Episodes

  • 10 - Beliefs.

    10 - Beliefs.
    Apr 4 2026
    Beliefs.
    The chief tenets of New Thought are:
    - Infinite Intelligence or God is omnipotent and omnipresent.
    - Spirit is the ultimate reality.
    - True human self-hood is divine.
    - Divinely attuned thought is a positive force for good.
    - All disease is mental in origin.
    - Right thinking has a healing effect.

    Evolution of thought.
    Adherents also generally believe that as humankind gains greater understanding of the world, New Thought itself will evolve to assimilate new knowledge. Alan Anderson and Deb Whitehouse have described New Thought as a "process" in which each individual and even the New Thought Movement itself is "new every moment". Thomas McFaul has claimed "continuous revelation", with new insights being received by individuals continuously over time. Jean Houston has spoken of the "possible human", or what we are capable of becoming.

    Theological inclusionism.
    The Home of Truth has, from its inception as the Pacific Coast Metaphysical Bureau in the 1880s, under the leadership of Annie Rix Militz, disseminated the teachings of the Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda. It is one of the more outspokenly interfaith of New Thought organizations, stating adherence to "the principle that Truth is Truth where ever it is found and who ever is sharing it". Joel S. Goldsmith's The Infinite Way incorporates teaching from Christian Science, as well.

    Therapeutic ideas.
    Divine Science, Unity Church, and Religious Science are organizations that developed from the New Thought movement. Each teaches that Infinite Intelligence, or God, is the sole reality. New Thought adherents believe that sickness is the result of the failure to realize this truth. In this line of thinking, healing is accomplished by the affirmation of oneness with the Infinite Intelligence or God.
    John Bovee Dods (1795–1862), an early practitioner of New Thought, wrote several books on the idea that disease originates in the electrical impulses of the nervous system and is therefore curable by a change of belief.[citation needed] Later New Thought teachers, such as the early-20th-century author, editor, and publisher William Walker Atkinson, accepted this premise. He connected his idea of mental states of being with his understanding of the new scientific discoveries in electromagnetism and neural processes.

    Criticism.
    The New Thought movement has been criticized as a "get-rich-quick scheme" as much of its literature contains esoteric advice to make money.
    Although the movement began with roots in feminism and socialism, it increasingly attached itself to far right and racist ideology, arguing that poverty was a sign of spiritual weakness, and that "for the sake of race improvement... poverty and suffering must not be alleviated by the state."

    Movement.
    New Thought publishing and educational activities reach approximately 2.5 million people annually. The largest New Thought-oriented denomination is Seicho-No-Ie, which was founded by Masaharu Taniguchi in Japan. Other belief systems within the New Thought movement include Jewish Science, Religious Science/Centers for Spiritual Living and Unity. Past denominations have included Psychiana and Father Divine.
    Religious Science operates under three main organizations: the Centers for Spiritual Living; the Affiliated New Thought Network; and Global Religious Science Ministries. Ernest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science, stated that Religious Science is not based on any "authority" of established beliefs, but rather on "what it can accomplish" for the people who practice it. The Science of Mind, authored by Ernest Holmes, while based on a philosophy of being "open at the top", focuses extensively on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Unity, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, identifies itself as "Christian New Thought", focused on "Christian idealism", with the Bible as one of its main texts, although not interpreted literally. The other core text is Lessons in Truth by H. Emilie Cady. The Universal Foundation for Better Living, or UFBL, was founded in 1974 by Johnnie Colemon in Chicago, Illinois, after breaking away from the Unity Church for "blatant racism".

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    4 mins
  • 09 - Origins.

