The Key To Living Happily In The Moment? Let Your Brain Ponder The Future
Written by: Angela C M Cox, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
My favorite wine shop used to be located, rather whimsically, at the corner of Water and Vine Streets. It closed a few years ago – who could have foreseen it? – but when it was open, there was nothing I loved more than slipping in there on a warm summer evening after work in search of the perfect bottle.
There was nothing was more satisfying than wandering the cool, fragrant aisles, like a treasure-hunter, seeking just the right vintage to sip on the porch or in the back garden as the dusk settled in ever-increasing layers of violet.
Or maybe the goal was finding something robust and red to toast the changing of the seasons on an autumnal Saturday afternoon. Something earth-bound and smoky to imbibe while a jack-o-lantern sunset the western sky on fire.
Whatever my purchase, it was always a part of creating a future moment in time. I would envision this wine to go with that meal. Ponder the perfect grapes and the proper glasses. Anticipate a just-so vintage for a just-so moment.
And in all of this, my mind was simply doing what psychologists and neuroscientists now believe is one of the human brain’s greatest strengths: prospection.
Pondering. Considering. Creating. Organizing and constructing a future from the materials and memories of the past. For many years, cognitive science was focused strictly on the past (memory) and the present (perception), but often gave far less thought to the ways our minds handle the future. Now many psychologists believe that prospection – our ability to forecast and organize the future – is one way we use memories and our lived experiences to guide our future decisions and to keep ourselves and others safe.
Prospection is actually the very opposite of living in the moment because, as it turns out, we humans aren’t very good at that. We are, however, excellent at anticipation, foresight, planning, and exploring possibilities. If you think about some of the happiest times of your life, it’s likely the happiness wasn’t focused as much on the day or the moment, but on the anticipation leading up to those events. Graduations. Weddings. The arrival of a child. The joy of the journey, as the saying goes. The excitement of looking forward.
That joy, in fact, is often such a focal point that research around prospection indicates most adults think about the future up to three times more often in the course of their day than they do the past or the present. And people actively involved in planning future events showed significantly higher levels of happiness and notably lower levels of stress.
When I was a child, my mother always told me not to wish my life away, and this adage seemed to be backed up by all the “carpe diem” and “be present” and “live in the moment” rhetoric that I have been exposed to nearly every moment of my adult life for the last twenty years.
And yet…
What if it’s not an either-or proposition? What if part of living fully in the moment is planning and hoping and anticipating our future? What if we could we take advantage of our brains’ amazing capacity for happily pondering the future without losing our balance in the present moment?
Establish Rituals
One way to balance present living with future organizing is through rituals. By nature, rituals ground us in the present moment, but because they rely on repetition, they also live forever in the future. A good ritual is a moment, rooted in time and place, that we can plan and organize around as we seek to contain the often-chaotic present.
And because rituals add something certain into a world of uncertainty, we could argue that we need them now more than ever. One form of loss everyone has been experiencing over the last two years is the inability to plan ahead, to see a future, to believe things will shift and change for the better soon. We are stuck in the waiting room of life right now, and if you are feeling generalized grief and anxiety that you just can’t seem to shake, it’s likely to be due in part to our brains not being allowed to do what they do best and envision the future.
Rituals don’t have to be grand and ceremonial. A ritual is anything that allows you to slow down, shift your perspective, take a deep breath, and move into the next moment changed, better, recharged, more fully in control, more fully YOU. Just the act of moving through the planning, engaging, experiencing, and then back to anticipating can bring us joy and stability in moments of pain or grief.
Utilize the “More Of” Principle
Another benefit to understanding our brains’ need to anticipate and plan ahead is the way this strength can actually help us through difficult present moments by helping us focus on future growth instead of worrying about present failures.
In recent studies of employees receiving feedback at work, employees whose managers encouraged them to focus on doing “more of what they did right” and planning their future work and goals that way showed significantly higher rates of professional development, personal growth, and feedback implemented. By contrast, employees who were only given feedback about what they did wrong were less likely to implement feedback and showed far less engagement and initiative around future planning.
Ultimately, when we allow our brains to do what they are best at doing, we find more happiness and growth. When we force our brains to continue living through past mistakes or ruminating on the present, our quality of life declines sharply. There is much to be said for being present, but for the best mental health, most neuroscientists suggest a good helping of the future on a regular basis, too.
The Corner of Not Yet and Someday
One of the last times I saw my sommelier at Water and Vine, I remember making some banal comment as he was ringing up my purchases about being “so busy.”
He nodded and concurred, and then in that effortless way he had, he conferred dignity on my banality by remarking, “There's never enough time to do all the things we want to do in a day, is there? I seem to tell myself ‘One day...’ a lot.”
I smiled and gave in to the magic of the moment and to the ephemeral joy of his fleeting wistfulness.
“Very true. I suspect most of us live on dreams of Someday.”
“And if Someday never comes,” he said as he wrapped brown paper around my bottles of Pinot and Chardonnay, “well, we still have wine.”
Angela Cox, PhD, is an organizational effectiveness consultant and Founder of Three Kindnesses.
Three Kindnesses is a behavioral model for individuals, teams, and organizations based on safety, empathy, and diversity. The goal is to give people permission to be their authentic selves and to create the environments where they can thrive, find safety, and be valued for unique skills, wiring, identity, and experiences. With a strong focus on all forms of diversity, including neurodiversity, Three Kindnesses believes in working to understand the unique needs of individuals because understanding each other makes our world, kinder, safer, and more inclusive.
Angela Cox, PhD, is an organizational effectiveness consultant and Founder of Three Kindnesses. For more information about Three Kindnesses, check out https://threekindnesses.com or follow us @3Kindnesses on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Angela C M Cox, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine After beginning her career as a college professor, Dr. Angela Cox has spent two decades in HR and Learning and Development at Fortune 500 companies. From designing meaningful learning experiences to facilitating leadership development programs and consulting around employee engagement and organizational effectiveness, she was consistently focused on how to increase employee satisfaction and psychological safety through deliberate acts of kindness and inclusion. Despite an ever-growing list of skills and credentials, Angela and her neurodivergent brain often found it difficult to fit in and to find places where she could do her best work. Finally, after years of toning down her passion and shaving on her quirky edges to try and fit into a corporate mold, Angela co-founded Three Kindnesses in order to give others the permission she always wanted in her own workplace environments. Permission for people to be themselves, quirky edges and all. An emerging voice of encouragement and inspiration in the neurodivergent community and an ambassador for deliberate, radical kindness, Angela is also the author of two soon-to-be-released books on "How to Be Kind" and a contributing writer to Entrepreneur's Leadership Network.
