Retraining with Imagination

Fun fact: your brain can’t tell the difference between performing an action in your imagination and performing it in reality. Like we learned yesterday, when it comes to the formation of your brain’s pathways, the more you practice good actions in your mind, the more likely you are to convert those good actions into automatic behaviors.

Because your imagination impacts who you are, you must ask yourself if you are thinking of ways to do good, to help others, and to successfully resist temptation, or are you imagining giv­ing up on whatever change you want to make? Are you imagining worst-case scenarios and constructing highways in your brain for anxiety, or are you imagining the best and fostering hope? Do you imagine revenge or forgiveness?

Imaginative roleplay can also help you overcome sin by training and making proper reactions to temptation automatic. You can devise and rehearse specific plans in your mind, such as “I will do X in the event of Y.” That way, when such an event occurs, you will respond appropriately and instinctively. When imagining yourself facing a temptation, for exam­ple, it’s easy to think, I wouldn’t do that in real life though. Not so fast.

What you imagine changes you little by little, so whatever you assume is impossible in real life slowly becomes ever more possible. That’s why it’s important to imagine yourself doing the right thing so that you establish it as an automatic response. That is, you will do the right thing without having to think twice about it because you’ve trained yourself to respond that way.

Imagination is a powerful force for shaping and changing your brain. Because the brain activates and reinforces the same path­ways when imagining an action as it does when performing an action, you become what you imagine. That means your imagi­nation can help or hinder your moral development.

Takeaway: Your brain can’t tell the difference between performing an action in your imagination and performing it in reality.