We’ve all heard about the importance of mental health, but how many of us actively work on maintaining and improving our mental wellbeing? For years, I bought into the notion that mental health was something static – either you had good mental health or you didn’t. It wasn’t until I was faced with a life-altering health challenge that I discovered the game-changing concept of mental fitness.
When I was diagnosed with an incurable inflammatory bowel disease at a young age, I found myself struggling with chronic pain, an uncertain future, and fears about my ability to live a “normal” life. In desperation, I began researching every technique out there to manage my symptoms – and that’s when I stumbled upon visualization.
Visualization is the practice of creating vivid mental imagery and scenarios in your mind before they actually happen. It’s like giving your brain a multi-sensory preview of an experience. And according to cutting-edge research, visualization can physically rewire your brain in strikingly similar ways to actually doing the visualized activity.
A 2013 study published in the Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that visualization triggers parallel neural and behavioral patterns in the brain as real-life actions. In simple terms, your brain can’t fully distinguish between a vividly imagined scenario and reality. This is why elite athletes have been using visualization for decades to improve their performance under pressure.
As Michael Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman explained, the most decorated Olympian of all time would meticulously visualize every stroke, every potential obstacle, and every triumph in his mind before competing. By ingraining those visualized experiences, Phelps primed his brain for success when it came time to race.
But you don’t have to be an Olympic athlete to benefit from this powerful mind hack. Visualization can be leveraged for everything from building self-confidence and resilience, to learning new skills, to managing chronic conditions like the one I faced.
In my case, I used visualization to mentallly rehearse walking again without pain, staying calm during flare-ups, and seeing myself living an active, purposeful life. Little by little, the neural pathways I was reinforcing through visualization allowed me to become my best, healthiest self even while managing an incurable disease.
That’s the magic of mental fitness – it empowers you to be proactive about your state of mind instead of just accepting your mental health as a static quality. Just like physical fitness, it requires consistent daily practice across five key areas:
- Consistency – Building mental fitness habits day by day, just as you’d train your body consistently.
- Diet – Being intentional about the content you “feed” your mind through news, social media, conversations etc.
- Cardio – Actively exercising your brain through reading, writing, learning etc.
- Rest – Allowing your mind to rejuvenate through good sleep habits, meditation, and unplugging from stimuli.
- Strength Training – Challenging and rewiring your brain through techniques like visualization.
When it comes to that last pillar of strength training, visualization is arguably the most powerful tool in your mental fitness arsenal. By creating your own mental movies around challenges, goals, and desired habits, you’re laying the neural groundwork for your brain to catch up to your ambition.
Let’s say public speaking is your Achilles heel and you have a big presentation coming up. You could show up hoping for the best…or you could spend a few weeks vividly visualizing yourself confidently commanding the stage, delivering your talk flawlessly, and imagining the sense of pride and accomplishment you’ll feel afterward.
Through visualization, you’re getting reps in without ever leaving your living room. You’re upgrading your mindset from “I hope I don’t mess up” to “I’ve got this.” The visualization creates a positive feedback loop where the more you see and feel yourself succeeding, the more your belief catches up to make it a reality.
This is exactly what I do before any speaking engagement or important life event. For example, in preparation for the talk summarized earlier, I spent 3 weeks visualizing every aspect – how I would walk onto the stage, the specific stories I would tell, the well of calm confidence I would draw from, and even small details like what I was wearing.
Then in the minutes before taking the stage, I did one final visualization run-through. By making visualization a consistent part of my mental fitness regimen, I’d strengthened the neural connections that allowed me to feel poised and present when it came time to speak.
The best part is that visualization is free, can be done anywhere, and gets more powerful the more you practice it. To get started, simply carve out 5-10 minutes per day to vividly imagine a scenario you want to master, whether it’s staying focused in an important meeting, learning a new language, or even bouncing back from a disappointing setback.
Use all five senses to make the visualization as realistic as possible. What would you see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste in this ideal scenario? Add in the positive emotions you want to experience as well. The more lifelike details you can conjure, the more your brain will treat the visualization as a real impressionable event.
Then, as you make visualization a daily discipline, you’ll start noticing the residual effects in how you think, feel and perform. You’ll gain a newfound sense of calm confidence that you’re proactively optimizing your mind. You’ll become more resilient and emotionally grounded, because you’ve trained your brain for the challenges you’ll inevitably face.
Most importantly, you’ll stop feeling like a passive bystander to your own mindset and mental health. You’ll know that through consistent mental fitness practices, you have the power to shape your brain into its highest performing, happiest, and most resilient version.
So don’t just talk about mental health – start actively investing in your mental fitness. Explore the transformative world of visualization. Train your mind just as methodically as an Olympic athlete or performer. When you make mental fitness a lifestyle, you’ll never again wonder whether you have what it takes to overcome any obstacle. You’ll know it to be true, because you’ll have ingrainted that unstoppable self-belief into the very fabric of your brain.