Imagination is a very powerful tool. If you want to make a lifestyle change, visualizing yourself throughout the process can help.
It has always been said that where the head passes the rest of the body passes, or that healing occurs from top to bottom. It is important that in a vital or healing process you previously imagine how it is going to happen to help it happen.
Sometimes worry or problems are installed in the imagination, invade us and make us sick. If we modify the imagination, if we manage to establish new images, the process changes.
HOW ARE IMAGES OF THE BRAIN CHANGED?
Sometimes, curiously, accepting those that are or are worrying at the time, paying attention to them, because those images have their reason and sometimes even the keys to get out of there.
Everything that happens is the best that could happen: investigating positively, taking the imagination to brain circuits that lead to optimism, helping to get out of the disease or to find a positive meaning in it, to put light where there is darkness.
With magnetic resonance is observed, when they imagine objects, events, music or words, the occipital cortex of the same mode is activated when any of those things happens in reality.
IMAGINATION AND HEALTH ARE RELATED?
When something is done, cortical activation sends signals to the lower centers of the brain, which can activate or deactivate stress responses and modify things like blood pressure, clotting and immunity.
Similarly, clinically, it has been known for years that when someone worries – an imaginative function – they can also activate the physiology of stress, which over time leads to physiological exhaustion, maladaptive behaviors and vulnerability to disease.
Conversely, if you imagine yourself in a beautiful, peaceful, and safe place, and focus on what you see, hear, and feel, you tend to relax as if you were there.
The images provide an overview, show how life events are connected. Emotions and physical symptoms make those connections apparent.
Imagining how a muscle relaxes helps to relax it, and regularly imagining the activation of the immune system stimulates the number and aggressiveness of natural killer cells.
This connection explains the usefulness of visualizing improvements if you have asthma, allergic rhinitis, tension or migraine headache, neck and lumbar pain, irritable bowel, premenstrual dysphoria, dysmenorrhea, Raynaud’s syndrome, anxiety, depression, hypertension.
They have also been shown to alleviate complications in some medical and surgical procedures, and in childbirth.
They help prepare for lifestyle changes, illness, and even death.
HOW TO PRACTICE VISUALIZATION?
- Let the images unfold and pay attention to what they teach.
- In emotionally fragile people with a history of psychosis or trauma, the images can be difficult to handle or digest.