    09 - Origins.
    Apr 4 2026
    Origins. The New Thought movement was based on the teachings of Phineas Quimby (1802–1866), an American mesmerist and healer. Quimby had developed a belief system that included the tenet that illness originated in the mind as a consequence of erroneous beliefs and that a mind open to God's wisdom could overcome any illness.[10] His basic premise was: The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in [...] Therefore, if your mind had been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory or truth, I come in contact with your enemy, and restore you to health and happiness. This I do partly mentally, and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impression and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure. During the late 19th century, the metaphysical healing practices of Quimby mingled with the "Mental Science" of Warren Felt Evans, a Swedenborgian minister. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, has sometimes been cited as having used Quimby as inspiration for theology. Eddy was a patient of Quimby's and shared his view that disease is rooted in a mental cause. Because of its theism, Christian Science differs from the teachings of Quimby. In the late 19th century, New Thought was propelled by a number of spiritual thinkers and philosophers and emerged through a variety of religious denominations and churches, particularly the Unity Church and Church of Divine Science (established in 1889 and 1888, respectively), followed by Religious Science (the Institute of Religious Science and Philosophy was established in 1927). Many of its early teachers and students were women; notable among the founders of the movement were Emma Curtis Hopkins, known as the "teacher of teachers", Myrtle Fillmore, Malinda Cramer, and Nona L. Brooks; with many of its churches and community centers led by women, from the 1880s to today. Alongside these ecclesiastical developments, others like Henry Wood in Boston, provided some of the movement’s most systematic literary foundations. In works such as The Symphony of Life, and New Thought Simplified, Wood articulated a structured philosophy of mental causation grounded in disciplined thought and constructive affirmation. His writings presented New Thought not merely as devotional religion but as a practical mental science, emphasizing inner law, character formation, and the deliberate direction of consciousness. Through these works the principles of mental discipline and self-transformation became central to the movement’s broader development. Suggestive Therapeutics and Auto-Suggestion. The psychological framework that later entered New Thought through the language of affirmation, mental discipline, and self-transformation can be traced to the clinical work of the nineteenth century Nancy School in France. Physicians such as Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim advanced the position that hypnosis was a normal psychological state governed by suggestion rather than by occult force. In the United States, these clinical principles were first institutionalized at the Chicago School of Psychology, founded in 1896 by Herbert A. Parkyn. At a time when much of New Thought operated through churches and independent lecturers, the Chicago School framed mental influence in clinical and instructional terms, using the language of scientific psychology rather than theology. Its teaching emphasized that suggestion operated according to fixed mental laws that were termed the Law of Suggestion. Emerging from the Chicago School of Psychology were figures who carried its teachings far beyond the clinic and classroom. Among the most prominent was William Walker Atkinson, who translated the school’s clinical principles of suggestive therapeutics into broader concepts of thought force, personal magnetism, and will development, presenting them as practical methods for everyday life rather than techniques confined to therapeutic treatment. Atkinson also joined with another of the school’s leading protégés, Sydney B. Flower, to establish New Thought magazine, which became the most influential journal of the movement. In 1905, Parkyn’s Auto-Suggestion set out the first sustained, systematic presentation of self-directed suggestion in American mental science. Building on the mental science formulations advanced by his close family friend Henry Wood in Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893), Parkyn framed repeated affirmation and disciplined thought as a deliberate method for reshaping character, health, and circumstance, supplying what became the practical backbone of New Thought’s self-empowerment ethos. Growth. New Thought is also largely a movement of the printed word. Prentice Mulford, through writing Your Forces and How to Use Them, a series of essays published during 1886–1892, was pivotal in the ...
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    7 mins
  • 08 - Twentieth century.

