When you adopt the habit of visualizing, you’ll probably find that you automatically shed some other bad habits. Vinny experienced watershed changes when he started visualizing nightly. “I lost weight, sure, but every area of my life began improving.” Along with making healthier food choices, Vinny also started drinking less. “I still enjoy a good wine now and then. I just don’t drink as much because my body doesn’t want it, and I don’t feel the need for the stimulation.”
Any bad habits in your life, like cravings or addictions, may start to fall away on their own once you start practicing visualization on a daily basis. That’s because so many bad habits are coping mechanisms for an overly stressful life. When the stress goes away, so does the need for the coping mechanism. Nonetheless, you may want to develop more good habits to help speed up your progress. Whether it’s getting regular exercise, improving your snacks by substituting fruits and vegetables for chips and candy, or watching less TV, good habits can make a big difference in how you feel and a big difference in your results.
I like to think of a good habit as an asset that pays dividends forever. The hard part is creating the habit, but once it’s in place, it can yield positive results that affect every aspect of your life, automatically. You don’t have to think about a habit—the behavior is automatic. Your morning routine is to wake up and brush your teeth, and this habit saves you countless thousands of dollars in dental bills and keeps your breath fresh and clean.
No one needs reminding how challenging it is sometimes to create healthy habits or eliminate negative ones. But visualization is uniquely suited to helping you add or delete any habit you want.
HOW HABITS FORM
What you may not realize is that your brain is specifically designed to form habits. They make your life easier. If you couldn’t create habits, every day would be a horrific chore, according to Bruce Wexler, M.D., a neuroscientist and the author of Brain and Culture.1 He has studied brain plasticity and how it plays a role in habits and changing them. One of the things he has learned is that we evolved to be creatures of habit. If we had to make decisions about our every behavior, we would quickly become overwhelmed. The brain’s operating needs consume about 25 percent of the energy we take in, even though the brain represents only 2 percent of the body’s overall weight. What’s more, the brain expends 30 percent of its efforts in just keeping the body running—overseeing breathing, circulation, digestion, and other organ functions. If it couldn’t form habits for which little brainpower is required, we wouldn’t have lasted very long as a species.
To form habits, our brains rely on a neurotransmitter called dopamine. When you get pleasure from a behavior—whether it is something bad for you, such as eating french fries, or positive, such as performing well at your job—dopamine levels surge. This neurotransmitter then travels to two areas of the brain: one is responsible for memory, the other for desire, decision making, and motivation. The result is that the brain links a pleasurable memory to the behavior.
The next time you even think about that behavior, your body will release more dopamine in anticipation. Should you act on the memory and the impulse created by this anticipatory release of dopamine—you eat more fries, say, or stay late at work—the whole process repeats: even more dopamine is released, and this further reinforces your behavior. This is how we begin to form habits. The more you do something that your brain interprets as rewarding, the more you’ll want to do it.
This dynamic is great for creating habits that have some immediate benefit because it’s that in-the-moment reward that generates the dopamine response. However, it’s often the bad habits that provide instant gratification, such as eating junk food, drinking, taking drugs, or watching TV.
How can you create good habits like exercising, drinking wheatgrass juice, doing homework, or cleaning your desk? These behaviors don’t always offer immediate benefits and therefore rarely trigger that pleasurable chemical release that kick-starts the habit-forming dynamic.
The tried-and-true method for forming healthy habits is a little like drudgery: you force yourself to do these actions day in and day out until one day (hopefully!) they become a habit. Eventually, you create a neural network for the habit, which is like a well-worn path in the brain. These networks are long strings of brain cells connected to each other, like a winding path through a field. Picture a huge field of tall grass that comes up to your waist that you need to walk through. The first time you try to make a path, there are any number of directions you could choose. But the second time through, you’re more likely to take the path you made the first time. Eventually, you’ll have a trail of trampled grass that offers little resistance and requires little effort to follow.
