121 Why High Performers Meditate, How They Do It, And How You Can Too: Visualization Mental Practice And Quiz Inside This Episode

Visualization Mental Practice And Quiz Inside This Episode. In this episode, we explore the research behind why meditation helps high-performing athletes and performers boost their skills. We’ll cover different types of meditation and mental training techniques that can be used right before competition or performance to alleviate anxiety and negative thoughts. THERE’S also a quiz inside to see how good you are at mentally visualization practices, a technique used by high performers.

If you haven’t already, listen to THE LAST episode #120, when I talked to Tom Klisiewicz of Smart Health Wellness and Performance, about how performance is related to mental resilience. For better performance at sports, work, or school, we talked about how meditation is one way to boost our mental strength.

The following transcript is automated:

[00:00:00] The Benefits of Meditation for High Performance

Intro:

Dr. Juna: Welcome to the Mindbody Space podcast, where you can stress less and boost your performance and wellness just by listening. Hi, I'm Dr. Juna, a mom, MD passionate about sharing evidence-based tips and exploring fascinating topics like neuroscience and meditation with experts in education, medicine, and psychology. In the last episode, number 120 with Tom Klisiewicz, we talked about why high performers meditate about high performing athletes using meditation as a way to boost performance. So today I want to get into a little bit of the research behind why meditation seems to help high performing athletes or performance in general, and in particular, what types of meditations are most useful when you're about to step onto the court or on the field or on stage, or even if you're pitching your boss, or maybe you're going on a job interview or school interview.

So we've all seen these famous athletes meditating. My favorite is Novak Djokovic. He's a top tennis player in the world, and you can often see him sitting on the bench with a towel over his head and doing his meditation. So he talks about doing his mindfulness. Meditation. And mindfulness is a type of meditation which consists of paying attention in the moment to what's happening in that moment. So you're using your senses or you're just looking at what's happening in the moment in front of you. Or in his case, if you have a towel over your head, you're just focusing on your breath and noticing the rise and fall of your breath. So what's happening in real time, that's part of mindfulness. And at the root of our ability to focus is the noticing of our internal mental dialogue and just letting it all go without getting involved in our own thoughts, in our own conversation with ourselves. So let's say he's down and losing a game. He might be sitting there and he might start having negative thoughts. So let's say he's not having the best match and he sits down, he has to recover. And normally a lot of negative thoughts would flood in for athletes or anyone who's not doing well in whatever you're performing. So he's probably just letting all those thoughts go, focusing on his breath so that that internal dialogue doesn't get out of hand. So that's quote unquote mindfulness. Or you could just think about it as focusing your mind on what's happening in the moment.

We also know that our senses, whether interoception, that's our brain understanding what's happening within our bodies. So sometimes if we pay attention, you can feel the slight pulsation in your fingers or hands, and that's always there. But you can focus your attention on that and feel that. That's interception, like feeling your body from the inside out. That's because every single part of our body has nerves in it, peripheral nerves that relay messages into our central nervous system, up our spinal cord and into our brain. So when we have an internal dialogue running, we're not paying attention to what's happening in front of us. And of course, when you're on the court, in the field, performing on stage, or even in a job interview, it's very difficult to focus on what you're doing or saying while that internal dialogue is running at the same time. It's like having a lot of noise on at the same time. So it really helps athletes, performers, and basically anyone who has to focus on something that's high stakes.

Basically, all of us who need to focus on what we're doing in the moment to live our lives in that moment. This exercise of bringing our minds back to what we're doing, focusing on what's happening in the moment, sensation wise, is very helpful. It helps us to alleviate anxiety about what might come in the future or worry about what already happened. And in the case of performance, you can come back to your training. So we're assuming that you've either practiced the piece you're going to be performing on stage, or you've done mock interviews, or you've been practicing all your life to play tennis or basketball. So when you practice meditation and being in that moment, then you're releasing all the layers of unhelpful thoughts. Now, corrective thoughts might be helpful, so you can correct your own technique, or maybe you think about what you're going to say next. That's all helpful. We're talking about the unhelpful negative processes that we often get stuck in inside our own heads. So that's why meditation in many forms, or if you don't want to call it meditation, just simply focusing on what's happening in the moment, bringing your focus back. That's why it's so helpful. One particular type of meditation that's super helpful is mental rehearsing or visualization.

