The Worst-Case Scenario Your Brain Imagines Is Almost Never What Happens | Cassi Vieten

Key Takeaway

When you catch yourself catastrophizing, do not try to suppress the story. First name it as an imagined prediction, then deliberately build a detailed counter-story: picture yourself grounded, capable, and supported as the situation unfolds. Borrow the bodily feeling of a time when you were already in flow—on a field, with friends, in nature—and rehearse bringing that state into the challenge. Imagination is not magic, but it can shift how you prepare, act, and recover.

Episode Overview

Dan Harris speaks with clinical psychologist Dr. Cassi Vieten about using imagination as a trainable cognitive tool rather than treating it as fantasy or magical manifestation. They explore Vieten's VISTA framework for visualization, idea generation, embodied sensing, transformation, and application, with practical uses for anxiety, conflict, pain, self-compassion, and cultivating safety through "glimmers."

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Worst-Case Scenario Your Brain Imagines Is Almost Never What Happens | Cassi Vieten from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're going to talk about how to reduce catastrophizing, interpersonal conflict, and even physical pain while meanwhile increasing your sense of safety in your own nervous system through an innate capacity we all have. That capacity is imagination. Now, you might be thinking, "Imagination? That sounds either boring or like something other people have, like people who work at Disney or Pixar." But we're all imagining all the time. Thinking about it. We're always uh casting forward into the future, thinking about how things may go, often in uh paranoid and fantasmagoric ways.

But my guest is going to talk about what she calls adaptive imagination, healthy imagination that we can use to our benefit in lots of really interesting ways. One thing you might be imagining at this point in my introduction here is that huh is what you're talking about similar to the popular notion of manifestation. Well, it is and it isn't. And we'll get into that in this interview. Uh my guest today is Dr. Cassie Viton. She's a clinical psychologist and the director of research at the Arthur C.

Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California at San Diego where she also uh directs the center for mindfulness and she's got a new book which is called Imagine That Transform How You Think, Feel and Live with the Science of Imagination. Dr. Cassie Viten, welcome to the show. Hey, it's great to be here, Dan. Imagination, you call it uh the oldest human technology. Uh yeah, why do you call it that? and and more broadly what what is imagination in in your view? So the first thing I would say to listeners is number one to begin to view your imagination as a useful tool as a useful territory of your cognition.

So when I talk about imagination, you know, they think of it as a kind of maybe a little frivolous, a little bit of a luxury. Some people are very imaginative, others aren't. But the truth is that all of us are imagining all day, every day, and it profoundly affects how we show up in the world, how we perceive reality. Learning how to use your imagination in a way that's beneficial is beneficial not only to how you experience the world, which is very important, but also to your brain, to your body, and to your health.

imagination. I guess I think about it as the oldest human technology because even as we became mammals and started to kind of understand how to survive, I believe that probably for a very long time what you saw was what you got. You know, it wasn't like I wonder what's around the corner. I wonder what's over that mountain over there. Over time, there's this inner part of our cognition that has evolved and that lets us test out situations before we get into them so that we can sort of try to figure out who am I in this, who will I be in this when I'm going to a job interview, how might it go?

That's the default mode network. Sitting and wondering and projecting and conjecturing. And so that's one form of imagination. I call it simulation imagination. Whereas there's another form of imagination that I call generative imagination. And I know you're familiar with the research on mindfulness and now more recently on psychedelics that there's a bit of a dampening of the default mode network. The other parts of your brain begin to light up. And especially with psychedelics, there's a ton of network interconnectivity that's happening. And so that's where these new and different ideas start to emerge.

The interesting way that mindfulness connects to imagination is it allows you to understand when am I imagining and when am I sensing? Am I telling myself a story right now or is this something that's apparent through my five senses? And that is very helpful especially with negative forms of imagination. And you know this from your meditation practice. I know it that one of the interesting things is when you sit quietly practicing mindfulness. My first 10-day retreat, I could not believe how much I was imagining and how much of that was negative.

And so when we become aware of our imagination and how our mind wanders, we can begin to feel a little bit more empowered about what do I want to be imagining right now? We may want to sit and be completely with exactly what is, which is the goal of many meditation techniques, but we also in our day-to-day lives might say, "I notice I'm imagining something really awful about the rest of my day. What if I was to say, "How about if I imagine something positive for the rest of my day?" So, if I'm hearing you correctly, meditation, specifically mindfulness meditation, where we learn to have self-awareness about what's happening in our mind and body at any given moment, can be useful for both forms of imagination, for the simulating the fretful pro prognostication version.

Just having bringing mindfulness to bear can uh help you see, oh yeah, this is what I'm doing right now. Can I change the channel? And then uh similarly mindfulness meditation helps you quiet the default mode and put you in a state where you might have uh generative ideas. ideas. ideas. Yeah. And it's really hard to force yourself to come up with new possibilities. But one of the things we can do as opposed to forcing it is create the ideal conditions externally and internally to open our minds to new possibilities.

