What are positive affirmations, to quote wiki...........Affirmations in New Age and New Thought terminology refers primarily to the practice of positive thinking - fostering a belief that "a positive mental attitude supported by affirmations will achieve success in anything." More specifically an affirmation is a carefully formatted statement that should be repeated to one's self and written down frequently. For an affirmation to be effective, it needs to be present tense, positive, personal and specific.
Our brains are pretty tricky beasts and I also found this great info about what actually happens when we are making a positive affirmation, but don't forget this also works with negative conditioning, which is what most of us are prone to doing to ourselves. "Neural pathways develop as neurons learn to fire in a particular pattern. What we repeatedly and frequently say to ourselves or hear from
others, creates a pattern of neuron firing. After hearing said commentary again and again, this then develops into a neural
pathway. Picture a path through a grassy field. The more foot traffic
the path has, the more defined it becomes. As the neurons fire together
in their pattern, they develop connections to each other. After a
while, when a portion of the pattern is present, the connections with
the previously fired neurons cause the entire pathway to fire. Thus, a
part of the pattern is experienced as the full pattern. The brain has
“filled in the blanks” and “connected the dots” in a kind of neural
shorthand. The result is that when something said or experienced is
even similar to prior statements or similar to the events that caused
the prior statements, then the set way of responding is triggered." To read the whole article clink the following link, it is a very interesting post, and clarifies exactly what happens inside these tricky beasts of ours. This clearly highlights why we need to replace our negative nay nay minds with some positivity!!
This week we will have a positive affirmation each day. This will hopefully motivate me to get over myself and also inspire us all to dream, believe, create and allow the positive energy to flow into our personal space.
Interesting, but is there really any solid evidence that affirmations work? I want to believe it as much as you do, but as I'm researching the subject in scientific journals, I'm not coming up with a lot. I'm trying to set up a blog about it now: intelligentselfimprovement.blogspot.com - Many thanks.
ReplyDeleteHi John, I have bookmarked your blog and will watch with interest. Unfortunately you won't find scientific data on many of these subjects, they simply don't study the intangible enough. Maybe you could find more research on the powers of the mind perhaps?? Hunt in an abstract fashion for information.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend I shall call Fran for privacy's sake. In our younger days she was a little clumsy. All of our friends focused on this and continually made comments about it to her face, she went from being slightly clumsy to downright dangerous to take into a store. She literally could not go into a shop without knocking something off a shelf, and sometimes even a cascade effect would eventuate. Her mind had listened to the negative affirmations for so long she believed it herself and became what everyone called her.
I really do think it works, going by what I have witnessed myself.
Many thanks for your comment, good luck with your blog.