Episode 2: Affirmations Don't Work!: Here's Why (A Science Perspective) And What To Do Instead

In this second episode, I go into a spiritual world “myth” – that you can manifest what you want simply by saying affirmations to yourself every day.

These “spiritual” myths are as destructive as they are insidious. There’s nothing wrong with you if they don’t work. The concept is incomplete.

In this episode, I talk about:

•  Why affirmations don’t work (from a brain perspective)
•  An example of trying to “manifest” money to put it into context
•  What’s most likely happening if affirmations have worked for you on occasion
• What to do instead of affirmations (an ingredient in creating what you want)

I want to hear your thoughts, comments and questions. You can send them to me at

sara@sarasabin.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome back to the second episode of the Mind Body Spirit Accelerator. I am really excited to be back, and I'm pretty sure at some point I will forget what number podcast I'm on. Probably later down the road. But as this is only number two, I am very aware of the number. In this episode, I am going to be talking about affirmations don't work. Here's why. So this is carrying on the theme that I started in episode one, where I talked about gaps or incomplete information in the spiritual world, which means that a lot of the methods that are perpetuated out there actually don't work or don't work all of the time. Affirmations are an example of that. So I'm going to go into some of the reasons why they don't work. Before I do that, I'm going to give you an example of what an affirmation is for anyone that is not familiar with them. And if you are familiar with them and you've tried it and it doesn't work, and you put it in the box of shit that doesn't work from the spiritual world, great, just bear with me while I define it. So affirmations are a series of statements, it could be one or maybe a few statements that you make in the first person and in the present tense, which basically talk about something that you desire to have happen. A very common example of this are things that you say in the financial space. So let's say you have always wanted to be a millionaire. You might make up a series of statements that look like I am a millionaire, I am financially abundant, I bring in multiple streams of income from many sources. Whatever. Doesn't really matter what the statement is, but the idea is that you repeat them for a certain amount of time every day, and that is supposed to magnetize your desire towards you. Now, I dare anyone to say that this works really well all the time for them. In fact, please email me, send me a message, whatever, if this has worked really well for you. Because if it has worked for you, there are a few reasons why that could be that have nothing to do with the affirmations themselves. So, number one, your higher self wanted you to become a millionaire by a certain age to teach you a lesson of some sort. Maybe it's that being a millionaire would never make you happy, and that you needed to get happiness from the inside, or you were supposed to make a million so you could lose a million. Whatever. So, anyway, there was some kind of pre-fated design that you were going to be able to do that by that age, and you attributed it to the affirmations incorrectly. Another reason could be that you already had a load of other ingredients in your field that are necessary for you to be able to create that million pounds. What I mean by ingredients is for anything that you want to create, there are ingredients which constitute both energetic and practical ingredients that you would have to be doing and embodying in order to create that. Sorry, a million pounds is not going to just drop out of thin air because you're meditating about it. And if it does, refer back to the first reason I've just said that. But I'm going to assume for the majority of people listening to this, given I'm talking to people that have decided that life sucks in some way, maybe you've decided affirmations don't work so well. Here's why they don't work. So I'm going to go into that, but I'm also going to go into what you can actually do, which is more effective. Well, because you are saying something that you probably do not actually believe. So a few things here. And your brain is going, No, you're not. You're not a millionaire. You're a you're a delusional, mate. Your emotions are actually responding to whatever your first thought is about the thing that you are saying. So you're having this internal tug of war as you're saying these things, and this might all be happening under the level of your awareness, so you might not be aware that this is going on, but your brain is simultaneously arguing with you whilst you're saying it, and you may be aware of it, you may not be aware of it. If you're not aware of it, the other reason why they don't work is because essentially it's about what you think most of the time. So, what what do I mean by that? Let's say you are trying to create a million pounds, but most of the day, let's say 80 to 90 percent of the day, you are worrying about money. So you are worrying about how you're going to pay your next mortgage payment, you are stressed about paying your bills, you are stressed about your tax bill, you look at your bank account, and you're pretty much having a heart attack or telling yourself you don't have much money. And this may have no bearing on reality, right? So you may actually have, I don't know, £100,000 in your bank account already, but you still feel worried about money all the time, let's say, because you think you're gonna lose that money at any given moment. So 80 to 90 percent of the day you're having recurring thoughts around money, and you will also have certain belief systems around money. Again, if you've been in the spiritual world, this won't be news to you. Things like money doesn't grow on trees, feelings of scarcity that you had from childhood, any negative shit or negative associations you have towards money, or rich people are evil, blah blah blah blah blah. Fill in the blank. And then let's say to be super generous here, for 10 to 20% of the day, you actually do manage to have positive thoughts about money. So let's say you are feeling abundant, you're feeling appreciative of the money that you have. You look at your bank account and you're like, yeah, actually, that's not so bad. And you are actually feeling positive that actually you have ideas that could turn into million pounds, million-dollar ideas later down the road. So I'm gonna ask you this question 90% of the day you have negative habitual patterns of thought and emotions about money that are negative, 10% of the day it's all good. Think about this in terms of a scale. Which side do you think is going to win out? I probably don't need to tell you the answer to that question. But the answer to that question is what you are thinking about more of the time is what is going to create your reality. So, I know I will cover this separately in other episodes, but you have around your body an electromagnetic field. And your electromagnetic field is made up of the electromagnetic frequencies that are given off by your brain, your heart, your cells, your muscles, etc. Your thoughts create electricity, your emotions create electricity, and that goes into your electromagnetic field. The more of a certain thought you have, the stronger the electricity, the