You are already imagining. The question is what.

I listened to a long conversation this week on the Mel Robbins podcast with Dr. Cassandra Vieten, a clinical psychologist at UC San Diego who has spent years studying imagination. She's director of research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination there, and her new book, Imagine That, came out this month.

Can you get anything you want in life just by imagining it? Unfortunately, it's not that easy. I wish it were. But the conversation changed how I think about what a guided soundtrack is actually capable of, and what it can create in your life. And that motivates me tremendously.

What imagination actually is

Vieten defines imagination as three things: simulating reality, reconfiguring it, and transcending it.

Simulating is the ordinary one. You're doing it constantly. Think about your own front door, the hallway behind it, how the light falls in the afternoon, how it smells when you cut an orange. That's simulation. So is running tomorrow's difficult meeting, or a performance, in your head before you get there.

Reconfiguring is adding something. You know the day is going to be hard, so you decide that on the way home you'll stop and buy the good coffee and sit with it for twenty minutes. You've altered the thing you were imagining.

Transcending is finding a story big enough to hold what's actually happening. Not pretending the situation is different. Changing the size of the frame you're looking at it through. Reframing is another word for this.

Most of us are simulating the wrong thing

Here's the part that stopped me.

When you imagine seeing something, the visual parts of your brain engage. When you imagine moving, the motor parts engage. This is why athletes who rehearse mentally tend to perform better than those who only train physically. Your brain treats imagined rehearsal as a kind of practice.

Which means the reverse is also true. If you spend your morning bracing, running through the layoff, the argument, the diagnosis, you're giving your body a version of the stress response for something that hasn't happened and may never happen. There's an old line, attributed to more than one writer, about having suffered many terrible disasters, most of which never arrived. It's funnier than it should be.

Vieten's point isn't that you should stop. It's that you can't. You're always going to imagine something. If you're already an expert at imagining the worst (this runs in my family, for sure), that's evidence you can be trained in the other direction too. And that's genuinely good news.

You do not have to see pictures

This is the part I want to underline, because I think it stops a lot of people.

Not everyone visualizes. Vieten described teaching workshops where four or five people in every room would say they saw nothing at all. Some people simply don't get images. That matches my own experience running workshops. If you've ever closed your eyes during a guided meditation and felt like you were failing at it, this is probably you, and you weren't failing.

Her alternative is to write the story instead.

She gave an example I keep thinking about. One story of your life is that you're a pinball. You get fired out of the tunnel every morning, knocked around all day, and you never decide anything.

Another story is that you're a woman walking through the Alps. There are uphill sections. When they come, you breathe and walk methodically. When you see something beautiful, you stop and stay with it. I love walking in the Alps myself, so this one is an easy picture for me to borrow.

What's your favorite place to walk? Use it as a metaphor for your meditations, or simply as a good place to daydream. Daydreaming in a peaceful environment, even a little each day, has real, measurable effects on the brain.

Two things worth doing on paper

Write the opposite story. What is it about my current story that I'm tired of? If the exact opposite were true, what would that look like? Write it out properly. Decorate it with color if you like.

List ten ways to make it worse. This one sounds like a joke, and it isn't. Take the situation you're stuck in and write down ten ways you could actively make it worse. Then flip each one. What you end up with is a list of concrete, specific things you'd never have reached by asking yourself what you should do. The unconscious mind answers the strange question more honestly than the sensible one.

There's a third, for anyone caught in a two-option loop: should I stay or should I go, on repeat for months. Sit down and write fifty possibilities, and don't edit for realism. Open a bookshop in Scotland. Join the circus. When you look at all fifty, you'll usually find they share something: every one of them involved travel, or solitude, or being outdoors. That's the real information, and something small and actually possible tends to fall out of it. Look for the underlying pattern.

Where I draw the line

Vieten made a distinction that I think is the whole thing.

So-called magical thinking is wanting things you have no control over to suddenly appear: other people changing their behavior, winning the lottery, weight loss without any effort.

The version she practices is about how you want to show up. Honest, kind and supportive to yourself, with better boundaries, with a different energy level. Those are things you can actually do.

And she was clear that you should imagine the difficult parts too, not just the result. If the goal is the half marathon, picture the boring six o'clock training run in the rain. Most people only picture the finish line, and then the first cold morning tells them they were wrong about themselves.

Intention, attention, repetition

That's her whole mechanism, and I like it because there's nothing mystical in it. Set the intention. Give it deliberate attention. Repeat it until it's the default rather than the effort.

Her own morning practice is simple. She meditates. Then she walks through the day ahead in her imagination: where she'll be, what she'll do, who she'll speak to. Then she asks what quality she wants to bring to it. Balance, or warmth, or firmness. Then she remembers a time she genuinely felt that, sits in the body memory of it for a moment, and carries it into the day.

This is rehearsal, and it costs nothing.

The small door

The image she ended on was of pointing out a door in someone's house that they'd walked past for years without noticing, opening it, and finding a whole wing behind it. Your imagination isn't frivolous, and it isn't only for children or artists. You're using it all day whether you attend to it or not. You may as well use it on purpose.

I built Imagine, my violin meditation on von Suppé's Poet and Peasant, from exactly this idea: opening doors in your own house, one at a time, and walking through what's on the other side. If you haven't read the story behind it, it's here.

Science backs this up as a real method for reaching goals, whether that's a trip you've always wanted to take, a new education, finding a partner, working through anxiety, or finding an answer to something that's felt impossible. You have the innate power to change. Come with me, and enjoy the ride.

With love and intention,

Aja