Do Affirmations Work? What the Research Splits Into Two

Affirmations are short, positive statements about yourself or your life, repeated to change how you think and feel, such as “I am confident” or “I deserve success”. The modern habit goes back to Émile Coué’s autosuggestion in the 1920s, and teachers from Maxwell Maltz to Vadim Zeland have refined it. Research splits the practice in two. Repeating flattering statements can backfire for the people who use them most, while a different practice, writing about your own values, has good evidence behind it.

This page explains both halves, what the teachers themselves said about why affirmations fail, and where the research lands. It explains the idea. It doesn’t give you affirmations to repeat.

Where did affirmations come from?

Émile Coué, a French pharmacist, built the first popular method. He had patients repeat a general phrase, “every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”, morning and night, in a relaxed, almost mechanical voice. He called it conscious autosuggestion, and in the 1920s it drew crowds across Europe and America.

Coué also left a warning that most of his followers dropped. He held that when imagination and willpower conflict, imagination wins, and the harder you push, the worse it goes. He called this the law of reversed effort. Maxwell Maltz picked it up in Psycho-Cybernetics (1960) and built his own approach to relaxation and effort around it.

From there, affirmations spread through self-help, the New Thought movement and later the law of attraction. The repeated “I am” statement became a fixture of manifestation teaching.

How does Vadim Zeland explain affirmations?

In Reality Transurfing, Zeland treats an affirmation as a slide made of sound instead of pictures: a deliberate inner statement meant to replace the old ones you carry about yourself. Then he spends most of his discussion explaining why the usual way of doing it fails.

His rules, in summary:

• Feeling beats repetition. Words on their own don’t reach the deeper part of you that he calls the heart. Feeling something once does more than repeating it many times.
• One idea at a time. A sentence that bundles health, calm, energy and confidence asks for five feelings at once, and you can’t produce them.
• Vary the wording. Saying the same phrase until it’s routine drains it.
• Treat the cause. Repeating “I have nothing to fear” while the source of the fear stays in your life does nothing. An affirmation doesn’t replace changing the situation.
• Present tense, positive framing. State what is working now, not what you aren’t, and not what will happen someday.
• No pressure. Repeat it in a calm, flat state. Insisting, forcing or chanting yourself into a high creates the kind of tension he calls excess importance, and the statement bounces off.

Then Zeland makes the admission that matters most. If your mind has to work hard to convince your heart of something, the mind doesn’t believe it either, and no amount of repetition will fix that. He also separates affirmation from intention: you feel confident at the moment you decide to act confidently, not after telling yourself you are confident a hundred times.

Read at face value, that is an argument against the technique from a man who teaches it. It’s also close to what researchers later found.

Do affirmations work?

The best-known test is a 2009 study in Psychological Science by Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee at the University of Waterloo. Its title gives away the result: “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others.”

The team first surveyed students and found that most believed positive self-statements help. Then they tested one. Participants repeated “I am a lovable person” to themselves during a short task.

• People with high self-esteem felt slightly better afterwards.
• People with low self-esteem felt worse, in mood and in how they rated themselves, than similar people who didn’t repeat the sentence.
• In a follow-up, people with low self-esteem did better when allowed to consider negative thoughts about themselves alongside the positive ones.

So the affirmation helped the people who didn’t need it and harmed the people who did. The researchers’ explanation is simple. When a statement sits far outside what you believe, each repetition calls up the counter-evidence. You say “I am lovable”, and your mind lists the reasons you’re not.

That’s Zeland’s diagnosis in plain psychology: the mind doesn’t believe it either. It also fits the research on false beliefs and the self-image. A statement that contradicts your picture of yourself meets resistance, and the picture tends to win.

What is self-affirmation, and why does it work?

Most articles claiming “science proves affirmations work” cite a different body of research under the same word.

In 1988 the psychologist Claude Steele proposed self-affirmation theory. Its core idea: people protect their sense of being adequate and good. When something threatens that sense, such as a test, a criticism or a health warning, they get defensive. Reminding them of a value that matters to them restores the sense of adequacy and lowers the defensiveness.

In the experiments, “affirming” means writing for ten or fifteen minutes about a personal value, such as family, honesty, music or faith, and why it matters. It involves no self-praise and no repetition.

The results have been striking in places:

• Geoffrey Cohen and colleagues reported in Science in 2006 that a brief values-writing exercise narrowed the achievement gap between Black and white seventh-grade students over a school term.
• David Sherman and Cohen’s reviews, including a 2014 paper in the Annual Review of Psychology, collect findings that values affirmation makes people less defensive about threatening health information and more able to perform under stress.
• A brain-imaging study by Christopher Cascio, Emily Falk and colleagues in 2016 found that values affirmation engaged brain regions tied to self-related processing and reward. Popular articles often cite it as proof that affirmations “rewire your brain”. The study tested values writing, not repeated self-praise.

Larger replications have found smaller and less consistent effects than the early school studies, including a 2017 trial led by Paul Hanselman. The direction holds up better than the size. Even so, this is the practice with the evidence, and it works by a different route from the one affirmation teachers describe. It doesn’t tell you that you’re something you doubt. It reminds you of something you already hold true.

Why do affirmations make some people feel worse?

Three research findings explain most of it.

The gap between statement and belief. The further an affirmation sits from what you believe, the more it provokes the opposite thought. Wood’s results show it most in people with low self-esteem.

