The Problem With Positive Affirmations For Anxiety

When you're struggling with anxiety, it seems like everyone has advice.

• "Just think positive!"

• "Try repeating affirmations!"

• "Tell yourself you're calm and confident!"

These suggestions come from friends, family, and sometimes even mental health content online. The idea is appealing in its simplicity – replace negative thoughts with positive ones, and your anxiety will melt away.

As a psychotherapist, I've seen this scenario play out countless times in my practice. One client - let's call her Emma - came to me frustrated after months of diligently practicing positive affirmations.

She'd stand in front of her bathroom mirror each morning, repeating phrases like "I am calm," "I am in control," and "Everything will work out perfectly." She'd write these affirmations in her journal, set them as phone reminders, and recite them whenever anxiety struck.

But something strange happened – Emma's anxiety didn't improve. In fact, sometimes she felt even worse after trying these positive affirmations. She felt like she was doing something wrong, or that there was something uniquely broken about her that even the most basic anxiety management technique wasn't working.

Emma wasn't alone. Many therapists and researchers who specialize in anxiety disorders have identified fundamental problems with using traditional positive affirmations for anxiety. What looks like personal failure is actually a predictable outcome of applying the wrong tool to a complex problem.

My Top Five Issues With Positive Affirmations For Anxiety

Let me explain the five key problems with positive affirmations for anxiety, and what actually works better.

1. Affirmations Reinforce the Resistance Pattern

When you use affirmations like "I am calm" during anxiety, you're actually reinforcing the idea that anxiety is unacceptable and must be eliminated. This creates what I call a resistance pattern.

Think of anxiety like quicksand – the more you struggle against it, the deeper you sink. When you repeat "I am calm" while feeling anxious, you're essentially telling yourself, "This feeling is bad and needs to go away." Your nervous system picks up on this resistance and interprets it as confirmation that something is wrong, which can actually intensify your anxiety.

Emma also told me she used to try to push his anxiety away, telling herself to "snap out of it" and "just pull myself together." But as she told me in therapy, "it keeps creeping back in." This is because what you resist tends to persist. Fighting anxiety only makes it stronger.

2. Affirmations Create an Internal Argument

When you're in the middle of feeling anxious and tell yourself "I am completely calm," part of your mind immediately knows this isn't true. This creates an internal argument – one part trying to force positivity, another part recognizing your actual experience.

Imagine telling someone who's clearly upset, "You're not upset at all!" They'd likely feel misunderstood and possibly become more upset. The same happens inside your own mind when you try to override your actual experience with positive statements that contradict what you're feeling.

This internal conflict can make you feel worse – not only are you anxious, but now you're also "failing" at your affirmations, which can add a layer of self-criticism.

3. Affirmations Focus on Elimination Rather Than Approach

Most positive affirmations aim to eliminate anxiety ("I am not afraid," "I am relaxed"). This creates a fundamental problem – you're orienting yourself away from something rather than toward something.

When you're constantly trying to escape anxiety, you're actually keeping your attention fixed on it. It's like telling someone, "Don't think about a pink elephant" – the instruction itself puts the pink elephant in mind.

In my practice, I distinguish between "elimination strategies" and "approach strategies." Traditional positive affirmations are elimination strategies – they try to make anxiety go away. But ironically, this focus on elimination keeps you trapped in the anxiety cycle.

More effective approaches focus on what you want to move toward, even while acknowledging discomfort. For example, instead of "I am not anxious," a more helpful thought might be "I can take action even while feeling anxious."

4. Affirmations Maintain the Content Focus

Anxiety disorders aren't really about the content of your worries – they're about the process of how your mind responds to uncertainty and discomfort.

Traditional affirmations often engage with the specific content of your fears. If you're anxious about a presentation, you might say, "My presentation will go perfectly." This keeps you focused on the content (the presentation) rather than recognizing the larger pattern of how you respond to challenges.

The content of anxiety constantly shifts – today it's a presentation, tomorrow it's a social gathering, next week it's a health concern. If you're constantly addressing each new worry with specific affirmations, you're playing an endless game of whack-a-mole rather than addressing the underlying process.

As I often tell my clients, if you're "in the content, if you are down here instead of up here, you're going to get stuck."

