TOSS aside what your shelves of self-help tomes may tell you.

Repeating positive statements, it turns out, may not help boost low self-esteem, a new study has found. It might even make you feel worse, reported the Washington Post.

Professor Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo in Ontario and two colleagues ran tests in which they got students to repeat statements to themselves, such as "I am a lovable person", charting how their moods changed after doing so.

Those of their subjects - 32 male and 36 female psychology students - who already had low self-esteem did not find any improvement in their mood. Indeed, the gap between those with high and low self-esteem actually grew.

Yet, as the researchers note in an article in Psychological Science journal, self-help books, reaching back at least to 1952's famed The Power Of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, have always advised repeating your own supposed strengths to yourself.

"At this moment, thousands of people across North America are probably silently repeating positive statements to themselves," the researchers observed.

The study found that even if the subjects were told to focus on how the statement "I am a lovable person" might be true about themselves, the results did not vary.

This suggests "that for certain people, positive self-statements may not only be ineffective, but actually detrimental", the researchers concluded.

"One possibility is that, like over-positive praise, they can elicit contradictory thoughts."

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