Affirmations and Self-Esteem: Who They Help and Who They Don't

If you've searched for affirmations for self esteem, you've probably run into two kinds of pages. One
hands you a list of a hundred lovely sentences and promises they'll change your life. The other warns
you, usually citing one famous study, that if your self-esteem is low, affirmations will actually make
you feel worse.

Here's the honest answer, and it's one neither kind of page gives you: they're talking about two
different practices that happen to share a name. Once you split them apart, the research gets much
clearer, and so does what you should actually do tomorrow morning.

The short answer

Repeating a grand statement you don't believe ("I am a lovable person") helped people who already felt
good about themselves in the most famous study on this, and made people with low self-esteem feel
slightly worse. That's the backfire everyone quotes. What almost nobody quotes is that when researchers
tried to reproduce that backfire in 2020, across two studies, they couldn't.

Meanwhile, a different practice also called affirmation, where you reflect on what genuinely matters to
you rather than declaring who you are, shows the opposite pattern: the people with the lowest
self-esteem tend to benefit the most.

So the question isn't really "do affirmations work for low self esteem." It's "which kind, worded how."
Let's take those one at a time.

"Affirmations" is actually two different practices

The word covers two things that psychologists study separately:

Positive self-statements. Declarative claims about your identity, repeated: "I am confident," "I am
lovable," "I am enough." This is what most apps, Pinterest boards, and affirmation lists mean.

Values affirmation. Spending a few minutes writing or speaking about something you care about
deeply, like your friendships, your creativity, or your honesty, and why it matters to you. No identity
claims at all. This is what most of the academic literature means, going back decades.

The distinction sounds fussy, but it's the whole ballgame, because the evidence for the two runs in
opposite directions for people whose self-esteem is low.

The famous backfire study (and the replication that complicates it)

In 2009, Wood, Perunovic and Lee
asked people to repeat "I'm a lovable person" and measured their mood. Participants with high
self-esteem felt a bit better. Participants with low self-esteem felt worse than the group that said
nothing at all. The likely reason is simple and human: when a sentence collides with what you privately
believe, your mind doesn't absorb the sentence, it argues with it. Every repetition becomes another
round of "no you're not."

That finding deserves to be taken seriously, and we do: it's half the reason this site keeps telling
you to make affirmations believable. But there's a second chapter most pages skip. In 2020,
Fielden and colleagues ran
two replication attempts with around 460 participants total. In both, positive affirmations neither
helped nor hurt, and self-esteem didn't moderate the effect. The backfire didn't show up.

What should you make of that? Not "affirmations are safe for everyone," and not "the backfire was
fake." The fair reading is that the harm story is weaker than the internet believes, and the effect of
repeating unbelievable statements is somewhere between mildly negative and nothing. Nothing, notice, is
still not a benefit. We walk through both papers in more detail in
can affirmations backfire.

The finding nobody quotes: low self-esteem benefits most

Here's the part that genuinely surprised me when I first read past the headlines. In the values
affirmation tradition, low self-esteem isn't a risk factor. It's where the biggest gains show up.

Düring and Jessop (2015) had 328 people complete a values
affirmation exercise before reading uncomfortable health information. For participants with low
self-esteem, the exercise led to more open engagement, better attitudes, and stronger intentions to
act. For participants with high self-esteem, it did roughly nothing. The authors' conclusion is worth
quoting in spirit: affirmation may matter most for exactly the people who usually get warned away from it.

That fits a wider pattern. Creswell and colleagues (2013)
found that a brief values affirmation restored problem-solving performance in chronically stressed
people, the group that had the most to regain. And a large 2025 study reported by the
American Psychological Association
found that simple self-affirmation exercises boosted well-being and reduced anxiety across age groups,
with effects that held up at follow-up.

The mechanism seems to be less "convince yourself you're great" and more "remind yourself you're bigger
than the thing currently threatening you." A person who remembers she is a loyal friend and a careful
nurse can hear hard feedback without her whole self-worth going down with it. No identity claims
required.

So who do affirmations for self-esteem actually help?

Putting the research together honestly:

• If your self-esteem is already decent, classic positive self-statements are fine and may give you
  a small lift. The one caution is wording that outruns your belief; keep it in the "rings true" zone.

• If your self-esteem is low, skip the grand identity declarations. Not because they'll definitely
  hurt you (the replication says probably not), but because the evidence they'll help you is thin, and
  arguing with your own affirmation is a lousy way to spend a morning. You have two better options:
  believable statements about direction and effort, and values affirmation. The second one is the only
  affirmation practice where people like you are the documented best responders.

• If your low self-worth feels heavy, constant, or has lasted a long time, affirmations are the
  wrong tool, full stop. More on that below, because it matters more than anything else on this page.

