“Proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize thoughts, not only as dreams or visions in the mental realm but also as experiences in the material realm.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
What Is Visualization?
Visualization is a very polarizing topic. Some people swear by it and credit their success to visualization, while others believe it’s total quackery and nothing beats taking action in the real world. But what is visualization? As this article states “In laymen’s terms, it means recreating all the images, sounds and feelings in your mind surrounding an activity in order to practice in a perfect environment. Just like the small dojo where Morpheus and Neo fight in the movie.” Basically, it means the following – if you want to improve your free throw shooting, you visualize yourself shooting free throws, with the most amount of detail possible. All of us use visualization often – when we remember a certain detail from work or a social event, or when we prepare for the next day and imagine that important meeting we have. Most people, however, can get negative in their visualization, which can lead to negative consequences in real life as well.
What Does The Science Say About Visualization?
Here is what the same article I quoted above says about a free throw shooting experiment: “Australian Psychologist Alan Richardson made a little experiment. He took a group of basketball players, divided them in 3 groups and tested each player’s ability to make free throws.
- The first group would practice 20 minutes every day.
- The second would only visualize themselves making free throws, but no real practice was allowed.
- The third one would not practice or visualize.
The results were astounding. There was significant improvement on the group that only visualized; they were almost as good as the guys who actually practiced.”
From this article: “In my meetings with the Soviet researchers in Milan, they discussed government funded athletic programs that integrate sophisticated mental training and rigorous physical training. One study evaluating these intensive programs suggests their potential. Four matched groups of world-class Soviet athletes diligently trained for many hours each week. The training regimens were as follows:
Group I – 100% physical training
Group II – 75% physical training, 25% mental training
Group III – 50% physical training, 50% mental training
Group IV – 25% physical training, 75% mental training
When the four groups were compared shortly before the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, Group IV had shown significantly greater improvement than Group III, with Groups II and I following, in that order.”
Another study in this one: “A study looking at brain patterns in weightlifters found that the patterns activated when a weightlifter lifted hundreds of pounds were similarly activated when they only imagined lifting. In some cases, research has revealed that mental practices are almost effective as true physical practice, and that doing both is more effective than either alone. For instance, in his study on everyday people, Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist from Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, compared “people who went to the gym with people who carried out virtual workouts in their heads.” He found a 30% muscle increase in the group who went to the gym. However, the group of participants who conducted mental exercises of the weight training increased muscle strength by almost half as much (13.5%). This average remained for three months following the mental training.”
What Makes Visualization So Powerful?
From “Seeing is Believing” article quoted above: “Brain studies now reveal that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as actions. Mental imagery impacts many cognitive processes in the brain: motor control, attention, perception, planning, and memory. So the brain is getting trained for actual performance during visualization. It’s been found that mental practices can enhance motivation, increase confidence and self-efficacy, improve motor performance, prime your brain for success, and increase states of flow—all relevant to achieving your best life!”
As you may have noted, the studies mentioned above are all done on either athletes, or people who have experience with a skill, like going to the gym. That’s a key aspect of useful visualization – you need to know the task you will be visualizing well enough to be able to recreate it in your mind with as much detail as possible to reap the full benefits of visualization. I’ll give you an example – I have never played the guitar. If I was to visualize playing the guitar, would that be useful for my real-life guitar skills? Probably not, as I wouldn’t even know where to begin and how to make that visualization real. If you ask me to visualize performing a squat or a deadlift however, I have done those movements thousands of times and can visualize getting ready, walking to the bar, and performing the movement with a lot of detail. The more experience you have with something, the more powerful visualization becomes for it. As mentioned above, your brain takes the same mental actions when you are vividly visualizing performing a task as it does when you are actually performing it.
Beliefs have consequences. They influence the actions you take, and every successful person learns to use their mind to their advantage sooner or later. If you are into bodybuilding (and I believe everyone should be, especially if you daygame), then you might have heard of powerlifter Greg Nuckols. Here is an article by Greg called “Unleash Your Inner Superhero” I highly suggest you read the whole thing – go ahead, I will wait for you!
