Are You Past or Future Oriented? The Psychology of Our Relationship to Time

Oct 03, 2024

depression , psychology

Time: it can stretch or run away based on our mood and what we're doing
Emma Kilburn takes a deep-dive into how our relationship with time can affect our overall life and sense of self

Once upon a time there was a Greek man called Melisander. The god of time, Cronos, gave him a gift that allowed him to make time pass more quickly or more slowly. The god warned Melisander to make good use of the gift, but instead he used his new power solely to his own advantage and did not share it with anyone else.

After many years, Cronos appeared to Melisander and told him that because he had abused his power, he would lose it. Melisander asked for one final wish, asking to return to the day before he received it, when he was still a young man. While Cronos granted his wish, he was outraged at Melisander’s deception and decided to punish not only him but the whole human race. Cronos decided that time would pass more quickly when people are having fun or are with others, and more slowly when they are bored.

We all have a relationship with time: it punctuates our every action. Everything we do requires time. We divide our days into hours and minutes, and our lives into past, present and future. These divisions help us make sense of the world, to create structure and meaning from its otherwise relentless flow.

Our need to exert control over the passage of time is reflected in the language we use to describe our relationship with it: we try to ‘save time’, ‘make time’ and ‘spend time wisely’. However, any sense we have that we can control or limit the passing of time is, ultimately, purely illusory. The punishment meted out to Melisander in mythology may serve to explain this illusion: we apply our own subjectivity to something that is entirely independent of us.

A whole range of factors may determine the extent to which we are aware of the passage of time, including our age, our jobs, how time-rich or time-poor we feel, and where we live. With this awareness, we then constantly make decisions about how we spend our time. Many of us may also dedicate time (plus money and effort) to activities, products or interventions designed to halt or conceal its passing, from exercise to diets to plastic surgery. We may also see artistic or philosophical endeavours – whether that be painting, literature or philosophical treatises – as an attempt to reject time’s passing and instead to capture or even transcend a moment in time.

From a personal point of view, I am and have always been preoccupied with time, both daily and more globally. As a teacher, I work very long hours and have a long commute. I regularly give up a day at the weekend to catch up on my work and feel squeezed from all sides. I often find myself sacrificing sleep, relaxation, exercise or just doing nothing to my workload.

More widely, I have always been aware of and anxious about the passage of time. My anxiety, plus the fact that I have been in or worked in education for most of my life, has locked me into the habit of undertaking annual reviews of what I have achieved over the last year, primarily at the end of each academic year but also – in common with many people – around my birthday and at the start of each calendar year. This cycle, along with a general sense of dissatisfaction with my life, then imposes a greater sense of urgency in terms of how I spend my time; ‘shoulds’ and ‘coulds’ tend to prevail and make it harder for me to take time to relax or to detach myself from time and just be in the moment.

The time paradox

I have recently read a book by Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University. In it, he identifies and then unpicks the paradoxes inherent in our relationship with time, the chief of which is the fact that while time regulates every choice or decision that we make, we seldom recognise the profound impact that our attitude to time has on all aspects of our lives.

Beyond this, he has identified six approaches to time, and devised an exercise that enables you to identify which relationship to time is your most dominant. Each of these approaches can play its own key role in determining how we think and act.

The six approaches are:

Past negative: I often think about what I should have done differently in my life
Past positive: I reflect positively on the past
Present fatalistic: I believe that destiny determines many aspects of my life
Present hedonistic: Ideally, I should aim to live every day as if it were my last
Future: Respecting future deadlines and not getting behind with work is more important than having fun this evening
Future transcendental: I believe that only my body is destined to die

The predominance of any of these perspectives is likely to have a significant impact on choices we make and how we experience time in the present. While each may bring benefits, they also have negative implications if they dominate our relationship with time to the exclusion of other possibilities.

