Affirmations do they work?

Affirmations help us to challenge and defeat self-sabotaging thoughts.

Just as we do repetitive physical exercise to get stronger, affirmations can be thoughts of as exercise for our mind/brain. For 25+ years I have used the analogy of “reprogramming” our brain. Learning to think differently is part of how we learn to get rid of the pain pathways and replace them with new circuitry. Affirmations can help us stop bad habits and pain is a kind of habit that we need to break, in a neurologic sense.

Affirmations are typically positive, optimistic statements we create or use those that others have created that resonate for us. We can use the same one for days or weeks or vary them from day-to- day. Both techniques can be successful. Here are some examples to start with:

Most are written in the present tense and include an optimistic future.

The science

This approach is based upon clinical experience and psychological theories, such as self-affirmation theory (Steel, 1988). Empirical studies were done that suggested that we maintain our sense of self by affirming what we believe in positive ways. Cohen and Sherman in 2014 wrote about “self-efficacy” and how we protect ourselves from threats by strengthening our resilience with affirmations.

Self-affirmations have been shown to decrease stress (Sherman, et al 2009 and Critcher and Dunning, 2015) They were used effectively to help people increase physical activity (Cooke, et al 2014) and even helped people to eat more fruits and vegetables (Epton and Harris, 2008).

Some empirical, as yet unpublished data suggests that recording the affirmation and hearing it aloud in your own voice may be more powerful than internal dialogue or hearing another person’s voice reading the affirmation.

A few minutes a day is enough to start and obtain some benefit. You become more sophisticated at the fine-tuning of your affirmations over time and more adept at using them for a variety of issues and goals. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/anxiety-another-name-pain/202001/affirmations-and-neuroplasticity https://www.instagram.com/p/CvvAG-OucDp/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

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