It’s part of human nature to want to believe that something is absolutely true or absolutely false.
Human beings don’t like uncertainty.
An absolute true or false means we can take action in the right direction with absolute confidence.
And if we’re stuck because we’re uncertain about something, we often find a way to trick ourselves to certainty in order to go ahead and take some action.
That’s not necessarily bad. Belief promotes action which then proves or disproves the initial belief.
You may suffer some losses as a result of your actions, but in the end, there is definitely learning, and learning is always good, no?
Do you believe what I’ve just said?
If you read again, you will see I have my own beliefs. I’ve chosen to believe that learning is good because it promotes experimentation in my life.
I am open to suffering some losses because I believe this is how I’ll ultimately achieve success. But it’s just me and what I’ve chosen to believe.
I’m saying all this because, as you’ll see below, research showed that the efficacy of our affirmations depends on the degree to which we believe them.
For example, no matter how many times and how loud you shout, “I’m a superman”, it will make no difference if you don’t believe this statement deep inside.
I’m talking about positive affirmations— positive statements that you say to yourself to counteract limiting thoughts and uplift yourself.
Before you continue, you may wish to watch a couple of videos first.
In these videos, my friends and experts psychologists, Dr Sophie Henshaw and Bill O’Hanlon share their opinions on positive affirmations with me.
Table of Contents
Why Positive Affirmations May Work for You
Those who believe that positive affirmations will get them success will probably get success.
Now, whether the reason for their success was the affirmations or something else, that’s another story.
This is the typical cause-and-effect bias.
The best resource I’ve found that explains the cause-and-effect bias is this book by Richard J. Heuer on the CIA’s website.
Those who believe in positive affirmations look around for evidence that supports their efficacy and link it to their own experience—a cognitive phenomenon called distortion.
For example, they may read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich or Anthony Robbins.
They may ignore any information that suggests that positive affirmations don’t work.
This is a phenomenon called deletion in which you ignore information or evidence that’s not congruent with your beliefs.
When they come across research findings that positive affirmations can work for some people and harm others (see the section below), they may conclude that they belong to the first category (distortion again).
And after they’ve had some success they go out and preach that positive affirmations work and start talking to their friends about how they got what they wanted in life using positive affirmations (a phenomenon called generalisation).
But, if they’ve had success, does it really matter how they got there? Maybe yes, maybe no. They could have found a better and more effective way to success but they also could have wasted precious time.
Less certainty could have gone against them. The other downside is that they may mislead everyone that their way to success is the only way to success.
I believe (again believe!) that people who are confident about their positive affirmations don’t succeed because of the affirmations but because they’re confident!
Affirming to yourself that you have faith can take your faith a little further.
And that applies to those who don’t believe in positive affirmations but some other secret such as meditation, mantras, 5 am miracle mornings, visualisation, etc.
Anthony Robbins preaches incantations—a special form of affirmations in which you’re not only speaking words of empowerment but you’re also using your body and voice.
Tony Robbins believes that we can use our bodily self the right way to feel confident (he’s a massive guy by the way)—open up your chest, stand upright, open your shoulders and shout Yeeeeaaaah!
Yet, Tony is a massive guy and if you’ve heard his voice, you’ll see why this stuff or incantations work for him!
Do incantations work for everyone? I don’t think so.
Positive Affirmations Have Truths
I’ve experimented with positive affirmations in the past but I no longer use them for myself or my coaching clients—at least in their classic exaggerated form.
However, I respect people who use them and there are certain truths in them. I want to briefly mention a couple of things that I like about them.
Use Only Present Tense in Your Affirmations
This makes sense to me. Affirmations of the type: Next year I’m going to have the perfect body, My life will get better don’t work.
The same way a child doesn’t understand the word tomorrow:
We’ll have ice-cream tomorrow. When is tomorrow? I want NOW!
What if you repeated something like Next year I’ll have the perfect body for a whole year? Oops! When is the next year??? 🤷🏻♂️
When you say to yourself someday I will be rich, I will be less stressed, I will have love in my life, etc. all you’re confirming to yourself is that you are not happy with your life as it is right now, ie. you are poor, stressed and you have no love in your life!
If you focus on the now, you will be more motivated to take action now. Say something like
✅ I’m learning to experience feelings of calmness every day by practising yoga or spending time in nature.
❌ I will learn to manage my stress and my negative emotions
Did you notice the flip from negative to positive in the first positive statement? That takes me to the second point.
Don’t use Not, No, Don’t, Less!
When you say to yourself I don’t like chocolate, chocolate doesn’t thrill me, I’m not going to eat chocolate any more all you say to yourself is that you love chocolate!
