Willemijn van Dolen | Be careful what you manifest
Manifesting something can work both for and against you, as columnist Willemijn van Dolen discovered when she delved into the scientific research. “Our imagination is not a magical superpower, but neither is it a useless exercise in daydreaming.”
I was standing in line at the coffee shop, behind two students. They were chatting about their holidays and how they were looking forward to getting back to their studies. “This year, I’m really going to knuckle down. I want to get better grades, too.” “Yeah, you just have to manifest it.” What followed was an explanation of how you can create your own happiness, wealth and health simply through the power of your thoughts.
Manifesting has become so mainstream that you hear about it everywhere. Manifesting a job. Manifesting a relationship. Manifesting a passing grade in statistics. The idea is tempting: if you picture your future vividly enough, it will somehow come closer to you on its own.
Less likely to take action
I actually wanted to tell the students: be careful what you manifest. Research shows that positive fantasies feel wonderful, but sometimes they actually make us less likely to take action. People who spent time vividly imagining themselves successfully losing weight ended up losing less weight. Graduates who pictured an effortless start to their careers later received fewer job offers. And students who dreamed about getting high grades were, strikingly enough, less likely to achieve them.
The explanation? When we picture a future vividly enough, it can feel a little as though we’re already there. We get the reward in advance, while the work has yet to begin. That doesn’t mean dreaming is pointless. Quite the opposite. The researchers simply suggest adding one more step: mental contrasting. Don’t just fantasise about the end result — getting those high grades — but also imagine what stands between you and your goal. The deadline. The urge to procrastinate. The group project. The party that goes on until late. And think about what you’re going to do to overcome those obstacles. Only then does a wish become a plan. This may sound obvious, but according to the researcher, only around 10 to 25 per cent of people spontaneously engage in mental contrasting.
M&M’s
Interestingly, vividly imagining something and making it feel as though you’ve already experienced it can also work in your favour. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University asked people to imagine eating M&M’s in great detail. Not just to think about them in passing, but to mentally consume them: one by one, chewing, swallowing, and repeating the process. Afterwards, the participants were allowed to eat real M&M’s from an actual bowl. And what did they find? The people who had mentally “eaten” 30 M&M’s ate fewer in real life than the control group, who had instead imagined putting coins into a washing machine.
Their conclusion? Detailed, repeated mental consumption can produce a feeling of satiety: in a sense, your brain has already had enough before you even open the bag. But it only works if you actually imagine the act of eating. Simply thinking about M&M’s often, without visualising the eating experience, or imagining a different kind of snack, had no effect. The researchers call this process habituation: the more often you repeat an experience, even in your mind, the less strongly you respond to it. Apparently, then, you can become desensitised to imaginary M&M’s, too.
Our imagination is not a magical superpower, but neither is it a useless exercise in daydreaming. Sometimes it gives us direction. Sometimes it takes the wind out of our sails. And sometimes it helps us eat fewer M&M’s.
Now all I can do is hope — or manifest — that the student above notices my column.
