Imagination and emotional well-being are deeply intertwined – they share a symbiotic relationship: both constructs are critical for individuals and communities to make change in their lives and in society. Have you ever paid attention to how you feel when you are imagining and daydreaming? If so, you probably have noticed the strong positive impact that these actions have on your mental and physical health, your, personal growth, and your emotions – When we imagine, we laugh, we dream, we play – we experience joy. At the same time, when we experience these and other positive feelings, our cognitive flexibility broadens and we generate new patterns of thought that enhance our imagination – Put simply, it is easier to think in different directions, change perspectives, and suspend judgement. The opposite is also true when we feel anxious and stressed: our thinking gets constrained and our perspectives narrow – we feel stuck and only see a negative way forward, that feeds our unhappy feelings. This creates a vicious cycle, where difficulty imagining positive ways forward makes us more unhappy.

Leveraging on the symbiotic connection, the workshops, courses, and programs I offer are rooted in the integrated Discover, Imagine, Create approach that empowers individuals and communities to build stronger emotional well-being habits and harness their imagination from inside out. The following three areas illustrate how this approach works in practice.

Discover: Shared Cognitive Processes

The Default Mode Network (DMN) – also called the imagination circuit – is a brain region which is active when our attention is focused inwards, like during self-reflection, meditation, and daydreaming. It plays an important role in both the experience of emotional well-being and the act of engaging in imaginative thought, in particular, social-emotional imagination (reflecting and connecting with feelings of oneself and others) and time-travel imagination (constructing events across time and space) (Gotlieb et al., 2019). Multiple cognitive processes and behaviors that are associated with this network are also related to both constructs. This suggests that enhancing one activity would also boost the other one.

Approach in Action: Shifting attention inwards is the first step to internalize new optimistic habits and imagination strategies, as well as to be deliberate on when to use them. By activating the DMN, exercises will guide you to reconnect with your sense of self and deepen self-awareness, which will also help you learn how to regulate your thoughts and increase positive emotions. By the end of this stage, you will feel more confident and eager to start making free associations and traveling through time.

Imagine: Optimistic Futuring

We spend most of our time mentally traveling through time and thinking about the future, from what we prepare for dinner to what outfit we will wear to work tomorrow. However, our tendency when thinking about important decisions or our future life is to imagine apocalyptic scenarios – e.g., worse pandemics, being alone stranded on a deserted island – or negative situations rooted in current trends – e.g., AI takes over humanity. In this context, nurturing both positive emotions and the ability to envision life in fresh ways can bring hope and increase happiness (Quoidbach et al., 2009). Learning and practicing the tools to dream up and plan a wide variety of uplifting scenarios will make you feel more optimistic and happy.

Approach in Action: The practice of productive or imaginative imagination is the core of the training, the most fun, and what makes it unique! Exercises will guide you to open up your internal locks and envision positive paths forward different from what you have experienced or perceived. Before you know it, you will generate ideas, stories, and scenarios that transcend reality! Through this part of the training, you will learn to embrace your imagination: you will dream, play, and have fun as your ideas become less and less constrained by reality. The resulting outputs will be empowering, because they will reveal your creative potential and what you truly want for yourself and your life.

Create: Higher Quality Connections

Cultivating social relationships is a determining factor for emotional well-being, with the quality of those relationships having the greatest influence. In “The Good Life” book, Waldinger & Schulz (2023) explain that fun, supportive relationships improve well-being, while untrustworthy ones destroy it – this means that it is not about having a large number of friends, but having a reliable network that you can count on and with whom you feel aligned and understood. Interestingly, in a recent study Fowler et al. (2024) discovered that the practice of imagining shared future experiences with other people – which they called collaborative imagination – can foster higher quality social cohesion and increase people’s empathy toward others. This suggests that imagination could help bring people closer and improve the quality of relationships. In other words, the act of envisioning positive futures paths with another person – rather than alone – makes those visions richer and more authentic which also leads to both people feeling more optimistic and hopeful. At the end, the bond between these two people is a strong connection.

Approach in Action: Co-imagining is the first step to transform ideas something tangible. Depending on the topic, format, and goal of the training, you could team up with one or more people to imagine a shared future by building on each other’s ideas – e.g. more inclusive policies – or you could team up with others to help each other articulate their own personal futures. Then, you will work on making the ideas tangible by creating blueprints, action plans, or prototypes. Drawing, sketching, working with blocks or ceramics, or even role playing are some of the techniques you will work with to take the first step towards making your vision a reality.

By the end of this transformative journey, you will realize that you can achieve anything you want if you only dare to imagine it.