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Talk To Yourself Kindly: Science Says So
The power of your words and using them for your own good
Noah Heim
April 28, 2023
If you've read a self-help book or been on Tik Tok in the last 5 years, you know that positive self-talk is preached all over.
Affirmation videos claim that you need to use this audio for whatever to be true.
Some people swear their changed life started with these positive affirmations.
Can that really be true?
If you've ever tried them, you know how awkward it feels.
So is this just another trend or are they actually useful?
Believe it or not, there's a solid amount of studies done looking at the effectiveness of this so-called magic.
And these studies are actually overwhelmingly positive.
It can create changes in:
Our sense of self
Behavior
Anxiety
We’ll get into that in a second, though.
Our self talk is spontaneous - you don't consciously create the ideas yourself.
However, we can train the voices in our heads to be more supportive and loving.
And this leads to more benefits than I can write about in one newsletter.
Affirmations are one of the tools that I used to turn my life around when I was at my lowest.
I knew that they worked for me and had the power to work for others, but I wanted to see what data there was to actually support these claims.
So after a bit of digging and reading, here we are.
What do affirmations actually do to us?
Let's dive in.
Sense of self
We know how important it is to have a model of our "self" (discussed in last weeks letter).
One study looked at the connectivity of the brain of participants using affirmations.
Significant links were found between the brain regions that are responsible for valuation, self-related processing, emotion regulation, and prospection.
Let's break this down a bit further.
Neurons that fire together wire together.
For those non-sciency people, this means that brain cells that fire at the same time have a tendency to sync up.
Similar stimuli will cause all the neurons to fire instead of just a single one.
In a way, they're connected.
Affirmations sync your dopamine center with the region for how you think about yourself.
That's a pretty good sync if you ask me.
This is training your brain to release dopamine as you talk about your self and life positively.
This will start the rewiring of your brain to think of your self and choices in a more positive light.
And having more compassion for yourself can also lead to having more empathy and compassion for others.
Better environment for yourself, better environment for all.
Changes in behavior
There was a pretty interesting side effect of the study above.
The participants who engaged in affirmations were far less likely to live a sedentary lifestyle even if they had before.
(My hypothesis is that dopamine threshold increased, but I'm not a researcher).
The same participants felt more positively about future situations.
Another study showed that participants were less likely to be upset by potentially threatening health news, while also implementing health advice.
Once again I'm not a scientist, but the results seem pretty clear to me.
Affirmations allow you to value yourself more as a being and a human.
It causes your brain to take your health into consideration.
After all, everyone cares for themselves deep down - our brains are wired for survival.
Just because we’ve lost touch with self-love, doesn’t mean it’s not there.
And it doesn't even matter if these things conscious or subconscious.
They’re happening.
Interesting enough, the participants were still showing these behaviors more than a month after the studies had ended.
Imagine what a consistent practice could do.
Lower anxiety
Anxiety comes from worry about a future situation.
You actually cannot worry about a past event, only the future effects of that event.
If you recall from earlier, affirmations trigger the part of your brain responsible for prospection.
Speaking affirmations won't cure you of all anxiety, though it can put you in a better mindset for looking at future events.
Athletes are a heavily studied group that we can take some insights from.
They’re some of the most anxious people with a need to be perfect .
One study done on tennis players suggests that a supportive default voice allows you to realize when a thought is not serving a purpose.
A common example that comes to mind is framing things in the positive.
So instead of "don't miss" you use "this is going in".
Framing things in the positive suppresses thoughts of the negative and allows for clearer focus on the task.
And I know that this translates into the rest of the world because I was the athlete that was training their internal voice.
Having a supportive internal voice raises your confidence.
The more confident you are, the less you’ll feel the need to doubt yourself.
Where we default to
Think of your brain as a river real quick.
A deep, wide, windy river - that's the manifestation of years of water flowing down the same exact path.
If you decided that one day you wanted to make a new river, it would take MANY tries.
It would need constant effort to send enough water down the same exact path to form any kind of stream.
The human brain is exactly that.
Your brain is a river.
Your thoughts, actions, and energy are the water.
Change is hard - especially when it's the direct opposite of what you're used to.
The energy you're putting in to positive self talk will want to flow back to the established, negative river.
This is normal.
You will slip up even after you've been at it for awhile - I still do.
But please don't let this push you to give up.
After some time, the new river will become your default - it will feel effortless for you to speak to yourself kindly.
And this is when all the struggle becomes worth it.
Thank you so much for reading and joining me on my journey into affirmations.
Like always, if you know someone that this information could benefit please share.
Until next time,
Noah
Disclaimer: though I did study a lot of things like this in college, I'm not a neuroscientist and these are my own conclusions that I came to reading and linking the data I found. I urge you to either read about or try these practices and come to your own conclusion.
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