And so creating the conditions internally that are conducive to imagination, that are welcoming to new possibilities means loosening our grip on our storytelling repetitive mind. mind. mind. You have this, you call it an atlas of imagination. imagination. imagination. You can think of imagination as a skill, as a cognitive function, but you could also think of it as a territory of being. And when we think about it that way, creating this map of the imagination became our goal. So we call it the atlas of imagination. I think you mapped out five modes.

So many different modes of imagination, but I'll start with first the three main kind of lands that are in the territory of imagination. One is the sensory. So yes, visual, but there's also uh gustatory imagination. You think of great chefs can imagine how flavors might go together and we call it sensory motor because you can also imagine how your body might move. Then we have cognitive narrative imagination and this actually doesn't require a lot of vision. You can tell a story and you can read a fictional story and you're not visualizing the entire time.

There is a storytelling form of imagination. So that's that cognitive narrative logical form of imagination. And there's one more, the social and emotional imagination. imagination. imagination. Imagining how another person might be feeling. Imagining what you might feel under those circumstances. So this type of imagination is very involved in empathy and and in compassion. I think the question that my viewers and listeners will come to this conversation with is okay, so how do I use this to my advantage? Um, and I believe you've come up with an acronym that helps us begin to think about how we can train this innate capacity, which you you described as at least in part a skill.

Um, and the acronym, I believe, is vista. Vi Ta. Yeah, those are actually practices that are conducive to developing your imagination in a conscious way. Vista stands for visualizing, ideulating, sensing, transforming and applying. So if we start with visualization, let's take self-compassion for example. There's a very common exercise in self-compassion which is to imagine someone who loves you very very much who has uncomplicated uncomplicated uncomplicated endless love for you. You imagine that person and whatever problem you might be dealing with, you might imagine how that person would react to you as opposed to your own brain which is like, "Hey man, get it together.

Come on, step up." You know, not always kind. This is a kind figure. That's one example of how visualization can help us in our everyday lives to si to see things in a different way, to have a new perspective. Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we did something that we're not proud of. We're beating ourselves up for it. maybe just today, but also maybe for years on end. Those practices of visualizing the loving, compassionate figure. Other concrete examples that seem minor, but they actually have a pretty big influence on your daily life, is just imagining situations before you go into them, especially if you're nervous.

I spent some time sitting and imagining what would it be like to sit down and talk to you? How would I want to show up? How would I want to speak? What kind of level of authenticity and vulnerability could I imagine in the future so that I could actually have it more likely when I'm talking to you? And that goes for something simple when we're working out or when we're recovering from an injury. Let's say you're uh in physical therapy. This is a great study that was showing people who were recovering from an injury and working that muscle.

when they imagined the muscle strengthening as they were doing the exercise, they got 30% more muscle strength than if they did it just distracted. So visualizing is a powerful tool that we can use very practically. Before we move on to uh the eye in Vista, we'll just stay with visualization for a second because I find this fascinating that that that thing you just said about how you you can visualize can visualize can visualize your your your muscles getting stronger or healing after an injury. And uh just just the visualization can give you a boost on top of the exercises you also have to do, do, do, right?

And I'm not sure we know all of why. I mean it's possible that in those experiments people were just focusing so much more as they were visualizing it that they were doing the exercises better but there could be some other reasons for it too that you are actually giving the message to your brain I want to strengthen this muscle and your brain is like great I'm going to put into motion the things in the body that need to strengthen that muscle a little bit more. So in in a very real way your imagination is a messenger to your brain.

what you imagine, you're kind of telling your brain, hey, I want to get ready for a great day, as opposed to getting ready for a fearful and difficult day. When I kind of say, I want to get ready for a great day, um, that means I'm going to show up in a way that's more relaxed, more grounded, more skillful than if I show up to my day a little bit defensive, a little bit on guard, a little bit ready for something bad to happen, and more reactive.

Okay. Okay. So, you're a scientist and you're citing evidence to show that visualization can help us practice for things and therefore perform better. Uh can help us um uh uh heal more quickly from injuries, can help us change the complexion of our day. How does all of that relate to the very popular notion of manifestation where if you just imagine something, it'll happen for you? Yeah. I am not actually a big fan of the secret. No disrespect to people who are. I don't like the idea that if you just visualize a BMW enough, you'll get it.

Like this is not something that I think is a useful way to look at the world because it can be magical thinking and it can also make you feel pretty bad when you didn't imagine it right. So what I like to say is that imagination is influential. is influential. is influential. It's not deterministic. So imagination helps influence. So when I said this study shows that when people were doing their physical therapy and imagining the muscle getting stronger, they got 30% more strength. They didn't get cured immediately.

They got 30% more strength. So look at your imagination as one influential tool that you have in your toolbox that can enhance your um your performance. And so if we look at athletes for example, one of the most robust bodies of literature around imagination and the oldest comes from athletes. And it's several studies now showing that if you're on a basketball team and one half of the team imagines practicing for multiple times, the other doesn't, the people who imagined practicing are going to do better in practice when it when they're actually playing basketball than the people who didn't.

they get a boost that is on top of their natural talent. So, it's a tool, but it's not magic. And when we portray it as magic, it's uh dangerous and irresponsible. When I wrote my book, imagine that, based on all of this research that we've done in our lab and that we have uh pulled together from other researchers, I separated it into the science of imagination, the power of imagination, and the magic of imagination. And that last section was pretty hard to walk a good line staying scientific but also allowing myself to be exploratory.

