ARE POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS/THOUGHTS B.S

I feel when you try to think positive thoughts or affirmations even imagery, or brains knows its bullshit because our brain don't believe them. Also I feel by doing this we repress negative emotions that we should be dealing with instead of lying to our smarter brain.

All comments are welcomed:

 

I think affirmations are good if used in conjunction with something ie mindfulness, but done as a stand alone exercise I question there effectiveness.

For example, when I'm being mindful and notice a negative emotion, if I transform the negative thought to a positive one, I'm slowly but surely replacing an unhealthy emotion with a positive and healthy one.

 

Mmm that does not work for me i tried that but my brain says Marco you are full of shit.

 

Marco, I think if we repeat positive affirmations they eventually become very believable and very much a part of us. I also think they become what we are given by the universe/God. I think if you believe you are going to be sick, you will be, I think if you concentrate on good things you will receive them. Start looking for the good things amongst all the bad.
TMS and the Law Of Attraction, have so much in common

 

Words Can Change Your Brain
The neuroscience of communication
by Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman

If I were to put you into an fMRI scanner—a huge donut-shaped magnet that can take a video of the neural changes happening in your brain—and flash the word “NO” for less than one second, you’d see a sudden release of dozens of stress-producing hormones and neurotransmitters. These chemicals immediately interrupt the normal functioning of your brain, impairing logic, reason, language processing, and communication.
In fact, just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.[1] You’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, and your ability to experience long-term happiness and satisfaction.
If you vocalize your negativity, or even slightly frown when you say “no,” more stress chemicals will be released, not only in your brain, but in the listener’s brain as well.[2] The listener will experience increased anxiety and irritability, thus undermining cooperation and trust. In fact, just hanging around negative people will make you more prejudiced toward others![3]
Any form of negative rumination—for example, worrying about your financial future or health—will stimulate the release of destructive neurochemicals. And the same holds true for children: the more negative thoughts they have, the more likely they are to experience emotional turmoil.[4] But if you teach them to think positively, you can turn their lives around.[5]
Negative thinking is also self perpetuating, and the more you engage in negative dialogue—at home or at work—the more difficult it becomes to stop.[6] But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person’s propensity to act irrationally.
Fear-provoking words—like poverty, illness, and death—also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry—perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.[7]
In order to interrupt this natural propensity to worry, several steps can be taken. First, ask yourself this question: “Is the situation really a threat to my personal survival?” Usually it isn’t, and the faster you can interrupt the amygdala’s reaction to an imagined threat, the quicker you can take action to solve the problem. You’ll also reduce the possibility of burning a permanent negative memory into our brain.[8]
After you have identified the negative thought (which often operates just below the level of everyday consciousness), your can reframe it by choosing to focus on positive words and images. The result: anxiety and depression decreases and the number of unconscious negative thoughts decline.[9]
The Power of Yes
When doctors and therapists teach patients to turn negative thoughts and worries into positive affirmations, the communication process improves and the patient regains self-control and confidence.[10] But there’s a problem: the brain barely responds to our positive words and thoughts.[11] They’re not a threat to our survival, so the brain doesn’t need to respond as rapidly as it does to negative thoughts and words. [12]
To overcome this neural bias for negativity, we must repetitiously and consciously generate as many positive thoughts as we can. Barbara Fredrickson, one of the founders of Positive Psychology, discovered that if we need to generate at least three positive thoughts and feelings for each expression of negativity. If you express fewer than three, personal and business relationships are likely to fail. This finding correlates with Marcial Losada’s research with corporate teams,[13] and John Gottman’s research with marital couples.[14]
Fredrickson, Losada, and Gottman realized that if you want your business and your personal relationships to really flourish, you’ll need to generate at least five positive messages for each negative utterance you make (for example, “I’m disappointed” or “That’s not what I had hoped for” count as expressions of negativity, as does a facial frown or nod of the head).
It doesn’t even matter if your positive thoughts are irrational; they’ll still enhance your sense of happiness, wellbeing, and life satisfaction.[15] In fact, positive thinking can help anyone to build a better and more optimistic attitude toward life.[16]
Positive words and thoughts propel the motivational centers of the brain into action[17] and they help us build resilience when we are faced with life’s problems.[18] According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, if you want to develop lifelong satisfaction, you should regularly engage in positive thinking about yourself, share your happiest events with others, and savor every positive experience in your life.[19]
Our advice: choose your words wisely and speak them slowly. This will allow you to interrupt the brain’s propensity to be negative, and as recent research has shown, the mere repetition of positive words like love, peace, and compassion will turn on specific genes that lower your physical and emotional stress [20]. You’ll feel better, you’ll live longer, and you’ll build deeper and more trusting relationships with others—at home and at work.
As Fredrickson and Losada point out, when you generate a minimum of five positive thoughts to each negative one, you’ll experience “an optimal range of human functioning.”[21] That is the power of YES.
For more information on the effects of positive and negative speech, see Words Can Change Your Brain (Newberg & Waldman, 2012, Hudson Street Press), and for strategies to reduce stress and improve communication, visit www.MarkRobertWaldman.com.

 

Affirmation will not work for sure if we don't believe in it. It is just a tool to help us achieve the feeling we want. I think it would help if we "choose" to believe in it. Like a good actor really living his role, he can cry with real tear, he can laugh convincingly, his face turn blood red when he get angry... We have to play the role we want to achieve.
If you want to be happy, "act" happy. Really really happy. If you want to be strong and healthy, act strong and healthy. The result will come.
It take years for us tmsers to become chronic worriers. It will take sometime to reverse a life time of bad habit. Health worry and negative thinking is a bad HABIT, a bad addiction. We need to replace it with new and more positive habit. The challenge is it will take at least 28-30 days to acquire a new habit and longer to eliminate old bad habits.

If you keep saying: "I will win the lottery this week" over and over again, it won't happen. But saying realistic, achievable positive affirmation is achievable. We just have to "choose" to believe it, really live it, refuse to give up, be patient...

Here is a story I love to share with others:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The experts said it couldn’t be done
According to legend, experts said for years that the human body was simply not capable of a 4-minute mile. It wasn’t just dangerous; it was impossible.
Further legends hold that people had tried for over a thousand years to break the barrier, even tying bulls behind them to increase the incentive to do the impossible.
In the 1940′s, the mile record was pushed to 4:01, where it stood for nine years, as runners struggled with the idea that, just maybe, the experts had it right. Perhaps the human body had reached its limit.
The breakthrough
On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier, running the distance in 3:59.4. As part of his training, he relentlessly visualized the achievement in order to create a sense of certainty in his mind and body.
Barely a year after Bannister’s accomplishment, someone else ran a mile in under 4 minutes. Then some more runners did.Now, it’s almost routine. Even strong high-schoolers today run 4-minute miles.
What does this mean for us?
I don’t know about you, but for me, a 4-minute mile is probably not in the cards. (5 minutes? Maybe one day.) That’s not the point. The point is this: It took a sense of extreme certainty for Roger Bannister to do what was considered un-doable. He alone was able to create that certainty in himself without seeing any proof that it could be done.
But once he crashed through that barrier, the rest of the world saw that it was possible, and the previous record that had stood for nine years was broken routinely.

 

All good points but my brain says back to me who are u fooling!!!

 

I think we have to believe the positive thoughts and mantras before our subconscious will accept them.

Balto scores big again. He gives such great advice.

Feed positive thoughts into our mind and they will give us courage to do what we need to do to feel good and to heal.

 

Thx you Walt just wanted to express what i have been going threw

 

Positive affirmation are a form of surrpression

 

I respectfully disagree, like Balto and many others have said, we are what we think. The purpose of an affirmation is for us to transform our way of thinking and not constantly gravitate towards the negative, which most of us tend to do. Much like mindfulness, the more you practice the skill, the better you become at not responding to negative chatter and seeing the possibilities in life.

 

I like this thread (especially the post by Forest on the second page):

http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/feeding-the-wolf-vs-lancing-the-boil.320/#post-2208

Which Wolf will you feed?

