how many affirmations per day to say

How Many Affirmations Per Day Should You Say To Make Them Work?


Positive affirmations are known to work for many successful people. It’s very common to repeat financial affirmations daily to build a millionaire mindset and to say general positive affirmations for a happy and healthy life.

Of course, you want your affirmations to work as fast as possible. But exactly how many times per day should you say your affirmations for the best results?

Depending on how many affirmations you have at once, find 5 to 15 minutes at least once per day to repeat positive affirmations. A good time for saying affirmations can be first thing in the morning, before bedtime, before lunch, or after a workout, as soon as you make it a daily habit.

There are two ways to repeat your affirmations:

  • Repeat each statement for a minute or so, then move on to the next
  • Create a solid message from all your affirmations and repeat it as a whole

I prefer the second option as it basically allows you to build an image of a new self and a better life and then carve it smoothly into your subconscious mind. To me, it’s much easier to believe in the whole picture than try to convince myself of a new thing with every single affirmation.

Nevertheless, different things work for different people, so you may try both methods and see what feels more natural to you.

There are, of course, different methods of building your affirmation message according to the number of goals you are trying to achieve. To illustrate them I’ve created a few examples you can find here.

Now let’s take a look at some common questions and misconceptions about repeating affirmations!

How many times to repeat affirmations?

To date, I’ve seen all kinds of things people claim to be a magic rule for affirmations to work!

  • Some say you need to write affirmations 15 times a day
  • Others claim that you have to repeat your affirmations 500 times a day
  • You’ll surely find someone who says 100 times a day is a minimum
  • Indians repeat their mantras exactly 108 times twice a day
woman frustrated and confused by different approaches to affirmations at home

Sorry to disappoint, but this is no algebra. You’ll never find a single algorithm that works for everyone in 100% life situations.

Here are just a few factors that affect how many times you need to repeat affirmations:

  1. The time you wake up. If you can’t think clearly at 5 am and just repeat your affirmations on autopilot, they won’t work.
  2. The number of your goals. When you only focus on one thing, you can repeat one affirmation over and over again. But when it’s more than one, your attention is unavoidably divided between them. The more goals you have, the less time you can dedicate to each affirmation.
  3. How far are you from your goals. If you are close to becoming a millionaire, a handful of millionaire affirmations said here and there are probably enough to keep you on track. But for someone who is starting from nothing, affirmations require more time to sink in until you develop the right mindset.
  4. Your work and life schedule. A single person that lives alone and doesn’t have a job has an extremely different day schedule from someone’s wife with three children and two businesses. Work with what you have: find your own time of day when you are alone and comfortable to say positive affirmations.

To some, saying your affirmation message once when you wake up is enough to set the intention for the day and get to work. Others need a longer session to convince themselves of the possibility of change. In general, say an affirmation as many times as you need to truly believe in what you say.

Most importantly, create a daily habit of saying affirmations with emotion and also repeat them when you need extra support in difficult situations.

What if I repeat affirmations 1000 times a day?

curious person should I repeat affirmations 1000 times per day

Please don’t! This is another common misconception.

When I say “repeat as many times as your need for an affirmation to sink in”, I don’t mean that many. You may sit for a week in the lotus pose and repeat, repeat, repeat, but you obviously won’t get any closer to your goals and dreams.

Sadly, there are some life coaches out there who assure their clients that repeating 1000 positive affirmations parrot-fashion every day will drastically change their lives. If you meet one, run!

Affirmations work through emotion and meaningfulness you put into saying them. When you just say words without thinking, this is exactly what it is: just saying words. Therefore it’s better to bring yourself into a calm state once a day, say your affirmations, and feel every word than randomly repeat some phrase in your head a 1000 times.

Not only you can’t possibly mean it every time, but you are also distracting yourself from doing everything else during the day. You may even get yourself into an anxiety state worrying that you didn’t say affirmations enough times. Not to mention that you won’t be productive with any of your tasks if your mind is busy repeating stuff.

We know that almost everything good in life is achieved through hard work and dedication. Don’t rely on affirmations alone to bring you to success. They will help to develop a success mindset and open your brain to new opportunities, but you need to put some work into it too.

According to my calculations, an average one-sentence affirmation takes somewhere between 1 and 7 seconds to say meaningfully. This means it may take up to two hours of your time to do it a thousand times. I’m sure there are plenty of ways you can spend that amount of time actively working towards your goals!

Don’t waste more than 15 minutes at a time on mental training. Set up your positive attitude and go do something useful to change your life!

Can you repeat affirmations in your head?

mindful woman mentally saying affirmations

You may be surprised, but this is what you already unknowingly do!

Generally speaking, everything we say to ourselves, whether good or bad, are affirmations. The trick here is to recognize the negative thinking patterns and replace them with positive statements and emotions.

Every thought you have during the day sends a message into your subconscious.

When you are constantly afraid that something bad may happen and then it happens, a good chance is that you are to blame. Your repetitive negative thoughts attracted that exact energy into your life. And by visualizing the bad outcome you unknowingly helped make it a reality.

I’m not saying you have to blame yourself for everything that happens in your life. Unfortunately, we are so used to negative thinking that we can’t always control those thoughts, especially in stressful situations.

What we can do, however, is populate our minds with positive thoughts instead. This is where we are in control!

By using affirmations, you consciously supplant your negative thoughts with good ones. By repeating them every day, you train your brain to think positive first. Saying affirmations out loud assures that you do it mindfully and with feeling, but you can say them mentally as well as soon as you do it intentionally and visualize what you think.

Can you listen to positive affirmations?

Absolutely! Similar to a guided meditation, listening to affirmations calms you down and helps reprogram your mind into positive thinking.

Here is a good example of powerful positive affirmations you can listen to even in your sleep:

This is absolutely beautiful and empowering, BUT!

As I mentioned many times before, positive affirmations work best when they are personalized. The better they apply to your own life, the harder they will work to improve it. That’s why affirmations you wrote for yourself will most likely be more effective than any general ones you found online.

The main flaw of recorded affirmations is that they are indeed general. They are oriented towards a big audience and apply to many people, but nobody in particular.

They will work when you want a general boost of your self-confidence and life quality. But as soon as you have set a specific goal for yourself, you better write your own personalized affirmations that are in sync with this goal!

As a nice workaround, you may use some app like ThinkUp. It allows you to record affirmations in your own voice and listen to them instead of saying them every time. Try it out if you are more a listener than a talker! You can record the affirmations that they have in the app, your favorite ones from my affirmations collection, or the ones you wrote yourself.

Conclusion on repeating affirmations every day

I hope now you have more understanding of how affirmations work and the number of affirmations you should say per day is not a question anymore! In case you still have some concerns or questions on a subject, tell me in the comments!

Always remember that it’s not the fact that you say affirmations that matters, it’s your intention behind it. As soon as you believe in the message you are sending into your subconscious mind, the form of it is not that important.

Write, say, sing, dream, listen, think, or imagine your affirmations – nobody can stop you from doing it your way! But repeat this daily so you get used to the idea of your new improved life!