If, as an individual, you have a tendency to plan, but then forget to actually do the things you meant to, then research on future thinking suggests a simple way of remembering that really does work. Imagine yourself carrying out those tasks and the steps you will need to follow in order to do them. So if you need to post a letter on the way to work and to buy some washing-up liquid on the way home, rather than trying to remember that you have two tasks to do, picture yourself actually doing them. Imagine which post box you will visit and when, and picture yourself putting that exact letter into the box. This only need take a second while you put the letter in your bag. Then decide where you will buy the washing-up liquid, visualise yourself finding the correct aisle, choosing a brand, picking it up and queuing to pay. This is far more effective than repeating the words to yourself in your head. It won’t work every single time, but you’ll be surprised at how often it does.
This technique can also help you to keep to any resolutions you make. If you not only make a plan, but imagine yourself carrying it out, you are far more likely to stick to it. Researchers have found it even works for encouraging people to eat more fruit. Given the goal of eating extra apples and bananas over the subsequent seven days, the students who were told to visualise when and where they would buy the fruit, and how they would prepare it, increased their fruit consumption by twice as much as those who simply set out to eat more fruit. The crucial element in successfully using imagery is to imagine the process and not just the result. Imagining holding the trophy high won’t help you win Wimbledon, but envisioning how you will approach playing perfect shots could.
It is clear from the experiences both of Alan Johnston in captivity in Gaza and Victor Frankl in a series of Nazi concentration camps, that imagery can bring solace in the most extreme situations. I’m struck by the fact that they both made active decisions to retain mastery of the one element of their lives over which their captors did not have complete control – the state of their minds. They were both determined to use their own thinking as a mechanism for coping. In 1945 Victor Frankl wrote his memoir of his time in the camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, in just nine days. It has sold more than 9 million copies worldwide, a figure which he found somewhat perplexing. Up until the last moment he had been intending to publish it anonymously and was puzzled that of the dozens of books he wrote, this should be the one which made him famous. Frankl’s preoccupation with controlling his own mental state gave rise to a type of talking therapy called logotherapy. Frankl reasoned that if a person experiencing the terror of the holocaust could find a way of controlling their mind then this must be possible in everyday life as well.132 Frankl wrote, ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’
While he was in the concentration camps, Frankl deliberately escaped the horrors of the present by throwing his mind forwards into the future. There was one type of suffering he found worse than any other. Although he was constantly cold, aware that he was slowly starving and lived with the continual fear of death, it was time that terrified him the most. He found not knowing how long he would be there to be intolerable. This lack of a time-frame for the future was ‘the most depressing influence of all’. The moment people arrived they said they knew they had no future. Some coped by closing their eyes and perpetually living in the past, but Frankl was convinced that the only way to survive was to plan – to somehow find goals, however small, which could give him a semblance of a future. In one of his lowest moments when he was marching in the bitter cold with sores on his feet, he forced himself to imagine he was in a warm lecture theatre giving a talk on the psychology of the concentration camp. This imagined future enabled him to complete the walk. He was manipulating his own mind time in order to survive.
PROBLEM 5: A POOR MEMORY FOR THE PAST
It is inevitable that memories fade over time, and for people whose memories are as traumatic as Frankl’s this can sometimes be welcome. But it is the flexible nature of memory that gives us such a strong power of imagination, so when we do forget positive memories too, we should not be too hard on ourselves. However, there are occasions when we wish we could remember more, and the research on the psychology of time perception does give us ways of improving both our memory for events and our ability to guess the date of those events correctly. The issue of dates is easier to remedy. By looking at the mistakes people made when they were tested on the contents of their daily activity diaries, I have devised a three-part system for estimating the date of an event more accurately – useful for everything from the trivial, such as finding out whether a broken kettle might be under guarantee or guessing when you last visited a friend, to the more serious, such as retrieving an old piece of work or giving reliable testimony in court.
First make a rough guess as to how many weeks, months or years ago the event took place. Next try to guess the actual date. This leads to more accuracy than guessing periods of time. Then to make your final estimate, add or subtract some days, months or years according to the following rules: for a personal event which happened more than two months ago, add some time on. So if it was six months ago that you think you went to France, it was probably seven. Eight years ago was more likely nine. But if it happened less than two months ago then the likelihood is that it happened more recently than you think – this is reverse telescoping. So if you guess it was roughly ten days ago, take a day off and go for nine days instead.
