Rethinking Positive Thinkingis Gabriele Oettingen’s 2014 book arguing that the happy daydreams we are told to cultivate actually drain the energy we need to reach our goals, and that the fix is not to stop dreaming but to set each dream against the obstacle inside you.
Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg, built the case over roughly twenty years of experiments: dieters who pictured themselves slim lost less weight, graduates who daydreamed about dream jobs sent fewer applications and earned less, and students who imagined top grades studied less.
Her answer is a four-step exercise called WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan).
Table of Contents
I finished the book feeling a little exposed, because I recognised my own habit of mentally “finishing” projects I had not started. This Rethinking Positive Thinking summary walks you through every chapter, the studies and numbers behind them, how to run WOOP yourself, and where I think the science deserves a harder look.
What Is the Main Lesson of Rethinking Positive Thinking?
The main lesson is that dreaming alone makes you less likely to get what you want, while dreaming followed by an honest look at your inner obstacle makes you more likely to act. Here are the key takeaways at a glance:
Positive fantasies are not the same as optimism. Optimism built on past experience (“I’ve done this before, I can do it again”) predicts success. Free-floating fantasies about an ideal future predict the opposite.
Dreaming relaxes your body. In one study, women who fantasised about wearing high heels saw their systolic blood pressure drop after just a few minutes. Relaxed people do not get off the couch.
Your mind treats the fantasy as a done deal. Oettingen calls this “mental attainment”: in the imagination you have already arrived, so the urge to act fades.
Dreams still have jobs. They help you endure situations you cannot control, give short-term relief, and show you what you really want.
Mental contrasting is the core fix. Imagine the best outcome first, then the main obstacle inside you. The order matters.
It works as a filter. When a goal is realistic, mental contrasting energises you. When it is unrealistic, it helps you let go and redirect your effort.
Add an if-then plan. Pairing mental contrasting with Peter Gollwitzer’s “implementation intentions” produces WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.
Reported results are concrete. WOOP groups exercised about an hour more per week, back-pain patients managed nearly double the lifts of controls at three months, and students completed 60 percent more PSAT practice questions.
Look inward for the obstacle. “No time” is usually a symptom. Fear, guilt, habit, or insecurity is usually the real block.
The catch: most of the evidence comes from Oettingen’s own lab, and an independent 2021 meta-analysis found a real but modest effect for the method.
Who Should Read Rethinking Positive Thinking?
You will probably love this book if you have read The Secret or a stack of “manifest it” books and quietly wondered why nothing changed, like self-help that comes with study designs, sample sizes, and control groups, are a teacher, coach, counsellor, manager, or health worker who wants a quick, free tool to hand to other people, and tend to start strong and stall, especially on health habits, studying, or difficult conversations.
You might bounce off it if you want a short, punchy read. The book repeats its study structure (fantasise, measure, follow up) many times, and the middle chapters can feel like a lab report, expect independent replication of every claim.
Much of the research described is Oettingen’s own, and are dealing with clinical depression, trauma, or addiction and need treatment rather than a motivation tool. WOOP can sit beside professional care but is not a substitute.
Introduction
Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation is a nonfiction psychology book by Gabriele Oettingen, first published in October 2014 by Current, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). The ebook came out on October 16, 2014, and the paperback followed on November 10, 2015, at 240 pages, according to Penguin Random House. The book has eight chapters plus a preface, notes, and an index.
Oettingen dedicates it to her sons Anton and Jakob and her husband, the psychologist Peter M. Gollwitzer.
Context: genre, subject, and the author’s credentials
The book sits between popular science and practical self-help. Its subject is motivation, specifically how the way we picture the future changes what we do in the present.
Oettingen’s background makes her an unusual voice on the topic.
According to her Wikipedia entry, she was born in Munich in 1953, studied biology in Munich, earned her PhD at LMU Munich, and completed her habilitation at the Free University of Berlin. She has taught at the University of Hamburg since 2000 and at New York University since 2002. Penguin Random House notes she has written more than 100 articles and book chapters on how thinking about the future affects cognition, emotion, and behaviour.
