How to do mental time travel

Need to know

You have a remarkable talent – the ability to step outside the present, and imagine the past and future in your mind’s eye. Known as ‘mental time-travel’, some psychologists propose it’s a trait that allowed our species to thrive.

If I ask you to imagine what you did yesterday, or what you’re planning for tomorrow, you can conjure up rich scenes in the theatre of your mind. Not only that, you can turn back the clock to picture past eras – Shakespeare’s London, ancient Greece, the dinosaurs, the Big Bang – before spinning the dial to imagine deep futures, from our grandchildren’s lives in the next century all the way to the day the Sun becomes a red giant, billions of years from now.

Yet many people don’t make as much of this talent as they could. In the accelerating, information-rich, target-driven culture of the early 21st century, the present often dominates thoughts and priorities instead.

Obviously, there’s much going on in the current day that deserves our attention: not just urgent global problems that lead the news, but precious moments of individual joy, fulfilment and happiness too. We need to be present-minded sometimes. However, too much focus on the ‘now’ can also lead to the kind of harmful short-termism that infuses business, politics and media – a near-term perspective that worsens many of the long-term challenges we face this century, such as the climate crisis.

Short-termism is, to an extent, culturally driven, from the near-term incentives of modern capitalism to the relentless barrage of 24-hour media. But it’s also compounded by a host of unhelpful human habits and biases too, such as our ‘present bias’, whereby we tend to prioritise short-term rewards over long-term benefits (the classic example is the marshmallow test, in which some children can’t resist eating a single treat now, rejecting the chance to chomp two later on). We also have a ‘near-far’ temporal bias caused by the fact that our brains tend to equate time with space. As a consequence, the present appears close, obvious, salient, concrete; the past or future, by contrast, is roughly drawn, abstract, unimportant.

Crucially, these biases and cultural influences are not insurmountable. I’ve learnt that there can be multiple benefits to consciously cultivating a longer view – and not just because it banishes harmful short-termism. I think of mentally time-travelling out of the present as a form of exercise. If practised regularly, it can lead to greater perspective in these tumultuous times, as well as being a source of hope and meaning. A longer view provides a deeper, richer awareness of how we fit into the human story – and the planet’s – and reveals just how fortunate you are to be here, right now. The geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls this perspective ‘timefulness’.

This is not escapism: on the contrary, the long view can reveal what truly matters in the present – what to be mindful of, and what to ignore. The upshot is greater clarity about one’s choices and priorities amid the cacophony and distractions of life in the mid-2020s.

So what can you do to expand your temporal perspective as you navigate work, school, family and all the other demands and desires of daily life? In this Guide, I’ll share practical tips and exercises that can help you escape the unwanted, short-termist distractions of the present, and discover the upsides of a longer time perspective.

What to do

Discover which ‘time perspective’ you hold

Before you begin taking steps to develop a longer-term view, it can help to get a sense of your current time perspective. Some people are more inclined to be present-minded while others are more past- or future-minded; and these perspectives also come in positive or negative varieties.

For a flavour of your own time perspective, reflect on the following statements, and for each one ask yourself: ‘How characteristic or true is this of me?’ Make a note of whether it is very untrue, untrue, neutral, true, or very true:

1. I think about the bad things that have happened to me in the past.
2. Painful past experiences keep being replayed in my mind.
3. It’s hard for me to forget unpleasant images of my youth.
4. Familiar childhood sights, sounds, smells often bring back a flood of wonderful memories.
5. Happy memories of good times spring readily to mind.
6. I enjoy stories about how things used to be in the ‘good old times’.
7. Life today is too complicated; I would prefer the simpler life of the past.
8. Since whatever will be will be, it doesn’t really matter what I do.
9. Often, luck pays off better than hard work.
10. I make decisions on the spur of the moment.
11. Taking risks keeps my life from becoming boring.
12. It is important to put excitement in my life.
13. When I want to achieve something, I set goals and consider specific means for reaching those goals.
14. Meeting tomorrow’s deadlines and doing other necessary work comes before tonight’s play.
15. I complete projects on time by making steady progress.

This is a short version of a test called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (if you prefer, you can complete the full version online) that was developed by the tech researcher John Boyd and the psychologist Philip Zimbardo (who you may know for staging the Stanford prison experiment). People’s answers reveal how they view time through five different psychological lenses.

