Imagining a more rewarding life can be more motivational than thinking rationally about your worries. 

John Lennon said it decades ago in his song Imagine and it seems behavioural researchers are on board too.  

New research from The University of Western Australia suggests that if you're struggling to motivate yourself to engage in healthy activities, you should imagine yourself carrying out the activity. 

Forrest Fellow, Dr. Julie Ji, and her colleagues from UWA’s School of Psychological Science compared strategies for motivating people to engage in pleasurable and achievement-oriented activities that they wanted to do more of in daily life.  

The study, published in Behaviour Research and Therapy, found that visual imagination-based motivational thinking led to higher activity engagement over the next week compared to simply scheduling the activities into the diary.  

Dr. Ji said making use of the human capacity to imagine future experiences was more successful at motivating behaviour.  

“Our findings suggest that vividly imagining yourself doing the activity in the near future and pre-experiencing the most rewarding moments of that activity appears to boost motivation,” Dr Ji said.  

“In contrast, mentally going over all the reasons why you should exercise more, eat more healthily, be more social, and learn new things doesn’t seem to be very effective.  

“Most interestingly, visual imagining is unique in its capacity to evoke positive emotions, and this emotional impact, in turn, predicted a greater motivation increase.” 

Dr. Ji said the study was relevant across health and mental health conditions, including physical inactivity and sedentary lifestyles, social isolation and loneliness, and depressed mood.  

“We know that regularly engaging in leisure, self-care activities, physical exercise and socialising with others are essential for maintaining our mental wellbeing. They help us enjoy life and feel good about ourselves,” she said.  

So, the take-home message is: keep up regular engagement in rewarding activities because it is crucial for staying mentally resilient.  

As for this writer, I’ll keep doing what I’ve done for years – off the golf tee, imagining that golf ball rolling in for a hole-in-one.