For public news events the rules are slightly different. Remember that key figure of 1,000 days or three years. If you think an event happened three years ago then you might well be correct, so stick with that guess. If you know it was less than three years ago, make it a month or two more recent than your first thought. If it was more than three years ago, perhaps even decades ago, make it a year or two or three earlier to compensate for the telescoping of time.
You can also look for time-tags; the personal events that tether our memories of the news. We know that people who are best at dating events are those who are able to link them to what was happening in their own lives. So to work out when Princess Diana died, consider where you were when you heard, or when the funeral took place. Where were you living? Where were you working? Then focus on any details which might give you other clues. What was the weather like when people were leaving flowers in Kensington Gardens? Was it light in the evenings? Could it have been in summer or winter? You would do some of this instinctively, but the more you deliberately pay attention to the details, the more likely you are to be correct. As you might expect, it’s the most significant events in your personal life that help you to tether a memory – so did it happen before or after you had a child, or before or after you moved house?
Then there’s the more general problem of forgetting events entirely. The more you discuss an autobiographical memory, the more likely you are to recall it, but that doesn’t mean that you will remember it accurately. Each time you tell the story you can reinforce earlier mistakes, but there are methods of improving recall. Think back to the research John Groeger did where he asked more than a thousand drivers to describe past car crashes, however minor. People remembered more accidents when they were told to work from the past to present, rather than the other way around. And they recalled more if they started from a specific date in time, rather than racking their memories for accidents from within a fixed duration such as the last year. This is a strategy anyone can use. If a job application form asks you for specific occasions where you faced up to a particular type of challenge at work, recalling them is a difficult cognitive task because you won’t have categorised these memories in your mind in that way. But again the research findings can be put into practice. Don’t think of the most recent challenge working backwards through time. Start with the first job you had that’s relevant to your application, think of those first few months and whether there were any challenges there, then move on to the period where you were more confident
and might have begun suggesting challenging projects at work. Do the same for each job up to the present day and the likelihood is that you will come up with far more examples than if you worked backwards. If you get as far as an interview for the job and further questions of this nature come up, you can do the same, but faster of course.
A final tip is to start with a longer time-frame than the one you are aiming for. So if a visa application asks you how many times you have been abroad in the past three years, think back five years and then narrow it down to three. This avoids the problem brought on by telescoping, where events are included from beyond the time period in question.
There is also a wider issue here for policymakers. The accuracy of the public surveys used to inform government could be dramatically improved by taking research on telescoping into account. If, for example, people are asked to look back and say how many times they have used their local swimming pool in the past three years, then it is important to know how the psychology of time might alter the accuracy of their recall. The survey should start with a longer time-frame and then narrow it down, and it should give people fixed dates to work from, starting with the earliest and working forward to the present day. This will give more accurate responses and minimise the influence of telescoping on the reliability of the results – essential for a government trying to get an accurate assessment of the use of different public services.
PROBLEM 6: WORRYING TOO MUCH ABOUT THE FUTURE
Daydreams can be enjoyable, and drifting into the future could even be the brain’s default position when it’s not occupied. But when daydreams turn into obsessive worrying they are far from satisfying, and excessive rumination can have serious consequences. When we think about the future, we combine old memories to create plausible future scenarios, but sometimes the plausibility seems to be missing. We begin catastrophising and thinking only of the worst. There are various approaches to managing excessive worry. A classic strategy from cognitive behavioural therapy involves deliberately imagining the worst-case scenario concerning your worry, followed by the best possible scenario. The real outcome probably lies somewhere in between. To take an example, if you are dreading telling your boss that you’ve made a serious mistake at work, your worst-case scenario is that they scream at you in front of everyone and fire you on the spot. The best is that they say it really doesn’t matter and that they’re glad you stopped by because they had been meaning to tell you about the pay rise they wanted to give you. The most plausible scenario probably lies between these two, but imagining them both can help you envisage the most realistic outcome, allowing you to worry a little less.
Ad Kerkhof is a Dutch clinical psychologist who has worked in the field of suicide prevention for 30 years. He has observed that before attempting suicide people often experience a period of extreme rumination about the future. They sometimes reported that these obsessive thoughts had become so overwhelming that they felt death was the only way to escape. Kerkhof has developed techniques which help suicidal people to reduce this rumination and is now applying the same methods to people who worry on a more everyday basis. He has found that people worry about one topic more than any other – the future, often believing that the more hours they spend contemplating it, the more likely they are to find a solution to their problems. But this isn’t the case. His techniques come from cognitive behavioural therapy and may sound remarkably straightforward, but they are all backed up by trials.133 I like the fact that he does not make grand claims for his methods. He openly told me that anyone who thinks these techniques will banish all worrying will be disappointed, but that if a person hopes to cut down the time spent worrying, then this is achievable.
