How Affirmations Help Me

Have you ever heard of negative self-talk? This is when a person will talk to themselves in their mind but instead of building themselves up, they will tear themselves down. As you can imagine this makes the person suffer from self-doubt and worry pretty much 24/7. This is me in a nutshell. I think I was in elementary school when my mind started this negative self-talk. Now I am grown, and my mind is still very susceptible to negative thoughts. In fact, they are constant. Of course, I can now see how much my negative thoughts have affected my life in every way. There are so many things that I have forbid myself to even attempt because I am convinced that I will be fail. It is like the negative thoughts have put a leash around my neck.

This is no way to live. In fact, I feel like I am just surviving instead of living. I want to finally change this. So, I went online to try and find out what could literally change my mind. I stumbled across a few things but one that caught my attention was called affirmations. I think the reason I liked affirmations was because they are the opposite of my negative self-talk. These affirmations are sentences or thoughts that you come up with that describe how you want to feel. To me it feels kind of like beating my negative thoughts to the punch or replacing them with a happy and positive one. There are a ton of videos online that can you give your positive affirmations that are more general and that anyone can use to start with. These affirmations can be memorized, written/read or just said out loud from your mind.

Since I am a beginner with affirmations, I chose to write down general affirmations. Now, here was the hard part for me. As I was writing down the affirmations, I could not help but feel that these affirmations were false. I felt wrong writing down the affirmations. Why, might you ask? I didn’t believe them. I could not believe it, even in the middle of writing positive affirmations my negative affirmations were taking over. I had to force myself to write down the affirmations and try and fight the negative thoughts. In the end I had 2 pages of positive affirmations and these affirmations said things like “I am a confident person” and “I love my life” and so on. The fact that it was hard to just write down the words made me realize how hard it might be to say it out loud and use them daily. It also felt like a challenge that I wanted to see through.

Every day I would write down the affirmations and then say them in my room out loud. Like I said at first it felt very uncomfortable to say those words. I realized that this was my negative mindset fighting back. I kept going. The more resistance I felt the angrier it made me and the more I wanted to see it through. It became a challenge for me to see it through. By the 4th day of the affirmations, I was finally starting to feel more at ease with the words. I felt less resistance and more acceptance. Not only that but I noticed that the affirmations now felt as if they were part of my life, an ordinary duty like brushing my teeth. The words didn’t bother me, and I even felt like I could eventually add to the list.

I also noticed that in my life my personality was a bit calmer. Of course, I still had those moments where I would make mistakes and yet the reaction to my mistake was now minimized. In times past if I did something that bothered me like making a mistake or disliking a change, it would ruin my day or at times week or even weeks. I would hold on to so much anxiety and anger and would compound it with my negative self-talk and as you can imagine I would live a miserable life for as long as the mood would last. I noticed after a few days of reading my affirmations that while life still happened, I still made mistakes and had unexpected changes in my life my reactions were different. It was as if my affirmations became who I was. I was happier no matter what. I was confident no matter what. I was everything I said I was in my affirmations.

Of course, it took me a while to realize these changes. I never noticed my reactions until after the fact and then I wondered why I had different reactions. However, once I realized that the change was directly connected to my affirmations it motivated me to continue the routine. I was so surprised to find that simply repeating affirmations could have a direct impact on my automatic reactions and my overall well-being. The most important result for me was that the more I write my affirmations the less negative self-talk that comes across my mind. Negative self-talk was starting to take over my life and like I said my life was becoming more and more miserable. I had no idea how to stop my negative self-talk until I found affirmations and I can’t believe that for me, this was the antidote.