The scientific data

The idea that we can use our mind to prepare for upcoming situations and ready ourselves for their real-world encounters is not a brand new concept. Research into visualisation has been an important focus to cognitive psychology for years. Visualisation, or at least components of it, has already demonstrated its utility in helping people with post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias, and behavioural disorders. However, visualisation as a performance technique has gained more interest recently, and for good reason, but is typically focused on performance-related outcomes within sports. There is strong evidence that sports psychology, particularly with a focus on results and goal visualisation, can help to optimise performance [5]. For example, elite runners who visualised performance-related challenges they might face during a race, such as pain and tiredness, outperformed runners who tried to distract themselves by ignoring them when they occurred [6-8]. Olympic athletes were three times more likely to meet their individual goals when they planned for adversity through mental preparation [9]. In fact, Michael Phelps, the most successful Olympian of all time, has famously credited some of his success to visualisation. It was his secret weapon for overcoming adversity and potential obstacles he might face, and he is known to have visualised races at least 100 times before race day.

Moving away from clinical and sports psychology, visualisation eventually made it to other sectors, such as business, medicine and surgery. With so much medical knowledge to acquire in a relatively short number of years, there has been a strong focus on improving learning among medical students, and researchers have started to look for non-conventional ways to find improvements in learning outcomes. Studies have shown benefits of using visualisation techniques, either alone or in combination with other strategies, to enhance surgical skills in medical students [10].

While there may be specific professions that want to take advantage of the benefits of visualisation, the reason why it will become more mainstream over the next 10 years is because visualisation can fit into everyones lives because and produce wide ranging advantages. Neuroscience has demonstrated how cognitive processes such as classical conditioning (automatic responses to a stimulus), perceptual learning (our ability to get better with practice, particularly in vision or hearing), problem-solving, and reducing anxiety, can all be influenced by visualisation [11-13]. It is no wonder that visualisation has also been used in the business sector, with top executives and celebrities utilising some aspect of visualisation. Not only are there substantial benefits to our daily lives, but visualisation has also been implicated in improving our ability to recognise opportunities for the future allowing us to reach greater heights of success (although research in this area needs substantiating) [14].

The truth is we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of how useful visualisation can be for us.

What happens in the brain during visualisation? 

When visualisation was first studied in the lab, most research focused on understanding the inter-neuronal processes that occur throughout the brain. Essentially, this meant looking at the visual cortex and how similar its effort-based activation was compared with real life. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it took a while to understand these processes because each study, using slightly different testing paradigms, showed variable results [15-18]. However, as more research was undertaken over the years, a clearer picture of the brain’s processes gradually revealed itself. 

Essentially, these types of studies described a brain that would become particularly active even when it was presented with no external stimulus, or in other words, visualising a real experience would cause our brain to react as if it was real [19]. This is particularly evident in the ventral temporal cortex, and the left hemisphere of the brain, although visualisation will recruit various brain regions (such as the frontal and visual cortex), as it would in real life. While subtle differences exist between brain activity from a real experience versus an imagined one, the overlap is impressive. What’s more, is that these studies demonstrated that the more detailed and convincing you can make your visualisations, the more your brain will learn from the experience [20]. The brain doesn’t seem to care where your experiences come from, it just wants to learn and improve.

Visualisation using your emotions

Arguably, one of the best uses of visualisation comes from training us to deal with stressful situations by rehearsing them in our mind. In this manner, we can put ourselves through (potentially hundreds) scenarios until we become more comfortable when the real-life experiences occur. We can perform better under pressure because we have become habituated to stress, which no longer strongly influences our behaviour.

Using visualisation to mentally prepare for stressful events helps because it acts as a form of exposure therapy. Typically, exposure therapy is a process to allow us to become more comfortable in stressful or triggering situations by exposing ourselves, little by little, to the stimulus until we reach a certain level of comfort. This works particularly well when combining visualisation with things phobias or anxiety from public speaking [21]. A good example of this was shown in a study published last year by a group in the Netherlands [22]. The researchers took a group of people and gave them a public speaking task. Before speaking, one group utilised visualisation, while the control group did not. The visualisation group reported significantly lower anxiety levels before and during public speaking. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this study was that the visualisation only needed to be 4 minutes long to provide a positive effect. If we translate this finding into our own lives, it means that taking a quiet moment before a stressful event to use visualisation can be used by almost anyone to regain composure, confidence, and reduce anxiety [23].

Visualisation can also help you to ‘re-wire’ your brain by invoking a process called affective learning. Affective learning causes us to affix feelings and emotions with specific stimuli. For example, if you see an adorable tiny penguin, you quickly recognise it as a penguin, and your brain fires up the associations it has previously made, such as “it is cute, and I feel happy now” (technically, there is a little more to it than this, but you get the general idea). This can work to your advantage. Suppose you practice visualisation using scenarios which will naturally cause you to feel anxious. In that case, you can consciously tag a positive feeling to it, like excitement or confidence. If each time you visualise the scenario, you remind yourself of how excited you should be, and more importantly, you genuinely feel those emotions during the visualisation, then you can train your brain to associate that stimulus with the emotional response you want, and feel that way when the time comes in real life [24]. This will work better if you are specific about the stimulus. For example, feeling anxious about making a phone call would require visualising the moment you pick up the phone, and feeling confident and enthusiastic about anything that happens next. It requires repeated visualisations, but it is possible.

As I said before, and I think it is worth repeating, this concept, in my opinion, is the most crucial takeaway from visualisation. Whether in sports, business, or daily life, performance benefits generally come from overcoming stress and panic during real-life events so you can work at your best. What I mean by this is that we are often prevented from making optimal decisions because of how we feel. Frustration, anger, anxiety, worry, fear of failure, and imposter syndrome, are just some of the negative emotions that impact our memory recall, decision-making, and overall performance in whatever it is we are trying to do. If we can learn to master those emotions when we are required to perform, we can regain confidence and self-belief and allow ourselves to operate at our potential. Of course, visualisation can help with much more than overcoming negative emotions and potential challenges, but I do believe this approach is where the most substantial benefits from; limiting the impact of unexpected and stressful obstacles, so we can remain confident and composed when we are faced with their real-life counterparts.