Positive thinking? It's not enough to reach your goals

"Dream it. Wish it. Do it" is a popular T-shirt slogan. It is not a very good way to change your life – as countless people who made New Year's resolutions to lose weight, start exercising or improve work habits are learning right about now.

Positive thinking has its merits, but it has been seriously oversold as a way to achieve goals, a growing body of research shows. If you want to change, you might want to confront your dreams with some hard, cold, even negative reality, studies show.

"It's so pleasant to believe that positive fantasies will work," says Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University. "But it's too good to be true."

Oettingen is the author of a new book Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. In it, she outlines a strategy for achieving health, personal and professional goals. Her strategy involves some positive thinking, but also a sober assessment of obstacles and a plan to overcome those obstacles – if, and only if, overcoming them ends up seeming realistic and worthwhile.

Want to eat better? Go ahead and visualize a refrigerator full of fresh veggies – but then ponder why those carrots and peppers are not in there now and how, exactly, you are going to change that.

Want to run a marathon, like all your friends? Picture that finish line. But also picture months of training, lost family time, sore feet. Some people who do that will be energized to pursue the marathon dream; others will let it go – and choose a more realistic exercise goal for themselves.

The notion that it's best to balance positive thinking with some negativity is old enough to qualify as ancient wisdom, says Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.

Still, for many people – especially traditionally optimistic Americans – charge-ahead positive thinking "feels like it ought to work," says Burkeman, a British journalist who writes for The Guardian and is based in New York.

Research questioning that idea has been accumulating for decades, he says.

ROSY VISIONS CAN BACKFIRE

One of Oettingen's earliest studies showed that positive thinking alone can backfire when it comes to losing weight. In that study, women in a one-year weight loss program who had the most positive fantasies about future slimness lost an average of 24 pounds less than women with less rosy visions.

The same thing happened with people who fantasized about recovering quickly from hip surgery, getting a date with an attractive person or getting good exam grades.

Oettingen's theory: Dreaming about a positive future "can seduce you into thinking you are already there. Then you don't get the energy to actually go there. Instead, you just lean back and enjoy the moment."

TURN DREAMS INTO ACTION

With additional studies, Oettingen came up with a strategy for turning dreams into action or, when appropriate, new dreams. It goes by the acronym WOOP, standing for:

• Wish: Let yourself dream about a specific wish for your life.

• Outcome: Think about the best thing that could happen as a result.

• Obstacles: Think about the thoughts, behaviors, habits and preconceived notions that might hold you back.

• Plan: Think about when and where an obstacle will occur and make an "if-then" plan: "If obstacle x occurs, then I will perform behavior y."

Someone who wants to walk more might end up with a plan like: "If I feel I do not have time to go for a brisk walk, then I will remind myself: I will be more productive after having been outside."

A free WOOP app is available through woopmylife.org.

The method could make a huge difference for "people who tend to get stuck in the dreaming part" of pursuing their goals, says Julie Norem, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College.

Norem's own research focuses on "defensive pessimism" – a strategy used by some people to successfully deal with anxiety. Basically, those people imagine worst-case scenarios and then take action to keep their nightmares from coming true.

There are people and situations for which more positive thinking works, Norem says. "Some people will get discouraged by thinking too much about the obstacles," she says, and can stay "super-motivated" by their dreams alone.

But, she says, "the older you get and the higher the stakes, the less likely that is to work out."