You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

By Joe Dispenza

I began to ask myself, “What if people begin to believe in themselves instead of in something outside of themselves? What if they believe that they can change something inside of them and move themselves to the same state of being as someone who’s taking a placebo?

Do people really need a pill or injection to change their state of being? Can we teach people to accomplish the same thing by teaching them how the placebo really works?”
I’ll explain how as long as you’re thinking the same thoughts, they’ll lead to the same choices, which cause the same behaviors, which create the same experiences, which produce the same emotions, which in turn drive the same thoughts—so that neurochemically, you stay the same. In effect, you’re reminding yourself of who you think you are.

Chapter Five How Thoughts Change the Brain and the Body

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.
If you continue to mentally practice enough times this new series of choices, behaviors, and experiences that you desire, reproducing the same new level of mind over and over again, then your brain will begin to physically change—installing new neurological circuitry to begin to think from that new level of mind—to look as if the experience has already happened.
- You’ll be producing epigenetic variations that lead to real structural and functional changes in the body by thought alone—just as do those who respond to a placebo. Then your brain and body will no longer be living in the same past; they’ll be living in the new future that you created in your mind.

The more knowledge and experience you have wired in your brain about the new reality you desire, the more resources you have to create a better model of it in your mental picturing, and so the greater your intention and expectation are (as with the hotel maids).
You are “reminding” yourself of what your life will look like and feel like once you get what you want. Now you are putting an intention behind your attention.
Then you consciously marry your thoughts and intentions with a heightened state of emotion, such as joy or gratitude. (More on heightened states of emotion is coming up.) Once you can embrace that new emotion and you get more excited, you’re bathing your body in the neurochemistry that would be present if that future event were actually happening.
It could be suggested that you’re giving your body a taste of the future experience. Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience—neurochemically, it’s the same. So your brain and body begin to believe they’re actually living in the new experience in the present moment.
By keeping your focus on this future event and not letting any other thoughts distract you, in a matter of moments, you turn down the volume on the neural circuits connected to the old self, which begins to turn off the old genes, and you fire and wire new neural circuits, which initiates the right signals to activate new genes in new ways. Thanks to the neuroplasticity discussed previously, the circuits in your brain begin to reorganize themselves to reflect what you’re mentally rehearsing. And as you keep coupling your new thoughts and mental images with that strong, positive emotion, then your mind and body are working together—and you’re now in a new state of being.

VISUALIZATION

“In the sixth grade, a coach taught us about the importance of visualization,” Aaron Rodgers told a sports reporter for USA Today.2 “When I’m in a meeting, watching film, or [lying] in bed before I go to sleep, I always visualize making those plays. A lot of those plays I made in the game, I had thought about. As I [lay] on the couch, I visualized making them.” Rodgers was also able to successfully spin out of three potential sacks in that game, later noting about those plays, “I visualized the majority before I made them.”
Champion golfer Jack Nicklaus wrote in his book Golf My Way: I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First, I “see” the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright-green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I “see” the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there’s sort of a fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality. Only at the end of this short, private, Hollywood spectacular do I select a club and step up to the ball.
Jim Carrey, who tells an amazing story about what he did when he first came to Los Angeles in the late 1980s as a struggling actor looking for work. He’d written a paragraph-long affirmation on a piece of paper about meeting the right type of people, getting the right types of acting jobs, working on the right movie with the right casting, and being successful and contributing something worthwhile and making a difference in the world. He would go up to Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills every night and lean back in his convertible and look up at the sky. He’d say that paragraph to himself, committing it to memory, as he imagined that what he was describing was actually happening. And he wouldn’t drive back down from that Hollywood overlook until he felt as though he was the person he’d been imagining, until it felt real for him. He even wrote a check to himself for $10 million, penning “for acting services rendered” on it and dating it “Thanksgiving 1995.” He carried the check in his wallet for years.
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. When they presented themselves to the world, they were able to get their minds and bodies to work together, and they created in the material world what they’d first conceived in the mental realm.
- In a Harvard study, research subjects who’d never before played the piano mentally practiced a simple, five-finger piano exercise for two hours a day for five days—and made the same brain changes as the subjects who physically practiced the same activities, but without ever lifting a finger.
- In another study of 30 people over a 12-week period, some regularly exercised their little fingers, while others just imagined doing the same thing. While the group that actually did the physical exercises increased the strength of their little fingers by 53 percent, the group that only imagined doing the same thing also increased the strength of their little fingers—by 35 percent. Their bodies had changed to look as if they were having the physical experience in external reality over and over again—but they only experienced it in their minds. Their minds changed their bodies.

