day preconstruction method: A novel method to strengthen future self-continuity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000574

There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.

By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy

© Psychology Today