What Your Body State Does to the Future You Imagine

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

Everything about this exercise happens above the neck. You sit somewhere, usually at a desk, and you write two descriptions of yourself set some years ahead — one of the person you hope to be, one of the person you are afraid you will turn into — and you make them specific enough to contain actual scenes rather than qualities. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, who introduced the idea in 1986, were describing something they thought was already operating in everyone: you carry around a set of selves you regard as possible, and that set quietly influences what you attempt. Writing them down is an attempt to get at that set deliberately instead of leaving it to run in the background. Nothing in the procedure asks anything of your body, and that is worth registering before reading any further, because it is exactly where yoga has something to offer and also where the two practices genuinely have nothing in common.

Yoga

Yoga, in the form most people meet it, is a sequence of held and moving postures coordinated with regulated breathing, with attention kept on the physical sensations the whole way through. The postures are not the point in themselves — they function as a reliable way of producing sensation strong enough that attention has something to rest on. Two things are being trained at once. One is the capacity to notice what your own body is reporting, moment to moment, at a finer grain than the usual background hum; the other is the ability to bring your attention back to that reporting when it wanders, which it does constantly. The slow breathing that runs through it has a measurable physiological effect independent of the postures: extending the out-breath shifts the nervous system away from alarm and toward settling, which is why a class can leave you calmer than when you arrived without having addressed a single thing that was worrying you.

What you get out of pairing them

Be straightforward about the size of the claim, because this pairing is not one of the strong ones. Yoga will not clarify your future. It has no content about identity, and practitioners who use it purely as breath and body work are not missing a component. What it can supply is a starting condition. Most people sit down to write about their lives in the evening, after a day that has left them keyed up or flattened, and the picture of the future they produce in that state is inflected by the state — grander when they are wired, smaller and more defended when they are depleted. Half an hour of practice beforehand does not make the writing wiser. It changes which version of yourself is holding the pen. In the other direction the offer is smaller still and only applies to a particular kind of practitioner: if you already do yoga and find yourself drifting or bailing early in the hard part of a session, having written down who you are trying to become gives that specific moment something to be about. Neither of these is a large effect. They are worth naming honestly rather than inflating.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What Yoga rests on

• Interoceptive attention randomised trials
  Directing sustained attention to internal bodily sensations increases awareness of the body's state and changes how that state is experienced.
• Attention is trainable randomised trials
  Repeatedly practicing directing and redirecting attention strengthens the ability to control where it goes, making that control more available over time.
• Slow breathing downregulates arousal randomised trials
  Slow controlled breathing shifts autonomic balance toward parasympathetic dominance and reduces physiological arousal.

Where they actually meet

The possible selves exercise rests on the claim that a vague sense of 'who I might become' only motivates once it's given concrete shape — a written hoped-for self and feared self, with the gap between them and where you are now doing the motivating work. Yoga rests on a claim about a different kind of attention entirely: sustained attention to the body's own internal signals, sometimes called interoceptive attention, is trainable, and slow controlled breathing shifts the nervous system toward calm rather than alarm. Held together, the Kegan-style move each is making becomes visible: possible selves work turns a diffuse pull toward or away from a future — usually just felt as vague ambition or dread — into something written down and looked at; yoga does the same to present bodily arousal, turning 'how I feel' from something simply happening to you into a state you can notice and work with in real time.

The principle underneath both

What links them, if anything does, is that what you are able to notice depends on the state you are noticing from. In yoga this is not controversial and is more or less the working assumption of the whole practice: your reading of what your body is doing changes as arousal rises and falls, which is why the same posture is intolerable on one day and unremarkable on another. In the possible selves exercise it is rarely acknowledged at all, though the same thing is happening — which futures feel available to you shifts with your mood, and there is a long line of psychological research, going back to Gordon Bower's work in the early 1980s, showing that current emotional state biases what comes to mind toward material that matches it. Neither tradition owns the observation. But only one of the two builds anything on it.

What that makes the real goal

Stated so it belongs to neither practice: you want to be able to tell the difference between what you actually want and what your current physiological state is telling you that you want. That distinction is doing a great deal of work in ordinary life and is almost never made explicit. A future imagined at eleven at night, three coffees deep and a hard conversation still circulating, is not a report on your values; it is partly a report on your nervous system. So is the flat, resigned version produced when you are exhausted. The goal is not to reach some neutral state — there is no such thing, and waiting for one is its own avoidance — but to know roughly which state you are writing from, so you can discount accordingly and check the result later against a different day.