Reactance. People push back when they feel pressured to adopt a view, even by themselves. Jack Brehm described this in 1966. Hypnotists know it too. Teppo Holmqvist’s hypnosis manual recommends phrasing a new belief as something the person chooses, because forced statements meet resistance. The hypnosis guide covers how suggestion works and fails.

Effort. Trying to force a thought in brings back its opposite. Daniel Wegner’s research on thought suppression found that trying not to think of something keeps it alive. Coué, Maltz and Zeland all reached a version of this rule, a century apart: insisting stops the belief from taking hold.

A fourth effect is less important but real. A phrase repeated many times stops sounding like language. Psychologists call this semantic satiation, and it’s Zeland’s reason for varying the wording.

Should affirmations be in the present tense?

Most teachers say yes. Zeland argues that a statement about the future keeps its goal in the future. Neville Goddard taught that you should feel the wish as already fulfilled, the core of the law of assumption.

Research on goals complicates this. Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer found in 2002 that people who fantasised most about an achieved outcome put in less effort and did worse than people who pictured it more realistically. Oettingen’s later work on mental contrasting found that pairing the wished-for outcome with the main obstacle works better than the outcome alone. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran’s 2006 review found that simple if-then plans (“when X happens, I will do Y”) have a solid effect on reaching goals.

So the present-tense rule is the weakest part of affirmation teaching by the evidence. Feeling the outcome may help motivate you. Treating it as done, without facing the obstacles, tends to sap the effort that gets you there. The page on imagination and the nervous system covers what mental rehearsal can and can’t do.

What does the research say?

Claim	Who made it	What research shows
Repeating positive statements about yourself makes you feel better	Coué and most of the self-help tradition	Mixed. Slight benefit with high self-esteem, harm with low self-esteem (Wood, Perunovic and Lee 2009)
Affirmations are proven to work	Popular coverage	Most of the evidence is for values affirmation, a different practice (Steele 1988; Cohen and Sherman 2014)
Feeling matters more than repetition	Zeland; Goddard	Consistent with the research. Short, engaged values writing works; volume isn’t the active ingredient
Forcing a belief makes it fail	Coué; Maltz; Zeland	Supported by research on reactance (Brehm 1966) and thought suppression (Wegner 1994)
Vary the wording	Zeland	Supported. Repetition drains meaning (semantic satiation)
State the goal as already achieved	Zeland; Goddard	Evidence against it on its own. Positive fantasy lowers effort; mental contrasting helps (Oettingen and Mayer 2002)
An affirmation changes events outside you	Law-of-attraction teaching	No evidence. Effects run through mood, attention, self-concept and behaviour

Who should take care with affirmations?

People with low self-esteem. The evidence suggests flattering statements can make you feel worse. If repeating one leaves you flat or arguing with yourself, that’s the finding, not a personal failure. Stop, and don’t push harder.

People who are depressed. Repeating positive phrases isn’t a treatment for depression, and failing at them can feed the sense that you’re the problem. Talk to a doctor or licensed therapist. If you have thoughts of harming yourself, contact a crisis line (988 in Canada and the US).

Health and money goals. Affirmations don’t treat illness or create income, and this site never suggests they do. Keep medical care and financial decisions in the hands of qualified people.

People with a history of trauma. Statements such as “I am safe” can stir up the opposite when your experience says otherwise. A trauma-informed professional is the right guide.

What does this mean for changing who you are?

Under all of this sits the question affirmations try to answer: how does a person change what they believe about themselves? The teachers and the researchers agree on more than they think. A statement that clashes with your self-image provokes resistance. Feeling counts for more than volume. Force backfires.

What changes the picture is evidence you produce yourself: acting, again and again, from the person you’ve decided to be, until the statement describes your track record instead of a hope. That’s slow work, and it’s easier with someone helping you choose words you can believe and check them against what you do. We do that work together in coaching.

Frequently asked questions

Do positive affirmations work?

It depends on who says them and what they say. In a 2009 study by Joanne Wood and colleagues, people with low self-esteem who repeated 'I am a lovable person' felt worse afterwards, while people with high self-esteem felt slightly better. A different practice, writing about your own values, has much stronger support.

Why do affirmations make me feel worse?

The likeliest reason is that a statement far from what you believe invites your mind to argue with it. Each repetition calls up the counter-evidence. Wood's team found this pattern in people with low self-esteem.

What is the difference between self-affirmation and positive affirmations?

Positive affirmations are flattering statements about yourself, repeated. Self-affirmation, in Claude Steele's research, means briefly writing about a value that matters to you, such as family or honesty, with no self-praise. Most of the evidence people cite for affirmations comes from the second kind.

Should affirmations be in the present tense?

Most teachers, including Vadim Zeland, say yes, so the goal doesn't stay in the future. Research on positive fantasies by Gabriele Oettingen points the other way: picturing a goal as already achieved tends to lower effort unless you also consider the obstacles.

How many times should you repeat an affirmation?

No study supports a number. Repetition can backfire, because a phrase repeated many times loses its meaning, an effect called semantic satiation. Zeland himself argued that feeling something once matters more than saying it a thousand times.

Can affirmations change your reality?

No research shows a sentence changing events outside you. Where affirmations help, they work on the person saying them: attention, mood, self-concept and what that person then does.

This article is educational and is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making major changes, especially if you live with a mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.