Brain Science Behind Visualization (mental rehearsal)

Let’s start by explaining that your Frontal Lobe, located right behind your forehead, is your creative center. This is the part of the brain that learns new things, dreams of new possibilities, makes conscious decisions, sets your intentions, and so on. It’s the CEO, so to speak, and even more to the point, the frontal lobe also allows you to observe who you are and evaluate what you’re doing and how you’re feeling. It’s the home of your conscience. This is important, because once you become more aware of your thoughts, ultimately you can better direct them.
As you practice mental rehearsal and truly concentrate and focus on the outcome you want, the frontal lobe is your ally, because it also lowers the volume on the outside world so that you’re not as distracted by information coming in from your five senses. Brain scans show that in a highly focused state, such as mental rehearsal, the perception of time and space diminishes.
The moment you imagine a new future for yourself, think about a new possibility, and start to ask specific questions—such as What would it be like to live without this pain and limitation?—your frontal lobe snaps to attention.
- As the CEO, the frontal lobe has connections to all the other parts of the brain. So it starts selecting networks of neurons to create a new state of mind as an answer to that question.

If your frontal lobe is orchestrating enough of these neural nets to fire in unison as you focus on a clear intention, there will come a moment when the thought will become the experience in your mind—that’s when your inner reality is more real than your outer reality.
Once the thought becomes the experience, you begin to feel the emotion of how the event would feel in reality (remember, emotions are the chemical signatures of experiences). Your brain makes a different type of chemical messenger—a neuropeptide—and it sends it out to the cells in your body. The neuropeptide looks for the appropriate receptor sites, or docking stations, on various cells so that it can deliver its message to the body’s hormonal centers and, ultimately, the cells’ DNA—and the cells get a new message that the event has occurred.

Stem Cells: Our Potent Pool of Potentials

They’re at least partially responsible for how the seemingly impossible becomes possible. Officially, these are undifferentiated biological cells that become specialized. They’re raw potential.
When these blank slates are activated, they morph into whatever kind of cell the body needs—including muscle cells, bone cells, skin cells, immune cells, and even nerve cells in the brain—in order to replace injured or damaged cells in the body’s tissues, organs, and systems.
In wound-healing studies where the subject is in a highly emotional, negative state like anger, the stem cells don’t get the message clearly.
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.

How Intention and Elevated Emotion Change Our Biology

Maintaining such an elevated emotion allows us to get far more dramatic results much more quickly—the same kind of amazing results as we see in the placebo response.
- Japanese researchers found that watching an hour-long comedy show upregulated 39 genes, 14 of which were related to natural killer cell activity in the immune system. Several other studies have shown increases in various antibodies after subjects watched a humorous videotape.

Positive emotions cause the body and brain to flourish.
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.
Studies show that getting in touch with positive, expansive emotions like kindness and compassion—tends to release a different neuropeptide (called oxytocin), which naturally shuts off the receptors in the amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear and anxiety.
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.

Chapter Six Suggestibility

Programming the Subconscious: Acceptance, Belief, and Surrender

And like hypnosis, the placebo response also doesn’t just work for everyone. The placebo patients you’ve read about who were able to make positive changes last for years (like the men who had the sham knee surgery) respond much like hypnotherapy subjects who’ve been given posthypnotic suggestions. For some, like these men, such suggestions work beautifully. For others, not much happens.
Why not? It takes thinking greater than how they feel—in turn allowing those new thoughts to drive new feelings, which then reinforce those new thoughts—until it becomes a new state of being. But if familiar feelings have become the means of familiar thinking and the person can’t transcend that habituation, he or she is in the same past state of mind and body, and everything stays the same.
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.
But the emotional component is key in this experience; suggestibility isn’t just an intellectual process. 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.
In fact, it’s generally accepted in psychology that a person who experiences intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and is therefore more suggestible.
The autonomic nervous system is under the control of the limbic brain, which is also called the “emotional brain” and the “chemical brain.” The limbic brain, depicted in Figure 6.1, is responsible for subconscious functions like chemical order and homeostasis, for maintaining the body’s natural physiological balance.
It’s your emotional center. So as you experience different emotions, you activate this part of the brain, and it creates the corresponding chemical molecules of emotion. And since this emotional brain exists below the conscious mind’s control, the moment you feel emotion, you activate your autonomic nervous system.
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.
Remember in The Empire Strikes Back, when Yoda said to Luke Skywalker that there is no try, only do (or do not)? The same is true with the placebo response: There is no try; there’s only allow.
On the other hand, emotions like gratitude and appreciation open your heart and lift the energy in your body to a new place—out of the lower hormonal centers. 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 happening to you in the present moment. Gratitude, therefore, is the ultimate state of receivership.

Memories

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).
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.
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.
Since implicit memories are developed from the emotions of experience, two possible scenarios explain how this unfolds:
- (1) A highly charged one-time emotional event can be immediately branded and stored in the subconscious (for example, a childhood memory of being in a big department store and getting separated from your mother)
- (2) the redundancy of emotions derived from consistent experience will also be repeatedly logged there.

A few additional elements can also silence the analytical mind and open the door to the subconscious mind in order to increase a person’s level of suggestibility. For example, physical or mental fatigue increases your suggestibility. Certain studies have shown that the limited exposure to social, physical, and environmental cues in sensory deprivation can cause increased susceptibility. Extreme hunger, emotional shock, and trauma also weaken our analytical faculties, therefore making us more suggestible to information.

Demystifying Meditation

Like hypnosis, meditation is another way to bypass the critical mind and move into the subconscious system of programs. The whole purpose of meditation is to move your awareness beyond your analytical mind—to take your attention off your outer world, your body, and time—and to pay attention to your inner world of thoughts and feelings.
In order of slowest to fastest, the brain-wave states are delta (deep, restorative sleep—totally unconscious), theta (a twilight state between deep sleep and wakefulness), alpha (the creative, imaginative state), beta (conscious thought), and gamma (elevated states of consciousness).

Chapter Seven Attitudes, Beliefs, and Perceptions

When you string a succession of thoughts and feelings together so that they ultimately become habituated or automatic, they form an attitude. And since how you think and feel creates a state of being, attitudes are really just shortened states of being. They can fluctuate from moment to moment as you alter how you think and feel. Any particular attitude can last for minutes, hours, days, or even a week or two.
If you repeat or maintain certain attitudes long enough and you string those attitudes together, that’s how you create a belief. A belief is just an extended state of being—essentially, beliefs are thoughts and feelings (attitudes) that you keep thinking and feeling over and over again until you hardwire them in your brain and emotionally condition them into your body.
You could say that you become addicted to them, which is why it’s so hard to change them and why it doesn’t feel good on a gut level when they’re challenged. Because experiences are neurologically etched into your brain (causing you to think) and chemically embodied as emotions (causing you to feel), most of your beliefs are based on past memories.
Now let’s move the concept forward a little further. If you string a group of related beliefs together, they form your perception. So your perception of reality is a sustained state of being that’s based on your long-standing beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings.
And since your beliefs become subconscious and also unconscious states of being (that is, you don’t even know why you believe certain things, or you aren’t really conscious of your beliefs until they’re tested), your perceptions—how you subjectively see things—for the most part, become your subconscious and unconscious view of your reality from the past.
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.

Changing Your Beliefs

So then ask yourself: What beliefs and perceptions about you and your life have you been unconsciously agreeing to that you’d have to change in order to create this new state of being?
Since beliefs and perceptions are based on past experiences, then any of these beliefs that you happen to hold about yourself came from your past. So are they true, or did you just make them up? Even if they were true at some point in time, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re true now.
We don’t look at it that way, of course, because we’re addicted to our beliefs; we’re addicted to the emotions of our past. We see our beliefs as truths, not ideas that we can change.
We’ve in fact conditioned ourselves to believe all sorts of things that aren’t necessarily true—and many of these things are having a negative impact on our health and happiness.
Other cultural beliefs can cause premature deaths.
- For instance, Chinese Americans who have a disease, combined with a birth year that Chinese astrology and Chinese medicine consider to be ill fated, die up to five years early, according to researchers at the University of California at San Diego who studied the death records of almost 30,000 Chinese Americans.

