You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

we spend too much of our attention and energy thinking about what we don’t want instead of what we do want.

The key is making your inner thoughts more real than the outer environment, because then the brain won’t know the difference between the two and will change to look as if the event has taken place.

the more you learn about the “what” and the “why,” the easier and more effective the “how” becomes.

the more you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, the better results you’re bound to get.)

Priming is, basically, when someone, someplace, or something in our environment (for example, taking a test) triggers all sorts of associations that are hardwired into our brains (that people grading this test think black students score lower than whites), causing us to act in certain ways (not scoring as highly) without being conscious of what we’re doing.

What we’re conditioned to believe about ourselves, and what we’re programmed to think other people think about us, affects our performance, including how successful we are.

In other words, in exactly the same environment, those with a positive mind-set tend to create positive situations, while those with a negative mind-set tend to create negative situations. This is the miracle of our own free-willed, individual, biological engineering.

What you think is what you experience, and when it comes to your health, that’s made possible by the amazing pharmacopeia that you have within your body that automatically and exquisitely aligns with your thoughts.

in order to change, you have to become conscious of your unconscious self (which you now know is just a set of hardwired programs).

The hardest part about change is not making the same choices we made the day before.

Once we understand that crossing the river of change and feeling that discomfort is actually the biological, neurological, chemical, and even genetic death of the old self, we have power over change and we can set our sights on the other side of the river.

If we embrace the fact that change is the denaturing of the hardwired circuitry from years of unconsciously thinking the same way, we can cope. If we understand that the discomfort we feel is the dismantling of old attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that have been repeatedly etched into our cerebral architecture, we can endure. If we can reason that the cravings we battle in the midst of change are real withdrawals from the chemical-emotional addictions of the body, we can ride it out. If we can comprehend that real biological variations are occurring from subconscious habits and behaviors in which our bodies are changing on a cellular level, we can forge on. And if we can remember that we are modifying our very genes from this life and from untold previous generations, we can stay focused and inspired to an end.

It’s our environment that is controlling how we think, act, and feel. We’re victims of our personal realities, because our personal realities are creating our personalities—and it’s become an unconscious process. Then that, of course, reaffirms the same thinking and feeling, and now there’s a tango or a match between our outer worlds and our inner worlds, and they merge and become the same—and so do we.

“Our subjective states of mind, consciously motivated behavior, and our perception of free will can modulate gene expression to optimize health.”

“The tools of our consciousness—including our beliefs, prayers, thoughts, intentions, and faith—often correlate much more strongly with our health, longevity, and happiness than our genes do.”10 The fact is, just as there’s more to our bodies than a sack of bones and flesh, there’s more to our genes than just stored information.

When you’re truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the outer environment during the process, the brain won’t know the difference between the two. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the new future event in the present moment. You’ll signal new genes, in new ways, to prepare for this imagined future event.

This is possible through mental rehearsal. This technique is basically closing your eyes and repeatedly imagining performing an action, and mentally reviewing the future you want, all the while reminding yourself of who you no longer want to be (the old self) and who you do want to be. This process involves thinking about your future actions, mentally planning your choices, and focusing your mind on a new experience.

plenty of evidence shows that mental rehearsal is extremely effective for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

What all of these individuals have in common is that they eliminated the external environment, got beyond their bodies, and transcended time so that they could make significant neurological changes within.

wound-healing studies where the subject is in a highly emotional, negative state like anger, the stem cells don’t get the message clearly. When there’s interference in the signal, as with static on the radio, the potential cell doesn’t get the right stimulation in a coherent fashion to turn itself into a useful cell.

So when the placebo effect is at work, and you create the right level of mind with a clear intention and combine it with a nurturing, elevated emotion, the right type of signal can reach the cell’s DNA.

that increased positive emotions produced increases in vagal tone, a measure of the health of the vagus nerve, which plays a major part in regulating the autonomic nervous system and homeostasis.

strong positive emotions helped the subjects trigger real physical changes that improved their health. Positive emotions cause the body and brain to flourish.

Now look at the pattern of many of the placebo studies: The moment someone starts getting a clear intention of a new future (wanting to live without pain or disease) and then combines it with a heightened emotion (excitement, hope, and anticipation of actually living without pain or disease) is the moment the body is no longer in the past. The body is living in that new future, because as we’ve seen, the body doesn’t know the difference between an emotion created by an actual experience and one created by thought alone. So that heightened state of emotion in response to the new thought is a vital component of that process, because it’s new information coming from outside the cell—and to the body, the experience from the outer environment or inner environment is the same.