A lot of my research has been in the field of spirituality and health. And so I do believe that imagination is a way that we can delve into arenas of our consciousness that have information for us that we can't get in ordinary states of consciousness, but that can really help us in our everyday lives and in our existential lives. So that area of our being, you could call it like underneath the subconscious. You know, we all know that when we're in therapy, sometimes when we're in meditation, there are symbols or things that arise that we say, "Oh, man." You know, or psychedelics, let's say.

People have profound experiences that are mystical in psychedelics that happen potentially in their imagination or maybe in I don't know some different form of inner reality and it changes their lives for the better. I mean, we are seeing people who are having profound reductions in post-traumatic stress symptoms, people who are combat veterans, and it's not like they just had a thought, "Oh, I see. I can still live a safe and fulfilling life even after some of the things I've experienced." That thought comes often after they've had some imaginative experience that doesn't just tell them, it shows them or it communicates to them in this different way.

So I do think there's kind of a magic of imagination in that sense that um it helps you get in touch with a sacred aspect of yourself and it gives people a sense of existential or spiritual relief when they encounter these figures. You could even say, and I hope this doesn't offend anyone, that the religions around the world were people imagining all of these very complex systems of symbols and metaphors that could help them get closer to their values and remember their connection to the sacred and in their everyday lives even when they're facing challenges.

And I find that very helpful for many, many people. A few things before we hear from our sponsors. I just want to gently nudge you if you haven't done it already to go over to danh harris.com and sign up for my newish meditation app 10% with Dan Harris. I am so proud of what we're doing over there. We've got all of these live video sessions at least once a week where you can meditate with me or one of our amazing teachers and then get your questions answered.

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We'll be right back after this. I was so bad at so many subjects in school, but there was one thing I really loved, and that was learning new languages. So, I'm really excited that Rosetta Stone is one of the sponsors of our show. Rosetta Stone just came out with Rosetta Stone Sapphire, their biggest launch in over a decade. This brand new language learning app uses the researchbacked method uh Rosetta Stone is known for and adds fresh cutting edge features making it easier than ever to go from knowing a couple of phrases to speaking confidently about the topics you care about.

I have played with Rosetta Stone Sapphire and it's really impressive. It makes the learning process quite fun and interactive. you can do it right there on your phone. And uh I I picked randomly Japanese because um I um have been fantasizing of late of taking my family to Japan at some point in the next couple of years. And and I was picking up phrases within 5 minutes. One of the coolest new features is something called chat missions, which turns conversation practice into a game. It's a supportive way to build confidence before putting your language skills to use in real life.

If you want to take your language skills to the next level, don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. 10% happier listeners can get 20% off their Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. Visit rosetta.com/happier. So, I take your point that there there is some magic. You might call it mystery here, especially when you when you think about psychedelics. Although I do want to um come back to that in a second. But the important point to remember as it pertains to manifestation is that if you pedal that as some sort of magical cural that defies the laws of physics, then you know like for example I can cure my breast cancer without going to see an oncologist uh just by p the power of positive thinking.

That's when things can go haywire. It's super interesting because for a while I was thinking okay positive imagination negative imagination that's what we are really talking about here and I remember coming to a point where I said no no no it's not about positive and negative it's about adaptive and maladaptive because adaptive healthy imagination it slants towards things that are more positive or more pleasant but there are uses of negative imagination that are not maladaptive not maladaptive not maladaptive if you Think about, for example, all of the dystopian novels that people write.

It's not that those are damaging. They're actually ways for us to explore what might happen to us if we go down a path. You know, 1984, that book was about a warning to us about how we could fall into getting lost. And all of us can get lost. That serves an adaptive purpose. And even some of your own negative imagination serves an adaptive purpose. You know, you do not want to cross the street against the light because you can kind of imagine getting hit by a bus.

You know, you don't want to test that, right? You want to test it in your imagination, not in reality. At the same time, maladaptive imagination tends towards the negative. Um, mostly negative imagining is what is not great for us. But there are forms of quote positive imagining that can also not be great for us. Imagining that I could cure my own breast cancer and I don't need to avail myself of western medicine or worse imagining that I have it because for some reason I wasn't imagining correctly or I wasn't thinking correctly.

Such a terrible thing to say to someone. I mean, I have been in situations with mothers of very ill infants, and if that worked, believe me, they would have done it, right? They would have found a way. At the same time, if you're in a dysfunctional relationship, let's say, with someone who is truly destructive, you can imagine for many, many years that that person actually does love you and they are going to get better and they are going to follow through with their promises next time.

That's a positive view, but it's not very helpful for you. It's better for you to kind of see what's going on. Back to the blame the victim aspect of the power of positive thinking or manifestation. And I'm sorry to keep coming back to manifestation, but it's one of my hobby horses because I I think it's so [ __ ] dangerous and and and it's disturbing that it's this popular. Back when I was a news reporter, I interviewed a bunch of the gurus who showed up in The Secret.

