How you perceive the time can influence your life

We mentally time travel almost every day. We visit our past, stay in the present moment, and think about the future. Some of us spend a lot of time worrying about what will happen tomorrow or next week, some of us tend to continuously think about the things that have happened to us in the past while some tend to have a strong focus on momentary pleasures. 

Have you ever thought about your own time orientation? In our daily lives, most of us take time for granted and we don’t normally give much attention to how we psychologically relate to our past, present, and future. One of the most famous social psychologists, Philip Zimbardo, and his colleague, John Boyd, coined the concept of time perspective and showed that our attitudes toward time can influence our choices, emotions, and behaviours. This means that ‘how we think about time’, and not necessarily what we do with our time, can be very important to our emotional wellbeing and social relationships. For example, time perspective can impact things like decisions around spending money and financial planning, engagement in health-related behaviours, and the way we cope with stress and anxiety.   

 Zimbardo and Boyd’s distinguished the following 5 types of time perspectives:

Past-negative

You tend to dwell on past events which upset you and let them affect you negatively. You approach these events with sadness and regret and think about the good things you missed out on.

Past-positive

You look at the past in a positive, warm and sentimental attitude and with nostalgia. It gives you pleasure to think about the stories of your past.

Present – hedonist 

You show a tendency for seeking pleasure, choosing the things that give you momentary enjoyment. You do not want to miss out on the excitement and you tend to lose track of time.

Present – fatalistic

You don’t get much pleasure from the present moment, passively accept life, experience life as a matter of luck and think that you lack agency in life, which keeps you from making plans for future and taking action.

Future orientation

You tend to delay gratification because you’re very ambitious and you look forward to the future. You are conscientious and always eager to take action and move forward.

Although this model of time perspective is open to criticism given measurement issues, it still provides a framework for us to understand how we approach time in general. A sixth perspective, named transcendental-future, was also added later to the model but not much research has been done around it.  

Time perspective variations are relatively stable and are learned and modified by a variety of different factors such as our personality, upbringing, life experiences, education, society and culture. Each of us have a unique combination of time perspectives, although one or two perspectives often dominate more than the others. Focusing on one time perspective does not necessarily prevent us from thinking about the others. Our age can also have a strong influence on our orientation towards each of these perspectives. In childhood or teenage years, present-hedonist orientation might be dominant while in young adulthood, future orientation may takeover. Moreover, while older people tend to remember the past more positively than younger people, they usually become less focused on both hedonistic and fatalistic perspectives.   

How Does Time Perspective Affect Us?

In some situations, an orientation toward the future or a focus on the present seems to matter the most when it comes to success, happiness and relationships with others. But in general, according to research, those who have a positive orientation toward the present tend to be more open to new and pleasurable experiences, cope with stress more effectively, and find more meaning in life; whereas those who believe that their lives are controlled by luck seem to lack meaning in life. Besides, those who have positive attitudes toward the past and avoid ruminating on the negative events of the past usually have more positive relationships, receive more social support, have higher self-esteem, and find more meaning. A future orientation can help us set goals and move forward and encourage us to engage in more healthy behaviours. Too much focus on the present, however, is associated with risky behaviours such as risky driving and substance use, while a strong focus on the past negative is related to depressive symptoms. Therefore, when one particular time perspective dominates at the expense of others, it might become dysfunctional, which signifies the importance of balance.  

Although time orientation is relatively stable, it can also be tweaked. That is, we can learn to shift between different perspectives. Each individual is unique, with different personality characteristics and different lifestyles. Therefore, there is no single time perspective recipe for a good life. There are costs associated with emphasising any of the individual time perspectives. However, Zimbardo and Boyd talked about balanced time perspective which gives us the ability to switch between time orientations to meet the situational demands. This flexibility protects us from having a bias toward a specific time orientation that minimises others. What they found was that a balanced perspective consists of a combination of a moderately high level of past-positive and future orientations, a high level of present-hedonistic orientation, and a low level of present-fatalistic orientation. Research shows that a balanced time perspective is positively associated with wellbeing, self-esteem, and life satisfaction.

 When you have a balanced time perspective, you are more likely to fully enjoy your time with your friends and family; you tend to be more involved in leisure activities on a day off without any guilt; you can approach your situation from a future perspective when you’re working on a task and setting goals for yourself. Therefore, the ability to be flexible seems to be a good option to experience the best outcomes. But again, there are individual and contextual differences that we need to evaluate before making important decisions. One thing that might work for you might not be the best option for someone else.   

Practical Implications

Past

Most of us think that we are the victims of our childhood and the negative things that happened during that time. Our past does have a considerable impact on our present and who we are today, but it’s not the only determinant. A better predictor of our lives is how we perceive our past in the present: the meaning we attach to the things that happened. A negative attitude towards the past might make us anxious, feel like we lack self-control and agency in our lives, and might hinder our tendency for taking responsibility.