Most people’s answers indicate a mix of all five, but some perspectives can be more dominant than others – and each has upsides and downsides. To get a sense of your dominant perspective(s), look to see which statements you agreed with most strongly:

Past-negative (if you agreed most strongly with 1, 2, 3): your worldview is coloured by the trauma, difficulties and regret you’ve experienced.
Past-positive (if you agreed most strongly with 4, 5, 6): you are grounded in your history and traditions, warmly and nostalgically.
Present-fatalistic (if you agreed most strongly with 7, 8, 9): you’re pessimistic, perhaps even doomist, about current events.
Present-hedonistic (if you agreed most strongly with 10, 11, 12): the time is now, and you’re going to enjoy it.
Future (if you agreed most strongly with 13, 14, 15): you’re a forward-planner and gratification-delayer.

Your score can reveal your own personal starting point as you seek to cultivate a longer-term view. For example, if you scored high on present-hedonistic, you’re currently more likely to focus on the moment, taking risks and seeking adventure. People high on this category are pleasure-seeking, intense and playful. The downside is that they are poor forward-planners, and their ‘devil may care’ attitude makes them more likely to fall prey to addictions. Delaying gratification is difficult when there are salient pleasures to be won and immediate pains to be avoided.

The people who score high on present-fatalistic, by contrast, are the Eeyores of the world, defined by feelings of helplessness towards the future, which they see as predestined. On the positive side, they are more likely to believe that luck or fate can change circumstances, but their doomist inclinations lead to lower mental wellbeing.

The ideal mix, according to Zimbardo and Boyd, is to score low on the measures with negative rumination, and moderate-to-high on the others. Or more specifically, you want to avoid being too past-negative and present-fatalistic, and embrace a healthy mix of past-positive, present-hedonistic and future. This allows an individual to learn from their roots, live in the moment and plan for tomorrow.

The good news is that people are not fixed in their categories. One group of psychologists who gave people mindfulness training, for instance, found that it fostered a more balanced time perspective with less rumination. Others found that certain interventions can boost the future perspective: for example, asking people to write down what they would want said about themselves in their funeral eulogy, or to imagine being 90 years old, sitting in a rocking chair and remembering their life. As you’ll discover, the rest of this section is about using these types of interventions to boost your own long-term perspective – fostering a clearer, healthier view of both the past and future.

Have a conversation with your future self

The psychologist Hal Hershfield – author of Your Future Self (2023) – argues that we tend to think of our future selves as different people, with the same kind of psychological distance as if we were considering the needs of a stranger.

That makes it hard to set ourselves long-term goals – from eating healthier to reducing smartphone time – even when we know they could bring benefits. It helps explain why I’ve broken too many new year’s resolutions to remember.

However, Hershfield has found that it’s possible to bring the future self closer, and make better choices in the present. For example, in one study, he found that showing people their faces edited to look older encouraged them to set aside more money for retirement.

Recently, I asked Hershfield to translate his findings into a simple exercise for people to try: an imagined conversation with their future self. In a BBC article we worked on together, he explored the question If you could meet ‘future you’, what would you ask them?

You might be tempted to pose a simple, closed question, such as ‘Are you happy?’ However, Hershfield suggests it’s more fruitful to imagine open questions, such as these:

• What have you been most proud of and why?
• In what ways – both positive and negative – have you changed over time?
• What’s something that you miss most from earlier in your life?
• What actions have you regretted?
• What actions did you not take that you regret?
• What’s a time period you’d most want to repeat?
• What things should I be paying more attention to now?
• Which things should I stress about a little less?

‘Imagine if you were to put these eight questions to your future self,’ he wrote. ‘What might you find out that would modify how you live now? It’d probably be the most important conversation of your life.’

Another way to bridge the gap between your present self and your future self could be to add events to a long-term diary: personal milestones that you hope to experience one day. For example, I’ll be celebrating my daughter’s 21st birthday in February 2034, retiring in 2046 and, if I’m lucky, marking my 50th wedding anniversary in 2058. This exercise risks being a little morbid; it can make you realise how little time you actually have left on Earth, but I find that the act of marking an actual date for the milestones in my life makes them feel more tangible. And crucially, I find myself more inclined to make changes today that will ensure they happen, such as eating more healthily or exercising regularly. (For even more ways to connect with your future self, check out this previous Psyche Guide.)