In the book itself, she mentions that Martin E. P. Seligman, founder of the positive psychology movement, was her research advisor at the University of Pennsylvania. So this is a critique of positive thinking from someone trained inside the optimism research tradition, not outside it.
Purpose: what is the book’s central argument?
The central thesis appears in the preface: the obstacles we think block our wishes “can actually hasten their fulfillment.” Pure dreaming, Oettingen argues, lets us fulfil wishes in our heads and saps the energy to fulfil them in life. Pure dwelling on problems does not help either.
What helps is “mental contrasting,” holding the dream and the obstacle together in a specific order, and then adding a concrete if-then plan. The book’s closing questions sum up the whole project: what is your dearest wish, and what holds you back from achieving it?
Background
Oettingen questioned positive thinking because her own early data contradicted it, and because she arrived in America from a culture that talked about problems more frankly.
As a German who moved to the United States, she noticed that Americans answered “I’m fine” even when they were not, and she describes a 1986 incident in Philadelphia where a professor was criticised by colleagues for being too “negative” about her personal troubles in a faculty meeting.
Her interest in fantasy began in Cold War Berlin. Studying depression across the border, she visited bars (Kneipen) in adjacent parts of East and West Berlin and recorded more visible signs of depression, such as slumped postures and sad faces, among East German patrons. She met an East German painter with no canvas or paint who told her, smiling, that one day he would visit Paris.
He had no evidence from his past that he ever would. That moment convinced her that hope based on fantasy is a different animal from hope based on experience.
The psychology of the time did not separate the two. Seligman defined optimism as expectations built on past success, and researchers such as Albert Bandura had shown those expectations predict effort and achievement. Oettingen borrowed a line from William James’s The Principles of Psychology, who wrote that everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence. If that difference holds for the past, she reasoned, it should hold for the future too.
The cultural backdrop matters as well. Oettingen opens chapter one by naming The Secret (2006) and Chicken Soup for the Soul as examples of a “cult of optimism,” and she cites a 2010 Pepsi Optimism Project survey in which 94 percent of respondents said optimism matters for creating ideas that change the world.
She also engages with Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book Bright-Sided, which attacked positive thinking as a mass delusion. Oettingen agrees with part of that critique but refuses the conclusion that we should simply become stern realists.
Rethinking Positive Thinking Summary
Below is my full summary of the book’s argument and evidence. I have kept the study details, because the numbers are the point. If you read this section carefully, you will have everything the book argues and most of what it proves.
Preface: What Problem Does the Book Set Out to Solve?
The preface frames the problem as the “curse of freedom.” In traditional or repressive societies, rules and authorities push people to act. In modern Western life, nobody stands over us telling us to stay healthy, build a career, or raise a family, so we have to motivate ourselves.
Oettingen says fantasies feel good in the short term but leave people “mired in indecision,” lurching from one plan to another. She promises a method, WOOP, that is easy to learn and works for short- and long-term wishes.
Chapter 1, “Dreaming, Not Doing”: Does Positive Thinking Actually Hurt Results?
Yes. According to chapter one, free-flowing positive fantasies about the future consistently predicted worse outcomes across health, love, work, and school.
The chapter opens with Ben, a college student in the late 1980s who spent months daydreaming about a woman he saw in the cafeteria, imagining museum trips in Rome and sketches on the quad, but never asked her out. Then come the studies.
The weight-loss study. Oettingen followed 25 obese women in a weight-loss programme at Penn. She measured two things separately: how likely each woman thought she was to succeed (expectation) and how positive her fantasies were when she completed scenarios such as meeting an old friend after finishing the programme or walking past a plate of doughnuts. After a year, women with high expectations lost an average of 26 pounds more than those with low expectations.
But women with the most positive fantasies lost 24 pounds less than those whose fantasies were more negative. She published this in 1991. She writes that colleagues told her to “stick closer to established concepts,” and that her second paper on the subject was rejected several times.
The crush study. She recruited 103 college students who had a crush on someone they were not dating. Five months later, the students with high expectations were more likely to have started a relationship. The students with the most positive fantasies were less likely.
