Time Required
15 minutes per day for two weeks
How to Do It
Take a moment to imagine your life in the future. What is the best possible life you can imagine? Consider all of the relevant areas of your life, such as your career, academic work, relationships, hobbies, and health. What would happen in these areas of your life in your best possible future?
For the next 15 minutes, write continuously about what you imagine this best possible future to be. Use the instructions below to help guide you through this process.
- It may be easy for this exercise to lead you to examine how your current life may not match this best possible future. You may be tempted to think about ways in which accomplishing goals has been difficult for you in the past, or about financial/time/social barriers to being able to make these accomplishments happen. For the purpose of this exercise, however, we encourage you to focus on the future—imagine a brighter future in which you are your best self and your circumstances change just enough to make this best possible life happen.
- This exercise is most useful when it is very specific—if you think about a new job, imagine exactly what you would do, who you would work with, and where it would be. The more specific you are, the more engaged you will be in the exercise and the more you’ll get out of it.
- Be as creative and imaginative as you want, and don’t worry about grammar or spelling.
Why You Should Try It
Sometimes our goals in life can be elusive. But research suggests that building optimism about the future can motivate people to work toward that desired future and thus make it more likely to become a reality.
This exercise asks you to imagine your life going as well as it possibly could, then write about this best possible future. By doing so, research suggests that you’ll not only increase your happiness in the present but pave the way for sustained happiness down the line.
Why It Works
By thinking about your best possible future self, you can learn about yourself and what you want in life. This way of thinking can help you restructure your priorities in life in order to reach your goals. Additionally, it can help you increase your sense of control over your life by highlighting what you need to do to achieve your dreams.
Evidence That It Works
Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 73-82.
People who completed the Best Possible Self exercise daily for two weeks showed increases in positive emotions right after the two-week study ended. Those who kept up with the exercise even after the study was over continued to show increases in positive mood one month later.
Sources
Laura A. King, Ph.D., University of Missouri
Jeffrey Huffman, M.D., Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital
Comments
and Reviews
Linda Taney
Yes, trying to do things each day to improve. It’s hard with COVID.
Lara
The practice itself can provide many benefits; however, it's easy to imagine futures that are somehow stemming from our current situation or others' opinions about us. By itself, it's not too helpful if we are influenced by our surroundings like this. In fact, it can be quite depressing (because we don't like what we imagined and get stuck imagining anything better, or we imagine something good and know that it won't happen). When coupled with another practice, for example, the Magic Wand (where we think of getting a magic wand and changing one thing in the world/people around us/us/etc. with it - absolutely anything), the practice makes more sense because we will be inclined to imagine a future which is taking us to our main goal or purpose. It helps to clarify our values as well. I want to note that this is an extremely difficult exercise if we are in a bad mood, but it should not be avoided. If done properly it can really lighten us up and put us on the right path. All in all, this is a good practice, but it needs more structure - at least to give us some momentum to keep going and enable us to find a way of making our dreams a reality.
hauke
And what to do, after imagine?
Nicholas Fulford
I have been practicing a variant of this for sometime before I read about it. My variant is what I call moral bootstrapping. With this you imagine your better self, the one who has insight, who is charitable, who knows not just how to do what is best, but is intrinsically aware of the deep connections that exist. Then from that place I make decisions. What that does is bootstraps me from the me who cannot see and make the best decisions about life's complex problems to one who undoes the knots of complexity with compassionate gentleness and a sense of humour. Through it I am able to imagine my Sisyphus happy. I am still hewing wood and drawing water, and that is ok, because it is not about the activities, but who I am and am becoming in engaging with those activities. And that leads to seeing with an eye to beauty and meaning instead of a focus on pain, self-judgment, and other anxiety spirals. It doesn't hurt to stimulate oneself with music such as Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Lark Ascending". Music plays the listener as in the moment there is ascendance in whirls and swirls - which is what imagining my better self is in fact doing. It draws we up and out rather than down and in. Hell is an ego spiralling down towards ultimate fear in a state of ever building anxiety. Heaven is an ego diminishing, floating like a butterfly upon a zephyr becoming lighter, more beautiful, less distinct. The exercise is not difficult. What is, is remembering the better self when frustrations come and anxiety spirals start to form based on seeds that we feed ourselves. Breaking those spirals by imagining the better self is how to do it, and the more often I do this exercise, the better the chance is that I catch myself before becoming bound to an anxiety spiral. Life is beautiful, but I do not always see it.
John
Hi, thanks for this motivating post. I am really impressed with your thinking and will surely do this. Looking forward to similar information and will be happy to read more interesting things on this website.
Cedric
Sometimes the universe is a trickster. In the daily Compassion Card from Pema Chodron I received this message "Abandon any hope of fruition" Pema's Commentary read "The key instruction is to stay in the present.Don't get caught up in hopes of what you'll achieve and how good your situation will be someday in the future. What you do right now is what matters."
Jonas Hjalmar Blom
This was great. It really made me realize how the small steps I take today, tend to take me in a new direction and therefore end up in something very apart from what the small step in the other direction would mean. I recommend this to everyone!
Dorota
I was very enthusiastic when I started this practice and it worked great for a week. Somehow after a week I found it a little bit repetitive and it was difficult for me to do it with my full passion and engagement. In the last few days I tried to focus on how to deal with particular difficulties from my present as me in the past and the exercise regained a bit of novelty.
The Greater Good Toolkit
Made in collaboration with Holstee, this tookit includes 30 science-based practices for a meaningful life.
The Greater Good Toolkit
Made in collaboration with Holstee, this tookit includes 30 science-based practices for a meaningful life.