Why Affirmations Don’t Always Work & How to Make Them More Effective

When my spiritual journey first started, I didn’t understand what the fuss was about saying positive things to myself. For one, I didn’t truly believe what I was saying as much as I wanted to, and I eventually gave up trying because I wasn’t seeing results. Fast forward to today, understanding a lot more about the complexity of the mind and how much influence language has on us, positive affirmations have become integral in my practice.

What was that understanding that helped me make my affirmations more effective? Let’s explore that through this post. And before I unpack that, let’s take a hot second to answer the fundamental question – what even are affirmations?!

The word “affirm” means to offer someone emotional support, assurance, or encouragement.

Positive statements that are helpful in empowering someone (including ourselves) are called affirmations. This is one of many useful positive thinking exercises that we can leverage to retrain our thoughts. And it’s also become an increasingly popular spiritual tool to use affirming statements when dialoguing with ourselves. For example, “I’m a hard-working person and it’s okay if I don’t work all the time. I’m allowed to rest.“

Wait… So what’s so special about affirmations?

In essence, these statements are super straightforward but can be hard to accept about ourselves if the conditioning we’ve grown up with made us believe otherwise.

Though affirmations alone can’t heal us, they are foundational in healing our relationship with ourselves. I find that when the appropriate positive statements are regularly repeated and reinforced in conjunction with the tips I share below, it can really help us create a new vocabulary and transform how we speak about ourselves.

And in so many cases, when done right, affirmations have been known to calm anxiety, help us improve self-esteem and confidence levels, and overcome distressful situations where the mind would otherwise go into the rabbit hole of overthinking.

So how can we experience the transformational effect of affirmations?

1) First, let’s understand why affirmations don’t always work.

Affirmations don’t always work because the mental plane isn’t the only place where our limiting beliefs are stored. It’s not as simple as saying “positive thoughts” to ourselves.

Our pain is also stored in the physical body because when a tragic event first happened, it was too much for us to process. We never really let the energy “move through”us because the way it made us feel was just too much! And rarely were we taught how to explore these uncomfortable feelings and sensations.

So, the survival brain decided to store the pain away (in the form of a faint memory or sensation in the body) in order to cope with life. And not only did our system store away unresolved energy it also created takeaways from the event.

These takeaways might be misunderstandings about ourselves, like “my father yelled at me because I am not smart enough, and so, I should always keep quiet when someone smarter is speaking“.

Our mind and body may choose to shut “off” the incident if it hurt so much that we couldn’t bare the emotions and sensations. But we might still unconsciously act out of the belief that we’re not smart enough by going blank in interviews or feeling insecure around friends that seem to be smarter than we are. This phenomenon is called priming.

Note that all of this happens without us really “choosing” to do it as such. But it’s more like a survival mechanism that our system automatically moves to in response to an external threat.

So in this case, if we keep telling ourselves that we’re smart, it’s not going to land because there’s something deeper that’s not freed up yet. It’s like trying to put a bandage on a broken foot; we’re only working at the surface and not going to the real roots.

What should you do when an affirmation isn’t working for you?

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2) Your affirmations need to be believable, not perfect.

I love how accessible affirmation lists are on the internet at this point. But given the complexity of your past, they may not be a fit for you where you’re at in your healing journey.

For instance, sticking with the initial example, instead of telling yourself “I am smart“, you can find something more believable to you, like:

“I am smart in my own ways.”
“How smart I am has nothing to do with how lovable I am.”
“Every day, I am becoming smarter in areas that interest me.”
“I am open to learning something new, and that helps me become smarter.”
“It’s okay if I don’t know the answer, I can find it out later.”

I also love what my mentor, Alyssa Nobriga says, “affirmations should be at least 50% believable for them to land”.

How can you tell if an affirmation isn’t right for you?

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3) Affirmations have a lot to do with your state of mind.

When you’re angry or caught up in any other overwhelming emotions, you may have noticed that it’s harder to understand what someone else is saying.

This is because your mind and body are outside their window of tolerance – your reptilian brain has taken over and you’ve gone into survival mode. Your system has entered autopilot (which is why it’s called an autonomic nervous system), either preparing to fight, flee or freeze. Even your body goes through physical changes, like the muscles of your ears contracting, which literally make it difficult to hear or understand what’s happening.

It’s only possible to take in information once your cognitive, more evolved brain, the prefrontal cortex, gets back online. Once you’re able to rationalize things a little and exit the autopilot mode, you’ll find that you’re in a calmer state.

In a similar fashion, even if you’re not angry or outside your window of tolerance, you may still be overusing that same cognitive, left brain which was helpful a while back. Overusing it can in one word be described as overthinking. By the way, I’ve written an entire article about overcoming overthinking tendencies, if you’re interested.

So if you’re an over-thinker, when saying affirmations, your cognitive brain might interfere in the process if the positive statement doesn’t have enough evidence of truth based on your current reality.

So, what can you do?

To make an affirmation more effective, you want to be able to engage the subconscious or right brain in the process too. You want imagination and possibility to kick in. How?

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4) Positive statements are not just for your mind; they’re just as important for your body.

In the beginning, we explored how we tend to store the unresolved memories of our past in the mind and the body. So, in order to truly heal, we want to be able to share the new vocabulary with both the mind and the body.

In other words, we want to say affirmations out loud. This is so that your nervous system and physical body have a better chance to integrate the new belief.

Pro tip: If you want to take affirmations up a notch, start saying them in the mirror. Be the friend you need, and tell yourself the truth.

You are worthy of love, well-being, and abundance.
It’s more than okay for you to make mistakes.
Your needs are not too much, they’re just right.

Again, maybe some of these statements above might trigger some people. This is why I want to reemphasize taking it slow and being gentle with yourself. Say only that which is believable enough for you.

Concluding Thoughts

In true essence, affirming statements are the truths that we all deserve to hear about ourselves but may have never had the fortune of hearing. These then become an invitation for us to be deeply compassionate with ourselves and to give us whatever our mind and body have been waiting for, for so long!

Have any questions for me about integrating affirmations into your spiritual practice, or tips that you’d like to add for other readers? I’d love to hear more from you in the comments below.

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