Regular training is the process necessary to achieve the goal of completing the marathon.
If you repeatedly visualise the process of getting out of bed, putting on your running clothes and trainers and leaving the house to train, you will effectively lay down a “mental blueprint” for your brain and body follow when your alarm sounds in reality.
This will make it much easier to go for a run in the morning because your brain will have come to expect the process of waking up, getting ready and going straight out to train.
Regular exposure to spiders is the process necessary to achieve the goal of dealing with them calmly and rationally.
If you repeatedly visualise the process of finding a glass and a piece of card, placing the glass on top and the card underneath the spider and calmly putting it outside, you will effectively lay down a “mental blueprint” for your brain and body follow when you next encounter a spider in reality.
This will make it much easier for you to deal with spiders because your brain will have come to expect the process of getting the glass and card and calmly removing the spider.
Neuroscientists describe the brain as “plastic” because it can be shaped by our experiences rather than being hardwired with fixed ways of working.
This means that if you experience something repeatedly – an activity, a thought, a behaviour – a specific pattern of neural connections will be established in your brain relating to that experience. You are – in effect – programming your brain to activate this pattern of neural connections every time you have the experience so that you can eventually do it on autopilot.
That’s why something like riding a bike or learning a language feels incredibly difficult at first and then becomes so easy we do it without thinking.
When you first learn to drive, you’re nervous and frightened. Your foot shakes above the pedals, each movement feels clunky and unnatural. After repeated practice, you master it and driving becomes an activity you do on autopilot.
Habits work in the same way: if you do something repeatedly, your brain will develop an expectation that you’ll do it and it will start to feel “right” somehow (regardless of whether the activity is helpful or harmful).
That’s why we might feel the urge to eat chocolates in front of the TV every evening or why some people seem to exercise every day with little effort.
It’s the same for emotions, if you repeatedly feel a certain emotion – like fear about public speaking or anxiety about taking the public transport – these emotions become established in your brain like a habit.
But the flexibility of our brains means that if we decide to make those changes, after a while the new way of doing things will become normal requiring no willpower. We are not stuck with the brain we were born with: we all have the power to train our brains to work in the way that we want. We can leave behind unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour and install new ones which, if repeated, simply become part of who we are and how we do things.
Visualisation is the magical tool which will allow you to harness the amazing ability of your brain to change.
The crucial fact is that the brain cannot tell the difference between our imagined experiences and our real experiences
One set of volunteers was asked to play a sequence of piano notes every day for five days. Their brains were scanned each day in the region connected to the finger muscles.
Another set of volunteers was asked to visualise playing the notes instead, also having their brains scanned each day.
The brain scans showed that the changes in the brain in those who visualised playing piano were the same as in those who actually played piano.
This is why successful sportspeople – including Jessica Ennis, Wayne Rooney, Muhammed Ali, Jonny Wilkinson, Andy Murray – all use mental imagery and visualisation to turn them from good performers to great performers.
You can use visualisation in the same way: if you repeatedly visualise yourself taking the steps to achieve your goal, you will lay down a “mental blueprint” in your brain to make it easier when you come to take those steps in reality.
For example, visualising yourself staying calm on a busy train will make it easier for you to stay calm; visualising yourself choosing a smaller portion of healthy food will make it easier for you to make that choice when you choose your lunch in reality.
Think of visualisation as a mental rehearsal so when you come to make the change in reality, your brain just thinks “oh this old thing, we’ve been here before”.
Making a mental Mind Movie means creating a visualisation in the form of imagined moving images – just like a movie clip – which you can “watch” inside your mind.
The mental Mind Movie is particularly effective because you can visualise the process to achieve your goal, achieving the goal itself as well as including the emotions. Once you have made your Mind Movie, you can “watch” it on the screen in your mind as well as jumping into your body on the screen so you can feel the good feelings as if through your own eyes.
The Neuro Fix downloads use hypnosis and visualisation to make it easier to stop doing the things you want to stop doing, and start doing the things you want to start doing.
You may be asked to create your own personal visualisations – called mental Mind Movies – which you will “watch” in your mind every time you listen to your download. We will also guide you in creating powerful visualisations as you listen to your download which will prime your brain – effectively acting as a mental rehearsal for the new behaviour – making it so much easier to do, or not do, in reality. “