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- Mental Rehearsal—train your brain through intentional imagination.
Mental Rehearsal—train your brain through intentional imagination.
Practicing in your mind primes the brain to take action.
Welcome to Stretch—I’m Charlotte, a certified breathwork trainer and Body-Oriented Coach in training. My mission is to live my life to the fullest potential of my brain and body, and to inspire you do the same!
⏪ Our eyes are sophisticated little tools for regulating our nervous system. In the previous Stretch, we learned how we can use them to calm us down, improve focus and boost creativity.
⏩ In this Stretch, we’re exploring a hugely underrated feature of our brain—our imagination—and how we can train ourselves to use it to get better at pretty much anything we want.
One of the most remarkable features of our brain is that we can imagine things that aren’t real.
It’s a wonderful capacity, one that comes with a price:
Most of what we imagine is negatively skewed. Because of our brain’s negativity bias, we spend most of our time ruminating and catastrophising. We’re hardwired to be pessimistic.
But instead of mindlessly sticking to these default settings, we can learn how to use our imagination in a way that’s intentional and productive, and works for us instead of against us.
We do this through a practice called mental rehearsal, mental imagery or visualization, and it's one of the most valuable skills you can develop. As sports psychologist Jason Skelk says, “If you’re not visualizing on a regular basis, there’s no way you’re living up to your full potential.”
🎧 I’ve recorded a 10-minutes visualization for you to try. You can find it at the end of the newsletter.
A practice of visualization and simulation
Mental rehearsal is the cognitive process of purposefully creating and simulating experiences in your mind. So sitting down with your eyes closed, you’re creating a vivid mental video where you’re engaging all of your senses to make the experience as realistic as possible.
The goal is to mentally rehearse a performance, task, or scenario before actually executing it.
For example, say you have a big presentation coming up.
The default is to practice what you’re going to say. That’s it. Oh and of course, think of all the ways you might mess up.
With visualization, you’ll take a couple of minutes in the days leading up to the day to rehearse how you want the presentation to go. You might visualize yourself preparing for the meeting efficiently, being in the room feeling focused and high energy, overcoming a technical issue with calm, answering all the questions confidently, and feeling great about it afterwards. You’ve gone through the entire experience multiple times in your mind, so that once you’re there in the room, it all feels familiar. You’ve primed your brain and body on how to feel and behave.
Mental rehearsal is heavily associated with athletic performance, making regular people like us less likely to consider it for everyday scenarios like public speaking, job interviews, high-pressure scenarios and daily tasks.
And that’s a missed opportunity, because mental rehearsal is not just powerful for motor skills—it works just as well for cognitive, emotional and behavioural skills.
Here are a couple of examples of how I’ve been using it:
Train myself to get up and move my body whenever I feel stuck or lose focus, instead of staying seated, staring at my screen and wasting time on social media. (More on how I used visualization to work on “focused” as an identity trait here.)
Train myself to take a deep centering breath (6 seconds in, 2 seconds hold, 6 seconds out) whenever I feel overwhelmed or annoyed, instead of getting completely lost in the emotions.
Train myself to resist reaching for my phone the second I feel an ounce of boredom.
Train myself to feel excited about my long training runs for the marathon, feeling strong and energized, pushing through tiredness and boredom.
So as you can see, small everyday stuff where I’m basically just creating awareness and then rehearsing the desired action.
A crucial point: Visualization isn't magic. You still need to put in the work and actually do the things. But it changes your moods, energy, and self-belief, which impacts your actions and ultimately your results.
Think of visualization as taking back control of your mind's incredible power. Instead of letting your brain's default negative bias run wild, you're consciously directing your mental energy toward what you want to create and how you want to feel.
I’ve been doing this on and off for about a year now, and am now committing to making it a daily practice—even if just for 30 seconds per day—simply because of the incredible value I am seeing and experiencing.
Now, before we move on, some of you might be feeling a little bit skeptical.
So let’s first unpack why mental rehearsal works.
Visualization in terms of cognitive neuroscience
The practice of visualization has been around for centuries, but it’s only in the last decade or so, thanks to brain imagining, that we can speak of visualization in terms of cognitive neuroscience and the function of large-scale brain networks.
