Loss aversion and present bias
Two behavioural science concepts help explain this conflict: loss aversion and present bias.
Loss aversion means that the pain of losing something we value can feel stronger than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. For example, losing £100 can feel worse than gaining £100 feels good.1 Although health is probably our most valuable asset, its potential loss often feels less immediate: it is uncertain, usually gradual and difficult to notice from day to day. Good health is not always perceived as a possession, but as the absence of problems: I am not ill, rather than as possessing strength, resilience, and healthy years ahead.
Present bias is our tendency to over-focus on immediate rewards and undervalue future ones. Even short delays can sharply reduce the psychological value we attach to a reward. Neuroscience suggests that we can perceive our future self more like another person than our present self.2 In other words, skipping a health action today may feel like making a sacrifice now to benefit a stranger tomorrow.
If we are to make loss aversion and present bias relevant, health must be made to feel like a current, personal asset: health is your energy, your strength, your mobility, your independence and your vitality.
“Protect what you have” is more compelling than “avoid future illness”.
Why the future loses to today
Most of us know the rules of healthy living: move more, eat better and less, sleep well, do not smoke, drink less and stay socially connected. But these wellness actions compete with other powerful immediate rewards: the well-deserved crash on the sofa after a long day, or a glass of wine to unwind after stressful meetings. When they become our go-to solutions, familiar rewards reinforce the brain’s systems of “wanting” and “liking”.3,4
These rewards are immediate and certain. The sofa is here now; future mobility loss is hypothetical. The drink offers immediate pleasure; liver disease is uncertain and invisible. Future health loses this unfair contest.
Health needs a more immediate signal. The distance between who we are and who we may become feels too distant and uncertain. To change behaviour today, we need to connect now with tomorrow. We need a bridge: a way of making our future health relevant, visible and actionable now.
Health scares: powerful but temporary bridges
A health scare is one such bridge. A raised blood-pressure reading, a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes or an illness affecting someone close can suddenly make the future real. I experienced this after being diagnosed with atherosclerosis. Cardiovascular risk stopped being an abstract possibility and became real and personal.
But a health scare can be a temporary bridge. Whilst fear commands attention, its power fades. As medication or treatment works and normal life resumes, the scare becomes more distant, ushering back in old habits and their immediate rewards.
Waiting for a frightening health event is also the opposite of prevention: by the time the future feels real, damage may already have begun.
Visualising the future you: a stronger bridge
Another bridge is to make your future self as real as possible today. Visualise being an active grandparent or ticking off exciting trips from your bucket list. The more vivid that future person is, and the more clearly we connect them with lifestyle actions today, the stronger the bridge across time.5
For many, this can be an effective one-off exercise, but it is hard to maintain, and future discounting can overwhelm the effort. We can strengthen the link by writing letters to ourselves twenty or thirty years from now, explaining what we are doing today to make their life rewarding. However, the challenge is to make this sufficiently tangible every day to overcome the power of present bias.
Biological age: the strongest bridge
At a.genius, we have identified biological age as the strongest bridge. Our lifestyle model was developed with epidemiologists at Imperial College and translates current behaviours into a language everyone understands: how we are really ageing.
Chronological age tells us how many birthdays we have had. Biological age estimates how our bodies are ageing using health, lifestyle and biometric data. Genes influence how we age, but lifestyle and environmental factors also play a major role, and many of these influences are modifiable. Instead of simply saying that inactivity, poor sleep and poor diet may increase disease risk in 20 years, a lifestyle-based biological age model translates those distant risks into an estimate of biological age today.
This is powerful in five ways.
- It is personal: population statistics describe people like us; biological age reflects our current health and lifestyle inputs.
- It is immediate: long-term effects are transformed into the present.
- It is holistic: it connects physical activity, nutrition, sleep, cognitive health and social connectivity.
- It is intuitive: a three-year gap is easier to grasp than hazard ratios.
- It is modifiable: most importantly, the estimate can change when we take action today.
When we make lifestyle changes that reduce biological age, progress can feel like something valuable is being recovered. Prevention becomes less about sacrificing today for an unknown tomorrow and more about achieving a visible result now.
However, biological age must be used responsibly. It is an estimate, not a diagnosis, and different models use different inputs and may capture different aspects of ageing.7
A bridge must lead to a destination
A bridge is useful only if it leads somewhere. Our goal is to empower people to lower their biological age with a compelling and engaging personal glide path.
To create new habits, behaviour change needs its own feel-good factors: it should be easy, fun and sociable, with visible progress and immediate rewards. These features reinforce the new habit as the brain learns, “That action was worth doing.”8 Other practical steps include using cues to prompt action and linking a new behaviour to an established habit or routine.9
At a.genius, we believe lifestyle-based biological age is the most meaningful and effective bridge to make health feel like a possession today and to drive action now. It makes future health feel current, identifies the behaviours that matter and allows improvement to be seen and reinforced.
Sources and further reading
- 1. Kahneman D and Tversky A. “Prospect Theory.” Econometrica. 1979;47:263–291. View source
- 2. Ersner-Hershfield H et al. “Saving for the future self.” Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2009;4:85–92. View source
- 3. Berridge KC et al. “Dissecting components of reward.” Curr Opin Pharmacol. 2009;9:65–73. View source
- 4. Mitchell JM et al. “Alcohol consumption induces endogenous opioid release.” Sci Transl Med. 2012;4:116ra6. View source
- 5. Hershfield HE et al. “Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings.” J Mark Res. 2011;48:S23–S37. View source
- 6. Wang J et al. “Healthy lifestyle in late-life, longevity genes, and life expectancy.” Lancet Healthy Longev. 2023;4:e535–e543. View source
- 7. Mathur A et al. “New insights into methods to measure biological age.” Front Aging. 2024;5:1395649. View source
- 8. Woolley K and Fishbach A. “Immediate rewards predict adherence to long-term goals.” Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2017;43:151–162. View source
- 9. Singh B et al. “Time to form a habit: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Healthcare. 2024;12:2488. View source
