Bad habits and addiction can often feel impossible to overcome. Whether it’s in the form of sugar cravings, screen time, pornography, alcohol consumption, nicotine or other drugs, addictions and bad habits are struggles we all face in our lives.
While thinking about our personal vices and the changes we need to make can be uncomfortable to say the least, recognizing and naming a bad habit is the first step to getting back on track with our goals and our life.
A relatively new but powerful tool for people working on recovery are self-affirmations. Affirmations make a great addition to current SMART Recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous and other addiction recovery paths.
While we know that affirmations can help us change our mindset and our behavior in many areas of our life, many people find themselves asking questions such as these:
“Are affirmations effective in overcoming something as difficult as an addiction? And If so, is there any evidence of this working?”
The answer to both of these questions is yes! Let’s look deeper at the research on the relationship between affirmations and overcoming addiction.
A study published by the American Psychological Association looked at the benefits of self-affirmation in reducing alcohol consumption.
The study took a group of 278 participants and divided them into groups. All participants were shown a health message about the negative effects of alcohol consumption. After watching the health message participants were separated into groups. The control group did not take any further action. The rest participated in self affirmation exercises.
Following the health message and affirmation exercises all of the participants were monitored for alcohol consumption over a specific period of time. The results found that the groups who participated in the self affirmation exercises consumed on average 33% less alcohol than the group that only watched the health message.
This study demonstrates the incredible and powerful nature of self-affirmation practice. All participants were educated on the harms of alcohol, but those using self-affirmations were empowered to use that information to inspire real change. Affirmations might be the missing tool you need to change your life for the better!
If you would like to start practicing self-affirmations in your life to improve your habits and change your life for the better, check out the Selfpause app! Selfpause has thousands of inspirational affirmations, hundreds of meditation affirmation sessions and lots of tools to help write, record and listen to your own personalized affirmations. You can do this, trust the process!
