Manifesting: How Powerful Are Our Thoughts?

0:00Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we are pitting facts against finessing your future.

0:14We are looking into manifesting. Can you really use the power of your mind to create the future that you want? Because according to folks online, the answer is yes. It's f***ing real, man. Manifesting is real. This s***. It works. What I'm about to tell you is going to change your life. And here's what you need to do to change your life. You focus on what you want and then act as if you already have it. While you're writing this or typing this, I want you to genuinely feel the emotions as if that thing has already happened to you. So what would it feel like if you received what it is that you desired?

0:56How happy would you feel? What would that moment look like? We're method acting. We're cosplaying our future self. And before you know it, whatever you wished for will appear. And this idea that just by thinking about what you want, you can get it, it's become almost mainstream. One survey of over 300 people found that about a third of them believed manifestation could be real. And people say they've manifested all sorts of things. I manifested my crush. I also manifested some speaking opportunities, some partnerships. This is how I lost weight, a size 16 to a size 4. Literally, I manifested my green card.

1:36A Nespresso machine. I actually manifested a full man. And maybe it sounds strange that you could think your way to a Nespresso machine or a green card or a full man. But scientists have actually been studying the best way to achieve your goals for years. And that's what we're telling you about today. So get ready for your dreams to come true, because when it comes to manifesting, there's a lot of... What I'm about to tell you is going to change your life. But then there's science. Science vs. Manifesting is coming up just after the break. As long as you believe it to be true.

2:30Welcome back. Today, we are manifesting our futures. We're making dreams come true. And look, already one of your dreams is going to come true because senior producer Rose Rivel is in the room. Sounds like you manifested some coffee not too long ago. Hi. Hello. Hi, Wendy. So a few weeks ago, just so the audience knows, we each decided we were going to manifest something. something. Try to do this. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And you were going to try to manifest doing well in a swimming race. Yeah. So I signed up to swim an open water race and swimming a mile at the beach, and I've never done that before.

3:12So that's what I decided to manifest. Just like a good race, safe race, finishing the race, and not coming in last because there's also ego involved. Have you done this yet? Have you done the race yet? It's in a few days. Okay. So as we were chatting, we thought your manifestation goal, you know, it's kind of in your control. But we thought maybe ride up the ante a little for what I'm trying to manifest. Uh-huh. And so I, here's what I'm doing. I'm trying to manifest every time I need to ride my bike. It will not rain. I feel like that's a good one because it's very like universe, do me a solid.

3:53Yeah, that's right. And what I didn't tell you at the time, Rose, is that as a kid, I believed, convinced myself that I could indeed make clouds disappear. Oh, so you were drawing on an ancient power. So when we would go on family trips, I have very distinct memories of mom saying, you know, we're going to go on a hike today, Wendy. So no clouds, please. And me being like, I've got it. And I would stare at the clouds and think, dissipate, dissipate. You know, sometimes it works. So you kind of believe this, it sounds like. um away from rain clouds i do get part of this you know if you focus on what you want subconsciously you'll make steps to achieve it or consciously i don't know this is there something to this uh well let's dive in so believe it or not there is a scientist who has studied something that's an awful lot like a manifestation meditation the kind of thing you might hear from these influencers.

5:07Her name is Laura King. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri in Columbia. When I got on the horn with her, I chatted with her a bit about all the TikToks that I've been watching lately. And, you know, interesting though, the comments section is full of people saying that it worked. They manifested their ex-boyfriend texting them, wanting them back. How do we explain that? Because life is super fun. I mean, I'm a fan of magic when it happens. I think it feels super meaningful to people, but it's not. It's magic with a little M. Not a big one. So I got in touch with Laura because of the study she did back in the early 2000s.

5:49She had about 80 college students come into the lab and do 20 minutes of journaling. And they did this for four days in a row. Okay. And they were given different topics to write about. Like one group was told to write about their plans for the day. That was like the control group, just this neutral kind of boring topic. Another group was told to write about a traumatic event that they'd gone through. And there was a third group, and this is where the manifestation part comes in. They were told to write about their best possible self, which went like this. Think for a moment about their life in the future, their best possible life in the future.

6:26Imagine that you have succeeded at attaining all of your life goals and think of this as the kind of happily ever after for your life. And the people given this prompt loved it. People walked out of that lab feeling fantastic, right? Like, oh, Dr. King, I love your research. I love this study. Anytime. Just by imagining their best possible self, this had a real effect on people's moods, something that Laura could actually measure. Oh, that's cool. But what's really intriguing, and what intrigued Laura and other scientists who ended up doing their own versions of this study later on, is that the effects seem to actually last a while.

