This is my guide on how to quickly and efficiently level up your ability to immerse in your mindscape. By following these tips and tricks, you can anchor yourself and make mindscape exploration a valuable tool for switching and relaxing in your personal paradise. It’s a common precept that figuring this out requires trial and error, also that it takes a very long time. I believe the reason it takes some people so long is that they’re training in an inefficient way (though I may be wrong!). These tips will help develop your abilities quicker, leading to great progress quickly. It's better to view this as not a "master skill within days", but rather a marathon of constant improvement. Keep your expectations low to avoid demotivation.
One: Training. Every. Day.
If you want to build your skill, or any skill, the key is consistency. This is definitely, in my point of view, THE most important factor for developing your ability to immerse. By training every day, you fall into the mindset that every day is better than the previous one. It’ll take time for results to show up at first, but after even a week of this you’ll see your ability is better than Day 1. 10 minutes a day is much more effective than an hour once a week. You can start small and build up as the weeks pass, start with 5 minutes if you have to.
Two: Increasing working memory
Working memory is basically the human equivalent of RAM. The more RAM you have, the more you can focus on before you get overloaded. There’s many ways of improving working memory, from Dual N Back to Complex Working Memory training (both of which are available here). This, of course, is more effective if you TRAIN EVERY DAY. It’ll be hard but very much worth it. Also, as you train every day the amount of working memory required to immerse will decrease as your brain develops more efficient ways to immerse. All while your total working memory increases. Working memory is also needed to immerse while another headmate is switched in, as they’ll be using it to function as well. Start with easy tasks like immersing while another headmate does something simple like counting to 100, then as your ability grows graduate to immersing while another headmate takes a walk. We used Ultimate Custom Night to help learn this: Scout (one of my headmates who switched in) would play with a low score and I would immerse and keep my senses in awareness while sitting in a chair. Then, as he passed night after night we’d gradually add more score and I’d do more complex things like doing exercises and walking in mindscape.
NOTE: There's still uncertainty on how effective working memory training is, but I and many others have seen improvement in my abilities from developing it, so I think it's worth it.
Three: Improving visualization
Visualization is a skill that can be developed just like any other skill, and there’s SO MANY ways to improve it. Here's a good resource on it, as well as this and this. You can do this skill all the time during everyday life, like imagining animations while listening to music or reading fiction. Getting to a point where you can visualize easily will do wonders for your journey.
Four: Anchoring your senses
You want to be able to feel your senses in mindscape without directing conscious energy towards it. This mirrors everyday life; you don't need to think about feeling cold when going out on a winter night, it just happens. You can start with a single sense, then when it’s developed to your liking evolve the habit by adding another sensation. Be careful to not neglect the sense you just formed, it’s easy to forget about it after training it. For example, I started with feeling my bare feet on various mindscape surfaces, then kept going until it was second nature. After, I decided I wanted to feel my tail behind me, so I imagined how it would feel. Then, I’d constantly keep that sensation in my awareness until it got strong enough to barely need to focus on it. I’d go on to add more senses until I was satisfied. You can use the anchoring techniques used to stop yourself from dissociating, but for the mindscape. Find 5 things to see, 4 to feel, 3 to hear, 2 to smell, and 1 to taste. Then, take one of each to keep with you for as long as you can. I like to use gum for taste; as you chew on it constantly you can set a timer to aim for in order to get a concrete way to measure yourself. Start with a minute and go from there! Then, try to go for a streak of how many intervals you can achieve in a row. This is an excellent way to measure your success. As the skill gets better you’ll have spare RAM to either intensify the feeling or lengthen the duration, forming a loop of constant improvement. Eventually you’ll find yourself immersing much more efficiently, which will help prevent snapping back to the body.
REMINDER: keep safe while doing this, y'all.
Five: Create a meditation routine...Meditation is an excellent way to help develop your habit as it promotes neuroplasticity, a powerful brain functions that helps form your routines. The more of this you have, the less time it’ll take to form your habit, freeing up more time to develop the routines. There’s also many other benefits to meditation that’s a nice bonus!
Six: Create an “Immersing Room” in mindscape
By having a constant area that never changes you can develop a habit to help anchor yourself quickly every time you switch out. I have a meditation room that’s simply a large floating bedroom, but with glass for walls. Every time I switch out I go to this room and perform the 5-4-3-2-1 method to help anchor within a few minutes. Then I do whatever it is that I want to do in mindscape. By doing this repeatedly you’ll form a habit to instantly anchor yourself without even needing to think about it.
Seven: Practice without switching out
By switching I mean transferring bodily control to another headmate. You don’t have to be switched out to develop your habits. While in the physical body you can imagine chewing a piece of gum or feeling a phantom limb, then when you switch out you’ll find that you need less brainpower to achieve the same effect.
Logging your progress periodically gives you the ability to more effectively check in on yourself. Reread your logs to keep track of what works and doesn’t, and plan your next steps accordingly. This also contributes to neuroplasticity.
By rewarding yourself for a job well done you encourage the brain to develop the skill faster, as the subconscious links the two together. You can also create motivation to practice more for more enticing rewards. The subconscious will be conditioned to equate good progress to more rewards (leading to more desire to practice), and you can reduce bad habits for an extra bonus. For example, I want to reduce my time spent on my phone, so I abstain from it until I do a great job for the day. You can get very creative with this, literally anything can be a reward if it’s something you desire. Use small rewards for small progress and adjust as you do more intense training. As I’ve said in a previous post, I’m definitely more motivated to go above and beyond if I’ll get a brand new GPU for an intense goal (It’s an extreme example but it still applies).
Getting a full night of sleep cements your habits much more effectively than being sleep deprived, as you’ll have much more energy to spare for it. By being sleep deprived, you severely handicap your ability to learn new things like habits. If you’re constantly sleep deprived, gradually nudge yourself in the right direction by getting into bed at a regularly scheduled time, reducing screen time as bedtime approaches (read or log your progress instead!), and other common antidotes listed here.
Also, if you’re training heavily every day, take some days for lighter sessions. Mental fatigue can be pretty detrimental as you’ll accidentally form bad habits if you overlook something.
Eleven: For those of us with ADHD
ADHD will definitely affect your progress, but there’s many steps you can take to reduce interference. ADHD messes with the brain’s reward system, so you’ll have to think outside the box to do well. We crave instant gratification, so we’ll need other techniques to improve our progress. This is where gamifying the process, rewarding yourself, and taking short breaks really shine.
By following these tips, you can get into a loop of improving your progress every day, with great results occurring within the first week! The more of these you follow, the faster you’ll progress. Remember to stay safe, don’t do anything dumb like immerse while cutting veggies or anything absurd like that. Use common sense and use your best judgement. Also, remember to have fun! Explore with your headmates, use magic, things like that. Happy mindscape exploring!
