Imagination: Your Ultimate Entertainment System and Mental Playground

Your mind can become a prison or a playground depending on how you use it.

If you were in a room all by yourself with no distractions, where would your mind naturally go? Would you be more likely to stop and reflect on something positive and pleasant, or would your mind immediately rush to something negative and painful?

Most people are terrified of being alone with their minds. That’s why they need to constantly distract themselves with external stimulation whether it be watching TV, playing a video game, hanging out with friends, or potentially destructive behaviors such as drugs, alcohol, or sex.

Research shows that about 67% of men and 25% of women would rather give themselves an electric shock than spend time alone with their thoughts.

Are our minds really that scary – or did we just never learn how to use them properly?

Certain people seem like they would do anything to avoid being alone with their minds.

In general, we often under-value and under-appreciate the importance of time spent in solitude; and in many ways, our minds suffer for it, because we don’t gain the necessary tools that can only be cultivated and sharpened between you and your mind. No wonder we find our minds so scary: we spend so little quality time with them.

When you spend more quality time with your mind, you develop two essential skills:

• Mindfulness: the ability to focus and direct your attention toward your experiences as they unfold in the present moment.
• Imagination: the ability to create and generate your own unique content and experiences.

Both of these can be considered separate “mental skills” that are essential for happiness and well-being.

Of course, everyone has an imagination whether they are consciously using it or not.

If you don’t know how to use it, it can often work against you, such as imagining worst-case scenarios or all the ways things can go “wrong” in life.

If you learn how to use it, it can become a powerful force for seeing things differently, being more creative, finding solutions, and creating a more positive mindset overall.

Research shows that even everyday daydreaming plays an important role when it comes to creativity, decision-making, and problem-solving. Our minds like to mull over problems and play around with scenarios before making a final decision, even if it’s a mundane question like, “Hmm, what should I eat for lunch?”

Your imagination is one of many tools in your mental toolkit, but do you know how to use it effectively?

Imagination: Your Ultimate Entertainment System

One use of imagination is that it can become your own personal “entertainment system” once you’ve learned how to use it properly.

By “entertainment system,” I simply mean it creates positive, pleasurable, or enjoyable content. It’s not unlike movies, television, or video games, except you’re consuming the content internally rather than externally, with nothing but your mind.

Your imagination can even be considered the first type of “virtual reality.”

Our brains have the unprecedented capacity to create hypothetical worlds, characters, and stories that we can experience from a first-person or third-person perspective.

As long as we recognize these worlds are fictional (just like a movie, TV show, or video game), we should feel free to engage in them, participate in them, and play in them.

Unfortunately, many people don’t use their imagination anymore. It’s too easy to just consume the endless content we get through various technology and media, rather than worry about “entertaining ourselves.”

Of course I love and appreciate technology as much as the next person, but I also include my mind as a type of technology as well.

Minds are old technology, but they aren’t going away anytime soon, so you should probably train yourself how to use it.

Before we had elaborate entertainment systems to keep our brains occupied, people had to actually sit, think, talk, and brainstorm.

Our ancestors had to invent games that only required their bodies and minds (and maybe add a ball or stick). At night they’d gather by the fire, look up at the stars, and make up stories and myths. They had no choice but to use their imaginations to entertain themselves and create meaning in life.

Most of us don’t use our imaginations to this capacity anymore, but we can begin to improve our imaginations with practice like any other skill.

To start, I recommend trying to create more positive content using your imagination.

Here are simple ideas/suggestions to get you practicing:

• Revisit positive memories. In general, the ability to bring positive memories to mind is associated with greater happiness and well-being. It’s not just about having more “positive memories” to choose from though. People can be trained to more easily recall and remember positive events from their past, but they have to first take the time to sit, reflect, and generate a list of positive experiences from their past, however small or trivial they may seem. In fact, memory and imagination are more intertwined than we often realize. To recall any event, we have to reconstruct it with our imagination to some degree – it’s never exactly as it was when we first experienced it.
• Construct completely new experiences. The beauty of imagination is you can create anything you want (as long as you can imagine it). One helpful tip is to borrow sensations from the real-world and then exaggerate or combine those sensations in unique ways. For example, if you know the sensation of eating jello + the sensation of jumping into a pool, then you can imagine what it’s like to dive into a pool filled with jello. That’s a silly example, but it demonstrates the ways you can use your imagination to create entirely new experiences, including ones that wouldn’t make sense in reality.
• Create an “inner vacation” spot. Your imagination can be a powerful tool for relaxation and relieving daily stress. We all like to go on vacations to take a break from work and responsibilities, but what if you could go on vacation whenever you wanted? Imagine a specific “favorite spot” of yours – such as a calm beach, nature hike, or sitting by the pool – and then visit it in your mind. Make sure you give yourself time to evoke all your senses (sight, taste, touch, smell, sound). Your inner vacation spot can be based on a real place you’ve been to in the past or seen in pictures, or it can be a completely made up place. Your choice! And the best part is, the more you visit your inner vacation spot, the more you begin to associate that place with feelings of comfort and relaxation – a type of comfort/safety signal for your brain.
• Anticipate something positive in the future. While it’s best not to always live in the future, a healthy sense of anticipation is one way to use your imagination to help you get through a difficult day. For example, visualizing yourself catching up on your favorite TV show can help motivate you through a long day at work, or visualizing graduation day can help you get through a difficult day at school. Through our imagination, we can give ourselves a little “taste” of a future reward that awaits us, giving ourselves something positive to look forward to (and making the present moment a little more bearable).
• Practice mentally rehearsing new habits. A more practical use of imagination is as a form of mental rehearsal – or practicing new habits and new behaviors by giving ourselves an internal walk-through. For example, a golfer can visualize their golf swing, a piano player can visualize a new song they’re learning, or an actress can visualize their scenes and dialogue. In these cases, imagination is used as a way to improve or augment one’s skill, talents, or habits.
• Create a symbolic visualization. Once you start playing with your imagination, you start to discover the many different ways you can change your attitude and mindset through nothing but the power of your mind. One part of my multi-stage meditation is a visualization I came up with which I call “Burning Light.” The basic idea is I imagine myself as a great fire burning in a cave on the beach (usually at night). To me, this great fire symbolizes energy, motivation, and vitality. I even include small affirmations such as “I am energy” or “I am light” to help strengthen my positive feelings. It’s fun and it works (for me, anyway!)

These are just a few healthy ideas for ways you can explore your imagination more.

Remember that like all skills, the power of your imagination is something that is only going to get better with time, practice, and patience. For some people, it feels really awkward to play with their minds in this way, because they aren’t used to it – or never even considered the possibility.

Of course, everything that happens in our imagination is hyper-subjective. That’s why only you can really explore it for yourself and find the best ways to use it.

What helps one person isn’t necessarily going to help someone else. A certain level of open-mindedness and experimentation is required before you discover how to use your imagination in the best way possible.

What’s going on in your imagination today? It matters.

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