Take the perspectives of people in the past and future

If ‘future you’ is a stranger, then that’s even more so when you consider ‘future others’. Many of the world’s biggest problems, such as the climate crisis, might be tackled more easily if we could collectively extend greater empathy towards future generations.

Sometimes, the case for passing on a better world to our descendants is made using statistics: statements such as ‘By 2100, the world faces 1-2°C warming above pre-industrial levels,’ and so on. These claims are well intentioned, but the trouble is, if you don’t expect to live that long, it’s difficult to feel as much concern as if it were today or tomorrow. There’s a different approach that’s more effective. Research suggests that empathy for the people of 2100 comes more easily if you can step into their shoes.

In one study, researchers asked people to consider the impacts of future climate change in different ways. They gave one group data about climate impacts, on a global scale. They handed a second group the same information, but also showed them the story of one woman living in a degraded environment in 2105, burnt by the sun, with an itchy rash caused by swimming in a polluted sea. Afterwards, the researchers observed that, on leaving the experiment, this second group were more likely to pick up brochures about environmental harms. In other words, a single future person’s perspective seemed to trigger the participants’ concern more than a barrage of statistics.

You could try using this approach to cultivate your own long-term perspective. Rather than imagining the distant future in vague or statistical terms, picture vividly what it might be for a specific young person you know (or their children).

A related, but more positive, technique in this vein is known as ‘backcasting’, which involves imagining a hoped-for future. Similar to Hershfield’s ‘future self’ conversation, this involves picturing a future person looking backward to you in the present.

One example is a set of exercises from the Long Time Project, founded by Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke. They suggest picturing a child you know and care about today as an old man or woman, looking back at the legacy you left for them:

There’s a framed picture of you on the table. That person you care about who is celebrating their 90th birthday taps their glass and asks for everyone’s attention. They raise their glass and toast you. They thank you for something you did that helped shape their world for the better. What are they toasting you for?

Other groups have encouraged people to time-travel in the opposite direction: to step into the shoes of their ancestors, and consider the sacrifices they made, such as fighting in wars, or achievements such as making medical discoveries. Ask yourself: What did your grandparents’ generation do that enables your current way of life? Doing this, the researchers suggest, can encourage people to feel greater benevolence towards their own descendants.

In sum, past and future people become less like strangers if you make the effort to mentally time-travel to imagine the specific details of their lives.

Seek ‘temporal windows’ to deep time

If you want to take your mental time-travel abilities to the extreme, then why not take a step into deep time? Projecting the mind thousands or millions of years away from the present might seem like taking things too far. You might wonder how it could possibly be relevant to your needs today. But I find that when I reflect on how my life fits into the longer story of our planet, I feel more in touch with nature and the wider world.

There’s no doubt it can be discombobulating to consider that, from Earth’s perspective, your own lifespan is equivalent to a flash of sunlight on the surface of a lake. However, I find that knowing I am one link within a vast chain of people and organisms, living within a Universe that traces back to the Big Bang, evokes a feeling of sublime awe. And awe, psychologists have found, brings myriad benefits: it decreases the likelihood of rumination, for instance, as well as promoting altruism, and making us feel more connected with one another.

When possible, I try to seek out deep time through what I call temporal windows. This involves spending just a short while every week transporting your mind into the very long term, by mindfully observing your surroundings. If you look around, these windows are often accessible – whether it’s the rocks beneath your feet or the ancient light from the stars above you.

Even in a busy city, such windows can be found. Near where I live in London, for example, there are ancient barrows in Richmond Park, some of which are more than 4,000 years old. Until a friend pointed them out, I had often walked past them without realising they were there. Even holes in the street can offer a temporal window: roadworks can reveal layers of tarmac and rock layers that speak of historical and geological timescales.

With a bit of imagination, you can also conjure up temporal windows to the future. There’s an elderly care home around the corner from my house, with a small sign outside: it explains that a time capsule for future generations was buried there when the structure was built. I don’t know what’s inside, but I like that someone thought to leave a message for the future in such an everyday place. (If you want to find one near you, the International Time Capsule Society keeps a registry of such capsules placed around the world.)

The academic David Farrier – author of the book Footprints (2020), about humanity’s legacies – once told me about another exercise in mental time-travel he practised when he visited Shanghai. As he gazed up at the buildings, he spent a moment imagining how all the skyscrapers there might change, evolve and decay over millions of years: what would survive and what would not? Which materials are truly long lasting, and which are transient on geological timescales?

