You tend to feel a nagging sense of urgency that can create stress for yourself and those around you. You are highly ambitious, focused on goals, and big on making ‘to do’ lists. This sense of powerlessness can lead to anxiety, depression and risk-taking. You aren’t enjoying the present but feel trapped in it, unable to change the inevitability of the future. You are popular but tend to have a less healthy lifestyle and take more risks. You are dominated by pleasure-seeking impulses, and are reluctant to postpone feeling good for the sake of greater gain later. You tend to have happy relationships, but the downside is a cautious, “better safe than sorry” approach which may hold you back. You take a nostalgic view of the past, and stay in very close contact with your family. This can lead to feelings of bitterness and regret. You focus on negative personal experiences that still have the power to upset you. Zimbardo identified five key approaches to time perspective. Learning to switch time perspectives allows us to fully take part in everything we do, whether it’s a relaxed evening enjoying a glass of wine or reminiscing about long-ago events with an old friend.
Ideally, we can learn to shift our attention easily between the past, present and future, and consciously adapt our mindset to any given situation. But we can all change our time perspective, Zimbardo says. Affluence also has an effect: Poorer communities tend to live more in the present. Individualistic, “me-focused” societies tend to be future-focused, while more “we-focused” societies ones that encourage social engagement invest more in the past. Culture also has an influence on our time perspective. Most researchers believe our time perspective is largely learned in childhood. Zimbardo recommended that a more future-based time perspective could help students study and progress to higher education.
He believes that time perspective influences many of our judgements, decisions, and actions. After more than ten years’ research, he concluded that our attitude toward time is just as defining as key personality traits such as optimism or sociability. Stanford University psychology professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo coined the idea of time perspective.
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