Your brain activates many of the same brain regions
Brain imagining studies have shown that your brain activates similar neural pathways whether you're experiencing something real or vividly imagining it.
This explains why:
You get sweaty palms just thinking about public speaking
Athletes use visualization to improve performance and reaction time (just look at this F1 driver)
Imagining flexing your muscle physically makes your muscle stronger
Again, this incredible brain feature can work for us or against us. If we don’t take control of our thoughts, most of us will imagine negative scenarios, and our brains and bodies will react as if these scenarios are actually happening.
Your brain is designed to change
Visualization physically changes the brain. Used regularly, it creates and strengthens neural connections and pathways related to the task, making actual execution more effective. This process is known as neuroplasticity—the incredible feature of our brain to rewire and reshape based on our thoughts, actions and experiences.
The power of thought and imagination to change your brain has been talked about since 1904 by the great Spanish neuro-anatomist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal:
Thoughts, repeated in “mental practice”, strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones. The organ of thought (the brain) is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectable by well-directed mental exercise.
You can direct your Reticular Activation System (RAS)
Your conscious brain can only process 0.000001% of input. Everything else gets processed by your subconscious.
The RAS is a neural network in your brain responsible for deciding what information is brought into your conscious awareness. It filters out irrelevant information and only allows into your consciousness what (1) will keep you safe and (2) is of interest to you. (This filtering mechanism helps explain why you’ll hear your name in a crowded room.)
You help your RAS know what is of interest to you by keeping your intentions in the forefront of your conscious awareness, through visualization.
The power of this has been clear to me for my running.
I’ve been saying for years I want to run more and train for a marathon, but never made it a priority. In October 2023, I wrote in my newsletter: “I’m imagining 2024-Charlotte having run several races, training 3-4 times per week, feeling proud, healthy and strong.”
In 2024, I did 4 trail runs and ran my first marathon. Running simply became top-of-mind in all of my planning and conversations.
And last but not least… visualization is just FUN. Instead of always thinking about all the different ways we’ll fail or things will go wrong, it’s super fun to imagine all the ways we’re crushing it.
Ready to give it a try?
I’ve recorded a simple 10-minute visualization for you.
(When you click play, give it a few seconds to load and start playing. You can also download the file. If you have any issues, hit reply to this email!)
You’ll start with a short breathing and body relaxation exercise, as it’s important to first calm your nervous system before you visualize. Then I’ll give you cues to imagine a simple activity that you’ve wanted to do but for whatever reason you have not done. A goal. An intention. A habit.
An example would be to get up early and walk for 15 minutes, or to commit to not drinking alcohol, or to speak up more in meetings.
If you don’t know what to visualize, just ask yourself: what do you want to get better at? What would you like to succeed at? What would you like to do differently in 2025?
I’d encourage you to experiment with this for one week, and listen to this every day. Either right before going to bed, or first thing in the morning. And then, go do the thing. Suspend all judgment or disbelief, and just see what the effects are on your self-confidence and motivation.
A few tips:
Visualize from a first person perspective. Seeing the performance from your own eyes, as if you are actually performing it. For example, if your intention is to speak up more in meetings, visualize exactly what you would see, hear, say and feel while sitting in your seat, looking across the table at your colleagues.
Use all of your senses to create the scene so it’s as vivid as you can make it. The video you play in your head needs to capture the emotional experience you want to have. Engage all of your senses. What do you hear? What do you feel? You’ll feel this in physical energy as your nervous system responds to the stimulu.
“Start strong, stay strong, finish strong”. Use this template to visualize short clips of your intention. How do you want to start? How do you want the thing to go? How do you want to feel once it’s done? Spend 30 seconds on each part. You can cover a lot of ground in just 90 seconds.
And please, let me know how it goes!
Refer one person and get access to a guided Functional Breathing session
Functional breathing is the foundation of all breathwork: how do you breathe when you’re not paying attention? All research points to four important principles to consider:
• Through the nose
• Gentle and effortless
• Slow
• Expansive, using your diaphragm
In the guided recording, I talk you through why these four principles matter and give you cues to adjust your breathing. Functional breathing is the first thing I work on with all of my clients, and they all love it.
All you have to do to get access is refer just one person to sign up for Stretch using your personal referral code below. Thank you for the support! 🙏
What else I’m up to…
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