You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

  The speed of these changes can be truly remarkable. In just three months, a group of 31 men with low-risk prostate cancer were able to upregulate 48 genes (mostly dealing with tumor suppression) and downregulate 453 genes (mostly dealing with tumor promotion) by following an intensive nutrition and lifestyle regimen.14 The men, enrolled in a study by Dean Ornish, M.D., at the University of California at San Francisco, lost weight and reduced their abdominal obesity, blood pressure, and lipid profile over the course of the study. Ornish noted, “It is not really so much about risk-factor reduction or preventing something bad from happening. These changes can occur so quickly you don’t have to wait years to see the benefits.”15

  Even more impressive are the number of epigenetic changes made over a six-month period in a Swedish study of 23 slightly overweight, healthy men who went from being relatively sedentary to attending spinning and aerobics classes an average of just under twice per week. Researchers at Lund University discovered that the men had epigenetically altered 7,000 genes—almost 30 percent of all the genes in the entire human genome!16

  These epigenetic variations may even be inherited by our children and then passed on to our grandchildren.17 The first researcher to show this was Michael Skinner, Ph.D., who was director of the Center for Reproductive Biology at Washington State University. In 2005, Skinner led a study that exposed pregnant rats to pesticides.18 The male pups of the exposed mother rats had higher rates of infertility and decreased sperm production, with epigenetic changes in two genes. These changes were also present in about 90 percent of the males in each of the four generations that followed, even though none of these other rats were exposed to any pesticides.

  Our experiences from our external environment are only part of the story, however. As we’ve been learning, how we assign meaning to those experiences includes a barrage of physical, mental, emotional, and chemical responses that also activate genes. How we perceive and interpret the data we receive from our senses as factual information—whether that information is actually true or not—and the meaning we give it produce significant biological changes on a genetic level. Thus, our genes interact with our conscious awareness in complex relationships. We could say that meaning is continually affecting the neural structures that influence who we are on the microscopic level, which then influences who we are on the macroscopic level.

  The study of epigenetics also raises the question: What if nothing is changing in your external environment? What if you do the same things with the same people at exactly the same time every day—things leading to the same experiences that produce the same emotions that signal the same genes in the same way?

  We could say that as long as you perceive your life through the lens of the past and react to the conditions with the same neural architecture and from the same level of mind, you’re headed toward a very specific, predetermined genetic destiny. In addition, what you believe about yourself, your life, and the choices you make as a result of those beliefs also keeps sending the same messages to the same genes.

  Only when the cell is ignited in a new way, by new information, can it create thousands of variations of the same gene to rewrite a new expression of proteins—which changes your body. You may not be able to control all the elements in your outer world, but you can manage many aspects of your inner world. Your beliefs, your perceptions, and how you interact with your external environment have an influence on your internal environment, which is still the external environment of the cell. This means that you—not your preprogrammed biology—hold the keys to your genetic destiny. It’s just a matter of finding the right key that fits into the right lock to unleash your potential. So why not see your genes for what they really are? Providers of possibility, resources of unlimited potential, a code system of personal commands—in truth, they’re nothing short of tools for transformation, which literally means “changing form.”

  Stress Keeps Us Living in Survival Mode

  Stress is one of the biggest causes of epigenetic change, because it knocks your body out of balance. It comes in three forms: physical stress (trauma), chemical stress (toxins), and emotional stress (fear, worry, being overwhelmed, and so on). Each type can set off more than 1,400 chemical reactions and produce more than 30 hormones and neurotransmitters. When that chemical cascade of stress hormones is triggered, your mind influences your body through the autonomic nervous system and you experience the ultimate mind-body connection.

  Ironically, feeling stressed was designed to be adaptive. All organisms in nature, including humans, are programmed to deal with short-term stress so that they’ll have the resources they need for emergency situations. When you sense a threat in your external environment, the fight-or-flight response in your sympathetic nervous system (a subsystem of your autonomic nervous system) is activated, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase, your muscles tense, and hormones like adrenaline and cortisol shoot through your body to prepare you to either flee or face your foe in battle.

