How talking to your future self can improve your health and happiness

IT WAS with blended emotions that Hal Hershfield sat down for a video chat with a serial killer. However Hershfield, a behavioural economist on the College of California, Los Angeles, believed Pedro Rodrigues Filho may educate him one thing about how we are able to all make higher selections.

Rodrigues spent a complete of 41 years in jail for murdering 71 individuals, and different crimes. Of their dialog, he described to Hershfield how, in the future, he dramatically modified his mindset. Whereas in solitary confinement after killing a fellow prisoner who attacked him, he stated, he spoke to God and vowed to vary.

Following his second launch from jail, in 2018, Rodrigues claimed to have stopped killing, began exercising and commenced educating others in regards to the risks of crime on YouTube. “I think about myself to be a brand new individual now,” he informed Hershfield.

This dramatic change was “a strolling instance of how we might be totally different individuals over time”, says Hershfield. In his e book, Your Future Self, Hershfield exhibits that individuals who really feel near their future selves – and realise they might be totally different to their current selves – make higher selections, equivalent to exercising and staying on the appropriate aspect of the regulation. They have a tendency to have higher college grades, superior funds and higher well-being.

Not like Rodrigues, you don’t want a spiritual epiphany to make such a change. Hershfield is testing numerous strategies to permit us to interact with our future selves – together with writing them letters and even speaking to them in digital actuality – that might rework not solely the way you relate to your self, but additionally the way you behave within the …