Affirmations? Do they work?

Affirmations? Do they work?

COVID was a sad time. The world was shut, every buzz on my phone was bad news, and honestly it was all just too much.

So in June 2020 we made a tiny app called “Love Alert”. It sent you one kind line a day as a notification, that’s it. Stuff like this:

“You can’t make everyone happy. You’re not pizza.”

Over 10,000 people downloaded it. I don’t know if it helped them, but I know they wanted it, and during COVID it was what I needed too. We shut it down in 2021 because we couldn’t work out how to make money from it.

I still stop when Instagram shows me “no worries, you got time, and you can do it,” so I finally went and read what the studies say.

Telling yourself something nice and the thing researchers tested turn out to be two different things. When researchers repeated the famous “I am a lovable person” study with more people in 2020, saying the line made no difference to how anyone felt. What looked more promising was writing for fifteen minutes about something you care about, right before something hard.

Which is funny, because that’s not what Love Alert did at all.

The writing seems to work by putting the thing you’re scared of next to the rest of your life, so it stops feeling like all of you. So whether it works depends on you. When 58 school studies were pooled in 2021, it mostly helped students under pressure from a stereotype, and for the others the effect was close to zero.

The page draws that idea with your own worry. It’s a drawing, not a treatment, and the exercise is at the end.

If you did the fifteen minutes, what would you write about? Hit reply.

Akash

P.S. I will be in London from 22 to 30 October. If you’re around and would like to meet, hit reply.

affirmations · a sheets.works data drop

Your banking app is a few years old. Bacs, the UK payment system behind it, started in 1968, and we traced 19 everyday apps to the old systems they still run on.

Every file you send is a stack of layers, including the notes your phone writes about you, and you can pull a real photo apart to see them.

I checked fifty-six claims about what AI changed against company filings and public data: six things are really gone, twenty-two shrank, and thirteen grew.

One true news sentence every morning, and you keep the five words that carry the story, which takes about two minutes and has no ads.

It’s also an app: App Store · Google Play