Our brain works in the same way. The more times two brain cells, or neurons, communicate with one another, the more chemical receptors they develop at the interface between them. More receptors mean that it’s much easier and requires much less energy and effort for the two cells to “talk” to each other. Doing or thinking the same thing over and over wears a path in your brain, and it gets more and more reinforced each time you repeat the action.
Traversing the well-worn paths of your mind—those established neural networks—can be fine if the habit happens to be a healthy one, but not if the path leads to a behavior you’re trying to change. In that case, straying off the well-worn path and forging a new one will take a lot of focus, attention, and energy.
You may remember that when you were young, charging off in a new direction through a field of tall grass would have been easy and fun. You might have done it on purpose just for the thrill of breaking new ground. Not surprisingly, younger minds form new neural pathways much more easily. A youthful brain is more malleable or “plastic,” a trait that fades with age. Once we’re out of our teens, our brains lose some of their plasticity and ability to form new neural networks; altering the old ones can present a real challenge.
Don’t lose hope. There is one practice that has been proven to restore plasticity and malleability to the brain: visualization.
CHANGING HABITS
First, you should know that going after bad habits can pay some big dividends. If this feels a bit daunting at first, remember Vinny’s experience: simply by developing the habit of visualizing, he was able to suddenly form several new beneficial habits and shed some bad ones in the process. This snowball effect has been documented in research. In 2012, researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago designed a study on the beneficial effects of healthy change. They randomly assigned 204 people between the ages of 21 and 60 to try and increase their fruit and vegetable intake, increase exercise, decrease sedentary time in front of the computer or television, or reduce the amount of saturated fat in their diets. To get them started, the researchers promised to pay the volunteers $175 at the end of three weeks if the volunteers met their goals.
The cash incentive worked wonders, as nearly all the volunteers earned a payout. The researchers then continued to track the study subjects for the next six months, checking in periodically to see how their new habits were going. The volunteers were not only able to keep up their original goals; they began to add other healthy habits. Eating more fruits and vegetables led to a desire to reduce unhealthy foods. Cutting back on couch-potato time led to more exercise.2
The research indicates that tackling just one bad habit can have a domino effect on other undesirable behaviors. And since visualization is in itself a positive habit, you can count on several more coming with it. You’ll also be able to use it to create even more positive habits—or paths through that field of grass—by increasing the plasticity of your brain.
Noted health and heart researcher Dean Ornish, M.D., at the University of California in San Francisco, recently completed an analysis of the brains of people who regularly meditate or do yoga. As I’ve pointed out before, the way the Gabriel Method uses visualization incorporates all the benefits of meditation. Ornish discovered that, compared with people who never practiced relaxation techniques, the meditators and yoga practitioners had much longer protective caps—called telomeres—on the ends of their chromosomes.3 Telomeres shorten as we get older; when they get too short, cells die off. Over the past several years, researchers have linked shorter telomeres to a broad range of aging-related diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and dementia.
In Ornish’s study, the people who were performing visualization and meditation-related exercises not only had longer telomeres; they actually lengthened the protective caps by 43 percent over the five years of the study. They were essentially reversing aging in the brain, according to Ornish.
As we already know, a younger brain can more easily form new neural networks and new habits. When you use visualization to create positive behaviors, you’ll be surprised at how quickly your intentions become reality. After sliding into a contemplative, relaxed mental state—SMART Mode—your brain waves become much more powerful, and your brain actually becomes “younger” in a sense.
Children spend most of their time in the meditative alpha and theta states, which is why they can learn things so much faster. These are the brain states you reach with visualization. You can regain the neuroplasticity of childhood and use those brain wave states to quickly create any habit you want.
Remember, when you’re in SMART Mode you combine increased brainpower with increased focus and concentration. While in that state you have an extremely potent combination that can quickly forge new neural networks, allowing you to easily break bad habits and rapidly create new ones.
Employing visualization to create new habits is like using a bulldozer to make a path. Yes, walking through tall grass once a day will eventually create a path, but you can make a new path in minutes using a bulldozer. In the same way, you can create new habits and eliminate bad habits in minutes using visualization in SMART Mode.
