Episode Overview

At the beginning of the year, affirmations are everywhere. And while they can be supportive, many women find that repeating affirmations they do not believe actually makes them feel more frustrated, discouraged, or stuck.

In this episode, Laura explains why affirmations often backfire, not because you are doing them wrong, but because your brain is designed to protect you, not blindly accept statements that feel untrue.

You will learn how the brain responds to thoughts that create internal conflict, how cognitive dissonance shows up as self-judgment, and why nervous system safety matters before belief can change.

Laura introduces the concept of glimmers, small moments that signal safety, ease, or possibility to the nervous system, and explains how glimmers can gently support mindset shifts related to healing, relationships, business, and lifestyle changes.

This episode offers a kinder, more realistic way to work with affirmations so they feel supportive instead of forced, and helps you move forward without fighting yourself.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why affirmations can make you feel worse instead of better

• How the brain reacts to thoughts you do not believe

• What glimmers are and how they differ from triggers

• How to use glimmers to create believable affirmations

• How this approach applies to healing, relationships, business, and daily habits

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hello friends. Welcome to Episode 446, of better than before breast cancer. Hi. I'm your host, Laura Lummer, and I'm very excited to have this conversation with you today, because here we are. This podcast is coming out at the beginning of the year, mid January, and this is a time you pretty much can't look anywhere without hearing about having positive affirmations and not throwing shade on positive affirmations. But everywhere you look, someone is telling you what you should be saying to yourself in the mirror or writing in your journal every morning. Affirmations can be wonderful. They can be supportive, and they can help shape how you think and how you show up, but only when they're used in a way that your brain actually believes. Because what I have been seeing and hearing and not just in this space of this year, but I hear this all the time from women who are trying to change their mindset and writing affirmations or buying books on affirmations, and I've experienced it myself, and it's this frustration that comes up from trying to say the right thing, right the thing that we want to achieve, and ending up feeling worse instead of better, feeling like we failed at something, right? You repeat the affirmation. You think you're doing what you're supposed to do, and something inside of you feels even more tense, feels kind of I'm not. I'm not doing this right. I'm a loser here. Instead of feeling better about ourselves, we feel worse, and I want to assure you that that's not because you're doing affirmations wrong, which is first thing we go to judging ourselves. And it's definitely not because you're failing at mindset work. It's because your brain doesn't accept statements just because you repeat them. It's because we're not taught about affirmations in the right way. When you tell yourself something that you don't believe, your brain doesn't shrug and go along. It doesn't go like, Oh, okay. It pushes back, right? We've got to work with our brain. And often you don't notice this consciously, because we're more prone and wired to judge ourselves. We don't think about it like my brain is pushing back, because underneath that affirmation, brain is like, that's not true. That is not what our experience has been here. Or why are you pretending? Right? You're delusional. And that internal pushback, it's just how your brain works. It's how the human brain works, right? So there's actual research that supports this. Psychologist Joanne wood studied positive self statements, and she found that when people repeated affirmations that contradicted their current beliefs, especially around things like self worth or capability, they often felt worse and not better. The brain doesn't absorb the statement that isn't true or believable. It debates it. And this connects to something that's called cognitive dissonance, which is a concept that was introduced by Leon Festinger. And this is when there's a mismatch between what we say and what we live. The Brain experiences discomfort in that space, and instead of creating motivation, that discomfort shows up as self judgment, frustration and failure. So if you're trying affirmations, or if you tried them in the past, and you felt irritated, you felt discouraged, you felt like I just can't get there, trust me, it isn't that affirmations are useless. It's that your nervous system wasn't partnering with you, right? It wasn't included in the conversation or trying to force the narrative to your brain and your nervous system, and it's not having it, right? So this is what I want to talk about that's so important. It's a concept that I love because it's realistic and it works better with the brain. Instead of trying to overpower the brain, we cannot overpower our brain, but we can be really subtle with our brain. We can use old psychology that's really simple and a little sly with our brain. Right when people come to me and they're working really, really hard on their mindset and feeling very discouraged because they're not achieving that result, or feeling like they move forward, they're feeling very stuck, like I've been telling myself the same thing forever and nothing is changing. That's when we start to dig into well, what are you really telling yourself? And the first question I'll ask them is, do you believe that thought? Is that thought true? For you. No, well, then it's never going to work, right? And so I want to talk about a concept called glimmers. First of all, I love glimmers because it reminds me of shiny things, and my favorite color is shiny things. So the term glimmers is widely credited to Deb Dana, whose work is grounded in Steven