How to make affirmations work for you

There has been a lot of talk about affirmations in recent years, with people recommending them so you can feel good about yourself and improve your life.

However research tells us that affirmations don’t always work for everyone, and I’d like to explain a little more about how affirmations can work for you.

To work well, affirmations must be realistic and believable to the person using them.  Affirmations such as ‘I am a relaxed person’ tend to work really well for people who are indeed relaxed, as it affirms their knowledge about themselves and makes them feel good about it.  For someone who is anxious however, this affirmation simply makes them feel worse every time they repeat it to themselves as they know it is simply not true.

In order to prevent affirmations from being rejected by the mind, or from making you feel bad, they can be turned into a process, or a capability.  Therefore, an appropriate affirmation for the anxious person could be as follows – “I am capable of becoming happy and relaxed” or “I am learning to become more relaxed as time passes”.  

General affirmations are always good too – things like “I am getting better and better in every way every day” can be interpreted in a number of ways and therefore is accepted easily by the mind.

Affirmations can be really effective in being a guide for how you want to live your life, and for guiding where you’re going in your life.  To make yours really effective, make sure they’re realistic, believable, and focused on processes and capabilities.