The Placebo Effect

devabritow
Jul 7
7 min read

"What you think is what you experience."

**Wouldn't it be lovely if we could reach for a pill that would heal all that ails us?**

I'm just going to launch straight into this week's book. No beating around the bush, no framing, just the cold facts as presented by Dr. Joe Dispenza. You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter explores the profound connection between the mind and body, demonstrating how thoughts, beliefs, and emotions can significantly impact physical health and recovery. Dispenza contends that the placebo effect—where individuals recover merely by believing in a treatment—illustrates the remarkable capabilities of the mind. He asserts that we can learn to intentionally utilise this power without relying on a real placebo.

For anyone who needs a recap, a placebo is a substance or treatment that lacks any active therapeutic effect, yet is administered to an individual under the pretence of being genuine medicine or therapy. Ethics aside, it is frequently utilised in clinical research and psychology to evaluate the efficacy of new medications or treatments.

"You Are the Placebo is about putting you in the driver's seat of creating your own change..."

This is the third book by Dr. Joe Dispenza that I have covered since launching this blog last year. I wrote about the first book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, across three weeks, because it had so much valuable insight, and I had to work at reining myself in. Aside from Atomic Habits, which had two posts, I haven't dedicated more than one post to a single book since. The temptation was there, but I felt like I wanted to streamline the posts to a degree.

In Neural Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest, I worked through Dispenza's Evolve Your Brain, which is actually his first published work. While it won't be for several weeks yet, I'll eventually read and write about his last book, Becoming Supernatural.

If you'd like to revisit the posts on Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and Atomic Habits, I've included links at the end of this week's blog.

A central theme in Dr. Joe Dispenza's books, including the ones listed above, is the concept that your thoughts and emotions have the power to influence not only your biology but also your reality and future. His work has strong roots in epigenetics and neuroscience, and while often scientific, Dispenza presents his books in a way that is easy to follow. Of the three I have covered so far, Evolve Your Brain is probably the most challenging read. Yet, I was able to get through it and wrote what I hope was a coherent post on the book. The author presents that we do not need to be held prisoner by our genes or circumstances. Through focused intention, heightened emotions, and consistent mental practice, we can become the placebo - our own catalysts for transformation and healing. Dr. Dispenza dedicates entire chapters to what the placebo is (and how it came about). He also writes about the placebo effect in the brain and, by extension, the body. To avoid the rabbit hole I know I'll go down if I start focusing on those chapters, I'll make mind and matter the focal point of my post.

The Quantum Mind

"Your thoughts have consequences so great that they create your reality."

The above quote appears in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and I quoted in my blog post relating to the book. In the same post, I also mentioned Dispenza's reference to Descartes, who famously said, "I think, therefore I am". To summarise the author's inclusion of Descartes' quote in his book, the philosopher supported the idea of a three-dimensional (static) space and a flow of time independent of events. This concept, known as Cartesian dualism, proposes that the physical pertains to the material world, encompassing objects and physical entities that follow the laws of physics. In contrast, the mental refers to the consciousness or mind, including self-awareness, thoughts, and emotions that do not obey physical laws. Cartesian dualism raised questions about how these two substances (the mental and the physical) interact, leading to what is known as the "mind-body problem".

Einstein, of course, revolutionised our comprehension of the physical universe. His theory of relativity, which encompasses the spacetime continuum and E = mc², merges Descartes' three-dimensional view of space with the one-dimensional notion of time, creating a unified four-dimensional framework. Through this, he illustrated that time and space are relative to the observer's motion. Dr. Dispenza goes on to mention the "observer effect," the idea that observing a phenomenon or situation alters it. He states that:

"At the subatomic level, energy responds to your mindful attention and becomes matter."

**Mental Rehearsal: Fitness for the Brain**

In You Are the Placebo, the author expands on this in a chapter titled The Quantum Mind. He writes that, "So, according to the "observer effect", physical matter can't exist or manifest until we observe it - until we notice it and give it our attention." The question is, what am I focusing on? Where am I placing my attention?

Joe Dispenza frequently discusses mental rehearsal as an effective method for reprogramming the brain and transforming your life. It's like mental fitness for your gray matter. Mental rehearsal involves vividly picturing yourself thinking, feeling, and acting in new ways, as if the desired event or metamorphosis has already happened. The author suggests that the brain doesn't significantly differentiate between real and imagined experiences, allowing you to use thought alone to induce physical and emotional changes.

"This book is about making your mind matter. You now understand that the placebo works because a person accepts and believes in a known remedy - a fake pill, injection, or procedure substituted for its real counterpart - and then surrenders to the outcome without overanalyzing how it's going to happen."

Dr. Dispenza presents numerous case studies and personal anecdotes about the placebo effect in You Are the Placebo. The above quote appears in one of the final chapters, one that provides additional context that reinforces the book's entire premise. As with Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, the author concludes his book with meditation practices, and much like I did with that text, I skipped those chapters because they contradict my personal belief system. The exclusion of those chapters both when I read the book and during this blogging exercise does not, in any way, impact the import of You Are the Placebo, which, by all accounts, is a terrific read.

However, has it created any meaningful impact on me?

The Pit of Despair

I love the picture at the top of this blog post because I believe those things are essentially what we all want (or versions of what we all want). I'd replace "power" with peace, though, and "luck" with opportunity. A lot of the time, pills (antidepressants included) treat the symptoms and not the cause. It occurred to me as this blog post began to take shape that the dark place I sometimes find myself in is not unlike William Goldman's "Pit of Despair." If you've read The Princess Bride, you may recall that the pit is a torture chamber designed by the villainous Count Rugen (aka the six-fingered man). Situated beneath the castle in Florin, it is used to conduct cruel experiments in pain and endurance. The book's lead character, Westley, is held captive and tortured there with a device called "The Machine", which can drain a person's life. Goldman portrays it as a dark, secretive, and unsettling place, not unlike depression and anxiety. This self-help journey of mine has been (in part) about finding the root cause of the malaise I experience from time to time. It's also been about finding the tools that will help me dig myself out of the pit of despair that is often of my own making. Like Seneca said, "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality". This dark place is where I sometimes focus my attention. I have come to the stark conclusion that, very often, I am the cause of the pain I experience. When I don't rein in those obsessive thoughts, I become my own villainous Count Rugen, torturing my psyche with dark, secretive, unsettling scenarios that have no basis in reality. It is like I am conducting cruel experiments in pain and endurance, with me as the test subject. Westley survived the "Pit of Despair", thanks (in part) to Inigo Montoya and Fezzik, who rescue him and take him to Miracle Max, a royal healer. Miracle Max cooks up a miracle pill, and Westley prevails. I need to be the Miracle Max of my own story, except I won't need to cook up a miracle pill because I am the pill.

As an aside, if you've never watched The Princess Bride, I highly recommend it. It's one of cinema's best.

Westley throws himself down a mountainside, all to please his Princess Buttercup.

Coming Up Next Week

A couple of months ago, I bought Dr Julie Smith's Open When. It's an encouraging and easy-to-read self-help book written as a series of "open when..." letters that readers can refer to during various emotional difficulties. I'm not entirely sure how it will play out, but my idea is to use some (or even all) of the letters as focus points between the longer texts I write about. Given that I work full-time, I sometimes find it challenging to finish a book a week. I want to ensure that I give every book its just due, so this might be a way to do that. I may also start focusing on podcasts or poems, like I did with No one's Damaged Goods (from The Mel Robbins Podcast) and The Owl and the Chimpanzee, the poem by Jo Camacho of the same name. Open When remains unopened on my bookshelf, so I look forward to reading the first 'letter'. Cheesy puns not intended.