Do Affirmations Actually Work? What I Realized Washing Dishes

SPC FRAMEWORK · REFLECTION

Don’t think of a banana. Now you know why some affirmations backfire.

Try something for me. For the next ten seconds, do not think of a banana.

Too late, right? If you are like most people, the banana showed up the moment I told you to keep it out. I want to tell you how that little trick sent my mind spinning one morning at the sink.

I was washing dishes, and my thoughts had wandered into my notes. I use the Zettelkasten method, where you break every idea down until each note holds one single thought. And every note needs a title.

That morning I got stuck on the title. Would the note be more useful if I named it with a statement, or with a question?

Here is how statements work in that method. You write one as a claim, and it does not have to be true. Its job is to be tested. Later you place another claim beside it, one that contradicts it, and the friction between the two is where you get closer to what is actually true. In my notes, a statement is an invitation to argue.

And then I noticed the contradiction. Outside my notes, statements mean something completely different. Productivity and self-help culture turned affirmations into something almost mystical: say I am confident or I am enough often enough, and the mind will build a road toward it.

Inside my notes, a statement is something I am supposed to doubt, test and rewrite. In the popular version, it is something I am supposed to believe by repeating it. Same kind of sentence. Opposite instructions. So I went and read the research.

The banana has a name

In 1987, Daniel Wegner asked people to spend five minutes saying whatever came to mind, with one rule: do not think of a white bear. They rang a bell every time the bear appeared, and it kept appearing, roughly once a minute. Afterwards, when the same people were allowed to think about the bear, they thought about it more than people who had never been told to suppress it (Wegner, 1987).

Trying hard to push a thought away keeps it close. That is the banana.

When the sentence itself is the problem

In 2009, Wood, Perunovic and Lee asked people to repeat a sentence: I am a lovable person. For participants with low self-esteem, repeating it left them feeling worse than those who had not repeated it. Participants with high self-esteem felt better, but only modestly (Psychological Science, 2009).

The research that does show benefits is about something different. Scientists call it self-affirmation, and it is not a slogan. It means reflecting on the values that give your life meaning, especially when something threatens how you see yourself (Cascio and colleagues, 2016). In one small brain-imaging study with 27 college students, that kind of reflection was linked to lower self-reported stress and less activity in a brain region that responds to stress (Dutcher and colleagues, 2020).

So the popular affirmation and the researched self-affirmation are not the same thing. One asks you to say something you may not believe. The other asks you to remember something you already value.

And then the question came back

Back to my title. There is one more study that made me smile. In 2010, Senay, Albarracín and Noguchi ran four experiments comparing two ways of talking to yourself. People who asked themselves Will I? did better on an anagram task than people who told themselves I will, and they reported stronger intentions to exercise (Psychological Science, 2010).

A question keeps the door open. A statement gives the door something to push against.

I ended up doing both. The parent note, the one that holds this whole reflection, I titled with a question: What is the real value of an affirmation? The smaller notes underneath, one idea each, I titled as statements, because each one is now a claim I can test against the others.

“A good affirmation does not have to feel good. It has to build a more useful relationship between your words, your reality and your actions.”

Two small experiments to try this week

1. Turn one statement into a question. Pick a sentence you keep telling yourself, such as I will finish this, and ask it instead: Will I finish this? What would it take? Notice what your mind does with the open door. Treat it as an experiment, not a promise.

2. Reflect on a value instead of repeating a claim. Choose one value that matters to you. Write a few lines about a moment you lived it, and one about a moment ahead where you will need it. That is close to what the researchers asked people to do.

This is also why the SPC system begins at the 🥜 Seed Level, where the foundational idea is planted with intention. An intention points somewhere without pretending you have already arrived. It leaves room for the work, and for the friction, that turns a seed into something real.

So here is my question for you: is there a sentence you have been repeating that you have never actually tested?

If you want to see where you stand right now, the PB Evolution Free Assessment is three questions and about two minutes, with no call. You get a reading of your SPC stage right away, and I read every answer myself.

With clarity and intention,
Paula