Why a neuroscientist wants you to write to your future self to strengthen mental health and build clarity

Each year, I sit down to type a heartfelt email and schedule it to send exactly a year later to an unlikely recipient: me. It’s a practice I’ve done since 2022.

When I receive a letter from my past self, it’s a pleasant surprise and reminds me of what I’d hoped for 365 days ago — and what I’ve experienced since then.

“You are deserving of the best of everything. If that means being in a new living space next year, I know that will pan out,” I wrote to myself in October of 2023. A year later, I sat in my first apartment reading the letter and beaming with joy.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had that experience. In that same letter from 2023 I wrote, “I’m currently listening to Stevie Wonder.” I’d just seen the music icon perform live a few days before the message arrived in my inbox.

For the past three years, I’ve written letters to myself and scheduled them to send to me a year later.

But it’s not just the goals I set and achieved, or the synchronicities I didn’t anticipate, that stand out to me.

In each letter, I always encouraged myself to be more compassionate, to rest when I need to and to remember that “simply existing is enough. Anything else is surplus.”

It turns out that without even realising it, I developed a healthy routine that can have great benefits on my mental health, says Erin Clabough, a neuroscientist and a psychology professor.

One thing that we don’t do as much as we should as a culture is we don’t stop and think about the direction that things are going. A letter to your future self can really help with that.

Penning letters to your future self creates opportunities for checking in and gauging if you’re in alignment with “the life that we want to be living and the values that we say we have”, Professor Clabough says.

Reading the letter days, months or years in the future is a helpful tool for reflection because it gives you the ability to grow and change, she notes. “The idea that in the future, you’re going to come back and read that letter, I think that’s equally as important as writing it down.”

And the type of message you write can determine whether or not the practice will have positive or negative impacts on your mental health, Professor Clabough says.

“I’m actually not a huge fan of specific goal-setting. What I think is more useful is to set your intentions and to leave it really open-ended,” she says. “You’re supposed to be really compassionate to yourself and kind to yourself in this letter.”

She suggests addressing questions:

• What’s working well in my life?
• What’s not working? What doesn’t feel in alignment with how I want my life to be?
• How am I spending my time, energy and resources?
• What are my priorities and values?

Think of your life as a ship, and view your letter as the compass that is nudging you to go in the direction that you desire, she says.

“You’re more likely, when captaining the ship, to go towards that direction,” as a result, she notes. “You can look at the idea of a placebo, and you can see that our belief in what we’re doing and what’s happening to us actually makes a huge difference.”

Professor Clabough recommends writing a letter to yourself at least once a year, but also encourages having “little points along the way where we more intentionally check in with ourselves”.

In her own life, she finds it helpful to pick up her pen and write to herself, “when I’m going through a hard thing”, she says.

“I have in the past flipped ahead 40 pages (in my journal), and I’ve written my letter to my future self at that point, so that when I’m writing in my journal, at some point, I’m going to hit it,” Professor Clabough says.

She likes to affirm that she’s doing her best and writes how she hopes to feel by the time she reaches the letter in her journal.

“Setting intentions makes a difference,” she says. “I think this is something that should be utilised by all sorts of people, no matter their walks of life.”