You Are the Placebo

by Joe Dispenza, Dr.

Let’s go back to the idea introduced earlier that we each have different levels of our own acceptance to a suggestion, resulting in a spectrum of suggestibility. Everyone has his or her own level of susceptibility to thoughts, suggestions, and commands—from both outer and inner realities—based on many different variables. Think of your level of suggestibility as being inversely related to your analytical thinking (as illustrated in Figure 6.3): the greater your analytical mind (the more you analyze), the less suggestible you are; and the lesser your analytical mind, the more suggestible you are.

  The inverse relationship between the analytical mind and suggestibility.

  The analytical mind (or the critical mind) is that part of the mind you consciously use and are aware of. It’s a function of the thinking neocortex—the part of the brain that’s the seat of your conscious awareness; that thinks, observes, and remembers things; and that resolves problems. It analyzes, compares, judges, rethinks, examines, questions, polarizes, scrutinizes, reasons, rationalizes, and reflects. It takes what it has learned from past experience and applies it to a future outcome or to something it hasn’t yet experienced.

  In the hypnosis experiment described at the start of this chapter, for example, 7 of the 11 subjects given the posthypnotic suggestion to peel their clothes off in the public restaurant didn’t fully comply. It was the analytical mind that brought them “back to their senses.” The moment they began to analyze—Is this right? Should I do this? What will I look like? Who’s watching? What will my boyfriend think?—the suggestion was no longer as powerful, and they returned to their old, familiar state of being. The folks who immediately stripped to their underwear, on the other hand, did it without questioning what they were doing. They were less analytical (and so more suggestible) than their counterparts.

  Since the neocortex is divided into two halves called hemispheres, it makes sense that we analyze and spend a lot of time thinking in duality: you know, good versus bad, right versus wrong, positive versus negative, male versus female, straight versus gay, Democrat versus Republican, past versus future, logic versus emotion, old versus new, head versus heart—you get the idea. And if we’re living in stress, the chemicals we’re pumping into our systems tend to drive the whole analytical process faster. We analyze even more in order to predict future outcomes so that we can protect ourselves from potential worst-case scenarios based on past experience.

  There’s nothing wrong with the analytical mind, of course. It has served us well for our entire waking, conscious lives. It’s what makes us human. Its job is to create meaning and coherence between our outer worlds (the combined experiences of people and things at different times and places) and our inner worlds (our thoughts and feelings).

  The analytical mind works best when we’re calm, relaxed, and focused. This is when it’s working for us. It simultaneously reviews many aspects of our lives and provides us with meaningful answers. It helps us choose from myriad options in order to make decisions, learn new things, scrutinize whether to believe in something, judge social situations based on our ethics, get clear on our purpose in life, discern morality with conviction, and evaluate important sensory data.

  As an extension of our egos, the analytical mind also protects us so that we can cope and survive best in our external environments. (In fact, one of the ego’s main jobs is protection.) It’s always evaluating situations in the external environment and assessing the landscape for the most advantageous outcomes. It takes care of the self, and it also tries to preserve the body. Your ego will let you know when there’s potential danger, and it will urge you to respond to the condition. For example, if you were walking down the street and saw the oncoming cars driving too close to the side of the road where you were walking, you might cross the street to protect yourself—that’s your ego giving you that guidance.

  But when our egos are out of balance due to a barrage of stress hormones, our analytical minds go into high gear and become overstimulated. That’s when the analytical mind is no longer working for us, but against us. We get overanalytical. And the ego becomes highly selfish by making sure that we come first, because that’s its job. It thinks and feels as though it needs to be in control to protect the identity. It tries to have power over outcomes; it predicts what it needs to do to create a certainly safe situation; it clings to the familiar and won’t let go—so it holds grudges, feels pain and suffers, or can’t get beyond its victimhood. It will always avoid the unknown condition and view it as potentially dangerous, because to the ego, the unknown is not to be trusted.

  And the ego will do anything to empower itself for the rush of addictive emotions. It wants what it wants, and it will do whatever it takes to get there first, by pushing its way to the front of the line. It can be cunning, manipulative, competitive, and deceptive in its protection.

  So the more stressful your situation, the more your analytical mind is driven to analyze your life within the emotion you’re experiencing at that particular time. When this happens, you’re actually moving your consciousness further away from the operating system of the subconscious mind, where true change can occur. You’re then analyzing your life from your emotional past, although the answers to your problems aren’t within those emotions, which are causing you to think harder within a limited, familiar chemical state. You’re thinking in the box.

  Then because of the thinking and feeling loop discussed earlier in the book, those thoughts re-create the same emotions and so drive your brain and body further out of order. You’ll be able to see the answers more easily when you get beyond that stressful emotion and see your life from a different state of mind. (Stay tuned.)