The job study. In 1988 she recruited 83 male graduate students at a German university. Two years later, those who had fantasised more often about landing a job reported sending fewer applications, receiving fewer offers, and earning less money.
The exam study. To get away from self-reports, she studied 117 college students before a midterm and logged their actual grades. The more positively students fantasised, the lower they scored and the less they said they studied.
The hip surgery study. She worked with 58 patients in a German hospital before their first hip replacement. Two weeks after surgery, physical therapists who knew nothing about the study rated recovery. Patients who expected to recover well, based on an understanding of the steps, moved better and climbed more stairs. Patients who visualised a quick, easy recovery did worse.
She adds that by the late 1990s she had found the same pattern among children with chronic illness, low-income high school dropouts, and women in a business skills programme. Her summary line is memorable: people were “dreaming themselves to a standstill.”
Society-level data. With A. Timur Sevincer, she analysed the financial pages of USA Today during the 2007 to 2009 crisis and found that the more positive the coverage in a given week, the more the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined over the following week and month. Inaugural addresses from 1933 to 2009 showed a similar pattern: the more positive the speech, the lower the GDP and the higher the unemployment in the following term.
She is careful to say her results describe statistical likelihoods, not doom for every dreamer.
Chapter 2, “The Upside of Dreaming”: Are Positive Fantasies Ever Good for You?
Yes. Chapter two argues that fantasies help when you cannot act, give quick relief, and reveal what you truly want.
Oettingen first sets herself apart from Freud, who saw fantasy as unhealthy, and from Ehrenreich’s call for hard realism. She tells the story of Rachel, whose boyfriend Tim was jailed for selling marijuana to pay for college. While waiting for his sentencing, Rachel daydreamed about standing up in court and winning the judge over. The fantasy changed nothing in court, but it got her through the wait.
Fantasies come from needs. With Heather Barry Kappes, she deprived 70 students of food and drink for four hours, then fed some of them salty crackers.
The thirstier students fantasised more positively about drinking water. In a second study, 85 adults whose sense of meaning had been challenged produced rosier fantasies about a job interview. Needs, she concludes, generate dreams, and dreams keep our attention on the need.
Dreams help with easy tasks and waiting. A thirsty traveller in the desert who only needs to bend down when water appears benefits from staying alert to it. A person who needs months of auditions does not.
She cites Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report, which found 70 percent of American workers “not engaged” or “actively disengaged,” as one setting where daydreams help people kill time.
Dreams give a short hit of pleasure but feed later depression. With Doris Mayer, she asked 88 students to fantasise through twelve scenarios and measured depression. Four weeks later, the students with the most positive fantasies were more depressed, even though fantasising had coincided with lower depression at the time. She compares this to coping strategies such as denial that feel good now and cost later.
Dreams help you find your real wishes. Her example of a premed student eating a cheeseburger who imagines hospital night shifts and realises he hates hospitals is one of the funniest passages in the book. Fantasy, she says, is a cheap way to test-drive a future.
Her bottom line for this chapter: dreams are good for quite a lot, as long as we do not ask more of them than they can give.
Chapter 3, “Fooling Our Minds”: Why Do Positive Fantasies Make Us Less Motivated?
Positive fantasies reduce motivation because they relax the body and trick the mind into feeling the goal is already reached.
The high heels study. Oettingen and Heather Barry Kappes recruited 164 female students and asked them to imagine wearing fabulous high heels. One group kept fantasising positively; another was asked to write negative thoughts (sore feet, blisters, nobody noticing). Systolic blood pressure, a marker of energy, dropped in the positive-fantasy group and did not change in the other.
Oettingen notes that a cigarette raises blood pressure by about five to ten points, and the fantasy lowered it by almost half that much, after just six minutes of dreaming.
Fantasies make hard tasks less likely. In a study with 81 students reading about a painkiller shortage in Sierra Leone, those who fantasised that the crisis was solved were just as willing to donate $1 but less willing to donate $25. A follow-up using time (five minutes versus sixty) gave the same result. She also cites a figure that 21.7 percent of daily deal buyers never redeem their coupons, and speculates, openly, that fantasy might play a part.
