Joseph Murphy’s mental movie method vs mental-rehearsal research

What is Murphy’s mental movie method?

It is one of the techniques Murphy lists in chapter 6 of his best-known book, the chapter of practical techniques. Reading the 1963 text on 20 October 2026 (a transcription), we counted 10 techniques with their own heading in that chapter: passing-over, visualization, the mental movie, Baudouin’s technique (Murphy spells it “Baudoin”), the sleeping technique, the “thank-you” technique, and the affirmative, argumentative, absolute and decree methods. The mental movie sits right after visualization, which he introduces this way: “The easiest and most obvious way to formulate an idea is to visualize it, to see it in your mind’s eye…”

His own example comes from a lecture tour. He wanted a permanent base in the Midwest. In a hotel in Spokane, Washington, he relaxed on a couch and imagined himself talking to a large audience, saying in effect that he was glad to be there and had prayed for the ideal opportunity. He writes that he played the role of the actor, felt the reality of the scene, and woke the next morning at peace. A few days later, he says, a telegram asked him to take over an organization in the Midwest.

The second example is aimed at people selling a house: satisfy yourself that the price is right, relax into a drowsy, sleepy state, picture the check in your hands, give thanks for it and fall asleep feeling that it is natural. Murphy closes the section with the claim the whole method rests on: “A mental picture held in the mind, backed by faith, will come to pass.” He opens the section by crediting the same idea to William James, without a reference.

The method, broken into its parts

Murphy presents the mental movie as one gesture, but it bundles five separate choices. Research can test some of them and not others, so it helps to pull them apart before asking whether “it works”.

What mental-practice research supports

Sport and skill psychologists have studied “mental practice”, rehearsing a task in the mind without moving, for decades. In a 1994 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology, James Driskell and colleagues concluded that “mental practice has a positive and significant effect on performance.” The effect depended on the type of task, on how long the practice lasted, and on the delay between practice and performance.

A 2020 follow-up by Adam Toth and colleagues, covering 37 studies published between 1995 and 2018, found the effect again but smaller: “MP has a small but significant positive effect on performance (r = 0.131).”

Notice what was rehearsed in those studies: a movement, a sequence, a task the person then performed. That is nearer to Murphy’s Spokane scene, where he pictured himself speaking, though in a post he did not yet have, than to the house sellers picturing a check that someone else would hand them.

Picture the steps, not only the prize

In a 1999 study, Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor asked first-year students to spend 5 to 7 days, before a midterm exam, picturing the process (good study habits), the outcome (getting a good grade) or both; a control group only monitored their studying. The authors report that “process simulation enhanced studying and improved grades”, the effect on grades running through better planning and less worry. The abstract credits the gains to picturing the process; it does not report a gain from picturing the grade.

This is the most useful correction to Murphy’s method. His instinct to make the scene concrete, sensory and lived from the inside holds up. His choice of the happy ending as the scene does not. A moment of doing, the first sentence of the talk or the call you will make on Monday, is the version research favours.

When feeling it as real backfires

Murphy asks you to feel the outcome as already real and to go to sleep satisfied. Gabriele Oettingen’s research suggests that this feeling of already having can cost energy. In 2002, Oettingen and Doris Mayer reported four prospective studies, among them graduates looking for a job, students with a crush and students before an exam, with effort and performance measured weeks to two years later: “Positive expectations ... predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies.” These studies show a link over time, not a cause.

In four experiments with 343 American undergraduates in all, published in 2011, Heather Barry Kappes and Oettingen found that positive fantasies about an idealized future produced less energy, measured by blood pressure or by self-report, than questioning, negative or neutral fantasies. The studies are short lab sessions, and none of them tested Murphy’s exact ritual. They do suggest a fix that he did not offer: after the pleasant scene, name the obstacle.

Oettingen’s mental contrasting does exactly that: the wish, then the inner obstacle that stands in its way. Paired with an if-then plan, what Peter Gollwitzer calls an implementation intention, it becomes MCII, taught to the public as WOOP. A 2021 meta-analysis by Wang, Wang and Gai (21 studies, 24 effect sizes, 15,907 participants) found a small-to-medium effect of MCII on goal attainment, g = 0.336, and g = 0.242 once adjusted for publication bias (trim-and-fill); the authors warn that “the actual effect sizes may be smaller.”

Worked example: Murphy’s version and the evidence-based version

Take Murphy’s own theme, speaking in front of people, and a reader who has a talk to give on Thursday. The left column follows chapter 6; the right column keeps Murphy’s concreteness and first-person view, and swaps the parts research questions.

Running a mental movie in Dream Architect

The app’s night ritual, “Picture your dream”, keeps the parts of the mental movie that hold up and drops the promise. Your first night always uses the quick flow, three steps: The moment, The feeling, Sleep on it. After that you choose Quick or Full; the full flow has seven steps. These counts, and the ones below, come from the app’s content on 20 October 2026.

The moment is the scene. You can tap “Write my own moment”, whose hint reads “A few words, in the present tense.”, or pick one of 84 written scenes (4 for each of the 21 life areas) under “Or borrow one”, behind “Other ideas” once you have a moment of your own, which comes first. The feeling step asks “It’s real. What do you feel first?” and offers 5 feelings, among them Quiet confidence. In the full flow, Tomorrow’s sign and One small step add the cue and the action that Murphy’s method leaves out.

At the end, “I close my eyes” turns the screen dark: your moment shows for a few seconds with “It’s real.” and your feeling, then fades into a slow breathing ring. The screen stays dark for 1, 2 or 3 minutes (2 by default, under “How long the screen stays dark” in Settings). The next morning, the morning check-in asks: “Last night you relived this moment. This morning, did anything remind you of it?” That question is the honest version of Murphy’s telegram: you look for a sign you can act on, not for proof that the scene caused it.

What to keep from Murphy, and what to leave

Keep the concreteness: a place, a voice, a gesture, seen from the inside. Keep the repetition: in chapter 16 Murphy has a salesman run the same mental movie “night after night”, and the app asks “Tomorrow night, the same moment?” so that you come back to a scene you already know. Keep the calm ending.

Leave the mechanism. Murphy’s stories, the telegram and the buyer, are his own anecdotes, told without the nights when nothing arrived. No research cited here shows that a pictured outcome changes what other people do. What it shows is narrower and more useful: rehearsing your own next action improves how you carry it out by a small margin, and facing the obstacle with an if-then plan gives a small lift to following through.

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