Healthline: How to Craft and Use Affirmations for Anxiety
“An affirmation describes a specific type of positive statement usually directed toward yourself with the intent of promoting change and self-love while squashing worry and fear.
As a type of positive self-talk, affirmations can help you alter subconscious thoughts.
Repeating a supportive, encouraging phrase gives it power, since hearing something often makes it more likely you’ll believe it. In turn, your belief makes it more likely you’ll act in ways that make your affirmation become reality.”
“Affirmations can help strengthen self-worth by boosting both your positive opinion of yourself and your confidence in your ability to achieve your goals. They can also help counter the feelings of panic, stress, and self-doubt that often accompany anxiety.”
Affirmations can:
improve your mood
boost self-esteem
increase motivation
help you solve problems
boost optimism
help you address negative thoughts
“Connecting affirmations to your core values reminds you of what’s most important to you.
As you repeat these affirmations, you reinforce your sense of self along with belief in your own abilities, which can lead to greater self-empowerment.”
“Many people find affirmations to be powerful tools for changing unwanted thought patterns and beliefs — but they don’t work for everyone.
If affirmations feel ineffective or add to your distress, that doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It just means you might benefit from another type of support.”
#Affirmations #Anxiety #Routine
Read the full article here.
My Thoughts:
Although I do not personally have much experience with affirmations, I do know people who have (especially with regards to meditation) and who have also had great success with him.
A question for you all:
Have you had any personal experience with affirmations, and have they been helpful for you?
@sereneSunset26
My books tell me this —
Testing the Value of Self-Affirmations: Am I Lovable Because I Tell Myself I’m Lovable?
If you’ve ever felt down about yourself, you might have sought comfort from a friend or family member who spent some time telling you what a great and wonderful person you really are. Perhaps you’ve done the same for a friend of yours who was having a crisis of confidence. Pop psychology wisdom tells us that these affirmative statements, or affirmations, help us feel better about ourselves. We’re sometimes even advised to use self-affirmations to help boost our sense of self worth, and it makes good common sense that if you keep repeating to yourself statements such as “I’m a lovable person” or “I will succeed,” you’ll believe it and like yourself more. But is that really the case? (Gordon, 2001)
Relying on intuition alone to answer this question is not enough. Something that sounds like it should be true may not be. The only way to tell is to put the hypothesis to the test—and that’s exactly what a group of psychology researchers did with affirmations. They brought several dozen college students into their laboratory, where they first asked students to assess their self-esteem level and mood using questionnaires. Then the researchers instructed the students to write down their thoughts and feelings for several minutes. Half the students were given an additional instruction: Whenever a certain tone sounded, they were to give themselves a self-affirmation, telling themselves “I’m a lovable person.” (The group providing themselves the self-affirmation was the experimental group. The other group, which did not receive this additional instruction and did not engage in any self-affirmations, was the control group (Wood, Perunovic, & Lee, 2009).
After several minutes (and 16 repetitions of the self-affirmation for the experimental group), both groups were then given new tests of their current level of self esteem and mood to see if changes occurred. The results clearly showed that a change did occur for students who had low self-esteem and who engaged in self-affirmations: their mood and self-esteem went down. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the result that proponents of self-affirmation would intuitively expect. Instead, the study showed that not only were self-affirmations not helpful but that they actually seemed to backfire. Why might this happen? Interpreting these surprising findings is easier if we consider the findings of other, related research. If you consider these self-affirmations to be a form of self-persuasion, we can look at research on persuasion and find that people tend to be more persuaded by messages that are in line with their pre-existing attitudes. When a message is strongly contradictory to what a person already believes, he or she may counter that message with an argument. So when people who have low self-esteem tell themselves a contradictory message, such as “I’m a lovable person,” instead of being able to accept the message, they might think of times when they were not lovable because they acted unpleasantly or were rejected by others. The self-affirmation might therefore backfire by causing people with low-self-esteem to linger on negative thoughts that just confirm their poor self-image. These findings, which run counter to common-sense explanations, underscore the need to submit hypotheses to scientific testing. Even when the outcome seems “obvious,” we need to do research, because our intuitions are often simply wrong (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).
And another article here.
I haven't delved much into the topic and there's obviously different views and research we see around this but thought I'd share an opposite finding!
@theriverissinging
That is interesting! I could see how for some people that affirmations might cause that kind of cognitive dissonance - especially if the individual(s) in question have a pre-existing need for therapy due to something in their lives.
And also (as you know), sometimes affirmations just aren't effective for some people just in general.
I can't say that I've tried them much myself. There are times where I remind myself of things (such as being loveable), but probably not to the point of it qualifying as an affirmation.
@sereneSunset26
I mostly use affirmations in times of stress and anxiety to calm myself down and to see the other possible outcomes of the situation, because I am inclined to black-white thinking.
I feel like they do not help me much in boosting my confidence in relation to self-image rather, it helps me to manage the given situations at the moment.
@globalBraid3744
That's actually really interesting!! I never thought of affirmations being used to help manage various situations like that before.
I could probably use them for a similar purpose, though, as there have been times in my life where I have leaned towards black and white thinking myself.
@sereneSunset26 I don't actively use affirmations, but I will try if I am feeling overly anxious! I will tell myself to breathe through a tough moment or reminds myself that this feeling won't last forever. Affirmations can be really powerful!
@fruityPond7887
I often use the those same breathing techniques, especially with regard to meditation. Yesterday, before a dental appointment, I intentionally meditated for 40 minutes, and I felt it make a huge difference while I was there.
@sereneSunset26 That's amazing! I am really happy that you know that meditation works for you and you are able to use it as a preventative measure!
@fruityPond7887
Me too!!
I know it's obvious, but it's so much easier to exercise preventative measures than to try to treat something going on with us in-the-moment.
@sereneSunset26 Exactlyyy! It's better to prevent a panic attack than to not know your breathing techniques in the middle of hyperventilating!