Be Happier By Knowing Your Future Self

Aren’t you positively brimming with joy, now that winter has gone? No? Me neither. Yet several months ago, I couldn’t wait for the Ottawa snow to melt and spring to start. Now that it’s here, though, I can’t really tell what I thought was so exciting.

This is because when we imagine the future—like how we’ll feel when spring starts—we tend to only focus on the features of whatever we picture. In a 2005 study, Kent Lam and his colleagues asked Canadians about how happy suggests East Asian cultures think more holistically, and don’t focus much on just one difference.) In other words, if you only think about the most central feature of a future event, as one is likely to do with an “analytical” mindset, it can distort your predictions about your own happiness.