Use Affirmations to Make Improvements

Is there an area of your life that you’d like to change? Try affirmations? Affirmations can have powerful effects on people’s lives. We are always talking to ourselves through our conscious and subconscious thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts are negative and help keep us stuck where we are. For instance, some people repeat to themselves throughout the day that they are not good enough or they are not smart enough to do something they really want to do.

To use affirmations, sit quietly and think of a few things that you might want to change or improve in your life. If you are plagued with self-doubt, but you would like to be more confident, your affirmation might be: “I am totally confident.” It’s important to word your affirmation in the present tense, as if it is already a fact. Your subconscious will readily accept it as truth, especially with repetition. This can and usually does affect your actions, which will impact the area of your life you wish to change.

Repeat your affirmations silently throughout the day. Write them on a small card and find a quiet place to read them, or write them out on paper or repeat them to yourself in the morning and evening at home.

It’s important to keep your language positive, for example, instead of, “I will never have self-doubt again,” you would say, “I believe in myself.” The reason for this is that the subconscious picks up on the negative messages in the words “never” and “self-doubt.” It’s more effective to state it positively.

For a free, effective way to change your life, try affirmations.

— Adapted from Massage & Body Work magazine

  

Did You Know That. . . 

• Each day we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air.
• Researchers have found that stressed rats emit a different odor than unstressed rats. In response to the odor of the stressed rats, the unstressed rats have a “physical, analgesic response, so that they will be prepared for pain.” So there is the possibility the “the smell of fear” or the “smell of danger” is real.
• A human has 5 million olfactory cells, but a sheepdog has 220 million and can smell 44 times better than a human.
• A sneeze travels 85 percent of the speed of sound.
• A dinner guest once smothered to death under a shower of rose petals at a party thrown by Nero in ancient Rome.
• Humans have about 10,000 taste buds, rabbits have about 17,000 and cows have about 25,000.
• When humans taste things it works like this: We taste sweet things on the tips of our tongues, bitter things at the back, sour things on the sides and salty things all over the surface.
• Our taste buds wear out every week to 10 days and are replaced, but at a slower pace once we hit our mid-40s.

— Adapted from The Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman