Focused on the present moment will make bad long-term decisions

By learning how to concentrate on our long-term goals, maintain our willpower supply and train our willpower muscle, we can gain greater control over our bad habits – and live more fulfilling lives.

Do you ever overcommit yourself to responsibilities and later find yourself overwhelmed?

Do you sometimes regret your past choices when confronted with their actual costs?

Both phenomena are caused by our inability to imagine the future clearly – and especially to imagine our future selves.

We don’t see our future selves as ourselves, but as distant, different people. Our brain perceives them as strangers due to our inability to observe their thoughts and feelings.
This can lead to us putting off tasks, hoping that our future-self will have more willpower to deal with them – or even worse, racking up debt and hoping our future selves will be able to pay.
These hopes lead nowhere because your future-self is not different from your present self, and will also struggle when facing challenges, be it mustering the willpower to do an unpleasant task or balancing the budget.
So what can we do? A good method for becoming more familiar with your future-self is visualization: imagine your future-self thinking back on the decisions you are making today and their consequences.
So what else makes us neglect our future selves?

Our vulnerability to instant gratification.

When a tempting object is staring right at you, resistance often feels futile because the reward system in our brain reacts so strongly to visible rewards.

Why?
Because visible rewards make us overestimate the benefits of instant gratification and underestimate the value of exerting self-control. This leads us to make decisions that our future selves later regret.
But temptation becomes weaker if you then create some distance between you and the object – for example, by making it less visible or more difficult to reach.
This was shown in a study where office workers had access to candy. When the candy was placed out of sight inside a desk drawer instead of on the top of the table, the subjects’ candy consumption was reduced by one third.