Going Beyond Manifesting (Free article. Workbook for paid subscribers.)

The limitations of manifesting and how to use what works to your advantage

Let’s get this out of the way up front: manifesting pisses me off.

If you or someone you love has read the book The Secret back in 2006, the self help book by Rhonda Byrne & a film that same year, you’re familiar with “The Law of Attraction” (or if you’ve spent any time on wellness Instagram or TikTok the last 5 years).

In case you’re not familiar: the Law of Attraction is the spiritual belief that what you think about creates your reality. It’s based on the idea that in order to change your negative thinking patterns you have to “feel” like the desired change has already happened in your life. Then, because you’ve made it “true” in your nervous system, through some quantum mumbo-jumbo it re-jiggers reality to make it so.

I have encountered many, many, many people who are wellness-space adjacent that didn’t realize the above was the gut of how manifesting is supposed to work.

But that all above - that’s faith. And no shade on anyone’s faith… but here’s the part that gets me: Research in behavior change shows that manifesting this way will actually make you less likely to create positive change in your life. Let’s dive into why.

How does manifesting “work”?

Manifesting as it’s popularly practices follows these few easy steps:

1. Be very specific with the Universe about what you want

2. Create the emotional state in yourself right now as if it’s already happened. As if your life is how it would be if those things you want are present and real and true. Live your life as if they are true.

3. Maintain that feeling indefinitely

4. The Universe brings you what you have manifested

It’s a pretty powerful and effective grift for a few reasons. If you were already going to be successful the practitioner promoting manifesting can point to those who got what they wanted and say “see! It works!”. For those who do not get what they manifested, the practitioner can say “did you have any doubts?!” and blame the person’s failure on their very natural emotional reactions to change.

It’s not only gaslighting - it’s bad science…

One of the interesting things about the last 15 years or so has been watching the wellness space to evolve and it’s various attempts to be science-adjacent. The manifesting phenomena is no exception. Here are the 2 primary ways they say manifesting is “science”:

Subjective Reality Manipulation

Your interpretation of everything that happens to you and the story of your life is shaped by your perception. This is one of the major impacts of trauma as well as the social programming we’re all subject to. Doubt it? Go have a big stack of pancakes with syrup, let your blood sugar crash, and see how well you manage an unruly social situation. Low blood sugar will make you more irritable and you’ll have a skewed lens on what’s going on.

The implication by the manifesting camp is that through their techniques you can influence that subjective lens. They’re not entirely wrong; but doing so doesn’t re-write the fabric of reality to cut just the way you’d like it to be.

The “quantum”

The other major way manifesting gets sold as science is by referencing “the quantum”. Essentially, all atoms are made up of particles. At the sub-atomic (meaning particle) level the physics get weird and some strange things happen. One of those strange things is the observer effect - that observing a particle can affect it’s state of being.

This gets misrepresented in manifesting all the time. Essentially, the practitioner will say that your mind thinking about change will create change on the quantum level through the observer effect. The problem? That’s not how the observer effect works!

Essentially, the observer effect means the particle was changed by the experiment being run on it. Kind of like how if I shoved you then you should change by falling over. This doesn’t mean that if I think about shoving you that you’d fall.

What's the point of "wellness"?

What does science actually say?

Research by Gabrielle Ottengen in the late 90s and early 2000’s pours the foundation for what we can figure out about the effectiveness of manifesting. In her first few studies on behavior change she broke college students who had a crush on someone into 2 groups:

• one group imagining in rich detail how amazing it would be to have a relationship with their crush (like manifesting)

• the other group thought about how amazing it would be AND contrasted it with their current life circumstances (manifesting PLUS contrasting)

Which group was more likely to take action towards their goals? The second! It’s theorized that the group who imagined (like manifesting) felt the emotional payoff from their goal without having to take action, so were less driven to act. (Later studies would show that those who daydreamed in rich detail were actually less likely to pursue their desires than the control that didn’t daydream at all.)

What does that all mean? When manifesting is only focused on imagining you have your goals you’re least likely to take actions to pursue them.

What Actually Works

Knowing manifesting is ineffective is only half the battle. People try manifesting because they want to change. They want things to be different and they want to believe they have control to make that change. The good news is there are effective tools to help them!

In the study described above, the second group of students who imagined and contrasted that with their current lives were learning a technique called mental contrasting. That gets someone clear on what they have vs what they want. But there’s one more step.

Implementation Intentions are when that same person then considers two things: (1) what doable thing can I change right now to get closer to that goal? and (2) what might get in my way?

Here’s the whole process in one go:

1. Get very clear on what you want and all the delicious reasons it will be amazing if it all comes true. Really feel what that will be like.

2. Contrast that with how you’re living right now, to amp up the payoff of making changes and making moves.

3. Identify what tangible step you can take in the next few days and weeks, no matter how small.

4. Next, ID how you might get in your own way. What habits, beliefs, or other behaviors that you have control of might sabotage your progress?

5. Make a plan to deal with those obstacles when they come. (“If… Then…” strategies are very effective for this)

Here’s a Workbook (paid subscribers only)