How visualisation can help with recovery

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to Bend and Snap Active People Getting Back on Track. I'm a couple of minutes early tonight, so hopefully you won't miss too much of this live session. I just wanted to get a little head start today because I've got another session at 8 PM that I need to join promptly. So welcome anyone that's new that's just joined us. Thank you so much for joining this group. Um, really great to meet you, and, um, please say hello in the chat. Any questions, any comments at any point are really welcome during the live sessions. Um, I get super excited when Comments pop through and I can see that you're here with me. So yeah, I'm not normally a couple of minutes early, it's just tonight I'm ahead of the game because all of my family have got better offers tonight. They've gone to see, I think it's a Beatles tribute, and my husband's got a football match. With it coming towards the end of the season, there's midweek football games. My daughter's gone out with her friends with it being the school holidays, so I literally, I've done hula hoop group, it's been a really quiet evening for me, had my husband for the first 5 minutes of eating our meal together and then I had a lovely quiet meal to myself. So tonight's session is going to be all about visualisation. I never really knew how important that was and how it would become something that I would be speaking about in the present day. When I was first introduced to the concept of visualisation, I can remember thinking, oh, that's not me, I'm avoiding that one, I don't want to do that one. This was right back in 2018 when I first started out in coaching, and one of the approaches that we were being trained on was called visualisation, and we had to do a practice session with each other, and we had to take them to a beach, and we had a little script, and we had to like do the script, and I can remember thinking, oh, I don't like this, this is really not my kind of thing. I really wasn't comfortable with it, I didn't really see understand it, I didn't really know what it was, I just, in the beginning, I wasn't really bought in, but in the more recent years I've really, really seen the incredible power of this, and I think really the word itself can be a bit off-putting for some people because they kind of don't truly, it doesn't kind of make sense, they think, oh, I don't know how to do it, I don't know if I can, if I do it, I don't know how to do it right, I'm not able to visualize. A lot of people don't see images, they don't actually see pictures inside the mind, they're not a visual kind of person. We have what they call representational systems, like people have got a lead system, so for some people it's not the visual and they don't really imagine. Another word for it would be imagining. Imagining something, but I know that my husband does not imagine things in pictures. He seems to be more of sounds or feelings, so there's, there's other ways. It's not all just about pictures and what you're seeing. For me, I never really saw the connection. I'm very visual, I see lots of pictures and images and motions and movies and whatever else you want to call it. I'm highly visual, highly visual, and a good way of kind of describing it is, a really simple way, is if you're able to dread the future, It's not a nice way to imagine it, but are you able to dread something and not look forward to it? Because if that's the case, then there's a high chance that you're visualising a poor future, a poor outcome. You might not see it as visualising, but we can visualise poor outcomes, we just might not know we're doing it. Or you could imagine that you're standing at my front door, it's a big black door with a knocker on it, And are you able to imagine that you're standing at my front door? And if you are, then you're visualising it, you know, it's just a really simple way to explain what I'm sharing with you. And apologies if I'm ignoring you and no comments are coming through at the minute, it doesn't always work. And I'm also not really knowing what to do because I've been hacked this week. On Friday, I got an inquiry coming through for coaching on a website that I use called Bark.com, which many clients find me there, and I don't only use social media, but I use Bark.com as a platform for advertising and for clients to find me, which works really well, and it's been successful, and many people have found me there. I got an inquiry come through on there, and it all seemed really legitimate. The website was Real, the LinkedIn account all looked like a legitimate person. I think they may have been hacked, somebody may have stolen their identity, enquired with me, and then I've clicked on a booking link to book a meeting and it's literally hacked my computer. And initially I thought, that's not a booking link, whoops. And I was like, oh no, too late, even though I'd like checked it all out. Later that evening, my mum's ringing me, have you bought something on Amazon? Because I'd logged on her Amazon account on my computer, they'd spent 4 lots of £150, like consecutively. I was like, no, it's not me, please cancel it quickly. And then next thing I know, my eBay account's been hacked, someone's in my eBay account, someone's in my Amazon account, my— and so on and so on. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I was up till midnight changing passwords. And somebody's been back in it again today. So I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to get some help for how to figure out what on earth's been hacked. So that was my drama for this week, but ongoing. I'm sure it'll all sort itself out eventually. But luckily for me, my card didn't get hacked because I was hacked last week, something different. Somebody had been spending on Uber membership. I don't even know. I didn't even know you could be an Uber something membership. So all mine have been cancelled. So whoever hacked my accounts didn't get very far, so I'm hoping that I've gone on in there, but clearly I'm changing passwords and clearly someone's still able to access them. So anyway, enough about Jo's dramas for the week. I'm actually using the power of visualisation to see for myself, feel for myself, hear for myself, taste for myself, whatever it might be, we're using all our conscious senses. To basically experience our thoughts that we're having and bringing them alive, and I'm doing that with a good outcome, I'm not doing it with a bad outcome, because where's that going to get me? I'm just going to feel miserable and worried and scared, and I might not have even logged on tonight because I might have been scared of clicking on whatever. So the powers of visualisation. So like I said, In the beginning, I, 8 years ago, was a bit skeptical, and the only reason why I felt that way is because it was unfamiliar, it was out of my comfort zone, it was just like, oh, that seems a bit too crazy, a bit too strange, a bit too weird, a bit too whatever. I just was not comfortable with it because I'd never experienced it, and I, being a busy, busy mind, sat there and the other person like said, close your eyes. I didn't even want to shut my eyes. I was the kind of person that wouldn't even shut their eyes because I was like, I need to know what's going on in this room. And so I already wasn't really comfortable to just, you know, lean into the experience. So clearly it didn't go anywhere for me, um, at the time. And then as time's gone on, um, I practiced In my own time, really, just in my own space, and I began to realise that it was something that I was doing naturally. It was something that, once I understood it a bit more, and I like opened up to the concept, I realised that I was doing it all the time. I was doing it all the time. I can remember being laying there one night, just drifting off to sleep, And I was imagining myself running, and I was imagining myself doing like a longer run than I'd done before, and so on and so on, and it just, it was something that I'd done, I just didn't recognise it as visualising. I don't know what I thought it was, I didn't really have anything to describe it, it was just something that you do. When you're imagining, like a dream, like when you're dreaming, So yeah, but it can be a really great way to get to a calm nervous system and just to experience a nice feeling state. And I'm going to share in the comments because I've actually— here's one I prepared earlier. It's from the Curable app. I'm gonna be— oh, can I even comment in my own comments? Here we go, I think I can. I'm gonna copy and paste it and put it in the, um, if it'll let me. I want to put this in because this is how I got better with visualisations. I used guided ones which you can get on apps on your phone or on your computer. So there's one. Hi Emma, hello, thanks for saying hi, and now I know you're here, I'm not on my own, which is always lovely. I've just copied and pasted this guided visualization which I really like. It's from the Curable app and it's called the Control Room Visualization, and you literally just Get comfy, lie there, listen to the words and see where it takes you. And I like this one because it's quite a fun one and it calls it the control room, but the control room is your brain and you actually climb inside there and it's quite fun. It only takes 15 minutes and you climb inside. I'm better with guided, I'm better with another person leading on speaking and you follow their lead. A bit similar to hypnotherapy, mindfulness, anything like that. Guided visualizations are used in so many of the therapeutic modalities, especially in chronic pain recovery. So this one here is from Curable app, which is the app that I recommend, and if anyone wants the 6 weeks free trial I have a link, just drop me a message, I'll send it with you, but it might let you just try out this visualisation that's called the Control Room. I go through phases, I've listened to this one a few times lately and I like it. I listen to it while I'm getting ready on an evening at the minute, it's just my thing. So if you think you're not good at visualisation, but you can imagine a poor outcome, then you're better than you realise. You're just not using it to your advantage. So it's a really helpful thing. It's not something you have to put effort in. It's something that often you might realise in hindsight that you're doing naturally without any effort. Some people enjoy it a lot and they would factor it in on purpose. I never do. I just— Whenever it feels like something that I'm doing, then I do it, but I don't go out of my way to do it. But ultimately, it's a really nice way of bringing in better thinking, I guess, in the moment. If you've been having a lot of symptoms and a lot of pain, then it's a nice way of guiding thoughts in a nice direction. And it can actually be a really lovely way to experience changes in those symptoms or that pain, where you might actually have for yourself a moment of clarity or a click moment where you actually experience a change and you're like, wow. If your thoughts have been guided in a different direction, you may actually experience change or a shift in your physical sensation that could be enough for you to see, wow, like, I've never known that's possible. And for me, it was in a— the first time I experienced a shift in the levels of pain I was experiencing was in— it was a visualization, it was a hypnotherapy session, but it's the same thing, just different, different words for it. it's