Positive Mental Imagery and Its Benefits in Overcoming Depression

Sometimes, the most interesting study results are those that were not expected to have these results. This happened to me in late 2007 when I was interviewing one of the participants in a study who was asked to imagine positive events daily for a week.

Note: This article is based on research by Simon Blackwell, who tells us about the benefits of visualizing positive images in getting rid of depression and increasing optimism.

The main discussion topics during the interview were the advantages she had derived from this practice, the ideas she had thought of, and related topics. The interview proceeded without incident until I asked her if she had anything more to say, as I do with every interview. From that day until now, her response fundamentally altered my perspective on depression and continues to have a major influence on the research I continue to conduct and develop regarding the potential benefits of imagining positive images.

This girl was a 20-year-old graduate student with severe depression. She told me how some images started to come to her mind during the study period while she was living her daily life normally.

Many people experience spontaneous mental images in a variety of forms regularly. These images are linked to a phenomenon known as "mental time travel," in which we recall events from the past or imagine events from the future before experiencing them.

For example, hearing a certain song may lead to recalling events from your early years. These memories can be as simple as a static image in your head or as complex as a scene with smells, sights, sounds, and emotions you experienced at some point. Additionally, you might occasionally catch yourself planning your post-work relaxation activities after a demanding workday.

The girl who took part in the interview's research topic stated that it appeared that the training we had asked her to complete had an unintentional effect on this process. This hypothesis was intriguing for several reasons.

In everyday life, spontaneous mental images of the future are useful for planning, making decisions, and setting daily guidelines for behavior.

You can experience an event in advance, comprehend its nature, and explore your feelings toward it using these mental images that shine in your mind, even briefly. Examples of these images include picturing how much fun you will have when you do something. This mechanism improves your mood at present and changes your behavior. Also, imagination might motivate you to take steps to turn it into a reality.

According to some research, visualizing positive mental images of events or activities can help improve the behavior that turns this imagination into reality, such as working out or finishing tasks that have been put off. It is important to note that people differ in the frequency and quality of their spontaneous mental images in daily life.

For example, studies have shown that the most optimistic individuals visualize brighter, happier images in their daily lives and can easily envision a positive future in their minds. Contrastingly, research suggests that individuals experiencing depression or persistent low mood exhibit a distinct pattern of imagination. These individuals tend to have fewer and less vivid positive future images. In cases of severe depression, they may be unable to imagine anything positive happening in their future, even if they try.

These differences in spontaneous mental imagery can have a significant impact on daily life.

Mental time travel appears to be an automatic mental activity when the mind is not preoccupied with anything else. This means these mental images can be considered suggestions that affect your mood. Therefore, it makes sense that when you see positive images, they will help elevate your spirits and change your perspective on life. Conversely, you will feel bad and see life from a pessimistic perspective when these images are negative.

The frequency and benefits of spontaneous mental images may outweigh the benefits of deliberately imagined images. Data from observational studies, in which participants kept journals about their spontaneous thoughts in daily life, suggest that spontaneous thoughts about the future have a greater impact on emotion and behavior than deliberate thoughts.

It seemed that the girl I interviewed experienced a positive impact from these positive images on her emotions and her behavior in the future.

The study in which this girl participated included training sessions where she and other participants listened to recordings describing most planned daily situations with uncertain outcomes. This meant that these situations could go either way, but all of the scenes ended positively. The participants were required to imagine themselves in these gradually becoming clearer scenes as they listened to the recordings.

Our study's rationale was that, by repeatedly practicing imagining positive outcomes for uncertain situations, participants would naturally start to imagine similar positive outcomes for situations they encountered daily. This goes against the pessimistic thought patterns that are associated with depression.

One scene might begin with you and two others you don't know being invited to a friend's house for dinner. You discuss your career and interests, and the scene ends with the statement that "everyone feels something." This allows you to imagine others' reactions to what you've said. Naturally, someone with a negative bias might imagine that other people are uninterested and bored. Still, the audio recording ensures that everyone is listening to you with great interest.

The girl I interviewed told me that while she was going about her usual daily activities, the positive scenes she had imagined during the training would sometimes reappear in her mind spontaneously. Neither my colleagues nor I had anticipated this outcome.

Even more startling was that this girl told me that these positive mental images had an impact on her behavior in addition to her emotions. She cited an instance where she carried her food into the university restaurant, intending to sit alone. Then, she remembered the dinner scenario we had mentioned earlier. So, she sat with some people she didn't know well and engaged in fluent and open conversation, whereas she usually sat alone.

The results of the exercises we had the participants complete were, in my opinion, astounding and fascinating. During the remaining period of this study and in a larger clinical trial we conducted later, I asked the participants if they had been through the same experiment as the girl. A significant proportion of individuals who started to exhibit reduced depressive symptoms stated that they had a comparable experience. For example, one participant said that one day, she imagined the scene of walking and feeling energized, which made her decide to take a walk—something she didn't usually do.

The participant's insights have caused me to seriously consider using these imagination-based exercises to help increase the frequency of positive, spontaneous images in people's minds during their daily lives. As part of the first laboratory study on this subject, I have recently started experimenting with this phenomenon with my colleagues. The participants in this study received training similar to what we did in the clinical trial. Through earbuds, they listened to 40 audio clips (10–20 seconds long) that described commonplace situations. Initially, the outcomes of the clips were unknown, but they always ended positively.

The participants were asked to imagine themselves in these scenes as the events developed. This time, they were asked to keep a journal to record any spontaneous images derived from the scenes in the recordings during the three days following the training. The results were astonishing, as it turned out that the scenes included in the audio recordings were effective in evoking involuntary images derived from them, even if they were few. This means you can train yourself to create positive images that will continue to impact your daily life positively.

Upon reviewing our data, we found that participants who could visualize the audio scenes more clearly when listening to the clips also involuntarily imagined more positive images associated with the audio scenes. At the end of our laboratory sessions, we conducted a memory test. This test included some scenes imagined by the participants, which were linked to involuntary images imagined by the participants later.

We are now working on obtaining similar results and also verifying the relationship between imagining positive scenes - whether spontaneously or deliberately - and the potential benefits of these scenes for patients with depression. It may be helpful to consciously train yourself to create positive mental images, as this raw material later provides your mind with spontaneous, positive images. We believe spontaneous, positive images significantly benefit individuals, although research in this field is still in its early stages. However, intentionally generating positive images could benefit itself, even if it doesn't result in spontaneous positive images.

For example, many studies have found that repeatedly visualizing the idealized version of oneself can boost optimism.

Participants would write down their idealized self-image and future vision during a typical study for fifteen minutes. Then, they would imagine this future with maximum vitality for five minutes. This exercise would be repeated twice a week for two weeks. A different technique used to evaluate the influence of imagination on depression involves choosing particular happy memories that are meaningful to the individual and then vividly reimagining them to help with recall in stressful or frustrating situations.

Once you store a positive event or image in your memory, you can do many things to enhance the chance of these images appearing spontaneously in your mind later. Environmental cues like sights, sounds, smells, and occasionally bodily cues like hunger are the main causes of involuntary memories. Therefore, manage these triggering factors to enhance the incidence of involuntary memories.

Many try to employ these memory-triggering factors, sometimes without realizing it. One common practice is to carry or set as the phone background photos of one's loved people. The most advanced strategy is the training that associates cues from your everyday surroundings with particular happy memories.

For example, a study explored applying the well-known “memory shortening technique” or the “Method of Loci" to link certain positive memories with landmarks on a frequently traveled route, such as the route from home to work. Until now, researchers have studied this technique's impact on purposeful memory recall. However, it's possible that repeatedly connecting landmarks with positive memories or images could increase the chance of these images or memories appearing spontaneously. There will be more experimental studies on these imagination strategies and other related mechanisms as this field gains more attention. Still, for now, these hypotheses remain speculative as this research is in its early stages.

By gathering all the evidence from observational data to clinical trial results and findings from experimental studies, we may conclude that imagining positive images spontaneously helps improve mood, fosters enthusiasm and optimism, and prevents stress. However, these hypotheses have not been directly tested.

The benefits related to the functions and importance of imagining positive images in daily life and the potential benefits of increasing the frequency of these images remain theoretical, at least for now. These hypotheses are based on observational or indirect data. Still, I hope that broader research into these hypotheses will lead to a wide range of possibilities confirming the benefits of using positive mental imagery in daily life.