Porges polyvagal theory. And if you've heard me talk about the nervous system or polyvagal theory regulation, before you'll know what I'm talking about here. So we're very familiar with triggers, right? How many times you've been triggered by something? Triggers are moments that cue your nervous system that something is threatening, something is wrong, right? Or it's a reminder. It's like, oh my god, I had a really bad experience in the past. It left an emotional baggage behind it, left a scar behind it, left a trauma behind and my brain did not forget that. And now I'm seeing or hearing a situation or feeling a vibe that's reminding me I'm being triggered, and my brain is telling me this isn't safe, right? Our brain pulls us right back into the old patterns that the previous incident triggered. Patterns, fear, protection, right. Glimmers are the opposite of triggers. Glimmers are those little moments that send us a signal of safety, a signal of ease, a signal of connection to our nervous system, and they're not these huge breakthroughs. I don't know why we always think in like a groundbreaking work, right? They're not dramatic. They're very subtle, and we so often overlook them. So a glimmer, for example, could be a moment when you just realize, I'm okay, right? You realize, like, my shoulders are relaxed. I'm taking in deep breaths. I'm just really present. It could be a moment where you find yourself laughing and again feeling present. And I'll share a story with you. Like my husband went struggled with some depression, and he's worked on that a lot, and he's done a lot of things to support him. And recently we're having dinner, and he said, I just feel so good laughing again. It's so nice to laugh. And that's a glimmer, right? It could be handling a hard conversation in a challenging relationship or in a close relationship, and suddenly you realize I did a good job of that. I handled that way better than I used to handle that. And you can give yourself a pat on the back. It could be making a choice to have a cup of tea instead of a glass of wine. When you come home from a stressful day and giving yourself credit for making a choice that supported your healthy lifestyle, that's a glimmer, right? Because you decided I did this because it felt good, and I didn't choose to tell myself I was being deprived. Those are all glimmers, and this is why they matter. The brain learns through experience, not instruction. I mean, we don't have to, even, I think, debate the point. Nobody likes to be told what to do, and your brain is like you, right? It doesn't want to be told what to do. Wants to have experiences, but sometimes we have to really show it what we're experiencing. It trusts what we feel way more than what we're told. So triggers Train the brain to scan for danger, right? That's the automatic way it works. Glimmers Train the brain to notice safety. Now, both of these triggers and glimmers are constantly shaping our neural pathways in our brain, whether we're aware of them or we're not, and this is why glimmers are this powerful bridge to affirmations. Glimmers change your state first, okay, your state of being. Affirmations try to change the thought first and the nervous system always needs to feel safe before the brain can be flexible. We got to feel safe, right? Let's talk about how this plays out in real life. Let me give you a few examples. So let's talk about health. So I'm sure it's no surprise to you that many of my clients want to heal from breast cancer. They want to adopt an affirmation that says, I am healed from breast cancer. And I'll ask them sometimes, like, what do you want to believe? You know, what's the future version of you? And they'll tell me the statement that they want to go with. And I can see it in their energy. I can see they don't believe it right. Deep down, they're very scared, they're very unsure. They don't even believe healing is possible because, and I know this experience with stage four, widespread stage four cancer diagnosis, I found myself writing this manifestation, belief, this affirmation that said I have healed from metastatic breast cancer, and then I would notice what came up. I was like, I don't believe that yet, right? Because I've been told this is incurable. You can't do it right, whatever external noise. And so in my brain, my brain was like, That is not true, pushing back, right? So when that affirmation doesn't feel believable, the brain immediately starts looking for evidence against it to prove you wrong, right? So it ramps up your. Doubt. But if you start with a glimmer, and maybe that's something like a lab marker, moved into the right direction a day, you noticed that you had better energy as your healing, of feeling more connected to your body, noticing, like, maybe in a meditation or a workout or something like that, you're like, I was like, in the zone, I felt good. Now the brain has something to work with, because that's real, right? It's real. And so from there, the affirmation doesn't have to be I healed from breast cancer. It can be it's possible for people to heal, or it could be, I am open to the idea that healing can happen, or even my body has shown me moments of strength or healing. I've seen evidence of things moving in the right direction. I remember when I first saw the Docu series, the radical remission Docu series, and there are 10 healing factors in the radical remission book and philosophy, and they had a story on each of these healing factors. And as I listened to these people share their story. I just felt this like so much hope, right? This glimmer. It was like, yes, yes, people heal from cancer, and I'm a people, and so, wow, there is a possibility I can heal that felt true. Another example, let's talk about relationships. We could say you want to make your relationship better, whatever relationship, friendship, whatever it is, a romantic relationship, anything. And so you write down every day, I am in a healthy loving relationship, and then you feel lonely, you feel hurt, you feel disconnected, you feel anything instead of being supportive