It may seem like non-scientific optimism, but according to experts, affirmations can actually have an enormously positive impact on your mood, self-esteem, and overall sense of wellbeing.
How can these seemingly simple phrases transform your life?
What Are Affirmations?
Affirmations are short, positive statements and sentences that can help you to notice negative and self-sabotaging thoughts as and when they arrive, and then challenge and overcome them.
When affirmations are repeated often, they can have a positive impact on your life and wellbeing.
In many ways, using affirmations is the same as training a specific muscle when you are working out – you are using a repetitive exercise to improve your mind and general outlook.
The repetition of positive mental statements can actually reprogram our thinking patterns, and, over time, we will think, act, and see the world differently.
According to a growing body of evidence, there are a number of areas that affirmations can help in, including work and home.
Some of the main benefits include:
- Improve work performance. According to experts, affirmations can help to strengthen your performance at work.
– For example, taking a few minutes before a big meeting to consider your strengths can calm your nerves and help you feel more confident. This, in turn, favors a more successful outcome. - Reduce stress. Repeating affirmations can also help to reduce the impact and effects of stress, offering benefits for your physical and psychological wellbeing.
- Strengthen self-esteem. There are a number of cases of affirmations being used to successfully treat cases of depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and more.
– There is also evidence that affirmations can stimulate the part of our brains that encourage taking good care of our health. The more you value yourself, the more you will care for yourself.
How Can You Use Affirmations?
Incorporating affirmations into your daily life is easy!
They can be used in a number of different scenarios to make a positive change in your life, including:
- Thrive during big meetings. Rather than dread your performance review, use affirmations to help you feel cool, calm, and in control.
- Control negative feelings. Don’t let your emotions get the better of you.
– Using positive affirmations can help you to reframe the situation and find practical solutions. - Improve self-esteem. Use positive affirmations to remind yourself of all your excellent points.
– If you repeat them often enough, you will truly start to believe them. - Overcome a bad habit. You can also use affirmations to remind you not to do something, and this can be useful in nixing bad or unhelpful habits.
- Set personal goals. Once you’ve identified the goals and targets that you aspire to achieve, you can create affirmative statements to keep your mind focused and motivated on those goals, increasing your chance of success.
- Make changes. Combine affirmations with visualizations to picture and write about the changes you want to see.
– Repeat this affirmation until you make the change you are craving.
In order to help affirmations work for you, it’s important to ensure that you are seeing and repeating them regularly. The magic is in the repetition.
It’s also a good idea to write down your affirmations and leave them somewhere you can easily see. This makes it easy to remind yourself of them the moment you start to experience negative or intrusive thoughts.