You struggle with bad habits because you don’t care about the future enough.

There is one single concept that dictates most of your actions and ultimately the trajectory of your life.

It decides how you behave regarding your health, money, relationships, happiness, basically everything…

It’s the reason why some people invest, exercise and experience peace of mind while the majority is broke, out of shape, and stressed.

That is, your perception of time.

I personally wanted to make this article after reading the book, the Time Paradox. As I realized most bad habits in my life were only due to an imbalance in my perception of time.

The Paradox of Time

The reason why you’re making decisions you’re not proud of, cultivating habits that you know are bad for you is because you’re stuck in a time paradox.

Your perception of time is dominated by one single perspective and the lack of balance leads to the unsteady decisions that you make.

You see, there are three different point of view or perceptions that you can adopt past, present and future.

[Now, in the book they talk about it in more depth and there are other sub-categories that are being presented. But for our discussion I wanted to keep it accessible so I’ll not complicate it too much]

All 3 dimensions are important and need to be present in your life, the paradox states that if you’re using too much of one dimension then it will eat the other ones.

The perfect example of that is adolescence. During my years in high school, I was way more focused on the present and the past than I was concerned about the future.

And when I say the present I’m not talking about living in the moment like meditation practices, I was trapped in the present because I was terrified of the future and avoiding the past.

That led me to skip exercising, reduce my sleep, and not care too much about my grades because I was just living with a very narrow perspective on the present.

My perception of the future was very limited, I couldn’t seem to project myself a year or two down the line.

So the only time dimension I could focus on, was the present moment.

That’s why, when my friends called me to go out, I’d go out regardless of the exam I had the next day. That’s why I didn’t mind shrinking my sleep hours to keep playing video games until late at night.

This heavy focus on the present lead to a life of excess, instant gratification and sense of overwhelming guilt as I knew even at the time that, those were not choices I was proud of.

And if you’re a young adult, this is probably your reality too. Heavily relying on the present moment because you cannot balance it with the future yet while living in the past doesn’t lead to any growth.

Now a part of that time paradox can be explained because of the way your brain develops.

The part of your brain that takes care of the planification and the projection in the future, the pre-frontal cortex, is the part that takes most time to develop.

It’s fully developed around age 25, that’s why before that, most people will tend to be heavily present oriented and not care about future consequences.

Now this paradox doesn’t only take place when you’re stuck in the present, some people experience the same type of problem in their lives because they’re stuck in the past or future.

You probably know people who are stuck in the past, people whose only purpose when they get together is to reminisce about the old times and how life was better back then.

This can also be the case with older folks who wish they could go back in time to relive their prime time. This is the old man at a the bar that’s telling everyone about their past career as a baseball player.

Now finally, even if a minority, there are people who are stuck in the future, always doing something not for the sake of it but for what I could give them down the line.

The person that’s always in their books, working hard to get good grades to become, i don’t know, a doctor and that will work relentlessly for 8 years keeping their head under water.

The bottom line is that the time paradox can happen in any dimension, again the trap is to overuse one time dimension and not to balance it with the other two.

And if you want to escape it, the first step is to identify which dimension is mainly directing your life at the moment, is it the present, the past or the future ?

Bad Decisions

If you have problems with procrastination, if you’re not in shape, if nutrition is a struggle, if scrolling is a problem then it’s likely you’re stuck in either the past or the present but that you’re are not considering the future enough

[And I’ll develop that example in particular because this is what I experienced myself and that I see most often around me.]

You are always thinking in windows of 24 hours, the only thing that matters is what happens today, or this week but you have trouble projecting yourself several years in the future.

Although you could argue that this is how you live life, overly focused on what happens in the present, this is also the reason why you’re cultivating unhealthy habits.

Because if you know that fast food, drinking and not exercising is bad for you and that it shortens your life you simply won’t do it if you adopt a future perspective as it wouldn’t make sense.

But by relying solely on the present, you act as if there’s no tomorrow, you don’t save for the rainy days, you don’t exercise because it’s uncomfortable in the moment and you don’t make future time for you well being because it doesn’t matter right now.

