What is it about?
Many people don't think vividly about who they will be in the distant future. With the Day Preconstruction Method, people can describe their future – years away – in text, thereby strengthening the connection to their future self. In four studies, DPM strengthened participants' connection to the future. And although it did not affect their economic decision-making, it helped them live more in line with their values in the week after the study, thereby linking the present to their future self.
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Photo by Omid Mozaffari on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Unlike many other methods for strengthening the connection to the future self, such as VR or chatbots, DPM is a low-cost, easily administered writing exercise that can be done with pen and paper. DPM seems to primarily affect identity-related behaviors, such as valued living, instead of economic decisions. It is well-suited for integration into therapy, coaching, or personal development.
Perspectives
I started working on this as part of my PhD studies. Along the way, two things happened that shifted my perspective on the distant future. I became a father of twins, two fantastically normal children who both drive me mad and fascinate me beyond what I imagined possible. And I had malignant testicular cancer that took me away on sick leave for surgery and chemotherapy, giving me the experience of how my body slowly withered away. Through these experiences, the person I will be decades away became more important than ever. Yet, I didn't know that much about how to meet that future self, how to connect with it, how it would affect me today, or, in more scientific terms, the boundary conditions of that meeting. Therefore, the development and research on DPM were personally more important than many other studies I've conducted. I hope that the reader of this paper is encouraged to meet with their future self and thus gain a little more confidence about what's worth spending time on, in the present and in the future.
Jonas Hjalmar Blom
Karlstads Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The day preconstruction method: A novel method to strengthen future self-continuity., Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, March 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xap0000574.
You can read the full text:
Resources
DPM Text Explorer
Here, you can explore the text written by all participants across the four studies using quantitative text analysis tools. You can, for example, see the emotions, emotional tone, and themes in the different time conditions (present, near or distant).
Open access pre-print article
The article in pre-print version.
Data and analysis code on OSF
Data and analysis code.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