and like you're in a healthy loving relationship, so your brain says, No, you're not. Your brain's like Who you trying to kid. But if you notice a glimmer, like a moment that you do have clear communication, a moment when someone in that relationship respected your boundary, right, changed a behavior, or maybe you notice a moment where you find peace or clarity in understanding really, truly what you want and what you where you stand, right? Those are all glimmers. Oftentimes, instead of looking at those as a glimmer, we will look at those positive signs and go, Yeah, but let's just wait and see what else right? We reflect back on what's happened before, because we're triggered. So when we can look at a glimmer and bring it to our awareness and realize that now we can say, I can choose an affirmation like, Hey, I'm learning what healthy connection feels like, because I just experienced it. So I just showed my brain it was true. I could say, You know what, it's possible for relationships to feel safe, and that becomes something your nervous system can now accept and tolerate because you experienced it. It was true even for a moment, even for a glimmer, right? Let's talk about business. I have a coaching program where I work with women who want to start businesses. And a lot of times we've gone through this breast cancer experience, or we're living with it and going through it, and we want to go back and coach people and help people and give back to the world. So someone might just start a business, and they choose this affirmation that says, I run a successful business. Well, the truth is, they're feeling overwhelmed, they're feeling insecure. They're having imposter syndrome. They're feeling stuck. So instead of that affirmation creating momentum, it creates pressure. It's like, oh, you're not there yet. You know, I run a successful business. I haven't made a dime, right? It's cognitive dissonance. But if you notice a glimmer, like you follow through on something, you create a pathway to your social media. And you know what it is that you want to share, you create a podcast episode. You receive positive feedback from someone, or you have an idea that gives you clarity on the membership or the coaching program, or something that you want to create and offer to somebody that changes your foundation and now an affirmation can become something like, wow, I'm building something step by step. Or I am capable of learning what comes next. A lot of times when I work with someone, they have, they say, I have no nothing about tech. You have to know something about tech if you're going to build an online business. So noticing I just learned that, I just did that. That's a glimmer. Or, Hey, I noticed myself showing up even when it's uncomfortable. I showed up for myself. And God knows we can apply that again across all kinds of things in our life. So healthy lifestyle changes follow the same thing. So you could stand up all the time and say, I am disciplined, I am consistent. But if that doesn't reflect the life you're currently living, that could really lead to feeling like a failure and feeling guilty, but if you notice again, a glimmer that you chose a nourishing food over something that didn't serve you. If you moved your body today in a way you hadn't done before, or you moved it consistently for the number of days you committed to if you noticed that you gave yourself space to pause instead of push. Now you can allow an affirmation like, Hey, I'm learning to care for myself differently. Now this. Feels good enough for the brain to hold on to. So affirmations are not meant to override reality. They're meant to gently shape you and guide you to where you're going, right? The future version of you isn't created by convincing yourself of something you don't believe and of also like acting like you're not already awesome, because you got a lot of awesomeness, right? The future version of yourself is created by noticing what already is working and allowing yourself to build from there what is true. So remember, if you don't like affirmations, if they're not feeling good, if you don't do them at all because, like, that doesn't work. I've tried it a million times. Remember, it's feedback, and your nervous system wants to be a part of the process, so approaching it differently may work differently, and when you realize what a glimmer is, and you let a glimmer lead the way, then affirmations can stop feeling like something you're really forcing, and they can start feeling like something you're growing into, because they're true for you. Now, of course, this is another one of those episodes. I often hear people say, your podcast isn't just about breast cancer. It's great for everybody. Yeah, because I'm just talking about life and life experiences, but I'm talking about them to my community of women who's been through this shit with breast cancer, right? But if you liked it, if you feel like it, would support somebody else, share the episode, work together. Because when we come together as a community and we're connected and we have that support, it's even more helpful to rewire our brain and move into those future versions of ourselves. Another way to do that is come and join my free community living well after breast cancer. The link is also here. You can also find it on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com and for the cherry on top of everything, come and join me in the better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and life coaching membership, where we dig in to stuff on such an amazing level. You work with me,

16:54
a wonderful community of women, we talk, we coach, and it's just an incredible experience. Find all the details at the breast cancer recovery coach.com Be good to yourself. Don't force yourself. Don't judge yourself, and I'll talk to you next week.

17:09
You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more, your future's at the door.

17:28
Give it all you got

17:30
no hesitating. You've been waiting all your

17:39
life. This is your moment.

17:58
This is your moment. Shine to shine.