So, when possible, try moving your mind into deep time, and asking yourself: what came before all this, and what could it become in the long term? I find that doing so often reminds me just how fortunate I am to be alive, right now, reflecting on my vantage point within a grander temporal arc.

Think of time in generations, not years or centuries

Look at your family tree, and you’ll see you are only a handful of generations from the time of Jane Austen or George Washington. If you were born in the 1980s like me, you are around seven generations from Charles Dickens, and approximately 17 from William Shakespeare. If your tree traces to the UK, it’s possible that one of your ancestors even watched an original performance of Hamlet: after all, you potentially have more than 100,000 great-grandparents who lived in the 1600s (without any overlaps in your family tree, such as from cousins marrying, your number of grandparents doubles every generation).

Framed this way, the future is also closer than you think. One of the ways I find it easier to step outside the present is to think about my daughter’s life in the coming decades. Born in 2013, she could potentially live to see the 22nd century. On New Year’s Eve 2099, as the fireworks explode and people sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, she’ll be in her late 80s.

You might make a similar calculation for the young people in your own life: sons, daughters, nieces, nephews. In 2024, it’s estimated that 135 million people will be born worldwide – many of whom will become citizens of the next century. And, looking ahead, almost 11 billion more children will begin their lives before 2100. If they are lucky, some of the people born this century – including my daughter’s potential grandchildren – will live through to the 2200s.

Previous generations are only a branch or two away on your family tree, and the people of the next century and beyond are already here – or will be very soon.

Give a gift to the future

A few years ago, James Janson Young – who founded a YouTube channel about long-term thinking called Ours for the Making – was recovering from major surgery. During this time, he writes, his ‘sense of the future collapsed’. So, he decided to cultivate a practice called future-gifting.

‘In its simplest form,’ Young writes, ‘future-gifting is the straightforward, instinctive act of doing something in the present to support yourself (or those around you) in the future. It’s a practice of being generous to your future self in order to help them out a little and shape your future in the process.’ For example, you might write yourself a letter that you won’t open until 2030, or a scheduled email that won’t arrive for a year or even a decade.

While it starts with the self, what makes it powerful, Janson Young argues, is that it helps to build a habit that can spill over to acts of generosity and empathy for other people in the future too.

So, what would be your gift to future people? All of us leave behind both wanted and unwanted heirlooms. What will your legacy look like? It does not need to be a grand statue or presidential library but can be far more everyday. It could also be a personal possession, or a positive idea, tradition or norm: something you taught someone, or a way you inspired them.

I believe the greatest legacy I can aspire to leave behind is simply choice. Much of what we are collectively doing in the present threatens to close down the range of possibilities available to our descendants: whether it’s worsening climate change or causing species extinctions. It needn’t be so. I know I cannot solve the grand challenges of our time by myself, nor can I claim to know what the people of tomorrow will want or need. However, if I’m ever uncertain about my daily decisions or beliefs, I return to a core principle: I wish to pass on a world where tomorrow’s people have the ability to choose their own destinies. That, to me, is what it means to take the long view and be a good ancestor – and through that, I derive meaning and purpose in the present.

Seek alternative time perspectives and long-term communities

As we saw with the time perspective questionnaire, everyone has their own horizon of time. For some, it’s days or weeks, while for others it’s years or decades. It’s worth asking: who around you is pulling you towards the moment, and who is encouraging a longer horizon?

Throughout my life, I have come across many people whose targets, priorities and desires were heavily rooted in the present – I’m sure you have too. But I have also met many people who have a far longer perspective than my own: artists, philosophers, scientists and historians who spend their days extending their minds across thousands or even millions of years. Every conversation with them has opened my perspective to be a little closer to their lens on time. The more I immerse myself in their work, art or ideas, the easier I find it to escape the present.

Similarly, I’ve also come across other cultures around the world who think about time differently to my own Western-centric, scientifically trained, geological world view. For example, for the Yupno people who live in steep valleys in Papua New Guinea, time flows uphill. Yesterday is downslope and tomorrow is higher up the mountain. Other cultures see the past, present and future differently: the past is visible in front of them, and the future is unseen behind their heads (which is actually more accurate, if you think about it). Finally, Indigenous Australians have described time more like a body of water that surrounds you. When I realise time is a cultural construct, not an absolute object, I find it easier to think about how we might reframe our role and position within it.

