What does it mean that temporal distancing?

Asking how you will feel about this in a year reduces immediate emotional intensity.

Example: You send an email to forty people with the wrong spreadsheet attached. Your face flushes, your stomach drops, you start drafting apologies while simultaneously imagining everyone reading the wrong numbers and losing trust in your competence. Then you pause and ask yourself: will I remember this specific moment one year from now? The answer, almost certainly, is no. Within a week you will have sent a correction, most recipients will have forgotten, and the incident will have no measurable impact on your career. That single temporal shift — from the searing immediacy of right now to the mild indifference of a year from now — drops the emotional intensity from an eight to a three. The facts have not changed. The timeframe did.

Try this: The next time you feel a strong negative emotion about a specific event — not a chronic situation, but a discrete incident — stop and write three sentences. Sentence one: How I feel about this right now, rated 1-10. Sentence two: How I will likely feel about this in ten days. Sentence three: How I will likely feel about this in one year. Do not try to change your emotion. Just write the three ratings and notice what happens to the intensity as you move through the timeframes. Practice this with three separate incidents over the next week.