So it makes sense that we should concentrate not merely on avoiding negative emotions, like fear and anger, but also on consciously cultivating heartfelt, positive emotions, such as gratitude, joy, excitement, enthusiasm, fascination, awe, inspiration, wonder, trust, appreciation, kindness, compassion, and empowerment, to give us every advantage in maximizing our health.

Now we can understand exactly why it is that if we hold a clear intention of a new future; marry it to a state of expansive, elevated emotion; and repeat that over and over until we’ve created a new state of mind and a new state of being, these thoughts will seem more real to us than our previous, limited view of reality. We’re finally free. And once we truly embrace that emotion, we can more easily fall in love with the possibility that we’ve been envisioning.

That’s what suggestibility is: making a thought into a virtual experience and having our bodies consequentially respond in a new manner.

Suggestibility combines three elements: acceptance, belief, and surrender. The more we accept, believe, and surrender to whatever we’re doing to change our internal state, the better the results we can create.

Many folks can intellectualize being better, but if they can’t emotionally embrace the result, then they can’t enter into the autonomic nervous system

Allowing yourself to feel emotions is a way to enter the operating system and program a change, because you’re now automatically instructing the autonomic nervous system to begin creating the corresponding chemistry as if you were getting better.

If you bring up the emotion of gratitude before the actual event, your body (as the unconscious mind) will begin to believe that the future event has indeed already happened—or is happening to you in the present moment. Gratitude, therefore, is the ultimate state of receivership.

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.

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.

it could also be said that you’re much less suggestible to any thoughts that are not equal to your memorized feelings. Any

In other words, in order for you to dial down your neocortex and all the neural activity that it performs on a daily basis, you’d have to stop thinking analytically and vacate the faculties of reason, logic, intellectualizing, forecasting, predicting, and rationalizing—at least temporarily. This is what’s meant by “quieting your mind.”

Three levels of brain-wave patterns make up the beta-wave spectrum: low-range beta (relaxed, interested attention, like reading a book), mid-range beta (focused attention on an ongoing stimulus outside the body, like learning and then remembering), and high-range beta (highly focused, crisis-mode attention, when stress chemicals are produced). The higher the beta brain waves, the further away we get from being able to access the operating system.

In fact, scientific experiments have shown that you don’t see reality as it truly is. Instead, you unconsciously fill in your reality based on your memories of the past, which is what’s neurochemically maintained in your brain.

When your perception becomes so second nature and so automatic that you really don’t pay attention to the way reality truly is (because you automatically expect everything to be the same), you’re now unconsciously accepting and agreeing to that reality—

So the only way to change your beliefs and perceptions in order to create a placebo response is to change your state of being. You have to finally see your old, limited beliefs for what they are—records of the past—and be willing to let go of them so that you can embrace new beliefs about yourself that will help you create a new future.

Either way, the moment we accept the belief, it has an effect not only on our performance, but also on the choices we make.

But once any of us accepts, believes, and surrenders to an outcome without consciously thinking about it or analyzing it, then we’ll become suggestible to that particular reality.

by thought alone, your body moved from living in the same past to living in a new future. In reality, your body was no longer the mind; you were the mind. You were changing a belief.

Just changing your beliefs and perceptions once isn’t enough. You have to reinforce that change over and over.

It was the stimulus from the environment that created the associative memory from the conditioned response.

when we decide to create a new belief, the amplitude or energy of that choice must be high enough that it’s greater than the hardwired programs and emotional conditioning in the body.

other words, if you can imagine a particular future event that you want to experience in your life, that reality already exists as a possibility somewhere in the quantum field—beyond this space and time—just waiting for you to observe

you observed yourself in a particular new future that was different from your past, expected that reality to occur, and then emotionally embraced the outcome, you’d be—for a moment—living in that future reality, and you’d be conditioning your body to believe it was in that future in the present moment. So the quantum model, which states that all possibilities exist in this moment, gives us permission to choose a new future and observe it into reality.

It is, in a very real sense, the way you can intentionally manifest your desired reality, including a life without pain or disease. By focusing more on what you do want and less on what you don’t want, you can call into existence whatever you desire and simultaneously “fade away” what you don’t want by no longer giving it your attention.

She could only analyze her state of being equal to the emotions of her past, even though the answers she needed existed beyond those emotions.