  As your analytical mind is heightened, your suggestibility to new outcomes decreases. Why? Because an impending emergency isn’t the time to be open-minded: entertaining new possibilities and accepting new potentials. It’s not the time to believe in new ideas and openly let go and surrender to them. It’s not the time to trust; instead, it’s the time to protect the self by measuring what you know against what you don’t know in order to determine the greatest chances of survival. It’s the time to flee from the unknown. So it makes sense that as the analytical mind is endorsed by the stress hormones, you’ll narrow your thinking, be unlikely to trust and believe in anything new, and be less suggestible to believing in thought alone or in making any unknown thought known. Thus, you can use the analytical mind or ego to work for you or against you.

  The Inner Workings of the Mind

  Think of the analytical mind as a separate part of the conscious mind that divides it from the subconscious mind. Since the placebo works only when the analytical mind is silenced so that your awareness can instead interact with the subconscious mind—the domain where true change occurs—the placebo response is possible only when you can get beyond your self and so eclipse your conscious mind with your autonomic nervous system.

  Look at Figure 6.4 for a simple illustration of this. Let the circle in the figure represent the total mind. The conscious mind is only about 5 percent of the total mind. It’s made up of logic and reasoning as well as our creative abilities. These aspects give rise to our free will. The other 95 percent of the total mind is the subconscious mind. This is the operating system where all of the automatic skills, habits, emotional reactions, hardwired behaviors, conditioned responses, associative memories, and routine thoughts and feelings create our attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions.

  This is an overview of the conscious mind, the analytical mind, and the subconscious mind.

  The conscious mind is where we store our explicit, or declarative, memories. Therefore, declarative memories are memories that we can declare. They’re the knowledge we’ve learned (termed semantic memories) and experiences we’ve had in this lifetime (episodic memories). You might be a woman who grew up in Tennessee; who rode horses in childhood until you fell off and broke your arm; who had a pet tarantula at age 10 that escaped from its cage, requiring you and your family to sleep at a hotel for two days; who wo
n the state spelling bee at age 14 and now never misspells a word; who studied accounting in college in Nebraska; who presently lives in Atlanta so that you can be near your sister (who took a job for a large corporation); and who is now getting a master’s degree in finance online. Declarative memories are the autobiographical self.

  The other type of memories we have are implicit, or nondeclarative, memories, sometimes also called procedural memories. This kind of memory kicks in when you’ve done something so many times that you aren’t even consciously aware of how you do it. You’ve repeated it so often that now your body knows it as well as your brain. Think of riding a bike, operating a clutch, tying your shoes, tapping a phone number or a PIN on a keypad, or even reading or speaking. These are the automatic programs that have been discussed throughout this book. You could say that you no longer have to analyze or consciously think about the skill or habit you’ve mastered, because it’s now subconscious. This is the programmed operating system, which is depicted in Figure 6.5.

  When you’ve mastered how to do something until it has become hardwired in your mind and emotionally conditioned to your body, then your body knows how to do it as well as your conscious mind. You’ve memorized an internal neurochemical order that has become innate. The reason is simple: Repeated experience enriches the brain’s neural networks and then finally seals the deal when it emotionally trains the body. Once the event is neurochemically embodied enough times through experience, you can turn on the body and the corresponding automatic program just by accessing a familiar subconscious thought or feeling—and then you momentarily move into a particular state of being, which executes the automatic behavior.

  Memory systems are divided into two categories: declarative memories (explicit) and nondeclarative memories (implicit).

  Since implicit memories are developed from the emotions of experience, two possible scenarios explain how this unfolds: (1) A highly charged one-time emotional event can be immediately branded and stored in the subconscious (for example, a childhood memory of being in a big department store and getting separated from your mother), or (2) the redundancy of emotions derived from consistent experience will also be repeatedly logged there.

  Since implicit memories are part of the subconscious system of memory and are routed there either by repeated experience or by highly charged emotional events, when you bring up any emotion or feeling, you’re opening a door to your subconscious mind. Since thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body, the moment you feel a feeling, you’re turning on your body-mind (because your body has become your subconscious mind). You’ve just entered the operating system.

  Think about it like this: When you feel a certain familiar way, you’re subconsciously accessing a series of thoughts derived from that particular feeling. You’re autosuggesting thoughts on a daily basis equal to how you feel. These are the thoughts you accept, believe, and surrender to as if they were true. Therefore, you’re more suggestible only to the thoughts that are matched to exactly the same feeling. As a result, those thoughts that you unconsciously think about are the ones you accept, believe, and surrender to over and over.

  Conversely, it could also be said that you’re much less suggestible to any thoughts that are not equal to your memorized feelings. Any new thought that reflects an unknown possibility just wouldn’t feel right. Your self-talk (the thoughts that you listen to every day) slips by your conscious awareness on a moment-to-moment basis and stimulates the autonomic nervous system and the flow of biological processes, reinforcing the programmed feeling of who you think you are. Remember the study in Chapter 2, where researchers found that optimists responded more favorably to suggestions that were positive while pessimists responded more unfavorably to suggestions that were negative.

