Affirmations are out. Self-stories are in.
On the strange, messy work of changing who you are
I’ve never been particularly fond of affirmations.
When I look in the mirror and repeat mantra-like phrases to myself, with the sole aim of making myself feel better about myself, I think I’m playing a sort of game that can’t be won. I don’t know who I’m speaking to—Is it a spirit? Is it God? Is it something else?—and I don’t know when the affirmations are supposed to take effect—Is it immediate? Is it soon? Is it after thirty days of the same repeated behavior until I’ve fully convinced myself that it works?
Studies show, time and again, that affirmations work, but I still don’t quite believe it. I crave the tangible grasp of knowing that I am changing, like wipers swabbing drizzle off a windshield, or hot wax pooling around a lit wick. I want the effect to be immediate, but I am instead left only with abstractions—thought and feelings and long-standing beliefs about who I am.
But I’ve found a different, better way of thinking about affirmations.
I was on the Northeast Regional train to Philadelphia this past week. I was coming home from New York City after a few days visiting a friend. As I watched the city shrink in the distance, the permanently gray December sky hanging above it, I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, along with an ASMR video on YouTube. I closed my eyes and they stung, a biting mix of dehydration and hangover and exhaustion, and I drifted off to sleep as a young man, dressed nicely in a suit, sat next to me, working diligently, typing away on his laptop.
I awoke at one point, just barely grazing the surface of consciousness, to hear the ASMR creator reading affirmations in the second person, which I, the viewer, was supposed to repeat in the first person.
You are enough.
You are resilient.
You are going to be okay.
You are smart.
You are kind.
You are loved and loving.
You know that better days are coming.
You are strong enough to get through it all.
You release the past.
On and on they went. I repeated them in my head, keeping my eyes closed, before drifting back into a deeper sleep. When I finally awoke, I opened my eyes and immediately thought of something I had read a few weeks ago. It was from a piece called “Advice That Actually Worked For Me” by Nabeel Qureshi:
Tell the right stories about yourself. One of the more underrated insights you can get from reading self-help books is that the story you tell yourself about yourself matters. If you tell yourself you’re a very energetic person, that feeling tired is temporary, and you keep this belief going, you actually become more energetic. If you tell yourself you don’t get jetlagged, you might get less jetlagged on average. This goes for many other traits, too -- you can psyop yourself into believing lots of things about yourself which then come true, and make you more like the person you want to be.
When I read Nabeel’s advice a few weeks ago, it struck me as pragmatic: tell myself I already possess the traits I want, and over time those stories “come true.” But listening to the ASMR creator’s affirmations on the train, I found myself asking—how is this any different?
The question danced in my mind as I listened to the chatter of the other passengers. One man, bald and with thick-framed glasses, spoke on the phone about a creative project that should be delivered by the weekend. Next to him sat a woman, his wife I presume, with a brown and white dachshund on her lap, which was perfectly calm and still in its little red harness. Another woman, wearing a constant, relaxed smile, spoke on the phone with her sister, pacing up and down the aisle.
After chewing it over, I came to the conclusion that if affirmations are passive repetition—pre-written scripts that someone else wrote for you—then self-stories are active performance. They are the scripts you write for yourself and then perform until the performance becomes real.
To my surprise, Nabeel’s advice is already working for me.
While I was in New York City, my friend introduced me to another of her friends. We sat in a dimly lit bar in Chelsea and drank Negronis and beer until we were well-buzzed and ripe and hungry for the next thing. At one point, my friend said that she was glad that we could all meet, and that she knew we’d have much to discuss, partially because of overlapping interests but also because Matt can gab to a wall.
That phrase struck me. Never in my life has someone described me to someone new as having the gift of gab. Most of my adult life has been a deliberate campaign to overcome the introversion and shyness that colored my younger years. It took me back to the summer before freshman year of college, when I read How to Win Friends and Influence People because I was so afflicted with social anxiety, or how I used to get nervous over small, mundane interactions—ordering coffee from a barista, calling my doctor with a question.
But more recently, I’ve been telling myself—and others—that I’m an extravert, that I like spending most of my time with people, and that I genuinely enjoy talking to strangers and new acquaintances alike. With Nabeel’s advice in mind, it’s been a kind of tactical rebrand: Matt, the Super-Extravert.
I glanced at the dachshund, still sitting calmly with its head resting on its owner’s lap, and considered how strange and unsettling it is that we can change who we are. We are not fixed; we are fixing. We are playing with wet cement—a messy process of self-deception and self-creation that actually works. I could repeat an affirmation like I am smart, or I could tell a self-story like I am the type of person who loves to learn new things, and both things might eventually come true and do some fixing, until other people start to believe it too. But then, when the fixing has been done, and I am a changed new person, I’m faced with a different question: Was I not enough as I was?
As I stepped off the train at 30th Street Station and took the narrow escalator up to street level, wrangling my giant blue suitcase in front of me, I thought about what other stories I might tell. That I’m an accomplished writer. That I’m someone who stays calm under pressure. That I don’t take rejection personally. All falsities aiming to become truths.
I look around and there is an ugly mess of scaffolding all over 30th Street Station, an intricate lattice of lines hanging in the air, criss-crossing all the way up to the ceiling.
They remind me of the lines that I am drawing too, of who I am and who I will become.