The Best Possible Self Exercise: A 15-Minute Guide to Imagining Your Future

Imagine someone asking you to describe your life five years from now.

You would probably have a few ideas. A different job. A project you are proud of. A bit more freedom. Possibly a houseplant you have somehow kept alive.

Now imagine them asking you to describe an actual Tuesday in that life.

What are you doing at eleven in the morning? What matters to you? What does a good day feel like once it has stopped being a fantasy and become your ordinary week?

That second question is harder, and it is the one this exercise is built around.

Best Possible Self is one of the few things in this category that has actually been tested. What it has been shown to change is how you feel about the future, not whether the future arrives.

What is the Best Possible Self exercise?

It is a positive psychology writing practice, usually shortened to BPS.

You imagine a future in which the important parts of your life have gone about as well as they reasonably could, and then you write about that future in detail. Not a list of achievements. A description of what it is actually like.

Researchers have studied it as a way to influence optimism, mood and wellbeing. It is not a method for predicting or securing outcomes, and you do not need to believe anything in particular to try it.

How to do it

The University of California, Berkeley's Greater Good in Action project sets the standard version: fifteen minutes of writing, once a day, for two weeks.

Here is a version you can do today.

Step 1: pick a point in the future

One year, three years, five. Picture a life where you have made real progress on things that matter to you.

This does not have to mean wealth or recognition. It might be work you enjoy, relationships that hold, time for your own interests, or simply being less at war with yourself.

You do not need to work out how any of it happened yet.

Step 2: make it specific

This is where most people's version of the exercise falls over.

Instead of "I have a successful career", ask: what work do I do, who with, and what does an ordinary day in it contain?

Instead of "I am more confident", ask: in which situations, saying what, and what happened along the way that made that possible?

Berkeley's instructions are explicit about this. If you imagine a new job, describe what you would be doing, who you would be doing it with, and where.

Step 3: write for fifteen minutes without stopping

Describe the future as if you are looking around inside it.

Do not fix your grammar. Do not stop every two sentences to check whether it sounds impressive. Do not write it for an audience.

If you get stuck, go back to one question: what does a good ordinary day in this future actually look like?

One more instruction from the Berkeley version, which is the hardest part: if you find yourself comparing this future to your current life, or listing the money, time and obligations in the way, redirect. For fifteen minutes, imagine the circumstances shifting enough for the future to be possible.

Step 4: read it back

Notice which parts feel important.

Often what surfaces is not what you expected to want. The future you describe might contain fewer obligations than you assumed, or more time with specific people, or a kind of success that has much less to do with recognition than you would have guessed.

That is the actual output of this exercise. Not a plan. A clearer sense of what you were pointing at.

A worked example

Someone in a demanding job who wants more room for independent creative work might write something like this.

It is three years from now and I am at the kitchen table on a Wednesday morning. I still work hard but the shape of the week has changed. There is a small creative business alongside the job now and it matters to me. Some weeks are difficult. A project takes longer than I thought, or I have to learn something I do not know yet. But I have got more comfortable working things out as I go. I do not spend as long looking for the perfect way to start. I make a rough first version and improve it. This evening I am seeing friends and I do not feel guilty closing the laptop.

Look at what that reveals. The writer may have started out thinking they wanted a successful business. What the writing actually describes is autonomy, creative work, a better relationship with their own time, and tolerance for imperfection.

The exercise has not secured any of that. It has told them what they are aiming at, which is genuinely useful and frequently not what people expect.

Does the Best Possible Self exercise work?

Better than most things in this category, with limits worth stating.

A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 29 studies reported across 26 articles, covering 2,909 participants, comparing Best Possible Self writing against control conditions.

Those are standardised effect sizes across studies. They are not percentages. A figure of 0.33 does not mean anyone became a third more optimistic, and it certainly does not mean a desired outcome became a third more likely.

A randomised study published in 2025 adds the detail that matters most, and it is the detail every other article about this exercise leaves out.

Researchers ran the task with 240 students, against a control group who wrote about a typical day, and followed them up a week later. Immediately afterwards the Best Possible Self group reported more positive expectations about their future and better mood. One week later, the shift in expectations was still there. The mood difference had faded.

So the honest version is this. The exercise reliably changes how you feel in the moment, and that part does not last. It also changes what you expect of your future, and that part seems to persist longer. The study found lower anxiety symptoms at follow-up, and the path ran through those changed expectations rather than through the mood lift.

What none of this establishes is that imagining a future brings it about. The measured outcomes are psychological states. That distinction is the whole of our evidence index, and it is worth holding onto here.

Best Possible Self compared with manifestation scripting

On the page they can look almost identical. Both involve writing about a desired future in detail.

The research behind the first does not transfer to the second. You can enjoy either, and we have a guide to manifestation scripting with examples, but be clear about which one has been tested.

What if imagining a good future feels unrealistic?

That is a fair reaction and worth taking seriously rather than pushing through.

Sometimes the gap between your current circumstances and the imagined future is the whole experience of the exercise, and sitting in it is not useful.

Try a smaller version. Not your best possible life, a better ordinary week. Or one area of life improved rather than all of them.

And you are allowed to stop. The aim is not to deny real obstacles or talk yourself into believing everything is available to you. It is to look at a positive possibility for fifteen minutes and see whether anything useful surfaces. If persistent low mood is making that impossible, that deserves proper support, and a writing exercise is not a substitute for it.

How often should you do it?

The Berkeley version is fifteen minutes a day for two weeks. The studies have used everything from a single session to repeated writing over several weeks.

There is no evidence that one exact schedule is required. If you want the researched format, use theirs. If you are treating it as reflection, do it once and see what you notice.

What you should not do is turn it into another standard you feel bad about missing.

Three questions for afterwards

What did I imagine having more of? Time, meaningful work, connection, choice. Name the underlying thing rather than the object.

Which part surprised me? Often the future people describe is quieter than the one they say they want.

What could I explore this week? Not achieve. Explore. A small experiment tells you whether the future you wrote down is one you actually want.

If you want more structure for that, the future-self journal prompts go further, and there is a printable worksheet if you would rather do it on paper.

Your best possible self is not a perfect person

There is something misleading about the name.

It can sound like you are meant to describe a flawless version of yourself who never procrastinates, never worries and never has a bad week.

You are not. You can picture a good life that still contains uncertainty, responsibilities and ordinary problems. You can be more confident in it and still get nervous. You can have meaningful work and not enjoy every hour of it.

The useful part is not inventing someone who never struggles. It is working out which life is worth the trouble.

Fifteen minutes of writing will not deliver your future. It is quite good at telling you which one you were actually asking for.