    08 - Twentieth century.
    Apr 4 2026
    Twentieth century. After the philosophy of New Thought was established, several individuals and organizations rose to prominence to promote the beliefs. However, there is no consensus on who founded the New Thought movement. Charles Brodie Patterson has been credited. Patterson, a Canadian expatriate who lived in New York City, was labelled the movement's leader when he died in the early 20th century. One of Eddy's early Christian Science students, Ursula Gestefeld, created a philosophy called the "Science of Being" after Eddy kicked her out of her church. Science of Being groups eventually formed the Church of New Thought in 1904, which was the first group to refer itself as such. While Julius Dresser, and later his son Horatio, are sometimes credited as founders of New Thought as a named movement, others share this title. Horatio wrote A History of the New Thought Movement, which was published in 1919, and named his father an essential figure in founding the movement. Emma Curtis Hopkins is also considered a founder. Hopkins, called the "Teacher of Teachers", was a former student of Mary Baker Eddy. Because of her role in teaching several influential leaders who emerge later in New Thought movement history, she is also given credit as a mother of the movement. Inspired by medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore, Hopkins viewed the Christian Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Mother-Spirit. She wrote High Mysticism and Scientific Christian Mental Practice and founded the Emma Hopkins College of Metaphysical Science, which graduated a large number of women. Numerous churches and groups developed within the New Thought movement. Emma Curtis Hopkins is called the "Teacher of Teachers" because of the number of people she taught who went on to found groups within the New Thought movement. After learning from Hopkins, Annie Rix Militz went on to found the Home of Truth. Another student, Malinda E. Cramer became a co-founder of Divine Science, along with Mrs. Bingham, who later taught Nona L. Brooks, who co-founded Divine Science with Cramer. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who went to Hopkins together, went on to found the Unity School of Christianity afterwards. Authors learned from Hopkins, too, including Dr. H. Emilie Cady, writer of the Unity textbook Lessons in Truth; Ella Wheeler Wilcox, New Thought poet; and Elizabeth Towne. Considerably later, Ernest Holmes, who established Religious Science and founded the United Centers for Spiritual Living. The Unity Church is the largest New Thought church today, with thousands of members around the world. It was formed by the Fillmores in 1891. Divine Science was also founded in the late 19th century by Melinda Cramer and Nona Brooks. The United Centers for Spiritual Living was founded by Ernest Holmes in 1927. A similar organization, the Society for Jewish Science, originally conceived by Rabbi Alfred G. Moses in the early 1900s, the movement was institutionalized in 1922 with Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein's. The New Thought movement extends around the world. The largest denomination outside the U.S., Seicho-no-Ie, was founded in 1930 by Masaharu Taniguchi in Japan. Today, it has missions around the world, including the U.S. Smaller churches, including the Home of Truth founded in 1899 in Alameda, California continue successfully,[24] as does the Agape International Spiritual Center, a megachurch led by Rev. Dr. Michael Beckwith in the Los Angeles-area. Alongside these church-based developments, a parallel stream of New Thought took shape through the systematization of mental suggestion and psychological discipline. Henry Wood contributed significantly to this strand in works such as Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography (1893) and later New Thought Simplified, in which he articulated a structured philosophy of mental causation grounded in disciplined thought and constructive affirmation. Wood’s writings presented New Thought not only as a devotional system but as a practical mental science centered on the deliberate direction of consciousness. This movement toward a disciplined and systematized mental science within New Thought found institutional expression in the Chicago School of Psychology, founded by Herbert A. Parkyn in 1896. It was the first American institution devoted specifically to the systematic teaching of hypnotism, suggestion, and auto-suggestion. The school framed mind cure as operating according to the Law of Suggestion, rather than supernatural power. Its development of auto-suggestion as a system of self-directed affirmations aimed at reshaping character and circumstance helped define the practical core of New Thought’s self-empowerment emphasis. Among the Chicago School’s most prominent graduates was William Walker Atkinson, who worked as associate editor with Parkyn's Suggestion magazine in translating clinical suggestive principles into broader concepts of thought force, personal magnetism, and will development...
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  • 07 - History of New Thought.

    07 - History of New Thought.
    Apr 4 2026
    History of New Thought.
    The history of New Thought started in the 1830s, with roots in the United States and England. As a spiritual movement with roots in metaphysical beliefs, New Thought has helped guide a variety of social changes throughout the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st centuries. Psychologist and philosopher William James labelled New Thought "the religion of healthy-mindedness" in his study on religion and science, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

    Roots.
    Rooted in universal science, early New Thought leaders shared a Romantic interest between metaphysics and American Christianity. In addition to New Thought, Christian Science, transcendental movement, theosophy, and other movements were born from similar interests, all in the early long nineteenth century. John Locke's definition of ideas as anything that existed in the mind that could be expressed through words;[4] and the transcendentalist belief that ideal spirituality "transcends" the physical and is realized only through individual intuition, instead of through religion.
    Before anyone practiced New Thought as a set of beliefs there were a few influential figures whose teaching later contributed to the movement. The founder of the 18th century New Church, Emanuel Swedenborg, extended clear influence on many authors' New Thought writings on the Bible. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also influential, as his philosophical movement of transcendentalism is incorporated throughout New Thought. J. Gordon Melton notes that while "references to P. P. Quimby, whom many see as the founder of New Thought, are almost impossible to find in the early New Thought writers, references to Emerson are numerous." Franz Mesmer's work on hypnosis drove the work of Phineas Quimby, who was influenced in part by hearing a lecture by Charles Poyen.
    Phineas P. Quimby is widely recognized as the founder of the New Thought movement. Born in Lebanon, New Hampshire but raised in Belfast, Maine, Quimby learned about the power of the mind to heal through hypnosis when he observed Charles Poyen's work. About 1840, Quimby began to practice hypnotism, or mesmerism as it was called. Through this practice and further study, he developed the view that illness is a matter of the mind. He opened an office for mental healing in Portland in 1859.
    Calvinistic Baptist ministerial candidate Julius Dresser and his future wife Annetta Seabury Dresser came from Waterville, Maine to be healed by Quimby in 1860. They were healed in a short time. In 1882, Dresser and Annetta (his wife by then) began promoting what they called the "Quimby System of Mental Treatment of Diseases" in Boston. Their son Horatio figures importantly as New Thought's first historian. Horatio, a popular lecturer, edited The Quimby Manuscripts, which Quimby wrote between 1846 and 1865.
    In 1862 Mary Baker Eddy, originally a Congregational Church member, came to Quimby hoping to be healed from lifelong ill-health. In later years Eddy went on to found Christian Science. Dresser had started the controversy around the same time that a number of people who would become important figures in the New Thought movement were leaving Christian Science, and so even though they had not read Quimby's writings, they adopted him as a figurehead leader. After Horatio Dresser published his book on the history of the movement which repeated the claim, it was rarely challenged within New Thought.
    A forme r Methodist turned Swedenborgian minister named Warren Evans came to Quimby for healing in 1863. When he was healed shortly after, he started writing New Thought literature immediately. One source names him as the first person to publish a clear philosophy based on Quimby's practices.
    Prentice Mulford was pivotal in the development of New Thought thinking. From his writings in the White Cross Library, including Your Forces and How to Use Them, the terms "New Thought" and the "Law of Attraction" first came to fruition.