  If you’re being chased by a pack of wild, hungry wolves or a party of violent warriors, and you outrun them, your body will return to homeostasis (its normal, balanced state) soon after you reach safety. That’s the way our bodies were designed to operate when we’re living in survival mode. The body is out of balance—but only for a short period of time, until the danger passes. At least, that’s how it was meant to be.

  The same thing happens in our modern world, although the setting is usually a little different. If someone cuts you off when you’re driving on the highway, you might be momentarily frightened, but once you realize that you’re okay and you let go of the fear of having an accident, your body returns to normal—unless that was only one of countless stressful situations you stumbled into that day.

  If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response—and out of homeostasis—a large part of the time. Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit-card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new gray hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis.

  Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress. Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode.

  In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight. But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense. It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured. The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off.

  It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses.

  Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration,
allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.

  Several studies give strong evidence to show how epigenetic instructions for healing shut down during emergencies. For example, researchers at the Ohio State University Medical Center found that more than 170 genes were affected by stress, with 100 of them shutting off completely (including many that directly make proteins to facilitate the proper type of wound healing). The researchers reported that wounds of stressed patients took 40 percent longer to heal and that “stress tilted the genomic balance towards genes [that were] encoding proteins responsible for cell-cycle arrest, death, and inflammation.”19 Another study examining the genes of 100 citizens of Detroit zeroed in on 23 subjects who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.20 These people had six to seven times more epigenetic variations, most of which involved compromising the immune system.

  Researchers at the UCLA AIDS Institute found that not only did HIV spread faster in patients who were the most stressed, but also the higher a patient’s stress level, the less he or she responded to the antiretroviral drugs. The drugs worked four times better for those patients who were relatively calm, compared to those whose blood pressure, skin moisture, and resting heart rate indicated they were feeling the most stress.21 Based on these findings, researchers concluded that the nervous system has a direct effect on viral replication.

  Although the fight-or-flight response was originally highly adaptive (because it kept early humans alive), it’s now clear that the longer that survival system is constantly activated, the longer your body shunts its resources for creating optimal health, so the system becomes maladaptive.

  The Legacy of Negative Emotions

  As we keep making stress hormones, we create a host of highly addictive negative emotions, including anger, hostility, aggression, competition, hatred, frustration, fear, anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, guilt, shame, sadness, depression, hopelessness, and powerlessness, just to name a few. When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny.

  For example, if we can anticipate a possible known future scenario and then focus on that thought to the exclusion of everything else even for just one moment, the body will physiologically begin to change in order to prepare itself for that future event. The body is now living in that known future in the present moment. As a consequence of this phenomenon, the conditioning process begins to activate the autonomic nervous system, and it creates the corresponding stress chemicals automatically. This is how the mind-body connection can work against us.

  When this happens, we are demonstrating the three elements of the placebo effect in perfect symmetry. First, we start to condition the body to the rush of adrenal chemistry in order to feel a boost of energy. If we can associate a person, thing, or experience at a particular time and place in our outer reality with that rush of chemistry within us, we’ll begin to condition the body to turn on the response just by thinking about that stimulus. In time, we’ll be able to simply condition the body to be put in mind of that emotionally aroused state by thought alone—the thought of a potential experience with someone and something at some time and some place. If we can expect the future outcome based on the past experience, then the expectation of the event, when we emotionally embrace it, will change the body’s physiology. And if we assign meaning to the behaviors and experiences, we’re putting our conscious intention behind the outcome so that our bodies will change or not change equal to what we think we know about our reality and ourselves.

  But whether or not you believe that the stress in your life is justified or valid, the effect of that stress on the body is never advantageous or health enhancing. Your body believes that it is being chased by a lion, is standing perched on a perilous cliff, or is fighting off a pack of angry cannibals. Here are a few examples from scientific studies demonstrating the effects of stress on the body.

