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get in the future. In this view, money today is better than money
tomorrow, and being a couch potato right now is preferable
to training for next year’s triathlon. The real issue is just how
much more we stand to gain today and to what extent this bias
messes with our ability to set and accomplish our goals.
Consider this: roughly 30 percent of adult Americans have
high blood pressure (hypertension). And notwithstanding the
medical community’s efforts to improve recognition and treat-
ment, there is great dissatisfaction with the current rates of
controlling this disease. In response, researchers at the Medical
University of South Carolina decided to assess to what extent
discount rates (how we value the future compared to the present)
impacted people’s responses to having high blood pressure. 4
The fi rst thing of note is that the average health discount
rates were found to be 43.8 percent per year. Let’s think about
this for a minute. If we’re giving our money to the bank to buy
a CD, we only discount the future by about 1 percent (because
that’s about the interest rate we accept from the bank). But when
it comes to high blood pressure (you know, serious health stuff)
we devalue the future by nearly 44 percent? No wonder so many
people aren’t getting the proper treatments right now. They’re
looking at this and thinking, “Gee, the fi ve minutes I save now
by not wasting time checking my blood pressure is worth 43

percent more than the five minutes of extra life I’ll get next year
by treating this condition.”
Further analyses showed that just a 1 percent increase in
participants’ discount rate increased the likelihood that they
would not check their blood pressure by 3.5 percent, not alter
their diet and exercise by 0.6 percent, and not follow doctors’
treatment plans by 1.6 percent. What’s more, the people with
the highest discount rates, somewhere between 50 and 57 per-
cent (the folks who don’t value the future very highly at all),