What Is the 'Best Possible Self' Exercise — and Does It Actually Work?
By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-26 · 8 min read
Ten minutes imagining an ordinary Tuesday in a future that's gone well. It's not gratitude, and it's not the future-letters exercise either — here's what the research says, and why I added it anyway.
The best possible self exercise asks you to do something that felt almost illicit the first time I tried it: spend ten minutes imagining, in stupid amounts of detail, a future where things went well. Not brilliantly, not a lottery win — just well. I built it into Kansha a good while after gratitude journalling was already the whole point of the app, because I kept bumping into the same gap. Gratitude is superb at making you notice the good in today. It has almost nothing to say about tomorrow.
What is the "best possible self" exercise, exactly?
It comes from a psychologist called Laura King, who in 2001 asked people to write for twenty minutes a day, four days running, about a future in which everything had gone about as well as it realistically could. Not a fantasy where you win the lottery and never work again — a future built from choices you could actually recognise yourself making. You pick a slice of life, you pick a point in the future, and you write the scene in as much ordinary detail as you can stand.
The bit that trips people up is the word "ordinary." The instinct is to write a highlight reel — the promotion, the wedding, the marathon finish line. Kansha's version pushes back against that on purpose: the actual prompt you get is "It's an ordinary morning. I wake up and…" You're not writing the highlight. You're writing the Tuesday. What time do you get up, who's in the room, what's the first thing you do, how does the whole unremarkable stretch of the day actually feel from the inside. That's where it stops being a vague wish and starts being something closer to a place you could imagine walking into.
Isn't this just the "letters to your future self" thing again?
I wondered the same thing before I added it, and it's worth being honest about the overlap because on the surface they look like cousins. They're not doing the same job.
A letter to your future self is a message — you write it now, seal it, and it gets delivered to you on a set date. The point, drawing on research into what's called future self-continuity, is to close the gap between how vividly you can picture yourself now versus the stranger you'll become in five years; the more real that future person feels to you, the better the decisions you tend to make for them. It's fundamentally an act of communication across time.
Best possible self isn't a letter and nobody delivers it to you later. You're not writing to a future version of yourself — you're rehearsing being them, right now, for ten minutes, and then getting up from the desk changed by having done it. The research behind it sits closer to something psychologists call possible-selves theory: the idea that who you are includes not just your current self but the range of selves you could become, and that vividly picturing one of those possible selves quietly reorganises what you pay attention to and work towards. One exercise is about the relationship between now-you and future-you. The other is about temporarily becoming future-you and seeing what that does to today.
What does the research actually say?
I wasn't going to build a whole practice into the app on vibes alone, so here's what's actually been tested.
King's original 2001 study had 81 undergraduates write about one of four things: their most traumatic experience, their best possible future self, both, or a neutral control topic. Two results stood out. First, writing about your best possible self produced a real, measurable rise in wellbeing immediately — and unlike trauma writing, which is famously a rough couple of days before it helps, people didn't find it upsetting to do. Second, and more surprising: five months later, the people who'd written about their best possible self (like those who'd written about trauma) had fewer visits to the doctor than the control group. A writing exercise about an imagined future, done for less than two hours total, showing up in health records five months on.
A few years later, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky ran gratitude counting and best-possible-self visualisation head-to-head over four weeks. Both lifted positive mood straightaway compared with a control group, with no real difference on the negative-mood side — neither one cancels out your bad days, they're just adding good ones. The detail I paid closest attention to: people who kept doing the best-possible-self exercise at the two and four-week check-ins were the ones showing sustained gains. One go moves the needle for a day. Coming back to it is what makes the needle stay moved.
Then in 2011, Meevissen, Peters and Alberts had people picture their best possible self for five minutes a day over two weeks and tracked optimism after one session, one week, and two weeks. Optimism, mood, and expectations for the future all improved — and the improvement built as the fortnight went on rather than maxing out on day one.
I'll be straight about what this means for Kansha's version, which is a single ten-minute session rather than King's four days or Meevissen's fortnight: treat one sitting as a genuine mood lift and a useful bit of clarity, not a guaranteed rewiring of your outlook. The studies that show the biggest, most durable shifts all involve showing up more than once. That part isn't optional, and I'd rather say so than let the single-session version oversell itself.
Why put a forward-looking exercise inside a gratitude app?
Because gratitude and best-possible-self are, in a real sense, two ends of the same problem. Gratitude corrects for the fact that your memory is lopsided towards the bad — it forces the good, ordinary parts of an already-lived day back into view. Best possible self corrects for something else: most of us are oddly bad at picturing a good future in any real detail. Ask someone what they want and you get fog — "I'd like to be happier," "work should be less stressful." Ask them to write the ordinary Tuesday morning inside that happier, less stressful life, and the fog usually clears into something specific enough to actually walk towards.
I noticed this properly when I was deciding whether to leave client work and build Kansha full-time. It wasn't a spreadsheet that got me off the fence — I made plenty of those, and they mostly told me what I already knew, which is that the numbers were uncomfortable either way. What actually shifted things was sitting down and writing, in far more domestic detail than felt reasonable, what an ordinary Tuesday looked like two years into actually doing it. Not "the business succeeds." What time I'd start, what the first hour looked like, whether I'd still dread Monday mornings. Once that Tuesday had a shape, the decision stopped being abstract enough to keep circling and became a thing I could actually choose.
How do you actually do it?
The mechanics in Kansha are close to King's original, compressed into ten minutes.
Pick a domain first — your life as a whole, work, relationships, health, or creativity. Narrower is easier to write and easier to make specific, so if it's your first go, I'd steer away from "life as a whole" and towards one slice of it.
Pick a horizon — one year, five years, ten years, or a whole life. Nearer horizons tend to produce more grounded, plausible detail. Further ones give you more room to imagine real change, at the cost of feeling slightly less real while you're writing it.
Set ten minutes on the clock and start from "It's an ordinary morning. I wake up and…" Resist the highlight reel. Write the parts nobody would put in a speech — what you eat, what's on your desk, the small friction that's no longer there.
When you stop, rate how optimistic you feel about that future out of 100. It's not a test. It's just a marker, so that if you come back to this in a month, you've got something to compare against rather than a vague sense of whether it's "working."
Where it falls apart
It's not free of risk, and I'd rather flag the failure mode than pretend there isn't one. If you're using it to imagine a rosier version of a situation you already know needs to end — the job, the relationship, the thing you've been putting off — vividly picturing it going better can quietly become a more sophisticated way of not dealing with it. That's the same trap as toxic positivity wearing a different outfit: optimism doing the work that a hard decision should be doing instead.
It also feels odd the first time. Sitting down to earnestly imagine your own good future has a faint whiff of self-help seminar about it, and I'd be lying if I said that feeling fully goes away — it just gets less loud the more ordinary and specific you make the writing.
And it's worth saying plainly: if picturing any good future at all feels genuinely out of reach rather than just awkward, that's worth mentioning to your GP rather than pushing through with a writing exercise. There's real research showing that low mood can specifically blunt the ability to picture detailed future events, not just present ones — so struggling with this particular exercise isn't a character flaw, it can be a symptom, and it deserves more than ten minutes and a journalling app.
The two halves of the same practice
Gratitude keeps you honest about the good that's already happened, which your memory would otherwise quietly discard. Best possible self keeps you honest about what you're actually aiming for, which vague hope would otherwise leave permanently out of focus. Doing only the first one risks a life you're grateful for but not sure you're building towards anything. I added the second one to Kansha because I needed both, and I'd rather admit that than pretend gratitude alone was ever going to be the whole answer.