We all have a strong tendency to classify and label each other into various boxes. Moreover, we usually see things as being set in stone and incapable of too much change. For example, you might say that someone is naturally gifted at sports, whereas this other person has ‘two left feet’. That man over there is a natural born leader, whereas this poor guy here cannot cope under stress and will never go far in life. Despite all the various examples of people who have exhibited major improvements in life, we still have an inbuilt bias to discount peoples’ ability to improve their abilities.
However, what if you are in the situation of needing to significantly improve a particular skill or habit in your life. Maybe you want to become a much better sportsperson or musician and break through into the top elite of your field. Or maybe you are looking for a novel and effective way to overcome an illness that is severely restricting your life. Often we look at the gap between where we are now and where we need to be and see a massive, impenetrable divide. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers contends from observations that it takes at least 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to truly master a skill. That’s all well and good but what if you don’t have the time or extreme levels of perseverance required to achieve that. Is there there a way to dramatically improve your performance in a relatively short period of time. What if you know that mere physical effort alone won’t suffice to make greater progress.
Cracking the ‘mind code’
Either properly engineered brainwave entrainment or mental visualizations alone have the power to increase your performance, yet when combined they can have a profound effect on your ability to improve a particular skill or process. Daniel Coyle in his excellent book The Talent Code notes what happens in the brain when you practice and improve a particular skill. It’s not only new neural pathways that are formed in the brain, but equally important is the build up of fatty myelin sheath that protects the nerve cells and encodes nerve transmission.
If you haven’t come across audio brainwave entrainment before, it’s a type of sound therapy that provides an audio ‘pulsed tone’ stimulus to your brain. Through your auditory pathways, specific brain regions will ‘entrain’ to the stimulus (attempt to follow and emulate the sound patterns) and in doing so, your brainwave state follows the frequency provided by the audio stimulus. The great thing about audio entrainment is that, under the right conditions, it provides an access point to positively affect your cognitive function and support new neural pathway growth. Specific sound frequencies can be used to achieve different desired states such as deep relaxation, anxiety relief, increased focus and concentration and various other states. Essentially, think of it like an ‘intention optimizer’ that provides an ideal medium to performance mental rehearsals or visualizations.
Visualization on the other hand is not a novel concept and has been around since the dawn of time. There are a myriad of studies out there, such as in the field of sport, that have compared the use of mental visualizations to both actual physical practice and to a control group and demonstrated the significant benefit that mental rehearsals alone can have. In our view, what matters most is the quality of your mental rehearsals and ensuring you have the right ‘set up’ conditions to obtain optimal benefits.
We have set out below a protocol involving some suggested key steps to successfully perform a mental visualization or rehearsal session:
- Sit upright and get into a relaxed but focused mental state where your mind is free from distractions (note that brainwave entrainment can be excellent for achieving this).
- Ideally, use an audio brainwave entrainment track that takes your brainwave state down to the Theta level – an ideal level to support new neural pathway growth and memory retention.
- Choose a particular component or aspect of a skill that you want to improve e.g. the ball toss of your tennis serve, or the exact sequence in a piece of music you are learning.
- Treat this mental rehearsal with as much seriousness as you can. Imagine performing in front of a live crowd or under examination circumstances when you do this. This is critical to activate your limbic (emotional) regions in your brain.
- Visualize yourself in the first person carefully and systematically working through that specific aspect or sequence from start to finish – noticing any ‘blips’ or patches of uncertainty that you need to address and fill in. Notice how you feel emotionally at any point during the sequence. You want a relaxed but engaged sense of focus. Any feelings of uncertainty, panic or doubt are signals to focus in and rehearse that particular component.
- Engage all your senses as you do this to help reinforce the vividness and reality of what you are doing.
- Spend just a few minutes at a time on each aspect or sequence and, importantly, acknowledge or congratulate yourself for having improved your ability.
- At the end of each mental rehearsal session, spend a few minutes visualizing yourself producing a ‘winning performance’ with this particular activity. Note: it’s important to focus on a winning performance rather than a winning outcome (as you can control the former not the latter). See yourself in the first person generating the very best performance possible as if it’s happening right now – activate all your senses and feel all the emotions that come with it.
- You should notice results in a relatively short period of time but know that it can take at least three weeks of dedicated practice to form a new habit or skill.
With some slight adaptions this process, when coupled with with the right brainwave entrainment technology, can be used to increase your performance in a variety of contexts, including the following:
Sports Excellence
Excelling in sports can sometimes be as much as about mind mastery and mental discipline as it can be about natural physique and genetics. There is a strong case for optimal mental training in addition to just physical practice. Often you can reinforce the same physical weaknesses in your game if you don’t visualize exactly what you need to address and what perfection might look like. Moreover just about every athlete knows what it’s like to feel off their game mentally nearly every week or month. On the other hand, there are numerous examples in just about every elite sport of individuals who appear rather ordinary physically, yet are capable of exceptional feats through harnessing the power of their mind.
The first component of mental mastery is the ability to consistently get in the zone when you need to. Athletes frequently talk of having ‘on days’ and ‘off days’ and usually can’t explain why sometimes they’re on their game and, frustratingly, other times not. Through experience, we’ve found that the right brainwave entrainment frequencies can put you in a much better position to be in the zone when you need to. Our dual brainwave track, such as Switched On in our WorkSharp product can help to energize and motivate you, while reducing the negative voices that might lead to self-doubt.
