Positive affirmations are everywhere. They are on TikTok, Pinterest, journals at Target, and your cousin’s Facebook stories. Yeah, very few explain why they work, and how to use affirmations to manifest your goals.
Affirmations aren’t magic. They’re not “say it and the Universe delivers it like it’s available on Ubereats or Amazon Prime. Using affirmations are surprisingly a psychological tool for rewiring your subconscious mind to help you step into being the person who you want to be, and for lining your behavior with the future you want to manifest.
Let’s talk about their surprising origin, what they are, how they work, and how you can start using them today to manifest your best life overtime.
What Are Affirmations Exactly?
Affirmations are short, intentional statements that reinforced the identity, beliefs, and behaviors that you want to embody, or situations in advance that you see yourself participating in. My personal favorite is “I have ten thousand followers on my social media platforms for Overjoyed Labs.”
Using affirmations is my go to manifestation technique and it’s one of my most successful ways of bringing to life the things that I desire.
Using affirmations rewires your subconscious mind, causing you to believe in your manifestations being something that you already have the more that you use them. It’s actually pretty cool how they work, so let’s break all of this stuff down and try not to bore you to pieces in the meantime.
The more you begin to focus on your affirmations as if they have already happened(or at least are possible), the more motivated and confident you feel that you can achieve them. If this isn’t your first time here on my site, then you’ve read my other post about how focusing on your manifestations, reprogram your subconscious into looking for evidence that the things that you believe have happened actually exist.
When your brain doesn’t see any visible proof, it then resorts to looking for ways to make the things that it believes are real become real. That’s when you recognize opportunities, and resources, and you feel more motivated and sure of yourself that you can take action to accomplish your dreams.
It also causes you to take action, to show up, and to build habits that will help you achieve your dreams. Overtime you embody the person who has it is subconscious mind start to believe that your goals are already accomplished. That’s if you do the work you need to pull it off because nothing falls from the sky simply by reciting it multiple times. People love to sell you that for clicks.
Not all of them have to be vague and wealth centered such as “I am rich.” Affirmations can not only help you have the needed self-identity to manifest your goals, but it’s a powerful boost to your self-esteem and how you view yourself. This helps release negative self-talk to eradicate poor habits that get in the way of you manifesting your dreams, such as telling yourself that you’re not good enough or don’t deserve accomplishing your goals.
Examples of positive-self talk are:
- “ I am someone who follows through”
- “I deserve good things.”
- “ I am safe to receive abundance.”
- “ I make good financial choices.”
- “ I trust myself to make good decisions.”
Affirmations came to be popular because they were used to help shape your self-identity to reach your goals. Here’s how.
The Origins of Affirmations for Subconscious Reprogramming
Affirmations did start with spiritual TikTok. Their origin can help you better understand their usage. They became popular due to Dr. Claude Steele’s Self-Affirmation Theory that he developed while studying how alcohol usage affects social behavior. He often used example examples with smokers, and have them being told the health risks and still continuing to smoke was a threat to how they viewed themselves. Basically trying to make them feel bad about their decisions, and how their continuing to smoke was not it.
However, affirming a positive value in their lives that had nothing to do with smoking that was important to their self image such as being more successful at work influenced them to stop. History research on affirmations and its effects were found to reduce biased attitudes, and lead to making more positive health choices and behaviors. So how was that so? I’m glad you asked.
The Psychology Behind Affirmations
Affirmations work through a few psychological mechanisms, and none of them about quantum, leaping or tapping into high vibrational vortex’s.
- Reprogramming your subconscious to manifest
Your subconscious mind has a hard time differentiating between what exists and what you tell it is real. Your brain rewires itself and adopts what you consistently put into it. The more you think about it, the more you believe it exists.
Reading, writing, and reciting affirmations does it send energy out to the universe and makes things show up. Every time you focus on your desires, your subconscious accepts them as existing. Think you’re conscious mind aligns with it, and you begin the process of manifesting your goals.
- Inspired action through subconscious shifts
You’ll begin to notice actions that you can take to make your goals your reality that may feel like a gift that was handed down from the universe. Why? Because the more you focus on your goals, the more you start to subconsciously seek out ways to accomplish them.
Since your subconscious operates underneath your current conscious thoughts, you may not even realize that your brain is constantly scanning for ways to manifest your dreams until you notice something that aligns with them such as a message on a billboard or a course in an ad on Instagram. It’s the logic behind the law of inspired action.
- Identity reframing
Seeing actions that you can do to make your dreams, a reality is only surface level if you don’t do anything to go after them.
The more you identify with being the person who has it, the more confident you become. You take more actions to be that person, and to do what it takes when you train your mind to believe that you can have it. Information are a great way to accomplish shifting your identity, boosting, self-esteem, and motivating you to take the action necessary to reach your goals.
- Replaces negative thoughts
Focusing on positive outcomes, interrupt, thinking about negative BS that can stand in the way of accomplishing our dreams. One of my saving graces has been to say my affirmations when I found myself focusing on the wrong thing.
