Do Positive Affirmations Work
Positive affirmations are two practices with one name. Repeating a flattering sentence made students with low self-esteem feel worse in the best test of it, and reflecting on a value has small effects that shrank at scale.
Answer to the question
Do positive affirmations work?
It depends which kind. Repeating a flattering sentence such as "I am a lovable person" made students with low self-esteem feel worse in a 2009 experiment, and helped students with high self-esteem only a little. Reflecting on a personal value shows small but reliable effects in health studies, and a large school replication found none.
Key takeaways
- Joanne Wood and colleagues found in 2009 that students with low self-esteem who repeated "I am a lovable person" felt worse than students who did not, while students with high self-esteem felt better to a limited degree.
- Claude Steele's 1988 self-affirmation theory asks people to reflect on a value that matters to them, with no sentence about the self to repeat, so it is a different practice that shares the word.
- A 2015 meta-analysis of 144 experimental tests found small but reliable positive effects of self-affirmation on accepting health-risk messages, intending to change and changing, largest for behaviour.
- A well-powered 2017 replication, run where an earlier field experiment had found lasting school benefits, found none, and could rule out all but a very small effect.
Positive affirmations are two practices that share a name, and the evidence on them points in different directions. One is repeating a flattering sentence such as "I am a lovable person", which has one clear experimental test against it. The other is reflecting on a value that matters to you, such as family or music, which has small effects that shrank when it was tried at scale. The self-help tradition means the first and the research tradition means the second. Mixing them up lets a claim about one sound like a finding about the other, and each has been tested with a different question.
Did repeating a flattering sentence lift the students' mood?
The sentence version is popular. A survey of undergraduates found only three per cent said they never used positive affirmations of this kind, and that students with higher self-esteem used them more and judged them more helpful. Students with lower self-esteem agreed more often that the statements can make a person feel worse.
Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who "need" them the most.
Joanne Wood and colleagues then tested positive affirmations of this kind. Half of 68 students repeated "I am a lovable person" and half did not, and all completed a mood measure presented as something else. Among students with low self-esteem, those who repeated the sentence felt worse than those who did not. Among students with high self-esteem, repeating it left them feeling better, but only to a limited degree.
The design is narrow: two experiments, student samples and one phrase. The authors left out participants of East Asian descent, on the ground that they are less likely than Westerners to endorse self-statements.
The paper's abstract ends on the line that gave the finding its reputation: repeating positive self-statements "may benefit certain people, but backfire for the very people who 'need' them the most."
A second experiment in the same 2009 paper, with 116 undergraduates, asked some students to focus only on how the statement was true and others to consider how it was both true and not true. Those low in self-esteem who focused only on the true side did worse on mood. The authors propose that an instruction to think only positive thoughts sets a standard, so that each intruding negative thought is read as failing it.
Does reflecting on a personal value do better instead?
The second practice is the one with a research tradition behind the word, and it comes from Claude Steele's 1988 chapter on self-affirmation theory. Its premise is that people work to protect an image of themselves as adequate, and that a threat in one area can be absorbed by reflecting on something else they value. A typical exercise asks people to write about a value such as family relationships or music. It contains no statement about the threatened area and no statement about the future.
The values version of positive affirmations has been tested far more widely. The sentence version has the one experiment above and, as far as we found, no replication in either direction. Across 144 experimental tests pooled in a 2015 meta-analysis, self-affirmation had small but reliable positive effects on three stages of health behaviour change: accepting health-risk messages, intending to change, and changing, with the largest effect on behaviour.
In classrooms, a 2021 meta-analysis of 58 studies found a small benefit for students facing identity threat and a negligible one for the rest. The benefit was larger when the exercise was delivered as a normal classroom activity.
The larger replications were less kind, and Growth Mindset After the Tests traces small effects at scale for another school intervention. In a setting where an earlier large field experiment had found lasting benefits for pupils, a well-powered 2017 replication found none, and its estimates were precise enough to rule out all but a very small effect. Its authors concluded that the exercise may be fragile when delivered at scale in schools.
Where a self-help book agrees with the studies
Matt Furey's Psycho-Cybernetics 365, published in 2025, is a year of daily entries built around sayings from the 1960 Psycho-Cybernetics. Its entries for 6 November and 10 December hold that positive affirmations in the spoken "I am" form fail when a person's mental picture of themselves contradicts them. The book has no endnotes, no bibliography and no citation of any kind, so the claim is a position and not a finding, and the remedy it offers rests on the same absence of sources.
The position lands where the 2009 experiment did, by a different stated route. The book blames a clashing mental picture, and the paper points to the distance between the sentence and what the person already believes about themselves. The same book repeats the twenty-one day rule without a source, which How Long a New Habit Really Takes follows to its origin.
The 2009 authors also say when positive affirmations might still help someone with low self-esteem: when the self-view at stake is not major, when careful consideration is impossible, and when the statement falls within what the person already finds believable. Their own contrast, that "I select good gifts for people" is safer than "I am a generous person", was not tested in any of the studies.
A third practice, distanced self-talk, swaps the pronoun and not the wording, and What Distanced Self-Talk Sounds Like covers it. Who the person is decides the result in both practices. Self-esteem flips the sign for the repeated phrase, and identity threat separates the students who gained from those who did not in the values version. Reflection on a value keeps one result the repeated phrase lacks: small, reliable shifts in how people take health messages across 144 tests.
Common questions
Do positive affirmations work?
It depends which kind. Repeating a flattering sentence such as "I am a lovable person" made students with low self-esteem feel worse in a 2009 experiment, and helped students with high self-esteem only a little. Reflecting on a personal value shows small but reliable effects in health studies, and a large school replication found none.
Is self-affirmation the same as positive affirmations?
No. Claude Steele's self-affirmation theory asks people to reflect on a value that matters to them and contains no statement about themselves to repeat. Positive affirmations in the self-help sense are sentences asserting a desired state, repeated on the theory that repetition installs them.
Can positive affirmations make you feel worse?
In one 2009 experiment, students with low self-esteem who repeated "I am a lovable person" felt worse than students who did not. The finding comes from two experiments with student samples, so it shows the effect can occur, not that it will occur for any one person.
Sources
Wood, J. V., Perunovic, W. Q., & Lee, J. W. (2009). 'Positive self-statements: Power for some, peril for others.' Psychological Science, 20(7), 860-866. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x.
Steele, C. M. (1988). 'The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self.' Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 261-302. A theoretical chapter.
Epton, T., Harris, P. R., Kane, R., van Koningsbruggen, G. M., & Sheeran, P. (2015). 'The impact of self-affirmation on health-behavior change: A meta-analysis.' Health Psychology, 34(3), 187-196. doi:10.1037/hea0000116. Read at the level of the abstract.
Wu, Z., Spreckelsen, T. F., & Cohen, G. L. (2021). 'A meta-analysis of the effect of values affirmation on academic achievement.' Journal of Social Issues, 77(3). doi:10.1111/josi.12415. Read at the level of the repository abstract.
Hanselman, P., Rozek, C. S., Grigg, J., & Borman, G. D. (2017). 'New evidence on self-affirmation effects and theorized sources of heterogeneity from large-scale replications.' Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(3), 405-424. doi:10.1037/edu0000141. Read at the level of the abstract.
Furey, M. (2025). Psycho-Cybernetics 365: Thrive & Grow Every Day of the Year. London: Souvenir Press. Entries for 6 November and 10 December. Cited as a primary text for a position, not as evidence.