What do you do when you are in a funk, super overstressed, and are stuck in this bad space? 

Affirmations are a self-help strategy used to prompt self-confidence and belief in your own abilities.  They're positive statements that can help you to challenge and overcome self-sabotaging  and negative thoughts. When you repeat them often, and believe in them, you can start to make positive changes.

Affirmation can help you shift your mindset.  Help you believe yourself even when you are fearful or have failed.   

Neuroplasticity, or your brain’s ability to change and adapt to different circumstances throughout your life, offers a clue to help understand not only what makes affirmations work, but how to make them more effective.

Your brain sometimes gets a little mixed up on the difference between reality and imagination, which can be surprisingly useful.

Creating a mental image of yourself doing something activates many of the same brain areas that actually experiencing these situations would.

Regular repetition of affirming statements about yourself can encourage your brain to take these positive affirmations as fact. When you truly believe you can do something, your actions often follow.

Using affirmation before any event, may help you feel more relaxed and help you avoid those negative thoughts or doubts that enter your mind.  

There are many ways to put affirmations into your daily habits.  Repeating an affirmation can help boost your motivation and confidence, but you still have to take some action yourself. Try thinking of affirmations as a step toward change, not the change itself.

Affirmation practices you can use: 

• Affirmations with Visualization . 
•  Affirmations help setting personal goals . 
• Journaling Gratitude with affirmation
•  Find a quiet spot and journal "I am….".   
•  Morning or evening routines
• Add in activity with your affirmations  

Trouble...

Gratitude is a gift — and gratitude changes everything. When we allow ourselves to look critically at our lives through the lens of gratitude, and to focus on the many reasons we have to be grateful, life gets better. ... A focus on gratitude reduces stress and increases levels of contentment. It truly is life-changing.

Resilient people proactively cultivate positive emotions like humor, gratitude and optimism. You don’t even have to find anything to be grateful for. The simple act of looking for the positive decreases the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. Just looking for something to appreciate increases serotonin and dopamine, the feel-good neurochemicals in most antidepressants.

Gratitude affects your brain at a neurological level. A gratitude practice has a positive impact on: sleep, mood, alertness, physical risk markers for future disease, happiness, better financial decision making, problem solving, optimism, productivity, and goal orientation. People who practice gratitude are perceived as more likable, have fewer aches and pains, have increased self esteem, and make friends more easily. Practicing gratitude lowers stress, enhances empathy, lowers your risk of cancer, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and it improves your immune system and cardiovascular health.

Our brain has a negativity bias, causing it to constantly scan the environment for what’s wrong.  You can train the brain by sitting in a positive experience for 15-20 seconds. Really soak in that beautiful moment, appreciate it, and relish the feeling. You have to deliberately sustain and internalize positive emotions to transfer them from short-term memory to long-term storage. You can’t just have the experience. You have to install it.

There is literally no downside to practicing gratitude.

Ways to incorporate gratitude into you daily life. 

• Journaling for 5 minutes a day about what you are grateful for can enhance long-term happiness by 10%.
• Write...