Affirmations Tell The Truth

Affirmations are a simple brain based strategy. And they work to change your mind.

But they are not a fast fix for solving complex problems.

Some folks - often companies trying to incorporate more “self-care” and “mental health” - have used brain based strategies like affirmations as a way to push legitimate problems to the side while making it our responsibility to just think and imagine ourselves to a place where we can ignore those problems and continue to perform successfully.

THAT

NOT

THE

POINT.

To lie to yourself is dangerous business.

Affirmations aren’t a way to convince you of something that isn’t true — they are a way to remind you of what is true so that you can better handle the real problems.

So I wanted to provide a little more context – beyond last week’s blog - on why I think affirmations are an easy starting place for making this a great year.

Affirmations Remind You of The Truth

Making changes, solving problems, or shifting behaviors is courageous business. And if you are in a state of fear or anxiety or insecurity - your body may be wanting to freeze or flee. That might be the internal resistance you feel when you WANT change but can’t seem to figure out what to do to make it happen. Affirmations can be a way of REMINDING yourself of what is true -

REMINDING yourself that you are safe

REMINDING yourself that you are not alone

REMINDING yourself that you are strong.

Because when we believe that’s true — and for almost all of us it is — we can find the creativity to dream of something different and the courage to try something new.

Affirmations Balance our Negativity Bias

Our brains do really well at remembering the bad stuff and recognizing threats. It's a negativity bias that is thought to be an evolutionary trait that helped our ancestors survive by paying more attention to potential threats and dangers.

When we encounter something negative, our brains tend to pay more attention to it, and this increased attention leads to better memory for the negative event.

AND negative thoughts and emotions can be more persistent because they often lead to further negative thoughts and emotions. For example, if you have a negative thought about yourself, it can lead to feelings of sadness or worthlessness, which can then lead to more negative thoughts. This cycle of negative thinking can be hard to break, and it can lead to the persistence of negative thoughts and memories.

Affirmations can help to balance that out by intentionally feeding our brains the good stuff since the negative stuff seems to make it there without any effort.

Affirmations Help Us See The Good

We see what we expect to see. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It's a type of cognitive bias that can lead people to only pay attention to information that supports their existing views, while ignoring or dismissing information that contradicts them.

Confirmation bias can have a number of negative consequences, including making it difficult for people to consider alternative viewpoints but in the case of affirmations we can use this bias in our favor. Because when we remind ourselves and truly begin to believe a positive statement like “I am not alone” our brains will help us by finding examples of how that is true. And this is another way we can reinforce the good in our lives rather than focusing on the bad.

SO just to be clear.

I don’t want you to use affirmations to lie to yourself or even to imagine an alternate reality.

I want you to use them as a way to tell yourself the truth. Because the truth is usually kinder than the story we are telling ourselves. And it takes time to reprogram our internal dialogue.

So repeat, repeat, repeat and your true and beautiful, affirming message will start to get through the other noise.

Jennifer

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