7:05Wait, just feeling good, that lasted longer? How much longer? Well, Laura checked in on them three weeks later and found that they were better off than the people who had done the other prompts. Three weeks later? Yeah. Three weeks later? And other studies since then have had people do this best possible self-exercise and found similar things. In fact, a few years ago, a review paper called this exercise, quote, a viable intervention for increasing optimism, positive affect, health, and well-being. Wow. So why does it work? We don't really know. Laura doesn't know. But her best guess is that it has to do with putting sort of smaller everyday things into context, like sort of adding some perspective about why we do the little things that we do every day.

7:54sort of like, what is the ultimate purpose of all this stuff? Which is something that we often forget, right, in the everyday kind of mundane hassles and the stuff that we're trying to accomplish, right? At the end of the day, you checked off all your boxes, you feel good. But when you've placed that to-do list in a larger, grander context, it also gives you meaning. So, Wendy, the bottom line is that thinking about a bright future for yourself feels good. Yes, yes. But then the question becomes, does it end up being true? Because manifesting, the mythology of manifesting... It goes a step further.

8:29It's not just, you know what's a really nice thing to do? Just picture your goals and dreams. You'll feel great. They say those dreams will happen. Yeah. So will they happen? So I asked Laura about that. So do people, after they do the best possible selves intervention, actually make their best possible self come true? I have no idea. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Laura, why don't you know? They didn't test for it. They didn't follow them, you know, 10, 20 years later or whatever. And as far as I can tell, of all these studies that, like, had people do the best possible self thing, none of them actually, like, that wasn't their goal.

9:11They didn't follow up and see, like, did you make it come true? So who do we need for this? For our Big M magic. I don't know if I could offer you Big M magic, but I can offer you Big S science. I'll take it. I do have some answers for you about that, and it's going to come up after the break.

9:41Welcome back. Today we are manifesting. We are trying to make our dreams come true with our minds. Senior producer Rose Rimler is telling us all about it. Hello, Wendy. So, yeah, I wanted to check in about your manifesting experience. You said that you were manifesting sunny days while bike riding, or at least no rain. Mm-hmm. And you sent me some evidence that you were doing your homework. That's right. I'm a good student. There is this gray cloud looming. It will not rain. It will not rain. The gray cloud that I see before me will dissipate. It will not rain. And I, too, have been trying to manifest something, a good swim.

10:34Mm-hmm. So I'm imagining that I'm in the water. I'm towards the end of the race. I'm watching everyone on shore cheering. And as I'm swimming, the water is getting shallower and shallower. I'm getting up to the shore. And I get out of the water and I cross the finish line. And I'm just celebrating with everyone and eating a hot dog maybe. And then I check the results later. And I'm fifth place. I love it. You're like, you can manifest whatever you want. You could have been first place. Oh, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right. Oh, I'm ruining it. I'm sending out my negative vibes, of course.

11:22And you're thinking, no, no, no, no, no. Manifesting dreams, I want to be fifth. I don't even need a medal. Oh, Rose. And you call yourself American. Remember my score on the narcissist test?

11:40So the idea here behind this whole thing is that you're supposed to be putting out positive vibrations into the universe. And then the universe will match your positive vibrations. I've heard it described as like turning yourself into an antenna that you like tune to what frequency you want the universe to be on. So like you send those signals. This is how manifestation is supposed to work. Yeah, basically. I'm summarizing a bunch of different schools of thoughts because this whole concept has been around at least a century. And, you know, there was this big book that came out about it a while back, The Secret, if you remember that.

12:22Yes. Wow. But moving away from vibes, the big science question here is, does the act of like thinking about manifesting something up your chances that you'll actually get what you want. And for this, we need Gabriela Etienne. She is a professor of psychology at New York University. And her research is all about how people turn their wishes and fantasies into things that they can actually achieve. So she had this one big experiment where one of the things that they did was they recruited students who were in their last year of grad school and asked them, do you ever have, you know, positive fantasies about your future job once you get out of grad school?

13:07And she found that some people just naturally do this a lot. They do this more than other people. And so what's cool about the study is she followed up a couple years later and asked them basically, like, how is it going with your career? Are you getting a lot of job offers? Are you making a good salary? And what we find is that the more positively these university graduates fantasize about their success in work life, the less successful they were two years later. The more positively that they fantasized, the less successful they were. It basically backfired. Yeah. The more they dreamed about like getting a job and having a job that they liked that paid them well, the less likely they were to have a job.

