Dr. Jameca Cooper explains affirmations as positive statements that reduce stress and activate beneficial neural processes in the brain. Brain imaging shows they decrease resistance to threats and increase self-compassion, something she says many people lack even when they care for others.
Chapters
This month is National Self-Care Awareness Month, and it's important, right? We all need to do more self-care because we all need to take care of our bodies and our minds so that we can be healthy for our families. So today we're going to focus on affirmations. Make sure you subscribe to this channel before we get started. Affirmations— what is an affirmation. First, I talk about it in my book, which is called I Am My Sister's Keeper: The Brown Girl's Guide to Radical Healing on Amazon. But today we're going to talk about affirmations because they're not just beneficial for brown girls and women of color, they're beneficial for everyone. So what is an affirmation? An affirmation is a positive statement or phrase that you use for goal setting or stress reduction. It can be anything that you really think is important to your life at that time. So let's say we're using affirmations such as, "I am strong." Then by saying, "I am strong," you should move toward the goal of being stronger and reduce the stress in that area as well. So, there have been some wonderful studies out about affirmations, and they've been done using brain imaging. So scans, like when you think about an MRI scan where you can see the images of your brain and the activity in your brain. These studies have shown the benefits of affirmations by having people do affirmations while getting their brain scanned. How cool is that? So what they found in their studies is that affirmations are beneficial for 3 different reasons. One reason is that it helps to reduce stress. Isn't that amazing? That's what we all want in our lives because overall everyone has too much stress. The second thing that it does is it helps to decrease the resistance that we might have to what could be perceived as threatening messages. What is a threatening message? It could be really anything. It could be a move to a new house. It could be a marriage. It could be a divorce. It could be any messages that you tell yourself about this situation or this person is a scary situation. So it helps to reduce that. Affirmations helps to reduce that. The third thing that affirmations does, number 3, is that it helps us to increase self-compassion. And gosh, don't we all need more self-compassion? We do. That's the answer. I've done therapy for almost 20 years now, and the one thing I've consistently seen with my clients in therapy is that while they can be supportive and loving and giving to their families and their children and people around them, but many times people are the hardest on themselves. So sometimes we have to give ourselves a little bit of grace and mercy and to take it easy on ourselves. We all need more self-compassion. This month is Self-Care Awareness Month. Be aware of yourself. Take time for yourself because you are a priority. You have to be a priority because if you're not healthy, how can your family and those around you be healthy? So today you learned 3 things about affirmations. Make sure you pick up the book. Subscribe to this channel. Stay tuned for more videos on affirmations. In particular, I'm going to be giving you out some really good and important affirmations, especially as it pertains to women of color and women in general. Thank you.
