You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

realities—based on many different variables. 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.
The inverse relationship between the analytical mind and suggestibility.
The analytical mind (or the critical mind) is that part of the mind you consciously use and are aware of. It’s a function of the thinking
neocortex—the part of the brain that’s the seat of your conscious awareness that thinks, observes, and remembers things and that resolves problems. It analyzes, compares, judges, rethinks, examines, questions,
polarizes, scrutinizes, reasons, rationalizes, and reflects. It takes what it has learned from past experience and applies it to a future outcome or to something it hasn’t yet experienced.
In the hypnosis experiment described at the start of this chapter, for example, 7 of the 11 subjects given the posthypnotic suggestion to peel their clothes off in the public restaurant didn’t fully comply. It was 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 folks who immediately stripped to their underwear, on the other hand, did it without questioning what they were doing. They were less analytical (and so more suggestible) than their counterparts.
Since the neocortex is divided into two halves called hemispheres, it makes sense that we analyze and spend a lot of time thinking in duality:
you know, good versus bad, right versus wrong, positive versus negative,
male versus female, straight versus gay, Democrat versus Republican, past
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versus future, logic versus emotion, old versus new, head versus heart—
you get the idea. And if we’re living in stress, the chemicals we’re pumping into our systems tend to drive the whole analytical process faster. We analyze even more in order to predict future outcomes so that we can protect ourselves from potential worst-case scenarios based on past experience.
There’s nothing wrong with the analytical mind, of course. It has served us well for our entire waking, conscious lives. It’s what makes us human.
Its job is to create meaning and coherence between our outer worlds (the combined experiences of people and things at different times and places)
and our inner worlds (our thoughts and feelings).
The analytical mind works best when we’re calm, relaxed, and focused.
This is when it’s working for us. It simultaneously reviews many aspects of our lives and provides us with meaningful answers. It helps us choose from myriad options in order to make decisions, learn new things,
scrutinize whether to believe in something, judge social situations based on our ethics, get clear on our purpose in life, discern morality with conviction, and evaluate important sensory data.
As an extension of our egos, the analytical mind also protects us so that we can cope and survive best in our external environments. (In fact, one of the ego’s main jobs is protection) It’s always evaluating situations in the external environment and assessing the landscape for the most advantageous outcomes. It takes care of the self, and it also tries to preserve the body. Your ego will let you know when there’s potential danger, and it will urge you to respond to the condition. For example, if you were walking down the street and saw the oncoming cars driving too close to the side of the road where you were walking, you might cross the street to protect yourself—that’s your ego giving you that guidance.
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. We get overanalytical. And the ego becomes highly selfish by making sure that we come first, because that’s its job. It thinks and feels as though it needs to be in control to protect the identity. It tries to have power over outcomes it predicts what it needs to do to create a certainly safe situation it clings to the familiar and won’t let go
—so it holds grudges, feels pain and suffers, or can’t get beyond its victimhood. It will always avoid the unknown condition and view it as potentially dangerous, because to the ego, the unknown is not to be trusted.
And the ego will do anything to empower itself for the rush of
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addictive emotions. It wants what it wants, and it will do whatever it takes to get there first, by pushing its way to the front of the line. It can be cunning, manipulative, competitive, and deceptive in its protection.
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,
familiar chemical state. You’re thinking in the box.
Then because of the thinking and feeling loop discussed earlier in the book, those thoughts recreate the same emotions and so drive your brain and body further out of order. You’ll be able to seethe answers more easily when you get beyond that stressful emotion and see your life from a different state of mind. (Stay tuned.)
As your analytical mind is heightened, your suggestibility to new outcomes decreases. Why Because an 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 against what you don’t know in order to determine the greatest chances of survival. It’s the time to flee from the unknown. So it makes sense that as the analytical mind is endorsed by the stress hormones, you’ll narrow your thinking, be unlikely to trust and believe in anything new, and be less suggestible to believing in thought alone or in making any unknown thought known. Thus, you can use the analytical mind or ego to work for you or against you.

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