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    4 mins
  • 06 - New Thought.

    06 - New Thought.
    Apr 4 2026
    New Thought.
    The New Thought movement (also Higher Thought) is a new religious movement that coalesced in the United States in the early 19th century. New Thought was seen by its adherents as succeeding "ancient thought", accumulated wisdom and philosophy from a variety of origins, such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures[citation needed] and their related belief systems, primarily regarding the interaction among thought, belief, consciousness in the human mind, and the effects of these within and beyond the human mind. Though no direct line of transmission is traceable, many adherents to New Thought in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed to be direct descendants of those systems.
    Although there have been many leaders and various offshoots of the New Thought philosophy, the origins of New Thought have often been traced back to Phineas Quimby, or even as far back as Franz Mesmer, who was one of the first European thinkers to link one's mental state to physical condition. Many of these groups are incorporated into the International New Thought Alliance. The contemporary New Thought movement is a loosely allied group of religious denominations, authors, philosophers, and individuals who share a set of beliefs concerning metaphysics, positive thinking, the law of attraction, healing, life force, creative visualization, and personal power.
    New Thought holds that Infinite Intelligence, or God, is everywhere, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect.
    Although New Thought is neither monolithic nor doctrinaire, in general, modern-day adherents of New Thought share some core beliefs:
    1 - God or Infinite Intelligence is "supreme, universal, and everlasting";
    2 - divinity dwells within each person, that all people are spiritual beings;
    3 -"the highest spiritual principle [is] loving one another unconditionally... and teaching and healing one another"; and
    4 - "our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living".
    William James used the term "New Thought" as synonymous with the "Mind cure movement", in which he included many sects with diverse origins, such as idealism and Hinduism.

    Overview.
    William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), described New Thought:
    For the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the "Mind-cure movement." There are various sects of this "New Thought," to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.
    It is an optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers – a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings.
    One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.

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  • 05 - Notable supporters.

