Yes, Your Thoughts Do Affect Your Reality

A grown-up perspective on the Law of Attraction

When I first became interested in spirituality and self-development, circa 2016, I adopted a belief in the Law of Attraction. If you haven’t seen the film The Secret, or heard of the Law of Attraction, let me break down its central message for you: your thoughts attract your reality. In the movie, people are depicted as thinking their way into big sums of money or curing chronic illnesses; ultimately, The Secret is about how the energy you put out in the world is essentially a boomerang. Depending on where you are in life, The Secret and the Law of Attraction oozes appeal, promising a fast-track to make your (material) dreams come true.

So, like a good little self-developer, I started taking this belief along with me every day: my thoughts shape my reality. I started believing in the power of positive thinking, and experienced some positive results in my mood and in the way I appraised events that happened to me. I wore a necklace that said “positive vibes only”, and am indeed positive that I was insufferable to my friends during this time.

Along with these positive shifts, I began to develop some negative side effects: I became terrified of every negative thought I had, convinced that they would cause bad things. I was extremely paranoid that my thoughts were powerful enough to directly spin themselves into reality, and thus vigilantly monitored my mind for negativity, trying very hard to be positive at all times.

Of course, always being positive is not only unsustainable but also untrue; gradually over the years, I have come to a more nuanced opinion of how thoughts affect our reality. It is not, as The Secret depicts, about thinking money into existence or trying to Pollyanna our way through life. Reality, which includes good and bad, positive and negative, is a little more complicated than being at the whim of our (often fickle) thoughts and feelings.

As any meditative practice will reveal to you, thoughts are just thoughts. Thoughts come and go. Thoughts do not need to hold much power—and many, many of them are relatively insignificant.

Still, many thoughts do affect our reality. As I have learned over and over again in graduate school thus far¹, our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intimately connected. They are intertwined with one another. Our thoughts affect our feelings; our feelings affect our thoughts; our behavior affects our thoughts and feelings, and vice versa.

If we want to get even more specific: our beliefs about ourselves affect our lives even more so than our thoughts do. Our beliefs inform what we think and what we do, and if we have a negative belief about ourselves, we are bound to see its ramifications play out in our lives in some way.

Here is my more mature perspective on the Law of Attraction: while our thoughts and beliefs do affect our reality, they are not literally transcribed from our minds to the outside world. We are simply not that powerful, and, there are a lot of other factors that influence what we experience.

Arriving to this perspective has meant that I no longer stress about having a negative thought; and, it has propelled me to consider that when I’m experiencing a challenge or a problem, my underlying beliefs may indeed be contributing to it. Working with thoughts and beliefs does have the potential to transform aspects of our lives—within a realistic limit.

I’m sure you know the type of thoughts and beliefs I’m talking about, the ones that end up limiting you or creating issues: The beliefs that tell you I’m not worthy unless…or, I’m not XYZ enough…or, I’m too much of XYZ…

We all have these kinds of thoughts—and yes, they absolutely affect our experience of life.

I will leave you this week with a therapeutic offering in this vein, should you be seeking one:

1. Consider the problems you’re having in your life right now. Consider that they are being influenced, at least in part, by your thoughts and beliefs. The way you are thinking about yourself (or the problem) may be preventing you from solving said problem.

2. Identify those thoughts and beliefs; become aware of them. (Write them down, even.) Do they reflect who you want to be? How are they holding you back?

3. Identify a preferred mindset or belief: if you actually believed this or thought this way, your problems would be a lot easier to navigate.

4. Experiment with thinking in this way. What would it be like to believe X?

5. Experiment with doing something that shows yourself you could think this way: What would you do if you thought in this way or believed this thing? What kind of person would you be if you believed X?

6. When you find something that works or feels right—repeat, again and again. You are well on your way to therapeutic change.

Onward, with positive and realistic beliefs about yourselves—

Maggie

1. I’m getting a M.S. in Early Childhood and Family Clinical Counseling (a therapist’s license) and am 50% through school.