Introducing (drum roll) …foresight.
Foresight is the ability to predict what will happen or be needed in the future. It’s a form of critical thinking that involves playing out the likely consequences of an action before taking it. It’s one of those late-stage acquisitions of our brain development that integrates in our mid-20s and gets fine-tuned with practice.
Our predictive brains are busy 24/7, sifting through environmental data and suggesting possible outcomes. From a neuroscience perspective, there’s a 4-to-1 ratio of brain activity going outward (what we expect to occur) versus inward (sensory input from the environment). When the environmental input matches our expectations, we continue moving forward with ease. When we get surprised by unexpected stimuli, good luck!
Environmental input allows us to make edits on our accrued experience, which becomes the baseline for what we expect to unfold each day. But there are always errors. The universe keeps throwing unexpected events that don’t match up with our norms, and our internal editor doesn’t always keep up. The consequence is stress.
Stress activates hormones that cut off the brain’s ability to access past experience and memory. Fight-flight-freeze occurs. These are not moments when thoughtful, considered decision-making happens. They become the times when we say, “If I had only known then what I know now, I would have made different choices.”
Even when outcomes are undesirable, we possess the coping skills to solve problems. The magic of hindsight lies in the ability to stay calm enough to not disable foresight so you can accurately predict what will happen or be needed in the future. No regrets.