Fantasies reduce felt energy and real accomplishment. In a study of 50 students, those who fantasised about winning a $200 essay prize felt less energised. In another with 49 students, those who imagined a perfect week felt less energised and, a week later, reported accomplishing less.
Mental attainment. The most interesting study in this chapter used a revenge story and a reaction-time word test. Students who fantasised more positively about getting revenge were slower to recognise violence-related words, which in this kind of task suggests the goal had already been “attained” in their minds. As she puts it, dreaming becomes a “fairly convincing (if short-lived) substitute for doing.”
Fantasies bias what we read. In a second shoe study with 77 women, those who fantasised positively spent more time reading the pros of high heels than the cons on a mock website, but only if they did not already strongly plan to wear heels.
She closes with a joke I keep repeating to friends: a man begs God to let him win the lottery, and God finally answers, “Would you buy a ticket already?”
Chapter 4, “The Wise Pursuit of Our Dreams”: What Is Mental Contrasting?
Mental contrasting is the practice of first vividly imagining the best outcome of a wish and then vividly imagining the main obstacle inside you that stands in the way. Oettingen built it around 1990 after her early results disappointed her.
The first mental contrasting study. With 168 female students at two Berlin universities, she compared four groups: mental contrasting (future then obstacle), indulging (future only), dwelling (obstacle only), and reverse contrasting (obstacle then future). Two weeks later, the result surprised her.
Mental contrasting did not boost everyone. It energised students who already had high expectations of success and reduced effort among those with low expectations. In her words, people benefit most from pursuing “not just any wish, but a feasible wish.”
That twist is the heart of the book. Mental contrasting is a sorting tool. It pushes you harder toward what you can realistically get and helps you disengage from what you probably cannot. Her friend Kevin, who spent years chasing his late father’s entrepreneurial dream before taking an MBA and a management job he enjoys, illustrates the letting-go side.
More evidence from the chapter:
The “Michael S.” study. 143 female students saw a photo of an attractive model presented as a doctoral candidate. Mental contrasters with high expectations became much more eager to meet him; those with low expectations cooled off.
Blood pressure. With 63 students, mental contrasting raised systolic blood pressure when the goal seemed attainable, and later work showed the effect lasted at least twenty minutes. Indulging lowered it regardless.
Math. 90 male vocational students who mentally contrasted put in more effort and got better grades from teachers when they expected to improve.
Asking for help. Among 135 undergraduates, mental contrasters who expected help actually got more of it two weeks later.
Creativity. 158 students given flattering feedback and mental contrasting solved about 6.5 creativity problems, compared with about 5 for indulgers and about 4 for dwellers.
Mental contrasting for fears. Oettingen flips the method for anxiety. You imagine the feared future first, then the positive reality that makes it unlikely. With 158 adolescents in Weißensee, an ethnically homogeneous district of Berlin, this reverse-direction exercise increased tolerance and willingness to engage with refugee peers among those who believed they could overcome their fears. She adds a caveat I appreciated: mild anxiety can help performance, so use this only on fears that are both unjustified and debilitating.
The chapter ends with Charlie, a graduate student caring for his grandmother through ovarian cancer, who realised his real obstacle to taking a break was guilt. He described mental contrasting as “like ripping the Band-Aid off.”
Chapter 5, “Engaging Our Nonconscious Minds”: How Does Mental Contrasting Work?
It works mostly below awareness, by wiring the wish to the obstacle and the obstacle to the action that beats it.
Oettingen opens with Nick and Liz, a long-distance couple who keep dreaming about a house in Vermont until Nick sees that his fear of leaving his EU job is the real obstacle. Then the lab work:
Future-to-reality links. With Andreas Kappes, she tested 134 students using a primed lexical decision task, flashing a “future” word for 50 milliseconds, too fast to read, then asking participants to classify a “reality” word. Mental contrasters with feasible wishes recognised the obstacle word faster. The link ran in one direction only, future to reality, which explains why the order of the exercise matters.
The link dissolves once you succeed. In a study of 142 students, the association faded for those who were told they had scored in the 87th percentile on a creativity test, but stayed for those told they were in the 43rd.
