Do Affirmations Really Work?

Yes. Affirmations do work. Many of us would have heard this telling quote.

"Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny."

Let's watch the phrase "Watch your words, for they become actions" a bit closer. It holds within it the rationale for why affirmations work.

We've probably heard of the term "self-fulfilling prophecy". A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction about an event that causes itself to become true, irrespective of whether or not it was true in the first place. More specifically, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a forecast that plays on the mind of people, influencing them to behave in a way that will make the forecast come true. A case of words becoming action, action becoming destiny!

This is not mere pop psychology. It has a lot of science behind it. Affirmations, positive or negative, also have a lot of science to support the way they work. Neuroscience, in its attempt to decode every human emotion and action, has indeed done its bit towards providing justifications behind a lot of beliefs that we sometimes consider as superstitions or folklore. Surely, there is a lot of wisdom in folk tales and the tales of yore.

Even us common laymen know that every part of the human body is connected to the brain. So we know that the tongue is connected to the brain. The tongue is the key player in producing speech. So every spoken word is transmitted to the brain, which assigns the word to the 'processing center' in the brain, which helps the brain retrieve the meaning of the word from past stored knowledge and associated emotions. Once this decoding is done, the spoken word, now laden with meaning, is sent to the 'action center' in the brain, which instructs the body to respond to the meaning of the word. All this within a spilt second! Did we at all know that there are so many processes involved in the translation of the word to action! Intelligent design huh?