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........

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