Submodalities exercises are short drills in which you deliberately change one quality of an internal picture, sound or feeling, brightness, size, distance, volume or location, and notice what happens to the feeling attached to it. Most of them take under ten minutes and need nothing but a quiet chair. Their point is not relaxation. It is to show you, with your own material, that the emotional weight of a memory sits in how you are representing it, not only in what happened.
| Exercise | What you change | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| The contrast test | Brightness, size and distance of one image | Finding which quality actually carries the feeling for you |
| Dimming a nagging memory | Colour, focus, distance | Taking the sting out of a small, recurring irritation |
| Turning down the inner critic | Volume, tone, location of an internal voice | A repetitive self-critical sentence |
| Brightening a resource state | Size, brightness, movement | Building a state you want more access to |
| The driver test | One quality at a time, systematically | Identifying the single change that does most of the work |
What exactly is a submodalities exercise?
It is a structured way of editing the qualities of an internal representation and checking the result. You bring up an image, notice whether it is bright or dim, near or far, moving or still, then change one of those qualities on purpose and pay attention to whether the feeling rises, drops or stays flat.
The vocabulary comes from the glossary side of the model. If the terms are new, our reference entry on what submodalities are and how they are grouped lists the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic qualities you will be working with. This article is the practice half: the entry explains, these drills train.
Two things make an exercise worth calling an exercise rather than daydreaming. You change one variable at a time, and you check the feeling before and after. Skip either and you learn nothing, because you will not know which change did what.
How do you run your first one?
Start with the contrast test, on something mildly annoying rather than something painful. Ten minutes, six steps:
- Pick a small irritation from the last week. A comment that landed badly, a task you keep putting off. Nothing heavy.
- Let the memory come up and rate the feeling from one to ten. Write the number down. This matters more than it sounds, because memory of a feeling drifts within minutes.
- Notice the picture. Is it still or moving, in colour or not, close to your face or far away, life-sized or bigger, and where in your visual field does it sit?
- Change one quality only. Push the image twice as far away and leave everything else alone. Rate the feeling again.
- Put it back, then try a different single change. Drain the colour out. Rate again. Then shrink it. Rate again.
- Compare your numbers. One change will have moved the needle more than the others. That one is your lever for this kind of material.
People are usually surprised by how personal the answer is. For one person distance does almost all the work and colour does nothing. For the next it is the other way round. There is no universal setting to memorise, which is the whole reason the drill exists.
Which five exercises are worth practising?
These five cover the ground a Practitioner group works through in its first two days, in rough order of difficulty.
- The contrast test. The six steps above. Run it three times on three different memories before you do anything else. It builds the noticing skill everything else depends on.
- Dimming a nagging memory. Take the quality that moved your rating most and push it further. Distance, then black and white, then smaller, then still instead of moving. Stop when the feeling is neutral rather than pleasant. Aiming for pleasant tends to snap back.
- Turning down the inner critic. Find the sentence you say to yourself, then locate the voice. Most people can point to a spot: behind the left ear, in the middle of the head. Move it to your knee. Slow it down. Give it a cartoon accent. The content usually stops mattering once the delivery is absurd.
- Brightening a resource state. Recall a time you felt genuinely capable. Make the image bigger, brighter and closer, add movement, and step into it so you are looking out through your own eyes rather than watching yourself. Do this one daily for a week and you will notice the state becomes easier to reach on demand.
- The driver test. Work through a list of qualities on one memory, one at a time, and log each rating. Tedious, and the most useful hour you will spend on this, because it hands you a personal map of which levers work on you.
Once these are comfortable, the obvious next step is a pattern that chains several changes into a fixed sequence. Our guide to the visualization techniques NLP actually uses covers how those sequences are built, and our reference entry on the swish pattern is the best-known example of one.
What usually goes wrong?
Four failure modes account for nearly everything. None of them mean the exercise does not work for you.
Starting too heavy. People pick their worst memory on day one, feel overwhelmed, and conclude the method is useless. Work on a seven out of ten irritation, not a bereavement.
Changing five things at once. The feeling shifts, you have no idea why, and nothing is repeatable. One variable, every time.
