If you’re engaged in the process of manifesting your dream life, you might already be using a vision board.
Whether I’m providing dating and relationship coaching, wealth and abundance coaching, confidence and mindset coaching, or any other type of life and manifestation coaching service, I often recommend the use of a vision board.
In many cases, the results speak for themselves, but it’s understandable if you might be a little skeptical of how it all works.
After all, how can putting some pictures on your wall help you manifest the life of your dreams?
Well, there’s more to it than that, but there’s also some interesting scientific evidence that supports the use of vision boards.
Let’s take a look at it.
Reality Vs. Visualization
If you’re reading this, it’s a good bet that you have a brain in your head.
And our brains are wonderful, complex organs that science is just starting to understand the workings of.
One of the discoveries we’ve made has to do with how the process of visualization actually works, related to neural pathways.
Neural pathways are the way we learn.
When we have a new experience, our brain creates neural pathways to remember how to do it.
That way, the next time you do it, it’s a little easier.
And just like a real pathway, the more times it’s taken the easier it becomes to travel.
This is why something that’s difficult to do at first becomes a little easier the second time, and the third time a little easier than the second, and by the hundredth time you can practically do it in your sleep.
But here’s the thing – your brain can’t actually differentiate between you actually doing something, and you visualizing yourself doing something.
It still builds neural pathways all the same.
Last year, I wrote an article called The Science Behind Manifesting Your Dream Life, where we looked at a study that explored a group of people with immobilized wrists.
Both groups had their wrists immobilized, but one of them visualized themselves flexing their muscles – that group had stronger wrists at the end of the study.
That’s because of what we talked about above – visualization is powerful!
But what does that have to do with vision boards?
When you assemble your vision board, full of images that make you feel awesome, expansive, excited, and energized, and you meditate on it, exploring the feelings inspired by it, express the gratitude of it as it manifests – you’re actually building neural pathways.
You’re literally rewiring your brain to accept your dream life as reality.
Repetition Makes It Easier
Have you noticed how comforting it can be to watch your favourite TV show or movie, listen to your favourite music, or play your favourite game?
That’s no coincidence.
Physiologically speaking, when you try something new, your body treats it as though it was a potentially dangerous situation, and as a result it releases the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
They’re there to put your body on heightened alert to any dangers you might face, so you can get to safety most effectively.
The problem is, it can’t necessarily differentiate between a situation that’s genuinely dangerous, and something it just hasn’t experienced before – it looks at each of these the same way.
But remember in the last section where we looked at how your brain has trouble distinguishing between actually experiencing something and visualizing it?
That can help you here as well.
When you use a vision board as a visualization tool to manifest the life of your dreams, you’re helping your mind to become accustomed to how it feels to actually experience it.
Last week, we talked about how fear isn’t actually a bad thing, and that engaging in what we fear most can help us work through it, and even more, use it to our advantage.
This idea is part of why that can help us.
Because the more you visualize yourself living the life of your dreams, the more your mind gets used to understanding it, and the less triggered it will be to release those stress hormones.
So using a vision board can actually make it easier for you to slip more easily into living your dream life as you manifest it.
But there’s even more to it than that.
The Science Of Thinking
Dr. Derek Muller is the host of the YouTube channel Veritasium, and about a year ago he uploaded a video called The Science Of Thinking – it’s fascinating stuff.
In the video, Muller describes two different modes of thinking for your brain – psychologists call them “System 1” and “System 2”.
System 1 is the side of your brain that does a lot of things on autopilot.
It processes all the information coming through your senses, sorts through it, picks out the relevant and noteworthy bits, and discards the rest.
Meanwhile, System 2 is slower, more methodical, and is better at catching mistakes – but it takes a lot more mental energy to engage.
If you’re asked to do a complex math question in your head, for example, System 2 is the part that kicks in, and if you’re asked what five times five is, System 1 will tell you it’s twenty five because you spent so much time in grade school writing out multiplication tables that it’s seared into your memory.
What does all this have to do with vision boards?
System 1 is able to respond as quickly as it does because of the experiences you’ve had in your life.
Meanwhile, because System 2 takes a lot more energy to engage, we engage System 1 whenever we can.
Professional basketball players, for example, are able to make split second decisions and reactions in the middle of a game based on what they’ve built into their System 1 memory – in their case, thousands of hours of practice.
Your vision board helps with this as well.
The more you use your vision board to visualize your dream life, the more your dream life becomes a part of your System 1 memory.
And therefore, as you start to see your dream life manifest itself, your mind will react to it much more openly.
Using your vision board can help you firmly plant your dream life into your System 1 memory.
This is a big step toward manifesting the life of your dreams.
Book Your FREE Connection Call With Evelina Hovich Today
Do you feel like there’s something missing from your practice of manifesting your dream life?
Do you know you’re capable of something much greater, but you feel stuck where you are?
I’m Evelina Hovich, a Toronto life coach, and I can help.
The universe has amazing, wonderful gifts in store for all of us – we need only learn to open ourselves to the possibilities.
The art of manifesting the life of your dreams is inherent in all of us, but sometimes we need guidance in our journeys.
Book your FREE connection call with me, Evelina Hovich, today, and let’s begin manifesting a life beyond your wildest dreams.