    05 - Notable supporters.
    Apr 2 2026
    Notable supporters.
    - In 1897, Ralph Waldo Trine wrote In Tune with the Infinite. In the second paragraph of chapter 9 he writes, "The Law of Attraction works unceasingly throughout the universe, and the one great and never changing fact in connection with it is, as we have found, that like attracts like."
    - In 1904, Thomas Troward, a strong influence in the New Thought movement, gave a lecture in which he claimed that thought precedes physical form and "the action of Mind plants that nucleus which, if allowed to grow undisturbed, will eventually attract to itself all the conditions necessary for its manifestation in outward visible form."
    - In 1905, Elizabeth Towne in her book You and Your Forces or The Constitution of Man, writes, "The Law of Attraction governs in all knowledge," "Desire is the Law of Attraction, become conscious through recognition," and "The correspondence of not only bodily diseases, but outward experiences, to the temperament, is absolutely fixed. It is governed by unalterable law-the Law of Attraction."
    - In 1906, in the title of his New Thought movement book William Walker Atkinson used the phrase Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World, stating that "like attracts like".
    - In his 1910 The Science of Getting Rich. Wallace D. Wattles espoused similar principles – that simply believing in the object of one's desire and focusing on it will lead to that object or goal being realized on the material plane (Wattles claims in the Preface and later chapters of this book that his premise stems from the monistic Hindu view that God provides everything and can deliver what is focused on). The book also claims negative thinking will manifest negative results.
    - In 1915, Theosophical author William Quan Judge used the phrase in The Ocean of Theosophy.
    - In 1919, another theosophical author Annie Besant discussed the law of attraction. Besant compared her version of it to gravitation, and said that the law represented a form of karma.
    - Napoleon Hill published two books on the theme. The first, The Law of Success in 16 Lessons (1928), directly and repeatedly references the law of attraction and proposes that it operates by use of radio waves transmitted by the brain. The second, Think and Grow Rich (1937), went on to sell 100 million copies by 2015. Hill insisted on the importance of controlling one's own thoughts in order to achieve success, as well as the energy that thoughts have and their ability to attract other thoughts. He mentions a "secret" to success and promises to indirectly describe it at least once in every chapter. It is never named and he says that discovering it on one's own is far more beneficial. Many people have argued over what it actually is; some claim it is the law of attraction. Hill states the "secret" is mentioned no fewer than a hundred times, yet reference to "attract" is used less than 30 times in the text.
    - In 1944, Neville Goddard published Feeling Is the Secret, which promoted creative visualization and emotional feeling as a form of meditation to receive desires from the universe. His second book on the topic, Out of This World (1949), explored the reasoning behind the so-called "feeling" and how assumptions if repeated enough can "harden into fact". His third book, The Power of Awareness (1952), Goddard explains of the concept of "I am" to reason that the human subconscious mind has a "god-given" ability to manifest and create reality if it is impressed by the feeling.
    - In 1960, W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill co-wrote Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude.
    - In his 1988 The American Myth of Success, Richard Weiss states that the principle of "non-resistance" is a popular concept of the New Thought movement and is taught in conjunction with the law of attraction.
    - The 2008, Esther and Jerry Hicks' book Money and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Health, Wealth & Happiness appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list.

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  • 04 - Descriptions.

    04 - Descriptions.
    Apr 2 2026
    Descriptions. Proponents believe that the law of attraction is always in operation and that it brings to each person the conditions and experiences that they predominantly think about, or which they desire or expect.Charles Haanel wrote in The Master Key System (1912): The law of attraction will certainly and unerringly bring to you the conditions, environment, and experiences in life, corresponding with your habitual, characteristic, predominant mental attitude. Ralph Trine wrote in In Tune with the Infinite (1897): The law of attraction works universally on every plane of action, and we attract whatever we desire or expect. If we desire one thing and expect another, we become like houses divided against themselves, which are quickly brought to desolation. Determine resolutely to expect only what you desire, then you will attract only what you wish for. In her 2006 documentary, The Secret, Rhonda Byrne emphasized thinking about what each person wants to obtain, but also to infuse the thought with the maximum possible amount of emotion. She claims the combination of thought and feeling is what attracts the desire. Another similar book is James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy, which says reality can be manifested by man. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, says readers can achieve seemingly impossible goals by learning how to bring the mind itself under control. The Power by Rhonda Byrne and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho are similar. While there are personal testimonies that claim that methods based on The Secret and the law of attraction have worked for them, a number of skeptics have criticized Byrne's film and book. The New York Times Book Review called The Secret pseudoscience and an "illusion of knowledge". Philosophical and religious basis. The New Thought concept of the law of attraction is rooted in ideas that come from various philosophical and religious traditions. In particular, it has been inspired by Hermeticism, New England transcendentalism, specific verses from the Bible, and Hinduism. Hermeticism influenced the development of European thought in the Renaissance. Its ideas were transmitted partly through alchemy. In the 18th century, Franz Mesmer studied the works of alchemists such as Paracelsus and van Helmont. Van Helmont was a 17th-century Flemish physician who proclaimed the curative powers of the imagination. This led Mesmer to develop his ideas about Animal magnetism which Phineas Quimby, the founder of New Thought, studied. The Transcendentalist movement developed in the United States immediately before the emergence of New Thought and is thought to have had a great influence on it. George Ripley, an important figure in that movement, stated that its leading idea was "the supremacy of mind over matter". New Thought authors often quote certain verses from the Bible in the context of the law of attraction. An example is Mark 11:24: "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours." In the late 19th century Swami Vivekananda traveled to the United States and gave lectures on Hinduism. These talks greatly influenced the New Thought movement and in particular, William Walker Atkinson who was one of New Thought's pioneers. Criticism. The law of attraction has been popularized in the early 21st century by books and films such as The Secret. The 2006 film and the subsequent book use interviews with New Thought authors and speakers to explain the principles of the proposed metaphysical law that one can attract anything that one thinks about consistently. Writing for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Mary Carmichael and Ben Radford wrote that "neither the film nor the book has any basis in scientific reality", and that its premise contains "an ugly flipside: if you have an accident or disease, it's your fault". Others have questioned the references to modern scientific theory, and have maintained, for example, that the law of attraction misrepresents the electrical activity of brainwaves. Victor Stenger and Leon Lederman were critical of attempts to use quantum mysticism to bridge any unexplained or seemingly implausible effects, believing these to be traits of modern pseudoscience. Skeptical Inquirer magazine criticized the lack of falsifiability and testability of these claims. Critics have asserted that the evidence provided is usually anecdotal and that, because of the self-selecting nature of the positive reports, as well as the subjective nature of any results, these reports are susceptible to confirmation bias and selection bias. Physicist Ali Alousi, for instance, criticized it as unmeasurable and questioned the likelihood that thoughts can affect anything outside the head. The mantra of The Secret, and by extension, the law of attraction, is as follows: positive thoughts and positive visualization will have a direct impact on the self. While positivity can improve ...
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  • 03 - Lucky girl syndrome.