Your mind doesn’t pay attention to the negation — it only sees chocolate if you’re talking about chocolate!
The same happens when you say to a child, Don’t touch the vase and they end up touching it! What a weird child! Every time I tell them not to touch the vase, they touch it!
I find it a good practice to focus on the thing that you’re running towards rather than the thing you’re running away from. I believe the same about goals. Don’t quit your job because you hate your boss. Focus on what would an ideal job like for you? What would you like to explore next? What do you want to create in your life? When you think like that, you may even experience compassion about your boss and even your boss will be happy for you and your new career!
This is my favourite analogy (by far not the best though!) when it comes to shifting your focus to the right thing. Almost every motorcyclist out there has faced what is called target fixation when riding their motorcycle.
Target fixation is a reflex which occurs when your eyes focus on an obstacle and you end up riding your motorcycle straight into it. When confronted with a dangerous situation or something unusual suddenly appearing in our field of vision, our natural instinct is to look directly at the object posing the threat and exclude everything else. Unable to look away and even consider an escape route, we tend to go where our eyes take us, often directly into the object. Where you look is where you go!
What does Research Say about Positive Affirmations?
A research study by Professor Joanne Wood at the University of Waterloo concludes:
Among participants with low self-esteem, those who repeated a positive self-statement (“I’m a lovable person”) or who focused on how that statement was true felt worse than those who did not repeat the statement or who focused on how it was both true and not true.
Among participants with high self-esteem, those who repeated the statement or focused on how it was true felt better than those who did not, but to a limited degree. Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who “need” them the most.
So, positive affirmations may work for people with high self-esteem but backfire for people with low self-esteem, ie. the people who need them most!
And continues…
Further research is needed to uncover precisely why positive self-statements can backfire. One possibility is that, like overly positive praise, they can elicit contradictory thoughts. However, contradictory thoughts alone may not be as important as what those thoughts imply.
When participants were allowed to focus on contradictory thoughts along with affirmative thoughts, they were better off than when they were asked to focus only on affirmative thoughts. The instruction to focus on contradictory thoughts may have conveyed that such thoughts are to be expected. In contrast, for participants who struggled unsuccessfully to avoid negative thoughts, such thoughts may have signified that the positive self-statement was not true of them.
This means that you may be better off by acknowledging limiting thoughts and beliefs about yourself while working towards more empowering thoughts and beliefs.
For example, if you don’t feel confident all the time, affirming to yourself that you’re Chuck Norris may arouse contradictory thoughts!
✅ Although I’m not always confident, I’m building my skills and taking action which increases my confidence further.
❌ I’m super-confident all the time!
Here are some more conslucions from the study:
It is possible that positive self-statements may benefit people with low self-esteem under some circumstances, such as when the self-views at stake are not major, when careful consideration of the self-statement is impossible, and when the statement lies within one’s latitude of acceptance.
Moderately positive self-statements involving specific attributes (e.g., “l select good gifts for people”) may be less likely than global (e.g., ”l am a generous person”) or extremely positive self-statements to arouse disconfirming thoughts or self-verification motives among people with low self-esteem.
However, outlandish, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as “l accept myself completely,” are often encouraged by self-help books. Our results suggest that such self-statements may harm the very people they are designed for: people low in self-esteem.
It’s important to pay attention to the language that is used by Professor Wood and that’s why I italicised may in their research conclusions above. May implies possibility rather than certainty. The only certainty is to do with the results of the experiments.
Sometimes people who are biased towards one view will read a research study looking only for evidence that proves their beliefs while ignoring anything that contradicts their beliefs (distortion and deletion).
If you read through the comments under this article you will see what I’m saying. What you will also see is that people have totally different experiences as to whether positive affirmations work or not.
If you want to read the full research study by Joanne Wood, you can find it here.
Making Peace with your Unassertive Self
Think about this:
Why does someone need all those positive affirmations in the first place?
What makes you wake up one day and say I need to repeat these positive affirmations to myself every single day?
The reason you need all those affirmations is that there is a part in yourself that doesn’t believe what you’re trying to force yourself to believe, ie. that you are confident, successful, rich, fit, etc.
And there is a part of yourself that wants to be more confident, successful, rich, fit, etc.
By trying to repress the part of yourself that doesn’t feel confident creates conflict, friction, unnecessary war. As professor Wood said, not only is it useless but it may backfire too.
Making peace with your unassertive self and turning your attention to what’s possible for you is the way to go in my opinion.
