Five Simple Ways To Practice Mindfulness to Live Happier
Gabrielle Mastronardo
May 9, 2024
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Using Powerful daily Affirmations has the ability to raise the quality of our thoughts and our lives as a whole.
We have somewhere around 70,000 thoughts a day on average. These thoughts have more effect on us than you might expect.
Using affirmations on daily basis is a powerful way to ensure that your self-talk stays positive, motivating, and encouraging, combatting any unconscious or conscious negative thoughts.
When you boil it down, Affirmations are positive or uplifting statements. By saying these statements aloud, listening to them, or writing them down daily you feed your conscious and subconscious mind with good thoughts rather than self-sabotaging thoughts.
It’s pretty simple— but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s too good to be true. It’s been backed up by research that positive self-talk leads to positive behavioral changes and vice versa with negative self-talk.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you’re telling yourself all day that you can’t do something or that you don’t deserve it, you’re probably not going to act in the way that you would if you told yourself that you do deserve it or that you can do it. Whatever you tell yourself, you’re going to start believing it, regardless if it’s good or bad.
Stating Affirmations daily creates change in your life because your brain starts to take these statements as fact, even if you don’t fully believe them yet with your conscious mind. Our self-image starts to change and is followed by actions that fit with this new-found image of ourselves.
After a month of repeating daily affirmations to myself, I was shocked to see how my life started to transform. I was able to make better decisions that were aligned with my goals. I quickly found that I had more confidence and felt more motivated than I had in years.
This happens because our subconscious mind can’t tell what’s the truth and what’s not, it takes everything we say to ourselves as fact. This is why when you think about something that makes you nervous or anxious before it happens the same area of your brain gets activated as if it was actually happening.
By repeating powerful affirmations daily, you are training your mind to think in this new way about yourself, which leads you to make better decisions that all lead to a positive chain reaction and a transformed life.
Decide what you’re trying to affirm, is it self-love, belonging, success, or positivity? Find 7-12 affirmations that you want to use— remember this is a long-term game and you’ll be using these affirmations every day for a while.
Once you have your affirmations picked, there are different ways to work with them: Listening, Reading, and Writing.
If you’re looking for some to get started check out my list of Positive Affirmations for Self Love!
When you’re first getting started working with Affirmations it feels awkward to say them aloud. By listening to pre-recorded affirmations you’ll begin to get comfortable with hearing these thoughts about yourself. If you’re really struggling with hearing the affirmations, there’s a workaround called Subliminals.
Subliminals are affirmations hidden under another sound. Now you might be wondering how affirmations still work if we can’t hear them directly. That’s a fair question, but subliminal speak to our subconscious mind— and are so effective that advertising companies started putting them under the audio of ads until it was banned by law to do so.
Once you’re more comfortable hearing affirmations, it’s time to start reading them aloud. Hearing yourself say the affirmations will help them resonate deeper into your mind. I started by repeating the affirmations that I was listening to.
At first, it felt like I was kind of lying to myself, but little by little I started to believe the affirmations and see my life transform. From my worth ethic to my self-confidence it was all unfolding in the most positive way before my eyes.
Regardless if you read your affirmations aloud or simply listen to them, you should be writing them down in your journal every single day. writing down affirmations can be extremely powerful. Just think about it, when you write something down you’re also thinking about that statement in your head while you do it— so it acts as another layer of reinforcing the positive affirmations.
Whenever you work with affirmations you can expect at some point or another your ego is going to chime in and try to self-sabotage. Our ego is driven by safety and doesn’t like things to change, even if that’s a positive change.
You might find yourself thinking, this isn’t true or I don’t really believe what I am saying. This is your ego reacting to the affirmations, not your true self. To help fight these ego blurts, first acknowledge them by noticing that they are happening and that what your ego is saying isn’t true.
Try writing down all of the negative emotions and thoughts that come up while you’re using your daily affirmations and then rewrite them in a positive and affirming way. The more you do this the better you’ll get at turning a negative into a positive. Even after years of affirmations, you’ll still get a little blurt from your ego, it’s normal, just don’t let it hold you down.
Affirm the Present Moment, not the Future
Powerful affirmations are always set in the present moment, not the future. For example, it’s better to say I am successful at building relationships that last, rather than I will be successful at building relationships that last. This signals to our brain that this is who we are, that we are someone who currently builds connections and relationships with people, so we will start acting accordingly because we are currently self-identifying as this.
If you say it’s a future thing there’s less holding you to it, you’re not currently identifying as that, but rather say that sometime in the future you’ll be like that— it’s like pushing your to-do list off till tomorrow.
Avoid Generic affirmations
This isn’t to say that you need to be extremely detailed or specific but if you say something like “I am successful” it’s a lot harder to believe in it than if you say something like “I am successful at growing my business and I have all the knowledge that I need to build the life of my dreams” this simple adjustment makes your affirmations more powerful and more likely to impact you.
Use Affirmations Daily
Like most things in life, affirmations are meant to be used consistently to create meaningful change. Start by affirming yourself for 2 to 5 minutes twice a day. I like to do it while I am getting ready and before bed while I am doing my skincare routine. This is called habit stacking, and it helps you stay consistent because you know that if you do habit A (getting ready or skincare in this case) then you know that you can do Habit B automatically.
Be patient.
Affirmations don’t work overnight, it will take some time before you start to notice changes, don’t let this deter you. Keep saying your affirmations daily and you’ll be amazed as your life starts to transform in a positive way right before your eyes.
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