In case anyone sees this, a little update. Since I posted this nearly one year ago, I have made some progress in my mental rehearsal habits. - I have let go of the desire to visualize and instead frame the exercise as "imagining". This takes away the pressure to see images and the disappointment and doubt that come from not seeing them. - I notice that I seem to see something like grainy stick figures of my body, but it feels more like the idea of it rather than an image of it. - I have tried a couple of guided imagery sessions, and even though I don't _see_ anything, I have found the guided aspect of it helpful. I would like to do that more in order to increase the effectiveness of the activity. I feel grateful for the advice in this thread. Thank you for helping me get past my trepidation about the effectiveness of mental rehearsal without visual imagery.
Thanks, Teresa. Solidarity feels good. I still have the occasional experience of my mind wandering _way_ off course while in the middle of throwing a ball. I wonder how that relates to your experience of forgetting your routine in the middle. My routine is less than 2 seconds long, so there's less to forget than there is in a long program. :)
Hi, Shayne. I find this quite helpful, so thank you. It confirms a few conclusions I'd already made, such as why visual mental rehearsal seems to help, that it's possible (although maybe unlikely) that I could improve my visual imagery vividness by practice, that tapping into another senses might help quite significantly (I seem not to be able to see nor smell, but I believe I can hear and feel well enough), and that emotional regulation might be closer to my bottleneck than physical refinement through mental rehearsal. I hadn't thought about the possible upside before. Indeed, I probably don't relive failures as vividly, although I certainly remember them. (I'm remembering one hilarious one now!) I have been using various meditation practices to help me with general emotional regulation and in particular letting go of the past. The book "Zen Golf" helped me get started in this direction. I have made huge strides in emotional regulation in the past few years, even to the point where one coach told me that it was probably time to re-focus on some physical aspects of the game. (That's partly what's led me here.) I'm at the point where I can't readily distinguish which I need more: refining physical movements and regulating emotions. I have enough time and energy to try hard at both, so I'm looking for options, and I can't spend hours per day doing physical practice, which led me to visual imagery and mental rehearsal and now I'm here. Thanks again.
Hi, Jonathan. Thanks very much for this. In particular, this part speaks to me in a way that I hadn't experienced before: > it is a way of communicating between the part of your mind that builds desires and the part of your mind that handles motor control This more-fundamental principle gives me some clue about how visual mental rehearsal works and how to substitute for it. I experienced one interesting phenomenon about 8 months ago. I was practising with a new coach and they encouraged me to simplify my mental state and focus more narrowly on some physical aspect of my movements. I managed to really throw myself into that and about 15 minutes later I noticed something strange: after throwing a ball I had a retrospective sensation of having made a physical mistake without having felt that mistake while I was throwing the ball. (In bowling, the total time spent moving to throw a ball for me is less than 2 seconds.) It was as though not trying to think about the movements while I was moving helped me notice a mistake in movement, albeit after the fact and somewhat vaguely. I could say, "That didn't feel right", but I couldn't yet clearly point to the symptom let alone the cause. Perhaps this was an incident of unknowingly beginning to differentiate the major feelings between when I do it well and when I don't. And maybe I could benefit from doing more of that more consciously. Even now, I have difficulty articulating the differences. Maybe I need to feel them more. This gives me an idea for my next practice.
Thanks, Jennifer. Even absent formal research, I'd be happy to learn more about the effectiveness of non-visual mental rehearsal in sports. Everything I've read so far has compared specifically visual mental rehearsal to physical practice and concluded that the visual mental rehearsal was quite close to physical practice in effectiveness. Can we say the same for non-visual mental rehearsal? As you say, there's no research yet, but are there plausible mechanisms that would strongly suggest it? This is the kind of thing I'd like to know: if I do non-visual mental rehearsal, am I wasting my time and am I fooling myself if I believe that it's significantly similar to physical practice in effectiveness?