With greater awareness we can work towards achieving more of a balanced relationship with time. When I completed the test, it confirmed that my most dominant attitude to time is past negative, closely followed by a focus on the future. This came as no surprise, since I would say that these two aspects of my relationship with time tie in most closely with my anxiety (future) and depression (past negative).

Looking back

Martial said that to be able to enjoy one’s past is to live twice, and people who can view their past in a positive light often also enjoy positive psychological and emotional health. However, people with positive views of the past are more likely to seek to maintain the status quo, and from a global perspective Zimbardo observes that there is a risk that nations that live in the past will be left behind.

For those of us who find it hard to reflect positively on the past, it's important to remember that it is not so much the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives as our attitude towards those events. If we can reinterpret and rewrite our past, we can achieve a greater sense of control over our future. Zimbardo suggests several ways in which we can work towards this:

List three significant events that have happened in your life. Rather than focusing on the negatives, consider what positive messages you can take from these events, and how these lessons can then help to improve your future. Complete a gratitude list each day for two weeks. At the end of each day, simply write a list of things for which you were grateful that day. A friend of mine gave me a memory jar, to keep tickets, post-it notes and other souvenirs of happy moments. I can revisit its contents if I need to reposition my view and memories of the past.

Techniques such as these are particularly valuable for those whose approach to time is primarily informed by a negative view of their past. It can lead people to replay painful experiences in their minds, and to efforts to stay busy to avoid thinking negatively about the past. These negative attitudes may derive from the actual experience of challenging past events, or from our current negative reconstruction of earlier events.

Either way, while we cannot change past events, we are able to change our attitudes and beliefs about them. While this is not straightforward, most of us will be able to identify a time when we have managed to do this.

The psychological effort required to do this may feel most challenging for people who are struggling with their mental health. There is close alignment between a past negative perspective and issues related to depression. People living with depression are more likely to look to the past rather than the future to relieve their depression. They believe that revisiting the causes of their symptoms will somehow help to solve their problems, and Zimbardo warns that this can lead to a downward spiral that exacerbates the severity and length of an individual’s depression.

As someone who has a past negative relationship with time, but who has benefited enormously from therapy over the last twenty years, I find Zimbardo’s assertion that we should put the past to rest a little challenging and over simplistic. It is perhaps not as easy as he suggests simply to accept the past and build a vision of a better future. However, I certainly believe that an understanding of past events and how they influence our behaviour can enable us to make changes that will help us move forward with greater awareness of our patterns of thought and of the events and triggers that are most likely to have a negative impact on our mental health.

Focus on the present

All of us begin our lives with a natural focus on the present. Some people retain this focus into adulthood, where it can assume one of two overriding characteristics: hedonistic or fatalistic. A focus on living in the present may seem like a positive, and in many ways it is. However, an excess of present orientation can pose its own challenges particularly for those whose relationship with time is present-fatalistic. These people feel that they lack agency, and that their lives are controlled by external forces, rather than determined by their own actions and choices.

For some people, a fatalistic approach may be linked to a religious value system, and in these instances is perhaps less likely to have a negative psychological impact. However, present-fatalistic people are prone to view life events through a negative lens – accepting blame for failure and failing to accept responsibility for personal success – and as a result are more likely to experience significant psychological problems.

You are likely to know and like numerous people whose approach to the present is more hedonistic, since they often appear exciting, spontaneous and sociable. They tend to have high levels of intrinsic motivation. They focus on immediate gratification and avoid situations or people that require maintenance or high levels of effort. In common with the other perspectives, this hedonistic approach to time has both positives and negatives, though the former generally offset the latter. Drawbacks include a lack of organisation and planning, weak impulse control, and a tendency to be less conscientious and emotionally stable than other people.

Despite the more problematic aspects of a present perspective, those of us who are overly focused on the past or the future might benefit from anchoring ourselves more securely in the present, not least since this is the timeframe in which happiness and opportunities often present themselves, which we might otherwise fail to notice. Techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can help us to achieve this, and reduce the impact of depression and anxiety, which are often tied to past and future perspectives.

