心理预演越充分，实际表现就越好。

原文英文

Mental rehearsal is a critical step in breaking bad habits. Once you notice a bad habit and identify the specific times it occurs, you have already taken the first step toward change. Your next step is to determine the positive habit you wish to use to replace this negative one (note: the goal is to replace, not just erase the habit). Once you have identified the bad habit, its triggers, and your intended response, your next task is mental rehearsal.

Mentally rehearsing how to handle specific situations is vital for habit change. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University found that if we mentally rehearse ideal outcomes before performing a task, the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain—is fully activated, greatly stimulating proactive action. The more thorough the mental rehearsal, the better the performance.

Medical research also indicates that mental rehearsal—the vivid and specific imagination of a behavior—helps mobilize the brain cells responsible for performing that actual behavior. Researchers also found that mental rehearsal is particularly important when attempting to replace bad habits with good ones. This is because the prefrontal cortex becomes highly active as individuals prepare to overcome habitual reactions, focusing intensely on upcoming events and their responses.

When the prefrontal cortex is dormant, people are more likely to fall back into deep-seated habits. Conversely, once we activate the prefrontal cortex through mental practice, we are more likely to implement our rehearsed, desired responses when facing similar situations.