Something happened recently where I was completely blindsided and had to unenroll from my graduate school program right away. I was pretty upset and I called many different friends and my family to process what happened and what to do next. A common phrase I heard from those I talked to was “Everything happens for a reason.”
But with my time spent working on the How I Decided podcast and learning about decision-making, I think “Everything happens for a reason” has taken on a new meaning for me and it’s because of a decision-making tool called mental time travel.
“Everything happens for a reason” (I’m just going to call it EHFAR moving forward) is a cliche that deals with the unfairness for life by stating that whatever shit just happened in your life happened for a reason. After hearing EHFAR, you try to find that elusive “reason” for why all this happened.
Think about the last time when something really shitty happened to you, not because of your own irresponsibility or choices, but maybe someone treated you unfairly or you just got unlucky. After we experience that, it’s easy for us to see only the negatives, feel extremely upset, and not think clearly. So when someone tells us “EHFAR!” and we go searching for a reason why everything happened the way we did, we often can’t come up with anything. Everything sucks, there’s no silver lining, we’re cooked.
But for all situations, I strongly believe there truly is a reason out there. An answer to EHFAR and a reason to be optimistic about our future. How do we find it? And how do we find it sooner rather than later so that we’re able to effectively deal with our difficult situation in the present? The answer has to do with the tool of mental time travel.
Mental Time Travel
The term “mental time travel” was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, building upon the work of Endel Tulving. Tulving proposed the term “chronesthesia,” a brain ability acquired through human evolution that allows us to recollect and feel past personal experience. Tulving suggests that recalling past events helped humans learn what to avoid and how to behave in the future.
Suddendorf and Corballis built on that research by suggesting that the same time travel that people use to recall past events is also used to imagine future events and how we’ll feel in future scenarios. In this great TED article, Jane McGonigal says that mental time travel “allows us to ‘pre-feel’ different positive futures.”
So let’s go back to our hypothetical scenario where something really shitty just happened to us. How do we find that answer to EHFAR? What we can start to do is use mental time travel and imagine how we’re feeling in the future. Annie Duke, one of my favorite authors and psychologists, suggests the 10–10–10 method.
- Imagine how you’ll feel about this bad situation 10 days from now
- Now imagine how you’ll feel about it 10 months from now
- Finally, imagine how you’ll feel about it 10 years from now
Just going through this exercise helps us realize that our negative emotions and feelings will not last long-term. People always tell you after hard moments that things will work themselves out, but doing this exercise allows you to feel and understand it for yourself that everything will be ok. We’re able to do this because we can remember moments in the past where we’ve felt super upset and thought the hard times would last eternity, but they didn’t and we bounced back from it.
Ok, so now we’ve realized that our negative emotions are temporary, but how do we find that answer to EHFAR? Let’s try some more mental time travel:
- Imagine a day in your life 10 months from now…what will you be doing? Who will you be doing it with? What new things are you doing that you aren’t doing right now? What will your morning routine be like?
Through this exercise, you’re able to imagine new possibilities for what your life will be like, hopefully in a more positive way. Maybe after injuring yourself in a bad accident, you’ve rediscovered a new hobby that you always enjoyed or got to learn something new that you always wanted to do but never had the time. Maybe after getting laid off, you’ve not only had the time to take a break and spend more time with family, but you also found a job that aligns more with your values and passions and now you wake up pumped to go after it at work.
Just imagining these new, pleasant things won’t make them happen automatically, but that’s not the point right now. The point right now is that you’re feeling upset about something that happened, and what you need is a light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what EHFAR is really all about. Sometimes you can’t immediately understand why things happened the way they did, but if you give yourself a reason, an opportunity to chase something new or better yourself, that becomes your reason. More often than not, we have to go out and choose what our answer to EHFAR really is! Mental time travel encourages your brain to run wild in helping you identify these new opportunities and new goals that get you fired up.
On the flip side, mental time travel also keeps us from making impulsive, poor decisions when we’re upset. Again, let’s go back to that situation of something shitty happening. When we’re upset and negative, we’re more susceptible to bad choices and lashing out: acting out against others who we feel have wronged us, using social media as a weapon to attack others, and even acts of physical violence.
These are actions we normally wouldn’t do but when we’re angry it’s easy to lose control. It’s important in these moments, especially after the immediate aftermath of a bad event, to use mental time travel and think about how you will feel in the future. Again, we can apply the 10–10–10 method, but shorter the time frames.
- Imagine how you’ll feel about your actions 10 minutes from now
- Now imagine how you’ll feel about your actions 10 hours from now
- Finally, imagine how you’ll feel about your actions 10 days from now
The truth is that whatever you’re thinking of doing is probably not going to make you feel better at all. In fact, you may immediately regret it.
We Still Need Time To Process
In advocating for using mental time travel to deal with difficult situations, I am not saying that we should entirely skip the part where we give ourselves the time to process what happened, talk to those close to us, and do things we enjoy.
It’s unrealistic to expect ourselves to immediately jump into positive thinking right after something bad has happened. One of my favorite quotes is from Daniel Negreanu, one of the most successful poker players of all time. It’s from an interview where he talks about days where he’s lost a ton of money and sits in his hotel room. But instead of telling himself that night that “hey everything’s going to be ok!”, he lets himself sit in that despair and hopelessness for that night and embraces it.
I don’t want to make mental time travel sound like it’s something we can use to skip over all the ugly parts of bad things happening. Because we can’t skip over those things. We have to sit with them for as long as we need because it’s part of being human to experience to lows.
But once we’ve given ourselves proper time to recover, mental time travel can be an extremely powerful tool that helps us make choices to bounce back, and prevents us from making poor decisions that we’ll regret. Everything happens for a reason and it’s within our power to choose that reason and make it a reality.