The Secret, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, was a massively popular DVD and book. It really was just about the idea that you can get anything you want through the power of positive thinking. And I remember asking one of these jokers, okay, I just covered the earthquake in Haiti. Are you saying that that city was devastated, all his babies died and some of them in Udo because they were thinking incorrectly? and you know he folded like a cheap lawn chair whichever one of these gurus I was interviewing at the time and and you just have to run the you know the counterfactual here to see how ridiculous this claim is that you can again that you can get anything you want through the power of positive thinking.

Having said that I do think you know I did have Dr. James Dodie, who sadly is no longer with us on this podcast to talk about what I call the sort of non-bullshit version of manifestation. And I hear that when you're talking like there's this way in which in in some ways and and you'll correct me if I'm wrong. I think about it like we can through visualization or other forms of imagination kind of talk to our subconscious subconscious subconscious um make make the mind and body open to possibilities to fulfill our dreams in some way.

Um that's what I took from Dodie. Is that does that land does that jive with how you Yeah, absolutely. I mean I I never want to disrespect anybody's work. Like I do feel like a lot of people opened their mind when they read The Secret. It was to me oversimplified and you know went way too far but there were people who were like wait a minute laughing because I want I want to disrespect that word. I know. I know. I hear you. But you know at the same time sometimes you know Arthur C.

Clark is our namesake at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination and he said sometimes to find the limits of the possible you have to go beyond them a little into the impossible. And this is again where mindfulness comes in is another good quote that I just love is some truths can only be found in fiction. And so when we bring mindfulness to our imagination we can say look imagination is a realm where definitely everything is not accurate. In fact, accuracy is sort of irrelevant in the territory of imagination.

What we want to do is say, does the imagination hold value for us? Does it hold information for us that we can't get in any other way? And so another thing that is a great research finding is so there's this research on storytelling and when somebody is telling a story to a group of people and they've done this with doing the EEG of the storyteller and they're getting the EEG of the people in the room when they're telling them information they don't really get very entrained like the people's mirror neurons are not activating and you know they may be learning conceptually but they're sort of like okay I'm processing what you're saying.

When people are telling a story, it's more like the mirror neurons are getting activated and they're learning in a different way when they hear a story as opposed to just information. Of course, the great teachers know this. They tell, you know, what Jesus used parables, right? We know that telling a story captures the imagination and teaches people in a different way than giving them information. And so it's important for us to I think realize why do we go to movies? Why do we go see art?

Why do we watch Shakespeare over and over and over again? Partly entertainment, partly distraction, partly, you know, respecting a craft. But we also go because those things are teaching us things about life that are ineffable. They can't be said in logical linear language, poetry. These things hold truths for us in and they come out of that imaginative realm. Have you sighing only? Yes, I I I think everything you're saying is really interesting and um you know, we only disagree on uh my uh overabundance of desire to disrespect the um the the secret people before we continue marching through the Vista acronym and and the various ways in which we can um work with our imagination to to benefit our ourselves and others.

Um just a question about our modern world which is so focused on perfection, productivi productivity, optimization, optimization, optimization, checking things off our to-do list. And I don't say this with any judgment because I do all of this stuff um myself. Can the way we're living now be a a hindrance when it comes to accessing and and utilizing our imagination? Well, of course I'm biased, right? But I would say absolutely yes. I mean, how many multiplechoice exams did you take in your K through 12 education, showing you that there were only kind of four possible answers and only one that was right?

Okay, that's true for some very determined aspects of our lives. But most of the issues that we all face in our everyday lives, in our families, in business, and health care and medicine, there aren't only four possible answers. And there's not even only one right one. And so we've all almost been taught to prematurely constrain ourselves to only what is immediately applicable and productive and usable right now and to edit out anything else and to be in a real hurry when we're doing these things. And intelligence in some ways is has been defined by the ability to race to a to an applicable solution.

But I would warn us against only living in that domain because there are ways of knowing that go beyond those kind of highly categorized very simplistic simplistic simplistic uh reductionistic deterministic ways of knowing. And this is what our greatest inventors um Einstein you know uh Tesla you know these people were thinking way outside of the box. Galileo and even people that we know in our everyday lives. You can probably think of someone in your life now that somehow always has a greater perspective and they always bring in some kind of brand new idea or a brand new way of looking at things that moves the conversation forward.

So what we know about imagination is it's different from creativity. And here's how. Imagination is spending time in a field of possibilities, opening yourself up to adjacent possibles, right? To even far possibles and allowing yourself to spend quite a bit of time there so that different things can come in that bypass the previous categories or the rigid meaning systems that we've created in our lives. This can happen in a relationship and it can happen at a paradigm level and everything in between. And so the rush to make something productive something productive something productive to move those possibilities into what philosophers of imagination called constraint.

Not a bad thing. Constraint is actually a good thing because when we move into constraint, which means okay, but what do we actually have the tools for and what's actually feasible and what could happen in this setting. When we race to that too quickly, we leave out a ton of possibilities that if we were to spend more time with them, we might realize, oh wait, that could actually be feasible in a situation that could be applied. So the encouragement is to spend more time in the open field of possibilities and this moves into vista right ideiating sensing transforming and applying.

