Why imagining movement might help with Parkinson's — how this site thinks about it, the brain science behind it, and an honest account of what's solid, what's shaky, and what we simply don't know yet.
The rest of this page explains all of that more fully, with the studies behind each point. Read as much or as little as you like.
Here's an important difference this site starts from. Parkinson's gets worse slowly over time — it isn't a one-off injury you can simply relearn your way back from. So the word "recovery" — getting back to how things were — doesn't belong here. Nothing on this site will promise that.
But there's an opposite mistake too. Because Parkinson's gets worse over time, it's easy to think the only honest thing to offer is comfort and acceptance — with no hope that movement itself can improve at all. That would be too cautious. For some Parkinson's symptoms, there's real, published research showing that mental practice can genuinely help — not a lot, but really.
Not getting better in the sense of going backwards — but living better, and sometimes moving a little more easily, even while the condition itself keeps moving forward.
That's the whole claim, and nothing more. Every practice, every script, and every evidence rating on this site sticks to it — hopeful where the research allows it, and quiet where it doesn't.
When you clearly imagine doing a movement, your brain doesn't just sit there. Picturing an action in detail switches on many of the same brain areas that switch on when you actually do it. Imagining a movement and actually making it are, to your brain, close cousins.
Researchers have used this to study Parkinson's itself. Brain scans of people imagining walking show unusual activity in the very same walking-control areas that are linked to freezing (Snijders et al., 2011). Imagining and moving really are close relatives in the brain.
There's a catch here that doesn't come up with other conditions, and it would be dishonest to skip past it. Parkinson's slows down imagined movement too — not just real movement. When researchers ask people to imagine a task and time how long the imagined version takes, it comes out slowed in much the same way the real movement is (Heremans et al., 2012). How vivid someone's imagery is also varies from person to person, and appears to be connected to how severe their symptoms are (Readman et al., 2023).
Put simply: the very ability these practices rely on is itself affected by the condition they're meant to help with. That's an uncomfortable thing to admit on a site built around imagery. It's also true, so it belongs here.
The same research found something useful inside that problem. When people were given cues to guide the imagery, the slowing got smaller and the pictures got clearer (Heremans et al., 2012). That's the reason every practice on this site is led and paced by a voice, instead of leaving you to imagine on your own. With Parkinson's, guided imagery and unguided imagery are not the same thing — and the research suggests the guiding is the part that matters.
There's a second part to this, and it's less tidy. Cueing helps, but it doesn't appear to solve the whole problem.
Guided imagery traditionally asks you to feel a movement rather than watch it — to sense the weight shifting, the hand closing, the foot meeting the floor. That's called kinaesthetic imagery, and it's the approach the practices on this site are built around. It comes from the tradition Jeremy trained in, where the felt sense is treated as the thing that does the work.
But two studies from the same research group suggest something different may be happening in Parkinson's. In one, people with Parkinson's and healthy volunteers were both asked to imagine a hand movement while watching it. Both groups got better at copying it. But only the healthy volunteers reported their mental pictures becoming more vivid — the Parkinson's group reported no change. And when researchers looked at what predicted the improvement, the healthy group's gains tracked how well they could feel the movement, while the Parkinson's group's gains tracked how well they could see it (Bek et al., 2019). In the second study, people practised imagery daily for six weeks. Their performance on the actual tasks improved considerably. Their imagery didn't get more vivid at all — if anything it slipped slightly (Bek et al., 2021).
Taken together with the slowing that Heremans found, that's three studies pointing the same way: imagery in Parkinson's may run on a different track than it does in people without it, leaning on the visual rather than the felt, and practising doesn't reliably make it more vivid.
There's one more wrinkle, and it cuts against the assumption you'd naturally make. You might expect that more severe symptoms mean weaker imagery of the affected side. A separate study looked at this directly and found the opposite for one measure: people with more severe slowness on their left side reported more vivid felt-sense imagery for that side, not less. The same wasn't true for the right side, or for tremor, or for overall symptom severity — just that one specific link. The researchers' best guess is that a limb that's become more effortful to move draws more attention, and that extra attention may be what shows up as vividness (Readman et al., 2023). It's a single finding, not yet replicated, so it shouldn't be leaned on — but it's a reason not to assume that more advanced symptoms automatically mean less to work with in a practice like this.
