Laced with enough imagination to make him useful

Imagination doesn’t necessarily have to mean fantasizing.

Journeying to the far off island inside our mind to find new ideas for our next creative project is probably the most common application of this distinctly human ability.

But there’s a practical feature to imagination that most people overlook. We can use it for specific tasks like coping with stress, improving our mood, healing our pain, deepening our resilience and connecting with others.

Remember, imagination is merely the part of the mind which forms and manipulates images. We produce and simulate novel objects, sensations, and ideas in our heads without immediate input of the senses.

And the good news is, this psychological faculty can reach such a pitch as to influence our physical reality. Not unlike taking medication, imagination can be a therapeutic vehicle. For ourselves and others.

My first therapist was a doctor who specialized in hypnosis for patients with chronic pain. During our sessions, he wrote a series of personalized guided imagery audio meditations for me. He said they would tap into my imaginative powers to heal my anxiety, stomach cramps and panic attacks.

Twice a day for nearly a decade, I would listen to his voice talk to me through the headphones, inviting my brain to calm itself down and use its imaginative powers to find greater peace and wellbeing. The results were extraordinary. Not only did these audio meditations help me heal in the moment, but they also trained me to treat imagination as a skeleton key for opening the doors to growth in the future.

Years later, I launched a new business. And this psychological faculty came in handy during our six months of development. I would take time each week, usually while exercising, to produce and stimulate imagined futures where my product was wildly successful and profitable.

Those mental excursions built a foundation. And whatever mistakes, failures and setbacks I encountered along the way didn’t kill my momentum. Imagination kept me in the game where others might have quit. It was like a flotation device.

What’s your practical application of the abstract skill of imagination? How do you use it to heal your own life?

And by the way, the results can be for others as well. From an interpersonal perspective, imagination can also be the engine of compassion and connection. We can use our creative powers to understand the inner battles other people might be fighting.

Imagination can help us see why someone we’re about to judge might be just like us. Imagination helps us figure out how it’s possible that somebody could think or behave in a certain way, and under what circumstances would it make perfect sense to do so.

That’s a powerful interpersonal tool. It makes us stronger spouses, better coworkers, more useful citizens of the world.

And the best part is, the more of it we use, the more of it we have.

Human imagination has no substitute, and there is no expiration date on it.

How many throbbing environments to feed your imagination do you have?