Recently, I’ve been practicing a technique that I call Mental Verbalization. It’s quite a simple technique, but one that I think can be powerful in shaping my knowledge and how I think. I didn’t realize how useful it was until later when I began to try it out just out of curiosity, and it worked wonders on my mental health, at least for the few times I’ve tried.

I remember there was a study on mental practice, which had participants mentally rehearse an activity, such as playing the piano. One group of participants was told to mentally practice for 2 hours by visualizing their fingers playing the keys in their head. There was another group of participants that practiced physically for comparison. The study found that the groups that practiced mentally showed signs of improvement to a lesser degree compared to the physical practice group.

I thought that was incredible because I’m not always able to practice the activities that I want to physically. Now I’ll be able to improve on my craft and hobbies without doing it physically. What was actually more impressive was that I decided to do this recently with other things in my life.

On my journey to improving my mental health, I’ve been listening to guided meditation and podcasts. I’ve found that while I can passively listen to guided meditations, there are points in these meditations that I want to actively internalize. Either through repetition and/or what I call mental verbalization. The gist of this is simply repeating what I am hearing but in my head.

I found that repeating it mentally helped my brain understand that what I am hearing is actually important. Similarly, I have seen people repeat words verbally when they realize that it is something of importance. I think that as human beings, we tend to mimic behavior, and we would do it especially when we find it is important. This mimicry, while a basic method of learning, is still a good tool worth utilizing.

As I’ve been listening to guided meditation and learning how to have more self-compassion, I’ve used this mental verbalization tool to help me internalize the compassion that I needed to deal with the critical part of myself. I have only begun to use this, but I found it beneficial right from the moment I decided to try it out.

Until the next post, thank you for reading! As always, wishing you love and succcess!