When feelings have become the means of thinking in this manner—or we can’t think greater than how we feel—then we’re in the program. Our thinking is how we feel, and our feelings are how we think. What we experience is like a merger of thoughts and feelings—we’re finking or theeling. Since we’re caught in this loop, then our bodies, as the unconscious mind, actually believe they’re living in the same past experience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Our minds and bodies are one, aligned to a destiny predetermined by our unconscious programs. So to change requires being greater than the body and all its emotional memories, addictions, and unconscious habituations—that is, to no longer be defined by the body as the mind.
The repetition of the cycle of thinking and feeling and then feeling and thinking is the conditioning process of the body that the conscious mind delivers. Once the body becomes the mind, that’s called a “habit”—a habit is when your body is the mind. Ninety-five percent of who you are by the time you’re 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, skills, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes that functions like a subconscious automatic computer program.
So 95 percent of who you are is a subconscious or even an unconscious state of being. And that means your conscious mind’s 5 percent is working against the 95 percent of what you’ve memorized subconsciously. You can think positively all you want, but that 5 percent of your mind that’s conscious will feel as if it’s swimming upstream against the current of the other 95 percent of your mind—your unconscious body chemistry that has been remembering and memorizing whatever negativity you’ve been harboring for the past 35 years; that’s mind and body working in opposition. No wonder you don’t get very far when you try to fight that current!
That’s why I called my last book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, because that’s the greatest habit we have to break—thinking, feeling, and behaving in the same way that reinforces the unconscious programs that reflect our personalities and our personal realities. We can’t create a new future while we’re living in our past. It’s simply impossible.
What It Takes to Be Your Own Placebo
Here’s an example that will pull all of this together. I’m intentionally choosing a negative event, because these types of events tend to keep us limited, whereas more successful, empowering, and uplifting events usually help us create a better future. (That process will become clear soon.)
So let’s say that you had a horrific past experience with public speaking that scarred you emotionally. (Feel free to substitute any emotionally scarring experience of your choice here.) Because of that experience, you now fear standing up to talk in front of a group of people. It makes you feel insecure, anxious, and anything but confident. Just thinking about looking out over a meeting room of even 20 people causes your throat to close up, your hands to go cold and clammy, your heart to race, your face and neck to flush, your stomach to twist, and your brain to freeze.
All of these reactions come under the jurisdiction of your autonomic nervous system, the nervous system that functions subconsciously—below your conscious control. Think of autonomic as automatic—it’s the part of the nervous system that regulates digestion, hormones, circulation, body temperature, and so on without your having any conscious control over them. You can’t decide to change your heart rate, alter blood flow to your extremities to cool them off, heat up your face and neck, change the metabolic secretions of your digestive enzymes, or shut off millions of nerve cells from firing on command. Try as you might to consciously change any one of these functions, you’ll probably find that you won’t be able to do it.
So when your body makes these autonomic physiological changes, it’s because you have associated the future thought of standing in front of an audience delivering a presentation with the past emotional memory of your flawed public-speaking experience. And when that future thought, idea, or possibility is consistently associated with the past feelings of anxiety, failure, or embarrassment, in time the mind will condition the body to respond automatically to that feeling. This is how we continuously move into familiar states of being—our thoughts and feelings become one with the past because we can’t think greater than how we feel.
Now let’s take a closer look at how that works inside your brain. The particular event that was embossed and patterned neurologically as a past memory (remember, experience enriches brain circuitry) becomes physically wired in your brain just like a footprint. As a consequence, you can retrace your steps and recall the negative public-speaking experience as a thought. In order for you to remember it on command, the experience must have had a significant enough emotional charge as well. So you can also emotionally bring to mind all of the feelings related to your foiled attempt to be a successful orator, because it seems as though you were chemically altered from the experience.
I want to point out that feelings and emotions are the end products of past experiences. When you’re caught up in an experience, your senses capture the event and then relay all of that vital information back to your brain through five different sensory pathways. Once all of that new data reaches the brain, mobs of nerve cells organize into fresh networks to reflect the novel external event. The moment those circuits jell, the brain makes a chemical to signal the body and alter its physiology. That chemical is called a feeling or an emotion. Thus, we can remember past events, because we can remind ourselves of how they felt.
