Mickey Was Right All Along with “A Little Bit of Magic”

Hop on and join me in uncovering the 3 magical elements of self-affirmations that could improve our wellbeing.

Self-affirmations have benefits across threatening situations. We have often heard that affirmations can decrease stress, increase wellbeing, improve academic performance and make people more open to behavior change. I was a passable believable in self-affirmations and had tried it occasionally. From my personal experience in self-affirmations practices, the effects I would say were somewhat trending southwards of my expectations. This contrasts with the positive experience that many others may have experienced with self-affirmations. Hence through today’s blog, I hope to share with you about the exciting discoveries that I had uncovered from research journals that could soon pivot us towards a journey of improved wellbeing through self-affirmations.

Self-affirmations are acts that affirm one’s self-worth, often by having people reflect on core values, which may give us a view of the self. This in turn can allow us to move beyond specific threats to self-integrity or self-competence.

Dr Christopher N. Cascio at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication, Philadelphia had conducted experiments on the neurocognitive processes associated with the act of self-affirmation. 33 Participants in the experiment were exposed to affirmation stimuli and 28 were not. The participants’ functional magnetic resonance imaging was studied, particularly on how the neural mechanisms were related to self-affirmation. The findings supported the idea of a relationship between affirmation and neural reward pathway. This effect was also associated with focusing on future rather than past experiences. This means reading positive affirmations could have especially strong effects within the brain’s reward system if it was activated in conjunction with a future orientation thinking which in turn promotes desired future states or motivations.

Having learnt about effective self-affirmations should be coupled with future orientation thinking, I wondered if that was it, and would that be the Ah Ha moment ? Guess what, I discovered from the research findings that overall there are three magical elements of successful affirmations and they are the ones that connect:

1. Thinking about the future as compared with past.

2. Thinking focuses on personal goals

3. Thinking not tied to the immediate environment, that is to say thoughts that are not related to a given task at hand. I.e. the thinking shifts away from the task at hand.

Additionally our future mindset may act synergistically with value-based self-affirmations if the affirmations embrace these three elements which could in turn bolster a sense of self prior to threat exposure or stress inducing situations.

Having discovered the science which in my view supports self-affirmations, the take away from my own discovery journey is that self-affirmation was never only about focusing the mind on the affirmation statements (reading, listening or otherwise), but also evoking thinking about the future, our personal goals, and gently invite the thinking to be away from the current task at hand. Hence with these three things in mind, I do hope you would soon realize how self-affirmations could help to make a positive experience in your life. Follow your heart and let it take you whenever it chooses to go.

Feel free to also explore other Wellness Chums blog post including this one on “3 for 30 – A Strategy to Develop Attitudes of Gratitude for Improved Well-being"

If you like to support Wellness Chums or cheer on our on-going efforts in sharing evidence based positive psychology research that could enhance wellbeing for you and also the society at large, do subscribe to our email mailing list by scrolling to the bottom part of this link, Subscribers would also receive complimentary latest email notifications of new Wellness Chums blog post.

You are amazing, have a great day!

For more self-affirmation inspirations check out the ideas below from our Wellness Chums Android App which would be launched sometime soon or visit us at Wellness Chums Instagram or Pinterest.

Self-affirmation Inspirations