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Visualize Yourself To a Healthy New Year
Ever found yourself setting a New Year's resolution to lose weight and get healthy only to find yourself back to your old habits less than one week later? If so, you are not alone. Only 8% of people who make New Year's resolutions actually achieve their goals.
While most people try to use will power alone to stick to their New Year's resolutions, will power is not enough to override the temptation to go back to old habits. Instead of using will power this New Year, use visualization instead.
Visualization is the use of mental images to influence bodily processes, such as to raise or lower one's blood pressure and to control pain, as well as to prepare for athletic or other kinds of performance based events.
In fact, one study found that people who did not go to the gym, but rather, visualized themselves lifting weights, increased their muscle strength by 13.5% despite never lifting a single dumbbell. While they didn't gain as much strength as those people who actually did lift weights (30% increase), it is truly remarkable that they gained any strength at all, considering that their activity level didn't change.
So, this year, if you have a goal you would like to achieve for 2016, put yourself into a focused state of mind using meditation or self-hypnosis and visualize yourself as you would like to be. Visualization works regardless of whether you would like to be able to say no to chocolate or to say yes to a public speaking opportunity; the key is to make the mental image of what you would like to achieve so vivid, so clear, so intense, so realistic and lifelike, it's as though it were happening right at that moment.
The reason a vivid mental image has such power is that thoughts produce the same brain and body processes as actions. In other words, the brain doesn't know the difference between what is real and what is visualized and instructs the body to release the same neurochemicals during the visualization as though it were a real event.
This mental and physical rehearsal sets the stage for success when the time comes to participate in the real event, whether that event is a big race or the simple act of saying no to a plate of cookies. The key is to put yourself in that focused state of mind known as “flow” or “being in the zone” in order to achieve the vivid visualization required.
Personally, I use a self-hypnosis technique that puts me “in the zone” in less than two minutes; others prefer to use meditation or prayer. The reason I prefer self-hypnosis over other techniques is the fact that it is a duplicable process that I can repeat regardless of where I am and every time I do it, I get “into the zone” faster.
To me, less structured techniques for achieving a “flow” state, such as meditation, are less reliable as there is no set procedure to follow and it might take me five minutes to get “into the zone” one day and 20 minutes the next day using meditation, for example.
The important thing is to identify a technique that works reliably for you and to use it every day to visualize yourself achieving your New Year's resolution.
