Affirmations are the best stress relief activities!
Affirmations are very powerful tools for bringing about the kind of life you want. They also are best stress relief activities. However, they have an evil twin – what I call the dark side of affirmations.
Basically, affirmations are thoughts you choose to think because you want the results they’ll produce. Created correctly, using positive, powerful words in the present tense repeated often, they produce the effects you want by convincing your subconscious mind the conditions they describe are in fact real.
For example, let’s say you’re stressed about money. You need financial stress relief activities. You know everything begins as a thought, you want to create more wealth in your life, so a positive affirmation would be, “Money now flows to me freely from all directions,” or “I am now rich beyond my wildest dreams,” or “I am wealth. I am abundance. I am prosperity.”
Repeated aloud, with emotion, these affirmations are effective stress coping strategies because they make you feel abundant, whatever your current circumstances. For them to take root in your mind and produce increased wealth in your life, they must be repeated often. This can be done in myriad ways – you can sing your affirmations, write them repeatedly, record yourself saying them and listen to the recording, or create a vision board around them.
The problem is, often when people have completed their affirmations for the day, a process that might take 15 minutes, they revert back to their normal way of thinking and speaking. In other words, they fall right back into the habit of thinking that created the stress in the first place!
This is the dark side of affirmations. People get complacent, thinking their 15 minutes of pure positive thought will over-ride the thoughts they’re thinking the rest of the day. Fifteen minutes vs 15 hours? How effective do you think that will be?
If you really want these positive thoughts to become reality, you have to become aware of what you’re saying and thinking the rest of the time. Staying with our wealth example, I hear so many people saying they want to be wealthy, but then their conversations are peppered with “I can’t afford it,” or telling their children “I don’t have the money”.
Sound familiar? These are very negative affirmations. But when repeated continuously, they act the same way. The subconscious perceives them as truth, and will make those statements true for you. And likely, for the child who keeps hearing it as well.
The first step in correcting this is to increase awareness of your habitual negative thoughts. The second, to replace them with one of the powerful affirmations I’ve suggested, or one of your own.
A good technique for this is to wear an elastic band on your wrist. Whenever you catch yourself having one of the ‘dark side of affirmations’, snap that elastic! Congratulate yourself on your increased awareness, then replace that thought with an affirmation of your choosing. Try these stress relief activities, be consistent, and soon you’ll be seeing positive results you’ve been dreaming of!
Love & Light, Alexandria
The elastic trick really helps! Thanks for the suggestion!
Thanks Renee – spread the word, and if you have any other tips feel free to share!