While there may be some things you do not wish to know in the future, accurate prediction can create many benefits for you. Those benefits can involve events over the next few seconds, or long-term experiences over succeeding years that will affect your physical, mental, financial and spiritual health. Here are nine categories in which predictive analysis may have merit for you:

Health: We are now moving from your ‘medical history’ to your ‘medical future’. Health specialists have always known that prevention is preferable to the cure. DNA tests can provide some indications about future issues for your health. Public awareness about the barometer of poor future health is now stronger than ever, given that Dr Google has arrived on the scene. Many actions and choices adopted at the right times can create a life less prone to disease.

Stability: When you perceive that the world is volatile and outside your control, you can too easily feel unsettled and even fearful about what is up ahead. Predictive capability can generate an opposing mindset. At least you will be determining aspects of the future yourself, rather than letting others dictate their thinking to you. Your locus of control moves from being outside you, to creating stability within you. Conversely, an external locus of control means that you will be held captive by horrendous media sensationalism, or by the relative who can only talk about the miseries of the future.

Relationships: While there is little evidence-based reality to the 7-year itch, the ability to predict the future of a possible relationship will save you endless heartache. Gut feeling matters in the very early stages. In the longer term, looking for indicators of concern can save your present relationship. Instead of slowly sliding downwards, you can implement some interventions that redress the predicted issues.

Intuition: Trusting your intuition supports your predictive efforts. Even an overwhelming amount of data cannot create the prediction all by itself. The data needs to be combined with gut feeling, something that robots are unlikely to do for a while yet. Throughout human history, we have struggled to accept the worth of intuition. It has been denigrated because there is little scientific validity, and yet your premonition about what is about to happen may be a valid predictive tool. Financial security is an obvious benefit of predictive ability. We are not talking about winning the lottery here, but instead, evaluating and acting on some strong research that can steadily lead to a comfortable standard of living. The only way you might (repeat: might) benefit from gambling is by approaching it professionally. Earning money, and then investing it in your chosen financial category – whether it be shares, real estate, or rare art – is the most obvious approach. This investing can be based upon professional advice, as well as your gut instinct.

Thinking. Your thinking capacity benefits strongly from engaging in prediction. Through the rest of this book, you will discover worthwhile strategies for analysing what is up ahead. Those strategies all need you to think deeply. You are likely to make better informed decisions, especially when you are researching the probabilities and trends of specific events. At the very least, it will be great exercise for your brain.

Sport. You will play more effective sport. There are at least two supportive points to this. The first is the long-term, in which you accurately predict and then action your results (or your team’s) over a full season or even longer. The second is that most sport requires you to predict what your opponent is about to do. The better you are at a sport, the more effective you will be at rapidly calculating what your opponent will do next. A split-second advantage makes all the difference.

Gratitude. When you engage in open-minded research, you may just discover that the world is not all gloom and despair. Billions of people right now are modelling what has been successfully accomplished all through history. They are resilient, adaptable and capable of creating solutions to difficult problems. You may even express gratitude for what has already been achieved in our history. You can see the possibilities (and yes, the perils) up ahead. Forewarned is forearmed, and having confidence in your predictive ability can lead to effective interventions for you, and even for the rest of the human race.