You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

by Joe Dispenza

By changing your internal state, you can change your external reality.

Scientists in the 1960s coined the term nocebo (Latin for “I shall harm,” as opposed to “I shall please,” the Latin translation of placebo),

Are we more likely to suffer from arthritis, stiff joints, poor memory, flagging energy, and decreased sex drive as we age, simply because that’s the version of the truth that ads, commercials, television shows, and media reports bombard us with? What other self-fulfilling prophecies are we creating in our minds without being aware of what we’re doing? And what “inevitable truths” can we successfully reverse simply through thinking new thoughts and choosing new beliefs?

We are creatures of habit. We think somewhere between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day,1 and 90 percent of those thoughts are exactly the same ones we had the day before.

If it sounds as though I’m saying that we live a huge part of our lives on autopilot, that’s exactly right. Thinking the same thoughts leads us to make the same choices. Making the same choices leads to demonstrating the same behaviors. Demonstrating the same behaviors leads us to create the same experiences. Creating the same experiences leads us to produce the same emotions. And those same emotions then drive the same thoughts.

Ninety-five percent of who you are by the time you’re 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, skills, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes that functions like a subconscious automatic computer program.

The word protein is derived from the Greek protas, meaning “of primary importance.”

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.

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.

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.

Fear, futility, anger, hostility, impatience, pessimism, competition, and worry won’t signal the proper genes for better health. They actually do the opposite. They turn on the fight-or-flight nervous system and prepare your body for emergency. You’re now losing vital energy for healing.

Your thoughts and feelings come from your past memories. If you think and feel a certain way, you begin to create an attitude. An attitude is a cycle of short-term thoughts and feelings experienced over and over again. Attitudes are shortened states of being. If you string a series of attitudes together, you create a belief. Beliefs are more elongated states of being and tend to become subconscious. When you add beliefs together, you create a perception. Your perceptions have everything to do with the choices you make, the behaviors you exhibit, the relationships you chose, and the realities you create.

From a quantum perspective, if 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.