Positive Thinking Day

Affirmations and your brain

Your thoughts directly impact your mood, attitude, and behavior. Negative thoughts tend to create bad moods, bad attitudes, and unsuccessful behaviors. On the other hand, positive thoughts lead to positive actions and positive actions lead to positive outcomes. This is why it is important to keep your thoughts positive and focused on the things you want in life. The repetition of positive thoughts – or affirmations – will literally change your brain and help you create the life you want.

Affirmations are short positive statements that help re-pattern your self-talk and rewire your brain. Be sure to create your affirmations in the present tense and clearly state what you want. For example, “I succeed in all I do.” The key to successful use of affirmations is repetition. By repeating these positive thoughts over and over, you are rewiring your brain. Brain cells that fire together wire together. Using affirmations will help you literally create new neural pathways in your brain (neural nets). This is like creating a new groove on a record or wearing a path in the grass. It takes some time - and repetition - to create these new neural nets, but with patience you will rewire your brain for success.

As you stay focused on the new positive thoughts, the old negative neural nets will wither away and the positive neural nets will strengthen. This will make it easier for you to stay positive and take the necessary positive steps to reach your goals.

Affirmations can help you stay positive

Positive affirmations are a perfect way to help you develop positive thinking patterns.  The point of of using affirmations, is to change your negative patterns of thinking.  It is like creating a new pathway in your brain.  It is re-wiring your brain for success.  Repetition is the key when using affirmations.  The goal is to replace the negative self-talk with new positive self-talk.  It is like recruiting and strengthening a new muscle.  Just as it would take time to build up strength in this new muscle and it takes time to re-pattern your thoughts.

ipopin one-minute affirmations make this process fun and easy for everyone.  Our customers (at www.ipopin.com) agree that ipopins help them keep a more positive mindset.  In honor of PTD, ipopin.com will donate 30% of the sales (between now and September 14, 2008) to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.  We think this is a good deal - you get the very cool and transformational ipopin one-minute affirmations AND you will be helping to find a cure for spinal cord injury! 

Remember we are giving you the following ipopin affirmation to celebrate PTD - I choose to create a great day.

Check out this post for more specific information about affirmations.  You can also go to Think Positive! Blog to read more about affirmations. 

Is positive thinking always an effective strategy?

I read a couple of articles over at Lyman Reed's blog, Creating a Better Life that got me thinking.  Check out his posts- I Am - I Feel- There Is (Rotten Apples) and In Praise of Positive Thinking.  He talked about the the importance of dealing with emotions and not trying to mask depression or other emotions with affirmations or any other personal development technique.  Let me first say that I agree with Lyman 100%.  Emotions are important and need to be addressed.  I believe that it is important to learn how to really feel your emotions and allow them to flow their natural course.  Emotions start, rise to a peak, and then dissipate.  Unfortunately, many people are afraid of their own emotions and stifle this natural flow.  A very important part of emotional health is to let the energy of the emotions flow naturally.  If we stuff or ignore our emotions, they get backed up like a pressure cooker and might "explode" at inappropriate times.

While I am a big proponent of letting our feelings flow, I am also a hardcore believer in affirmations and positive thinking.  Our thoughts drive our emotions.  When we feel depressed, sad, anxious, stressed, angry, happy, excited, or any other emotion, it is a partially a result of the thoughts we have been thinking (I also understand that neurotransmitters play a role as well).  Therefore, in my opinion, if we frequently feel depressed, sad, anxious, etc., then we must work to change our thinking.  When we don't like the way we feel, it is in large part due to the negative unhealthy thoughts going on.  Unfortunately, over time these negative thoughts really take hold.  The more often we think these thoughts, the stronger the neural net (a group of neurons that that get "wired" together due to repeated use) becomes.  In other words, you have negative thoughts and then you feel bad.  As this happens over and over, you develop strong neural nets that makes it easy to continue with this negative pattern.  It then becomes more difficult to change to positive thoughts, but that doesn't mean we should give up.

Here's an analogy that might help make this more clear.  Let's say you are walking on a path in the woods.  You know that this path leads to a dark, scary dead-end, but the path is familiar and easy to walk.  You know if you want to go somewhere else you will have to begin clearing a new path.  Would you just continue walking the dead-end path over and over, wearing an even deeper groove?  Or would you start clearing the new pathway?  Sure, it is difficult work.  Certainly you need to focus on one step at a time.  However, it doesn't make good sense to decide that making a new path is too hard and you are going back to the familiar and easy path - knowing you do not like the destination.

So, when you do not like the way you are feeling, you must begin creating a new feeling by thinking new thoughts.  The new positive thoughts might feel awkward, uncomfortable, and/or difficult at first.  You might think that it is too difficult, but if you want to feel better you NEED to change your thoughts.  A very effective way to do this is by using affirmations.  As you repeat the affirmation over and over, it is like swinging your machete to start clearing the new path.  You can't expect to swing the machete once and automatically have a new pathway appear in the woods.  You will have to repeat the affirmations frequently and persistently.  You did not create the current bad feeling mindset overnight and you will not create a new better feeling mindset overnight.

Another way to think about it is that developing a new positive mindset is like recruiting and strengthening a muscle - it takes some work and repetitions of strengthening exercises.  You keep at it until you build this muscle up.  Likewise, you keep using your affirmations until you have successfully changed your self-talk.  Over time, you will retrain yourself to have a positive optimistic mindset and your emotions, mood, and attitude will follow suit.

If you want help creating affirmations check out this post or go to Think Positive! Blog to read our daily affirmations.

What do you think?  Are affirmations always helpful?  Or, can they do harm?

Using affirmations to change your thinking patterns

Thoughts have a direct impact on our emotions, attitudes, and behaviors.  The repetition of positive thoughts (affirmations) will lead to a positive attitude, positive actions, and eventually success.

Affirmations are powerful positive statements you can use to retrain your brain and shift away from your negative self-talk. Affirmations should be concise sentences stated in a positive way and in the present tense. When creating an affirmation remember to state what it is that you want, not what you don’t want.

For example, rather than saying "I no longer eat sweets" you would want to say, "I now choose healthy foods to nourish my body." The problem with the first example is that you are still focusing your mind on the sweets. The second statement helps you stay focused on eating healthy foods.

I know that some people reject affirmations because they don't really believe the statement and so they don't think it will help. Remember that the point of affirmations is to change your negative patterns of thinking. It is like creating new grooves on a record (I suppose I am dating myself by referring to the old vinyl LP's). It is re-wiring your brain.

Of course there is part of you (maybe all of you) that doesn't believe the statement... your thoughts have been saying something else for a long time and have likely created a strong neural net – a deep groove. You need to keep saying the new statement over and over until you make a new groove - until you make that new neural pathway. And yes, sometimes old habits die hard. That negative way of thinking and believing did not occur overnight and the new positive pattern won't be created overnight.

Create your affirmations and then repeat them often. The goal is to replace the negative self-talk with new positive self-talk. It is like recruiting and strengthening a new muscle. Just as it would take time to build up strength in this new muscle and it takes time to re-pattern your thoughts.