What this means if you're using the practices. If a script asks you to feel your hand closing and all you get is a picture of it, you are not doing this wrong. You may be doing exactly what the research suggests people with Parkinson's tend to do — and in the one study that looked, it was the seeing rather than the feeling that went with the better result. Take whichever comes more easily. Don't strain after a sensation that won't come; the straining is more likely to get in the way than the missing sensation is.
It would be more comfortable to leave this out. It sits awkwardly beside scripts written in the language of feeling, and the honest position is that nobody knows yet which route matters, or whether vividness is the mechanism at all. But three studies is a pattern rather than a stray finding, and a site that asks you to trust its account of the evidence has to include the parts that complicate its own design.
So the basic idea holds together, with those caveats attached: if imagining a movement uses real movement circuitry, and if the imagery is cued and guided so it stays clear, then practising an easy, comfortable movement in your mind might make that ease a little more available to your body. That's a reasonable idea — but an idea isn't proof, and the next section is where we get honest about what's actually been tested.
Research into imagery for Parkinson's is still new, and it's patchy. Put simply: the basic brain-science case is fairly solid, a few small studies point in a hopeful direction but aren't very certain, at least one well-run study found no effect at all, and some symptoms have barely been studied. Here's how that plays out across the five practices.
The single most important thing to know is a disappointing one. A 2025 study pooled together many carefully done trials of motor imagery and watching movement, using the standard overall movement-symptom score doctors use for Parkinson's. It found no real improvement — whether people were on their medication or off it (Pettenuzzo et al., 2025). For overall movement symptoms, the most recent and most direct evidence says: no effect. Keep that in mind for everything below.
It isn't the only study to come up empty. An earlier trial run across several treatment centres — better designed than most in this field — compared mental practice against plain relaxation, and found mental practice was no better for people's mobility (Braun et al., 2011). That one is worth sitting with for a moment, because it can be read two ways: either mental practice didn't do much, or relaxation did just as much good. The study can't tell the difference, because nobody in it was given neither. Since this site offers both, the result is less damning than it first looks — but it's still a null result, and hiding it would defeat the point of this page.
Walking is the one area where something positive still shows up — but only when researchers measure walking itself, not overall movement scores. The brain-science reasoning is solid: imagining walking uses the same circuits involved in freezing. There's also a sensible argument that imagery could help someone rehearse a way through freezing triggers — like walking through a doorway — by practising where to place their attention or which cue to use (How, Wagner & Brach, 2022). Reviews focused on walking report small, uncertain improvements in walking speed and in freezing episodes afterward. Several studies have reported fewer freezing episodes after training built around watching movement, including one where brain scans changed alongside the walking (Pelosin et al., 2010; Agosta et al., 2017). But the one well-run trial that combined watching movement with imagining it found no effect on freezing or balance at all (Bezerra et al., 2022).
That difference deserves naming, because it doesn't flatter this site. The encouraging freezing results mostly come from watching movement on video. The practices here are about imagining movement. The two are related — the brain treats them as cousins — but they aren't the same thing, and evidence for one doesn't automatically carry across to the other. If freezing is your main worry, video-based observation training and cueing strategies from a physiotherapist have more behind them than anything on this site does, and that's where to start.
That fragile, carefully-hedged bit of hope is also the best reason on offer among the five practices. It isn't a strong reason. It's simply the strongest one available — which is why Walking Freely is still rated Emerging rather than something sturdier.
Slowness of movement (bradykinesia) used to be the most hopeful area — trials found that adding motor imagery to physiotherapy improved slowness more than physiotherapy alone (Kashif et al., 2022). Two things have since weakened that finding. Those trials mixed imagery together with virtual reality, so no one could tell how much imagery alone was doing. And the big 2025 study above, which directly measured movement symptoms including slowness, found nothing. One cleaner study did speed up finger movement after a single session of watching movement, and the effect was still measurable two days later (Pelosin et al., 2013). It's worth knowing what that was measured against: not a blank screen, but a steady sound cue — an approach already known to help people with Parkinson's. That's a demanding comparison to come out ahead of, which makes the result more interesting than it first appears. It was still a small study measuring finger tapping in a lab, not anything in daily life. This is why Finding Flow's rating was lowered.
