Why Building a Vision Board Makes the Restlessness Worse

Introduction: Looking at It Does Not Fill You

Pictures of the ideal house, the car, the destinations, the body, the partner, pasted onto a single board and looked at every day. A vision board is a device for visualising a wish and drawing forward the felt sense of its arrival. In principle it was to generate positive feeling and sharpen the goal. And yet, continued over time, each viewing does not fill the mind so much as build a faint restlessness. Is that experience familiar?

The correct way to build a vision board has already been discussed at length. What this article places is the question one step before it: why picturing a wish more vividly intensifies the restlessness instead.

Here is the conclusion first. The restlessness does not build because you are pessimistic. To wish for something is logically identical to confirming that you do not currently have it. A wish setting out from lack pushes that lack further into the foreground the more it is concentrated upon. This is not a question of a bright or dark disposition. It is a question of the structure of the act itself.

To Want Something Is to Confirm Its Absence

Each time a person looks at the picture of the ideal house, they simultaneously confirm that today, again, they do not live in it. Each time they read the list of wishes aloud, they present themselves with an inventory of what has not yet arrived. A wish taking absence as its starting point becomes a daily ritual of confirming absence.

Manifestation teaches people to hold a sense of fulfilment, while what is actually performed daily is the repeated confirmation of an unfulfilled present. The very attempt to manufacture a positive mood keeps digging up the fact lying beneath it — that this has not yet been obtained. Concentrating awareness on a thing wanted includes, by definition, concentrating awareness on the state of lacking it. Concentrate brightly or concentrate darkly: so long as the object of concentration is something not currently held, the lack comes with it.

Attention Enlarges Whatever It Is Turned Toward

The mechanism is bound up with how attention works. Human attention enlarges, within the mind, whatever it is turned toward. Concentrate awareness daily on some object and that object gains presence in your life.

When manifestation teaches people to concentrate awareness on the state of arrival, what actually enlarges is the gap against the reality in which nothing has arrived. The more attention is poured in, the more that gap swells inside the mind. The act of concentrating awareness becomes, in itself, the watering that grows the lack. Ironically, the more vivid the vision board, the stronger the effect. Rendering the ideal down to its details renders the distance between that ideal and your present self in equally sharp relief. Raising the resolution of the wish is, in the same motion, raising the resolution of the lack.

Even a Gratitude List Turns Into a Device for Confirming Lack

A distinction from gratitude lists is worth touching on here. Gratitude — turning toward what is already at hand — sets out from sufficiency rather than lack, and works to settle the mind. In the manifestation context, however, even gratitude is bent into a means of attracting a future not yet held.

The moment a person is asked to give thanks as though you already have it, gratitude ceases to be a confirmation of sufficiency and becomes work performed to fill a lack. The same act of gratitude works in opposite directions according to whether its starting point is sufficiency or lack. That a practice which ought to fill a person can be converted into a device for confirming lack shows how deep the frame of manifestation runs.

Feeling That It Has Arrived Takes the Action Away

Psychological research reveals a further pitfall in the vision board. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen studied experimentally, over more than two decades, the effects of picturing a desired future. Her conclusion runs directly against the teaching of manifestation. The more vividly people fantasise about a desired future in positive terms, the more they lose the energy to act toward realising it [Oettingen, 2014].

The reason is plain. Feeling that something has already arrived, the brain responds to some degree as though it genuinely has, and the urgency of moving toward the goal slackens. Draw the sense of achievement forward and the action that would repay the loan stops occurring. A vision board does not merely build restlessness; it quietly blocks the circuit that would convert that restlessness into action.

▸ The whole picture of this mechanism, in which concentration removes action, is dissected in does the subconscious mind really grant wishes.

Conclusion: Restlessness Is the Accurate Symptom of a Wish Set Out From Lack

That building a vision board makes the restlessness worse was never a matter of your being pessimistic. Wanting something is identical to confirming its absence, and a wish setting out from lack reproduces that lack the more it is concentrated upon. Attention swells the gap, gratitude itself converts into work performed against lack, and feeling that it has arrived removes the action. The restlessness was not a defect. It was the accurate symptom of a wish whose starting point was lack.

If so, what is required is neither more vivid picturing nor stronger concentration. It is to ask again whether the wish set out from absence or from presence. Receive, as your next step, the design for re-examining the starting point of a wish. The whole structure producing this restlessness is set out in what the law of attraction actually is.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Oettingen, G. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation (2014) Current
• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. “A Dark Side of the American Dream” (1993) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2)