What Writing Daily Affirmations for a Year Taught Me
In January of 2020, I wrote an article about what writing daily affirmations for a month taught me. Yesterday, I filled up my daily affirmation & gratitude journal and wanted to reflect on my experience.
I started writing daily affirmations and things that I was grateful for because I wanted to start changing my harsh inner voice that would constantly criticize me. I wish I could say the voice is gone forever, but I can confidently say that the voice has gotten a lot less critical, and I’d like to give a lot of credit to this practice of writing daily affirmations.
I’m the type of person that can fall into a routine fairly quickly, so it wasn’t too hard to start writing daily affirmations and gratitude, however, it was hard in the beginning to come up with things to write about because my inner voice was so critical. I used to often think “I don’t even believe half of this stuff I’m writing down”. After a couple of months, I stopped thinking that. Sure, there would be days where I didn’t believe myself, but for the most part, I started believing what I was writing. I credit that to the fact that I created this routine and habit where I would write regularly. Just the act of writing daily started to change some of my inner thought patterns. It’s pretty crazy to think how writing a simple sentence can start to change lifelong inner thought patterns.
Now that my journal is filled up, I want to start something new where I spend a few minutes every morning reading one of my affirmation entries from the past. I think it will be nice to read the things that I affirmed in the past, and reflect on how my voice started to change throughout the year.
I don’t think affirmation writing is for everyone, but if you’ve been on the fence about doing it, I would highly recommend giving it a try. It could be as simple as typing up a single affirmation every day. It could be the same affirmation every day. Overall, I’m very grateful I tried out this practice, and hope to continue doing it in the future.
