Episodic Future Thinking in the Treatment of Risky Behaviors

  There’s an extremely wide range of risky behaviors and circumstances. For example, smoking, drinking, practicing certain sports, or being in a pressurizing job. They can lead to heart attacks, cancer, COPD, and respiratory failure. In fact, risky behaviors refer to events that we tend to mentally try to escape because their presence creates danger for us: death. Preventing these events, via healthier habits, behaviors, and lifestyles, is one of the objectives of health sciences and psychology in particular. In this context, recent research reported in Papeles del Psicólogo analyzed how future episodic thinking influences the avoidance of risky behaviors (Aonso-Diego…