Why Affirmations are BS…
🙋♀️ Raise your hand if you have ever tried to use positive affirmations?
🙋♀️ Raise your hand if you felt like you were lying to yourself when you were using them?
🙋♀️ Raise your hand if you gave up on using them five minutes later because it felt like a joke?
Positive Affirmations Are Great (in Theory).
The idea of saying something positive to yourself to change your mindset is good, BUT it ignores one thing…your subconscious mind.
Conscious vs. Subconscious
Your conscious mind includes things that you are actively aware of (your thoughts, feelings, goals, desires). Your subconscious mind lies below the level of your awareness subtly influencing your actions and behaviors.
The conscious mind makes up about 5% of your brain functioning, while the subconscious makes up about 95%.
Changing Your Beliefs
The words you are reading on this screen are like your conscious mind. The subconscious is like the underlying programming that creates the words on the screen.
To modify a belief or create a new one, you have to enter the programming and make the change at that level in order for it to be effective.
The Subconscious and Change
The subconscious is very rigid and does not like change. It’s only job is to keep you alive and it does that by repeating the same experiences/beliefs that you had yesterday.
Your subconscious interprets anything unknown as scary and it will try to avoid anything scary at all costs.
If you’ve held the belief “I’m not good enough” AND you are still alive, your subconscious is not going to magically start letting you believe “I am good enough” just because you use it in an affirmation. The new belief represents the unknown which feels like a threat to your subconscious.
Changing the Programming
To change a belief, you have to do it incrementally. You introduce new possibilities. You make suggestions, not demands.
My favorite ways to start these suggestions are with a “maybe” or a “what if” statement.
These statements work well to enter a new possibility into your subconscious because it doesn’t directly challenge its existing belief.
Introducing a New Belief
A common belief for people is “I’m not good enough,” but if you try to change that to “I am good enough,” your subconscious will immediately reject it because it is firmly holding the opposite belief.
So you plant a seed…”maybe I am good enough” or “what if I am good enough already?”
Because you are not phrasing it in absolute terms “I am good enough”, your subconscious cannot immediately reject it. And because it does not immediately reject it, your subconscious can now start to ponder that seed.
Signs Your Subconscious is Accepting a New Belief
Tap into your body, it will tell you. When you’re trying out a new belief, notice how you feel physically, this is an indicator of whether your subconscious is accepting or rejecting what you are telling yourself.
Acceptance typically feels like expansion, you can breathe easily, you feel an openness, a lightness, or a peaceful feeling.
Rejection typically feels like contraction, breathing is harder, you feel a tightness, a heaviness, or you just feel icky.
So maybe affirmations are not entirely BS; however, you do have to learn to use them in a way that is acceptable to your subconscious mind or they won’t stick.
How Therapy Can Help Anxiety
Anxiety Therapy can help you identify and reframe the negative beliefs that are holding you back. If you have questions about anxiety counseling or would like to book a session with me, use the Contact Me button below.
You can also download the: Rewrite Your Subconscious Beliefs Workbook.
