Stress is one of the biggest
complaints people have about their lives.
People worry about money, work, and family. They are also dragged down by events that
have happened in the recent past. A bad
test grade can throw a student into a funk.
A fight with a partner in the morning can affect the rest of the
day. A missed sale at work can ruin a
weekend.
How can people become more
resilient to these negative events in life?
This question was explore in a
paper in the February, 2015 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Emma
Bruehlman-Senecal and Ozlem Ayduk.
They focused on people’s ability
to travel mentally through time. They
suggest that thinking about the distant future can help people get beyond
recent events that are causing stress.
In particular, this longer time-perspective helps people to recognize
that most events in life are not that important. As a result, while they may be
stressful in the short-term, they will not have long-term consequences. Recognizing that events have their impact
mostly in the short-term can make even their short-term impact less severe.
In one study, participants were
all people who had a significant event in the previous two weeks that they
found to be very stressful. Some
participants were told to think about their life the following week and to
focus either on their feelings or the implications of the stressful event. Other participants were told to think about
their life the next year and to focus on the implications of the event. A control group got no instructions. Afterward, participants filled out a
questionnaire about their current mood as well as questionnaires that assessed
their feelings about the permanence of the event they experienced.
Participants who focused on their
life a year after the event experienced less stress and negative feeling than
those who focused on their life the next week or those in the control
group. Focusing on the distant future
also led people to think that the event would have a less permanent impact on
their lives than thinking about the near future.
The researchers ruled out a number
of possible counterexplanations for this result
For example, they did a version of the study in which all participants
were told that thinking the future (either the near or distant future depending
on the condition they were in) has been shown to make people feel better about
stressful events. Even with these
instructions, participants who thought about the distant future felt better and
felt that the event was less permanent than those people who thought about the
near future.
Some of the studies looked at
students who had just taken a midterm exam.
Students who did poorly on the exam felt better if they thought about
the distant future than if they thought about the near future. But, students who did well on the exam felt
equally good regardless of whether they thought about the near future or the
distant future.
In this study, the researchers
also looked at the students’ final exam grades.
You might think that reducing students’ stress by having them focus on
the distant future might make them feel better in the short term, but not learn
from their mistakes. So, they might
actually do more poorly on the final exam if they thought about the distant
future. In fact, students who did poorly
on the midterm did equally well on the final exam regardless of the
instructions they were given in the study, suggesting that thinking about the
future reduced stress, but did not influence motivation to do well in the
class.
Ultimately, these results suggest
that thinking about the future helps to give you perspective on the negative
events in your life. When something goes
wrong, it is tempting to obsess over the details of what went wrong. High levels of stress are not helpful for
getting work done in the future, though.
So, it can be valuable to recognize that most of the events of your
life—even ones that seem incredibly important at the time—do not have a
life-changing impact.
