Does imagining a good future help?
· Source: King, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2001
It’s early, the house is still quiet, and you’re sitting outside with a coffee before anyone needs you. Your mind drifts forward: the job you might apply for, the flat with a proper kitchen, the trip you keep postponing. For a minute it feels good. Then a more sensible voice cuts in and calls it daydreaming, and you go inside to start the day.
That voice has a point. Wishing doesn’t pay rent. But psychologists have tested a specific, structured way of picturing the future, and found that it does something for how people feel. It’s one of the more studied exercises in this field, and it started with a small experiment on a group of students.
Four days of writing about the future
In 2001, Laura King asked 81 undergraduates to write for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row. King built the study on Pennebaker’s well-known writing method, in which people write about their hardest experiences. Each student was randomly given one of four topics: the most traumatic event of their life, their best possible future self, both of those, or a neutral topic as a control.
The best possible self here means a future in which things have gone well. King measured mood just before and just after each session. With the students’ consent, she also collected their records from the campus health centre, and three weeks later she measured their well-being.
What changed, and what didn’t hurt
Two results stand out. First, writing about life goals was less upsetting than writing about trauma, and the difference was statistically clear. Second, writing about the best possible self went with a rise in well-being three weeks later.
The health records added a third piece. Five months after the writing, students who had written about trauma, about their best possible self or about both showed less illness in the health centre records than the control group. That’s the point of the paper’s title. A pleasant topic was linked to the same health benefit that the painful topic had shown, without the pain.
Keep the limits in view. These were 81 students at one university, and illness was counted from health centre records. It’s one careful experiment, not a promise about everyone.
It also helps to know what “well-being” means in a study like this. It’s subjective well-being: how the students themselves rated their mood and their lives when asked. Nobody was cured of anything, and nobody stopped having bad days. On average, though, the ones who had spent four sessions picturing a good future described themselves as a little better off weeks later, which is a modest change and a believable one.
Why the comparison with trauma matters
Writing about trauma was the method King started from, and in her own study it was the more upsetting topic of the two. Plenty of people simply don’t want to spend four evenings reliving the worst thing that happened to them.
King’s result offers another way in. Picturing what you’re working toward seems to do some of the same good while feeling better along the way. For someone who has nothing dramatic to process, or who isn’t ready to, that’s a useful option to have.
Many studies later
The exercise caught on. In 2019, Carrillo and colleagues pulled together 29 studies that compared it with a control condition. Across them, the best possible self exercise improved well-being, optimism and positive mood compared with controls. Effects on negative mood and depressive symptoms were small.
The authors also noticed a hint that shorter practice and older participants might do better. That was a trend, not a firm result, but it’s encouraging for anyone who doesn’t have twenty spare minutes a day. You don’t need a long ritual to try this.
A path, not a wish
Look at how the exercise is described in that review: a positive view of yourself in the best possible future, after working hard towards it. The last part matters. This isn’t picturing a lottery win. It’s picturing a version of your life that you helped bring about.
That’s also what makes it practical. Once you can see the good future in some detail, it’s easier to notice one small thing that points toward it. The flat with a proper kitchen turns into a savings goal. That postponed trip becomes a date in the calendar. We’re suggesting this step ourselves, but it follows naturally from describing a future you’ve worked for.
One honest note about format. Everyone in King’s study wrote. Speaking the future aloud instead of writing it wasn’t part of the design, so nobody knows yet whether it gives the same result. Trying it is fine. Just treat it as your own experiment.
Picture the future you’d be glad you worked for, then name one step toward it.
Coffee on the porch, a second time
Here is an invented morning. Elena is outside before work again, and this time she lets the daydream run on purpose. She pictures herself a few years from now, when things have gone about as well as they reasonably could.
She works fewer evenings and has kept that boundary. There’s a small garden, and her brother visits often enough that his kids know where the biscuits are kept. Her Tuesdays are ordinary and good. The picture isn’t grand, just specific, and it’s clearly hers. She notices that the details came easily once she let herself stay with them for longer than a minute.
Then she asks what one step toward it would look like this week. She settles on two: leaving work at six on Thursday, and calling her brother about a weekend in spring. Then she goes inside, feeling a bit lighter than the sensible voice would have allowed.
When the future feels closed
Sometimes this exercise just doesn’t work. You sit down to imagine a good future and nothing comes, or only dread does. If that happens once, try again on another day. If it’s how the future has looked to you for weeks, and the things you once enjoyed have gone flat, that’s worth talking about with a doctor or a therapist. The exercise is for ordinary days, and it isn’t meant to carry that weight on its own.
Try it tonight
- On a quiet morning or evening, picture your life a few years ahead, after things have gone as well as they reasonably could.
- Describe it for a few minutes, with details: where you live, what a normal Tuesday looks like, who is around.
- Finish with one small step toward it that you could take this week.
Describe that future in Halflight, out loud and in detail. It keeps it under today’s date, so next year you can read back what you hoped for and see how far you’ve come.