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.
You just have to make a decision that has finality. And once the amplitude or energy of that decision becomes greater than the hardwired programs in your brain and the emotional addiction in your body, then you are greater than your past, your body will respond to a new mind, and you can effect real change.
You already know how to do this. Think about a time in your past when you made up your mind to change something about yourself or your life. If you recall, a moment came when you probably said to yourself, I don’t care how I feel [body]!
Instantly, you got goose bumps. That’s because you moved into an altered state of being. The moment you felt that energy, you were sending your body new information. You felt inspired, and you came out of your familiar resting state. That’s because, 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.
- Documenting a total of 150 cases of psychosomatic blindness in Cambodian women in Long Beach—the largest known group of such victims anywhere in the world—van Boemel and Rozée presented their research at the 1986 American Psychological Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The audience was riveted.
- The women in this study became blind or nearly blind not because of some eye disease or physical malfunction, but because the events they lived through had such an emotional impact that they literally “cried until they could not see.”
- https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/03/04/cambodian-women-blinded-by-memory-of-atrocities/

The heightened emotional amplitude from being forced to bear witness to the unbearable left them not wanting to see anymore. The event created physical changes in their biology—not in their eyes, but most likely in their brains—which altered their perception of reality for the rest of their lives. And because they kept replaying the traumatizing scenes over and over in their minds, their vision never improved.

The Power of the Environment

Just changing your beliefs and perceptions once isn’t enough. You have to reinforce that change over and over.
Unfortunately, however, the effect doesn’t stick for everyone. In fact, for some, the placebo effect only lasts for a certain amount of time, because they go back to who they were before: their old states of being.
The same thing happens with drug addicts who’ve been clean for many years. If you put them back in their same environments where they used to do drugs, even without their ingesting any drug, being there turns on the same receptor sites in their cells that the drugs did when they were using—and that in turn creates physiological changes in their bodies as if they’ve taken the drugs, increasing their cravings.9 Their conscious minds have no control over that.
The environment can also signal healing. Hospital patients in Pennsylvania who recovered from surgery in a room with a view of a stand of trees in a natural suburban setting needed less-potent pain medications and were released seven to nine days earlier than patients in rooms facing a brown brick wall.
If you could access a new state of being through meditation by combining a clear intention with getting in touch with that heightened state of emotion that was mentioned earlier, and you got up jazzed and on fire about what you were creating every day, you’d finally start coming out of your resting state. You’d then be in a new state of being, with a different attitude, belief, and perception, no longer reacting to the same things in the same way, because now your environment would no longer control how you think and feel.
You’d then be making new choices and demonstrating new behaviors, which would lead to new experiences and new emotions. And so you’d then turn into a new and different personality—a personality that doesn’t have the arthritic pain or the Parkinson’s motor issues or the infertility or whatever other condition you want to change.

Changing Your Energy

In other words, 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.
In order to change a belief or perception about yourself and your life, you have to make a decision with such firm intention that the choice carries an amplitude of energy that is greater than the hardwired programs in the brain and the emotional addiction in the body, and the body must respond to a new mind. When the choice creates a new inner experience that becomes greater than the past outer experience, it will rewrite the circuits in your brain and resignal your body emotionally. Since experiences create long-term memories, when the choice becomes an experience that you never forget, you are changed. Biologically, the past no longer exists. We could say that your body in that present moment is in a new future.
A similar process happens with the firewalkers, the glass chewers, and the snake handlers. They get clear that they’re going to move into a different state of mind and body. And when they hold that firm intention to make that shift, the energy of that decision creates internal changes in their brains and bodies that make them immune to the external conditions in the environment for an extended period of time. Their energy now is protecting them in a way that, in that moment, transcends their biology.
Remember the 98.5 percent of our DNA that scientists call “junk DNA” because it doesn’t seem to serve much of a useful purpose? Surely Mother Nature wouldn’t place all of this encoded information in our cells, waiting to be read, without giving us the ability to create some type of signal to unlock it; after all, nature doesn’t waste anything. Does anyone have further insights into Junk DNA and ideas of how it’s used? Email me Sean@whatgotyouthere.com
if you changed your energy the way you read about earlier in this chapter, could that help you access your true ability to authentically heal your body? When you change your energy, you change your state of being. And the rewiring in the brain and the new chemical emotions in the body trigger epigenetic changes, and the result is that you become quite literally a new person. The person you were before is history; a part of that person simply vanished along with the neurocircuitry, chemical-emotional addictions, and genetic expression that supported your old state of being.

Part II TRANSFORMATION Chapter Eleven Meditation Preparation

When to Meditate There are two times a day that are the most conducive to meditation: right before you go to bed at night and right after you get up in the morning.

So the moment you start to notice your mind wanting to go in that direction, you just pull the reins in, settle your body down, and bring it back to the present moment—just as I do when I ride my stallion. And then, in the next moment, if you start thinking, Yeah, but you have to do this, you forgot about that, and you need to do the thing you didn’t get to yesterday, just bring your mind back to the present moment again.

Read the book for all his meditation techniques.