You’re basically living as if there is very little life left. But nowadays life is rather long, modern medicine and accessibility to food allows us to live until we’re 80 and by living your life only in the present you paradoxically restrict your potential of living a long and healthy life.

You won’t be able to accomplish great things because becoming great at something means consistently engaging and prioritizing whatever momentary thing over the real stuff that would benefit you in the future.

Ability you do not have if you’re only living in the present. This is why delicious but high calorie foods, Tik Tok and alcohol can be dangerous for someone that hasn’t a timeline balanced with their future.

This is why most people fall for the dopamine traps.

The worst part is that when you’re a young adult, every body keeps telling you that your life is ahead of you, that you have the time, you need to make the best out of your 20’s because it’s just the beginning.

Paradoxically, this cultural emphasis on pleasure in the present is a significant part of the problem.

It’s like your own future is not tied to your current actions, as least that’s what it felt like to me when people were telling me this.

I felt like why “bother planning for the future, I have my whole life ahead of me” and I just need to enjoy the time because after that there seem to be a natural shift that happen.

Almost as if you wake up one day and you’re suddenly an adult that starts planning for the future.

That is not true and that’s even a dangerous thing to believe in, at whatever age you’re at right now, whatever journey that you’re on.

You can be sure of one thing, the actions that you take in the present, the actions that you take today will have a major impact on the future of your life.

You should not close your eyes on the future and perceptualize it as this distant thing you’re unrelated to.

This is why you make bad decisions in your life, this is why you don’t have the body that you want, this is why you don’t save enough money for future projects, this is why you can’t seem to master new skills.

You’re probably putting way too much importance on the present and the past and not considering your future enough.

But you need to tell your brain and make it understand that you do have agency over it,

And in order to do that, you need to use the past to remind yourself that you have a margin of control over your future.

Look back at the decisions you made a couple of years ago, wether it was to enroll in uni or to stick to tennis for example, those decisions you made in what is now the past have directed what was the future at the time which is now your present.

The sooner your understand that your timeline is malleable by your actions, the stronger the control you’ll gain over the course of your life.

From there, once you have that insight, the goal is to start shifting your daily time perspective to consider the future more, to put more emphasis on it whenever you’re making mundane choices.

Balance Your Perspective

I’m not going to lie, the shift is almost entirely a psychological shift, there are practical tools that you can use and strategies that you can put in place which we’re going to explore in a minute but again, 90% of work is mental.

It always starts with awareness, you need to start observing your actions, your behaviours and your thoughts in order to understand your perception of time. You need to study yourself.

Depending on your personality, the experiences that you’ve been through and what life put your way, your perception will be unique and you’re unlikely to experience time the same way people around you are.

[I’ll link down the time perspective inventory present in the book, for you to be able to clearly assess your time perspective, https://www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo-time-perspective-inventory/]

I wasn’t very patient before, in fact I was stressed out and anxious most of the time. And had you put me in a room and told me to wait a few hours without anything except my thoughts

it would have felt like an eternity because I was so focused on the present that every ticking second felt longer.

Meanwhile these days, I can project myself in the future better. I know that the waiting will lead to me being free so waiting in the moment is less difficult because I know it will lead to a future expected outcome.

The patient version of me is not someone that has a superpower, just someone that knows that the future isn’t so far away and that their current actions are going to have impact on the future.

And as I told you before, for me the most important question is how to become more future oriented so that you can work on the goals, dreams and long term vision you have for yourself.

I think that this shift towards the future is on paper rather simple. You need to detach yourself from only living in the present and relying on gratification in the present, you have to start cultivating doing the opposite, doing things for what you’ll get down the line.

You need to set yourself a really hard and distant goal and reach it using medium term and short term goals, without relying on instant gratification.

You have to teach your brain that you need to have more consideration for the future because this is what will lead you to achieve the outcomes that you want.

Confront Your Reality

But for that to be possible, you have to be willing to confront your current reality, and face the truth.

Most people either don’t know it or are scared of it, but you can find unlimited motivation, drive and energy in your negative emotions.

This is by far, the hardest part of the journey if you want to rebalance your time perspective.