Expecting a picture. A sizeable minority of people do not see clear internal images, and some see none at all. If that is you, the exercise still runs: work with the sound qualities or with where the feeling sits in your body and how it moves. Trying to force visual imagery you do not have is a dead end, and being told to try harder is bad instruction.
Not checking afterwards. A change made in a quiet room is a change made in a quiet room. Whether it holds is a separate question, and the answer comes from testing it.
One honest caveat. Submodalities work is well established as a practice inside NLP and it is genuinely useful for everyday irritations, habits and self-talk. It is not a treatment for trauma, panic or depression, and the research base is far thinner than the confident language in most NLP marketing suggests. These exercises complement professional care, they do not replace it, and anything that reliably floors you belongs in a room with a qualified therapist rather than in a solo drill.
How do you make the change hold?
By testing it against a real situation and repeating it until the new version is the one that comes up automatically. A submodality shift is not a one-time deletion; it is a preference your mind learns from repetition.
Three things make the difference. Repeat the change quickly, five or six times with a clear break in between, rather than holding it in place once. Then imagine the next real moment when the old response would have fired and check what shows up. If the old feeling returns, you have information, not failure: you probably changed a quality that was not the driver.
And ask whether the feeling was doing a job. The irritation that keeps you preparing properly for a difficult conversation is not always worth dimming. If a change would leave you less careful about something that deserves care, leave it alone or change less of it.
What I watch for when a group practises this
The most common thing I correct is speed. People run the whole thing in about four seconds, in their heads, without pausing to rate anything, and then report that nothing happened. When I ask them to slow down and actually say the number out loud before and after, the same exercise lands. The pause is the measurement, and without measurement there is no exercise.
The second thing is that people describe what they think they should see instead of what is there. Somebody says the picture is far away because far away sounds like the right answer, and their hand is pointing at a spot thirty centimetres from their face. That gap is exactly what a second pair of eyes catches and why these drills go faster with someone watching. It is most of what the first two days of our seven-day certification course in Lisbon are spent on, in groups small enough that nobody practises unobserved.
If you want the source material rather than a summary, Richard Bandler and Will MacDonald set this out in An Insider’s Guide to Sub-Modalities (1988), and Bandler’s Using Your Brain for a Change (1985) is where most of the exercises taught today originate.
Carolin Mallmann, Licensed Trainer of The Society of NLP, Lisbon
Frequently asked questions about submodalities exercises
How long does a submodalities exercise take?
Between five and fifteen minutes for a single drill. The contrast test, which is the standard starting exercise, takes about ten minutes including the before and after ratings. Longer sessions are rarely better, because attention to fine internal detail fades quickly.
Can I do submodalities exercises on my own?
Yes, and the simple ones are designed for solo practice. The limit is that you cannot see yourself. A partner notices when your description does not match what your body is doing, which is where most of the useful correction comes from, so alternate solo drills with practice in a pair if you can.
What if I cannot see mental images at all?
Then run the exercises on sound or feeling instead. Change the volume, speed or location of an internal voice, or notice where a feeling sits and how it moves. Aphantasia is common enough that any competent trainer has a non-visual version ready, and needing one is not a sign the exercise will not work.
Do submodality changes last?
Some hold immediately, most need repetition. Running the change five or six times quickly, then rehearsing the situation where the old response used to fire, is what turns a shift in a quiet room into one that survives a Monday morning. If it snaps back, you probably changed a quality that was not the main driver for you.
Are submodalities exercises safe for difficult memories?
For ordinary irritations and habits, yes. For trauma, panic or depression they are not a substitute for professional treatment, and working alone on material that genuinely floors you is a bad idea. Start with low-intensity memories, and take anything heavier to a qualified therapist.
Keep exploring
- Five NLP visualization techniques that hold up in practice, for the patterns these drills feed into.
- Milton Model examples you can say out loud, published this week, if you would rather practise language than imagery.
Carolin Mallmann is a Licensed Trainer of The Society of NLP, trained by Richard Bandler. She has trained more than 300 people and runs English-language NLP trainings in Lisbon, in groups of no more than ten.
