Adaptive Time Management: A Life-History Framework Integrating Mental Time Travel, Mortality Awareness, and Anticipatory Decision-Making

Adaptive time management is a newly developed life-history framework that integrates humans’ capacity for mental time travel with mortality awareness as a strategic process for time and resource allocation. Rather than triggering terror management, we conceptualize mortality awareness as an adaptive cue that recalibrates subjective time perception and episodic future thinking. This framework maps three key life-history factors (resource scarcity, unpredictability, and harshness) onto corresponding decision premises: perceived remaining time, death’s uncertainty, and life’s inevitability. We review evidence suggesting that: (1) constricted horizons accelerate delay discounting and favor immediate, fast strategies; (2) unpredictability of death (temporal variation of death) evokes emotions and prompt strategic present-oriented choices that secure survival under high-risk conditions; (3) inevitability of death (life’s finitude) fosters slow strategies through resource bet-hedging mental travel that allows time measure and management; and (4) episodic end-of-life thinking elicits anticipatory emotions that adaptively regulate self-control and cognitive reappraisal. We also introduce preliminary findings on “life-history intertemporal meditation” as a potential intervention for adaptive regulation. Finally, we discuss adaptive time management in applications in death education and mental health. Together, this framework highlights how harnessing life-history mental time travel and mortality awareness can promote adaptive decision-making and emotional resilience across the lifespan.