Using your imagination is important for your mental health and wellbeing.
Many psychotherapy models use imagination, through visualization imagery for self-regulation, processing memories, unpacking catastrophic imaginings that induce anxiety, and employing imagery-rich metaphors. This is for good reason – imagination is a powerful tool that we can use in therapy, and in everyday life.
According to a 2023 study, a controlled, playful use of imagination can serve as a positive coping strategy during times of stress and trauma, promoting resilience (Rubinstein, D., O’Rourke, N., & Lahad, M.). But imagination is not only useful for combating mental health issues; it can also help us to succeed in reaching our goals, improving our skills, and embodying who we want to be.
Emerging research suggests that vividly imagining ourselves handling challenges, social encounters, or mastering new skills can actually enhance our performance in real life. Our imaginings have the power to ultimately shape our expectations and our choices (Dabas et al., 2025).
Cassandra Vieten, PhD, professor and research director at UC San Diego, has studied the power of imagination extensively and discovered the concept of imagination neurodiversity. She wrote the book Imagine That: Transform How You Think, Feel, and Live with the Science of Imagination to help readers better understand their own unique imagination profile and use it to their advantage. Her VISTA framework, Visualizing, Ideating, Sensing, Transforming, and Applying, offers five distinct ways of exercising the imagination.
Dr. Vieten shares her thoughts on the power of imagination in therapy and beyond.
Q: Share a bit about your background and what inspired you to write Imagine That.
Cassandra Vieten: I’m a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine, and I direct the research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I also direct the UCSD Center for Mindfulness and serve as clinical psychology director at the Center for Psychedelic Research.
On paper, imagination might look like an unusual thing for a scientist to spend time on. I still get a version of the same reaction when people hear what I study: isn’t that a little soft? Shouldn’t “real” science be curing diseases and solving the climate crisis? But I have trouble thinking of anything more foundational than understanding how humans come up with original ideas and creative solutions in the first place. Imagination isn’t frivolous, it’s a working tool of the brain, woven into learning, foresight, empathy, and problem-solving.
The seeds of Imagine That go back much further than my research career, though. My parents had a nearly complete set of National Geographic on our shelves, and I’d get lost for hours in photographs of bioluminescent creatures in the deep sea or Aboriginal art from Australia, worlds that stretched what I believed was possible. My dad was a biochemist who used to boost me up on a stool in his lab to look at pond microbes under a microscope, so I learned early that the invisible world was every bit as full of mystery as the visible one. And my mom was a Jungian-inspired counselor who introduced me to dreams, myths, and symbols, a different kind of truth, maybe not as measurable, but very influential all the same.
Those three driving forces, the outer world, the microscopic world, and the inner world, shaped a very particular kind of imagination in me, one that leans visual and sensory and reaches for story to make sense of hard things. Fiction gave me language for something I couldn’t yet name on my own. That’s really the throughline of my whole career: that subjective experiences, what we imagine, the stories we tell ourselves, have real weight, real influence, and can be powerful catalysts and practices for growth and healing, or keeping us limited.
Q: What is imagination neurodiversity, and how can we better understand our unique imagination profile?
Cassandra Vieten: Imagination neurodiversity is the idea that each of us imagines differently, not just in what we imagine, but how, and that this pattern isn’t something we’re stuck with. Some of this is likely genetic, but at the same time our imagination styles are something we can identify and deliberately shape.
In our lab, we’ve mapped eighteen different dimensions of imagination that fall into five broader modes. Where you land on each of these results in what we call your imagination profile, your own particular blend of imaginative strengths, tendencies, and blind spots. Some people are vivid visualizers who freeze up when asked to generate a brand-new idea from scratch. Others can conjure incredible sensory detail but struggle to picture their own future. My own profile leans toward being story driven and visually vivid when it comes to fantasy, but I can’t imagine how a piece of furniture might look in a room to save my life.
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The point isn’t to find the “correct” profile, because there isn’t one. It’s closer to the paradox we see in other forms of neurodiversity, where a real challenge in one area can sit alongside a genuine strength in another. Once you understand your own profile, you can stop measuring yourself against somebody else’s version of “creative” and start working with the imagination you actually have, leaning into what comes easily, and building the muscles that don’t. (If you are curious, take a quiz here to learn about your own profile: https://imagination.ucsd.edu/profile/).
Q: How can imagination be developed through practice? What is one specific exercise for readers interested in expanding their imagination?
Cassandra Vieten: While you may have imagination tendencies, it is trainable the same way any other cognitive skill is, through repetition that literally strengthens and rewires the neural connections behind it. In the book I organize the practice side of this into a framework I call VISTA: Visualizing, Ideating, Sensing, Transforming, and Applying. Each is a different way of exercising the imagination on purpose.
