The science behind your track
Do affirmations actually work? Here is the research our tracks are built on
It is fair to be sceptical, because a lot of what you read about affirmations online is vague. We write your affirmations using rules that come from published research into affirmations, habits, sleep and stress. Every study is named and dated below, so you can read the research yourself.
What the research says
These 4 studies shaped how we write every track.
The largest review of self-affirmation research so far combined 144 studies. Students spent a few minutes writing about what mattered most to them. Afterwards, the students spoke up more in class, kept going with their work for longer and thought better of themselves. The biggest improvement was in how the students felt.
1 · Healthcare, 2024A 2025 review in American Psychologist found that self-affirmation raised self-esteem and lowered stress, anxiety and unhappiness with how people look. In one of the studies, students who spent a few minutes writing about what mattered most to them kept more of their friendships and made more new friends over a term.
2 · American Psychologist, 2025This review looked at whether writing about what matters to you changes what people actually do, as well as how people feel. Across 46 tests of real behaviour, self-affirmation changed what people ate, what people drank and whether people smoked. The review measured attitudes, intentions and behaviour, and behaviour changed the most.
3 · Health Psychology, 2015Here is one single study as an example. Students wrote down what mattered most to them, and then took a hard problem-solving test. The most stressed students who had done the writing scored better than the stressed students who hadn't done the writing, and scored about the same as the students who weren't stressed.
4 · PLOS ONE, 2013How long does it take to form a habit? Why the planner is 66 days
Different people take different amounts of time to form a habit, so we based the planner on the range the research found.
In the best-known study on habits, the fastest people formed a new habit in 18 days. 66 days was the middle of the range, and 66 days isn't a target you have to hit. How long you take to form a habit depends on you and on the habit you choose. About half the people in the study had formed their habit by day 66, and some people formed their habit much sooner.
fastest in the studyslowest in the study
The planner is for the habit you are building, and the planner has nothing to do with how often you listen to your track. You can listen to your track as often as you like, and you keep your progress when you miss a day of the planner. You can listen to your track whenever you like.
5 · Lally et al., 2010What's in the 66 day planner
The planner runs over 10 weeks, and each week has a different purpose. Everything in the planner is written around the goal you described.
Weeks 1 to 4 build the new habit. In week 1 you simply notice what you already do each day. In week 2 you link your new habit to something you already do every day, such as waiting for the kettle to boil or sitting down at your desk. In week 3 you make a plan in the form ‘when this happens, I will do that’, plus 2 or 3 backup plans for days that go wrong. In week 4 you make your new habit so small that skipping the habit would feel silly.
Weeks 5 to 7 help you see yourself as someone who does your new habit. You look for proof that you already do your new habit some of the time. You describe your habit in the present tense, as part of who you are now. You also decide in advance what you'll do on days when you miss your habit. On day 46, the planner asks you to skip your habit on purpose and start again the next day, to show you that missing one day doesn't matter.
Weeks 8 to 10 make your new habit part of everyday life. You do your habit before you feel ready, look back at how far you've come since week 1, write down what you're grateful for, and choose the one change you most want to keep.
Each day of the planner has one instruction that takes under 5 minutes, even on a bad day, with no equipment and no help from anyone else. Each day has 2 lines to write on and a box to tick. Day 18 has a checkpoint, as 18 days was the fastest time anyone in the study formed a habit. The checkpoint reminds you that most people are still forming their habit on day 18.
The planner uses these methods: linking a new habit to an existing one (habit stacking), planning your next step in advance, planning for bad days, keeping your own record, making your habit easier to do, describing yourself as someone who already does the habit, being grateful for specific things, and telling one other person about your goal.
More detail on each part. Tap a card to open it.
The 12 areas, and what each one is built on
We write the tracks for each focus area using the methods that help most with that area, so a sleep track and a grief track use different approaches. Here is the approach we use for each area.
Career & work
Career tracks are written about your own goal at work, rather than general career advice. Each affirmation comes with a next step to take, as your career moves forward through what you do as well as what you believe.
