---
title: "Why Writing About Your Best Possible Future Works"
description: "Writing a few minutes about your best plausible future is one of the most-tested positive-psychology exercises, and it reliably lifts optimism."
slug: "best-possible-self-research"
publishedAt: "2026-05-24"
updatedAt: "2026-05-24"
keywords:
- best possible self
- best possible self journaling
- imagining your future self
- future self writing
- positive psychology exercises
- how to write about your goals
- best possible self research
- optimism exercise
tags:
- mood
- psychology
- journaling
---
Picture your life a few years from now, with things having gone about as well as they realistically could. Not a lottery-win fantasy, but the version where the effort you are already putting in mostly pays off. Spending a few minutes writing that down turns out to be one of the most-tested exercises in all of positive psychology, and one of the most reliable.
Researchers call it the Best Possible Self, and they have been studying it for more than twenty years. Here is what it is, what the evidence actually shows, and how to do it in a way that holds up.
## What the Best Possible Self Exercise Is
The exercise is short and specific. You imagine yourself at some point in the future, after you have worked toward your goals and things have gone well, then you write about that life in concrete detail. Not vague affirmations, not a vision board, just a few minutes of continuous writing about a believable, good version of where you are headed.
The word doing the work there is *plausible*. This is not about imagining an unearned windfall. It is the future you could actually build, across the parts of life you care about: your work, your relationships, your health, the person you are growing into. The realism is a feature, not a limitation. You are writing the future that effort makes possible, not the one luck hands you.
## What the Research Found
The exercise traces back to a 2001 study by Laura King, published in *Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin*. She had 81 people write for twenty minutes a day across four days. One group wrote about their best possible self, one wrote about a painful past event (a form of [expressive writing](/blog/expressive-writing-method), which makes meaning out of something unresolved), and a control group wrote about something neutral. The best-possible-self writers came away with a measurable rise in subjective wellbeing, and months later they were physically healthier than the controls. Notably, writing about the hopeful future was far less upsetting than writing about the painful past, and it helped just as much.
Since then the exercise has been run dozens of times. A 2019 meta-analysis in *PLOS One* by Carrillo and colleagues pooled 29 studies and 2,909 participants and found the Best Possible Self reliably improved wellbeing (d = 0.33), optimism (d = 0.33), and positive affect (d = 0.51). Those are moderate effects, which is the honest size for almost any brief wellbeing practice: real and repeatable rather than dramatic.
The most striking finding comes from a different angle. A 2017 meta-analysis in *The Journal of Positive Psychology* by Malouff and Schutte asked a focused question: of all the ways researchers have tried to make people more optimistic, which one works best? Across 29 studies and more than 3,300 people, the Best Possible Self was the single most effective method, with an effect more than twice the size of the other optimism interventions combined. If you want one evidence-based way to nudge your outlook upward, this is the practice with the strongest track record behind it.
## Why Does Imagining Your Future Make You More Optimistic?
A few minutes of writing can seem too small to move something as settled as your outlook. The mechanism is less mysterious than it looks.
Optimism, in the research sense, is mostly about expectations: how good you expect the future to be. When you write a detailed, plausible best-possible-self, you do two useful things at once. You rehearse a concrete positive future until it starts to feel reachable instead of abstract, and you clarify what you actually want, which tends to surface the next small step toward it. That combination of a clearer goal and a believable path is close to what hope researchers call agency plus pathways. It also draws on the same engine as [looking forward to something good](/blog/anticipation-psychology): a future vivid enough to almost taste pulls some of its payoff into the present.
## How to Do the Best Possible Self Exercise
The protocol is forgiving. King's original was twenty minutes a day for four days, and later studies show shorter sessions still help, so you can scale it to the time you have.
- **Pick a horizon.** A few years out is the usual frame: far enough that things have changed, close enough that it still feels like you.
- **Assume the effort paid off.** Write the version where you worked hard and it went well, not a windfall you did nothing to earn.
- **Be concrete.** Name the work, the people, the daily texture of the day. Specific beats grand every time.
- **Keep writing.** Let the pen keep moving for the few minutes you set aside. Polish is not the point; the imagining is.
- **Come back to it.** A repeated light dose beats one heroic session. In a four-week study, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky found that continuing the practice, with some variety, is what sustains the lift.
## How Big Is the Effect, Honestly?
Worth keeping in proportion. A 2025 randomized trial in *Internet Interventions* found the exercise reliably raised positive affect but did not, on its own, significantly lower negative affect. That is the honest shape of it: the Best Possible Self is good at adding optimism and good feeling, less so at subtracting the hard feelings. It lifts the outlook; it does not erase a bad day.
It also helps to be clear about what this is, because it sits near a more famous idea. The Best Possible Self is a close cousin of [manifestation](/blog/manifestation-psychology), with one practical distinction the studies keep surfacing. How you imagine the future matters: picturing only the finished outcome is the weaker version, while writing out a plausible, effortful path toward it is the version the research consistently supports. Whatever meaning you take from the practice is yours to keep. What the evidence backs is the writing itself, those few minutes of plausible-positive future on the page.
And like any wellbeing lift, this one fades if you do it once and never again. The same two ingredients that keep a hard-won goal from going flat, variety and genuine appreciation, are what the [arrival fallacy](/blog/arrival-fallacy-research) research points to for making a good feeling last. Revisit the exercise now and then, and let the picture evolve as you do.
## Keep the Future in View with Positive
Writing your best possible self is something you do now and then, a deliberate few minutes when you want to reset your sights. The harder part is holding that forward-leaning posture on the ordinary days in between. That is the small job the Positive app is built for: one handpicked quote each day is a brief, deliberate dose of the same hopeful attention, and a daily reminder makes it arrive without you having to remember. It keeps the outlook you wrote toward in view between sessions. No accounts, no ads if you go Premium, and it is free to download.
Optimism is not a fixed personality you are stuck with. It is partly a habit of attention, and a few honest minutes spent imagining where your effort could lead is one of the best-supported ways to practice it.
## Sources
- Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals (King, 2001)
- PLOS One, Effects of the Best Possible Self Intervention: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (Carrillo et al., 2019)
- The Journal of Positive Psychology, Can Psychological Interventions Increase Optimism? A Meta-Analysis (Malouff and Schutte, 2017)
- Internet Interventions, Impact of the Best Possible Self Intervention on Affective Well-Being in Early Adolescence (Bartha, Schmidt, and Tomczyk, 2025)
- The Journal of Positive Psychology, How to Increase and Sustain Positive Emotion: The Effects of Expressing Gratitude and Visualizing Best Possible Selves (Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006)