Home > Support & Survivorship > Patient and Family Support Services Program > Enhancing Treatment

Guided Imagery

Helps Reduce Anxiety, Depression and Fatigue

   LISTEN

An Introduction to Guided Imagery (MP3 4:33)

Guided imagery is a gentle but powerful technique that focuses and directs the imagination. It can be just as simple as an athlete's 10-second reverie, just before leaping off the diving board, imagining how a perfect dive feels when slicing through the water. Or it can be as complex as imagining the busy, focused buzz of thousands of loyal immune cells, scooting out of the thymus gland on a search and destroy mission to wipe out unsuspecting cancer cells.

LEARN MORE

What is guided imagery?

An Overview of Guided Imagery by Belleruth Naparstek
From www.healthjourneys.com

Guided imagery is a gentle but powerful technique that focuses and directs the imagination. It can be just as simple as an athlete's 10-second reverie, just before leaping off the diving board, imagining how a perfect dive feels when slicing through the water. Or it can be as complex as imagining the busy, focused buzz of thousands of loyal immune cells, scooting out of the thymus gland on a search and destroy mission to wipe out unsuspecting cancer cells.

All Senses are Engaged

Although it has been called "visualization" and "mental imagery", these terms are misleading. Guided imagery involves far more than just the visual sense. Instead, imagery involves all of the senses, and almost anyone can do this. Neither is it strictly a "mental" activity - it involves the whole body, the emotions and all the senses, and it is precisely this body-based focus that makes for its powerful impact.

How does it help?

Over the past 25 years, the effectiveness of guided imagery has been increasingly established by research findings that demonstrate its positive impact on health, creativity and performance. We now know that in many instances even 10 minutes of imagery can reduce blood pressure, lower cholesterol and glucose levels in the blood, and heighten short- term immune cell activity. It can considerably reduce blood loss during surgery and morphine use after it. It lessens headaches and pain. It can increase skill at skiing, skating, tennis, writing, acting and singing; it accelerates weight loss and reduces anxiety; and it has been shown, again and again, to reduce the aversive effects of chemotherapy, especially nausea, depression and fatigue.

Because it is a right-brained activity, engaging in it will often be accompanied by other functions that reside in that vicinity: emotion, laughter, sensitivity to music, openness to spirituality, intuition, abstract thinking and empathy.

Anyone Can Use It

Because it mobilizes unconscious and pre-conscious processes to assist with conscious goals, it can bring to bear much more of a person's strength and motivation to accomplish a desired end. So, subtle and gentle as this technique is, it can be very powerful, and more and more so over time.

One of the most appealing and forgiving features about imagery is that almost anyone can use it...imagery skips across the barriers of education, class, race, gender and age - a truly equal opportunity intervention.

People can invent their own imagery, or they can listen to imagery that's been created for them. Either way, their own imaginations will sooner or later take over, because, even when listening to imagery that's been created in advance, the mind will automatically edit, skip, change or substitute what's being offered for what is needed. So even a tape, CD or written script will become a kind of internal launching pad for the genius of each person's unique imagination.

Sources

An Overview of Guided Imagery by Belleruth Naparstek -- from www.healthjourneys.com.

updated 08/08

Return to top

Read Finding the Calm Within
an article about the benefits of Guided Imagery

See Also:

• Health Journeys
• The Healing Mind
• Academy for Guided Imagery

Adjust text size

University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center
1500 East Medical Center Drive
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

This site is part of the U-M Health System. The information presented is not a tool for self diagnosis or a substitute for professional care. © 2008 U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center