Dont Visualise – Thinkalise!

VISUALISATION VS THINKALISATION

Every time I talk about visualisation with a student we get trapped into a cycle of misunderstandings. I realised that is because visualisation is totally the wrong word to use for what I’m trying to teach them.

The word visualisation involves images above all. But that bears almost no relevance to what we do as freedivers when we try to re-live your dive, right?
In fact, (SPOILER ALERT!!) when you dive you don’t actually see yourself moving gracefully like a dolphin going down and up, or back and forth (and nor will your buddy, as we always look 10 times worse than we think we do).

What is that you see when you dive? Best case scenario you see a tiny fraction of never-ending rope in front of a blue background (or black, or green if you dive in shit places), then a plate, then a lot more rope, finally a safety diver and the surface. Or you see a long dark blue line with dark T’s on both ends. Or you have your eyes closed the whole time and see literally nothing at all.

Now tell me how are those images supposed to help you when doing your dives? They dont.
The main sense you use during your dive is touch, not sight: it’s stuff YOU FEEL, not stuff YOU SEE that give your brain most of the information you need and use to execute a dive. That’s why thinking in images doesn’t feel real, and if it doesnt feel real it is a pointless exercise and a waste of time.

What you should do is to think in feelings instead, so maybe we should call this process feelisation instead. Maybe, but thinkalisation is what I go with, and I’ll explain why.

Think back of a dive you did, do you not remember noticing the feel of water moving on your face, the feel of pullin

g on the rope or pushing off a wall, or having lactic legs, or the compression of your chest, or your first contraction coming, or the pressure on your ears. All this translates into thoughts and feelings that you must constantly screen and know which ones to keep and which ones to discard, which is why I call them constructive and destructive thoughts.
Think back to how many times during a dive you thought stuff like “this is just the 50m turn” during a dynamic dive, or “I’m only at x meters” when hearing a depth alarm, or “I’ll have to go all the way up” during a long descent, or “I’m already getting contractions” and so on.
We are not computers and we aren’t able to think without attaching feelings to it (except for the psychopaths in the room). So what happens is that, especially when we feel vulnerable and challenged, we attach negative feelings to a thought, and that makes it very tempting to give up and end the dive, or turn early, or panic if you are at depth.

How do you put this information into practice?

Take a dive (doesnt matter if depth, dynamic or static) and break it in many small segments.

Then make a detailed plan for every single segment of the dive and do not ever let your mind drift away from this one task. If you have enough experience, you also know which negative thoughts/feeling you usually get at certain stages of your dive, so prepare a valid answer to neutralise them.
Don’t let your your mind open to “free” thoughts coming: you control your thoughts and not the other way around.
If you are successful with this you will literally get to the end of your dive and get surprised that you are “already there without even realising that”. “Thinking right” is the key.

When should you thinkalise?

Before a big dive, take a few minutes in a quiet corner and go though all these segments with the same attention and intensity as you do when you live them for real. Go through all the dive, think it, feel it. If you get distracted or missed some things, then repeat one more time. You can also do it the night before a dive. At the beginning the more you do this the better because it will take some practice before you do it right and learn to select the constructive thoughts and use them correctly.

Like I said, this is a very big subject and there is so much more to be said, but this is a good starting point if you are new to the world of thinkalisation.