Did you know that simply writing a letter to your future self can help you make choices that improve your future options? 

Fundraisers have long known that they can loosen purse strings by helping donors identify with beneficiaries. Now researchers have discovered that similar dynamics enhance our ability to help our future selves.

Yuta Chishima and Anne Wilson demonstrated, in their 2020 study published in the journal Self and Identity, that high school students who wrote letters to their future selves, and then letters from that imaginary self back to themselves, experienced elevated identification with their future selves.

Researchers measure the extent to which a person identifies with their older self by analyzing the degree of overlap in the traits that a person sees as characteristic of their current self and those they see as characteristic of their future self. In a project led by Joseph Reiff, participants who perceived a great overlap of traits were more satisfied with their lives 10 years after filling out the survey than those who did not. How big a difference did it make? It was comparable to the impact of major factors such as relative income and educational background.

In a paper in the journal PLOS one, a team led by Michael Bixter reported that college students who experienced a greater sense of connection and similarity to their future selves were more likely to achieve academic success. In fact, with each degree of increase on the similarity scale, participants GPA's increased by about one-tenth of a point. 

I'll be covering additional ways you can better identify with your future self in coming blog posts. For a thorough treatment of the subject, read "Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today," by Hal Hershfield, a professor and behavioral scientist at UCLA's Anderson School of Management.