Things I Thought Were Silly Until They Completely Changed My Life: Affirmations

The second free, easy and accessible tool that has changed my life, so much that I’ve been doing it for years now, is Affirmations. If this is new to you, Affirmations is essentially the practice of speaking good things over yourself, of reinforcing the good things in your life and in your person.

This is the modality, shall we say, that I very genuinely thought was silly when I first heard about it. Just wishful thinking said aloud. I thought that up until the moment that I finally said: okay, but what harm is there in trying it? I wanted to feel better about myself; I was tired of having these mean, condescending voices in my head all of the time, telling me that I didn’t deserve the life that I wanted to have.

Then I finally began to recognize that those mean voices weren’t wise, they were just the voices of insecurity from the adults around me as I’d been growing up. They were the echoes of ancestors who had refused to heal and forgive and grow during their lifetimes and so they had gifted their dysfunction down the genetic lines.

Unfortunately, recognizing them for what they are and getting them to shut up are two very different things. My much younger roommate asked me once how to do this very thing: how did he get the voices of his abusers out of his head? The answer, I said, is the same answer to most questions about self-healing and growth: it’s a practice of replacing the bad ideas with good ideas. And the best conduit for that practice that I’ve found so far is affirmations.

Obviously, there isn’t a lot of prep that goes into this, but there is some. First things first, you need to decide what it is that you want to reinforce in your life. Do you struggle with self-worth? Then try “I am worthy of living a life I enjoy” or “I am worthy of having good things happen to me”. If you struggle with health issues say: I am healthy and my body is healing itself everyday.

Like meditation, affirmations work best when you come up with them yourself, tailoring them to your needs, which is something that meditation can help you with.

The bigger question that I had initially was why does this work? For something that seemed so woo-woo to me when I first heard about it, there’s actually a very good explanation for why it is effective.

Our thoughts are electric. That’s not a metaphor, that’s literal. The physiology of thought is electricity traveling along pathways in our brains. When we have a novel thought, we forge a new pathway. When we think the same thought over and over again, those pathways become ruts, essentially in our brain. Well, one of the laws of electricity is that it will follow the path of least resistance, which means that it is easier for us to think the same thoughts over and over again than it is to form new thoughts.

This is what it means to “run on default programming”. The programming itself is usually formed in our childhoods, from our parents and friends and school curriculum. By the time we become adults, after 13 years of education, or more, and 18 years of influence from our parents and siblings and friends, we have default programming that we are hardly aware of. Until we use our willpower to think different thoughts, the electricity of our minds will follow the deeply rooted paths borne from the words spoken over us by those around us, whether those were helpful words or hurtful words.

Doing daily affirmations of the thoughts that we would like to actually be our default programming is how we change it. Replacing the unhelpful thoughts with helpful, supportive, loving thoughts, through repetition will quite literally rewire your brain. The technical term for something like this is “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” or NLP. When the positive thoughts become the pathways of least resistance, then positive thoughts will become your default programming.

On a more woo-woo level, but still relatively scientific, voicing positive outcomes for your life has the potential to draw positive experiences toward you. Yes, you can call this “the law of attraction” or “manifesting”, but there’s real science behind it.

Everything vibrates and it vibrates at its own, distinct frequency. It’s how we have different colors; each color is a different frequency. Emotions, like colors, also come in different frequencies, different vibrations. That’s where we get phrases like “good vibes” and “high vibes”; we’re identifying that positive emotions have a higher frequency. The famed, but tragedy ridden scientist Nikola Tesla said “if you want to understand the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, vibration and frequency.”

Words are vibration. I define a word as intention matched with vibration in a focused direction. Like clocks on a wall that will begin to tick in unison with one another over time, vibration matches vibration in life. If you want to attract high vibrational experiences, then you need to vibrate at a high vibration yourself. Speaking good things over yourself will consciously bring your vibration into alignment with what you want in life.

That’s my theory on why it works, anyway. But at the end of the day, if other people speaking negative things over you can affect your life and your decision making, then it completely stands to reason that speaking positive, supportive words over your life can do the same thing, in a positive way. This practice helps build confidence and confidence is one of the keys to changing your life!

If you would like a launch point, here are some of the general affirmations I speak over myself daily:

• I am patient

• I am Kind

• I am fully supported by the universe

• I am healthy

• I am worthy of living a life that I love

• I am intelligent

• I am capable

• I am abundant

• I am joyful