The affirmation is a proposition. The associative network that forms as you reinforce the new belief is its propagation.

ALL ALT TEXT FOR THREAD: New beliefs can feel less real to you because, to your brain, they are less real. An old belief has years of deposits behind it—memories, emotions, experiences, associations, predictions. It’s been compounding, attaching itself to more and more of your life. A new belief may be healthier, more accurate, and more useful, but it doesn’t have that same history yet. It hasn’t built the associative network that makes the old belief seem obviously true. This is why it can be so disorienting to discover that the evidence for a new belief was already there in ways you couldn’t recognize before. You aren’t rewriting the past. You’re allowing a new understanding to reorganize evidence that was already there. And as old experiences begin attaching themselves to a different story, they can release all kinds of feelings—good, bad, and otherwise. Suddenly, the account isn’t empty. It has years of deposits you simply hadn’t been counting. But recognition isn’t enough to stabilize the new belief. You still have to keep giving your attention to the evidence that supports it, until those associations become easier to access than the old ones.