The psychology of your future self

The name for the distance

Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at UCLA, gave the problem a name: future self-continuity.

It is the felt connection between the person reading this and the person you will become. His review of the field sets it out (Hershfield, 2011, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences).

People who feel that connection more strongly borrow less and save more across a lifetime. That is correlation, not proof. It is where the work started (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009, Judgment and Decision Making).

The mirror experiment

In 2011, Hershfield’s lab put people in a virtual reality mirror. Half saw themselves aged decades. Half did not.

The group that met their older self put more of their pay into retirement: 6.17 percent against 4.41 percent, in a hypothetical allocation (Hershfield et al., 2011, Journal of Marketing Research).

The money was not real. The difference in feeling was, and feeling closer to the older self predicted the choice.

Letters, not mirrors

Another study skipped the mirrors and used a letter. Students wrote to themselves twenty years ahead, or three months ahead.

Over the following days, the twenty-year group exercised about 13 minutes a day. The three-month group managed about 9 (Rutchick et al., 2018, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied).

Self-reported, and one study. Still, the shape of it is hard to ignore: the further ahead the person, the harder they worked.

The part most articles leave out

In 2012, Bryan and Hershfield ran a version with real money. 193 university employees, actual payroll deductions, a message framed as coming from their future self.

It worked, but only for people who already felt close to that self (Bryan and Hershfield, 2012, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General). For everyone else, it changed nothing.

That result is the honest centre of this field. One session builds nothing on its own. The bond has to exist first, or be built.

What a 2025 review found

A systematic review pulled together 23 studies on future self-continuity interventions (Grekin et al., 2025, Personality Science).

The effects ranged from tiny to moderate. Most studies followed people for weeks, not years. Twelve of the 23 used university students.

The review could not even run a meta-analysis; the studies were too different. The honest summary is promising but thin.

What the research does not claim

It does not show lasting change over years. Almost nothing was measured past three months.

The flagship money study used hypothetical choices. The one real-money study, inside an investment firm, found a modest and short-term effect (Kausel et al., 2024).

Nobody should promise that a letter fixes a life. What the studies do show is smaller and more useful: vividness and repeated contact move behaviour a little, in the direction of the person you mean to be.

Why distance is the whole problem

Ask someone about their life in ten years and they speak like a stranger’s biographer. The plans are sound and nothing about them is urgent.

Hershfield’s early work measured how connected people felt to their future selves (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2009, Judgment and Decision Making). The less connected they felt, the more steeply they discounted the future.

That is the mechanism behind almost every abandoned plan. Not laziness: a stranger with your face, whose day nobody is watching.

What builds the bond

Two things keep showing up in the studies: vividness and contact.

The interventions that moved behaviour made the future self specific, and then kept the person in touch with it. A 2015 field experiment had people reply for a week to messages from their future self. Reported delinquency fell (van Gelder et al., 2015, Criminology).

Contact over days, not a single vivid hour. That distinction is the whole difference between a writing exercise and a practice.

What Unscripted does with this

Unscripted did not invent any of this. It is built on the shape of it.

The interview builds the portrait: your words, your life, the person on the other side of this. Then the part where studies succeed or fail: contact, repeated.

Your self writes every morning. You write back, and the letters get more specific the longer you stay. You can read the first one before paying anything.

The sources

Hershfield, Goldstein, Sharpe, Fox, Yeykelis, Carstensen and Bailenson, 2011, Journal of Marketing Research. Rutchick, Slepian, Reyes, Pleskus and Hershfield, 2018, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Bryan and Hershfield, 2012, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Van Gelder, Luciano, Kranenbarg and Hershfield, 2015, Criminology. Ersner-Hershfield, Garton, Ballard, Samanez-Larkin and Knutson, 2009, Judgment and Decision Making.

Hershfield, 2011, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Grekin, Thomas, Souweidane and Stidham, 2025, Personality Science.