I'm pleased to share the sixth episode of our "Coaches Ask a Sport Psychologist" series. Today, we're exploring a question that touches on mental preparation techniques:

"How much visualization is too much?"

In this episode, I discuss the role of visualization in psychological skills training (PST) and how to determine the optimal amount for enhancing performance. Visualization can be a powerful tool, but like any technique, it requires balance. I'll share insights on how to tailor visualization practices to suit individual needs and performance goals.

Join me as we delve into finding the right balance to make your visualization efforts most effective.

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Edited Video Transcript:

The question asked today is: "How much visualization is too much?"

The context of this question is a field of psychology called Psychological Skills Training (PST), which anchors one of the skills as visualization—to work through in your mind what you're going to do before you do it. The research on visualization is mixed, and the answer to this question is, honestly, it depends.

Our ability to problem-solve and think through upcoming situations is kind of amazing. Simply the fact that we can construct in our minds some reasonable facsimile of a future event and make some sort of a prediction about it is astounding in general for human behavior.

But the question being asked—how much is too much—comes to an answer of, well, when it becomes too much.

That's not a really satisfying answer. So, the nuanced response is: engage in visualization to the extent that it is beneficial to your performance.

Try a little bit, then go do the performance.

See if it's beneficial. If it is, try a little bit more. Go do the performance. See if it adds something to it. If it does, try a little bit more. Go do the performance. See if it adds something more to it. Somewhere in this process of "do more, perform," you're going to find that the amount of time spent visualizing is not significantly contributing to the performance.

At that threshold—wherever it may be for you, because it's going to be different for different people—do that much visualization.

You're probably going to find that, based on what the performance is—if it's a very complex task or if it's a very simple task, or if it's something that you haven't practiced very much versus something you've been doing your whole life—the amount at which visualization is beneficial, that threshold between being beneficial and just burning up your time, is going to vary drastically.

So, my best answer to "How much visualization is too much?" is: however much actually helps your performance. Anything beyond that, you could probably get better returns doing something else.