That article reinforces how powerful our minds are, and how we should use our brain to help us achieve success – “Just to rehash the bit about steroids, placebo studies have shown you can get “steroid-like” strength gains from simply thinking you’re on steroids. In one study, experienced lifters gained 4x the strength in about half the time (100 pounds in 4 weeks, vs. 22 pounds in 7 weeks, across 5 exercises) because they thought they were taking steroids. In another, national-level powerlifters put an average of 10-12kg (22-26 pounds) on each of their lifts (squat, bench, and deadlift) on the very same day because they thought they were given a fast-acting steroids. Two week later, when half were told it was a sham, their new strength gains vanished, while those who still thought they were on steroids managed to hit similar lifts again.”
How Does Visualization Apply To Daygame?
I know what you are probably thinking – “this is great, but I read your blog because of daygame and picking up women. How does visualization help me with that?” Like I said above, you need to have a decent amount of experience with the task you are visualizing in order to reap the benefits of visualization. So if you have never approached a girl in your life but think visualizing approaching hot women will be a silver bullet, then you will be wasting your time, as visualization is meant to be a supplement to the physical task done in the real world. If it is not, that just becomes mental masturbation.
However, let’s say that you actually daygame and have a couple of hundreds approaches under your belt (or more). You go out for a daygame session and get a few numbers. Then, there she is: the most beautiful girl you have seen in weeks. Her hair is as bright as the sun, her legs are longer than a flamingo’s, her ass is nice and round like a peach. You take a deep breath… and weasel out of the approach (a weasel is when you talk yourself out of approaching a girl you find attractive for those unfamiliar with the term). How could visualization help here? I have found it’s better for my approaches to be in the moment when I am daygaming. However, once I go home, I write my notes of the approaches in a notebook, and then analyze and write down what I want to improve. This is where visualization can help: close your eyes and return to the moment where you saw the beautiful girl you weaseled on. Use all your senses: remember what she looked like, remember what you heard at the time, what was around you, remember what you smelled. The more vivid, the better. Then visualize yourself walking up to her, strong eye contact, confident body language, deep voice. Visualize opening her, visualize her reaction to you. Words aren’t too important, as your subconscious mind works in emotions and images rather than logic. Visualize how her body opens up to you, visualize how confident you are, visualize the vibe between you two, the sexual tension. Visualize the great eye contact, the eyefucking, the smile on her face.
By correcting your mistakes with visualization, you rewire your subconscious in the way you want it to behave – in this example, you make the correction to approach rather than weasel. If you do this enough times, the next time you see a hot girl you will automatically start walking towards her and approach her. This can be used for any mistakes you find yourself making during your daygame approaches: weak eye contact, bad posture, feminine voice, etc.
Visualizing Daygame During Quarantine
I am writing this blog post during the quarantine, and my state has been under stay at home orders for a few weeks now. Due to pretty much all the venues I usually daygame at being closed (except the grocery store), I haven’t done an approach in over a month now. This is where visualization can help a lot, since most of us are either unable to daygame at all (and miss approaching), or we still try to daygame, but the volume of girls just isn’t there to get a lot of sets in.
Take a few minutes and visualize yourself in the venue you usually approach women (if you approach at a few venues like me, just pick one for each visualization session). What are you wearing? What is the vibe in the venue? What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? How do you feel emotionally as you are walking? Try to shut off your brain and imagine all of this as vividly as possible. If you have a few hundred approaches under your belt and daygamed consistently before the quarantine, this shouldn’t be very hard for you to do. Then, focus on yourself, but try to see yourself from outside your body: what is your body language like, how confident are you? Remember, when you visualize you want to see where you want to be, not necessarily where you are with your daygame skillset right now. So imagine yourself walking tall, with a smirk on your face, strong eye contact. Then, visualize your first approach: what does the girl look like? What attracted you to her? How do you walk up to her? How do you stop her? What is your vibe like? How does she react to you? How do you feel as you talk to a woman you are attracted to? Visualize her response, her eye contact, her smile, her feminine energy contrasting your strong masculine vibe. Again: the more detail the better, and the more useful the visualization will be.
You might find this hard at first, and your mind will wander. It is just like meditation: stick to it and before you know it, you will be able to do this for longer than ever and visualize approaching a few girls each time, and each approach will feel different as your brain will get used to visualizing and once your conscious mind shuts off, your subconscious will give you all kinds of details and emotions you never thought possible.
Conclusion
In summary, visualization is a very useful technique to positively train your mind to excel at things you already have experience with in real life. Due to the quarantine, a lot of daygamers are unable to approach in real life, and vivid visualization has been proven to have similar benefits to performing the same activity in real life, given that you have enough experience with it, and you focus on visualizing with as much detail as possible.
Midwest Daygame 