Do Affirmations Work? What the Studies Found

Affirmations can work, but how well depends on the kind of affirmation and on who’s saying it. Repeating a positive sentence like “I’m a lovable person” has little research behind it, and one study found it made people with low self-esteem feel worse. Writing about the values that matter to you, the kind of affirmation psychologists study most, has small but reliable effects in more than a hundred experiments.

Two kinds of affirmations, and which one research supports

In everyday use, an affirmation is a short positive sentence you repeat. Psychologists use “self-affirmation” for something else: a short exercise where you write about a value that’s important to you, like your family, honesty or a sense of humor.

	Positive self-statements	Values affirmation
What you do	Repeat a sentence about yourself	Write or think about a value that matters to you
Example	“I’m a lovable person”	“My friends matter to me because…”
Research	Few studies, one of which found it can backfire	More than a hundred experiments

What happened when people repeated “I’m a lovable person”

In a 2009 study, Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee first ran a survey and found that people often use positive self-statements and believe they help. Then they tested one.

In two experiments, people with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person”, or who focused on how the sentence was true, felt worse than people who didn’t. People with high self-esteem felt better, but only a little. The authors concluded that positive self-statements may help some people and backfire for the people who need them most.

This is the main reason we suggest starting with sentences you can believe today. “I’m learning to like myself” is easier to accept than “I love everything about myself”.

Do affirmations help under stress?

Values affirmation has helped people under stress in lab experiments. These studies used writing about values, not repeating sentences.

• Lower stress hormones. In a 2005 study, David Creswell and colleagues had 85 participants either write about a personal value or do a neutral task before a stressful lab test. The people who affirmed their values had lower cortisol responses to the stress.
• Better problem-solving. In a 2013 study by Creswell and colleagues, 80 students rated how stressed they’d been over the past month and then solved 30 hard word-association puzzles under time pressure, in front of an evaluator. The values affirmation improved the results of the chronically stressed students who were underperforming.

If you use affirmations to get through anxious moments, our list for anxiety covers more studies on self-talk when you’re stressed.

How affirmations work in the brain

Brain scans show that reflecting on your values activates areas linked to thinking about yourself and to reward. Two studies looked at this with functional MRI.

• In a 2016 study, Christopher Cascio and colleagues found that participants who affirmed their values had more activity in the brain’s self-processing regions and in regions linked to reward and value when they reflected on their core values in the future, compared with everyday activities.
• In a 2015 study, Emily Falk and colleagues showed health messages about physical activity to sedentary adults in the scanner. Participants who had affirmed their values showed more activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in thinking about yourself and what matters to you. In the following month, they became more active than the other participants, which the researchers measured with activity trackers worn on the wrist. The final sample had 45 people.

These scans show what happens in the brain during the exercise. They don’t show that a repeated sentence “reprograms” your brain, and they say nothing about sentences like “I am confident”.

How big is the effect of affirmations?

The effect of values affirmation is small. In a 2015 meta-analysis of 144 experiments, Tracy Epton and colleagues found that self-affirmation made people a little more likely to accept health advice, plan to change and actually change their behavior. The authors note that the effects are small but similar to those of other health interventions.

A 2014 review by Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman describes values affirmations that helped people at school, with their health and in relationships, sometimes for months or years.

Not every result has held up. A 2010 study reported that a 15-minute affirmation exercise had greatly narrowed the gap between men and women in a science course. When Marta Serra-Garcia, Karsten Hansen and Uri Gneezy reanalyzed the data in 2020, they found no improvement for women. The gap had narrowed because the men who did the exercise scored lower.

How to use affirmations day to day

1. Pick a sentence you can believe today. If it makes you argue back in your head, make it easier to believe. “I’m getting better at this” works where “I’m the best at this” doesn’t.
2. Before something stressful, write about a value. Choose what matters most to you, such as your family, your friends or being honest, and write a few sentences about why. This is the form of affirmation the studies above tested.
3. Tie your affirmation to something you already do. Say it while the kettle boils or when you lock the door. Our morning affirmations work well with this kind of routine.
4. Swap sentences that stop meaning anything. A sentence you repeat on autopilot is easy to stop noticing.

For 100 sentences grouped by part of life, see our list of positive affirmations. To turn your own words into an affirmation, read how to write affirmations. If you want an app that shows you affirmations every day, see our comparison of daily affirmations apps.

We built Graceup as a gratitude journal, and it also has more than 2,500 affirmations in 19 categories. You can save the sentences that feel true to you, write your own and set a daily affirmation reminder.

Photo: Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash