Future Vision in Money, Health and Work: Uses for ADHD

Between a method working in the laboratory and it working in my Saturday afternoon, a lot happens. This article is about that in-between part.

What vividly imagining the future is I described in this article, and how it is built in the step-by-step guide. Here I will look at three areas: money, health and work. In each I will write first what the research showed, then the everyday use.

The note I need to repeat is this: in ADHD the value of a distant reward drops faster (Jackson and MacKillop, 2016). The effect of vividly imagining the future on that drop has not yet been directly tested in ADHD samples. Most of the findings below are from the general population and from other groups.

The most important limit first

The most instructive study I read about this method turned out to be one that did not give the result I expected.

Adults in the pre-diabetes stage joined a six-month weight loss program. One group was given future vision training in addition, the other group a control training. At the end of six months, reward delay discounting had decreased in the future vision group; moreover, this decrease was also seen in choice tests where no cue was given. Weight, blood sugar measurement and physical activity improved in both groups but no difference emerged between the groups (Epstein et al., 2022).

So the method could change patience in the choice test for six months, but this change did not add an extra gain on top of the health gain the program was already providing.

Being more patient in a choice test and behaving differently in life may not be the same thing.

This finding did not cool me on the method, but it adjusted my expectations. Vividly imagining the future does not look like a solution on its own. It looks like a tool that adds a small weight at a moment of decision. For that weight to work, the decision needs to be made inside a structure.

Money

On the money side, I described how impulsivity works in impulsivity in ADHD, and where the leak comes from in ADHD and money. Here I only look at what future imagining can add to that picture.

Research. One of the best-known studies in this area is not exactly episodic future thinking but a very close idea. Participants met an age-progressed version of their own faces in virtual reality or in interactive tools on screen. In all four studies, participants who interacted with their future selves were more inclined to leave the money that comes right away and choose the money that comes later (Hershfield et al., 2011). These are laboratory studies and participants with ADHD were not examined separately. How much real saving behavior changed over months was also not the question of these studies.

The basket moment. Impulsive spending often happens in a single moment: above the pay button. A ready end-of-the-month scene may work for this moment. “The twenty-ninth of the month, the bills have come out, I look at my account and my stomach does not clench.” If you still want it after listening to the scene, applying the waiting rule and waiting a night is a good second step.

Giving the savings account a scene. As long as savings stand as a number, they are abstract. Giving the account the name of a purpose and writing a single scene belonging to that purpose (“a year from now, by the sea, I have turned the phone off”) ties the number to somewhere.

Bill and paperwork day. Putting in front of the payment you are putting off the comfortable moment after the payment: “This evening, the notification box is empty.”

Limit. If your money is really not enough, the problem does not come from the distant reward looking dim. An imagined scene does not make up for missing money, and nobody's poverty should be counted as a lack of patience. If you are under debt or livelihood pressure, turning to a financial counseling resource is a step that comes before the imagining exercise. Structural solutions such as automatic payment and separate accounts, because they do not rely on imagination, should in my view always be set up first.

Health

Research. On the health side the method has been studied especially on eating, smoking and diabetes risk. In adults who smoke, future vision both reduced reward delay discounting and lowered the number of cigarette puffs earned in a laboratory task (Stein et al., 2016). The long-term picture is more mixed, as in the six-month study I described above.

Midnight. Going to bed late is a very familiar cycle in ADHD. While opening one more video, the knowledge “I should sleep” does not work. In its place, the scene of the first half hour of tomorrow morning: the alarm, open eyes, getting ready without hurry. Keeping this scene as a short audio recording on the phone and listening to it before turning off the screen is the easiest way to put a scene at the moment of decision.

Movement. The reward of starting exercise comes weeks later. Yet every session also has a small and near reward: the shower after coming back from the walk, the tiredness that comes in the evening. To me this near scene seems more convincing than the distant reward.

Food and the market. The scene does not have to be about food. While writing the shopping list, picturing something you want to do on the weekend is also an option; I described the research basis for this in the first article.