The second component is optimal skills improvement. Using the mental rehearsal technique outlined above, in addition to your existing practices, can significatly improve your game. Ensure you identify the key components of any skill or process that you need to improve – e.g. if you are golfer, a particular aspect of your golf swing or a specific stroke such as bunker play; if you are a baseball or cricket player, your eye-ball coordination when striking; or if you are a basketballer, shooting three-pointers under pressure or sensing the ideal point to go in and take rebounds. Identifying, for example, your five priority components that you need to work on and systematically working through them can make a major difference in a short period of time. Lastly, spend some time visualizing yourself performing at your very best and succeeding – either with your specific skill or in your sport as a whole.
The third and final component is having the right mental fitness. Often you start off a golf game or tennis match and are playing well but then something goes wrong, or you run out of steam, and you basically give up mentally well before the final round. Improving your ability to quiet and still your mind through regular, meditative brainwave entrainment sessions can really help with this mental stamina and endurance. Both the Neural Advantage and Switched On tracks in our WorkSharp product work in different ways to stimulate your brain and support enhanced mental stamina.
Academic Achievement
Much in the same way as you can increase physical skills and improve your sports performance, you can also use brainwave entrainment and visualizations to improve your academic performance.
You might find for example that you have a good grasp of academic concepts in class or when studying, but when you get into exams your ability to recall information or think clearly can turn to custard and you don’t get the marks you know you are capable of achieving. Again, use the mental rehearsal technique outlined above but modify it to fit the experience of going into and sitting an exam. Visualize yourself remaining relaxed and engaged while thinking about the questions and trusting that the answers will flow. See yourself enjoying the process of responding to the questions and remind yourself that any anxiety you produce is a good sign and will give you the energy and motivation to power through the exam.
Alternatively, you might find that you’re not so good at retaining information or that you very quickly run out of steam when studying and don’t have the mental endurance or concentration to study for several hours in a row. Using an audio entrainment track like ‘Neural+’ or ‘Focal Point’ on our NeuroLearn+ product will take your brainwave state down to a particular frequency within the Theta level that is known to support increased memory formation and the release of ‘Long Term Potentiation’ factor in the brain. We’ve also found that persistent regular use of Neural+ helps to support increased mental stamina and concentration.
Recovery from illness
If you are interested in this area and haven’t read Dr Norman Doig’s excellent book The Brain That Changes Itself on the topic of neuroplasticity we would highly recommend it. Neuroscientists are learning how the brain is a lot more adaptive and ‘plastic’ than was traditionally thought to be the case. Various physical and mental exercises can be employed to create new neural pathways and hone fine motor skills in patients such as stroke victims, which was previously thought hopeless. As noted, you may want to consider properly engineered brainwave entrainment as the ideal platform to engage in these mental exercises for improvement.
Examples of situations where audio entrainment and visualizations can be used to support recovery from illness include strokes, meningitis, alcohol or drug addiction, chronic fatigue and numerous other areas. If you take chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, the latest research is pointing to mitochondrial failure as one central cause (mitochondria are known as the powerhouses inside each cell in your body). The ideal track to listen to would be one of our dual brainwave tracks such as Mind Revitalizer on our RevitaMind product, which is excellent for energy and motivation. You could place your attention on the mitochondrial structures inside every cell in your body (have a look on Google Images as to what they look like) and vizualise them starting to glow brighter and brighter (e.g. a vivid yellow gold or white color). Imagine breathing in and out directly through them as if they were each a tiny pair of lungs. See them becoming much stronger and much more efficient – generating energy for your body throughout the day. You could do this for all or just part of your listening session.
Another example is helping to address cognitive decline by using a visualization involving the hippocampus – a key brain region associated with short and long term memory formation and recall. The hippocampus is a structure within your mid brain that is often described as looking like a pair of seahorses on the left and right sides of the brain connected in the middle (again, have a look at Google Images for various pictures of it). The hippocampus is generally accepted as a key brain region in both short and long term memory recall and is noted to be a key area of degeneration in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. According to David Lynch, the natural rhythm of the hippocampus is in the Theta range and entrainment at this frequency may support long term memory potentiation (ref: “The Biochemistry of Memory: A New and Specific Hypothesis.” Science 224 (1984): 1057-63). While listening to one of our Neural tracks (which provides the essential Theta level stimulation), you could actually place your attention on the left and right parts of the Hippocampus and visualize them as a pair of lungs. Imagine that with each in-breath, you stimulate and energize your Hippocampus. On the out-breath, visualize both sides sending signals to and from the front and back regions of the brain. Place your attention on this area of your head and feel as if it’s really happening as you do this.
Performance in other fields
Musicians such as concert pianists, violinists etc can also apply the above principles to accelerate their own progress (well within the so-called 10,000 hours suggested by some commentators). Similarly, you can employ brainwave entrainment and visualizations to achieve a variety of other states; for example, overcoming insomnia, eliminating work stress, seeing yourself exceeding all your sales targets or even improving your performance in the bedroom! There is really no end to the number of contexts in which you can improve your performance. We’ll leave it up to you to get inventive.
*If you are interested in trying properly engineered brainwave entrainment in conjunction with mental visualizations to enhance your performance in a specific field, then we would suggest WorkSharp if you are a sports professional, NeuroLearn+ for academic studies and RevitaMind if you are recovering from a difficult situation.
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