See if we can move it into creativity. The conditions that foster creativity are not that open hugemindedness. It's actually how can I make something that will actually work. And that's how we move from imagination into creativity. So places like Pixar, Google, Apple, they've all come to the conclusion that they have to give many of their employees time to just imagine so that they can come up with outside the box solutions and not be kind of harnessed into a productive mindset every minute of every day. Makes sense.

uh and every time I you know give myself time to go on meditation retreat or take a walk or whatever that's or meditate that's when the best stuff happens um as opposed to when I'm I'm trying to bulldoze my way towards solutions. towards solutions. towards solutions. Just take us back through the rest of Vista so briefly just so we know what it is. is. is. Yeah. So vista visualizing we've talked about ideiating this is things like thought experiments or imagining counterfactuals or imagining ways that things could be different and using those thought experiments to explore the problem that you're trying to solve.

Right? So what you're doing is changing the way you think temporarily, letting go of some of the constraints for a little bit and saying, "But what if? What if I was able to do this without anxiety? What if I was able to have a different um view on things? I'll share with you a difficult example from my life. Um I'm in recovery from alcoholism and when I was actively practicing alcoholic, my imagination got very very very compressed and narrowed. And this happens for people in addiction.

It happens for people in depression. It happens for people in anxiety where the possibilities get very small. So you can drink or you can feel terrible. Those were the two possibilities. And my choice was often to drink which became untenable over time because it's you know extremely harmful. Then my imagination told me if you tell anyone that you need help you are going to be blackmarked forever. you know, you're going to be seen as irretrievably irretrievably irretrievably impaired. And so the the main thing you need to do is make sure that you never let anyone know how bad this is.

That became a year at least of self- torture and not functioning well, not showing up how I wanted to be, and finally hitting a place where out of sheer desperation, I called a coworker and said, "I can't stop drinking." And they came to my house and said, "Oh my god, we love you so much. Take the next month off. Find treatment. Don't worry. We've got everything covered." everything covered." everything covered." I mean, that was a year of me imagining that the response would be, "We hate you.

You're terrible. You're a huge failure." When the real response was, "Oh my gosh, please take care of yourself. We've got it covered." That's what I mean about opening up your imagination. And we don't want to wait until we're desperate and at the very end of our rope to open up our imagination and say, "Is there a different solution for my marriage that feels like it's gone dead? Is there a different solution for my kid who won't talk to me? Is there a different solution that I can imagine as opposed to looping around the same thought patterns over and over and over and over and not getting anywhere?

I'm sorry to hear about that struggle you had. I'm very brave of you to talk about it here. I've never heard anybody call themselves a practicing alcoholic. I kind of like that phrase. Oh, yeah. No, I was definitely actively practicing. practicing. practicing. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're on the other side of it. So, so that's that's ideating um now made vividly clear to us through your willingness to be vulnerable. Um remind me what is the S in Vista? in Vista? in Vista? S is sensing. And so one of the things that can really make your imagination so much more useful to you is to move beyond the visual as we were talking about and sense into how might it feel different if I did this in a different way.

How might it feel differently in my body? How might it feel different in my emotions? How might my heart uh my my my state of being be different? And so you can imagine a situation that is not happening right now, maybe one that you want to happen, and instead of just visualizing it or ideulating about it, put your whole entire body into the situation. I'll give you a good couple of examples. One is a colleague of mine named Bob Beard is at the Center for the Science of Imagination at Arizona State University and he's working with um veterans who often come out of their time in the military feeling like they have limited possibilities like their identity was their military life.

They may have experienced a ton of trauma. They're carrying that with them. They don't really know where to go next. So what he did was paired them with artists and they sat down and started imagining possibilities for their new life that were unedited. Like let's not think right now about exactly how this is going to happen. Let's just imagine yourself in a new life where you are the kind of person you want to be. You're showing up. You're in the activities and connections you want to have.

The artist sketches it out for them and creates art pieces that the veterans then kind of use as guideposts or a map for how they want to move into the future. It's not that they create a carbon copy future of what the artist created or what they saw in their minds, but it sure gives them a sense of hope and optimism and a compass. What is my true north and how can I orient all of my decisions around that true north? It helps a lot if they put themselves into the situation.

Another example is we have used virtual reality quite a bit in our studies. Uh virtual reality for mindfulness training, virtual reality for awe induction. And during COVID, my colleagues Patrick Coleman and Origami Air and the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, everybody was at home, but they had their VR headsets. And so they had youth from a number of different countries who would join in their VR into an airship that was flying over something like the Pacific Northwest and they had conversations in their avatars with each other about what kind of world they wanted to build in the future.

the future. the future. Number one, many of these young people said, "No one's ever asked me what kind of future I want to build on on Earth on in our world, in our society." And so they had to really think about it. They shared it and then the VR artists were as they shared creating that future. And eventually [snorts] the airship landed and when the avatars came out of it, this is all in a VR headset. They saw what they had imagined. The village square, a place where elders were respected, a place where art could be made and shared, a redwood grove that pe where people could go to reflect and be mindful.

