What Are Affirmations?
An affirmation is a straightforward statement, which when frequently repeated, profoundly affects both your conscious thinking processes and more importantly, your subconscious.
We say many things to ourselves every minute of the day, some positive but mostly negative. We tend to focus on what we don’t have, or what’s going wrong, or what’s missing in our life. To counterbalance this, it’s important to make your affirmations positive, personal, and in the present tense.
As the name implies, affirmations should be “affirming,” meaning “giving support or encouragement.”
Do affirmations work?
Many studies have been conducted around the success of affirmations. Read more here.
Note: the keys to the success of affirmations are repetition and intentionality.
How does any affirmation affect us?
Behaviour
Affirmations are at the root of everything we do. If we tell ourselves we’re fat, we might go on a diet. If we tell ourselves we’re a failure, we might quit too early when confronted with a challenge. In contrast, the best affirmations take us to new heights of success and achievement.
Thought Patterns
Are you a glass-half-empty or a glass-half-full kind of person? Affirmations are what guide you to either be positive or negative in your outlook. For example, if you’re always putting yourself down, you’re likely only to notice how things go wrong in your life.
Habits
Affirmations also impact the small actions we carry out throughout the day. Creating a habit takes intentional action repeated over time. Affirmations spoken or thought repeatedly build habits whether we want them to or not. In the best-case scenario, we leverage positive affirmations to create healthy and good habits. But untended, negative affirmations can cause you to build up some pretty bad habits over time.
Environment
We tend to surround ourselves with things that reflect our subconscious mind. If we’re full of negativity, we might be more likely to seek out a poor company or go places and do things that are not to our benefit. In contrast, positive affirmations help us to seek out the company of mentors and friends that build us up and to seek an environment filled with positivity, light, and learning.
How do Affirmations Help Us?
The good news is that affirmations that are well-directed can do us a lot of good in every aspect of our lives. In general, they have several benefits:
Motivation
Nothing spurs action better than the thought you’re going to succeed at what you’re going to do. After all, if the outcome is assured, why wouldn’t you get moving to make it happen?
Goal-Orientation
Affirmations direct our thoughts in a particular direction. When combined with a goal, affirmations are what make things happen. By repeating the goal frequently in your mind through affirmations, you never lose sight of where you’re going and why you’re going there.
Habits
Affirmations can create positive habits leading to good health, a more organized life, and an approach to work that gets things done.
Subconscious
One of the fascinating aspects of affirmations is how they work even when you think they won’t.
Socialization
The funny thing about affirmations is that they start to affect your outlook. When you’re constantly feeding yourself a stream of positivity, you’re going to find you’re more positive in approaching life. This alone is a benefit, but it leads to another one you might not think about otherwise. As you become more positive, the people around you can’t help but notice. They’re drawn to your sphere of influence, wanting to be near you solely because you have such an upbeat outlook on things. A positive outlook leads to friendship, new relationships, and success.
Positivity
Your positive outlook is going to push you toward new opportunities in all walks of life. When you feel good about who you are, and about how you’re growing and changing for the better, you naturally seek out more educational opportunities and are positioned better for whatever transformation awaits. Here’s where you renovate your interior self. When you’re happier and more confident, this positive outlook affects how you stand, how you walk, and how you conduct yourself physically. Positivity shows through in every aspect of your life and health.
Health
Did you know that affirmations have interesting effects on your body? Studies using MRI technology found how repeating affirmations acts in much the way praise does in your body. Anytime someone compliments you on a job well done, you experience a surge of dopamine in the brain. Now imagine the same effect coming from an affirmation. But the benefit doesn’t stop there. Using affirmations regularly starts cueing your brain to notice the good things in life. This leads to emotional regulation, reduction of stress and anxiety and can even affect the health of your heart and other systems in the body negatively impacted by stress.
If you would like help in creating personal affirmations to help you achieve your goals, book in a call with me and I will show you how.
