Using functional imagery training to manage anxiety

Jackie Andrade

Like many students at university, Jasmine found her anxiety rising as assessments approached. She felt she had coped pretty well with the first weeks, meeting new people and getting into a routine with shopping and cooking, but now the workload was ramping up and she did not feel prepared for her first assignment. She had worked so hard to get here and was increasingly terrified that she would fail. Perhaps talking to her tutor would help but that would mean admitting she had fallen behind, so she felt trapped. Right now, she just wanted to quit so the stress would go away and she could feel more like herself again.

Jasmine saw a study on anxiety advertised on the School of Psychology’s research portal and signed up. In a single session of FIT lasting around 40 minutes, delivered by a research student, she practised imagining how she would plan and set aside time for her assignment, and how good she would feel when she handed it in knowing that she had done her best. The researcher asked her to choose a task that she did frequently that would remind her to practise imagery. Jasmine chose her favourite procrastination activity, making a cup of coffee. Whenever she waited for the kettle to boil, she closed her eyes and imagined taking the coffee back to her desk and completing the next step of her plan. She found this quite relaxing, mentally practising what she was going to do next. In her own words, FIT “gets all those bad thoughts out of your brain, because you're using the positive imagery. You're not worrying any more”. Because she was spending less time worrying, Jasmine completed her assignment successfully and started the next one feeling more confident. 

A follow-on study of 29 students with anxiety found that FIT reduced their scores on a measure of anxiety – the GAD-7 – by an average of 5.4 points. This reduction was not simply an artefact of being in a study; participants in a ‘delayed intervention’ group did not experience reductions in anxiety while they were waiting to receive FIT. This research has recently been published in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy.

Participants in our study told us that the imagery component of FIT was key to helping them change: “I guess it's just picturing it all done and the feeling of it all being done. It kind of makes you want to get to that feeling as soon as possible. So yeah, you try and do as much as you can, so you can feel happy and sorted.”

If you work with young people experiencing anxiety, please get in touch to find out how FIT can help them to find their happiness. Email us at functionalimagerytraining@plymouth.ac.uk

You can read the study for free here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005796725001081

Andrade, J., Kavanagh, D. J., Bowditch, C., Mackriel, E., Ravenhill, E., Sime, A., ... & May, J. (2025). Early phase testing of functional imagery training as an intervention for anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 104786.