It was my therapist who made sense of it. She said, ‘Aahana, do you go around saying, I am a girl, I am a girl, every day?’ I said, ‘No!’ ‘Yes, because it’s a fact and you believe it,’ she replied. She told me that affirmations need to be rooted in reality, and have to be believable, or they can harm us negatively,” shares Aahana Mulla, author and emotional guide. 

Mulla recently went in for therapy, because the “self-talk or affirmations” that she repeated to herself every day, were getting toxic. “After a point, it felt like I needed to repeatedly say these things to myself to feel better. And that was putting [a lot of] pressure on me, which in turn was adding to my negative feelings.” Eventually, to get herself out of the spiral, she started going “downstream”. “I started to let go, and made it light and easy. If the affirmations came easy, great, or else fine. I also recommend that instead of affirmations, try replacement statements—if you have a bad thought, replant it with a good one. Move your body. Journal. There are many more ways to rid negativity beyond affirmations”.