Mind Over Matter: The Placebo And Nocebo Effect

Hey everyone!

Thanks for joining me in today's episode.

Today's episode is going to be all about energy,

How our thoughts and emotions impact our health,

The placebo and nocebo effects,

And how coherence is so important.

So I want to start off with a saying that perhaps some of you are already familiar with,

And that is,

Where our attention goes,

Energy flows.

There's a Japanese water experiment by Dr.

Masaru Emoto.

In his experiment,

He showed that water is impacted by the thoughts and emotions of the people in its environment.

His book,

The Hidden Messages in Water,

Demonstrates how when people expose water to their love-filled emotions and intentions,

The water molecules form really beautiful patterns and structures.

But when water is exposed to fearful and hateful emotions and intentions,

The water form really disfigured and really displeasing patterns and structures.

Dr.

Emoto also conducted a rice experiment in which he put cooked rice into three different jars.

He wrote,

Thank you on one,

You fool on the second one,

And nothing on the third one.

He then instructed school children to speak to the jars every day and say those words to it,

And then for the third one,

Just completely ignore the last one.

According to the experiment,

The thank you jar fermented but did not get moldy,

The you fool jar of rice got moldy,

And so did the completely ignored jar of rice.

People are made mostly of water.

So how do our words,

Intentions,

And energy impact us and others around us?

There's a gentleman named Dr.

Zach Bush,

Who's a triple board certified medical doctor.

He specializes in internal medicine,

Endocrinology,

And metabolism,

And in hospice and palliative care.

He's huge on hydration and having healthy structured water.

He believes that water has memory within its structure,

And the water within a person's body has specific water structures based on our energetic blueprint from our life experiences.

It's the water in our body,

In different areas of our body,

That hold the data that gets processed through our brains.

I find this such an interesting idea because it boils down to,

See what I did there?

Anyway,

It boils down to our emotions,

Also known as energy in motion,

Being the language of our body,

And thoughts being the language of our brains.

As Dr.

Joe Dispenza says in his book,

You are the placebo.

Marrying the concepts of water structure and water memory,

And Dr.

Joe Dispenza's discussion on the relationship between the emotions of our bodies and the thoughts of our minds,

Continually affirming one another over a long period of time,

Forming neural pathways,

Because as they say,

Neurons that fire together,

Wire together.

I can really see how our thoughts,

Emotions,

Intentions,

And energy impacts our health,

Our personality,

The people around us,

The decisions that we make in the short and long term,

And ultimately the path that we take in life.

Before I continue on with that thought,

Let's hold it and talk more about the power of mind over matter.

Again,

In the book,

You Are the Placebo by Dr.

Joe Dispenza,

He talks about the study conducted in Japan,

Again,

Where school children went through an experiment,

Which is probably considered somewhat controversial,

Which is the nocebo experiment with poison ivy.

These were school children who were extremely allergic to poison ivy,

And let's first define what a placebo and a nocebo is.

The word placebo comes from the Latin root,

Placer.

I might be,

Um,

Not saying that correctly,

But that's how I think it is pronounced,

Placer,

Meaning I will please.

And nocebo comes from the Latin root nocere,

Meaning I will harm.

So,

In a placebo effect,

A positive response is the result of a treatment that is actually neutral.

In a nocebo effect,

The subject's condition gets worse because of their negative perception to the treatment,

Even though the treatment is actually,

Again,

Neutral.

So,

In this Japanese experiment,

The school children were shown a poison ivy leaf and were told that this was just a harmless inert leaf,

And the poison ivy was rubbed on one arm.

Then,

They were shown a harmless inert leaf and were told that it was poison ivy,

And it was rubbed on the other arm.

In this experiment,

Almost all the children had an allergic reaction to the arm that they were told was rubbed with poison ivy,

And almost all the children,

Again,

Had no reaction to the arm that was actually rubbed with poison ivy,

And they were told that it was a harmless leaf.

