Affirmation

Affirmations are used during hypnosis in order to produce useful change. Well-crafted, personally-relevant affirmations will have a powerful beneficial effect; botched ones will be utterly useless, no matter how much effort you put into the hypnosis. At their best, affirmations have an emotional hold on you, and phrase your desired intent in a way your subconscious can understand.

The subconscious mind is powerful, stubborn and conservative. Its job is to keep you alive, and it attempts to do so on the basis that if you made it through yesterday, chances are you’ll make it through today. It will go out of its way to ensure that its core beliefs are upheld, because it views them as the programming that has kept you alive so far. There is no filter of critical thought or analysis; that’s the conscious mind’s job. If it worked before, then it becomes part of the unconscious programming; the more it worked, the stronger that circuit becomes.

You stick your hand towards fire, and it gets uncomfortably hot, maybe even burnt. This causes pain, which is bad, and you pull your hand back, which is better. The subconscious notes that grabbing fire = bad, and not grabbing fire = good, so it sets up circuitry intended to stop you grabbing fire. If, consciously, you choose to do so, the subconscious will try to stop you with fear, common sense, memories of old pain, and so on; and it will do this whether or not your reasons for wanting to pick up something burning are good or bad.

Every aspect of your life gets sifted in like this. Most of the unconscious programming is set up by the age of seven or eight, but the subconscious keeps on running those circuits all of your life. If you fight it consciously, it fights back, and as it controls body and brain chemistry, it generally wins. Spend your first years hungry, and you’ll grow up with weight issues that no diet or exercise regime can shift, because the subconscious is fighting tooth and nail to keep you alive as best it knows how.

Hypnotic affirmation is the tool that allows you to tinker with the programming in the unconscious. Good affirmations speak in language that the unconscious understands. It doesn’t know whether the things you experience are real or imagined, if there’s no physical feedback. It doesn’t understand timescales, or good intentions, or lies, or what you meant to say. It understands how things make you feel. It knows that pleasant experiences are to be repeated, even if your conscious knows they’re fattening, or immoral. It will cheat, cajole and bully your mind into making sure that its vision of the ‘correct’ world is the one that you live in.

Subconscious by Burcindrummer

To speak to the subconscious, you need to speak in the present tense, and you need to do so clearly, positively and emotionally. Wherever possible, you need to back it up with imagined pictures, and pertinent details. The hypnosis makes it receptive, so that it will pay attention to what you want to tell it. You need to make sure that what you want to say makes sense.

So to start with, remember that the unconscious doesn’t really understand past and future. That’s too analytical. Affirmations should always be in the present tense, and should present your desired outcome as current truth. If you say “I want to lose weight”, the subconscious does a quick audit, finds that yes, you do indeed want to lose weight, adds a bit of extra emphasis to that circuit, and congratulates itself on a job well done. All you’ve done is make yourself more desperate to lose weight. If, instead, you say “I am slim”, although you know you may be lying, the subconscious doesn’t. Instead, it checks around, discovers that for “I am slim” to be true the body has to lose some weight, and sets about making you lose weight.

For similar reasons, you can’t use negation in an affirmation. If you say “I am not hungry”, the subconscious doesn’t really understand the ‘not’, and just fixates on the ‘hungry’. Mmm, hungry. Hungry, coming right up. Positive phraseology can help you round this — “I am pleasantly full” — but in some areas, you’ll need to think outside the box.

Don’t be scared to throw some duration in for emphasis. The subconscious might not understand time, but it can deal with absolutes. “I am always pleasantly full” can’t be made true with an instantaneous flicker of sensation.

Finally, do what you can to engage the subconscious with nice, shiny things like detail and emotion. It doesn’t play well with abstracts. “I am a size six” is much more specific than “I am slim”, and gives the subconscious something to really get behind. Add some feeling, and it’ll really take notice. “I love being a gorgeous size six” is a statement that comes with a bundle of good feelings attached. That means its worth running as a program. Add in a mental image where you waltz into a room looking fabulous in your brand new size six dress, because the subconscious can’t tell if it’s real or not, only that you’re experiencing it, and it makes you feel great. That makes it a high priority. Then, when the subconscious checks current reality and discovers you’re not a six at all, it assumes you’ve just slipped a couple of sizes in the last instant, and will start working hard to reverse whatever calamity just befell you.

The subconscious is your tireless champion, forever fighting to keep you alive. It’s just that sometimes, you have to gently pick it up and point it in the right direction.

Disclaimer: I don’t understand US female clothing sizes all that well, so my apologies if size six is anything other than healthy.