Obstacle-to-action links change behaviour. 99 students were sent three floors down for a fake BMI measurement. A hidden camera recorded stair use. Mental contrasters who believed they could get fitter took the stairs more, and the strength of the “elevator to exercise” association partly explained it.
Obstacles look more like obstacles. Studies with 130 and 119 students showed that mental contrasting made the obstacle feel more negative and more clearly an obstacle when success seemed likely.
Chess. 65 children from six German chess clubs were better at spotting that their own queen blocked checkmate after mental contrasting, if they thought winning was feasible.
Negative feedback. Among 153 students, mental contrasters with high expectations remembered more of the negative feedback they received and used it constructively.
The chapter closes with Brenda, who discovered that her resistance to exercise came from painful past associations, and realised that exercise was now something she wanted to do rather than had to do.
Chapter 6, “The Magic of WOOP”: What Are the Four Steps of WOOP?
WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan, and it combines mental contrasting with if-then planning. Oettingen opens with two school counsellors she worked with in Minnesota in fall 2013.
Tammy realised her real obstacle was the pressure she put on herself to finish every chore, and she let the laundry wait so the family could eat together. Leslie realised she felt “too busy” to walk her puppy Jo-Jo, which kept him barking all night. She walked him and slept eight hours.
Field evidence for mental contrasting. 52 mid-level health care managers who practised mental contrasting for two weeks reported better time management and easier decisions than those who only indulged. A study led by her son Anton with 49 second and third graders in a low-income German school found mental contrasters did better on an English vocabulary quiz.
Implementation intentions. The “P” comes from Gollwitzer’s research. In one early study with Veronika Brandstätter, students asked to write a report about their holidays two days after Christmas Eve returned it 71 percent of the time if they had planned when, where, and how, versus 32 percent without a plan. The most effective plans follow the format: “If situation X arises, then I will perform response Y.”
Oettingen reports that a statistical analysis of almost one hundred such studies found a “medium-to-large” effect. In a small study of 20 people in drug withdrawal, 8 of 10 with if-then plans wrote a résumé by 5 p.m., compared with none of the 10 without.
Why combine them? Mental contrasting builds commitment and identifies the obstacle. The if-then plan pre-loads the response. In a snacking study with Marieke Adriaanse, women who did both cut back more than those who did either alone.
The four steps as the book describes them:
- Wish. Pick one wish that is challenging but feasible within a set time (a day, a week, a year). Name it in three to six words.
- Outcome. Identify the single best result of fulfilling it. Imagine it vividly and let the images flow.
- Obstacle. Ask what in you holds you back. Look inside, not outside. Oettingen suggests that a feasible wish already accounts for external barriers. Imagine the obstacle just as vividly.
- Plan. Choose the most effective action or thought against the obstacle, identify when and where it will next show up, and form an if-then plan. Say it once more to yourself.
She flags a common mistake. People keep the if-then shape but put the goal behavior in the “if” slot. An attorney’s “If I raise my voice and challenge opposing counsel, then I will help my client” is wrong. “If I feel insecure when she objects, then I will remind myself I’m just as prepared” is right. The “if” must be the obstacle or the situation.
She also shows how WOOP can bring up hard truths. A counsellor named Colin, wishing to buy a house with his partner David, discovered that his obstacle was anxiety about settling into a domestic life in Minnesota, tied to his painful childhood.
Chapter 7, “WOOP Your Life”: Does WOOP Work Outside the Lab?
According to the studies reported in chapter seven, yes, across health, relationships, school, and work. Oettingen first points out that people rarely mental contrast on their own. In one study with Sevincer, only 9 percent spontaneously did so, compared with 36 percent who indulged in the desired future. Across three studies, only 16 percent did it naturally.
