Using Positive Affirmations to Cure Anxiety and Depression

A very simple way to alleviate anxious feelings, panic or depression is to use positive affirmations. When we are nervous or feeling down in the dumps, it's often caused by our minds replaying the same negative, bad thought. Like a broken record, we tell ourselves things like, "I can't do this," "I am never going to feel better," or, "I hate myself."

If you imagine the brain as a film that records a thought, you can see how negative thoughts can wreak havoc on the mind. The more you repeat something bad, the deeper the thought will be ingrained in your head, making it hard for you not to believe it or to change it.

Students are taught to repeat something at least seventeen straight times correctly to learn it. Repetition ingrains an idea, a fact, or an image in our mind. Even smell and touch can be repetitively learned. And if it only takes a little over a dozen repetitions, it's no doubt that the hundreds of times per day you repeat a negative thought will make you believe what you're saying.

To overcome negativity and reclaim your peace of mind, fight negative repetition with positive repetition. Write down a list of five or ten positive affirmations that you can repeat to yourself over and over, not seventeen times, but seventeen-hundred times.

You are simply replacing the negative indentions on the film in your brain with positive indentions. If your negative indentions are deep, it will take a lot more positive repetition to replace them, but you can be sure that the deeper your positive indentions go, the more powerful they will be until they are just as powerful, or even more powerful, than the original negative thought.

Tips to using positive affirmations to your advantage:

1. Find out what your negative thoughts are saying, and then replace them with an opposite positive thought.

If you often tell yourself that you can't do something, write down: I can do this anytime I want.

Say it with feeling, with vigor-like you mean it-and in time you will believe it just as much as you once believed its negative opposite.