 

I think you're right, Walter: strong belief is the key. A feeling of certainty or strong belief is one of the "symptoms" (if you will) of the operation of the placebo healing mechanism in the brain.

 

Your mindset is what makes the difference in seeing results with affirmations or not.

Norman Cousins was told he had a very small chance of recovering from his nearly fatal condition.

As he explained in "Anatomy of an Illness," once he decided to be one of the few who will recover, the funny movies and high doses of vitamin C cured him.

That's why the first thing I do with my clients is to put them through a process so that they develop a Rapid Recovery mindset. Once you have achieved such mindset almost any positive strategy like affirmation will help you with your recovery.

 

I just feel like when i tell myself positive Affirmation i am suppressing real feeling i should be dealing with?

 

The way I look at this is that in speaking these things aloud, even though it seems like a lie, our own ears are hearing it and hopefully creating new pathways in the brain.

 

Marco, I think you are still trying to find the "one" thing, the "simple" thing that works. Recently, for example, you seemed to feel rather negative about the fact that many of us find lots if helpful techniques and resources well beyond Dr. Sarno's writings.

I'm sorry to tell you this - but recovery from TMS is not simple and it's not direct and it is different for every single individual. I think you must know this by now, but I wonder if it's not want you want to hear?

I use many different techniques, alternatively, or in combination. I absolutely go back to journaling whenever I sense there is a hidden emotion that my brain is trying to repress, although I am getting better at being mindful and present enough so that I can figure those things out in the moment - I'm working hard on that right now.

And I use positive affirmations ALL the time. I do NOT try to "cover up" negative emotions with false happy thoughts. The goal, as everyone responding has said, is to replace the negative self-defeating messages my brain is constantly bombarding me with. There is a HUGE difference.

Example: if I feel a wave of dizziness, my brain instantly goes into fight/flight mode. I cut that off immediately by telling myself that there's nothing wrong, I'm safe, and healthy, and there is no reason for fear. But I also recently realized that I've been too accepting of the dizziness (which has been a symptom for many years) and that I've been assuming it will go away some time in the future. So my new message is that the future is NOW. And I'm seeing some new improvement.

Neuroscientists have been telling us that our brains are wired to operate in the negative zone, constantly scanning the horizon for danger and constantly giving us negative messages of fear and worry. In addition to the repression that you are focused on, this is another survival mechanism that is also really bad for us when it goes on and on and on for years, and it clearly contributes to our physical problems. Neuroscientists are telling us that as well.

So I believe that we all need to understand this and take steps to change that negativity as part of our recovery process.

Again, everyone responding has already said this in one way or another. Here's the thing: IF you are willing to change the negative chatter in your brain, by trading self-defeating messages for constructive ones, it can't possibly hinder your recovery, and it might help.

I believe that the ability to change your mind and especially to be open, is essential to doing this work and to recovering.

 

I'd like to echo Jan's magnificent post and also add not even Dr Sarno laid out all of the modalities in his book. Sure he gave us a fantastic framework, but like many of the Dr's who have taken over his work they are still exploring techniques.

Whether we use Montes, David Hansom or which ever authors technique, they all have the same underlying theme, One must change his or hers way of thinking. If one doesn't, no amount of TMS work will ever be effective.

 

Exactly. tms/mbs is a complex issue for many of us, especially if you have multiple symptoms and have been suffering for a long time.

I think it's important to keep it simple and take it one step at a time, focusing on the techniques and doing the work. I myself needed to change my life in many different ways and find what works for me; body and mind (and that was far from simple). Going through a tms/mbs program wasn't enough, I needed a few more resources specifically targeted to my issues.

It's about changing your mind and by that changing you life.

 

This!

Currently, I'm educating myself on neuroplasticity. Once you boost your neuron production it'll be easier to change old neural pathways resonsible for pain signals.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sandrine_thuret_you_can_grow_new_brain_cells_here_s_how

The video is devoted to the issue of depression, but I it can serve as a useful tool to conquer pain. And the idea that our brains CAN be changed is very uplifting.