Health results reported in the book:
| Study | Participants | Reported result |
|---|---|---|
| Exercise and diet (with a German health insurer) | 256 women aged 30 to 50 | About one hour more exercise per week through four months; more fruit and vegetables still at two years |
| Chronic back pain | 60 patients | 35 lifts vs. fewer than 30 at three weeks; nearly 40 at three months, almost double the controls |
| Stroke rehabilitation | 201 mostly male patients | About 170 minutes of exercise per week after a year; average weight loss of 4.6 kg |
| Binge drinking | 72 undergraduates | 1.8 drinking bouts per week vs. more than 2.5 in controls |
One honest detail I respect: after two years, the exercise advantage in the 256-woman study had vanished. Oettingen argues a single one-hour session cannot hold a hard habit forever and that repeated WOOP is needed.
Relationships. 127 students in relationships of at least three months used WOOP to curb insecure behaviours such as checking a partner’s phone. Their plan was fixed: “If I feel jealous, then I will continue with my ongoing activities.” WOOP produced almost twice the reduction of the other groups and more commitment to the relationship.
School and work. In a study led by Angela L. Duckworth, high school and middle school students who learned WOOP completed 60 percent more PSAT practice questions over the summer. German parents rated WOOP students as finishing more homework, including children at risk for ADHD.
Low-income American middle schoolers with WOOP reminder cards improved their grades and attendance. Health care workers reported less stress and more engagement after three weeks.
Oettingen also places WOOP next to other approaches, including Carol Dweck’s growth mindset and Locke and Latham’s SMART goals. Her point is that those methods try to change conscious beliefs or goals, while WOOP works on the nonconscious links between wish, obstacle, and response. She calls it a complement rather than a replacement.
Chapter 8, “Your Friend for Life”: How Do You Make WOOP a Daily Habit?
You make WOOP a habit by practising it daily, starting with an emotional wish and a 24-hour wish, and adjusting your wishes as you learn. Oettingen compares WOOP to a guide dog that is not invested in any particular outcome but keeps you on a path. Her practical guidelines:
Begin with a deep wish and a 24-hour wish. An alcoholic who cannot fantasise about “not drinking” might find the real wish is a better marriage, and drinking becomes the obstacle.
Do it in the morning. She does, and reviews the day in the evening, often finding that her behaviour followed her plan without conscious effort.
Keep the format. Do not skip steps, reverse the order, or rush the imagery.
Use the app if it helps. She mentions free apps at woopmylife.org, including one built for low-income students aiming at college.
Fine-tune. A salesperson aiming for ten sales a day might reset to six after a partial win.
Ask “why” until you reach the real obstacle. Ray thinks his obstacle is binge eating. Underneath is loneliness. Underneath that is time wasted online. Each WOOP leads to the next.
Be patient and track progress. Her colleague Linda thought WOOP failed when she slept in instead of waking at 6 a.m. to answer emails. Oettingen argues WOOP worked by helping her choose a better path.
Use it for stress, fear, and decisions. For fears, start with the worst outcome and then the reassuring reality. For decisions, mental contrasting alone can settle a question like whether to buy a plane ticket or save for a car.
Start children young. A third grader who cried for hours at small frustrations learned a five-breath plan through WOOP and later asked for the principal’s phone so he could “do WOOP.”
She ends where she began, with the two questions about your dearest wish and what holds you back.
How Do You Do WOOP in Five Minutes? A Worked Example
To make this practical, here is how I would run a written WOOP based exactly on the book’s instructions, using a common wish.
Wish (3 to 6 words): Finish the report draft this week.
Outcome: Relief on Friday afternoon, a free weekend, a manager who stops chasing me. (Close your eyes and picture it for a minute.)
Obstacle (inside you): Not “too many meetings.” Ask why. Maybe the real block is fear that the draft will be judged as weak, so you open email instead. (Picture the moment you reach for the inbox.)
Plan: “If I feel the urge to check email when I open the draft at 9 a.m., then I will write one rough paragraph first.”
Notice the structure. The “if” is the obstacle, with a time and place. The “then” is one small, specific action. That is the whole method.
Rethinking Positive Thinking Review: My Critical Analysis
Rethinking Positive Thinkingis a sharp, humane, and refreshingly modest corrective to a self-help culture that sells wishing as a strategy. I came away grateful for a tool I can use in under five minutes, and a little wary of how much of the proof comes from one research family.
Does Oettingen support her arguments with evidence?
