The Non-BS Science of Manifestation: How Your Imagination Can Help With Pain, Anxiety, Conflict, and Recovery | Cassi Vieten

Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're gonna talk about how to reduce catastrophizing, interpersonal conflict, and even physical pain, while meanwhile increasing your sense of safety in your own nervous system through an innate capacity we all have. That capacity is imagination. Now you might be thinking, imagination? That sounds either boring or like something other people have, like people who work at Disney or Pixar. But we're all imagining all the time. Thinking about it, we're always casting forward into the future, thinking about how things may go often in, paranoid and phantasmagoric ways. But my guest is gonna talk about what she calls adaptive imagination, healthy imagination that we can use to our benefit in lots of really interesting ways. One thing you might be imagining at this point in my introduction here is that, Is what you're talking about similar to the popular notion of manifestation? Well, it is and it isn't, and we'll get into that in this interview. My guest today is doctor Cassie Vieton. She's a clinical psychologist and the director of research at the Arthur c Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California at San Diego, where she also, directs the Center for Mindfulness. And she's got a new book, which is called Imagine That, transform how you think, feel, and live with the science of imagination. Doctor Cassie Vieton, welcome to the show. Hey. It's great to be here, Dan. Imagination. You call it, the oldest human technology. Yeah. Why do you call it that? And and more broadly, what what is imagination in in your view? So the first thing I would say to listeners is number one, to begin to view your imagination as a useful tool, as a useful territory of your cognition. So when I talk about imagination, you know, they think of it as a kind of maybe a little frivolous, a little bit of a luxury. Some people are very imaginative, others aren't. But the truth is that all of us are imagining all day every day, and it profoundly affects how we show up in the world, how we perceive reality. Learning how to use your imagination in a way that's beneficial is beneficial not only to how you experience the world, which is very important, but also to your brain, to your body, and to your health. Imagination, I guess I think about it as the oldest human technology because even as we became mammals and started to kind of understand how to survive, I believe that probably for a very long time, what you saw was what you got. You know? It wasn't like, I wonder what's around the corner. I wonder what's over that mountain over there. Over time, there's this inner part of our cognition that has evolved, and that lets us test out situations before we get into them so that we can sort of try to …