US Sen­a­tor Al Franken may very well be the rea­son so many of us are bash­ful about self-af­fir­ma­tions.

Franken, a co­me­di­an in the 1990s, brought us what is un­doubt­ed­ly one of the most well-known – and cringe-wor­thy – af­fir­ma­tions of all time through his Sat­ur­day Night Live char­ac­ter Stu­art Smal­l­ey. Smal­l­ey was the one who kept in­sist­ing, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog­gone it, peo­ple like me!"

But what if self-af­fir­ma­tion isn't quite as awk­ward as you imag­ine it to be? What if en­gag­ing in a se­ri­ous prac­tice of self-af­fir­ma­tion could boost your ca­pac­i­ty to cope and to per­form in chal­leng­ing cir­cum­stances?

In­sti­tut­ing a self-af­fir­ma­tion prac­tice, says J David Creswell, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty, may pro­tect against the dam­ag­ing ef­fects of high stress on cre­ative prob­lem-solv­ing and per­for­mance un­der pres­sure.

The pos­si­bil­i­ty of coun­ter­act­ing the ef­fects of stress in high-stakes sit­u­a­tions caught my at­ten­tion.

Last year, I had my brain mapped for a sto­ry to find out how I han­dle stress. As part of the test, I un­der­went a se­ries of pro­gres­sive­ly more dif­fi­cult chal­lenges while hooked up to a quan­ti­ta­tive elec­troen­cephalo­gram (al­so known as a qEEG).

The re­sults re­vealed that while I per­form op­ti­mal­ly when every­thing is go­ing fine, in high-pres­sure sit­u­a­tions, I be­gin to make mis­takes – lots of them. I'm al­so less like­ly to be able to re­cov­er and re­set af­ter those er­rors. This, I found out lat­er, is a com­mon oc­cur­rence among peo­ple.

So we know that we're like­ly to melt down when things get hec­tic, but what ex­act­ly are we sup­posed to do with that in­for­ma­tion? Creswell's re­search may of­fer a re­mark­ably ef­fec­tive and sim­ple re­course.

As Creswell puts it, self-af­fir­ma­tion pro­vides "an easy and portable strat­e­gy that you can roll out be­fore you en­ter a high-pres­sure sit­u­a­tion where you are re­quired to per­form well," whether it's en­gag­ing in pub­lic speak­ing, ready­ing for an im­por­tant ex­am or giv­ing a crit­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion to your boss and her boss.

In their study, Creswell and his col­leagues asked par­tic­i­pants about their stress lev­els over the pre­vi­ous month. They then in­struct­ed half the sub­jects to un­der­take a self-af­fir­ma­tion ac­tiv­i­ty. These par­tic­i­pants ranked things – friends, fam­i­ly, a hob­by or a re­li­gious val­ue – that were im­por­tant to them and wrote down a few sen­tences about why their top-ranked val­ue was im­por­tant (this is a stan­dard self-af­fir­ma­tion ex­er­cise, Creswell says).

All par­tic­i­pants were then asked to com­plete, un­der time pres­sure, a se­ries of chal­leng­ing prob­lem-solv­ing tasks, for which they need­ed to use cre­ativ­i­ty to gen­er­ate the cor­rect so­lu­tions.

The sub­jects who were suf­fer­ing from high lev­els of chron­ic stress in the past month had im­paired prob­lem-solv­ing per­for­mance by a wide mar­gin. They solved rough­ly 50 per cent few­er prob­lems than the group with low chron­ic stress.

The ex­cep­tion: those par­tic­i­pants who had com­plet­ed the self-af­fir­ma­tion.

"We found that self-af­fir­ma­tion com­plete­ly elim­i­nates the ef­fects of chron­ic stress," Creswell ob­served. "Those sub­jects man­aged to erase the neg­a­tive ef­fects of the chron­ic stress on their prob­lem-solv­ing per­for­mance."

In fact, the chron­i­cal­ly stressed par­tic­i­pants who per­formed a self-af­fir­ma­tion per­formed as well as the par­tic­i­pants who re­port­ed hav­ing low chron­ic stress lev­els. It's re­flect­ing on an im­por­tant per­son­al val­ue, Creswell said. "We all thought the Stu­art Smal­l­ey's 'Gosh darn it, I re­al­ly like my­self' bit was hi­lar­i­ous, but that kind of af­fir­ma­tion may, in fact, un­der­mine the over­all ef­fect. Telling peo­ple to like them­selves more is def­i­nite­ly not the phe­nom­e­non we are talk­ing about."

Why not? Does telling your­self you're awe­some hurt you?

No, but it prob­a­bly doesn't help, ei­ther. Ac­cord­ing to Creswell, gen­er­al af­fir­ma­tions do not di­rect our at­ten­tion to any­thing con­crete. For ex­am­ple, telling an ath­lete to "fo­cus" dur­ing the heat of a com­pe­ti­tion does not help. But telling that same ath­lete to "fo­cus on your breath­ing" does. In the same way, the fo­cus of self-af­fir­ma­tion should be on some­thing spe­cif­ic and au­then­tic: for ex­am­ple, "I am a lov­ing fa­ther," "I'm a great ten­nis play­er" or "I spend a lot of time vol­un­teer­ing for my church." These are all val­ues that you can con­firm, as op­posed to some­thing vague like "I am awe­some."

While re­search on the ben­e­fits of self-af­fir­ma­tion goes back sev­er­al decades, we still don't have a good un­der­stand­ing of the un­der­ly­ing path­ways or why it pro­duces such wide-rang­ing ef­fects, Creswell says.

(cnn.com)

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