    03 - Lucky girl syndrome.
    Apr 1 2026
    Lucky girl syndrome.
    An incarnation of the law of attraction appearing in the early 2020s is known as lucky girl syndrome. According to Woman's Health this is "the idea that you can attract things you want (like luck, money, love, etc.) by repeating mantras and truly believing things will work out for you." In early 2023 AARP explained that "The newest self-help craze, lucky girl syndrome is Gen Z's spin on books like The Power of Positive Thinking, The Secret and Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want. This year's version, however, puts the emphasis on luck and consistently reminding yourself that the universe is conspiring to make good things happen for you because you are a lucky person." The BBC reported that "There isn't scientific evidence for it... some have labeled it 'smuggest TikTok trend yet'".
    A January 2023 article in CNET explained that "thousands of people across TikTok have posted videos about how this manifestation strategy has changed their lives, bringing them new opportunities they never expected. Manifestation is the concept of thinking things into being -- by believing something enough, it will happen."
    Also in January 2023, Today.com reported that "Different manifestation techniques are taking over TikTok, and 'lucky girl syndrome' is the latest way people claim to achieve the life they desire." It also said that "Videos detailing the power of positive thinking have amassed millions of views on TikTok, and manifestation experts seem to approve." The article also quoted a manifestation coach as saying "the lucky girl mindset is, indeed, a true practice of manifestation", and that it has been around for years.
    As reported by Vox, "If 2020 was the year that TikTokers discovered The Secret – that is, the idea that you can make anything you want happen if you believe in it enough – then the two years that followed are when they've tried to rebrand it into perpetual relevance. Its most recent makeover is something rather ominously called 'lucky girl syndrome...'" The article also reported that "What lucky girl syndrome – and The Secret, and the 'law of attraction', or the 'law of assumption', and prosperity gospel, and any of the other branches of this kind of New Age thinking – really amounts to, though, is 'manifesting', or the practice of repeatedly writing or saying declarative statements in the hopes that they will soon become true." The Vox article concludes "It never hurts to be curious, though. When you come across a shiny new term on TikTok, it's worth interrogating where it came from, and whether the person using it is someone worth listening to. Often, it's not that they're any better at living than you are; they're just better at marketing it."
    Attempting to explain the attraction of lucky girl syndrome, Parents interviewed an LCSW therapist for teens and their families on the subject who opined that "It makes us feel like we're in control of our lives. Gen Z is constantly exposed to bad news, from layoffs to political conflicts to the student loan crisis. It makes sense that they'd be drawn to something that would make them feel a greater sense of agency and control."
    The Conversation warned of the negative side of lucky girl syndrome, saying that what most videos on the topic suggest is "that what you put out to the universe is what you will get in return. So if you think you're poor or unsuccessful, this is what you'll get back. Obviously, this is quite an unhelpful message, which likely won't do much for the self-esteem of people who don't feel particularly lucky – let alone those facing significant hardship."
    Also regarding negative consequences, Harper's Bazaar warned that lucky girl syndrome has much in common with toxic positivity and that "If you try it, and it doesn't work for you, it could become yet another stick to beat yourself with. If you already feel vulnerable or wobbly, this could well be something else that makes you feel bad about yourself... it ignores the fact that life is not fair. And it ignores that some people are more privileged than others. It doesn't take into account the systemic and structural biases and inequalities that exist in the world."


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