guiding you into a different way of being, it's guiding your thoughts into a place that you may not have gone, and I, for the first time in, at the time it was the first time in 16 years that I felt like, wow, I felt really good, it disappeared, it was enough for me to know what was possible, if that could disappear then what on earth happened, so I've shared that story before about the hypnotherapy. Um, which is why I've just recently completed my CRT therapy training as well, Core Renewal Therapy training, which is a blended approach with hypnotherapy, cognitive behavioral, dialectical behavioral, and existential. So it's a really lovely blend, and there's a lot of this sort of stuff in there, which is a really nice thing to do. I even recorded an audio recently that I've shared with one of my clients. A personal one for them, and we can add music to the background, you can have it silent, there's so many things that you can do with it. You can even do your own, you can even record your own, it's so easy these days as well to make it personal for you. So yeah, there's a lot of ways of getting into this and just seeing whether you can utilise it for your own evidence or your own experience to be curious to see if anything changes. Because the amazing part of this is that the nervous system, it doesn't actually distinguish the difference between something that's vividly imagined, you know, whether you're really, really imagining that, like the thoughts are so powerful that the senses will experience it as though it's a real-life experience, as though it's really happening. Everyone can do this. I know you might think that you're the special one that's not able to, and recently there was a session with a lady who actually was really worried that she couldn't do it, and she got a massive amazing like, wow, I didn't even know I could do that! I never ever knew that I could do that, and that was a really lovely moment, especially if someone was a bit worried, like, oh, I don't think it's going to work, or I don't think I'm able to do it. But ultimately, a thought can be, is so powerful that you will imagine it and feel it like it's happening in real time. They're both processed the same way, whether it is happening in real time, Or whether it's an imagined, neurologically it gets processed in the same way, so both signals is possible, whether it's feeling safe or feeling under threat, it can, it gives you this, you know, that's how it works. Let me think of another example. Here's one that that, um, um, there was some research, um, what they conducted on patients who had, um, like clinical depression, anxiety, and it was to do with, um, serotonin levels. And, um, they put them in front of catastrophic images. and made them watch them for a period of time, and they did the level pre and the level post watching these videos, and the connection there was evidence-proven that the root cause was the thoughts, the imagination was bringing to life, and The body responded as though this is a real-life incidence. So it's really incredible what's possible. So why not utilize and just have a little bit of knowledge on how we can use it to really help us with getting back to activity, doing things that we've avoided? For me, it was getting back to sitting down. I had to use it for being able to actually— it'd been so long since I'd been sat down. Without avoiding it, that I had to spend quite a bit of time actually just really sort of like vividly imagining how easy it could be and getting myself to a comfortable place before even doing the activity itself. So for a lot of people who are really not able to do certain things, it begins with Visualising yourself doing it with ease, visualising yourself getting back to that activity with a little more ease than what you might have experienced before, and really using that because you've got to get comfortable with that before actually going out and doing it. It's a really important first step that can mean that when you do actually go out there and get back to it and do that, whatever that activity might be, whether that's getting out walking again, that can be the difference that makes the difference that allows you to be successful. A really dramatic example was the 100-mile ultramarathon that I completed. My first ever one was in 2022, and then I did another one in 2023 and 2024. But I spent a lot of time actually visualising that, like, kind of seeing it, you can get a lot of training done when you're supposed to be sleeping and relaxing. So that's kind of how I went about getting to doing that. So, and when your mind is actually settled into the visualization, the nervous system goes calm. If the visualization is not being put in front of Catastrophic things, like in that particular research experiment, won't recommend that. But if it's more about taking you to a nice place, whatever that might be, that's why I like the, some of the curable stuff, because it's not like, let's take you to a field full of whatever, like that might not be a nice relaxing place for some people, but it's quite specific with Focused towards like reduction of pain and symptoms. So they're more specialized towards that rather than a generic, um, being in a beach or whatever else like that because, um, that, that's not focused purely for symptom reduction or anything. They're just more general. I always think about my mum when I talk about this kind of thing as well because when I was a kid, my dad was a music producer and they had their own recording studio, and actually they didn't only record music, but my dad recorded, like, when you used to have cassettes, they recorded it for this lady who was a really well-known, well, I'm assuming she was like a hypnotherapist or something like that. And