How A Neuroscientist Creates A Vision Board + A Trick To Make It Even More Effective

Not everyone loves to exercise or eat healthy food, but enhanced longevity and better energy (plus a load of other health benefits) are reason enough to make those activities stick. On a similar note, personal growth practices can also feel mundane, but for a healthy brain (and, thus, a happier you), it's generally worth it. 

Based on the principles of the law of attraction, a vision board is essentially a collection of images, quotes, and other objects that serve as visual representations of your goals.

"We're bombarded with so much information," Swart says. "This has been the case for a long time, but if you read a copy of the New York Times today, you would receive as much information from that one newspaper as somebody would in their entire lifetime 100 years ago, and even then, they were overly bombarded with information," she adds. 

Vision boards help your brain sift through that information and home in on exactly what it is that you want. Your brain's natural filtering mechanism ensures that you don’t notice things that aren't relevant to your survival; however, in modern times, you may actually need to pay closer attention to those stimuli.

The next mechanism, Swart explains, is selective attention, which means that you start to notice things in your daily life that you already have on your vision board. "It's like when you buy a new car, and you suddenly see it everywhere," she says. "It's basically priming your brain to notice opportunities that will take you closer to your goals."

Finally, you have value tagging. The brain does this in two ways, Swart says, including a cold or logical way and in a warm or emotional way. Your survival necessities fall into the logical tagging, while more emotional things (like those on your vision board) fall into the latter tagging.

However, one quick hack can level up the efficacy of your vision board: Look at it before you fall asleep. 

"There's a psychological phenomenon called the Tetris effect1, which says that the thing you look at last imprints on your subconscious more strongly than anything else during the day," Swart explains. "So, I keep my physical action board next to my bed so that I see it first thing in the morning and at night."