Psychologists usually work with the past, but what if it's a mistake?

Andrii does not want to be sensible and explains this by the fact that he was the youngest child in the family. Masha struggles with drug addiction and delves into the memories of the first time she felt humiliation. Serhii blames ex-girlfriends when relationships don't work out.

But if psychologists were wrong all this time? What if it is not the past that prevents us from living normally, but how we see our future?

Psychologists have long been obsessed with researching the causes of mental illness, but a number of studies show that working with thoughts about the future is more effective in preventing depression and removing stress. Sometimes it is better to work on an image of the future than to analyze negative memories.

Veterans, refugees, and others with traumatic pasts do little to think about the future. Instead, they focus on thoughts about the past.

However, people who survived trauma but were able to build a healthy image of the future think less about the bad and cope better with stress. Thus, it would be useful to encourage people to work with optimism and set goals that develop hope for a good life6.

Thinking about the future in a positive way makes us open to possibilities. We have a healthy attitude towards tomorrow. Based on these considerations, Iolanta Burke and Julie Round conducted an experiment. The experiment involved women who had recently retired and were worried about their future. They thought about what to do with the rest of their lives. Some thought about their futility. When we asked the participants how they felt about their goals for the future, they had mixed feelings.

We began to help them gradually build an image of a bright future. The women wrote for 20 minutes every day for four days about the best version of their retirement time. They imagined their dreams coming true. They thought about family, home, leisure and other things that are needed to achieve their ideas. They thought about how everything was going according to plan and what their life would be like in 5 years.

On the fifth day, the participants of the experiment represented their 80th birthday using their senses. For example, they imagined what it would smell like at that moment and who would be next to them, including people they had never met in their lives. Then we asked to set goals for the future.

A week later, the participants in the experiment still had mixed feelings. They had to think about the things they felt and feared. The first positive changes appeared in three months. They spoke of the calmness and enthusiasm they had for the future. The subjects kept a picture of their 80th birthday and wanted to contribute to the lives of friends, family and society.

Envisioning the best version of your retirement days is a special case of one of the exercises that help create an optimistic view of the future. But there are other tools below some of them.

Imagine how something good will happen in the near or distant future - it doesn't matter if the event is big or small. Imagine how great it will be if everything goes according to plan. Enjoy the pleasant feelings that arise.

Hope depends on two skills. The first is to make a plan that will lead you to a better life. The second is to find the strength to follow the plan.

Try to determine what kind of future you want for yourself and think of a plan to achieve it. Without a plan, you can feel helpless.

Move your mind to a time when all your problems are solved. Now describe in detail how you achieved this.

Make a list of goals you want to achieve. Work out your strengths and think about how they can help you achieve your goals. Why it is better to align future goals with strengths, read the article Why you should know your strengths.

When we are focused on the future, we see the opportunities that future presents. We don't feel compelled to move along the rails that the trauma of the past has dictated. You can't change the past, but you can create the best future.

Just the opposite. We understand that bad things have happened, but we also understand that we want a good future and therefore choose it. This is a starting point that allows moving towards an optimistic future.

This article is an adapted translation of Iolanta Burke's article “Psychologists have traditionally focused on the past – what if that's all wrong?”