This reduces:
- Fear
- Self-doubt
- Scarcity thinking
- Anxiety
- Low self-esteem
- Laziness and procrastination
Focus, focusing on affirmations instead of negativity can increase:
- Confidence of self-esteem
- Motivation
- Ease fears surrounding mental, physical, and tangible lack.
- Recognizing of opportunities and resource resources to help manifest your dreams
- Improve your mood
This is why affirmations are used in therapy, coaching, and positive behavioral changes. Not just the manifest stuff.
Affirmations work because they give self-conscious new evidence about who you want to be, and not the version you want to outgrow. Even if you don’t believe in them yet, know that the more consistent you are with using them, the more you will find yourself accepting your affirmations as being so.
Before I let you go, let’s talk about how to have an arsenal affirmations to use and how to deploy them to help you manifest your dreams.
How to Create Effective Affirmations
You can find affirmation almost anywhere, including YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. However, they are way more powerful when you center them around your goals and who you want to be instead of some blanket ones.
- Use present or past tense language, such as:
- “I have successfully finished______.”
- “I generate ten thousand dollars per month from my Amazon store”
- “I am more focused on ______”
Focusing on your manifestations, as if you already have them helps to get rid of subconscious resistance that tells you that you can’t do it, and you begin to view it is already done. As previously stated, this jump starts your brain to begin looking for ways to make it happen as your mind begins to adopt the belief that it is already so.
- Make them identity based
Instead of “ I will be confident” try “ I am a confident person who finishes my fitness regimen.” or “ I am a successful twitch streamer”.
- Be specific
The more clear that you are about, you weren’t from life, the more you begin to see ways to make it happen more efficiently that are fine tuned to your specific desires. I once said that I want to find love, and attracted a man who was a serial cheater and liar. “Gots to be more careful.”
- Keep them simple
Make them short, clear, easy to remember and repeat. You’ll start remembering them and find yourself repeating them without needing to read them.
I sometimes find myself in traffic, in the self checkout line or in the shower, focusing on my affirmations that I’ve memorized. This helps you to focus on the things that you want to manifest and keep you in a positive, confident, and motivated mindset. You definitely need all of these to manifest.
- Make them believable
Your subconscious rejects what it feels is an impossible lie. I’m only 5’2, so I’ll rarely be the bigger person.
- Avoid negative terms
Skip using words such as:
- Don’t
- Won’t
- Never
- Can’t
- Need
- Want
- Will
While using these words sounds good, they keep your manifestations stuck in a future or reinforce lack. Affirmations should focus on your desires, and not more of what you don’t want.
How to Use Affirmations
Now that you’ve got some affirmations, you need some ways to deploy them to help manifest your best life. Choose what works best for you. Do all of them if you want. I can sit and mentally focus on my goals all day.
- Mirror work
Look yourself in the eyes and speak your affirmations. These can be uncomfortable at first, but they work great for self identity and confidence work.
Tip: memorizing them makes them easier to recite.
- Meditation
Affirmations work better when your brain is relaxed, making before and after sleeping calm real estate to speak or focus on your goals. Just don’t fall asleep.
- Scripting
This is my go to. Write them down. This helps you to commit them to memory, where reprogramming your subconscious mind gets the ball rolling to manifest them.
Tip: after writing them, read over them, then recite them out loud for extra oomph.
- Audio
Record yourself and listen to them before bed, while walking, cleaning, eating or driving. If listening, got yourself weird you out, YouTube, Bandcamp, and gum Road has an awesome selection of binaurals and affirmations that cater to your manifestation needs. I’m currently working on creating a YouTube channel for these, myself.
- Visual reminders
Post-it notes. Phone lock screens. Laptop wallpapers. Vision boards. Your subconscious files what you see, here, feel, read, think, taste, and smell away into your memory. Set up visual reminders that trigger your thoughts are manifesting your goals, where you will notice them. A really good place to put them is by your light switch or where you place your phone to charge it.
How Often to Repeat Affirmations
The universe isn’t waiting on you to say that you own a Bentley 3 times in a mirror like Candyman before you get what you ask for on the third time. It won’t keep it from you if you only say it twice instead of three times. There’s no magical number.
Psychologist suggest that mentally focusing on your goals for even just two minutes a day is enough to reprogram your self-conscious mind over the course of 30 to 90 days.
Your brain is a muscle that can’t be trained. Affirmations are like reps at the gym the more you do them, the stronger your belief becomes to help you manifest the life you see yourself having.
Make sure to check out my post on how to reprogram your subconscious to boost your manifesting. It gives you a deep dive on what your subconscious mind is, how to reprogram it, and how to use it to manifest your goals.
Recommended reading: Reprogramming Your Subconscious to Manifest
How Expressing Gratitude Can Boost Your Manifestation Game
How to Use Visualization for Manifesting Success
How Food and Exercise Improve Your Mood and Manifesting Ability
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