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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. 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 realizing it, I developed a healthy routine that can have great benefits on my mental health, says Erin Clabough, a neuroscientist, author and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. "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," Clabough tells CNBC Make It. "A letter to your future self can really help with that." Here's why Clabough recommends the practice, and what you should consider when you sit down to write your own letter. Be the captain of your ship 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," 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, 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." Clabough suggests asking these questions when writing to your future self: 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 to yourself as the compass that is nudging you to go in the direction that you desire, she says. I think this is something that should be utilized by all sorts of people, no matter their walks of life. Erin Clabough Neuroscientist and author "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." 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," Clabough says. In her entry, she affirms that she's doing her best and writes about 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 utilized by all sorts of people, no matter their walks of life." Want to level up your AI skills? Sign up for Smarter by CNBC Make It's new online course, How To Use AI To Communicate Better At Work. Get specific prompts to optimize emails, memos and presentations for tone, context and audience. Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It's newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life, and request to join our exclusive community on LinkedIn to connect with experts and peers.