13:57They reported having like fewer job offers and they made less money than people who didn't really fantasize about that stuff. Wow. Wow. So less job offers, less money, totally different to those folks on socials we were hearing from before. And I found other examples of manifesting backfiring. There was a survey of almost 400 people that found the ones who believed in manifesting the most were more likely to have made risky financial investments. They did stuff like they bought crypto. They believed in some like get rich quick stuff. And they were more likely to have declared bankruptcy than other people.

14:38Ooh, okay, yeah. Which made me think of all the advice from manifesting people about how you need to spend so much time, you know, daydreaming and like just thinking about all these good things that are going to come to you. So that sounds actually like pretty, given your results, maybe that's really bad advice. It's good advice if you want to just feel good. It makes you figure. We found that too. But if you really want to go and get your fantasies in reality, then it's bad for us. And does Gabrielle know why it backfired? Well, what might be going on is that the people who were fantasizing more were putting in less work to actually get what they wanted.

15:23Like, Gabrielle have found that those graduate students that she followed up with two years later, the ones who fantasized a lot, they weren't putting in as many job applications as their peers. And there was a similar study she did about college students fantasizing about getting good grades. And the ones who fantasize the most about their good grades spent less time studying. So Gabriella thinks that this backfiring effect is all about where you put your energy. Maybe people don't put so much effort in their realization of the positive fantasies. They spend too much time off in la-la land. They forget to actually fill out their job application.

16:02Too much time. And what we later found in the experiments is that they feel already arrived. They feel already in the positive future. Our mind is very strong. So they feel in the positive future. And if you already feel accomplished, what do you do? You relax. Yeah, it's not just that people were less motivated. She's also seen a physiological reaction in people's bodies. So in a study where they had people fantasize while they measured their blood pressure, she found that their blood pressure actually went down while they were fantasizing. So her idea is that as you're fantasizing and feeling good and relaxed, you just have less fire in your ass to actually go out and then accomplish these goals.

16:54That's how Gabrielle thinks about it. Yeah, that's right. And I will say this is different from sort of generally having a positive or optimistic outlook on life. You know, being a person who kind of generally believes that things will go okay for you, things will work out. That's actually associated with good outcomes, even being good for your health. But fantasizing, not so much. So then I guess for folks who do have goals and want to achieve them, Has science learned a better way to do this? Do we have a science-backed way to manifest? Yeah. I mean, there's actually a whole branch of psychology that's dedicated to figuring out how to help people set and achieve goals, and we can draw from that.

17:44Great. It turns out a critical thing is not being too Pollyanna about what you want. You actually have to consider the hard stuff or bad stuff that might come up and might get in your way. Which is the exact opposite to TikTok, right? Which is just saying, you know, just focus on... Just think about what you want. Yeah. And scientists like Gabriela have come up with some, I guess, you know, to compete with our TikTok colleagues out there, we should probably call them hacks. Right. Okay. So hack number one, think about your obstacles. Yeah. And Gabrielle has tested this by having people pick a goal, imagine why that goal would be so great, you know, but then also imagine what the obstacles might be to getting there.

18:32So like add in a splash of realism. And she's found that this approach works better than just focusing on the goal or just focusing on the obstacles. You need both together. Great. And she's done experiments where this technique has gotten people to do more exercise, to deal with issues at work, and has even gotten children to do their homework. So that's really something. Okay. Okay. But if you really want to take it up a notch, you got to go a little further. Which brings us to hack two. Use if-then statements. I remember these. Yeah, from our ADHD episode. So these come up in ADHD coping strategies as well.

19:14So the idea is to think up specific obstacles that could come up in, you know, stopping you from getting your goal. And think about what you're going to do if that obstacle comes up. And put it in the statement, if blank, then why. So if this happens, then I'll do why. For example, there was a study of T girls who wanted to avoid getting pregnant. And the researchers had half the girls do this exercise where they made if-then statements about what could go wrong with their birth control. They said stuff like, if I forget to take my pill one day, then I will, you know, use a condom the next time I have sex.

19:54Or if my partner doesn't want to use a condom, then I will, I don't know. Tell them to f*** off. Yeah. And researchers followed up with these people a couple years later and found that in the group that made these if-then planning statements, there were half as many pregnancies among them compared to a control group. Uh-huh. Wow. A review paper found that overall, people using these two hacks, imagining an obstacle to their goal and then coming up with an if-then statement for what to do, generally works pretty well. The paper found a small to medium effect size for people achieving their goals using these methods.