  By the same means, if you were to change how you feel, could you become more suggestible to a new stream of thoughts? Absolutely! By feeling an elevated emotion and allowing a whole new set of thoughts to be driven by that new feeling, you’d increase your level of suggestibility to what you were feeling and then thinking. You’d be in a new state of being, and your new thoughts would then be the autosuggestions equal to that feeling. And when you feel emotions, you’re naturally activating your implicit memory system and the autonomic nervous system. You can simply allow the autonomic nervous system to do what it does best: restore balance, health, and order.

  Isn’t that what many people did in the placebo studies mentioned earlier? Weren’t they able to bring up an elevated emotion like hope or inspiration or the joy of being well? And once they saw a new possibility without ever analyzing it, wasn’t their level of suggestibility influenced by those feelings? As they felt those corresponding emotions, didn’t they enter the operating system and reprogram their autonomic nervous system with new orders—by thought alone—autosuggesting equal to those emotions?

  Opening the Door to the Subconscious Mind

  If there are different degrees of suggestibility, then that can be demonstrated visually by showing different thicknesses of the analytical mind. The thicker the barrier between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, the more difficulty you’ll have getting into the operating system.

  Take a look at Figures 6.6 and 6.7 on the following two pages, which represent two people with different types of minds.

  The person in Figure 6.6 has a very thin veil between the conscious and subconscious minds and therefore is very open to suggestion (like Ivan Santiago from the beginning of the chapter). This person will naturally accept, believe, and surrender to an outcome, because he or she doesn’t analyze or intellectualize too much. Folks like this might be more innately prone to accept that a thought is a potential experience and embrace it emotionally so that the package becomes imprinted on the autonomic nervous system, ready to be executed as a reality. These people don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure things out in their lives, and they don’t overthink many things. If you’ve ever seen a hypnosis stage show, the subjects who make it to the front of the room usually fall into this category.

  Now contrast this with Figure 6.7. If you look at the thicker analytical mind that separates the conscious and subconscious minds, you can easily see that this person is less prone to taking suggestions at face value without a significant degree of help from his or her intellectual mind in evaluating, processing, planning, and reviewing. People like this are highly critical and will make sure they’ve analyzed everything before simply surrendering and trusting.

  A less analytical mind (represented by the thinner layer in the illustration) is more suggestible.

  Bear in mind that some of us have a more built-up analytical mind even without constantly living by our stress hormones. We might have studied different subjects in college or lived with parents who reinforced the mechanisms of rational thought when we were young, or maybe it’s just part of our nature. (Nevertheless, you can have a significantly broad analytical mind and still learn how to get beyond it—I certainly did—so there’s hope.)

  A more developed analytical mind (represented by the thicker layer in the illustration) is less suggestible.

  As I said before, neither of these types is more advantageous than the other. I think a healthy balance between the two works very well. Someone who’s overanalytical is less likely to trust and flow in his or her life. Someone who’s overly suggestible might be too gullible and less functional. The point I want to make is that if you’re continually analyzing your life, judging yourself, and obsessing about everything in your reality, then you’ll never enter the operating system where those old programs exist and reprogram them. Only when a person accepts, believes, and surrenders to a suggestion does the door between the conscious and subconscious minds open. That information then signals the autonomic nervous system and—presto!—it takes over.

  Now take a look at Figure 6.8. The arrow represents the movement of consciousness from the conscious mind into the subconscious mind, where the suggestion is biolog
ically embossed into the programming system.

  This figure represents the relationship between brain-wave states and the movement of awareness from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind, moving past the analytical mind during the practice of meditation.

  A few additional elements can also silence the analytical mind and open the door to the subconscious mind in order to increase a person’s level of suggestibility. For example, physical or mental fatigue increases your suggestibility. Certain studies have shown that the limited exposure to social, physical, and environmental cues in sensory deprivation can cause increased susceptibility. Extreme hunger, emotional shock, and trauma also weaken our analytical faculties, therefore making us more suggestible to information.

  Demystifying Meditation

  Like hypnosis, meditation is another way to bypass the critical mind and move into the subconscious system of programs. The whole purpose of meditation is to move your awareness beyond your analytical mind—to take your attention off your outer world, your body, and time—and to pay attention to your inner world of thoughts and feelings.

  Many stigmas surround the word meditation. Most people conjure up images of a bearded guru on a mountaintop, immune to the elements and sitting in perfect stillness; a monk in a simple robe, his face adorned with a huge, mysterious smile; or even a young and beautiful woman, with flawless skin, on the cover of a magazine, dressed in stylish yoga clothes and looking serenely free from the enslavement of all of the demands of daily life.

  When we see these images, many of us might perceive the discipline required as too impractical, too out of reach, and beyond our abilities. We might see meditation as a spiritual practice that doesn’t fit into our religious beliefs. And some of us are simply overwhelmed with the seemingly endless varieties of meditation available and are unable to decide where to begin. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult, “out there,” or confusing. For this discussion, let’s just say that the whole purpose of meditation is to move our consciousness beyond the analytical mind and into deeper levels of consciousness.