The Mental Snooze - A Psychology Life Hack
- Tara Ferguson, PhD
- Apr 9
- 3 min read
Welcome to my first ever Vlog post! I hope you enjoy :)
The Mental Snooze is technically something I “made up” but it is based on decades of science in performance psychology. The most commonly known use of this sector of psychology is in working with athletes to accomplish their goals, but it is also commonly used in executive coaching and trauma therapy. Since I specialize in trauma therapy, that is where I have used it the most.
The basic gist is that our brains are essentially programmable, for better or for worse. Just like they say, “you are what you eat,” as a psychologist, I would also say, “you are what you think.” For us humans, that’s unfortunate because we have “issues,” which means we can get caught up in insecurities, negative thoughts, self-doubt and possible worst-case scenarios.
Since the brain is a problem-solving tool, that’s just what it does – looks for problems, and then solves them. Just like your heart naturally beats, your brain naturally finds, analyzes and solves problems. And just like we can use conscious effort to slow our breathing and heart rate, we can also apply this same effort to create a new tone for our thoughts. The implications of this are actually quite mind-blowing!
Early studies in performance psychology found that whatever we imagine, to our brains, is the same as if we actually engaged in the imagined scenario. The most famous study looked at the brains of individuals who threw a ball, or just imagined throwing a ball – there was no difference in what they observed in brain activity between the two conditions.
In trauma therapy, we use this mechanism to heal unmet needs of trauma survivors and imagine alternative endings that communicate safety to the nervous system, therefore, breaking the PTSD stress response. With an athlete who has been missing his kicks, training would focus on them imagining the football going right through the goalposts repeatedly. With an executive who wants to be more present in meetings with his staff, we would focus on creating a visualization of them doing so, with all the accompanying sensations, thoughts and behaviors.
Here, with the Mental Snooze, we are doing the same – we are programming a chain of events that we want to occur. In order for our brain to follow a path, we have to lay down the tracks for it ahead of time. Imagine that you went out into the woods and you came to a fork in the path – down one path, it seemed to dwindle into overgrown brush and trees; down the other path, it was well carved out and clearly more well-traveled. Which way would you go?
Your brain thinks just like you do! The neural signals in the brain are going to choose the path that is most clearly worn, well-traveled and therefore, safe. So, if we want our thoughts to travel down the “right” path, we have to clearly indicate to our brains which path that is, through consciously choosing our thoughts. Again, this is mind-blowing, because think of the implications! What would happen if we “fed” ourselves calming thoughts, accepting thoughts, or loving thoughts?
For the Mental Snooze, we are using this knowledge to create the path in which we REMEMBER to complete a needed task. We identify our target event (ex – remembering to get the food out of the freezer), then we program the before, and the after. That way, when our brain recognizes the situation that we programmed, it “turns on” the programmed chain of events (the neural path that we created previously when we imagined the scene and set the snooze). From there, the brain will present the next item in the chain, and luckily, this will be the event that we needed to remember.
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