So when your lecture went amiss, all of the information that your five senses were picking up in your external environment changed how you were feeling in your inner environment. The information that your senses were processing—the sight of the faces in the audience, the expansiveness of the room, and the bright lights above your head; the echoing sound of the microphone and the deafening silence after your first attempted joke; the immediate rise in the room’s temperature the moment you started talking; the smell of your old cologne evaporating from your own perspiration—changed your inner state of being. And the moment you correlated this unique event in your outer world of the senses (the cause) with the changes going on in your inner world of thoughts and feelings (the effect), you created a memory. You associated a cause with an effect—and your own conditioning process began.
So after the self-inflicted torture of that day, which fortunately ended with no rotten fruits or vegetables being thrown in your direction, you drove home. On the ride, you kept recalling the event over and over again. And to varying degrees, every time you reminded yourself (which is exactly that: reproducing the same level of mind) of your experience, you produced the same chemical changes in your brain and body. In a sense, you repeatedly reaffirmed the past and continued the conditioning process further.
Because your body acts as your unconscious mind, it didn’t know the difference between the actual event in your life that created the emotional state and the emotions you created by thought alone when you remembered the event. Your body believed that it was living in the same experience over and over again, even though you were actually alone in the comfort of your car, and the body responded physiologically as though you were indeed reliving that experience in the present time. As you fired and wired the circuits in your brain that were derived from the thoughts related to that experience, you were physically maintaining the synaptic connections, and you were now creating even more lasting connections within those networks—you were creating a long-term memory.
Once you arrived home, you told your partner, your friends, and maybe even your mother about the events of that day. As you described the trauma in grievous detail, you were working yourself into an emotional froth. As you also relived the emotions of the incident, you chemically conditioned your body to the day’s past event. You physiologically trained your body to become your personal history—subconsciously, unconsciously, and automatically.
In the days that followed, you were moody. People couldn’t help noticing this, and every time someone asked you, “What’s wrong?” you just couldn�
��t resist. You opportunistically took them up on the invitation to become more addicted to the rush of chemistry from your past. The mood created from that experience was just one long emotional reaction lasting for days. When weeks of feeling the same way every time you remembered the event turned into months, even years, it became a prolonged emotional reaction. It’s now not only a part of your temperament, character, and nature, but also your personality. It’s who you are.
If someone else asks you to talk in front of a group again, you automatically cringe, shrink, and become anxious. Your external environment is controlling your internal environment, and you’re unable to be greater than it. As you expect the thought that your future (a public-speaking opening) will be more like the feeling of your past (unlivable torment), just like magic, your body, as the mind, automatically and subconsciously responds. Try as you might, it seems as if your conscious mind can gain no control over it. In a matter of seconds, a host of conditioned responses from your brain and body’s own pharmacy manifest—profuse sweating, dry mouth, weak knees, nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, and uncontrollable fatigue—all from a single thought that changes your physiology. Sounds like the placebo to me.
If you could, you’d turn down the opportunity to do the talk, saying something like, “I am not a public speaker,” “I am insecure in front of people,” “I am a bad presenter,” or “I am too afraid to talk in front of large audiences.” Whenever you say, “I am . . .” (insert your own words here), what you are declaring is that your mind and body are aligned to a future or that your thoughts and feelings are one with your destiny. You’re reinforcing a memorized state of being.
If, by chance, you were then asked why you chose to be defined by your past, as well as your own limitation, I’m certain that you’d tell a story equal to your past memories and emotions—reaffirming yourself to be that way. You’d probably even embellish it a little. From a biological level, what you’d really be proclaiming is that you were altered physically, chemically, and emotionally from that event several years ago and haven’t changed much since then. You’ve chosen to be defined by your own limitation.
In this example, one could say that you’re enslaved by your body (because it has now become the mind), you’re trapped by the conditions in your environment (because the experience of people and things at a certain place and time are influencing how you think, act, and feel), and you’re lost in time (because by living in the past and anticipating the same future, your mind and body are never in the present moment). So in order to change your current state of being, you’d have to be greater than these three elements: your body, your environment, and time.
So, then, thinking back to the beginning of this chapter, where you read that the placebo is created from three elements—conditioning, expectation, and meaning—you can now see that you are your own placebo. Why? Because all three elements come into play in the previous example.
First, like a talented animal trainer, you’ve conditioned your body into a subconscious state of being where mind and body are one—your thoughts and feelings have merged—and your body has now been programmed to automatically, biologically, and physiologically be the mind by thought alone. And anytime a stimulus from your external environment is presented to you—like an opportunity to teach—you’ve conditioned your body, just as Pavlov conditioned his dogs, to subconsciously and automatically respond to the mind of the past experience.