If I had to hand a reader just one exercise to start tonight, I’d give them this: pick an important upcoming conversation or situation you are facing, like a hard conversation with a partner, a difficult task at work, or an important interview or presentation. Before it happens, spend two or three minutes picturing it in real detail. Not just the words you’ll say, but how you’re standing, the tone of your voice, how your shoulders feel, staying loose and steady rather than tight. Walk yourself all the way through it, calm and clear, to the other side.
Here’s why this works: your brain doesn’t distinguish nearly as much as you’d think between something you vividly imagine and something you’re actually experiencing. Brain imaging research shows that when people imagine a threat, the same fear circuitry lights up almost as if it were real, which is exactly why rehearsal like this is so useful. Your nervous system starts laying down some of that groundwork for calm before you ever walk through the door. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, and works anywhere, which is part of why I think of imagination as a genuine health practice, not just a creative one.
Q: What role does imagination play in mental health?
Cassandra Vieten: A much bigger one than most people realize, for better and for worse. I think about mental health on a couple of continuua: the familiar one running from few symptoms to many (anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress), and a second one, mental well-being, running from languishing to flourishing. You can have real symptoms and still be flourishing; you can have no diagnosis and still be languishing. Imagination touches both axes.
On the harmful side, a lot of suffering is really imagination running unsupervised. Catastrophizing, a hallmark of anxiety, involves vivid, detailed imagining of the worst outcome. Depression often comes wrapped in maladaptive storytelling: everyone hates me, I can’t do anything right. Those aren’t facts, they’re narratives your imagination is generating and your mind is mistaking for reality. I know this from the inside, too. I’m a person in recovery from alcoholism, and before I got sober, I imagined constantly that I could stop drinking “tomorrow,” that a little rest would fix everything, that telling anyone the truth would cost me their respect. All of it was imagination working against me.
But that same capacity, pointed the other direction, is one of our best tools for healing. Viktor Frankl survived a concentration camp partly by imagining himself, in vivid detail, teaching a lecture hall after the war and reuniting with his wife, using imagination to blow on the secret coals of hope he always held inside. Research on future-oriented interventions has found that helping people with depression and suicidal ideation vividly imagine an attainable, hopeful future can measurably reduce both suicidal thinking and depression scores. The goal isn’t to imagine only “positive” things, sometimes rehearsing a hard outcome is exactly what keeps you safe. Even horror films and dystopian novels are ways that society explores what might happen, or what could happen, if we collectively lose our way. The real marker of a healthy imagination is whether it’s adaptive: does it help you cope, connect, and function, or does it leave you smaller, more afraid, more alone?
Q: How might therapists utilize imagination in clinical practice?
Cassandra Vieten: More than most clinicians probably give themselves credit for, a lot of our most evidence-based approaches already run on imagination, even when we don’t call it that.
In CBT, when a therapist has a client fully imagine a feared scenario in vivid detail, not just a vague fear, but gaming the whole thing out, including the survivable aftermath, and then imagine a best-case and a most-likely scenario alongside it, that’s a deliberate use of imagination to dilute a catastrophic narrative. Exposure-based approaches for phobias work the same way: imagined encounters with a feared object, repeated in a safe setting, teach the nervous system that the threat is smaller than it thought. Imagery rescripting, used with painful or traumatic memories, has a strong evidence base for easing emotional suffering.
Then there are approaches that use imagination even more directly. In Gestalt therapy’s empty-chair technique, a client imagines a parent, a partner, or a part of themselves sitting across from them and has an actual dialogue, which lets people externalize unfinished business in a way flat conversation rarely reaches. Internal Family Systems, or “parts work,” has people imagine their anxiety, their inner critic, or their grief as a character they can actually talk to, get curious about, and hold with compassion instead of fighting. None of these treat imagination as make-believe, they treat it as a real, embodied experience capable of producing real change, because the nervous system responds to a vividly imagined scene almost as if it were happening. For clinicians, I think the invitation is to get more intentional and more literate about a tool that’s often already present in the room.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from spending time with Imagine That?
Cassandra Vieten: I hope people close the book believing two things they may not have walked in believing: that their imagination is already unlike anyone else’s, and that it’s not fixed. It’s trainable, ordinary, and theirs to shape.
We’re living through what I call the Great Flattening, always plugged in, always managing information, rarely asked to create anything new, with less and less unstructured time to just wonder. That flatness has a cost. I see it as a kind of atrophy, not a permanent condition, and the antidote isn’t just telling people to feel more hopeful or more wonder-filled. It’s giving them the actual skill of generating hope, and the capacity and tools to re-enchant their own life on purpose. That’s the line I keep coming back to: the antidote to despair isn’t just hope, it’s the skill of generating hope. The antidote to disenchantment isn’t just wonder, it’s the ability to re-enchant your world, using your imagination.