Hello and welcome to Health Check from the BBC.
I'm Claudia Hammond and in this special edition of the programme, we are looking to the future.
We are very nearly halfway through the year and perhaps like me,
you're reflecting on where the past six months have gone.
Or maybe you're focusing on what's still to come in 2025.
For now, in the immediate future, let's look ahead to the next half an hour.
I've gathered an expert panel of psychologists to explore how we conceptualise the future in our minds and whether that might have implications for our health and our wellbeing.
Can we use ideas of the future to motivate us in the present?
Is it optimism or a little pessimism which might help us to live more healthily?
Well, before we meet my panel in the studio, I wanted to hear from a different panel of experts,
some small people with a whole lot of future ahead of them.
Future means, like, what happens next.
Future is, in my eyes, like maybe 50 years' time when technology has developed.
Future means what you're going to be or hire up.
It's any time except the past.
The future starts, I think, when I'm eight.
The future probably starts in ten years.
I think it'll be when I'm eight, but when I'm eight, the future will move on to when I'm nine.
So the future is whenever it's a year on.
A year older, I don't...