What Advice Do You Wish You Could Give Your Younger Self?

Positive psychology’s focus on mindfulness, or being in the “here and now,” seems to discourage your thinking about anything other than what you’re doing at the present moment.

According to mindfulness experts, in fact, you can manage your life’s stresses far more successfully if you stay 100% tuned in to your current experiences. If you’re having fun, for example, don’t imagine how disappointed you’ll be when the fun is over. If you’re feeling anxious, try to turn your attention away from forcing the anxiety go away, and allow yourself to live with that unsettled feeling.

Although there indeed may be many benefits to living in the moment, people’s identity depends on memory and the sense that you’re consistent over time. Your past is a part of you and, unlike the future, is a known factor.

If you’re feeling stressed, for example, you could comfort yourself by remembering past times in your life when you were stressed but were nevertheless able to get out of the situation. Perhaps you’re running very late for an appointment, due to no fault of your own, and you’re imagining the worst should you indeed miss the appointment altogether. However, haven’t there been other times in your life when you were almost late? Weren’t you able to come up with a plan to get where you needed to be and it all turned out alright? Perhaps you actually do have the resources to get yourself out of seemingly impossible situations.

Drawing on your past can be more than beneficial in lowering your stress. That sense of continuity you have about your life over time can also help you gain perspective on who you are now and what the possibilities are for your future. According to a new study by Clemson University’s Robin Kowalski and Annie McCord (2020), you can also gain in the present by harkening back to your younger self and thinking about "what you wish you knew then."

Kowalski and McCord note that people are constantly both seeking from and giving advice to others, but what about if you gave advice to yourself? What if that advice were able to change the course of your life? Advice you could give to your younger self, based on the life experiences you have had so far, might consist of telling yourself not to get in a relationship with your ex, accept the job you eventually left, or breaking off all communication with your parents.

Because some of the advice might take the form of so-called “counterfactual thinking” (e.g. “If only I hadn’t…), it’s possible that advice to your younger self might be associated with the emotion of regret. Previous research, the Clemson authors note, shows that the most common regrets about the past include such areas as education, romance, career, finance, health, and even spirituality. When you catalog the regrets in your life, do they tend to fall in these categories? What specifically do you regret the most, and how does this make you feel now?

Although regret is definitely a negative emotion, as Kowalski and McCord observe, it may have adaptive qualities, signifying a certain degree of maturity and even high subjective well-being: “happy and complex adults can experience regret at the loss of a self or selves that they can no longer be, while at the same time, actively living in the moment with a best possible present self… instead of being an inhibitor of future action, regret can motivate change and corrective action” (p. 2). In other words, once you realize something is wrong, you can set about taking steps to make it right.

This “lost” self, or the person you might have been, is most likely to be tied to actions in your past taking place during your teens and 20s. The Clemson researchers propose that the so-called “reminiscence bump,” or greater recall of events occurring during youth, should therefore play a pivotal role as a source of advice from your past to your present self. According to self-discrepancy theory, furthermore, the past self you could have been reflects your ideal self, or the person you wish you were.

They propose that your experience of negative emotions should be more intense for the self that slipped away due to failure to follow through on your hopes and dreams than for the actions you took that you realize now were a mistake. In other words, you may have failed by taking the wrong actions, but at least you will have given yourself the chance to succeed.

In the first of two studies, Kowalski and McCord asked the members of their online sample of 189 adults (nearly 50-50 male-female, average age of 40) to provide a list of the top three pieces of advice they would give to the self they were in high school. The next question asked participants to consider whether this advice would bring them closer to their ideal self or instead to their “ought” self, the person they felt they should be (i.e. fulfilling roles and responsibilities).

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Then the participants answered the intriguing question of what their high school self would think of them now. Ponder this question for a moment. Would you be amazed at what you’ve become or would that high school self consider you a total loser?

A second study repeated the procedures of this first study on a new online sample but added questions to determine how nostalgic participants felt toward the past, and whether they experienced the emotions of shame and guilt. Here again, ask yourself whether you look back on your past with a feeling of fondness or does your high school past conjure up images of all the things you wish you had been.

The study’s findings showed that, consistent with previous research, most participants gave their younger selves advice about relationships, education, “selfhood” (identity in general), money, and direction or goals. In turn, they also believed the pivotal events in their lives included family, death, and health problems. Consistent with the reminiscence bump, participants were also more likely to regard the pivotal event ages as occurring in their early to mid 20s but the ages varied by type of event. Positive events were most likely to peak somewhat at around the age of 30 and negative events were more evenly spread across the age groups.

The one exception was that, for negative events, there were a large number associated with the late teens. If you asked yourself how your high school self would feel about you now, then it might not surprise you that about an equal percent (18) of the sample were proud as were those who were disappointed. It might also not surprise you to learn that most of the people who thought they would be proud of themselves also considered themselves to be following the advice they offered their younger self.

What do these findings mean for you and the advice you would give to the person you were then? The authors concluded that most people do ask themselves, at least once in a while, what they would do differently if they knew then what they know now. "However," the authors go on to note, "as any parent knows who tries to impart the life lessons they have learned to their teenage children, most of the advice we offer to our younger self has to be learned through personal experience” (pp. 15-16).

In other words, you might have regrets now about your past, but in practical terms, there was no way then you could have known what you know now. Instead, that advice falls into the category of “life lessons.” Yet there may be some value in listening to that advice now. If you wish you had spent more time with loved ones when you were younger, you can still commit to putting a higher priority on relationships moving ahead into the future. If you wish you had stayed in school longer, perhaps it’s still possible to enroll in an adult education program or evening college courses.

To sum up, if your ideal self is different than the self you feel you represent now, you don’t have to live forever with that discrepancy. Thinking back about the past doesn’t just have to be a passive reminiscence process. Use memories of your younger self to direct your future self to achieve greater fulfillment.

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