Can your subconscious mind bring you money? Murphy’s promise, checked

What did Joseph Murphy promise about money?

Chapters 9 and 10 of the book are about money (their titles use words this site does not repeat as promises). The thesis is stated in the first lines of chapter 9: if you are having financial difficulties, “it means you have not convinced your subconscious mind that you will always have plenty and some to spare.” Hard work, he adds, is not the way: “You do not have to strive or slave hard.”

The method is repetition. Murphy tells readers to repeat two words for about five minutes, three or four times a day, and at bedtime to repeat a single word, his word for great abundance of money, “quietly, easily, and feelingly. Do this over and over again, just like a lullaby.” Chapter 10 adds a longer line to say several times a day: “I like money, I love it, I use it wisely, constructively, and judiciously.”

He also makes promises that go well beyond mood. On investments, he says that if you repeat that “Infinite intelligence governs and watches over all my financial transactions”, “you will be protected from loss, as you will be prompted to sell your securities or holdings before any loss accrues to you.” On pay, he warns that an employee who silently resents being underpaid will be let go, and concludes: “Actually, you dismissed yourself.”

How much of Murphy’s money advice is about action?

Both chapters end with a numbered summary, 15 points for chapter 9 and 14 for chapter 10. We sorted the 29 points by what they ask you to do, reading a transcription of the 1963 text on 22 October 2026. The sorting is ours, and a different reader could move a point or two between the first three rows, but the last row would not change: none of the 29 points names an action with money in the world, such as earning, spending, saving, budgeting or learning a skill.

What does the research say about thinking your way to money?

No study has tested Murphy’s claim directly, and it is hard to see how one could: the promise is that money arrives by routes nobody can trace. What researchers have tested are its parts, and the results run the other way.

Picturing the outcome. In four studies, Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer (2002) separated positive expectations, judging a good outcome likely, from positive fantasies, enjoying images of it. Expectations predicted more effort and better results; fantasies predicted the reverse, and one of the four groups was graduates looking for a job. Effort and results were measured weeks to months later, up to two years. The step-by-step dream job guide in this series goes through that study.

Upbeat talk about the future. Timur Sevincer and colleagues (2014) found that the more the economy pages of USA Today talked positively about the future during the 2007–2009 crisis, the more the Dow Jones fell over the following week and month; the data are correlational, and the authors draw no causal conclusion from them.

Money on the mind. A whole research area tested whether reminders of money, seen or handled without much thought, change what people do. A 2019 meta-analysis by Paul Lodder and colleagues pooled 246 experiments. Published studies showed a sizeable average effect (g = 0.42), unpublished ones a much smaller one (g = 0.15), and the 47 preregistered experiments, where the analysis is fixed in advance, an effect of g = 0.01, not distinguishable from zero. The authors note that 38 of those 47 measured one specific attitude, so the gap needs care. Still, the evidence for money acting quietly on behaviour from the back of the mind is weak, and these studies were about what people think and do, not about money arriving.

Where Murphy was ahead of his time, and where he does harm

One passage reads well today. Murphy reports people who said for months that they were prosperous and “felt within that they were lying to themselves”, and he advises a line that “will not arouse any argument”: “By day and by night I am being prospered in all of my interests.” Forty-six years later, Wood, Perunovic and Lee (2009) found that people with low self-esteem felt worse after repeating a flattering statement about themselves. A line has to be believable to help, as Murphy saw.

Other passages do harm. Calling poverty “a disease of the mind”, or telling an underpaid worker that being let go was self-inflicted, puts the cause of money trouble entirely inside the person. Pay, prices, family money, health and the job market weigh on money far more than any inner state; “Does believing in yourself help with money?” in this series looks at what belief predicts and what it cannot move. And the promise that inner guidance will tell you when to sell your investments is a reason to be careful with the whole chapter: a feeling is not a selling signal, and this page gives no investment advice.

What to keep from Murphy’s money chapters

Each idea below is Murphy’s, followed by what the research says and the version we suggest. The version is a practice for attention and habit, not a route to an amount of money.

A money scene for tonight, rewritten as a step

Dream Architect’s Money & security area has 4 pre-written scenes, among 84 in 21 areas (counted from the app’s content on 22 October 2026). All 4 picture an outcome: turning the key of a house by the sea, paying for a coffee at the airport without checking the price, sending a monthly gift to a cause, unpacking in a second house. They can be pleasant to borrow on a tired night. For practice, the research above favours a scene of something you do.

Here is an illustrative example, not a real person. At “The moment”, choose “Write my own moment” and keep to the hint, a few words in the present tense: “Sunday, 7 p.m. I open my banking app, set up a small transfer for payday, and close the laptop.” At “The feeling”, Relief or Quiet confidence fits better than a jolt of excitement. The next day, do the transfer, whatever the amount. The scene rehearses a step you control; it does not promise what the step will lead to.

For the next layer, three pages in this series go further: how to make saving automatic (“How to reprogram your mind for money”), what the brain does with money (“Train your brain for money”), and how to test a money belief before you rewrite it (“How to overcome negative beliefs about money and jobs”).

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