You have to realize and show your brain that the current actions you’re engaging in are probably not what is going to get you to your real goals and aspirations.

The thing is that living in the present is a good thing if it means that you’re intentional about it.

But the reality is that most people who live in the present are forced to do so because they are terrified of the future and melancholic of the past.

Therefore, most of the time, it is not even a choice, it’s the only thing that you have control over and that is why people engage in short term gratifying behaviours that are destructive in the long run.

So if you want to become more future-oriented, the first step is to realize that the bad habits you’re cultivating are part of your life because you’re living in the present by default and cannot feel in control of your future.

That was my reality and swallowing that pill and acknowledging that I was making poor decisions as a result of not having enough perceived control over my future is what initiated the change.

Envision It

As I said, you need one goal, one project, you need to work on something really hard, distant and challenging.

The game plan is simple, you need to put yourself up for the test and see if you can reach it.

You need to craft a vision of who you want to become and what you want to achieve and from there - reverse engineer a goal.

One goal, don’t fall for the new year’s resolution trap. You focus on one thing that you’re going to add to your lifestyle for the next years to come.

For most people, it’s going to be about their health and more precisely taking better care of their physical health.

This was the case for me, back then I was young but out of shape, couldn’t lift anything, couldn’t run, couldn’t do more than 10 push ups.

But still I was going out, eating whatever I wanted, scrolling for 3 hours and skipping classes in the morning because I was playing too many video games at night.

I couldn’t envision a better alternative as, again my perspective on time was that I only have control over what happens right now.

When I started to dive into those negative emotions about my lifestyle and envisioning my goal of getting in shape, I started using those as motivation to go to the gym and push myself.

You find sustainable motivation in the pain of staying the same, not in the quest of novelty and change.

Quiet The Voice

But the goal part is actually not that important, the most important thing is that you develop emotional resilience to get there.

Let’s say that you want to get in amazing shape, you want to reinvent your physique. The main obstacle to this is only going to be your emotional state when it comes to doing the thing.

The only real thing that’s preventing people from reaching most of their realistic but distant dreams is the inner voice that tells them they can’t do it.

It’s the voice in your head that tells you to stay in front of the TV when you’re exhausted and you just got home from hard day at work but that you know it’s time for the gym.

You need first to learn not to listen to that negative voice. In my case, when I started going to the gym I remember this constant voice in my head trying to get me to stop and go back to old and unhealthy pattern.

This is the part of you that doesn’t want to change, the part that is fighting the change. Most of the time, this is the only real reason why people quit and don’t end up reaching their goals.

But ultimately that voice is internal and even if it sounds like someone is telling you that : won’t be able to do it and to quit your session when it starts to get difficult.

You can still choose to go on and not listen to it. That voice doens’t have any direct control over your actions. It’s something that you choose to listen to or not.

At the end of the day, you’re the one in control of your limbs and even if it feels like altering the future seems impossible without big goals and grand gestures everyday, it’s quite the opposite.

Small and daily practices will add up and lead you to a whole different life in the long run. Tiny tweaks in your mindset and behaviours is the most powerful weapon you have to reshape your life.

Time Perspective

Finally, the last thing you need to be aware of is that you’re perception of time is flawed and you are very bad at projecting yourself in the future.

You can only project your current self in the future without being able to compute all the changes in your character and your mentality that are going to take place in the meantime.

This is why, if at the moment your inner voice is really negative and you have not acquired much resilience it feels like everything is demanding, impossible and you’re not able to reach it.

This is because you are using what you know right now and the skills and limitations that you have in the present to envision your future.

Except, it doesn’t work like that, things are going to evolve, you’re going to learn new skills, you’re going to get better at your craft…

Therefore, you shouldn’t project yourself in the future, envision it, have faith in it but don’t get too attached to it as the only thing that matters is that you engage in actions that will get you closer to your vision.

In the end, the time it takes you to get where you want to go doesn’t really matter because it’s not about the destination, it really is all about the journey.

Whatever you’re working on at the moment, it is going to take time, way more time that you think it needs, so you got to learn to enjoy the journey, that’s the only real way to get there.

As always I hope this helps , trust the process.