5. Affirmations Fail to Create Arousal Congruence

Your body's physiological arousal (racing heart, shallow breathing, etc.) is a natural part of the anxiety response. Traditional affirmations try to talk you out of this physical experience, creating what psychologists call "arousal incongruence."

It's extremely difficult to convince your body it's calm when it's clearly in an aroused state. This mismatch between what you're saying ("I am calm") and what you're experiencing (physical arousal) creates cognitive dissonance and makes the affirmations feel fake or ineffective.

As I explain to my clients: "If people are oriented around 'I got to calm down' as I give my talk, that's what we might call arousal incongruent, which means in order for me to be okay now, I've got to alter my psychophysiology and knock it down to calmness and then go forward. That's a very difficult task."

A more effective approach is "arousal congruence" – acknowledging and accepting your body's current state while choosing how to respond to it.

What Works Better Than Positive Affirmations?

Instead of traditional positive affirmations, here are five more effective approaches I teach my clients some of the things below. Before you read on though, you should consider taking the free anxiety quiz I created, because you'll get an exclusive mini-email course on how to change your relationship with anxiety and more on understanding the 10 Rules Of Anxiety.

1. "What You Resist, Tends To Persist"

Rather than fighting anxiety with affirmations like "I am calm," try accepting its presence: "I notice I'm feeling anxious right now, and that's okay."

Anxiety's job is to scan for potential threats – dismissing it only makes it come back louder. The goal isn't to eliminate anxiety but to change how you respond to it.

2. "Not Every Song on the Radio Needs a Sing Along"

I use this metaphor with clients to help them distinguish between anxious thoughts that deserve attention and those that don't. Just like you wouldn't crank up the volume for every song on the radio, not every anxious thought deserves your full engagement.

I call this the "Priority vs. Promotion" distinction. Some anxious thoughts are genuine priorities that require action, while others are just "promotional" background noise – worries about situations that are out of your control or too distant to act upon right now.

3. "Are You Stewing or Doing?"

When anxiety takes over, you often become immersed in the thought, lost in the scenario, starring in the mental movie rather than watching it. This is what I call "stewing" – being consumed by anxious thoughts without taking productive action.

Instead of positive affirmations, try a simple reality check: "Am I stewing or doing?" This creates space between yourself and your thoughts, helping you step back and observe them rather than becoming them.

4. "Is That All You Got?"

One of my favorite paradoxical techniques is to actually challenge anxiety rather than trying to soothe it away. When anxious thoughts arise, instead of countering with positive affirmations, try saying: "Is that all you've got?" or "That's the best you can do?"

This approach may seem counterintuitive, but it works by flipping the script. Instead of being a victim of anxiety, you become the director of your experience. By purposefully engaging with fears and even exaggerating them, you often realize how unlikely they are, which disarms anxiety.

5. Break the Habit Circuit

Worry and anxiety can become habitual over time, creating efficient neural pathways that activate automatically. Rather than trying to override these pathways with positive affirmations, work on disrupting the pattern itself.

For example, if anxiety strikes when you lie down in bed, get up and change locations. Write down your worries before bedtime to signal to your brain that you've addressed them. These pattern-breaking techniques can be more effective than trying to think your way out of anxiety with positive affirmations.

The Paradox of Anxiety Management

The most effective approach to anxiety isn't eliminating it but developing a different relationship with it. This is the paradox at the heart of effective anxiety treatment – by stopping your attempts to control anxiety and instead accepting its presence, you actually gain more control over your life.

So rather than positive affirmations that try to convince you that "everything is fine," try these alternative statements:

• "I notice I'm feeling anxious, and I can handle these feelings."

• "This discomfort is temporary, and I can function alongside it."

• "I don't need to be calm to do this important thing."

• "I can be anxious AND take effective action."

• "This is just my brain doing what brains do – it doesn't define me."

Remember, the goal isn't to eliminate anxiety – it's to live fully even when anxiety is present. Paradoxically, when you stop trying to fight anxiety with positive affirmations and instead learn to function alongside it, the anxiety often naturally decreases over time because you're no longer feeding it with resistance.

I'm an anxiety therapist in Los Angeles and I've seen this approach transform the lives of countless clients who had previously been stuck in the cycle of affirmations that never seemed to work. By changing your relationship with anxiety rather than trying to positive-think it away, you can reclaim your life and discover that you're stronger and more capable than anxiety led you to believe.