It’s Not Just Imagination: The Physical Impact of Your Thoughts

I never cease to be amazed at what the mind can do.

When I worked in pharmaceutical R&D, most people thought the placebo effect was just a figment of the imagination. Now we know that what you expect to happen when you take a placebo prompts your brain to meet that expectation.

This results in a release of chemicals that the brain has available to it to produce the effect you’re expecting – within reason. 

This is the scientific basis of the placebo effect. 

And this effect also contributes to the efficacy of a large number of medications. Believing in a drug (or a doctor) can make it work better, for example. It’s also why more expensive versions of the same thing often work better for people (a branded product vs a mass market version) because the higher price results in a greater expectation, which drives a greater change in brain chemistry.

But some of the most impressive mind-body effects come when we use visualisation, which is what I want to talk about here, because some powerful new studies were published in 2025.

For starters, visualising movement impacts the same neural circuits as making the actual physical movements. 

Move your arm, imagine moving your arm. Look at a brain scan and the changes are the same.

There’s a reason for this. 

If our ancient ancestors heard rustling in a bush, it may or may not have been a predator looking to eat them. The brain needed to react the same way, though – regardless of whether it was real or imagined danger. If it didn’t then they might not have lived to pass their genes on.

So evolution favoured a brain that processed real or imagined things in more or less the same way.

The scientific journals are aplenty with research on visualisation, but I thought I’d highlight a few new 2025 papers.

Using Visualisation to Increase Strength in Older People

Most visualisation research has employed younger people as volunteers. Reasons for this include the fact that universities often recruit volunteers from the campus and there are far more young university students around. 

Secondly, a major research area for visualisation has been sports science and in helping enhance sports performance. Since most sportspeople are younger, it always made sense to recruit volunteers or a similar age.

But in this new research, scientists recruited older people. The youngest was 68 years old, the oldest was 87.

They asked them to visualise doing bicep curls – three sets of 10 a day, Monday-Friday each week for 8 weeks.

Incredibly, this improved their maximum strength by 22%.

Without lifting a weight during that time.

That’s not a small number.

Imagine you could bench press or squat 100 kg and then, doing nothing different other than visualising yourself doing lifts, you upped that to 122 kg. That’s what it’s equivalent to.

I particularly like this study. There’s plenty of research showing that visualising can make us physically stronger, but this showed that the effect is irrespective of age. So yes, we can even use visualisation in old age to increase physical strength.

I think that’s pretty significant.

Other studies show the best strength gains come when we combine actual training with visualisation training.

Using Visualisation to Reduce Pain

Another significant piece of visualisation research from 2025 that I’d like to highlight is where visualisation was found to produce about the same reduction in pain as physiotherapy treatment for arthritis patients.

Out of 48 arthritis patients, half received TENS, ultrasound, hot pack application, and did knee exercises. The other half visualised receiving the treatments – where someone verbally led them through a visualisation of receiving each treatment.

For example, when visualising receiving TENS treatment, they visualised the silicon electrodes being placed on their skin. They were guided to imagine the tingling sensation that’s typical of the electrical stimulation of a TENS device. They were also reminded of the technical details of the device – its frequency and pulse.

And the same kind of idea for ultrasound and hot pack application. They visualised doing the knee exercises too, imagining the physical sensations.

The treatments – real or visualised – were 45 minutes long, 5 times a week, for 2 weeks.

Incredibly, the reduction in pain was as big for those who visualised the treatments as in those who had the physical treatments.

That’s astonishing.

Pain reduction visualisation often uses symbols to represent pain and then moving them – for example, a ‘pain’ dial with the dial moving from a high number to a low number. But here, they simply visualised receiving treatment.

I want to say, though, that this doesn’t diminish the power of these therapies, which help millions of people around the world. I just want to highlight what the mind can do.

How Does it Work?

There’s two things going on. 

First, visualising impacts brain circuits in much the same way whether a thing is really happening or whether it’s being imagined, as I pointed out a moment ago.

The second thing is that the brain makes its own painkillers as it responds to expectation of pain relief. When a visualisation is clear and a person is immersed in it, like they were in this study, the brain will have released its own painkillers – known as endogenous opioids – which then reduce the pain. 

The researchers didn’t measure the opioids, but given it’s a standard placebo pathway the brain uses in placebo analgesia, it’s most likely what happens.

And importantly, the pain is reduced specifically where they visualise. Research at the university of Turin, for example, showed that when a person had expectation of pain relief induced in one hand or foot and not the other, pain reduced in only that hand or foot. 

The brain had produced endogenous opioids only in the region corresponding to where they expected pain relief.

So whether you use visualisation to improve your strength (you can also use it to improve your flexibility, by visualising yourself doing stretching exercises) or to manage pain, one thing is certain:

Our minds are much more powerful than most people tend to realise.

References

The 22% strength gain study. Link here

The pain reduction study. Link here

University of Turin research: Link here

To read more about visualisation, placebo, and more, I’ve written two books that dive deeper into the subjects:

‘How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body’ and ‘Why Woo-Woo Works: The Surprising Science Behind Meditation, Reiki, Crystals, and Other Alternative Practices’