Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation

systolic blood pressure actually declined after dreaming

help people who were having trouble achieving wishes large and small. It was difficult to focus my work on fantasies knowing that they made individuals continue to struggle, so I wondered if there was anything I could do to the process of dreaming to turn things around and make dreams more helpful for achieving wishes. In particular, since positive fantasies tended to relax people, was there a way that I could use dreaming to wake them up, get them into gear, and motivate them to succeed?
I reasoned that the best way to get people up and moving was to ask them to dream and then to confront them right away with the realities that stood in the way of their dreams. I called this confrontation “mental contrasting.” If I could ground fantasies in reality through mental contrasting, I might be able to circumvent the calming effects of dreaming and mobilize dreams as a tool for prompting directed action.

Conventional wisdom holds that dreams are supposed to hype us up, not calm us down. But as our data show, that is not usually how it works.

Other research Heather Barry Kappes and I have done has confirmed that positive fantasies make us especially unfit to handle hard tasks that require concerted effort.

But after their imagery exercise, women who had only positively fantasized about wearing high heels showed lower systolic blood pressure. By contrast, the women whose positive fantasies we’d quelled by asking them to negatively question their heels showed no change in blood pressure.

Perhaps people were losing less weight or making less progress recovering from hip surgery simply because their dreams were relaxing them, making it harder for them to get off the couch and move toward their goals.

We would be wrong to jettison our dreams, just as we are wrong to blindly assume that simply dreaming something can make it so.

Upon completing this exercise, take a moment to reflect. Our positive fantasies can take away the worries of today and our immediate suffering.

My collaborator Doris Mayer and I decided to see if dreaming about an ideal future could help ease depression in young people.

We found that the more positive students’ fantasies were, the more depressed they had become.