Wishful Thinking: What Positive Thought Really Does to the Heart, Mind, and Soul

The most popular advice in the world may be quietly making you weaker. For thirty years researchers have tested the promise at the center of positive thinking: that vividly imagining the life you want helps you get it. The results came back the opposite of what everyone expected. The job seekers who fantasized most got fewer offers. The dieters lost less weight. The patients recovered less mobility. Pleasant imagination does not fuel pursuit - it relaxes you, because the mind treats the daydream as a partial payment on a reward that was never earned. Three thousand years earlier a Hebrew king had already written it down: The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing. WISHFUL THINKING is an unsentimental account of what positive thought actually does to a human being - to the mood, the body, the nerves, the will, and the soul - and where it fails the people who need it most. It takes the science seriously. Cognitive therapy, learned helplessness, the placebo effect, the broadening power of joy, the research on gratitude and hope and post-traumatic growth. And it holds every finding up against the King James Scriptures, where the same terrain was mapped long before anyone measured a cortisol level. Inside you will find: The machinery of the mind - why interpretation runs upstream of emotion, why a broken spirit really does dry the bones, and why the ten spies came back from Canaan calling themselves grasshoppers Where wishing fails - the untempered mortar of Ezekiel, the tyranny of the forced smile, the rich fool who spoke beautifully to his own soul, and why affirmations make some people feel worse The renewing of the mind - repentance as a change of mind, Philippians 4 read as an ancient protocol, gratitude that is accounting rather than denial, and hope that maketh not ashamed. This is not a book that asks you to lie to yourself about a single thing. It does not promise a smaller storm. It offers a foundation, and the storm comes anyway, and the house stands. For the man who tried affirmations and felt like a liar. For the woman told to keep her chin up at a funeral. For the believer who suspects some of what he heard from a pulpit about faith was the law of attraction wearing a cross. Stop wishing. Start building. And build on something that was there before you were.