A re-evaluation of our past and interpreting it in a more realistic way can help us look at our present self in a more positive and rational way. You don’t have to forget what happened in your past but merely remembering the negative events with sadness and regret and is only going to upset you. Instead, we should remember these events in a way that we can learn from them. Even the most painful memories of the past can be helpful for us in our present lives to make better decisions, to grow, and to feel gratitude. So if you think that your attitude towards the past is too negative, you might want to learn how to interpret the negatives in a different way or should intentionally make effort to find the good things that happened to you in the past. Sometimes we focus too much on the negatives and dismiss the positives. Seeing both will help you boost your energy. You can also try gratitude exercises such as writing down a few good things that happened on a particular day or a week. 

Present

In recent years, many self-help books or personal development gurus ask people to stay in the present. This idea has become very popular. Although there are many valuable aspects of staying in the present, choosing one thing at the expense of others is not always useful. When the focus on the present becomes the search for only the momentary pleasure, it might lead to an unbalanced life. Just living in the present, like just living in the past or future, can be dissatisfying. Satisfactorily living in the present requires an understanding of the past and learning from it, as well as transforming the future into the present. The present becomes more meaningful when there is a harmony between the past, the present and the future. We can find meaning in life to the extent that we make a consistent story from all three of them.

If you think you have an extreme present-hedonistic perspective, you might want to design your environment in a way that limits the cues for momentary pleasures. The lack of cues might help you focus on other things than hedonistic activities. You might also focus more on the future by thinking more about the costs of hedonistic activities and also by goal-setting activities. If you think that you are (or you have recently become) future-fatalistic, you might want to visit your core values in life, set a few goals congruent with these values, and identify easy and actionable steps to achieve these goals. This can help you feel more control in your life and increase your sense of responsibility. Another thing can be giving yourself permission to experience hedonistic activities as well. Too much focus on fatalism might keep you from enjoying the pleasurable activities; therefore, identifying what gives you pleasure and doing them more often might provide you with a more balanced present perspective.

Future

In today’s world, we’re obsessed with multitasking and finishing the tasks very quickly. Employees have become overly future-oriented, as have some parents who try to make their children overly success-oriented. Thinking about the future and rejecting the momentary pleasures is becoming a habit. We see time as our enemy and wish that we have more than 24 hours in a day. Many feel they are not in charge of their own time, and that time is driving them instead.

If you also find yourself focusing too much on the future, you might want to slow down and practice present-oriented activities. These activities might look different for different people ranging from meditation and mindfulness practices to spending time with loved ones and immersing oneself into an activity of their liking. You can take some minutes to laugh with colleagues at work or experience some time alone in a corner to relax.

The Takeaway

Just take your time and ponder on how you view your past, present and future. See what’s going on there; your attitudes and actions. Then, you can identify and make adjustments if needed. To optimise your life situations and relationships, avoid the extremes such as constantly thinking about the negative things that have happened, constantly looking for momentary pleasures at the expense of the future, and constantly thinking about the future at the expense of present enjoyment. 

References

Beek, W. V., Berghuis, H., Kerkhof, A., & Beekman, A. (2010). Time perspective, personality and psychopathology: Zimbardo’s time perspective inventory in psychiatry. Time & Society, 20(3), 364–374.

Drake, L., Duncan, E., Sutherland, F., Abernethy, C., & Henry, C. (2008). Time Perspective and Correlates of Wellbeing. Time & Society, 17(1), 47–61.

 Henson, J. M., Carey, M. P., Carey, K. B., & Maisto, S. A. (2006). Associations Among Health Behaviors and Time Perspective in Young Adults: Model Testing with Boot-Strapping Replication. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 29(2), 127–137.

Holman, E. A., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2009). The Social Language of Time: The Time Perspective–Social Network Connection. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 31(2), 136–147. 

Keough, K. A., Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (1999). Whos Smoking, Drinking, and Using Drugs? Time Perspective as a Predictor of Substance Use. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 21(2), 149–164.

Sobol-Kwapinska, M., & Jankowski, T. (2015). Positive Time: Balanced Time Perspective and Positive Orientation. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17(4), 1511–1528.

Webster, J. D., Bohlmeijer, E. T., & Westerhof, G. J. (2014). Time to flourish: the relationship of temporal perspective to well-being and wisdom across adulthood. 

Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (1999). Putting time in perspective: A valid, reliable individual-differences metric. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1271–1288.

Zimbardo, P. G., Keough, K. A., & Boyd, J. N. (1997). Present time perspective as a predictor of risky driving. Personality and Individual Differences, 23(6), 1007–1023.