There's one study that elegantly shows how visualization can actually be as helpful as physical practice. It's an old study, but an excellent example of how mental training works. A study done by Alvaro Pasqual Leone. I hope I'm saying that right. He's a neuroscientist and he studied mental and physical practice groups of subjects in a lab at Harvard Medical School. And he taught these volunteers a one handed five finger exercise. Then they had them practice for 2 hours a day for five days and measured the area of the cortex, or the brain where the sensory motor cortex that go directly to these fingers were located. And this study showed that the cortical motor areas, the brain areas that are responsible for the fingers being used in the exercise, enlarged, and these areas of the brain were more accessible, the neurons in this area readily fired. In other words, the skill of playing this five finger exercise is readily available in the brain. Then he had another group of volunteers. Just think about practicing this simple exercise. They did not move their fingers and only imagined playing this piece. And lo and behold, it showed that the brain areas activating the fingers also increased with just mental practice.

So there was a reorganization of neuronal connections in the areas that control those fingers. Pretty amazing. What's also really amazing is that these volunteers were focused because can you imagine playing a five finger exercise for 2 hours every day for five days? I mean, that takes a lot of commitment and persistence and repetition in order to actually change your physical brain. This is also described by Robert Niedifer. He wrote a book in 1985. So this is very old, and this book is pretty hard to find. I had to get a secondhand used copy. But it's really the basics of mental training, and it's called an athlete's guide to mental training. And in it, he talks about mental rehearsal. And in chapter six, he talks about, what are your imagery skills? People vary in their ability to image situations, so some people may have a sharper ability to mentally image something that's not theirs. So let's go through the exercise he gives to see how good your imagery skills are, because not everybody has the same capacity for imagining things visually. Maybe some people are more strong in their auditory senses

Test how good your imagery skills are. Mental visualization skills. So you can do this exercise with me. :

Now, just close your eyes. So obviously you're not doing this if you're driving and listening to this. So wherever you are, just begin by closing your eyes and imagine that you're getting up, stand up and move across the room or whatever space you're in in your mind, only with your eyes closed. Now, once you get to the other side, turn around and come back to wherever you're sitting right now and sit down. If you want to go ahead, just pause and imagine that it shouldn't take you longer than 10 seconds. So this was all mental, right? So you had your eyes closed and you're just imagining yourself walking across the room or space you're in and then coming back and sitting back down in your chair.

You can answer yes or no to this checklist. Were you able to get clear and vivid images? Were you able to see color? Did you see a series of snapshots? Did the action feel like a movie, continuous action, as opposed to a snapshot? So in your mind, were you an observer watching yourself perform like you would watch a movie? Yes or no? In your mind, were you the actor? Were you mentally rehearsing from the perspective you would have if you were inside your own body? In this case, you wouldn't be able to see your own face when you imagined moving? Yes or no? And finally, when you imagined yourself moving, were you able to actually feel the movements? Did you feel the tension levels change in the muscles that would be working as you walked and sat and all those different things?

If you said yes to most of these, you have excellent imaging skills, and it wouldn't really matter if you saw yourself as the observer or if you were the actor, because those are two things that you can train. And if you happen to be on the court, in the field, performing on stage, or even in a job interview, you would want to take that view of being within the person, being the actor, and feeling the muscles activate and all of those kinesthetic physical feelings. Okay, so that's one thing you can do. So even if you didn't have vivid skills or if it was just kind of, eh, to begin with, whatever your imagery skills are right now, you can always improve it. So all you have to do is practice.

[00:09:32] Enhancing performance and dealing with negative thoughts through visualization

Dr. Juna: And part of it is when you're doing the thing that you want to imagine, let's say you're practicing a certain piece on the piano, then you want to feel and do it very slowly and different speeds, all the kinds of active rehearsal practicing that you would do normally. And then when you close your eyes, really try to imagine playing those notes.

So there's other ways to deal with negative thoughts when you're performing. And we'll cover this again two weeks from now, we'll be talking about the psychology of enhancing human performance using a theory called mindfulness, acceptance and commitment program. So tune in for that and subscribe and share this so that you don't miss any episodes, because

next week we're going to be talking to Jordana Confino. Jordana is a graduate of the Yale Law school, and after years of working as a lawyer, she's turned into a lifestyle coach for high achieving professionals. And Jordana knows everything about being a perfectionist. Her story is a must listen, she's going to tell us all about her journey as an overachiever to burning out and discovering positive psychology.

And she's going to leave you with the most important thing, practical tips on how you can listen to yourself so that you can be attuned to your own passions and values to find the path that really speaks to you.

To get a good night's sleep, head on over to my YouTube channel, @fallasleepeasy to drift off and sleep like a baby.

Please subscribe and share with a friend, family, anyone who needs to stress less, boost performance, and be happier. And soon enough, you'll be surrounded by Zen people. Until next time, this is Dr. Juna wishing you and your loved ones wellness.

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