Sleep
Sleep tracks encourage you to write down the tasks you still need to do before you go to bed. In one sleep lab study, people who wrote a short to-do list at bedtime fell asleep faster than people who wrote about the day they'd had.6 · J Exp Psychol, 2018
Focus & productivity
Focus tracks help you notice what distracts you, rather than forcing yourself to concentrate. Once you know what distracts you, you can plan a way to reduce that distraction.
Confidence & self-esteem
Confidence tracks are based on research into self-efficacy, which shows that believing you can do something makes you more likely to do it. Each affirmation comes with a next step, as believing in yourself and taking action help each other.
Stress & anxiety relief
Stress tracks use a breathing pattern of 2 breaths in and 1 long breath out, and help you see stress as your body getting ready for a challenge. People who were taught to see stress as their body getting ready, rather than as harm, coped better with a hard task, and their bodies calmed down more quickly afterwards.7 · Crum et al., 2017
Motivation
Motivation tracks help you decide your next step in advance, in the form ‘when this happens, I will do that’. A review of 94 studies found that planning in this way makes people more likely to do what they planned.13 · Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006
Money & abundance
When money is tight, worry about money takes up so much attention that making good money decisions gets harder. Money tracks help you feel calmer about money, so you can think clearly about your money decisions instead of dreading them.
Relationships & connection
Relationship tracks help you put an exact name to what you feel. Research shows that naming an emotion lowers how strongly your body reacts to the emotion, even though most people expect naming an emotion to make the emotion stronger.8 · Psych Science, 2007
Grief, heartbreak & letting go
Grief tracks are based on research showing that grieving people move back and forth between facing their loss and getting on with everyday life, and that both are normal. Grief tracks aren't based on the 5 stages of grief, as the 5 stages came from interviews with dying patients rather than bereaved people, and reviews have found the 5 stages don't describe real grief.9 · Stroebe et al., 2017
Gratitude & self-love
Gratitude practice has been tested in 28 countries across 163 groups of people, and gratitude practice clearly improved wellbeing. Gratitude tracks help you notice specific things you're grateful for.10 · PNAS, 2025
Health & vitality
Health tracks focus on small daily habits that you can keep up even in a bad week, instead of starting again every Monday. If you miss a day, the days before still count, and you don't have to start from the beginning.
Calmer parenting
Parenting tracks help with what you say to yourself when you're about to lose your temper, as what you say to yourself is the part you can change. Children usually calm down faster when the adult with them is calm. Parenting tracks focus on what you can do next time.
The 5 minute resets
A 5 minute reset is for a stressful moment you're having right now, such as at your desk, at 3am, or 10 minutes before a difficult conversation. A track is something you order once and listen to whenever you like. A 5 minute reset is written about what's happening to you today, and we send it to you straight away.
A 5 minute reset gives you a few minutes to breathe and work out what you can do about the problem today.
Personal members have 5 minute resets for everyday life, as well as 5 minute resets for work. The personal 5 minute resets cover being awake in the night, difficulties with someone close to you, not feeling good enough, money, loneliness, grief, waiting for news, and caring for someone.
The breathing in each 5 minute reset changes with the situation
The ‘Overwhelmed’ and ‘Stressed’ 5 minute resets use 2 breaths in and 1 long breath out. In a trial of 108 people who did this breathing for 5 minutes a day for a month, the breathing improved mood and slowed breathing more than mindfulness meditation did.11 · Cell Reports Med, 2023
The ‘Can't switch off’ and ‘Struggling with sleep’ 5 minute resets use a slower pattern, with the breath out longer than the breath in. Getting ready for sleep needs a slower pattern than calming down in a stressful moment.
Each 5 minute reset then includes a short exercise for your situation
Depending on the 5 minute reset, the exercise might ask you to name your feeling exactly, find evidence against a doubt, separate what you can act on from what you can't, or write down what you still need to do before bed.
Each 5 minute reset is short enough to do anywhere with headphones in.
