The Right Kind of Magical Thinking
7 min read
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Most Americans know the legend of Johnny Appleseed. In school—and via a famous Disney cartoon—we learned that he wandered barefoot through the western territories in America’s pioneer days, scattering apple seeds to grow trees in the wilderness that would feed unknown strangers, all while singing hymns of praise and trusting that the Lord would provide for him as well. Behind the legend was a real person named John Chapman, who lived from 1774 to 1845 and really did spend his adult life planting apple trees.
By contemporary accounts, Chapman was a true eccentric: “He went bare-footed, and often travelled miles through the snow in that way,” and he “wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot.” He was, in fact, a Swedenborgian—a member of the mystical sect founded by the 18th-century scientist and spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg to restore the “internal sense” of Christian scripture.
Because of his carefree lifestyle and esoteric spirituality, Chapman is usually characterized as a manifester—that is, an adherent to the doctrine that if you hold positive beliefs, a higher power will make them come true. This was a common belief in Chapman’s time, originating with mystics and faith healers who taught that positive thoughts create health and happiness.
To this day, this trust is a peculiarly American trait. Dozens of books are published each year on manifestation and the related concept of the law of attraction, which maintains that you draw into yourself what you choose to focus on. No wonder that the crude, instrumental form of this notion has plenty of believers: If you want to make a lot of money, just imagine yourself rich and act as if you already are—the universe will deliver.
You may be someone who already subscribes to the idea of manifestation or you may be someone who thinks it all sounds like pseudoscientific baloney. However, the truth about manifestation actually lies between these polar views. And that truth can be useful to you: By understanding the inner workings of manifestation and using that knowledge the right way, you can avoid the nonsense and realize a happier future for yourself.
Manifestation is generally described as the way that mind and matter can be affected by mystical forces so that what you think about comes true. Accordingly, you should focus on positive outcomes in life, not negative ones. To the idea’s proponents, if you think all the time about getting sick, you will get sick. But by the same token, you can focus your way out of disease through positive thoughts of recovery and health.
Academic psychologists refer to manifestation of this sort as a form of “magical thinking” or superstition, and typically regard it as evidence of psychological problems or mental impairment. These researchers have argued that people who hold these beliefs tend to have difficulty controlling obsessive thoughts. One much-cited study on superstitious behavior hypothesizes that it tends to occur when people have damage to the brain’s hippocampal region, leaving them with reduced memory, learning, and emotional-processing skills. Other studies disagree with a theory of neuropathology, and instead see manifestation more as a coping mechanism to ward off suffering. What these scholars agree on is that manifestation, as a practical concept, is unscientific and ineffective.
Before we conclude that manifestation is a waste of time, or worse, however, we should note that the studies above tend to look only at manifestation in which a person envisions just an outcome they want. But a person can also envision the process of working toward improvement—and this turns out to have scientifically measurable and different effects.
For example, in a study from 1991, researchers followed women who wanted to lose weight and either fantasized about being thinner or imagined the process of getting thinner. They found that realistically envisioning the process involved these women anticipating obstacles and making day-to-day improvements that led to significant weight loss after one year. The reverse was true for those who merely fantasized about being thinner: These women experienced significant weight gain because they acted as if they’d already achieved success and put less effort into a better diet. A study from 2002 reached similar conclusions, when researchers found that university students who focus on their ultimate academic performance tend to lose self-esteem during their college career, whereas those who focused on learning and progress without regard to final results enjoyed increased self-esteem.
What all this suggests is that no evidence exists for a mystical force that gives you what you imagine, and acting as though such a force does exist can set you back. But short of magical thinking, considered reflection on the process of achieving a desired outcome can change your behavior in productive ways. If you want a big balance in your bank account, thinking of a large number won’t help. But thinking about how you’re going to make financial progress and anticipating possible setbacks can encourage you to adopt useful habits of thrift and responsibility—and that becomes how you manifest a chosen goal.
Many columns I write are based on questions I get from friends and strangers to which I don’t know the answer—so, my own curiosity piqued, I go find out. This case is no exception: Someone asked me recently about the truth behind manifestation, and more specifically, whether happiness could be manifested. So can you, in fact, envision the process of being happier and become happier as a result? The answer is a qualified yes.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, psychologists found that your beliefs about the source of happiness determine to a considerable extent whether you will get happier. If you believe happiness is not under your control, you generally won’t do the work to get happier; if you believe happiness comes from your personal choices and behaviors, you will probably make an effort to improve your well-being. In other words, manifesting happiness as a destination to which you might gain access is futile, but understanding happiness as a direction based on your habits can work wonders.
To manifest happiness, keep in mind these four principles:
1. The goal is to get happier, not happy.
You may never attain perfect bliss in this life, but you can make progress, year after year. That means you should envision goals like the one proposed by my friend Dan Harris via his wellness movement, Ten Percent Happier. I cite my own case as is testament to this, as I have written: Bit by bit, since starting this column—which I did consciously for my own well-being during the COVID-19 lockdowns—I have grown in happiness and been able to measure that progress (here are some tools you can use to do the same). So now I know that I am 60 percent happier than I was four years ago.
2. Envision progress.
If you could become, say, 10 percent happier in a year, what would that mean? Again, you can measure this, but think also about how you would know and how it would affect your life. And be realistic: Being 10 percent happier does not mean that you’ll never argue with your spouse or that you’ll completely love your job. You will still have setbacks and bad days. But the progress toward happiness that you envision will be very noticeable in your basic outlook and sense of optimism. Others will notice it as well.
3. Set the strategy.
To make these incremental gains, create a list of personal habits and behaviors you want to change. Place them in order of importance, prioritize the top two or three, and imagine yourself engaging in them. Also imagine yourself struggling with them and failing from time to time, and what you will do when that inevitably happens. If you are having trouble deciding on what these behaviors should be, let me suggest reading the archive of “How to Build a Life”—there are a couple hundred columns to get you started.
4. Get started.
The most important step is taking action. Take the top behavior from step three, make it into a manageable change for tomorrow, and go to bed resolved to undertake it. The operative word here is day-at-a-time manageable. If you resolve to practice gratitude for 16 straight hours, you’re not thinking realistically; if you resolve to make a short gratitude list, you’re on the right track.
Given the evidence I found while researching this column, I got to wondering whether the Johnny Appleseed character really was a deluded manifester trying to will future bliss into existence or whether there was more to him than that. It turns out that he was actually just an old-fashioned, hard-working entrepreneur—albeit an oddball who liked to go barefoot, sleep outdoors, and wear a saucepan on his head.
Chapman’s Swedenborgian beliefs were quite esoteric, but the man behind them, Swedenborg himself, was eminently practical. “Everyone can know that willing and not doing, when there is opportunity, is not willing,” he wrote in his 1758 book Heaven and Hell; “also that loving and not doing good, when there is opportunity, is not loving.” This is the kind of manifestation that works and that animated Chapman. He didn’t scatter apple seeds aimlessly, but bought land, little by little, and cultivated nursery orchards in areas of growing population in the western territories. Over many decades, Chapman rose from poverty to wealth, leaving more than 1,200 acres of valuable nurseries to his heirs, all while creating a reliable supply of fruit and cider for the settlers. By all accounts, he died a happy man, beloved by those who knew him and feasted on his apples.
That was his manifestation: The true story—not the myth—is the one you can emulate to manifest the life you want.
