We all do it: going over different versions of a future conversation, trying out sharp replies to that intimidating person, or getting a taste of what it would feel like to do that secret thing. Most of us have even experienced funerals of people we know - including several versions of our own - in the safety of our imagination.
We do this so that when one of these scenarios actually happens in real life, we are prepared for it. We won't feel the full dose of tension and negative emotions, because we have already felt some of it during our mental preparation. We won't be surprised and we'll know what to do and say.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Here's the thing about mentally preparing yourself: it feels like it's going somewhere, but it actually drags you in the opposite direction.
First of all, that kind of mental preparation isn't proper preparation. Can you think of examples where elaborately mentally preparing yourself really paid off? When the moment came, did you feel prepared? Mostly it turns out to have robbed us of our energy and hours of our time, without improving our response to life's happenings. Also, life tends to have a funny way of playing out the one scenario you hadn't thought of.
Second of all, mental preparation is really hard work for the brain as well as the body. The brain experiences all these imagined scenarios as if they're really happening, in the sense that it has the entire emotional load to process, whether you're really experiencing the scenario or not. Like Albus Dumbledore said, just because it’s happening inside your head, "why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
The body experiences your mental scenarios too, perhaps more than you think. Our muscles tend to join the story whether we notice it or not. They tense up as you brace yourself for a shock or a difficult moment. You might slightly clench your jaw, make fists, tense your shoulders, as a natural, evolutionary reaction to threat - even though it's only in our mental movie. Even when we are just having inner speech - talking in our heads - the various muscles that control speech tense up (as mentioned in a fascinating book by Tim Parks).
Playing out every possible scenario in your mind's cinema as a means of avoiding feeling unpleasantly surprised actually contributes to the opposite: it increases tension and attention to possible threats, making us stressed out and less capable to cope with what life throws at us.
Thinking things over for around five minutes can lead to new insights. But after about ten minutes, it usually doesn't really take us anywhere. Could it be beneficial to keep these scenarios short? Or to make them about successes and wishes granted? Or even to take longer and longer breaks from the mental cinema?
What are your thoughts on this type of mental preparation? And on the relationship between thoughts and physical tension?
[[[Who am I? Check out my introductory post here!]]]