It was incredible, you know, that the embodied entry into that kind of place, whether it's in VR, in art, or even just in your imagination, has a whole different um power in helping with you being able to hope, have optimism, have a direction, and even create some plans about how you're going to get there. very practically on the sensing part of Vista, like how would I do that in my everyday life in order to to, you know, access this? Well, I was listening to your podcast a while back and you talked about fear of going into an MRI.

And so that would be a really good example of being able to lie down, imagine with all of your embodiment what it will be like to lay on the table, to be rolled back, to have the huge sounds. doing that over and over and over again, but feeling yourself in it, relaxed, calm, grounded, even fearful, but being able to witness the fear and allow it to be there and return to the breath. Doing that over and over and over and over again in your imagination imagination imagination is in some sense a form of exposure therapy, I guess you could call it.

When you do go into the situation, no shame if it's like, "Sorry, still panicked. still don't want to go in, but it's much more likely that you'll be able to do it in a way that you want to do it if you've imagined it all that time. You know, as I say, it's influential. It's it's not something that's going to cure everything. But there is now a ton of exposure therapy, using imagination, using virtual reality for people who have trouble with that kind of detail in their imagination.

their imagination. their imagination. using graded exposure therapy for fear of flying, fear of spiders, fear of all kinds of things. Walk us through T and and A and then I want to ask you about some very specific use cases. use cases. use cases. Yeah. So very quickly T and A are transforming and applying and this is where we get into the realm of creativity. So you've visualized, you've ideiated, you've sensed into it. Then it's like okay can I take these imagined scenes and transform them into something that's actually real or actually helpful in my life.

Also, people have had some very interesting experiences where they have done imagination exercises going back in time to a very difficult part of their lives and meeting themselves in that part of their lives and saying, "Hey kiddo, I know that it's really, really hard right now and I'm so sorry you're going through this. Just know that you're going to make it through this. You are going to make it through it and I'm here in your future. I've got you. I'll see you when you get there.

Okay. It obviously doesn't change the past, but wow, it really changes somebody's feeling about the past. And that change in perspective and feeling helps them live into the future in a way that's not hampered or driven by their past. That's a great experiment done by colleagues Julia Mossbridge and Michael Shapiro. They also have people go into their future and meet their future self and say, you know, this is your idealized future self. It's somebody who's embodying the way that you want to be in the world in the future.

And having their future self kind of be like, hey, man, I'm up here. You're going to do great. Um, here's a couple tips for how you get to where I am right now. Those imagination exercises seem so like such a fantasy, but when you talk to these folks, they're like, "Ever since I met that future self, I know where I'm going. I know how to make decisions. I just ask myself, is it taking me closer to that future self or is it taking me further away from it?

Did we cover the T and the A there? Yeah. So, transforming, that's what transforming is. And applying is bringing it into the world. You know, whatever you imagined, even if it's something that can't happen right now, can you sketch it? Can you diagram it? Can you sort of write it down? Can you create a poem about it? Can you create a painting about it? Can you do something? or can you actually create a project? Can you create a podcast? Can you create a paper? Can you create an organization that is going to actually make change based on what you learned through the earlier parts of Vista?

Okay. So, let's talk about how to apply our capacity to imagine in some very specific uh areas of our lives. you uh write a great deal in your book uh about using imagination to deal with catastrophizing. catastrophizing. catastrophizing. Um so let's get super granular and specific on how we can do that because I think a lot of the people listen to the show including the host of the show deal with a lot of catastrophizing. Yeah. I mean pretty simply if you continue to catastrophize about an upcoming situation I I'm going to do a terrible job.

Something terrible is going to happen to my child. um this is never going to make it. You know that what what I'm trying to do is never going to manifest itself. You can't really stop that. As you know from mindfulness practice, we can become aware of those thinking patterns and see them as thinking patterns and stories. But you can actually create counter stories and imagine them in great detail. I am going to be able to make it through this. There is going to come a time when my kid and I are going to be talking to each other again today.

They're going to have a good day. They're not going to have a terrible day. They're not going to fall apart. And sometimes those imaginings are they hold information for you that you didn't know about before. So it's not like my kids having a super hard time. They're struggling a lot. Maybe they're not doing well in school. They're calling me saying they feel depressed. That is understandably terrifying and you can't get out of it through imagining your way out of it. But you can consider a time in the future when your kid is coming out of it.

You're back in connection. They're doing well. And you might say, you know what, that kid, they actually need more structure or they need more time in nature. They need more art. They need more encouragement for their singing. Maybe you're someone who's like, "Dude, you're never going to make a living singing. Like, it's not a good idea for me to encourage you to sing." But through your imagination, you say, "You know what? It actually is a good idea for me to encourage them to sing because when do I see my kid come alive?

It's when they're singing. Let me put more effort and energy into that." I want to share too a great form of therapy called geek therapy that I write about in the book where kids who are deeply into their fandoms, deeply into their screens, you know, obsessed with Fortnite or, you know, the world of Harry Potter, these geek therapists will talk to them about their fandom, and they'll say things like, "Okay, you're having a hard time at school. Which of your friends reminds you of the villain in your the thing that you're this huge fan of?