Mostly, yes. Every major claim is tied to a described study with a sample size, a control group, and an outcome measure, and several outcomes are objective rather than self-reported: actual grades, physical therapist ratings, hidden-camera stair use, blood pressure, lifts in a timed test.
She also designs controls that rule out obvious alternatives, such as reverse contrasting to show the order matters and a neutral picture-rating dummy task to show positive feedback alone was not doing the work.
Still, the samples are often small (25 women, 58 patients, 20 people in withdrawal), and the society-level findings about USA Today headlines and inaugural addresses are correlations that cannot tell us which way causation runs. Positive speeches might come in bad times as reassurance, for example.
Does the book fulfil its purpose?
It does. The promise in the preface was a simple, evidence-based method for turning wishes into action, and WOOP is exactly that. It also makes a real contribution by separating two kinds of optimism, expectations and fantasies, that popular culture lumps together.
What independent research says
This is where I want to be fair to both the book and the reader. Jill Suttie, reviewing the book for Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine on December 17, 2014, praised the argument but noted that few of the experiments described were run by anyone other than Oettingen herself, which raises the risk of bias.
Since then, independent work has appeared. A 2021 meta-analysis by Guoxia Wang, Yi Wang, and Xiaosong Gai in Frontiers in Psychology pooled 21 studies with 24 effect sizes and 15,907 participants. It found a “small to medium” effect of mental contrasting with implementation intentions on goal attainment (g = 0.336).
After adjusting for publication bias with the trim-and-fill method, the estimate dropped to 0.242. Interventions delivered face to face did better (g = 0.465) than those delivered through documents (g = 0.277). The authors themselves call for more studies.
My reading of that: WOOP works, but more gently than some of the book’s striking single-study numbers suggest. “Nearly twice as much” in a small trial and a pooled g of about 0.24 to 0.34 are not the same story.
Strengths: what I found compelling
The distinction between expectation and fantasy. This one idea reorganised how I think about hope. You can be confident about a goal and still harm yourself by daydreaming about it.
Honesty about failure. She reports that her early papers were rejected, that the two-year exercise effect faded, and that results are “statistical likelihoods.” Self-help books rarely admit that much.
Disengagement as a feature. Most motivation books push you to persist. This one tells you it is healthy to drop a wish that WOOP reveals as unrealistic. For anyone burned out on endless striving, that is a relief.
The “obstacle inside you” rule. Shifting the question from “what’s in my way?” to “what in me holds me back?” is the most practical line in the book.
Range of populations. Children, stroke patients, refugees’ future neighbours, nurses, students, chess players. The variety is impressive even if the labs are mostly hers.
Weaknesses: what frustrated me
Repetition. Chapters four and five follow the same template many times. Readers who want the method can skim much of the middle.
Small samples and self-reports. Several headline results rely on what participants said they did.
The language of “magic.” Chapter titles and phrases like “the magic of WOOP” sit awkwardly beside a careful scientific argument, and they slightly undercut the book’s anti-hype message.
Speculation mixed with data. The Groupon example and the questions about heart surgeons and air traffic controllers fantasising are framed as speculation, but they sit right next to real findings, and a quick reader may not notice the difference.
Little engagement with critics. Apart from Freud, Maslow, and Ehrenreich, the book rarely tests itself against researchers who might disagree.
My personal reaction as a reader
Reading chapter three, I felt caught. I am someone who drafts the celebratory part of a project in my head, the finished essay, the good feedback, long before I write a sentence.
Oettingen’s high-heel and essay-prize studies suggest that this habit is not harmless warm-up; it may be quietly lowering my energy before I start. Equally, I found chapter two kind. It did not shame me for daydreaming. It simply told me what dreams are good for (waiting, relief, discovering what I want) and what they are bad for (doing hard things).
That balance is why I trust the book more than louder titles in the genre.
Which Books Are Similar to Rethinking Positive Thinking?
Books similar to Rethinking Positive Thinkingeither attack positive thinking, explain motivation science, or teach habit-building with planning. Here is how it compares:
Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). The cultural attack on positive thinking that Oettingen cites directly. Ehrenreich is polemical and sociological; Oettingen is experimental and constructive. Read Ehrenreich for the diagnosis, Oettingen for the treatment.
