You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

these can’t be just any emotions. The survival emotions that we already explored in the last chapter knock the brain and body out of balance and so downregulate (or ...

Fear, futility, anger, hostility, impatience, pessimism, competition, and worry won’t signal the proper genes for better hea...

They turn on the fight-or-flight nervous system and prepare your body for emergency. You’re now los...

It’s a similar situation with trying to make something happen, by the way. The m...

pushing a...

You’re struggling, attempting to force an outcome, even if you don’t realize that’s w...

That knocks you out of balance, just as the survival emotions do, and the more frustrated and impatient you ...

There is no try; there’s only allow.

All those negative and stressful emotions are so familiar to us and connect to so many past known events

that when we focus on them, those familiar emotions keep the body connected to the same past conditions—which...

No new information can then program your genes in any new ways. Your past ...

Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions for increasing your level of suggestibility. It teaches your body emotionally that the event you’re grateful for has already happened, because we usually give thanks after a desirable event has occurred.

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 ...

Gratitude, therefore, is the ultimate state of re...

If you can bring up the emotion of appreciation or thankfulness, and combine it with a clear intention, you’re now beginning to embody the event emotionally.

You’re changing your brain and body.

Specifically, you’re chemically instructing your body to know what your mind ha...

We could say that you’re in a new future in the...

You’re no longer using familiar, primitive emotions to keep you anchored to the past; you’re now using elevated emotio...

Think of your level of suggestibility as being inversely related to your analytical thinking

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 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 analytical mind works best when we’re calm, relaxed, and focused. This is when it’s working for us.

It’s always evaluating situations in the external environment and assessing the landscape for the most advantageous outcomes.

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.

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, fa...

Then because of the thinking and feeling loop discussed earlier in the book, those thoughts re-create the same emotions and so drive you...

You’ll be able to see the answers more easily when you get beyond that stressful emotion and see your life from a diff...

As your analytical mind is heightened, your suggestibility to new outcomes de...

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 agai...

Since the placebo works only when the analytical mind is silenced so that your awareness can instead interact with the subconscious mind—

the placebo response is possible only when you can get beyond your self and so eclipse your conscious mind with your autonomic nervous system.

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

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,

These are the automati...

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 ...

Once the event is neurochemically embodied enough times through experience, you can turn on the body and the corresponding automatic program just by accessing...

and then you momentarily move into a particular state of being, which executes...

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 (bec...

When you feel a certain familiar way, you’re subconsciously accessing a series of thoughts derived from that particular feeling.