Which of your friends reminds you of, you know, who's the Sam to your Froto? Who's somebody that, you know, has your back? All of a sudden, through these stories, these kids are opening up and this is a way they understand their lives and they're willing to share their emotions through doing it in this mediated way in what they're such a huge fan of. fan of. fan of. So, you said a lot there. I just want to go back to the sort of the base case of me or anybody watching or listening worrying about a specific thing and then catastrophizing about it.

Um again the kind of maladaptive imagination that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation and how we can use adaptive imagination to calm the nervous system. And you said something like kind of imagining it going well. So, for example, if I haven't done a public speaking gig in a long time, usually if it's on television, I'll be nervous for 48 to 72 hours beforehand. And I think what you're saying is I can actually just imagine that that it goes really well and that I've helped people and and had a good time.

When in your life are you the most grounded, comfortable, and in flow? So if you imagine the times in your life when you're most grounded, comfortable, and in flow, when you feel like you are at the top of your game and stuff is just coming through, you not having to create, it feels great. I did this when I had a public speaking fear and I was literally backstage and I'm a soccer player and so I thought about when are the times when I feel at a very embodied level the best I ever feel?

It's when I'm playing soccer. And so I said, "Just get out on that stage and put the ball in the net." And that framing of a different way of kind of storytelling. I was like in my uniform, in my cleats, in my imagination, walking onto the stage and I'm like, "Hey everybody, how's it going?" You know, it's that bringing in the soccer imagination didn't make me play soccer on stage. It made me speak well because I was imagining a time that I do feel that way.

Okay. Hey, let me ask you about another uh specific use case for the imagination. imagination. imagination. Um you say we can use it um when we find ourselves in conflict with other people. Obviously one of the greatest stressors of many most of our lives is difficulties with other people. And it's often because the two people in the situation or more than two people in the situation have very different worlds that they're living in. And that really tells you how much imagination is a part of the world you live in.

If two of you are having the exact same experience and you are seeing it completely differently, it's not the sensing of the experience that's different. It's what you're imagining about the experience. So, you know, a partner uh doesn't take out the trash for 3 days when it's their job and it's sitting there smelling and overflowing. You're imagining, you know, this person is just showing me how much they don't respect me. They're showing me how much they don't care about our home. The other person not doing it is saying, "I am so overwhelmed.

I'm almost immobilized by life. Like, I can't even get myself to face the trash." You know, they're not thinking at all about you. They're not thinking about whether or not they respect you or whether or not they care about their home. They're like, "I can't face it. I just I can't even do it right now." So, you're having two different imagined experiences. And what you can do is become curious. What are you imagining about this? When you don't do this, I'm imagining that you are saying, "I don't really care about her and I don't really care about my house." And I want to know what are you experiencing about this?

Hopefully, people have enough insight to say, you know, I just feel like I can't face it. I can't do it right now. and I don't even, you know, I don't want to ask for help or it's so low on my priority list right now. I'm so stressed about other things. And as we share what we're imagining with each other, it becomes clearer and the pathway through it can become clearer. become clearer. become clearer. You have this term the inevitability loop and that we can use imagination to interrupt it.

Uh you might have just described it, but just in case you haven't, I want to throw that out there as something you can respond to. Yeah, I mean it's just that this is the way it is. It's the way it has to be. it's the way it always will be. That thought is goes against what you and I understand as the obviously the temporary nature of reality. Um and in order to get beyond that feeling of inevitability, inevitability, inevitability, we must sit back and if we need to, we can create external conditions for new perspectives and imagination.

One of the things I really loved about the acronym Vista is if you go to the top of a mountain or you go to a place with a huge view or you go to the ocean, even if you look at those images on your screen, it can really help you dial out your imagination to have a sense of awe. You've probably had Derk Kelner on the podcast. Ah is you know your mouth drops open your eyes open your pupils dilate you even make a sound sometimes like ah right you're actually opening to some new possibility and so if you're stuck in a thought of either inevitability or in there's only two choices and I can't decide which one to make most of the time there are many many more than two choices certainly more than one and if you can't bust out of that yourself.

You can try going outside, exposing yourself to these huge vistas. You can try many other ways of delving into your imagination, having something come out of it. All kinds of practices do this throughout the world. Um, and you know, psychedelics are one of those. Um, not for everybody, right? But if you've been beating your head against one wall for a very, very long time, sometimes it takes a 2x4 to crack that open. How can we use imagination to deal with physical pain? Yeah, there are some good studies showing and sometimes this is with just imagination and sometimes this is with addition of virtual reality.

One of the most powerful studies is when kids uh young people have a burn and it's severe, they have to go through a process of wound debridement, which is one of a very painful medical procedure that has to happen to avoid infection and and speed healing. And so what they did for these kids is gave them a VR headset and put them in a snow cave where they bury their body in snow and there's ice everywhere. while they're doing the wound debridement which burns and feels hot, they're in this and they showed significant reductions in pain.