Remembering. In intentions like making an appointment, getting a test done, taking a medication, the question is remembering more than the distant reward. Here the exercise has another use; I describe it below under work. How and when you take a medication, though, is a decision you need to talk through with your doctor; the imagining exercise does not stand in for it.

Work and deadlines

Research. It had long been thought that reward delay lay behind procrastination, but the evidence was thin. A recent study followed participants' whole work progress in a long-running real task. Those who discounted the future more procrastinated more. The same relationship did not appear when looking only at the day of finishing or at survey answers (Zhang and Ma, 2024). This is a finding of association and from the general population; it does not show that future imagining reduces procrastination, it only suggests that the target is in the right place.

The part tested in adults with ADHD is remembering the intention, that is, prospective memory. In a study with 196 adults, 98 of them with ADHD, picturing while forming the intention was associated with more intentions being carried out. The strongest effect came from picturing the moment the task is finished; picturing yourself doing the task gave a medium-level benefit only in the ADHD group (Stelz et al., 2026).

The evening after the deadline. Putting the evening after the delivery in front of a long task. The computer is off, there is something else on the table, the mind is quiet. Why the deadline always slides to the last night for me I described in the article on deadlines in ADHD; future vision does not change that last night, but it can add a small pull to the weeks before.

Separate scenes for interim deliveries. If a single big delivery scene stays too far away, split the task into parts and write a separate scene for the moment each part is finished. “Friday afternoon, the first section has been sent.”

The moment of starting. Based on the finding of Stelz and colleagues, when you struggle to start a task, first picture for a few seconds the first minute in which you sit at the desk and open the file; then the moment the task is finished. Process and outcome, both together.

If you run your own work. In my own company the tasks I put off most are the tasks whose reward is not visible: invoices, accounting, long-term planning. Finding a scene I can put in front of those tasks seems to me to make them come out a little more easily from the “important but can't be done” list. I am not presenting this as a finding, I am presenting it as an experiment.

A small one-week experiment

Starting all three areas at once would, for me, be the shortest path to building a system and dropping it on the second day. So I suggest a smaller setup.

Choose one decision. Which repeating decision have you regretted most in the last two weeks? The video opened at midnight, the item thrown in the basket, a task put off? Choose only one.

Write one scene. A single positive scene for the time when the cost of that decision is paid. Place, time, body, two senses. In the present tense.

Set up one cue. Turn the scene into a thirty-second audio recording or a one-sentence note and put it where the decision happens: next to the shopping app, at the bedside, on the first page of the work file.

Count for one week. When you met the decision, did you use the cue, and what did you choose after using it? Two lines on paper are enough.

At the end of the week look at the numbers. If nothing changed, thinking that this method did not work for you for that decision is also a legitimate result. Then moving to a structural solution such as friction or automation would be a better use.

Mistakes seen in all three areas

Putting it in place of structure. Automatic payment, waiting rule, interim deadline, alarm. These work without needing imagination. Future vision is meaningful when added beside them; when put in their place it is fragile.

Building a fear scene. Scenes of debt, illness, being fired. Why negative scenes stayed weak in the research I described in the first article; in my view they also feed avoidance.

Using it for every decision. A scene listened to twenty times a day becomes ordinary within a week. Choose the one or two decision moments you struggle with most.

Daydreaming alone without acting. The scene should last thirty seconds and be followed by a small action: closing the tab, putting on the shoes, opening the file.

When other help is needed

When money trouble, health worry and work pressure come together, the load can be bigger than an exercise can carry. If there is long-lasting low mood, sleeplessness or hopelessness, you need to talk to a mental health specialist. Diagnosis and medication decisions are the doctor's job. If you have thoughts of harming yourself, in an emergency you can call 112, and for psychosocial support you can reach ALO 183.

The measure for me

When I look at these three areas, the question I ask myself has changed. I no longer ask “does this method work”; for ADHD the evidence does not yet have an answer to that question.

I ask this instead: at the moment of this decision, is there an image on the distant side? If not, I put one there. If there is one and I am still making the same choice, then the problem is not in the imagining but in the structure. Then I drop the imagining and go back to the structure.