Bradykinesia also already has an established, physiotherapy-based treatment most people won't have heard named this way: LSVT BIG, an intensive programme that retrains movement amplitude directly, with a randomised trial showing a clinically meaningful improvement on the standard motor scale against both an active comparator (Nordic walking) and unsupervised training (Fox et al., 2012). That's a different approach from mental rehearsal — physical retraining rather than imagined rehearsal — and where a physiotherapist offering it is available, it has firmer evidence behind it than anything on this page. If reduced movement amplitude is your main concern, ask your physiotherapist whether LSVT BIG is available to you.
This site doesn't offer a guided-imagery practice for speech, and that's on purpose. Soft, unclear speech in Parkinson's (called hypophonia) already has a proven, gold-standard treatment — LSVT LOUD — which works through intensive, effortful retraining of how loudly a person speaks. That's a completely different approach from mental rehearsal, and it gets results that last (Ramig et al., 2001; Fox et al., 2012). Offering a gentle imagery script alongside it would wrongly suggest the two are equally effective. If speech is a concern, the honest advice is to see a speech-language therapist — not to use a script from this site.
There is one related thing on offer here, and the difference is worth being precise about. A one-to-one conversation with Jeremy can make room for how a changing voice feels — going quiet in a group, not bothering to repeat yourself, letting someone else speak for you, the slow retreat from conversations you used to enjoy. That's the social and emotional side, and it isn't what LSVT LOUD sets out to treat. It also isn't a replacement for LSVT LOUD. No conversation will make your voice louder; only the voice therapy does that.
Whatever the research does or doesn't show, one rule sits above all of it. Guided imagery is offered here alongside the things that actually do the heavy lifting in Parkinson's care — medication and its careful timing, physiotherapy, cueing strategies, speech therapy, and the guidance of a Parkinson's team. It never replaces any of them, and every practice page says so in its own words.
If a practice ever starts to feel like a replacement for your medical care, that's a sign to step back, not to lean in further. This site is meant to sit quietly alongside good treatment — not compete with it.
Imagining a movement is about as low-risk as anything in Parkinson's care gets. Nobody has reported harm from it in any of the studies on this page. But "low-risk" isn't the same as "no situations to think about," and it would be a poor sort of honesty to spend this much space on what the evidence doesn't show and then skip past this.
There are three situations worth naming.
If you experience freezing, or falls. Every practice here is done seated or lying down. Picturing an easy, unhurried step must never become a reason to attempt walking somewhere you'd normally avoid, or without the aid or the company you'd usually have. Feeling calm and steady during a practice is not the same as being steadier on your feet afterwards. If anything, treat these practices as a reason to be more deliberate about real-world walking and balance, not less — and keep using the cueing strategies your physiotherapist has given you.
If you experience hallucinations or confusion. These can occur in Parkinson's, sometimes as a side effect of dopamine medication. If that's something you've experienced, please talk to your neurologist before doing vivid imagery work. It isn't that imagery is known to cause any problem — it's that nobody has studied how deliberately generating strong mental images interacts with that particular experience, and your neurologist knows your situation and your medication. That conversation is worth having first.
If swallowing has become difficult. This one isn't about the practices at all. Swallowing difficulty needs proper assessment by a speech-language therapist, and it shouldn't wait — it carries risks that a quiet practice, or a conversation with anyone on this site, does nothing to address. If it applies to you, please raise it with your Parkinson's team rather than working around it.
Beyond those three: if any practice leaves you distressed, dizzy, or uncomfortable, stop. There is no benefit here worth pushing through discomfort for, and nothing on this site is the sort of thing where persisting is the point.
The separate ingredients used on this site — imagining movement, watching movement, relaxing, and breathing exercises — each have research behind them, listed in the bibliography. But the specific way they're combined into a four-part session — Part I (Breath and Light), Part II (The Ideal Being), Part III (The Anatomical Pathway), and Part IV (Closing) — is Jeremy's own creation, based on a therapy approach developed by Milton Erickson and his followers. That whole four-part combination has never been tested together in a clinical trial, and every practice page says so clearly. It's reasonable to trust the individual ingredients; it wouldn't be reasonable to assume the whole recipe has been proven.