Dear Me

Getting a surprise from the past is a strange and curious thing and it can be quite transformative too.

What do you think your future look like in a year, five years or more?

In this mission, you will send your future self some words of inspiration or comfort, or make a prediction about your life, your family or the world.

5 Reasons Why you should write a letter to your future self

Writing a letter to yourself gives you insight and teaches you valuable life lessons that will stick with you long afterwards. You could think of it as a time capsule.

1. Increase your self-awareness.
Taking time to articulate who you are now, will be an incredible gift to your future self. You will see just how much you have grown, how much you have changed and… how much you haven’t!

2. Cultivate gratitude.
Becoming more grateful can reduce stress and increase wellbeing and research shows that writing down the things we’re grateful for, can reduce stress and improve your mood.

3. Create your future.
Where will you be in one, five or ten years? Who do you want to become? By connecting with your future self in this way, you become more connected to and more conscious of your future and how you want to live it.

4. Appreciate your journey.
A lot can happen in-between writing and receiving a letter. This is a way to help you appreciate all that’s happened and everything that’s changed in that time.

5. Give yourself a memory.
Writing a letter to your future self isn’t something you do every day. It is a snapshot of your life at this point in time, it will be nostalgic to look back and see what you were thinking about now.

Top tips

• Be honest
The only person that will read it is you (unless you want to share it with someone).

• Give advice
You are a great person to give advice to. Something that you feel strongly about now might be exactly the kind of reminder your future-self needs.

• Do it regularly
You could even make it your New Year annual tradition.

How?

We recommend these 2 ways of writing a letter to your future self.

1. Write yourself an email

If you use this website, Future Me, they will send you your email when you tell them to. You can set it for exactly when you want it to be emailed to you. There may be a specific date that you think it would be good to receive it or you could set it for years in the future. Just be sure to use an email address that you’ll keep for a long time.

www.futureme.org

Or this one will send you an email when the Coronavirus crisis is over so you may want to write some specifically for this period of time.

www.postcorona.me

2. Write yourself a real letter.

You can, of course, write yourself a real letter as long as you remember to open it and you have to resist the temptation to open it too soon so don’t forget to date it. You could give it to a trusted friend or family member or hide it somewhere you know that you come across it one day.