Affirmations Suck and Here’s Why

My theory about affirmations is that they work, just not for those people that need them. Therefore, they are effectively useless. To put it in slightly more complex psychological terms – they suck.

Repeating occasionally bizarrely optimistic phrases is a common trend shared by nearly all self-improvement gurus from the likes of Napoleon Hill, all the way to Luisa Hay. They were invented by a Frenchman, Émile Coué – a pharmacist, psychologist & railroad worker, all rolled into one person. To my knowledge, he didn’t coin the word “affirmation”, but he did first describe the method. In particular, he is well known for his affirmation “tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux”. It sounds good in French, but to actually understand what it means, here it is English, it’s: “Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better”. Monsieur Coué believed that by repeating this phrase daily and endlessly, you’re bypassing your own resistance to change and slowly altering negative self-beliefs on a “deep” unconscious level.

The idea proved to be quite popular, I suspect for the very same reason that TV & movie ideas about magic are – except that working with pagans and practicing witches as therapy and coaching clients over the years, I’ve learned that magic actually requires quite a bit of effort and isn’t all its cracked up to be. You still must clean up your own life, because there’s no spell that will get you a better job if you don’t work your butt of looking for one. Be that as it may, it’s not that difficult to understand why this idea became so popular. It’s simple, there’s a bit of magic and fantasy in it, and it delegates the hard work to some unseen and unheard-of part of our psyche which allows us to go about our daily lives without making difficult sacrifices. It’s a way of being changed rather than changing yourself.

Writing for Vice, Tracey Ann Duncan, a yoga teacher, says the following:

We did the things the internet self-help gurus told us to do. We gazed into the mirror and said to ourselves, “I am beautiful, loveable, and the universe wants me to be happy.” We did it three times a day. And what happened? Fucking nothing.

You wanna know why? Because affirmations are basically bullshit.

Duncan draws on Joanne Wood’s research that demonstrates what I see in my practice too: affirmations may be helpful, but not for people who need them. In short, if you have high self-esteem, it might get even higher when you repeat an affirmation because you’re reminding yourself of something that you already feel as true, whereas if you struggle with self-esteem, it might actually further lower it. I hardly doubt that this study merits labeling all affirmations as “bullshit”, as Vice’s Tracey Ann Duncan does, but it certainly has to give us pause and directs us to use them with caution.

Since I’m a grumpy guy, I’m not a big fan of boosting anyone’s self-esteem either and I prefer to focus, instead, on self-worth, but let’s leave that for next month’s blog posts. Essentially, the reason why affirmations don’t work is because no matter how many times you repeat a statement that contradicts your fundamental experience of reality, that fundamental experience will not change. If I look down and see that the grass is green, no amount of repeating “grass is red” will change my perception of it. But it sure will make me feel frustrated.

Let’s see how that works in practice.

Susan came to work with me after her friend insisted that she sees someone, as she was starting to have suicidal thoughts. Susan was an ER nurse and a big New Age enthusiast, working part-time as a reiki healer. What convinced her to book a session with me was the fact that I teach and practice meditation.

Affirmations were a big part of her attempts to heal herself, along with meditation, herbal supplements, and journaling. Meditation and journaling were wonderful habits that we made great use of in our work together, but affirmations were a major point of disagreement. The affirmation that Susan particularly liked to repeat was I am enough. She chose that affirmation because she felt like she wasn’t enough, and following the affirmation logic, she would diligently remind herself that she actually is enough until she finally starts believing it.

Let’s take a step back and look at Susan’s story for more context. Her depressive episode began a month after her fiancée broke off their engagement and left practically without explanation. Not knowing the “why”, she reached for what was a childhood issue, already almost brimming beneath the surface: I was abandoned because I wasn’t enough.

The same way her father had abandoned Susan and her mother when she was six, she was now abandoned by her fiancée. At one point in our work together, during a meditation session, she recalled a scene that took place around the time her parents’ marriage was falling apart.