So,

This experiment is an amazing example of the power of mind over matter,

And one of the experiments that led to the science of psychoneuroimmunology,

That's a mouthful,

About a third of medical recoveries and healings are actually attributed to the placebo effect,

Which is such a significant factor of scientific studies that people conducting studies need to perform double blind experiments,

Where the subjects and the researchers don't know who got the real treatment and who got the placebo,

And many studies are even triple blind experiments where subjects,

Researchers,

And statisticians don't know until the experiment is done and the stats are done,

Too.

We can only interpolate that negative thoughts can also create illness and disease based on the same line of thinking.

Based on this evidence and data on how our thoughts and emotions can impact our health,

Imagine what miraculous and significant changes in other areas of our lives thoughts and emotions can impact.

These long-term neural pathways are not formed overnight,

They're formed by repeatedly having the same emotions,

The same thoughts,

The same habits,

The same events happen day in and day out in our daily lives.

As I mentioned earlier,

Emotions are the language of the body,

And usually when we experience an emotion,

We have a complementary thought that will go along with it,

And vice versa.

When we have a thought,

Which is the language of the mind,

We will have a complementary emotion that accompanies that thought usually,

And over a long period of time it basically becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our habits and our personalities are the result of these repetitive emotions and thoughts,

And often our bodies actually become the mind and our emotional bodies start controlling our brain and not the other way around.

So we become stuck in this endless loop of the same thoughts and the same emotions,

And as Dr.

Joe Dispenza says,

We're essentially living in the past and creating our futures based on our past.

Creating the future based on our familiarity,

Which is our past.

If we want anything to change in our lives,

Whether it be a health condition or something in our lives to change like our professional trajectory or our romantic relationships,

We need to change,

And changing takes effort,

Conscious effort,

And a lot of self-awareness.

In order to change,

We need our neural pathways to wire differently,

Which means they need to consistently fire differently than they had been before.

We need to change our identity.

If we want to,

For example,

Improve our health,

Get enough sleep,

Exercise,

And eat healthy consistently,

And what we do now is stay up late all the time,

Hardly ever exercise,

And eat unhealthy consistently,

We need to change our identity to someone who is healthy,

Gets enough sleep,

Loves to exercise,

Feels good,

Takes time to make healthy meals,

Or make healthy options when eating out,

And act accordingly to the new identity.

We have the power to sabotage and destroy our lives,

And we have the power to create a life full of love,

Health,

And wealth.

Again,

Where our attention goes,

Energy flows.

This is why I absolutely love and respect Reiki and energy healing,

Breathwork,

And healing meditations.

Reiki practitioners use their knowledge and experience with both their personal energy fields and the universal life force energy field,

Along with their intentions to heal the energy body of another person.

I will create an episode in the future that discusses chakras,

Or energy centers,

And how important it is for them to be flowing freely,

Not blocked,

Not stagnant,

And to be aligned.

Because everything they can have,

Like varying levels of misalignment in the chakras.

Breathwork sessions are a very effective and mechanical way that we can help ourselves unblock energy in our bodies and release.

And ultimately,

This is why coherence is so important for our health in every way.

Having a coherent mind and heart,

Especially,

Is so powerful.

And I understand that the word coherence may not be in the day-to-day vernacular of everybody.

So I want to explain to you what that is.

And coherence is a state in which all the parts fit together well,

So that they form a united whole.

And that's why when our mind and our heart are coherent and they're united,

We know what to do and we will act accordingly.

Because logically,

We know what we need to do and emotionally,

We know what we have to do and there's very little resistance to it.

Resistance and confusion comes when there's a variance between logically what we know and want and what our heart wants.

So the whole idea is coherence.

And also coherence with our values,

With our actions,

With our goals in life.

This is what it's all about.

And with that,

I want to thank you for joining me in this episode.

If you liked it,

Please subscribe to my podcast if you haven't already.

And if you know anybody else who might find this episode useful or enjoy it too,

Please share it.

And I will see you in the next one.