Since most of the placebo studies show that a single thought could activate the body’s autonomic nervous system and produce significant physiological changes, then you’re regulating your internal world by simply associating a thought with an emotion. All of your subconscious, autonomic systems are being reinforced neurochemically by the familiar feelings and bodily sensations related to your fear—and your biology perfectly reflects it.
Second, if your expectation is that your future will be like your past, then you are not only thinking in the past, but also selecting a known future based only on your past and emotionally embracing that event until your body (as the unconscious mind) believes that it’s living in that future in the present moment. All of your attention is on a known, predictable reality, which causes you to limit any new choices, behaviors, experiences, and emotions. You’re unconsciously forecasting your future by physiologically clinging to the past.
Third, if you assign meaning or conscious intention to an action, the result is amplified. What you’re telling yourself on a daily basis (in this case, that you’re not a good speaker and that public speaking elicits a panic reaction) is what has meaning to you. You’ve become susceptible to your own autosuggestions. And if your present knowledge is based on your own conclusions from past experiences, then without any new knowledge, you’ll always keep creating the outcome that’s equal to your mind. Change your meaning and change your intention, and just as the hotel maids in the study from the last chapter did, you change the results.
So whether you’ve been trying to effect positive change to create a new state of being or you’ve been running on autopilot and staying stuck in the same old state of being, the truth is that you’ve always been your own placebo.
Chapter Four
The Placebo Effect in the Body
On a crisp September day in 1981, a group of eight men in their 70s and 80s climbed into a few vans headed two hours north of Boston to a monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The men were about to take part in a five-day retreat where they were asked to pretend that they were young again—or at least 22 years younger than they were at the time. The retreat was organized by a team of researchers, headed by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, Ph.D., who would take another group of eight elderly men to the same place the following week. The men in the second group, the control group, were asked to actively reminisce about being 22 years younger but not to pretend that they weren’t their current age.
When the first group of men arrived at the monastery, they found themselves surrounded by all sorts of environmental cues to help them re-create an earlier age. They flipped through old issues of Life and the Saturday Evening Post, they watched movies and television shows popular in 1959, and they listened to recordings of Perry Como and Nat King Cole on the radio. They also talked about “current” events, such as Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, and even the feats of baseball star Mickey Mantle and boxing great Floyd Patterson. All of these elements were cleverly designed to help the men imagine that they were really 22 years younger.
After each five-day retreat, the researchers took several measurements and compared them to those they’d taken before the start of the study. The bodies of the men from both groups were physiologically younger, structurally as well as functionally, although those in the first study group (who pretended they were younger) improved significantly more than the control group, who’d merely reminisced.1
The researchers discovered improvements in height, weight, and gait. The men grew taller as their posture straightened, and their joints became more flexible and their fingers lengthened as their arthritis diminished. Their eyesight and hearing got better. Their grip strength improved. Their memory sharpened, and they scored better on tests of mental cognition (with the first group improving their score by 63 percent compared to 44 percent for the control group). The men literally became younger in those five days, right in front of the researchers’ eyes.
Langer reported, “At the end of the study, I was playing football—touch, but still football—with these men, some of whom gave up their canes.”2
How did that happen? Clearly, the men were able to turn on the circuits in their brains that reminded them of who they had been 22 years ago, and then their body chemistry somehow magically responded. They didn’t just feel younger; they physically became younger, as evidenced by measurement after measurement. The change wasn’t just in their minds; it was in their bodies.
But what happened in their bodies to pr
oduce such striking physical transformations? What could be responsible for all of these measurable changes in physical structure and function? The answer is their genes—which aren’t as immutable as you might think. So let’s take some time to look at what exactly genes are and how they operate.
Demystifying DNA
Imagine a ladder or a zipper twisted into a spiral, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what deoxyribonucleic acid (better known as DNA) looks like. Stored in the nucleus of every living cell in our bodies, DNA contains the raw information, or instructions, that makes us who and what we are (although as we’ll soon see, those instructions are not an unchangeable blueprint that our cells must follow for our entire lives). Each half of that DNA zipper contains corresponding nucleic acids that, together, are called base pairs, numbering about three billion per cell. Groups of long sequences of these nucleic acids are called genes.
Genes are unique little structures. If you were to take the DNA out of the nucleus of just one cell in your body and stretch it out from end to end, it would be six feet long. If you took all the DNA out of your entire body and stretched it out from end to end, it would go to the sun and back 150 times.3 But if you took all the DNA out of the almost seven billion people on the planet and scrunched it together, it would fit in a space as small as a grain of rice.
You Are the Placebo Page 11