The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (2006). The book Oettingen names in her first chapter as part of the “cult of optimism.” It is close to the opposite thesis: visualise and receive. Oettingen’s data are a direct challenge to its central promise.
Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman (1990). By Oettingen’s former advisor. It focuses on expectations and explanatory style. Rethinking Positive Thinkingfits beside it as a refinement rather than a rejection.
Mindset by Carol Dweck. Oettingen discusses Dweck’s work in chapter seven. Dweck changes your beliefs about ability; WOOP changes the mental links between goals and obstacles. They pair well. You can read my Mindset book review for the comparison.
Atomic Habits by James Clear (2018). Clear also recommends implementation intentions, the “P” in WOOP. His book is better on environment design; Oettingen’s is better on figuring out which goals deserve the effort.
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. A writer’s take on inner resistance, which is close to what Oettingen calls the internal obstacle, minus the lab data. See my piece on The War of Art and Resistance.
For wider reading lists, try my 15 best books on motivation and willpower, the 20 best self-help books with mini-reviews, the 100 best psychology books of all time, and, on Sopranu, 10 best productivity books ranked, and where their advice breaks down.
FAQs Rethinking Positive Thinking
What is the WOOP method?
WOOP is a four-step motivation exercise from Gabriele Oettingen: name a Wish, imagine its best Outcome, identify the main internal Obstacle, and make an if-then Plan to handle it. It combines her mental contrasting research with Peter Gollwitzer’s implementation intentions.
Is positive thinking bad, according to Oettingen?
Not entirely. Oettingen says positive expectations based on past experience help performance, and positive fantasies help you wait, cope, and discover what you want. What hurts is relying on fantasies of an easy, ideal future when the goal requires hard work.
What is the difference between mental contrasting and positive visualisation?
Positive visualisation stops at the dream. Mental contrasting adds a second step: imagining the obstacle inside you, always after the dream. The book’s lab studies suggest that the order creates a mental link that prompts action when the goal is realistic.
How long does WOOP take?
Oettingen suggests fifteen to twenty minutes the first time, and a few minutes or less once you are practised. Her lab exercises took between five and twenty minutes.
Is WOOP scientifically proven?
There is solid support, with caveats. Oettingen’s own studies show consistent effects, and a 2021 independent meta-analysis of 21 studies found a small to medium positive effect on goal attainment. The effect appears smaller after correcting for publication bias, so expect real but modest gains.
Can WOOP help with anxiety?
The book adapts it for unjustified fears: imagine the feared outcome first, then the reassuring reality, then form an if-then plan. Oettingen recommends it only for strong, unjustified fears, since mild anxiety can help performance. Anyone with a diagnosed anxiety condition should treat this as a supplement to professional care.
Who is Gabriele Oettingen?
She is a German-born psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg who has studied how thinking about the future affects motivation for more than two decades. She also discussed her research on NPR‘s Hidden Brain podcast in 2016.
Conclusion:
Is Rethinking Positive Thinking worth reading?
Yes, especially if you are a chronic dreamer who struggles to start. Rethinking Positive Thinkingtakes a slogan most of us absorbed without question and tests it the slow way, study by study, and the result is both humbling and useful. Dreams are not the enemy. They are just bad at doing the work.
When you pair them with an honest look at what in you is holding you back, and a simple if-then plan, they turn into fuel instead of a sedative.
Who will benefit most? General readers who want evidence-based self-help, students, teachers and school counsellors, coaches, managers, and health professionals who want a free, quick tool for clients. It is accessible to non-specialists, and Library Journal recommended it for general readers, noting that it is approachably written and includes detailed exercises. Specialists in motivation science will know most of the studies already, and should go to the primary papers and the 2021 meta-analysis for a sharper picture of effect sizes.
If you take one thing from this Rethinking Positive Thinking summary, take Oettingen’s two closing questions and answer them truthfully tonight. What is your dearest wish? What, in you, holds you back from achieving it?
