Repeating I am lovable made some people feel worse

In 2009 a psychologist at the University of Waterloo named Joanne Wood sat 68 students down for four minutes and asked them to write whatever they were thinking. Every fifteen seconds a doorbell sound went off. Half of them had been told that each time it rang, they should say one sentence to themselves: I am a lovable person.

Half the room had high self-esteem and half had low. The high group came out of those four minutes feeling better.

Guess who came out feeling worse than the students who said nothing at all? The ones who needed the sentence most.

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The paper ran in Psychological Science under a title that says it better than I can: Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others. In the writing, the low self-esteem group put down unlovable about as often as lovable. The sentence didn’t drown out the argument. It started one.

None of this is new. A hundred years ago a French pharmacist named Émile Coué had people saying Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better, twenty times on waking and again before sleep, counted off on a string tied with twenty knots. In February 1923 Coué was in New York making phonograph records.

Now walk over to my side of the industry. There’s an ebook for sale right now called How to Manifest a Specific Person, and the scripts in this corner run along the lines of he thinks about me constantly, he is texting me today. Venus and Mercury are both retrograde until November 13, which the date merchants treat as a sale.

Why the line turns on you

Here’s the part almost nobody talks about. Wood’s explanation was that a line far outside what you already believe reminds you of the distance, and the distance is what you feel.

That study tested lines about the self, not about a man. A Hostage Sentence sits even farther out, because the only evidence for it is a phone that isn’t ringing.

“But affirmations work for me.” Then keep them: the high self-esteem group felt better, and nobody here is taking a good tool off anyone. I’m asking what your line is about, and who gets to decide whether it’s true.

Am I telling you affirmations are nonsense? There’s a sticky note on my bathroom mirror as I type this, and I read cards for a living, so I’m in no position to sneer at a sentence.

During the fourteen months, mine was He’ll be back by April. I said it into my coffee on the porch every morning, and five times I paid a new psychic for a new month when the old one ran out.

My mother kept one going for nine years about a man and called it faith.

Wood’s suggestion was to go specific and modest. Not I’m a generous person, but I choose good gifts for people. Small enough to believe, true enough to stand on.

•	Tonight, ten minutes: write three lines about you, in the present tense. Cross out any with his name in it, or the word he.
•	Say each one out loud. Keep the one your mind doesn’t argue with, and if it argues with all three, make one smaller.
•	Saturday on waking and Saturday before sleep, say it three times. Coué used twenty knots. Three is plenty.
•	Same line, morning and night, for seven days. No upgrading it midweek because Tuesday went well.
•	Next Friday, one sentence in a notebook: is it easier to say than it was?

01	What sentence have you been saying about him that you would never say about yourself?

02	Which line could you say tomorrow morning without your mind calling you a liar?

03	What would you do this weekend to make that line a little more true by Sunday?

Saturday has a shape now: one line on waking, one line before sleep, and every hour in between belongs to you.