If you find yourself awake in the middle of night worrying, with thoughts whirling round repeatedly in your head, he has several strategies you can try. This is where imagery comes in useful again. Imagine there’s a box under your bed. This is your worry box. As soon as you spot thoughts that are worries, imagine taking those individual worries, putting them into the box and closing the lid. They are then to remain in the box under the bed until you decide to get them out again. If the worries recur, remind yourself that they are in the box and won’t be attended to until later on. An alternative is to choose a colour and then picture a cloud of that colour. Put your worries into the cloud and let it swirl backwards and forwards above your head. Then watch it slowly float up and away, taking the worrying thoughts with it.
This might begin to sound like psycho-babble, but there is strong empirical evidence from Kerkhof that for some people it does work. Not everyone finds that imagery suits them, but Kerkhof has another technique that he finds to be effective for most people. This is to set aside a time for worrying. Your worries relate to real and practical problems in your life, so you cannot rid yourself of them altogether, but you can learn to control when you think about them. Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously commanded his brother not to think of a white bear, and we know from the experiment on thought suppression which followed that, given that instruction, you can think of nothing but a white bear. I knew the feeling when I was a guest sometimes on the old TV chat show Richard & Judy. Because the programme was sponsored by Schwartz spices, strict sponsorship regulations meant that any mention of this particular brand of spices during the programme itself was banned. So every guest was given a piece of paper to sign beforehand promising not to refer to you-know-what-kind of spices live on air, with the result that, hard as you tried not to, they were all you could think about. Likewise, telling people not to think of their worries isn’t going to work. Instead Kerkhof recommends the opposite. Set aside 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening to do nothing but worry about the future. Sit at a table, make a list of all your problems and then think about them. But as soon as the time is up you must stop worrying, and whenever those worries come back into your head remind yourself that you can’t contemplate them again until your next worry time. You have given yourself permission to postpone your worrying until the time of your choice. Remarkably, it can work. It puts you in control.
PROBLEM 7: TRYING TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT
Back in 1890 William James mused on how to live in the present. ‘Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.’134
We might talk of our desire to live in the present, to stop our wandering minds from constantly leaping ahead or trailing back into the past. But do we really want to be stuck in the present like H.M., the man whose hippocampus was sucked out through a silver straw? It is true that increasing our attention to what is around us through techniques like mindfulness or meditation can bring benefits in terms of well-being, and this is something I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter, but there is a limit to how much we should desire to live in the present. On hearing the story of H.M., most people feel sorry for him, living in a nursing home, with no new memories, unaware that he was the most famous patient in neuroscience. He was condemned to live in the present, yet here are the rest of us, feeling we ought to be doing it more. Small babies are very good at it. They have the ability to learn, yet don’t have long-term memories and have no idea what might happen the following day, let alone the following month. The consequence of this is a total lack of control over their lives or the way they spend their time. They can’t plan; they can’t anticipate the following week; they can’t even look back fondly on earlier experiences.
As we grow up and our brains develop, time-travelling into the future appears to become the default position when the mind is wandering. Instead of yearning to live more in the present, maybe we shouldn’t fight the lure of the future. Research has found that anticipation is associated with stronger emotions than remembering the past, so if we want to improve our well-being maybe we should pay less attention to the pleasures of nostalgia and more to anti
cipating positive events in the future.
But what if you are convinced that you already spend too much time pondering the past and the future? James is right that the present moment constantly gets lost, but there are ways of stopping your mind wandering forwards and backwards in time. ‘Flow’ is the name for a special state of mind identified by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It means you become so absorbed in the task at hand that you think about nothing else and soon have no idea how long you might have been doing it. This is different from simply being very busy. Your mind is completely focused on the activity at hand; it’s not drifting back into the past nor forwards into the future. If you can find the activity that does this for you, you can slow the passage of time without feeling bored. It might come from playing music, running or gardening. You might already know what does it for you. For me it’s painting. When I travel I take a small sketchbook and paint when I get the chance. Very quickly I become completely absorbed in the picture and the view I’m painting. I probably feel calmer than at any other time. You lose all self-consciousness and become completely immersed in the process of the activity itself, rather than the outcome. Csikszentmihalyi identified certain essential features for a situation to induce flow. It needs to be neither so easy that you don’t need to concentrate, nor so difficult that you worry about the results. The activity should have clear goals, over which you feel you have some personal control.135
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