In my research, I have also encountered various communities of people – some of which you can join – who come together to cultivate a longer view. They allow people to connect, listen to talks, share insights, and even go on field trips. Each long-minded group has a different flavour, but they are united in the belief that the long term matters.

Perhaps the most well-known community is the Long Now Foundation. Headquartered in San Francisco, it has become increasingly international, with offshoots in Boston, London and Europe that organise meetups and talks, run by volunteers. Each local group has developed its own approach: the Boston chapter is shaped by the culture of its nearby universities, Harvard and MIT, as well as the region’s biotechnology sector. London has a more British approach, meeting monthly in a pub and going on an annual field trip to maintain the White Horse of Uffington, a 3,000-year-old chalk geoglyph in Oxfordshire. If you’re nearby, why not tag along this summer?

Another example of a long-term community would be the effective altruists. This community is concerned with many areas, such as poverty reduction in the developing world or the threat of AI, but it’s also a hub for those interested in exploring the principles of ‘longtermism’: the ethical belief that ensuring the future goes well is a key moral priority of our time. It has attracted controversy in recent years, but one place to discover if their approach is for you or not is the podcast and website 80,000 Hours, or the book What We Owe the Future (2022) by the philosopher William MacAskill.

Finally, there are communities and places you can visit centred on long-term art, especially in Europe. Every year, you can attend a ceremony in a forest north of Oslo in Norway for the Future Library, a project where novelists like Margaret Atwood submit a manuscript that won’t be published until 2114 – it’s the literary version of ‘future-gifting’. Visit the Dutch city of Utrecht, and you will find a poem embedded in the cobblestones of the street that is intended to run for centuries. Every Saturday, a stonemason adds a new letter, sponsored by the public. And in Germany, a trip to the small town of Wemding will bring you to the Time Pyramid – a project that the local citizens are planning over 12 centuries. Once every decade, they meet for a ceremony to place a new block: so put September 2033 in your long-term diary because that’s the next one.

A longer view is out there to be found – and, if you can seek it out, your perspective on time and the world can begin to feel a little richer, more grounded and perhaps even more hopeful. You have an incredible mind: capable of taking you to the ancient past or the deep future; to meet your ancestors or to picture your descendants. A unique form of time-travel is within your grasp.

Links & books

For me, embracing the long view means cultivating a ‘long’ media diet. If you digest only the daily news and social media, then the information that forms your perspective on the world is skewed – you know what’s happening now, but it’s the equivalent of shining a torchlight at your feet to navigate through a pitch-black forest. Daily news or social memes also cannot capture the slow changes that shape our world, both bad and good, from the creep of environmental change to the strides that science has made in tackling once-deadly disease.

For a longer perspective on global events, an excellent site is Our World in Data. Via long-term statistics and accessible writing, it makes for an insightful companion to your daily news diet, revealing long-term trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. The site covers both the bad and the good: creeping problems like climate change, but also positive developments like gradual medical victories over fatal diseases. Ultimately, you get a more rounded and accurate picture of how our world is changing.

The Long Time Project that I mentioned earlier in the Guide also produced a podcast series called the Long Time Academy. It comes with exercises to try, based on the ideas covered in each episode.

A fun immersive listening experience to try is Deep Time Walk, where, as you move, you journey through billions of years of Earth history.

For the BBC, I recently presented a trilogy of short films about a deep-time perspective. From Scotland’s million-year-old geology to forward-thinking art projects in Norway, my goal in these mini-documentaries was to explore what it takes to expand your view of time.

In terms of books, there’s my own, The Long View (2023), and I’ve already mentioned a few others in this Guide – but there are several more that offer complementary insights, including:

Timefulness (2018) by the geologist Marcia Bjornerud, a meditation on what you can learn by taking Earth’s deep-time perspective.

The Invention of Tomorrow (2022) by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw and Adam Bulley. If psychology is your thing, then this book dives deeper into mental time-travel and why the evolution of foresight was so consequential for the success of our species.

Deep Time Reckoning (2020) by Vincent Ialenti. To derive his own long-term learnings, this social anthropologist spent a few years in Finland observing the planners of a nuclear waste repository – a 10,000-year view.

The Good Ancestor (2020) by the philosopher Roman Krznaric. What duties do we have to posterity? Krznaric explores the social and political steps we could take if we began to care more about future generations

The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson. If fiction is your preferred read, then this novel follows an organisation seeking to advocate for the rights of future generations.