Now people are using VR for something even like dental work with kids or getting a blood draw which is very scary for most kids. They're finding I'm not even sure why they're not doing this all the time now because the data are very clear um that in part because of distraction and in part because you're giving your brain different messages that are pretty compelling um that kids do much better with blood draws with dental work when they're in these imagined worlds. imagined worlds. imagined worlds. VR headsets are not always available to us.

So, if I've just stubbed my toe or I'm in an interview and this often happens and my back is hurting, can I use my imagination to reduce the pain signals? signals? signals? Yeah. Put a snow pack on your back and your imagination stick your foot in a imaginary cold cold waterfall. The reason we use VR is because it's a powerful illusion and it gives your 360 degree it's a very power like the first time I learned about VR they asked me to step off a plank that was four stories high and you know inside of your mind you know you're in a room and if you step off nothing's going to happen but oh I had I got into a cold sweat I could not step off that plank very powerful illusions can be helpful but if you train yourself in imagination you and harness the influence that imagination has.

Won't take away all the pain. It will not take away all the pain, but it will help you reduce it. Final question for me. I saw something in preparing for this. Marissa Schneiderman, our senior producer, gave me a what we call a prep dock. There was something in there about re-enchanting life through what you call glimmers. And I specifically saw a mention in there of how these glimmers can allow you to feel safe in your nervous system. a phrase that really struck me because as somebody who's had quite profound anxiety since sentience, that is not always a sensation I have.

So I wondered if we could if you could say a little bit more about how how we could get these glimmers. Yeah. So I'm trying to remember the name of the psychologist or healthcare practitioner that coined the term glimmers. Um but she calls them the opposite of triggers. So we have triggers throughout our lives. We typically overreact to a cue in our lives because of past experiences understandably and those triggers can reactivate some old old stuff. So we might get more angry about a situation than we would have been otherwise because it connects to a past one.

We might get more reactive or more scared. Glimmers are kind of the opposite of that. Right now there's a bird making a nest on my porch and there's these little tiny birds in it that are meeping. These are like antidotes to find some of the beauty and the mystery of life and they work in exactly the opposite direction telling you, hey, life is pretty amazing. Also, there's a lot to be grateful for. I am kind of in a place where there's so many things in my life that I could be paying attention to that are right and good and true.

And those things don't always have to be real. You can spend time in your imagination encountering these kinds of glimmers, these things that make your nervous system feel better. Anything from imagining that you're going to a beautiful safe space. Uh people have cultivated these imaginary safe spaces in their minds. Mine is like a mossy bank next to a river and you know I sit there watching the leaves go down the river that can be thoughts or worries and um that can be really helpful for me and what Rick Hansen calls taking in the good.

So you can imagine wonderful things that have happened that you haven't savored completely or that you can savor over and over again. I mean, I can still savor when I was home with my daughter 25 years ago as a baby and sitting in a rocking chair with the sunlight filtering through the glass, little moes of dust and smelling the top of her head that smelled like a loaf of bread and the profoundly powerful love that I had for her in my arms. It can be a long time ago.

It can be yesterday, but as Rick says, we tend to ruminate about the negative. We can make the choice to also savor the positive and bring it back to mind and pay more attention to it. recognize that our brains aren't wired necessarily to focus on those things because they're not threatening, but in fact, they can become biochemical antidotes to the stressors in our lives if we take that time to spend time with savoring those experiences. experiences. experiences. You were just at the end of that answer talking about taking in the good.

I'm going to go back to the um the the first thing you mentioned which is about the the safe space or um sometimes it's referred to as a happy place. Um and these are like have these ideas have been degraded by by having by having by having so cliche right. I know I know sometimes I cringe myself. I'm like oh come on you just spent five years of research showing things that are common knowledge or were being talked about in the 70s. But you know, some of them have this very powerful nugget of truth in them and we need to be reminded.

And luckily now we have the tools of neuroscience to help us see that they're not just fantasies. They are having an impact in our biochemical our biochemical our biochemical makeup and our brains. And you know, I personally believe that our subjective experience is just as important as pictures of brains. But hey, it's pretty validating to see those pictures of brains and be like, hey, it is making a difference. difference. difference. Yes. And I I used uh the happy place imagination technique with when I was taking flights with my um exposure therapist uh when I was in the middle of um uh panic disorder on planes, although I I still have it, but not as bad.

Um and imagining sitting on the beach with my family actually was quite helpful. Not a panacea, but but but quite helpful. Just in closing, can you just remind everybody, Dr. Ven of the name of your new book and anything else you've put out into the world. Yeah, it's Imagine that. Um, transform how you think, feel, and live with the science of imagination. You can find us at the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. We'll be having an imagination summit uh August 11th when the book launches.

And if you missed that, then you can find that at the HeartMind Institute. And I'll also be teaching a workshop on imagination at the Eselin Institute in December. Cassie, thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme.

One last thing I want to say before you go. If you enjoy this show, please do me/ us a solid. Follow the show and leave a rating and a review on whatever platform you watch or listen to us on. It only takes a minute. It's free and it really helps new people find us and spread the good news that the mind is trainable. Thank you sincerely. I mean it. Thank you.