Look to the future

A transcendental-future orientation is related to religious beliefs, spirituality, and a belief in life after death. Beliefs about the goals, rewards or punishments that follow our death may influence present behaviour, and can often inspire responsible civil behaviour, born out of a concern for both the living and for future generations. This orientation can enhance feelings of self-worth and imbue life with meaning.

A more secular future orientation can be linked to what Freud referred to as the reality principle: while part of you wants immediate gratification, you often forgo it due to its possible future costs. ‘Futures’ plan ahead, and are often overly focused on time, of which they never feel they have enough. The advantage of their approach is that they often achieve the success that they envisage in their minds. They very much live in their heads, and believe that hard work, effort and self-denial are all needed to be successful. The downside of a future orientation is that it can exert significant psychological and practical pressure. Its adherents are likely to become overly focused on work and reluctant to allow themselves time off, or for fun.

It's important to remember that the future is not something we experience directly. Rather, it is what Zimbardo calls a ‘psychically constructed mental state.’ We build it from our hopes, fears, expectations and inspirations. It can move us away from the certainty of the present towards the uncertain possibilities of the future. It's easy to see how this can cause or exacerbate our levels of anxiety. Combined with modern preoccupations that consume much of our leisure time – social media being a key factor here – it can also lead to a sense of what Zimbardo calls ‘time press’, which again heightens our sense of anxiety. We feel we don’t have enough time, develop often ineffective and overwhelming strategies to help us save time, and become angry or anxious if we feel our time is being wasted.

Yet as is the case with all the relationships with time identified by Zimbardo, some of us could benefit from developing more of a future orientation. Its roots lie in our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for performing executive functions, such as identifying goals, predicting the future consequences of our actions and balancing future rewards against present desires. If our prefrontal cortex is doing its job, we stay on track and avoid both temptation and embarrassing social situations.

A simple exercise can help us shift to a more future-oriented sense of time. Ask yourself the question ‘who will I be?’, giving as many possible answers as you can. From these, identify five concrete goals you hope to achieve in the future. Then think about the time it will take you to achieve them. In this way, you can rehearse how and when you will achieve these goals.

The importance of time

It's clear that our relationship with time can have a significant impact on how we live our lives and on our wellbeing. It is helpful to be aware of which orientations we tend towards, to enable us to keep a watchful eye and ensure that we are not dependent on or preoccupied with them to our detriment. An awareness of our dominant Time perspective can also help us understand choices we make in specific, key areas of our lives. Time can influence the type of job we choose and how we spend the money we earn doing it. In brief, ‘pasts’ tend to be over cautious or overly reckless with their money, ‘presents’ find it hard to save, and ‘futures’ are overly cautious and don’t spend to enjoy the present.

Our relationship with time is also key when it comes to friendships and particularly to romantic relationships. When we first meet a new partner, the relationship exists only in the present. Over time that changes, and if the two partners in a relationship have different time perspectives and are unaware of this it can cause difficulties, since this will impact both their present behaviours and their view of a shared future.

A greater awareness of how we view time gives us a greater chance of happiness, which itself often requires a readjustment of how we allocate our time. Happiness – or perhaps contentment – can be difficult to achieve, and we often fail to make it enough of a priority. This is in part because we're taught to value hard work over happiness and pleasure, which are often seen as less important, and the resultant pressure we feel to use our time productively. Stephen Covey has said that we prioritise in two key ways. One is in order of importance, and the second is in order of urgency, which really relates to time. Urgent tasks always rise to the top of our to-do list, whether or not they are important. This can mean that important tasks, such as allowing time to be happy, drop to the bottom, and can be considered as time wasted.

If we can develop a greater understanding of how we relate to time and can learn not to allow any period of time to crowd out the others, we can hopefully find a more balanced approach and find both time and happiness in the present.