Repeated self-directed suggestion is claimed to alter feeling, behaviour and physical symptoms.
Coue's method, popular in the 1920s, prescribed repeating a formula of daily improvement on waking and sleeping. It is the ancestor of a long line of affirmation practices. The durable insight is that expectancy affects experienced symptoms, which is well documented; the claim that repetition reliably produces the improvement is not.
In practice
- A patient told a treatment usually works reports more improvement than one told it sometimes does, from the same treatment.
- A team repeatedly told the launch will go well is not thereby better prepared for it.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is expectancy, the mechanism behind placebo responses. Another is attention: repeating a formula changes what comes to mind and therefore what is noticed. A third is self-efficacy, which predicts persistence.
- In its favour
- Expectancy and placebo effects are measurable, and belief in one's own capacity does predict effort and persistence.
- Against it
- The original claims about physical symptoms were never tested, and later work on affirmations finds the benefits limited and sometimes reversed for people with low self-esteem, for whom the formula conflicts with their own view of themselves.
- Standing
- An early self-help doctrine that has not been tested as stated. Later research on placebo, expectancy and self-efficacy covers some of the same ground with better method, and does not vindicate the original claims.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop