The Power of Mental Time Travel
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about mental time travel: that uniquely human ability to spend time in the past or the future and to do so entirely in our own heads.
Sure, we’ve all heard that we need to “live in the present,” but there are obvious advantages to being able to imagine the future and revisit the past.
Perhaps it was the timing: this concept struck a chord with me in a pandemic in which many of us wish we had our own time machines.
How many hours have we all spent over the past year daydreaming about a tomorrow in which vaccine shortages are a thing of the past, and we are all shaking hands and then touching our faces and booking flights?
On the flip side, how many moments have we caught ourselves reminiscing about the carefree days of 2019, when seeing others did not involve mental math, risk assessment or thinking about our physical spacing?
I was reminded of the concept of mental time travel by Ethan Kross’s new book, Chatter, which is about managing our internal monologues. But the study of mental time travel traces back to Endel Tulving, a University of Toronto researcher and professor whose pioneering research on memory between the 1950s and the 1980s was part of a revolution in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. [1]
Tulving asserts that the key to learning is mental time travel — the ability to reflect on the past or anticipate the future.
It’s something we do without even noticing; flitting between the here and now, yesterday and tomorrow, as we make plans and make sense of our past. But it’s been my observation that when we use this ability consciously, we can shift our perspective and create change within ourselves and our environments.
Recently, a colleague of mine was struggling with a work matter. It had been months since she’d concluded a collaboration at work and there was still lots of emotion in the air. She was looking to move forward towards her ambitious goals but had an emotional anchor weighing her down.
She had a sense that this situation was getting in her way.
We brainstormed a couple of ideas and ultimately decided to focus on what she could affect.
Mental time travel allowed her to step outside of the situation and let go of the heat of the moment.
We posed questions like:
Where was she aspiring to be in the future? What mountain was she climbing, and in relation to her broader mission, what was the size of the problem she was facing?
What did she want to pay respect to from the past, and how did she want to acknowledge and respect what she and her collaborator had built together?
And finally, but perhaps most importantly:
How did she want to show up in the moment? Who is the person, the business owner, the human, she wants to be?
Weeks later, I spoke to my colleague. She told me that digging into her broader mission and facing the issue directly, from the vantage of the past, present and future, caused a shift within her. It was like the weight had been lifted off her. She wasn’t feeling reeled in by the conflict and had a lightness about her.
Some takeaways for you to consider as you deploy mental time travel to give yourself space and clarity:
If we can lift ourselves out of the day-to-day, we can see the threads of where we’ve been, and the patterns that we’ve woven over time.
Mental time travel can help us articulate what we aspire to, the often-unvoiced dreams we carry with us every day about what we will experience and accomplish in work and life.
We can use these shifting perspectives to help us get clearer about the leader, colleague and person we want to be in the world and the impact we want to have.
Mental time travel can be a distraction—dwelling on that perfect summer’s day may not help you finish that presentation on time—but when used intentionally it can free us from the moment and support us in making progress towards our goals.
