The Power of Affirmations: A Skeptic’s View

Aruna Gobalan
7 min readJan 15, 2021
PC: Alysha Rosly on Unsplash

After an hour of doomscrolling on my phone, I switched gears to doomscroll on Netflix, instead. That’s when I stopped to watch a documentary (mockumentary?) on the power of affirmations.

I saw folks claiming to have transitioned from genuinely desperate situations-serious emotional, financial, or relationship troubles-into becoming happy, thriving individuals. They attributed the change in their lives to the affirmations they had started to say to themselves every day.

The subjects on the TV show provided testimonial after testimonial touting the immense power of affirmations. They went to great lengths to explain how once they started to say specific phrases to themselves out loud multiple times a day, their lives transitioned from awful to great.

I have a confession to make-my BS-meter is pretty strong. It took all my willpower (plus motor skills) to stop my eyes from lodging at the back of my head, thanks to some heavy-duty eye-rolling.

(Note: I’ve since learned eye-rolls are essentially a way of looking away, a natural physical limbic-system response when you see or read something you find distrustful. I also learned that you could roll or cross your eyes all you want without hurting them or going blind. Good to know.)

Anyway, as a proponent of measured skepticism, I had my doubts about the power of affirmations.

However, in my own attempt at being an open-minded and less-judgy person, I’ve since explored the philosophy behind affirmations. My goal was to see if there is any scientific basis to this new-agey self-help phenomenon and evaluate its efficacy in bringing forth real change.

This post is about what I discovered.

Types of Affirmations

There are essentially two-types of affirmations:

a) A traditional model of affirmations referred to as self-affirmations which focuses on principal elements of how you view yourself.

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