more of a certain emotion you have, the stronger the electricity, i.e., the stronger that is encoded into the electromagnetic field. Hence why I said this kind of 9010 or even 8020 rule, 80% bad, 20% good is not actually that helpful to you overall. So for all of the reasons that I've just given, affirmations don't work in and of themselves. What does work is to start to change your habitual thought patterns. Now you might say to me, Oh well, Sarah, does that mean I have to monitor all of my thoughts all the time? Kind of. Joking, not joking. Um, you don't have to monitor all of your thoughts all of the time. There will be certain clues that you can use in order to understand what you really think and believe in relation to a particular topic. So, carrying on with the theme of money here. A very strong clue of whether you have negative thoughts or emotions in relation to money and whether you've had them recently is if you have lower back pain. And this can go from a dull ache that you barely notice up to quite painful lower back pain. So the degree of the pain will be roughly analogous to the strength and intensity of the emotions that you have in relation to money. So if you are having lower back pain, it is a good indication that you are having negative thoughts and emotions in relation to money. When you are thinking about money during the day, because it comes up so much, just putting your awareness or focus on it can start to dig out some of those belief systems that you have around money. So let's say you go to buy groceries and you're having literally a bodily response to it. Like, or maybe you'll maybe you have back pain or you have a sort of constriction feeling when you're buying your groceries or treating yourself to a massage or whatever it is that you're spending money on. That is an indication that you are having some kind of negative thoughts or emotions in relation to money, and those could be throwaway thoughts, and if they're throwaway thoughts, it's easier because you can rebalance it easily. I never have any money. You can look at your bank account and say, Okay, well, I'm saying that, but actually, I do have X amount in the bank account. Whether it's one pound or a hundred pounds, you can prove to your brain, yes, I actually have money in the bank account. So, what I'm saying that I never have money is actually factually incorrect. And herein lies the point that I'm trying to make. In order to reprogram how you feel about money, for example, it actually starts with providing evidence to your brain that you do have money. Now, I I want to clarify here there are other ingredients that go into building a million pounds. It's not just this, but this is a big part of it. Because what you want to start to do is to strengthen the neural pathways that you have in the brain around actually, I have money, money is available to me, I uh I have abundance of money, money always comes to me, etc. Whatever a belief it is you're trying to program in. You want to really encode that into your brain so that you can start to change those habitual thought patterns, which will start to change your emotions around money. So, what does that look like? You need to provide specific evidence to your brain, and that is the major problem with affirmations. There is no evidence provided, you're just making a random statement out of nowhere that your brain can really argue with very quickly. Your brain can't argue with very specific evidence, and that is the difference. So, that specific evidence is called micro moments, and that's how you start to change how you think. So, how would that work in practice? Take a specific statement. Money is always available to me. What you want to do is provide the brain with evidence, because the brain is an evidence collecting machine. You want to provide the brain with evidence that money is always available to you. And that means very tiny specific things. For example, I have five pounds in my wallet. I got paid X amount today from work. I got a refund of X pounds from the garage when I took my car in today. I have access to money from my other half. I have the ability to make money through investments. The key here is to provide something very specific. So we don't want vague stuff like oh yeah, money's always available to me because the world tells me to. Again, it could be I found a 50 pence piece on the corner of the road or a 50 cents piece, depending on where you live. And doing it consistently every day is important. I say five to ten minutes, maybe twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, or maybe at multiple points throughout the day, you actually stop and find these little pieces of evidence, and even better, write them down, is going to rewire yourself over time and change your focus. So neurons that fire together wires together out of sync lose the link. So you want to stop banging the drum of old stories of I never have any money and change it to actually money is always available to me, or whatever story it is that you want to change it to. So it will look for evidence that confirms beliefs that are already held. So what that means is again to come back to the point of money, if you believe that money is scarce, your brain is literally, or particular activating system specifically, is literally scanning the environment for evidence that that is true and deleting evidence that is not true. Deleting or distorting. So maybe you sort of notice it, but you kind of write it off, like things like, oh yeah, it is available, but only for people that look like this or come from this background or this or whatever. So you're distorting any information that is in contradiction to your belief system, and you will see this in action in all areas when you look online at people that are arguing with people that hold different belief systems to them, but are all over other people that agree and align with everything that they think and feel. So this is even more obvious today, and what that means is with a little bit of effort, you can train your Raz to call it the short name here. You can train your Raz to build up a new perception of you by changing your focus through micro moments. And over time, how much time is is the big question. It could take as little as 21 days, you may have heard that before, but more likely it's probably going to take around the 60-day mark until the thing that the new information that you're drip feeding to your brain becomes something that you naturally believe, i.e., you just believe it, you don't need to keep telling yourself about it. And that is a far more effective system for bringing in more money than affirmations. Again, not saying that it will bring you in a million pounds, but what it will do is certainly help to bring in money in unexpected ways or quickly, and I've seen this time and time. And again with clients because it's that shift in perception and focus that makes you more open and receptive to the opportunities that will bring in more money for you, and then it becomes this beautiful snowball effect. The more you notice it, the more it feeds into your evidence system. And I mean, really give it a try for a period of time. And let me know how you get on. And if it doesn't resonate with you, well, there you go. There'll be lots of other there'll be lots of other tools and tricks to come in later podcast episodes. So that's it from me today. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.