Positive Affirmations and the Unconscious Mind
There is this widely-held belief that the unconscious mind will believe whatever you repeat to it. So, if you repeat to yourself every day that ‘you have an amazing body’, you will end up believing it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
Our mind is always happy to believe something better about ourselves but it will also require evidence to support a new belief.
Every time you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re super confident, your unconscious calls you out on that:
📣 I’m super-confident!
🧠 Mmmmm… are you sure you are? No, you’re not! Why is your heart pounding then? Do you remember what happened in the last interview? Hehe… You will fail again… you know it… 😈
This self-talk can only create more and more frustration.
You can also see it this way: The more you feel the need to repeat your positive affirmations, the more you send a subliminal message to your unconscious mind that you are NOT all the stuff you’re trying to affirm to yourself.
So you may be thinking that you’re reprogramming your unconscious to believe that you’re more confident whereas you’re doing the opposite.
Positive Affirmations May Be an Obstacle to Growth
The other issue I see with positive affirmations is that they may undermine your growth.
Because if you were to accept the part of yourself that says I’m not confident you might be more open to exploring:
- What makes you think you’re not confident?
- Is it really true that you’re not confident?
- In what occasions do you experience that feeling?
- What can you do to build your skills and feel more confident?
Instead of stuffing yourself with positive affirmations and burying your ‘lack of confidence’ alive why not learn from it? Why not observe your limiting thoughts and build more self-awareness?
Self-awareness will lead to the right actions that will then install the new belief. That’s more powerful than any powerful statements you say to yourself.
Don’t Fake it Until you Make It
Those who believe in the power of positive affirmations argue that repetition is the key and eventually you can break through any limiting belief.
They may also try to enhance the experience by arounsing positive emotions go further trying to force uplifting feelings with their body, tone of voice, etc.
And as I said, that may work for some people! I do it myself when I am already in that state of empowerment! Come on, you can do it! Let’s finish this article before noon! But when I do it, I’m already feeling excited and I’m just nudging myself to feel a little more excited. That’s consistent with the research results. It’s the same when a coach encourages his players to run faster. His words have a positive effect on his players. Similarly, one can use affirmations to bring a little more excitement.
But for someone who’s on the other side of the emotion spectrum (e.g. some who’s struggling with anxiety), cheering Come on, you’re a tiger, you can do it may have the opposite effect on them.
I prefer positive statements that are 100% truthful and respect myself.
I prefer statements that point me in the right direction and a new possibility but also address the now and my current situation.
Because then change feels possible.
I ask my people: ‘How does that statement make you feel now?’ If it feels good now, it’s a good statement. But don’t repeat a statement that doesn’t feel good now in the hope that it will make you feel better later.
Here I’d like to quote Dr Suzanne Gelb who has a similar view on affirmations:
Many years, tons of self-help books, and a PhD in psychology later, I finally figured out why my positive affirmations never led to permanent transformation. Because they were, essentially, lies. And lies don’t heal us.
There is No Answer Fits All
In my opinion, human beings are vastly similar and vastly different. There is no one answers fits all in therapy and coaching. Did you know that there are 450 different therapeutic techniques? The fact there are so many proves that people are still looking for the one that works for everyone! But there isn’t such a therapy. Certain things work for some people and certain things work for other people.
To give an analogy here, I bet you have heard the term mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to pay attention and notice what’s happening while it’s happening — without getting caught in judgements, comparisons, narratives, or emotional reactivity.
If I asked you ‘is mindfulness good for everyone?’, what would you say? Most people would say yes but the reality is that mindfulness practice can be harmful to people with serious trauma and extreme stress arousal.
In other words, when you ask people to focus on how they feel when they’re feeling extremely stressed, they get even more stressed! This is what Georgetown University Professor and veteran Elizabeth Stanley found when working with people who are extremely sensitive to stress. She’s talking about all this in her book Widen the Window.
Final Thoughts
It’s a beautiful thing to have faith that something contributes to your growth. Faith itself can take you far. The same applies to positive affirmations.
I’m encouraging you to continue practising your positive affirmations if you’re feeling good every time you do it.
However, if these statements are not making you feel good today, don’t pin your hopes on them thinking they will make you feel better one day.
Why don’t you try this approach?
- Write down and practice statements that give you hope and motivate you towards taking action.
- Acknowledge any limiting thoughts and appreciate your own journey.
- Be grateful for where you are and the efforts you’ve taken to be there.
- And then, look at what’s possible for you, and go for it.
Be well, Angelos
PS: Here’s a bonus video with the award-winning psychologist Efrat Ginot PhD and myself in which we share a realistic framework for change and success.