None of this is a magic effect. Across the whole literature the gains are real but modest: a steadier
mood, a bit more openness, a slightly kinder default setting. Anyone promising more than that is
selling something. The full evidence picture lives in
do affirmations actually work.

Believable affirmations for self-esteem (a list that won't fight you)

Since you may have arrived here wanting an actual list, here's one, built on the one principle the
research keeps rewarding: your mind accepts what it can't immediately refute. Every line below is
either a statement of direction ("I am learning"), a statement of fact you can verify ("I showed up
today"), or a value you hold. There isn't a single claim your inner critic can cross-examine.

The first affirmation I ever wrote for myself was "I am completely confident." I couldn't get through
saying it without wincing, because it was audibly untrue, and hearing yourself say an untrue thing out
loud is its own small argument. The rewrite that finally stuck was "I keep showing up, even scared."
Same territory, but this one had evidence.

Statements of direction:

• I am learning to talk to myself like someone I love.

• I am becoming harder to talk out of my own worth.

• I'm getting better at letting compliments land.

• I am slowly replacing "what's wrong with me" with "what do I need."

Statements you can verify:

• I showed up today, and that counts.

• I have survived every hard day so far.

• I did one thing today that my future self will thank me for.

• People I respect choose to keep me in their life.

Values, spoken as reminders:

• The people I love get my honesty, and so do I.

• Being kind matters to me, and that includes being kind to myself.

• I care about doing things well, not about being beyond criticism.

• My worth was never up for a vote.

Take three or four at most. A short set you actually say beats a long list you admire. If you'd rather
build your own from scratch, the rewrite patterns are in
how to write affirmations that sound like you.

How to practice them so they land

Four adjustments, each with evidence behind it:

1. Keep it believable. The through-line of everything above. If a line makes you wince, don't push
   through the wince, rewrite the line. "I am becoming" beats "I am" on low days.

2. Try your own name. Kross and colleagues (2014)
   found that self-talk using your own name ("Maya, you've handled worse") creates a small psychological
   distance that makes hard moments easier to regulate. It feels odd for about two days, then it feels
   like a steady friend.

3. Anchor to a value once a week. Instead of a one-liner, take two minutes and speak about one thing
   that matters to you and why. This is the version of affirmation with the strongest evidence for low
   self-esteem specifically.

4. Say it out loud. Reading a line silently lets your eyes slide over it the way they slide over
   terms and conditions. Speaking it makes you produce the words and hear them in your own voice, which
   is a different level of engagement entirely. The case for this is in
   out loud versus in your head.

That last point is the one we've built our whole product around, so, full disclosure: we make Affirmly,
a spoken-affirmation app, and you should weigh this paragraph accordingly. Affirmly asks you to say
your affirmations out loud to your own reflection each morning, and it listens on-device (nothing is
recorded or uploaded) to check each repetition off. You write or edit every line yourself, which makes
the believability rule easy to follow. It's also fair to say it isn't for everyone: it's iPhone only,
it costs $3.99 a month, and it requires actually speaking, which is precisely the friction some people
want and others don't. A sticky note on the mirror is free and also works, if you'll actually do it.
The method matters more than the tool, and the method is in
how to do affirmations that actually work.

When affirmations are not the tool

One thing to say plainly, because this page is about self-esteem and self-esteem is tender territory.
If your sense of worthlessness is persistent, if it's been months, if it comes with hopelessness or
numbness or thoughts of harming yourself, that is not an affirmation problem and no app or list of
sentences is the answer. That's a "talk to a real person" situation: a therapist, a doctor, or, if
things feel urgent, a crisis line like 988 in the US. Affirmations are a small daily kindness for
everyday self-esteem wear and tear. They sit alongside real support, never in place of it.

And if you've tried affirmations before and they did nothing, that's not evidence something is wrong
with you. It's usually evidence the lines weren't believable or the practice was passive. Both are
fixable, and why affirmations don't work for me covers the fixes.

The honest bottom line: affirmations for self esteem help more people than the scare posts claim and
fewer than the hundred-item lists promise. Choose believable words, anchor them to what you value, say
them out loud, and let the practice be small. Small and daily is the whole trick.

Sources

• Wood, Perunovic & Lee (2009), "Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others," Psychological Science

• Fielden et al. (2020), "On the failure to replicate past findings regarding positive affirmations and self-esteem," Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science

• Düring & Jessop (2015), "The moderating impact of self-esteem on self-affirmation effects," British Journal of Health Psychology

• Creswell et al. (2013), "Self-Affirmation Improves Problem-Solving under Stress," PLOS ONE

• Kross et al. (2014), "Self-Talk as a Regulatory Mechanism: How You Do It Matters," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

• American Psychological Association (2025), "Self-affirmations can boost well-being, study finds"

Affirmly supports everyday wellbeing. It is not medical or mental health care and is not a substitute
for professional support. If you're struggling, please reach out to a professional or a crisis line
like 988 (US).