20:35A small to medium effect. Which in psychology is not bad. I mean, that's true. That's the entire field of psychology is based on small to medium effect sizes. And actually, Wendy, now I guess I can finally ask you, did you get rained on? Nope. Oh, forget it. Throw the whole episode out. Manifestation works. Oh, my God. Sometimes it was, yeah, it was really quite surprising. I would arrive at my destination and rain would start. Well, Wendy, you may very well be a weather witch, and I wish that for you. Right. But actually, like seriously, what do you think explains that? Coincidence, of course.

21:19Uh-huh. But you know what? But maybe because I really wanted it to happen, I was probably just way more aware of the weather than I normally would. So leading up to the time I would have to go. I wouldn't cheat. I wouldn't look at the radar. But maybe if I'm being really honest with myself, I would think, you know what? I could see some clouds off in the distance, but it's looking pretty good now. I'll go now instead of... I'll just leave a little earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just became like hyper aware of the weather. Yeah, I think so. Plus, I mean, I think if you were to keep doing this, there might be times when you get like a little drizzled on and you're like, that doesn't count.

22:01Or I don't know, you would just notice moving forward every time that it did supposedly work. And you might not notice every time it didn't really work. Classic confirmation bias. For sure. Of course. And also, I think a lot of us have a certain amount of main character syndrome. I'm not accusing you, Wendy, but... Definitely, definitely not fifth place roast.

22:27It reminds me actually of a story that Laura King told me. She's the psychologist that we heard from earlier. It was about something that happened to her when she was in college. And at the time, she was training to be a singer and she was at a voice lesson one day. And I was trying to hit this high note and trying to hit this high note and I could not do it. So at the end of my lesson, like the last few minutes of my lesson, my teacher said, let's try this one more time. And so he's running up the scale and he's running up the scale. And I'm trying to hit that note. And when you're trying to hit that really high note, right, you're almost whooping as if you're making a siren sound, right, like a child.

23:06And so I'm making this noise and suddenly this, you know, I open my mouth as wide as I could and I hit the note. and I sustained that note. And I stood there on this stage and this amazing sound is coming out of me. And then the building started to shake. And the floor of the stage is shivering under my feet. And this old building is like... Snow is falling off the roof in these grand... And I'm standing there sustaining this note, right? I caused an earthquake, right, in rural Ohio in the middle of January. I'm standing there. And I'm thinking, oh, my God, right? I caused an earthquake. This is incredible.

23:57I felt like I had discovered my superpower, right? And I'm standing there thinking, I will only use these powers for good. My voice teacher, who was a very, you know, religious slash spiritual man, I am not kidding you, got down on his knees and started praying at the piano bench. Wow. Okay. So this became a kind of super meaningful personal touchstone, right? Like I'll never forget that time I caused an earthquake. Of course not. And I just shared the story so many times. And then a few years ago, I thought, did that happen? Yeah, you're like, wait, what? And so I started looking it up. And it turns out there was an earthquake on this day in January in Ohio at exactly that time.

24:55And that's when I started thinking about, oh, my God, like all over Ohio, so many people caused that earthquake. Right? So many, like someone slammed a door and it started. Someone sneezed really hard. Someone turned on their hair dryer, right? Yeah. All of us caused that earthquake. Because that's how human cognitive processes are, right? Something big happens and we're like, whoa, what did I do? Mm, yeah. Okay, so Rose, your swim, your big swim is in a couple of days, right? Yes. So yeah, I'll call you afterwards. I'll let you know how it went. Great. Good luck.

25:43Hello? Hello, Wendy. It is I. I have completed my race. I don't know why I said it like that. Did you have a good swim? Yes. The weather was perfect. Wow. You're welcome.

25:56Did the crowd cheering on the other side? Actually, yeah, it did kind of end the way I had envisioned it in my goal that I, you know, I was swimming, the water was getting shallower and shallower and people were cheering and like waving me in and that part came true. But the big question, fifth place? I got 71st place. But you said for your age category, did that change it? In my age category.

26:28how do you feel that's your first open water swim yeah yeah I feel good and I have one more thing to tell you Wendy oh yeah this week there were 32 citations in this episode oh great if people want to see them they should click on the link in our show notes for our transcript and that's where all the citations are great thanks Rez thanks Wendy

26:56This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Katie Foster-Keys, Michelle Dang and Meryl Horne. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, So Wiley, Peter Leonard, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Thanks to all of the researchers we reached out to for this episode, including Dr. Lucas Dixon. A special thanks to Mark Johnson. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We are everywhere. And if you like what we're doing, give us a five-star review.