You’ll find this approach much more gratifying and rewarding than relying on the established methods of developing good habits through willpower and brute repetition, which can take months or years to really groove a new trail through your neural network. With visualization you can embed new paths and new patterns of behavior in a matter of days.
There’s also another way visualization can help you maintain your new behaviors. In a study from Germany, researchers monitored the brains of 69 volunteers as they put them in stressful situations. The researchers found that under stress, goal-oriented parts of the brain shut down, while areas responsible for habitual behavior remain active.4 What that means, as most people instinctively know, is that under stress we revert to old habits. The focus on the prize—your long-term goal of achieving the perfect image of yourself—falls to the wayside and you turn to the junk foods and destructive behaviors that give immediate relief.
Once again, stress can be poison when it comes to adopting new healthy behaviors and reaching your ideal self. Lucky for you, you’re already practicing the antidote. Visualization will alleviate that stress and make you resistant to the lure of comfort food and negative behaviors.
Starting CREATING HEALTHY HABITS VISUALIZATION you’ll find a visualization that you can customize as you like. This visualization will help you instantly create new positive habits and eliminate negative ones.
But first, let’s talk about the type of healthy habits you might want to adopt:
This list is just a starting place. You may have other habits that you want to focus on. For any habit you wish to create, simply visualize yourself doing the habit, while in SMART Mode, and then imagine yourself loving the new positive action and feeling tremendous benefits.
CREATING HEALTHY HABITS VISUALIZATION
If you’d like to create the habit of taking a family walk after dinner, try this visualization:
While in SMART Mode (see THE OCEAN OF LIGHT VISUALIZATION FOR GETTING INTO SMART MODE), imagine coming home from work feeling calm, refreshed, energized, and present. See yourself preparing a healthy, delicious meal for your family. Feel the vegetables in your hand as you’re cutting them, smell the herbs roasting in the stir-fry, and see how delicious and appetizing the food looks. Then imagine everyone coming home and sitting down together and having an amazing meal. See yourself feeling calm, relaxed, and present—giving your family all the love and attention they deserve. Imagine choosing healthy, live, vibrant foods at the dinner table, eating slowly, stopping frequently, feeling energized and satisfied, and having a marvelous time with your loved ones.
Then see yourself walking outside with your family—walking slowly, calmly, relaxed, and smiling. Hear the sounds of the birds chirping, the gentle breeze rustling through the trees, and feel the soft grass on your feet. Imagine that you’re holding hands with members of your family. Feel your child’s hand in yours. Imagine that you all are singing or laughing and joking and having a beautiful time just soaking up the moment. See yourself as you’re walking, feeling happy, relaxed, calm, confident, centered, and totally focused on the moment.
You can practice a visualization like this for any positive habit you’d like to create. For example, if you want to wake up early and go to the gym, simply imagine yourself doing so as you are going to sleep. The mental rehearsal activates neural pathways as if you’re actually doing the event you’re imagining. Studies with athletes have shown that when they imagine their ideal sport, the same neurons get fired as if they are actually doing the sport. So when you imagine yourself doing something, you are actually activating the brain cells in charge of forming that habit.
I find I will be much more likely to do anything I’d like to do in a day if I first imagine myself doing the event the night before as I’m going to sleep. So as you’re going to sleep at night or during your visualizations, imagine yourself doing the desired habit, loving it, and getting tremendous benefit. See yourself going to the gym, putting on your sneakers, tying your shoelaces, going on the court, and having an awesome game of basketball. See yourself scoring point after point, moving fast, feeling amazing, and loving every minute of it. Imagine waking up and making a delicious smoothie and loving the taste of it. Feel it nourishing your body and the weight melting off you. Again, these are just examples; the sky is the limit. By simply imagining the coming day as you are going to sleep at night, or during your visualizations—all the healthy, productive things you’d like to achieve—you’ll have a powerful mechanism in place for creating those habits.
Now that we’ve looked at some of the bigger underlying issues that create problems for losing weight, let’s dive a bit deeper into how we can use visualization and our newfound ability to create healthy habits to address some of the day-to-day issues we experience that can keep us stuck.