Manifestation sells a seductive promise: align your energy, believe deeply, cultivate the feeling of success, and the life you want will follow.
But if thoughts generate your reality, failure can only mean one thing.
You’re the problem.
Shay Blanchard, entrepreneur and influencer, was manifesting all of it: the money, the business, the audience – the life the internet insists is just a fucking mindset shift away.
“I started the practice from a place of desperation, and the deeper I got into it, the more frustrated I became,” she says. “My life still wasn’t looking the way I wanted it to, and I couldn’t understand why that was when I’d been doing everything right.”
@shay.blanchard The freedom is available for you, you gotta go after it!!
♬ original sound – Shannon 🍒 Lucky Life Guide
Manifestation is the belief that thoughts will attract desired outcomes.
Rooted in the early twentieth-century New Thought movement and later popularised by Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book ‘The Secret‘ on TikTok and Instagram, it’s accumulated millions of views, splintered into dozens of subcultures and spawned an ecosystem of shitty coaching programmes.
As with all trends, however, the complexity gets edited out. What remains is frictionless: visualise clearly, believe deeply, receive effortlessly.
For Shay, the appeal was obvious: the promise of control when everything feels out of reach.
“My thought process was, I’m not where I want to be financially, or career-wise, how can I change this?” she says.
At first, it felt like taking charge of her future, until it started to take a toll.
“All manifestation did was cause more stress and disappointment because you start thinking,” she says. “If I’ve visualised it, if I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do, why isn’t it happening?”
Professor Christopher French is a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a leading researcher in anomalistic psychology.
He isn’t surprised by the pattern.
“There are some people who ‘manifest’ certain things like money, or meeting a new partner, the typical things that motivate humans, it’s like selling a dream,” he says. “It’s selling people a lie basically, selling them a dream that’s quite likely to leave them disappointed. The universe is not just going to plunk these things you want in your lap supernaturally. It’s not going to happen.”
Soon, it turns into self-doubt.
“If you don’t get what you’re hoping for, it becomes your fault. You didn’t want it enough, or you didn’t have enough faith in the technique. People can end up feeling like they are somehow at fault,” he says. “There’s an element of victim blaming in all of this.”
Professor Neil Dagnall, a researcher in cognitive psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, connects this to a process known as reality testing, the ability to distinguish between internal experiences and external evidence.
“It’s affect-driven, making decisions about yourself from an internal framework as opposed to external evidence,” he says. “The outcome will be more volatile in terms of emotional reactivity.”
Failure doesn’t just disappoint, it destabilises – a setback is no longer situational; it’s fucking personal.
Affirmations in pastel fonts, ‘success stories’ squashed into 30-second clips, and bullshit routines that promise everything and more.
Simplicity is part of the appeal and the problem.
“These things can spread like wildfire. The algorithm will direct you to more and more success stories,” French says.
Even if manifestation produces genuine results for a small number of people, the mass frustration, self-doubt, and inadequacy get filtered out before they can reach anyone who might recognise themselves in them.
“The promise of manifestation in the online space is very magical, it’s very much sold like a neatly tied up package with a bow on top, just do it and you’ll get results, which is dangerous and can lead to disappointment,” Shay says. “I want to change my mindset because being someone who’s stuck with limiting beliefs just sucks. It’s not an enjoyable thing.”
The effect depends almost entirely on how manifestation is used.
“If it makes them happy, that correlates with optimism, and optimism correlates with life satisfaction and physiological wellbeing. If the reverse is true, they’re associated with poor psychological well-being,” Dagnall says. “If it starts to interfere with people’s everyday lives, then that’s when something becomes problematic.”
French points to a study in which self-described lucky and unlucky people were asked to count the photographs in a mock newspaper.
Hidden in plain sight was a large advertisement that read: ‘There are 27 photographs in this newspaper, you can stop looking’. The lucky people were far more likely to spot it.
“It’s that kind of thing,” French says. “Taking advantage of opportunities as they come along.”
Not receiving, noticing. Not attracting, acting.
This shift altered how Shay interpreted setbacks in her business.
Where manifestation once encouraged her to see failure as a reflection of insufficient belief, she began to recognise external context.
“I tell myself it’s just a slow season, which is a very real part of running a business, not proof of inadequate belief. Just reality,” she says. “How can you learn from the present and just accept it? I found that when you can accept the present reality as it is, then you can move forward.”
This reframe, from cosmic contract to personal compass, is what the wellness industry’s version of manifestation consistently leaves out.
Visualisation was never meant to override circumstance, only help people act with more clarity.
Strip out that nuance, and what remains is something that looks like empowerment, but functions like a trap.
Shay’s no longer waiting for the universe to catch up.
“My relationship to manifestation really changed,” she says. “And honestly? That’s when it actually started to work.”