Other practices that serve the same goal

If the aim is to settle the body before doing something reflective, several routes get there and some carry better evidence for that narrow effect than a yoga class does. Controlled breathing on its own is the most efficient: a 2023 Stanford trial published in Cell Reports Medicine compared brief daily breathwork against mindfulness meditation over a month and found the breathing practices, particularly a pattern of a double inhale through the nose followed by a long slow exhale, produced greater improvement in mood and a larger drop in breathing rate. Five minutes of that before you open the notebook is a smaller ask than a full session and targets the same thing. Progressive muscle relaxation — deliberately tensing and releasing muscle groups in sequence — is another well-established route with decades of clinical use, and it has the advantage of being obvious when it is working. And the oldest route is a rule rather than a technique: the standard clinical caution against making consequential decisions while acutely distressed exists precisely because the distorting effect is well enough established to be worth a blanket instruction.

A tradition that already does this

Yoga's own tradition already contains this pairing, in a more disciplined form than anything assembled here. In yoga nidra as taught by the Bihar School and Swami Satyananda Saraswati, the practitioner lies still through a long guided sequence of body-scanning and breath, and at a specified point — after the body has settled, not before — plants a sankalpa: a short resolve stated in the present tense about who they are becoming or what they intend, repeated a small number of times and then let go, with the same statement kept unchanged across months of practice. The ordering is deliberate and explicitly taught. The self-statement goes in after the settling, on the reasoning that it lands differently in that state. The tradition makes no measured claim about this, and no trial has isolated the sankalpa step from the rest of the practice.

Using Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Yoga

A yoga practice done purely as body-and-breath work is complete on its own terms, but for someone who wants the practice to connect to something beyond the mat, showing up because you're 'supposed to' rarely sustains attention through a hard pose. The possible-selves exercise gives it a concrete reference point: write one sentence describing a feared version of yourself under stress (snaps at people, white-knuckles through the day) and one sentence for a hoped-for version (handles pressure with a level head), then treat a specific difficult moment in practice — the point in a held pose where the easy move is to quit early — as the place you're actually testing which version shows up, rather than an abstract intention floating outside the session.

Using Yoga to enhance Possible Selves Exercise

Writing a vivid future self is a purely cognitive exercise, and it can float free of the body entirely — you can describe the calm, level-headed version of yourself in careful prose while your shoulders stay locked up and your breath stays shallow. Yoga's slow-breathing practice, which shifts the nervous system toward parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) dominance and lowers physiological arousal, gives the exercise a different starting condition: spend a few minutes on slow breath before writing or reviewing possible-selves entries, so the hoped-for self is being accessed from an actually settled body instead of being imagined on top of a keyed-up one, which is the state most people are in when they sit down to do this kind of reflection after a hard day.

Forearm plank, arms shaking, two more breaths

Your arms are shaking in a forearm plank you've been holding longer than usual, and the instructor calls two more breaths. There's a version of you that already dropped to its knees a moment ago and told itself that was plenty — and there's the version you wrote down last week, the one who stays a few seconds past where the body first signals it wants out. The long, slow exhale you're being cued into is the same breathing practice that lowers physiological arousal; it is, quite literally, part of what makes it possible to hold one more breath past the point your body first flagged as done. Stay for it, and the hoped-for self on the page gets a small, physical, lived instance instead of remaining a sentence you wrote about yourself once.

When this is worth reaching for

The condition this pairing actually fits is narrow, and it is worth naming precisely rather than broadening it. It applies when you have noticed that your writing about your own future swings hard with your mood — that the version you produce on a good Sunday and the version you produce on a bad Wednesday do not describe the same life — and you want a way of steadying the input rather than continuing to average the outputs. It also fits the practitioner who has been doing yoga for a while, finds it genuinely valuable on the mat, and wants it to connect to something off the mat without turning it into self-improvement work. It does not fit someone whose practice is already doing exactly what they want, and it does not fit someone in acute distress, for whom deliberately loading a feared self-portrait next to a session is more likely to hurt than help.

Where this does not apply

Yoga's core mechanism doesn't require any future-self narrative at all, and plenty of practitioners get everything they came for purely as breath and body work, with attention directed away from story and onto sensation. Grafting a possible-selves narrative onto every session can turn a practice that works partly because it's non-conceptual into one more occasion for thinking about yourself. Where the goal is simply nervous-system regulation with no identity content attached, adding possible-selves work is unnecessary, and on days it pulls attention out of the body and into narrative, it can work against what the session was for.

What the evidence does and does not support

Interoceptive attention training and slow breathing's effect on arousal both carry RCT-level support in contemplative and yoga research. The possible-selves principles are weaker by comparison: the concrete-versus-vague finding is observational, descriptive of outcomes rather than an experimental manipulation, and the claim that gap-awareness motivates change is a plausible mechanistic account rather than one demonstrated on its own in controlled trials. No study has tested pairing a written possible-selves exercise with a yoga practice; the claim that a calmer nervous system changes how future-self work lands is a reasonable inference from what's separately known about each, not a finding about the combination.