they recorded a whole load of relaxation cassettes, or whatever you called them back then, and I can remember my mum went to the— basically she was suffering really badly with reflux back then, and she went to the doctors, and the doctor said to her— the doctor was so clever and wise really when you think back— the doctor said to her, It must have been a long time ago, by the way, because I must have been about 12, and they said, you just need to go away and listen to some relaxation tapes, but because my mum had been recording this album, she couldn't even bear the thought of listening to them because she'd had that many of them, heard them over and over, and she wasn't bought into it. If anything, it made her go the other way. And even to this day, we talk about that now and I say, actually, that would have been really helpful for you back then. You'd be really good at it by now, you know, getting yourself into a relaxed place. Because clearly the doctor knew that the reason was a stressed nervous system. And back then, when you're suffering so badly with something physical, you might not be ready to hear the— you might have felt fobbed off. Go away and relax and everything's going to be fine. But actually, all those years ago, that, that is actually true. Like, doctors do know this stuff, but patients don't accept it very easily at times, my mum being one of them back in the day. And now I'd love to get my hands on those tapes and listen back to them and find out what it was that they were doing back then. But anyway, that's just my story for today. So you're interrupting the thought pattern more than anything, all in a nice way. All in a nice way. Because it's common that when you've got a chronic issue, you spend all day every day thinking about it, expecting it, anticipating it, worrying about it. It's very, very natural and it makes sense that you'd do that, especially when it's there and it's gonna grab your attention. But if you're able to just set aside, literally just Even 5 minutes. I know the one I've shared is 15, but there's some that are shorter. Even just 5 minutes to yourself to just do some vivid imagination to yourself. You don't have to have an audio, you can just be on your own in a quiet space and you can just— you don't even have to close your eyes if you don't want to, you can have your eyes open, you can have them closed, you can just imagine, feel yourself. If you can't see, that's fine, if you don't really see visions or pictures, you can Feel how it will feel. You can just feel your arms and legs moving the way they're moving. Just don't overanalyse it, just play around with it, just get curious. It's something you'll probably do without realising, you might just do it naturally. And just set aside 5 minutes to just have a go doing it. Share with me how you get on, I'd love to know. I find it super interesting how how differently we all experience the world. It's really incredible, the differences in how we all process information and how it's represented, represented back to us in how we experience it is unique to each and every one of us. So just notice what happens for you and Yeah, play around with it, get curious, and it's not about creating something that's perfect, see what comes up. There's one that I listen to and it always says, watch the pictures floating around inside your mind, it says something like that, and I'm like, ah, lots of different things coming and going, and it's just about getting quiet enough to even observe that. Because sometimes we don't even know it's going on, we just get a feeling and the feeling's not good. And other days you might get a nicer one and it just varies, it's just human experience. But the bottom line is that the calmer that the nervous system is, The better the feeling's going to be, and visualisations and playing around with it is a way to get you there. It's not the only thing, it's not the be-all and end-all, but just, just pick something that you want to get back to doing and just have a go at how does it feel. Some people got to close their eyes. To get anything, and just see what comes up. Yeah, don't think you've got to do it loads, or there's no set agenda to this stuff. Yeah, I'm just trying to think if there's anything else I want to really share about this stuff. But realistically, this is what's going to get you to a point where you're going to start believing what's possible, because that's where it sort of begins. Lots of athletes and sports people do a lot of this visualizing. Because if you cannot even visualize and feel like you can do something, then it's unlikely that you're going to be able to. So a lot of it starts with, with this. It's just how we're built. It's not actually— we're just using something that's natural. It's how, how we work, so we're not like doing— I wouldn't say it's a technique or an approach and it's something that's something you've got to do, it's just understanding that it's something that's happening and you can get a lot from it when you understand how you work. And when you start to understand what, what's really going on in the mind, that's what I'm doing my best to explain in this process. So for me, it just felt a bit fake at first when I had to sit there and I had someone talking me through a script and telling me to imagine that I'm on a beach and feeling the sand on my toes. I hated that, I didn't like that one. But there's so much more to it if you can do it your way. Yeah, so happy, have fun imagining, dreaming, daydreaming. I like to think of it as daydreaming, it's all the same thing. So good luck with that, let me know how you get on and I'll see you all next week. I'm gonna join my other meeting now, so thank you so much for being here, have fun, see you soon, bye! Bye!