by Mark Schiffman, M.S.
“Before a single event has begun, a single point awarded, a single shot contested, the competitors have already lived these Olympics. They’ve felt their hand raised, swelled with pride as the national anthem played, felt the medal hang and tug at their neck.” In a recent article in the Washington Post, sports writer Rick Maese describes how sports psychologists help Olympians train by having them mentally visualize the matches beforehand. Richard Suinn has been working with downhill skiers for over 40 years and his research shows that just asking the athletes to visualize themselves skiing made their brains and bodies react in similar ways to when they were actually skiing. Other research demonstrated that visualizing weight training showed an increase in strength and visualizing free throw shooting improved accuracy.
What works for athletes works for all of us as well. REBT therapists often incorporate Rational Emotive Imagery (REI) into sessions to help clients visualize their own version of a gold medal. For clients struggling with anger, it is often helpful to imagine common situations that trigger the anger and visualize what they can do and say differently before it happens. The same is true with other emotions like anxiety – imagine what situations often trigger the anxiety and visualize thinking and reacting in different ways. Just like in the Olympics, research and clinical experience shows that visualizing acting in a successful manner goes a long way to helping us actually act successfully.
