There is a version of me who apparently has unlimited energy, tremendous motivation and a remarkable capacity to deal with things I don't particularly want to deal with today.

Her name is Future Joy.

Future Joy is going to make the appointment I've been putting off, tackle the projects I don't feel like starting and get up early even though Present Joy stayed up too late. And for many years, I always believed Future Joy was also going to be much better at managing alcohol than Present Joy seemed to be.

Tomorrow I'll drink less. After vacation I'll take a break. January will be a good time to reset.

I placed an enormous amount of faith in that woman.

The funny thing is, every time Future Joy finally arrived, she was just...me.

She wasn't suddenly more motivated, and life hadn't magically become less stressful. Five o'clock still came around, the same cues and triggers were always there, and quite often she didn't feel any more like dealing with the thing I'd handed her than I had the day before.

So she just kicked it down the path and handed it off to the next Future Joy. And so on and so forth it went. For years. Decades, in fact.

I've been thinking about this concept of a Future and Present Me a lot since hearing psychologist Hal Hershfield talk about his research on something called future-self continuity, which is essentially how connected we feel to the person we'll be in the future.

In one of Hershfield's studies, researchers used fMRI scans while people thought about themselves today, themselves in the future, and about another person. What they found was that our brains can represent our future selves more like another person than like who we are today. And the greater the neural difference researchers saw between someone's present and future self, the more likely that person was to favor a smaller reward now over a larger reward later.

In other words, when Future You feels more like a stranger, it may be easier to make decisions that leave her holding the bag. And once I heard this, I couldn't stop thinking about how it applies to people wanting to change their relationship with alcohol.

You see, alcohol offers Present You something very immediate. There's the anticipation of the first drink after a stressful day, the familiar ritual that says work is finally over, the temporary relief of changing how you feel, and/or the pleasure of joining everyone else who's drinking.

Buuuuut...Future You gets the 3 a.m. wake-up, the rebound anxiety, the sluggish morning, and the oh-so-familiar promise that tonight I'll do better.

Present You gets the reward. Future You gets the bill.

But the more I've thought about this, the more I've realized there's something else going on here too. We don't just leave the consequences for Future Us.

We expect her to eventually rescue us.

I'll cut back after the holidays. I'll take a break when work settles down. I'll deal with it after vacation. I'll reset in January.

Somehow, there's always another version of us waiting somewhere down the road who will apparently be better equipped to make the changes. And maybe she will be.

Sometimes there are perfectly good reasons to wait, and I don't believe every desire for change requires immediate action, but I do think it's worth getting curious about what we expect to be different.

If we're simply assuming Future You will have more motivation, fewer cravings, less stress or a sudden willingness to do something Present You doesn't particularly want to do, we may be asking an awful lot of her.

Sometimes "later" isn't really a plan. It's just a transfer.

What if you actually got to know her?

One of the ideas I've been exploring based on Hershfield's work is remarkably simple: rather than continually handing things to Future You, have a conversation with her.

Choose a point six months or a year from now, and write Future You a letter. Tell her what's happening in your life right now, what you're struggling with, what you're hoping will change, and what you keep telling yourself you'll deal with later.

If alcohol has been occupying more mental space than you'd like, tell her about that too. What are you trying to figure out? What do you hope your relationship with alcohol looks like by the time she reads this?

Then switch perspectives and have Future You write back.

What does she want Present You to know? What is she grateful you did? What does she wish you'd worried about less? What does she wish you'd stopped leaving for her to figure out?

I love the idea of this exercise because Future You stops being some abstract woman we're simultaneously burdening with our choices and expecting to eventually fix everything. She becomes a little more real.

But simply imagining the person we’d like to become isn’t enough. We still have to figure out how to get from here to there.

Imagining Future You is only part of it

This is where the work of psychologist Gabriele Oettingen fits beautifully with Hershfield's research.

Oettingen has spent decades studying how we think about the futures we want, and her research suggests that simply fantasizing about a wonderful future doesn't necessarily help us create it. We also need to put that desired future alongside the reality we're living right now.

She calls this mental contrasting, and her work led to a simple exercise called WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.

Start with one thing you'd genuinely like to change. What is your wish, and what would be the best outcome if it happened?

Then (and I think this is the really useful part), what is the main obstacle inside you that's likely to get in the way?

If your wish is to take a break from alcohol, maybe your desired outcome is sleeping better and waking up clearheaded. But your obstacle might be that by 5:00 p.m. you're exhausted and your brain has learned that wine means the day is finally over. Or maybe Friday night doesn't feel like Friday night without a drink, or perhaps you're worried about what you'll say when everyone else orders a cocktail.

None of that means you can't do it. It's all just information. Data to mine.

With that data, you can now make a plan for the obstacle that's actually likely to show up rather than relying on Future You to somehow be more motivated when it does.

So when 5:00 p.m. comes and your brain immediately suggests wine, you'll change your clothes and take the dog for a walk before deciding what you want, or you'll know what you're ordering before you walk into the restaurant. Or when you hear yourself think, I deserve a drink, you'll pause long enough to ask what you're actually needing.

This is where I think Hershfield's and Oettingen's work come together in such an interesting way. Hershfield helps us make Future You more real, while Oettingen helps us figure out what's standing between Present You and Future You.

I've also started wondering whether there's another way to think about the relationship between the two of them.

Maybe neither one of you has to lose

It would be easy to interpret all of this as an argument for getting better at sacrificing what we want today for what will be good for us tomorrow, but that's not the point.

Present You matters too.

If you've had a difficult day and find yourself standing in the kitchen at 5:00 p.m. wanting that glass of wine, there may be a very real need underneath that desire, and it should be legitimately attended to. What kind of comfort or a transition out of work mode do you really need? What would really help in that moment? Maybe you need connection, pleasure, or simply ten minutes when nobody wants anything from you.

For years, alcohol may have been the way Present You learned to meet that need, and I'm not particularly interested in telling Present You that her needs don't matter because Future You wants better sleep.

I'm much more interested in asking: How can I best take care of both of us in this moment?

Maybe the answer is getting outside, calling someone, going to yoga, taking a hot shower, or pouring yourself something non-alcoholic that you genuinely enjoy to signal that you're done for the day.

The point isn't that any of those things are the "right" replacement for alcohol. The point is that now we're asking a different question.

We're no longer asking Present You to suffer for Future You, and we're no longer asking Future You to keep cleaning up after Present You.

Instead, we're learning how to take care of both of us in this moment, and I think that's a much more useful way to think about changing your relationship with alcohol.

You don't have to decide today what Future You will do about alcohol forever. You can simply give yourself one evening without it and see how tomorrow feels, or maybe you do an experiment for seven days, or perhaps you're curious enough to give yourself 30 days to really explore what changes.

Because Future You isn't some magically upgraded version of yourself waiting down the road to finally figure all of this out.

She's you, and you're already becoming her.