Positive affirmations are a common practice amongst personal growth enthusiasts. Not everyone seems to experience their powers, but everyone seems to believe that they should work, even when they don’t!
They fit nicely with the idea that we have the power to change our thinking and, therefore, our emotions, which is a central tenet in personal growth.
So why don’t positive affirmations always work? And how can we experience their powerful effects?
Positive Affirmations and Self-Deception
Not all uses of positive affirmations are healthy. Many people totally ignore reality, choose not to think and understand the situation they are in or the feelings they experience. They hope that by repeating a positive affirmation they can somehow make the bad feelings go away, or their situation to transform somehow.
Contrary to popular belief, positive affirmations are powerful, but they’re not magical.
In some situations, your mind will prevent positive affirmations from changing your emotions!
Is your mind acting against you? Is it trying to sabotage your success and well-being?
Not at all. It only tries to prevent you from fooling yourself!
Whenever you try to use positive affirmations to cover up a feeling you should acknowledge, that feeling will pop up at a later time and in situations you did not expect.
If you aren’t feeling happy, repeating to yourself “I am happy” can only work for a short time while you’re trying to get your mind to look away from your problems. But “looking away” is never a good option, and it’s not something your mind is comfortable doing for long periods of time.
Accepting Reality
Positive affirmations affirm something you already believe to be true. They are not intended to manufacture a new belief or a new reality.
The purpose of positive affirmations is to bring your focus to the reality that you acknowledge, but can easily forget about. You must always deal with facts when using positive affirmations. Otherwise, you will only be participating in a self-deception exercise, which your mind will punish you for (you HAVE been warned!).
The Proper Use of Positive Affirmations
Let’s say you made a serious mistake at work. Your default thought process can be to blame yourself, rationalize the mistake, look for excuses, criticize yourself, doubt your abilities and a string of other ways to punish yourself for the mistake.
With such an approach, you can leave yourself pretty damaged. It will lead you to shrivel up and recoil into a dark corner rather than to flourish and grow, as you should.
Rather than focus on the negatives of the situation, positive affirmations are intended to bring your focus to the positive aspects.
Instead of saying:
“I am OK”
“I feel great!”
“I am a beautiful human being”
“I’m the best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be” (if you do happen to say this to yourself, you might wish to see a therapist every now and then. Just a suggestion)
Link your affirmation to a fact that can help you develop that positive focus:
“I choose to learn from my mistakes”
This way, you are acknowledging that you have made a mistake (i.e. a fact you’re not denying or overlooking), yet you choose to focus on learning from the mistake. This is a healthy positive affirmation.
Whenever you doubt your abilities, repeating “I can do it!” might offer you a short-lived motivational high. But it’s something your mind can doubt. Remembering past accomplishments, and incorporating the reminder into your affirmations will win over your mind, and you won’t be experiencing any tension between what you say and what you think:
“I can do it, I’ve done it before!”
This way your affirmations will have the support of past experiences, which will boost your conviction and your confidence.
You can do a simple survey of your life, especially the low points, and you will realize that they are times when you forgot (i.e. did not bring to your attention and focus) all the accomplishments you have made in the high points.
Positive affirmations are meant to bring your focus to the experiences and the facts that can support your life decisions and revive your confidence in yourself and your abilities. They should never be used to affirm an idea you don’t truly believe in or that overlooks the feelings you experience and the situation you are facing.
4 replies on “Healthy Positive Affirmations”
Nice post 🙂 Deep yet funny.
I never believed in nor experimented with positive affirmations . But your approach to “healthy” positive affirmations makes more sense than the usual interpretation of such methodology that we hear about all the time.
Thanks, Nosayba 🙂
I *couldn’t* experiment with regular (unhealthy) positive affirmations, because my mind wouldn’t let me 😉
I don’t totally agree!
Even if Ur mine doesn’t believe it, it still have a powerful effect. Take this experiment that we did in 1 of the healing courses 4 instance:
A lady held her hand straight in front of her face. The teacher asked her 2 repeat: I’m not worthy & stupid! The teacher very easily pushed her hand down & she couldn’t resist. After that she asked her 2 say: I’m worthy & intelligent. The teacher here couldn’t push her hand down!
Now if she believed it or not. It affected her physical body.
Another example is the plant ex. Maybe U heard of it. When U put 2 plants or some do it with 3 (3rd as a control). U tel 2 1 plant daily +ve words & the other -ve 1s. The 1st grow beautifully but the other dies after a while. The plant doesn’t have brain 2 believe but was affected obviously!
Ur talking abt the physical brain. But affirmations doen’t work like that. It work on the energy field. On the consciousness(some call it sub conscious). The cons. doesn’t understand past or future. It works with “now” only. If U don’t say: I was or will b so & so. U say I am. Even if Ur physical brain doesn’t believe it. The cons. will attract what said that U have now & bring it 2 U. I suggest that U read “the secret” 2 understand this more ( :
Well, Eaman, the thing about experiments is that they are open to interpretation about what the true cause of the results is.
In your first experiment, the woman did actually believe the statements she was saying, and by repeating the words she was reinforcing that belief. The statements were working on a conscious level (she understood the statements) and they effected her psychology, which influenced her behavior. Try to get her to repeat the same statements in a language she doesn’t understand. The statements won’t have any effect, because their meanings wouldn’t register in the woman’s consciousness. I don’t deny that positive affirmations can have such influence. In fact, statements like “I am strong” and “I am weak” can both be true, depending on how we see ourselves!
But in the long term you cannot convince yourself of something you have sufficient evidence to prove that it is not true. You need to change your understanding of this evidence for the positive affirmations to work properly. Repeating “I can do it” to yourself when you’ve failed a thousand times in the past may not have a strong effect on your performance. You need to understand why you have failed so many times, and why this time it will be different.
As for the second experiment, I’m not so sure how scientific this experiment is, and whether it has actually been carried out. I honestly haven’t looked this experiment up, but it seems that most people who believe in this experiment have simply heard of it, and the most likely source of such experiments are dudes trying to sell you a course or a book. 🙂