Her parents were arguing in the living room and in an attempt to stop the fight, Susan took a bowl and threw it on the ground. Her parents stopped yelling and turned toward her. It seemed as if the sound of the expensive bowl breaking made them aware of her presence. After a moment of silence, her father yelled “it’s because of shit like THIS that I can’t have a moment of peace in this house”, and while his hands were pointing at the bowl, his eyes were now staring directly and furiously into Susan’s eyes. Only a moment later, he was slamming the front door and she could hear the car leaving the driveway. Susan’s mother looked at her in dismay and left the room too. Susan was left with the broken glass, alone and believing it was, indeed, all her fault.

This sense that she was to blame for her parents’ marriage and her father leaving wasn’t explicitly present in her consciousness but after he left, she became interested in self-improvement and personal growth, devouring all the self-help books she could find. She was a straight A student in high school and decided to become a nurse, a profession that would allow her to be good enough to everyone around her. In fact, Susan’s work ethic was also an echo of that “I’m not good enough” belief but it never manifested through guilt. Instead, it appeared as burnout and discontent. Susan would be the first person to work overtime if no one else wanted to, she would bring in donuts for her colleagues, she would go the extra mile for her patients. She would feel resentment when someone would be unfairly promoted, but instead of standing up for herself, she would do “shadow work” to get rid of what she perceived as envy. In reality, it wasn’t envy, it was yet another instance of “even though you work so hard, you’re just not enough, Susan”.

When her fiancée left without an explanation, “you’re not enough” was a whole, fully formed part of her psychic apparatus just waiting to step in and give her an explanation, leading to a deep depression. Always the fighter, Susan tried every self-help technique in the book, but to no avail.

When I proposed that she stops using the I am enough affirmation, she objected. If she didn’t repeat the affirmation, how was she supposed to start believing that she is enough, how could she possibly heal herself with that belief lingering inside of her?

I proposed an experiment. Repeat the affirmation in front of me, repeat it out loud, I said.

At first, she was reluctant to do so, but eventually agreed. About a minute into the experiment, I could see that she was beginning to feel sad, and even though I suggested ending the experiment, she said she wanted to continue. In two minutes, she started crying. I asked her to tell me more about how she was feeling and she replied that she was crying because she was feeling “like I’m really, but really, not enough.”

“More than before you began saying the affirmation?”

She responded affirmatively.

I took my chance to be “subtle”: “The affirmation is making you feel worse?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“Because it’s making me understand so much more how much I’m not enough.”

After that, she agreed to stop using the affirmation, but insisted on another solution. Not only the slow healing process that takes place in therapy, but something also that she could do on her own so that she has a sense of control over the process. I felt that she truly needed, both a sense of actively doing something and to give herself a break, so I came up with an alternative.

Buddhist and secular types of meditation make heavy use of phrase repetition, and this practice ought to be differentiated from either mantras or affirmations. The idea behind phrase repetition in meditation is not to convince yourself of anything, it’s not meant to reprogram your unconscious mind or anything of the sort. Phrases are meant to plant a seed so that you can cultivate a certain state of mind – not right now, not in the next five minutes, but over time, slowly. There’s nothing you’re supposed to believe or feel as you’re repeating the phrases, all you need to do is repeat and observe how your mind and body respond.

Because Susan was so hard on herself and demanded of herself so much discipline and hard work, it seemed to me that self-compassion might be a useful practice to implement. I shared the phrases that I use for myself and she modified them, ending up with these three lines:

May I accept the best and the worst,

May I feel at peace with what is,

May I be free from suffering.

Because Susan liked structure and was willing to devote as much time as necessary, I was able to create an increasingly more intense plan of meditation for her, and within the following weeks, her condition had begun to improve. Of course, self-compassion phrases were just one aspect of her healing process and some heavy lifting needed to be done in therapy. Fear of abandonment, guilt, etc. are issues too big to address with meditation alone, but self-compassion gave her the boost that she needed. Affirmations, on the other, didn’t. Where meditation allowed her to cultivate what’s productive, affirmations only emphasized where she was falling short.