The sound underneath your tracks
Ocean and rain
Ocean and rain sounds have the most research behind them. After a stressful task, people who listened to nature sounds recovered up to 37% faster than people who listened to traffic noise.12 · IJERPH, 2010
Pink noise and binaural beats
Pink noise and binaural beats have much less research behind them than ocean and rain, although plenty of people find pink noise and binaural beats help with sleep and focus. We offer pink noise and binaural beats because members asked for them, and you can choose whichever sound works for you.
The 4 hour overnight track is long enough to cover several full sleep cycles, so your track doesn't stop partway through a cycle. The moon phases in your weekly emails aren't based on research. We include the moon phases because we love them.
The numbers, for employers
Deloitte also found that employers get their money back faster from support that people use early, before problems get serious, than from support that is only used in a crisis. Build Your Inner Voice is support employees can use any day, written around what they describe, without having to ask anyone for help or permission. These figures are about workplace mental health support in general, and Build Your Inner Voice itself has not been tested for its effect on absence or staff turnover.
Books that inspired us
- The Secret and The Magic: gratitude and attention, practised daily. I started using affirmations after reading these two books.
- Rich as F*ck: speaking to yourself as the person who already handles money well
- Rich Dad Poor Dad: how what you were taught about money shapes what you do with it
- Manifest Like a Mother: working on your mindset while you're busy with family and work. A shout out to Francesca Amber's book club, which I've been part of and inspired by for 6 years.
- Beyond Wanting: preparing yourself for the thing you want, instead of only wanting it
- Start With Yourself: changing your own part of a situation before trying to change anyone else in it
- Do Less: working with your own energy and rhythm instead of pushing through them
- The One Thing: choosing the one task that makes your other tasks easier
- Atomic Habits: stacking a new habit onto one you already have
- Tiny Habits: starting far smaller than feels worthwhile
- The Power of Habit: the cue that starts a routine
- Mindset: ability as something you build rather than something you have, the idea most people know as a growth mindset
References
- Escobar-Soler, C. et al. (2024). Effectiveness of self-affirmation interventions: a meta-analysis. Healthcare, 12(1), 3. 144 studies, 36,419 participants.
- Zhang, Y., Chen, S., Hu, S. & Wang, X. (2025). The effects of self-affirmation on well-being: a meta-analysis. American Psychologist. 129 tests, 17,748 participants.
- Epton, T., Harris, P.R., Kane, R., van Koningsbruggen, G.M. & Sheeran, P. (2015). The impact of self-affirmation on health-behavior change: a meta-analysis. Health Psychology, 34(3), 187-196. 144 tests across 52 studies.
- Creswell, J.D., Dutcher, J.M., Klein, W.M.P., Harris, P.R. & Levine, J.M. (2013). Self-affirmation improves problem-solving under stress. PLOS ONE, 8(5), e62593.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W. & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. The 66 days is a median, and the range was 18 to 254 days.
- Scullin, M.K., Krueger, M.L., Ballard, H.K., Pruett, N. & Bliwise, D.L. (2018). The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1), 139-146. 57 young adults, one night in a sleep lab.
- Crum, A.J., Akinola, M., Martin, A. & Fath, S. (2017). The role of stress mindset in shaping cognitive, emotional and physiological responses to challenging and threatening stress. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 30(4), 379-395.
- Lieberman, M.D. et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428. See also Torre & Lieberman (2018), Emotion Review, 10(2), 116-124.
- Stroebe, M., Schut, H. & Boerner, K. (2017). Cautioning health-care professionals: bereaved persons are misguided through the stages of grief. OMEGA, 74(4), 455-473.
- Choi, H., Cha, Y., McCullough, M.E., Coles, N.A. & Oishi, S. (2025). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on well-being across cultures. PNAS, 122(28). 163 samples across 28 countries.
- Balban, M.Y. et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895. 108 adults, 5 minutes daily for 28 days.
- Alvarsson, J.J., Wiens, S. & Nilsson, M.E. (2010). Stress recovery during exposure to nature sound and environmental noise. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(3), 1036-1046.
- Gollwitzer, P.M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. 94 studies.
Get affirmations written about your life
Affirmations help most when the affirmations are about your own life. Tell us what you'd like help with, and we'll write and record 20 affirmations about your situation.
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