Picturing Your Perfect Morning May Be Working Against You

The more pleasure someone takes in picturing their future success, the worse they tend to do at getting it. That sentence sounds like a prank on the self-help shelf, and it is roughly what Gabriele Oettingen’s lab has been reporting since 2002.

Does visualizing your goals make you less likely to achieve them? In several studies by Oettingen and colleagues, vividly enjoying a positive future was linked to lower effort and weaker results than either doubting it or simply judging it likely, and one lab experiment showed lower physical energy right after the daydream. The evidence is real but narrower than the headlines make it, and some of its neighbors have not survived replication.

Both popular positions overreach. The first claim, picture your ideal morning and you will get there, has less support than its confidence implies. The rebuttal, positive thinking makes you fail, is also too strong.

What did the expectation-versus-fantasy studies find?

Oettingen and Doris Mayer published four studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002 (volume 83, pages 1198 to 1212). The participants were graduates looking for jobs, students with a crush on someone, undergraduates facing an exam, and patients about to have a hip replaced. Effort and results were checked weeks to two years later.

They separated two things most of us blur together. An expectation is a judgment: how likely do I think this is, given what I know? A fantasy is an experience: how good does it feel to imagine this? Positive expectations predicted more effort and better outcomes. Positive fantasies predicted the reverse. In the job-seeker study, as it is usually summarized, the dreamers sent fewer applications, got fewer offers, and earned less.

Here is the first complication. These were people reporting on their own thoughts, then being tracked, which makes the link correlational. Someone who luxuriates in imagining a dream job might differ from someone who doesn’t in a dozen ways that have nothing to do with the daydream.

Can a daydream really drain energy?

Heather Kappes and Oettingen ran that experiment in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011, under the title “Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy.” People were induced to fantasize in different ways. Those pushed toward positive fantasies about the outcome showed lower systolic blood pressure, a physiological marker of being energized, and less behavioral energy than people who fantasized negatively, neutrally, or in a way that questioned the desired future. The drop was bigger when the wish was more pressing to the person.

Think of it as a premature reward. The brain gets a taste of having arrived, so the pull to go and arrive weakens. That reading is the authors’ account, and it fits their data, but it is an interpretation. The blood-pressure result comes from short laboratory sessions run by the group that proposed the idea. No large independent replication of it is widely cited, and a skeptic is entitled to wait for one.

Nobody has tested this on mornings. There is no study of people vividly imagining a 6 a.m. run against people who didn’t. Carrying the finding to the morning routine is an inference — a plausible one.

What about mirror affirmations?

Different research, same family of advice. Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee reported in Psychological Science in 2009 (volume 20, pages 860 to 866) that people with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person” felt worse afterward than those who did not. People with high self-esteem felt a little better, to a limited degree. The suggested reason: a claim that clashes with what you believe draws attention to the clash. The miracle-morning crowd’s affirmation script is the usual target. WOOP, the method Oettingen built to fix this, is laid out in an earlier post; the newer evidence on it comes further down.

That result has since been challenged. Megan Flynn and Michael Bordieri ran two attempts in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science in 2020 (volume 16, pages 49 to 61). Their first study found no difference between conditions and no interaction with trait self-esteem. Their second, which added goal completion as an outcome, also found nothing. So the cautious reading is that affirmations are not reliably harmful to the low-esteem group, and also not reliably helpful. Standing at a mirror telling yourself you are a winner has, at best, a thin evidence base. Nobody has tested the mirror itself; the studies used spoken or written statements.

Does the opposite advice hold up?

Oettingen’s alternative is mental contrasting, packaged as WOOP: name a wish, picture the best outcome briefly, name the inner obstacle, then make an if-then plan for it. The idea is that holding the dream and the obstacle together restores the pull that the dream alone dissolves.

A 2021 meta-analysis by Guoxia Wang, Yi Wang and Xiaosong Gai in Frontiers in Psychology pooled 21 studies (24 effect sizes, 15,907 participants) of this combined method and found a small-to-moderate benefit for goal attainment, g = 0.336. Its authors warn that publication bias probably means the true effect is smaller. Pooled numbers like this often shrink when somebody counts the studies that never got written up.

That puts WOOP about where the original claim should have been: useful, modest, not a revelation. A g of about 0.3 means the average person using WOOP does somewhat better than the average person who doesn’t, with plenty of overlap between the groups. It does not mean contrasting fixes anyone’s mornings.

What should a person do with a perfect-morning daydream?

Positive fantasy about a future (enjoying the image) is not the same as positive expectation (judging success likely), and experiments by Oettingen and colleagues link the first to lower effort and energy while the second predicts more effort. The practical conclusion is not to stop imagining good outcomes. It is to avoid letting the imagining stand in for the plan, and to add the obstacle before the feeling of arrival has done its damage.

A plan made at night has its own problem. The person doing the imagining at 10:45 p.m. is in a calm mood the 6 a.m. person won’t share, and how a calm evening mood misjudges tomorrow’s effort has its own literature. A wake time pulled from what the last seven mornings looked like starts from data instead of a mood board.

Here is a made-up morning. Someone pictures a calm 6 a.m. with coffee, a run, and a clear head. The WOOP version adds one step: what will stop me? At 6 the likeliest answer is the warm bed and a phone within reach. The plan then reads, “If my alarm goes off and I am still lying down, then I put both feet on the floor before I touch the phone.” A sentence you can fail beats a picture that can’t.

FAQ

Does any kind of visualization help?

Imagining the process rather than the prize has some support. Pham and Taylor (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1999) had college freshmen simulate the steps of studying before an exam, and that group studied more and earned better grades than students who pictured a good result. It is one study of one population, so treat it as a lead rather than a rule.

Were the low-self-esteem participants hurt by every affirmation condition?

No. In Wood, Perunovic and Lee (2009), low-self-esteem participants felt worse after repeating ‘I’m a lovable person’ or dwelling on how it was true, but not after being asked to consider how the statement was both true and not true. The sentence itself was the problem, and a version that allowed some doubt did no harm.

Is WOOP better when someone guides you or when you read it alone?

Guided is stronger. In the Wang, Wang and Gai (2021) meta-analysis, studies built on live interaction between participant and experimenter averaged g = 0.465, while studies where people worked from written materials averaged g = 0.277. A book or an app page is closer to the second group.

What did people imagine in the Kappes and Oettingen energy experiments?

The 2011 paper reported four experiments. In one, participants imagined winning an essay contest; in another, women imagined looking and feeling good in high heels. Each compared induced positive fantasy with a different alternative: questioning the desired future, negative fantasy, or neutral fantasy.