Affirmations…Do You? Should You?

I’ve been on a theme of ‘mental health’ this last week or so, though I’m not really keen on the term ‘mental health’. As far as I’m concerned, anxiety and depression are umbrella terms to cover a wide variety of physical and psychological symptoms, each with multiple causes.

They are both impacted enormously, if not exclusively, by the functioning of our emotional system, our microbiome and what we eat, the quality of our sleep, and how we move our bodies.

Anyway, back to the point of this ramble; one topic that has remained popular as a way of counteracting psychological discomfort and disturbance is affirmations.

Do they work, are they effective, or are they counterproductive or even dangerous? What do you think?

As the topic is so big, I’m just going to look at one teeny tiny aspect…when might they be counterproductive.

In my view, it is incredibly important to acknowledge where you are in the moment. And whatever you are feeling in that moment is OK, you don’t have to solve it, rationalise it or cure it.

There can be a desire to resist what you feel in the moment and attempt to overlay it with affirmations. But if those affirmations contradict your experience you are working against yourself, you are forcing not flowing and creating an incoherence internally.

Life is a flow of energy and consciousness that connects us all. There are ups and downs, thoughts and feelings come and go. When you acknowledge and allow your internal experience without trying to force it away, you naturally flow back to centred neutral.

That means that when you bring your attention back inside, breathe, expand and soften your focus, your natural state of balance will return.

From neutral you can direct your energy and attention as you chose. But critically, you don’t have to manipulate or control your conscious thinking patterns in order for that to happen.

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