  Researchers at the Ohio State University College of Medicine confirmed that stressful emotions trigger hormonal and genetic responses, by measuring how stress affects the speed of healing minor skin wounds—a significant marker of gene activation.22 A group of 42 married couples were given small suction blisters, and then their level of three proteins commonly expressed in wound healing was monitored for a total of three weeks. The couples were asked to have a neutral discussion for half an hour as a baseline and then, later, to talk about a previous marital argument.

  The researchers found that after the couples discussed a previous disagreement, their level of healing-linked proteins was mildly suppressed (showing that the genes were downregulated). The suppression rose to an even greater degree—about 40 percent—in couples whose discussion ballooned into a significant conflict, peppered with sarcastic comments, criticism, and put-downs.

  Research also supports the reverse effect—that reducing stress with positive emotions triggers epigenetic changes that improve health. Two key studies by researchers at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston looked at the effects of meditation, which is known for eliciting peaceful and even blissful states, on gene expression. In the first study, conducted in 2008, 20 volunteers received eight weeks of training in various mind-body practices (including several types of meditation, yoga, and repetitive prayer) known to induce the relaxation response, a physiological state of deep rest (discussed in Chapter 2).23 The researchers also followed 19 long-term daily practitioners of the same techniques.

  At the end of the study period, the novices showed a change in 1,561 genes (874 upregulated for health and 687 downregulated for stress), as well as reduced blood pressure and reduced heart and respiration rates, while the experienced practitioners expressed 2,209 new genes. Most of the genetic changes involved improving the body’s response to chronic psychological stress.

  The second study, conducted in 2013, found that eliciting the relaxation response produces changes in gene expression after just one session of meditation among both novices and experienced practitioners alike (with the long-term practitioners, not surprisingly, deriving more benefit).24 Genes that were upregulated included those involved in immune function, energy metabolism, and insulin secretion, while genes that were downregulated included those linked to inflammation and stress.

  Studies like these underscore just how quickly it’s possible to change your own genes. That’s why the placebo response can produce physical changes in a matter of moments. In my workshops around the world, my colleagues and I have witnessed significant and immediate changes in our participants’ health after only one session of meditation. They transformed themselves and activated new genes in new ways by thought alone. (You’ll be introduced to some of them soon.)

  When we’re living in survival mode, with our stress response turned on all the time, we can really focus on only three things: our physical bodies (Am I okay?), the environment (Where is it safe?), and time (How long will this threat be hanging over me?). Constantly focusing on these three things makes us less spiritual, less aware, and less mindful, because it trains us to become more self-absorbed and more focused on our bodies, as well as on other material things (such as what we own, where we live, how much money we have, and so on), in addition to all of the problems we experience in our external world. This focus also trains us to obsess about time—to constantly brace ourselves for the worst-case future scenarios based on our traumatic past experiences—because
there’s never enough time and everything always takes too much time.

  So we could say that just as stress hormones cause the cells of the body to become selfish to ensure that we survive, they endorse our ego to become more selfish, too—and we become materialists defining reality with our senses. We end up feeling separate from any new possibilities, because when we never leave that state of chronic emergency, that me-first mentality that pervades all our thinking strengthens and endures, leading us to become self-indulgent, self-serving, and self-important. Ultimately, the self becomes defined as a body living in the environment and in time.

  As you have just read and now more fully understand, the reality is that you do indeed have some degree of control over your own genetic engineering—by way of your thoughts, choices, behaviors, experiences, and emotions. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who had the power she sought all along but didn’t know it, you also possess a power that you may not have previously realized was yours—the keys that can set you free of being chained to the limitations of your own genetic expression.

  Chapter Five

  How Thoughts Change the Brain and the Body

  Now you can understand that whether it’s joyful or stressful, with every thought you think, every emotion you feel, and every event you experience, you’re acting as an epigenetic engineer of your own cells. You control your destiny. So this raises another question: If your environment changes and you then program new genes in new ways, is it possible—based on your perceptions and beliefs—to program the gene ahead of the actual environment? Feelings and emotions are normally the end products of experiences, but can you combine a clear intention with an emotion that begins to give the body a sampling of the future experience before it’s been made manifest?