The Other Side of Affirmations and Low Self-Esteem
Note: If you are depressed, use all tools including affirmations under the direction and guidance of your mental health professional.
There’s a ton of research out there demonstrating that positive affirmations work in a variety of life situations. However, there’s also research out there that flatly states positive affirmations actually work against people with low self-esteem. This is an important issue because, in 2019, Psychology Today published an article that claimed 85 percent of adult humans on the planet have low self-esteem.
The question is who do you believe? I will leave aside, for the moment, that my personal story with affirmations is a radical refutation of the second set of research. I will focus instead on why I believe the research gets this result and how you can overcome this challenge and help affirmations work for you.
The research counseling against affirmations for people with low self-esteem states that affirmations make such people “feel worse” by immediately prompting a list of reasons the statement is false. This is what is known in psychological circles as cognitive dissonance. The inability to hold two conflicting beliefs simultaneously.
Next the research states people in this situation then spiral into more negative feelings because they compare their inadequacies against the positivity of the affirmation.
Thoughts on This Research
First, affirmations are a tool for changing beliefs. So, virtually everyone who uses an affirmation is going to experience cognitive dissonance. It’s really the response and the motivation in using affirmations that is going to create a positive or negative outcome. The reason “happy and successful” people do well with affirmations is because they have a solid self-image as a starting point. They use affirmations to create better situations in their lives and they are generally highly motivated and have incentives to bring about that better situation.
It’s true people with lower self-esteem will struggle more in believing positive things about themselves and the world. That doesn’t mean you stop. To me, this is analogous to saying you should stop after a couple counseling sessions because you haven’t found a positive result yet.
I went through significant counseling earlier in life. Sitting there talking about all the reasons your life isn’t working is pretty darn depressing too. Yet, few would suggest that counseling is not an effective tool because first blush is more pain not healing.
My Solution Based on 30 Years Working with Affirmations
I was that low self-esteem, severely depressed person back in my 20s. I reached a point, after much counseling and failure and nearly dying, that I’d had enough. I identified my thinking, much of which had been conditioned since early childhood, as the culprit. I became determined to shift my thinking in ways that could change my life. It was challenging, for sure.
Here’s my recipe for success with affirmations starting with low self-esteem.
You have to make a choice and be committed to change. You can’t succeed with affirmations if you’re determined to give your existing negative thoughts equal time in the process. They’ve had years of subconscious domination and repetition and have likely wreaked havoc on your life. Of course, they’re going to rise up when they are challenged. I’d compare it to drug detox. You’re going to go through some period of pain to get those drugs out of your system. The same is true of your negative thoughts about yourself. I don’t wish to sound harsh, but if you’re going to give your negative thoughts equal time with their dominant starting position, the positive thoughts will have no chance to win. You must choose and be determined to think differently about yourself. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Don’t compare today you to aspirational you. Affirmations are specifically asking you to see yourself as you can be at some point in the future, even in the face of evidence to the contrary right now. That is the foundation of all change in life. You must be able to envision and stay focused on the goal. Nothing in life could ever be accomplished unless you separate what something is from what it can be.
Overwhelm your negative subconscious thoughts. If you really want to change your view of yourself and your situation in life, you have to overcome the embedded negative thinking that supports that view and tyrannical ego determined not to change. Here are a couple of very practical ways to do this with your affirmations, especially at first. These two methods allow you to flood your subconscious with a counter-narrative.
Record your affirmations and play them at night while you sleep. Your subconscious mind is much more suggestable while you sleep and it’s in control. Your conscious ego is sidelined. You’re able to deliver heavy doses of your positive affirmations without the ego’s negative commentary on them. What I found when I started doing this, was that I definitely “heard” the affirmation while asleep. They started showing up as unconscious responses to my conscious mind’s negative thinking during the day.
Listen to your affirmations passively during the day. Listen to your affirmations at a low level and passively during the day. Put them on repeat. Again, your subconscious mind is hearing them, and your conscious mind will drown them out as you go about your activities. Your subconscious mind able to hear and remember the affirmations the same way you suddenly know the lyrics to a song you didn’t even realize you’d paid attention to.
Repetition, repetition, repetition. Enough said.
Make the words count. All affirmations are not created equal. Affirmations that make you feel something or get your other senses involved are far more powerful and generic affirmations. Write affirmations that evoke emotion or give you something to be excited about or batter old negative beliefs. You are the best one to write your affirmations, but someone who knows how to create good affirmations can help you with guidance from you.
Take small bites. Sometimes people use unrealistic affirmations. For a person really bought into their change, these might be aspirational. For someone struggling with self-worth, these kinds of affirmations can be disheartening. Try using incremental affirmations. Don’t go from being a writer who can’t even put a word on a page to a New York Times Bestselling author in one affirmation. That leap may be too much. Try creating affirmations around a small step forward you can take now. The cognitive dissonance is much more manageable when you take this approach.
Use first, second, and third person affirmations. Conventional affirmation wisdom is to always put affirmations in the first person. I agree with that as a general premise, but I have found that using first person affirmations (own the words), second person affirmations (absorb the words. This is how most of your negative thoughts came into your consciousness from the outside using you), and third person (use the power of your name to your advantage).
Nothing - affirmations included - will work for everyone. However, if you can put some basic rules around them, commit to seeing the process through, and put out an overwhelming personal ad campaign using them, people with low self-esteem can thrive and succeed with affirmations.
Put you mind on your side!
Ray