is useful to know. Great swathes of your day may be hired out, subservient to others’ whims, and you may have a limited say in what you do. But you can control your attitude. Budge the mood, expect better, and outcomes can improve.
It is worth a try. Persistent, nagging time stress, however trivial, becomes a chronic condition. Simply being exposed to multitudes of things happening at once percolates a state of constant expectation that is cognate with anxiety. This is the tax we pay for all those incomplete tasks, unsent or unread emails, grating Facebook posts, pieces of paper on our desk, meetings whose action points we have yet to enact, if they hum in our minds. This is why we write them down. Cognitive dumping outsources stress; an improvement, until to-do lists become the bully. Catalyze this stress into a permanently embattled perspective towards time and the minor magnifies: everything seems urgent, overwhelming; impatience becomes our default mode, and rush unavoidable.
What would a positive attitude towards time look like? I like this view, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, a model of eloquent rage written in horror at the tumbrels, guillotines and desecrated churches across the Channel: ‘Society is a contract between the past, the present and those yet unborn.’ Despite the legalistic language, for me it summons an interlocking chain of hands, reaching from the graves of the past to the cradles of tomorrow: the bond of trust required, as Burke saw it, to seal the deal that society offered – that is, to support all human interests. Current psychological research takes a similar view of what might be the healthiest attitude an individual can hold towards time. It has a catchy name: the balanced time perspective. It was invented by Philip Zimbardo.
Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison experiment, a notorious 1971 study in which adults played prisoners and guards in a fake prison. Things got dark, fast. Guards grew sadistic, prisoners depressed and passive. Zimbardo killed the experiment in consternation after three days as it teetered into abuse and the man playing the role of prison governor – Zimbardo himself – fell in with it. What this proved, if proof were necessary, is that much behaviour is a function not of innate character but of habitat: we follow the rules of our environment. Uncomfortable information after the genocidal complicity that marked Hitler’s Third Reich.
Since then, Zimbardo has sought to understand how to steer character for the better. His research, based on reams of studies, finds that a perky temporal outlook will produce a perky, productive human being.
Want to test your attitude? Consider the following questions.
1 What are your strongest memories and how would you describe your view of the past?
2 What are you doing this weekend and why?
3 What does the future hold and what matters most?
A balanced perspective is marked by a warm sense of the past (happy memories, fondness of traditions) zest for the present, and positive plans. All of which sounds like a very long description of optimism. But consistent evidence lends weight to the theory. Future-orientated countries and individuals enjoy greater success (if slightly less hedonism) than present-orientated ones. Effective people tend to feel positive about both past and future. Those with precise, full memories are also better at making plans. The message is plain: the more connected you feel to yesterday and tomorrow – the greater your sense of life as a connection between past and future, the dead and the unborn – then the clearer your focus on time and your life potential.
Ingenious methods exist to measure the breadth of our temporal horizon. Individuals with good impulse control – those who override temptations and cleave to long-term goals – evince warm feelings for their future self when their brains are scanned, regarding that imaginary being as they might a friend. By contrast, self-destructively impulsive people, unable to see far beyond their present, can feel as little for their future self as they would for a stranger.
Of equal interest in our view of time is the role played by our sense of agency. There is the goal-setting approach, seen among individuals who chart their life course; then there is the fatalist, who are closer to corks bobbing on time’s current, whither fate takes them – an outlook, Zimbardo notes, found in certain religions, as well as in pessimists, suicides and terrorists. Any one of us can feel either way, our perspective fluctuating by the hour, the season, our circumstances. In times of suffering, well may you believe in cruel fate or feel that time is the enemy. ‘Of all things past, the sorrow only stays,’ wrote Sir Walter Ralegh from his cell in the Tower of London, awaiting his summons to the axeman. Past successes, like the introduction of the potato and the courtly fashion for smoking, had proven an inadequate amulet against Elizabeth I’s disappointment in him.
Autobiographical memories are scripts that we use to tell ourselves who we are, what we like and how to get it. If the memories that you carry around like pebbles in your pocket fund self-limiting behaviour, you can bevel their sharper edges. Successful interventions conducted by Zimbardo and others with sufferers of post-traumatic stress and mental illness prove that a more enabling outlook on time can be cultivated. If that sounds close to brainwashing, consider how unreliable memory is, always editing. Perhaps our brain’s greatest gift is that it lets us forget so much that is dull or hurtful, instead spotlighting the peak experiences – the novelties, highs and lows – and giving them far more memory space than quotidian routine. This can mislead us into thinking that we had a wonderful trip or saw an incredible film because it ended well or there was one eye-wateringly hilarious incident, even – perhaps especially – if most of it was utterly unmemorable.
Years of therapy are not necessary to shift your angle on the future or past. A research team at the University of Miami asked three hundred students to recall an incident when someone had hurt them. One-third were then invited to spend a few minutes describing the event in detail, dwelling on their anger and subsequent misfortunes. Another third were also asked to describe the event, but in this instance to explore the good that had flowed from it (what they had learned or gained in strength and wisdom). The rest simply described their plans for the next day. Afterwards all three hundred completed a questionnaire setting out how they regarded the person who had upset them. Not surprisingly, the second group were far more forgiving, less likely to want to avoid the person concerned.
Spend a few minutes considering the profits drawn from a bad experience and you convert its value. Would your future look different if this kind of thinking became a habit?
Directions for a time-rich outlook
Past positive
The capacity to look warmly to the past is a psychological bridging loan, funding confidence for tomorrow. Although, as a financial adviser is obliged to remind you, past performance cannot guarantee future success, think more about the past and at the very least you will find your memory enriched – a good idea, since people with detailed recall have greater facility at drawing up detailed plans. To improve your powers of recollection, make a game of remembering happy things from different phases of your life. Could you also prioritize family or local traditions? If melancholy memories surface, dig a useful lesson from them. (Being bullied was my education in compassion, for instance.)
Present balance
Some pleasures render us passive recipients or consumers, others make us powerful and purposeful. Try to privilege experiences that help you to feel the author of your life’s story, connected with the world. Zone in on what you are doing as you do it and moments are instantly livelier. Could you be more interested in people, or pick more absorbing tasks?
Future positive
It begins in the expectation: that time can deliver what you crave. But the slightest nudge in a hopeful direction lifts the mood. For this reason, always arm yourself with something to look forward to, be it a holiday or an emergency biscuit. You might seek to develop a clearer vision of who and where you want to be. To this end, work on your prospective imagination. Perhaps try a different point of view for size; reading a novel or memoir is a collaborative exercise in evocation. And start daydreaming about credible pathways towards your future: specific goals, detailed plans. Then set a date to begin.