How Thinking Ahead Makes Life More Meaningful
1. It helps us make better decisions
2. It drives us to achieve our goals (if we get it right)
Prospecting has another important application: it drives us to achieve our goals. However, the relationship here is certainly not basic. The work of clinician Gabriele Oettingen and associates shows that whether looking to the future helps us achieve our goals depends on how we view what is to come.
In fact, research has tracked down that silver lining considering that our future may explode. The more resolutely individuals fantasize about actually reaching their goals, the less effort they put into recognizing them. For example, on one exam, people who fantasized the most about getting fitter actually lost less weight. Another examination found that surrogates who fantasized about their shift to an expert vocation were less effective in their job search, and surrogates who imagined more about their success were more reluctant to enter into a relationship with their crush.
It is significant that both tests tracked the opposite impact by having positive assumptions ("judging an ideal future as conceivable"). People hoping to lose weight were destined to get really fit; substitutes hoping to get a new line of work were destined to get one; and understudies who hoped to build a relationship with their success were destined to actually do so.
It is a good idea that having positive assumptions (confidence, basically) could expand our ability to achieve our goals, but why can fantasizing about the future really decrease the possibility of achieving what we need? As Oettingen and Klaus Michel Reininger write, positive dreams "lead individuals to intellectually appreciate the ideal future in the present time and place and consequently control speculation and future achievements."
However, our goals often come from our dreams. We need to dominate at work, discover Mr. or, on the other hand, Mrs. Right, or run a long-distance race. How would we transform these dreams into practices that help us achieve our goals? The exam proposes that while hope is significant, it is also helpful to distinguish between our dreams and our present reality, allowing us to see obstacles that we must survive.
For example, one exam asked substitute students to intellectually differentiate their positive dreams of benefiting from a career preparation program with parts of the program that could block their advancement. This reflection caused substitutes who expected to perform well in the program to submit more, and individuals who expected to do ineffectively submit less, again highlighting the importance of hopeful assumptions for progress. However, psychological differentiation was also key: positive assumptions did not expand responsibility in members who were not relegated to contrasting their current circumstance and their future hopes.
The results of a later report recommend that the appropriateness of mental differentiation is due to 'empowerment', which implies that when individuals have unique standards to prevail in something, considering what can block their goals energizes them to try to overcome those limits. At the end of the day, it helps to worry a little.
Mental differentiation, especially when used in relation to "performance expectations," that is, arranging to help overcome probable limits, has been shown to help people achieve their goals. To represent this interaction, Oettingen and its partners use the abbreviation WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. In research, WOOP-like intercessions have helped people end a terrible propensity to eat, exercise more, and improve school performance.
In this way, the research recommends that considering the future can inspire us to take important steps to reach our goals, but only when we consider inconveniences.
3. Improves mental prosperity
In addition to helping us make decisions and achieve our goals, there is evidence that prospecting can further improve overall mental well-being. It can even help people struggling with pain and recovering from injury.
Certainly, some scientists represent a connection between helpless prospecting and certain mental problems such as discouragement.
"We consider it faulty to be a hidden cycle of the center that drives discouragement," write physicians Martin Seligman and Anne Marie Roepke in the book Homo Prospectus. Specifically, they point out that people with sadness visualize potential perspectives that are more pessimistic than people without poverty. Also, people with sadness in general will overestimate the danger and have more skeptical convictions about what is to come.