Self-Care Challenge Day #1: Affirmations for Pregnancy and Beyond
For our first day, we’re kicking things off with perhaps the most simplest challenge of the week. Then again, maybe not so simple? Today we’re going to choose just one or two simple affirmations.
I can hear the groans already. 😂 I know, it can feel awkward and woo-woo, but every day we hear and see all of the ways we don’t measure up, we ourselves are our own worst critics, it’s so important that we make a habit of speaking kindly to ourselves. To build ourselves up.
As you choose your affirmations, remember that feelings don’t equal truth. Just because an affirmation doesn’t feel true to you doesn’t make it so. It’s good to speak and dwell on words that we merely hope are true. Hope is a dopamine. Dopamines make our brains feel good, energized. That’s basically the entire point of affirmations.
Don’t worry about trying to come up with your own, original, perfect affirmations. It’s entirely fine to take inspiration from others.
There’s some really lovely, powerful affirmations to be found at the following links:
So go ahead and pick one and then let’s put it somewhere you’ll see it every morning. Make a pretty graphic on Canva and save it as the home screen on your phone, print it out and frame it for your nightstand. My personal favorite is to take a dry erase marker and write it on my bathroom mirror. Just put it somewhere where you’ll see it every morning. Then take the time to read it every day. Dwell on it. Settle into the vision of what these words mean to you. Read it aloud, if that’s helpful to be stay mindful.
If you’re comfortable, don’t forget to share your chosen affirmation with the hashtag #SCPselfcarechallenge to enter for the shirt giveaway.
“A Look at the Research
The development of self-affirmation theory has led to neuroscientific research aimed at investigating whether we can see any changes in the brain when we self-affirm in positive ways.
There is MRI evidence suggesting that certain neural pathways are increased when people practice self-affirmation tasks (Cascio et al., 2016). If you want to be super specific, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex—involved in positive valuation and self-related information processing—becomes more active when we consider our personal values (Falk et al., 2015; Cascio et al., 2016).
The results of a study by Falk and colleagues suggest that when we choose to practice positive affirmations, we’re better able to view “otherwise-threatening information as more self-relevant and valuable” (2015: 1979). As we’ll see in a moment, this can have several benefits because it relates to how we process information about ourselves.”
If you’re interested in the science behind the benefit of daily affirmations, you can read the rest of the article the above quote came from here.