Interesting Olympic athlete "brain re-flash" technique

[willstar]

I had an interesting chat with my Osteopath today.

We were discussing anxiety, and developing methods of distraction from the symptoms.
He has done a lot of work with athletes around performance anxiety. One of the biggest problems that athletes seem to face, is a change to performance once they are aware of a crowd watching them.

A commonly practiced technique to relieve this problem is spending as much time as possible visioning their performance. Visioning a flawless run, passing over every hurdle faster than ever, clearing every high jump pole with a heap of height to spare, etc, with no influence from the crowd watching.
It is believed that if this is practiced enough, come time to perform, the brain is so used to that train of thought, that any mishaps caused by doubt or self consciousness are minimized.

I believe that this could be practiced by anxiety suffers, and i am certainly going to start trying it straight away.
If you have a particular time of day that symptoms start, or if a certain occurrence triggers it, spend as much time visioning that time, or happening, going along smoothly, without any uncomfortable thoughts. Make yourself believe it!

I hope this helps.

[jessed03]

This is an old post, I saw somebody reading it when I went to check if EMAN was online.

I really like your process, it's been something I've done a lot of. I more or less had your similar chain of though, visualization has been proven effective again and again, and as you can't always practice things enough in the real world, to practice it in the mind is a very good second best. I had the idea from reading N Hills Think and Grow Rich. I thought if this process can be used to create belief, why not use it to create the belief that I'm ok, and calm? I really liked how it worked for me.

Le bump for anyone who may be looking for a way to tap into that annoyingly stubborn subconscious.