Changing your life with affirmations?! Have you heard or seen people swear by words of affirmation and how impactful they are in the most positive way if used properly? Well, here we are going to go into why affirmations can change your life.
Change your life means change of thoughts which then changes your attitude and from there you will be able to change your life! This can be done through words of affirmations!
Self-affirmations is where affirm your own worthiness as an individual to gain beneficial effect such as increasing your own self-esteem and confidence. Self-affirmations are affirmations that can help you overcome obstacles in your life that may be causing some unwanted thoughts which then create your emotions. Therefore, self-affirmations have benefits such as minimizing negative feelings such as stress and anxiety.
Here Are The 3 Ways Affirmations Can Change Your Life
Threat Reduction
So the first way that Self-affirmations will assist you is by allowing you to reduce the intensity of the negativity in your thoughts which makes it less scary. So what I mean by that is whatever thought you are having, if it is negative and is creating you anxiety, self-affirmations can reduce that intensity for you, therefore, the level of threat of that thought reduces and becomes more manageable to work with.
Increases Motivation
Personally, self-affirmations have played a big role in my motivation. What I mean by that is the affirmations that I may say to myself may include subjects of what I am or want to be, what I want to achieve and what it would feel like reaching my goals. So when I repeat affirmations consisting of those topics, I begin to actually feel like I am what I am saying I am and that feeling will motivate me to take action on what I need to do to achieve my goal to obtain that feeling. The same can occur with you, when you decide to take time out to say your affirmations over and over, you will begin to feel excited about what you are saying that you will naturally feel motivated to accomplish your goals to reach your end goal!
Refocus The Mind On Positivity
Throughout many experiences in life, I am more prone to focus on the negative. And I am sure many of you can relate too. With that being said, it does not take much effort for many of us to dwell on the negative and to lose hope. Self-affirmations can help us to practice training our minds to focus on the positive that naturally brings hope within us. Self-affirmations help to “increase focus on sources of positive value to individuals and….reflect on personal core values and rewarding experiences” (Cascio, 2016). Personally, I have found this to be true in my experience because the self-affirmations you will say will most likely be ones that you came up with or have chosen that reflect on who you are and what you are trying to achieve.
Overall, self-affirmations will allow you to refocus on what you can and are able to achieve whether that is external or internal. Here you can find affirmations to input into your daily lives. When you say your affirmations, visualize what you are saying which gives more assistance in bringing in the feeling of that experience and enhances the motivation and hope that you are feeling so you can put effort into the action to make it happen!
APA Citations
: Cascio, C. N., O’Donnell, M. B., Tinney, F. J., Lieberman, M. D., Taylor, S. E., Strecher, V. J., & Falk, E. B. (2016). Self-affirmation activates brain systems associated with self-related processing and reward and is reinforced by future orientation.
Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 11
(4), 621–629. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv136
