How do Positive Affirmations Work? 

Positive affirmations can alter your mind-set and bring about positive changes in your health, wealth, and happiness. I know it sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but many scientific studies have shown – if you say something often enough you come to believe it. 

A study published in the journal ‘Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience’ used MRI to reveal that practicing self-affirmation activates the reward centres in your brain. For example, repeating sentences to yourself like

“Today I have unlimited energy and I use it well,”

really can have an effect of increasing your energy. The positive sentence fires up neural pathways and makes changes to those areas of the brain that make you happy and positive. 

Science is continually finding out about our brains and how they work. For instance, our brains are evolved for the purpose of keeping us alive. Life or death decisions have to be made very quickly – avoiding danger, finding food etc. The brain finds it much harder to make analytical assessments and prefers to create shortcuts that lead to ‘cognitive biases’ – these are beliefs or routines that we all get into without justification or any need to ‘compute.’ 

Examples of these are: – 

The Dunning-Krueger Effect: the tendency for novices to overestimate their skill and experts to underestimate their skill. 

Observational Selection Bias: The tendency to notice more of something once it has been noticed, like when we buy a new car and suddenly see that car everywhere. 

Confirmation Bias: The tendency to see more of and believe more of what already confirms your beliefs.  

This magic of affirmations is that they challenge these cognitive biases for your own benefit. By teaching your brain to question or think about the world in a new way. Instead of ‘I really need a cup of coffee to get me going’ you keep saying to yourself “I will have unlimited energy and I use it well,” then your brain starts to subconsciously search for signs that will make this true. When it does, the brain will then present the sign to the conscious mind.  

In our work over the past term, we have been using affirmation to strengthen our minds, vitality, and energy. Next term we will continue to use affirmations to help us have a more flexible approach to life.