8 Visualization Tips from the Huberman Lab
During the Mind of a Champion class, we talked extensively about visualization and mental imagery. This is one of the key steps in the Champion’s Daily Preparation.
I recently listened to a podcast on the topic from Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., who is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine.
In all the studies he found, mental training has, “been shown to be effective for greatly enhancing the speed at which you learn and the stability of that learning over time.” There was not one study in which mental training and visualization did not lead to an improvement in performance!
Below are 8 key takeaways that can help you to increase the effectiveness of your visualization and mental imagery practices.
1. Practice your visualizations 3-5 times per week
2. Brief – Simple – Repeated: Keep the motor skill or cognitive behavior you are practicing brief (15-20 seconds or so), simple (not a lot of sequences), and one that can be repeated over and over again with a high degree of accuracy
3. In each session complete 50-75 repeats of that 15-20 second task with a rest of approximately 15-20 seconds between each repeat
4. First-person imagery is significantly more effective than third-person
5. Keep up your Mindfulness practice (one of the other components of the Champion’s Daily Preparation) too because in order for the changes in brain plasticity to work, you need focused dedicated attention on the task to be learned. You need to minimize the number of times your mind wanders during your practice.
6. Get a good night’s sleep, particularly on the first night following that training.
7. Don’t speed the task up or slow it down when imagining it. It should take you exactly the same amount of time to practice it in your mind as it does to execute that task in the real world.
8. Your mental training and visualization should assign labels to what you are doing that can be matched to real world training and experiences. For example, let’s say you are working on your golf swing. You name the drive “golf swing 1A”, the putt “golf swing 1B”, etc. Then when you are about to perform that task in the real-world, recall that name just as you are about to perform it.
Overall, he does emphasize that this practice is not a replacement for real-world cognitive or motor training but it is an excellent augment.
It is best to use the maximum number of hours of real-world training that you can (ex. 10 hours per week), but add mental training (ex. 1 hour per week) to it. This will result in significant improvement over just doing the 10 hours per week of real-world training.
Although both are best, you can do mental training alone if you have been injured in order to keep the skills online and even improve over time. It is also great if you are traveling and can’t do real world training in the car, on the plane, etc.
Thankfully, you don’t have to perform this forever. Once you have a particular motor skill mastered, you can move on to another task or action that you want to improve.
Check out the full episode with more tips and explanations of the studies and science that supports this practice at this link –
https://hubermanlab.com/science-based-mental-training-and-visualization-for-improved-learning/
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