You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

your body has become your subconscious mind. You’ve just entered the operating system.
Think about it like this When you feel a certain familiar way, you’re subconsciously accessing a series of thoughts derived from that particular feeling. You’re autosuggesting thoughts on a daily basis equal to how you feel. These are the thoughts you accept, believe, and surrender to as if they were true. Therefore, you’re more suggestible only to the thoughts that are matched to exactly the same feeling. As a result, those thoughts that you unconsciously think about are the ones you accept, believe, and surrender to over and over.
Conversely, it could also be said that you’re much less suggestible to any thoughts that are not equal to your memorized feelings. Any new thought that reflects an unknown possibility just wouldn’t feel right. Your self-talk (the thoughts that you listen to everyday) slips by your conscious awareness on a moment-to-moment basis and stimulates the autonomic nervous system and the flow of biological processes,
reinforcing the programmed feeling of who you think you are. Remember the study in Chapter 2
, where researchers found that optimists responded more favorably to suggestions that were positive while pessimists responded more unfavorably to suggestions that were negative.
By the same means, if you were to change how you feel, could you become more suggestible to anew stream of thoughts Absolutely By feeling an elevated emotion and allowing a whole new set of thoughts to be driven by that new feeling, you’d increase your level of suggestibility to what you were feeling and then thinking. You’d be in anew state of being, and your new thoughts would then be the autosuggestions equal to that feeling. And when you feel emotions, you’re naturally activating your implicit memory system and the autonomic nervous system. You can simply allow the autonomic nervous system to do what it does best:
restore balance, health, and order.
Isn’t that what many people did in the placebo studies mentioned earlier Weren’t they able to bring up an elevated emotion like hope or inspiration or the joy of being well And once they saw anew possibility without ever analyzing it, wasn’t their level of suggestibility influenced by those feelings As they felt those corresponding emotions, didn’t they enter the operating system and reprogram their autonomic nervous system with new orders—by thought alone—autosuggesting equal to those emotions?
Opening the Door to the Subconscious Mind
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If there are different degrees of suggestibility, then that can be demonstrated visually by showing different thicknesses of the analytical mind. The thicker the barrier between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, the more difficulty you’ll have getting into the operating system.
Take a look at Figures 6.6
and on the following two pages, which represent two people with different types of minds.
The person in Figure 6.6
has a very thin veil between the conscious and subconscious minds and therefore is very open to suggestion (like Ivan
Santiago from the beginning of the chapter. This person will naturally accept, believe, and surrender to an outcome, because he or she doesn’t analyze or intellectualize too much. Folks like this might be more innately prone to accept that a thought is a potential experience and embrace it emotionally so that the package becomes imprinted on the autonomic nervous system, ready to be executed as a reality. These people don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure things out in their lives,
and they don’t overthink many things. If you’ve ever seen a hypnosis stage show, the subjects who make it to the front of the room usually fall into this category.
Now contrast this with Figure 6.7
. If you look at the thicker analytical mind that separates the conscious and subconscious minds, you can easily see that this person is less prone to taking suggestions at face value without a significant degree of help from his or her intellectual mind in evaluating, processing, planning, and reviewing. People like this are highly critical and will make sure they’ve analyzed everything before simply surrendering and trusting.
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A less analytical mind (represented by the thinner layer in the illustration) is more suggestible.
Bear in mind that some of us have a more built-up analytical mind even without constantly living by our stress hormones. We might have studied different subjects in college or lived with parents who reinforced the mechanisms of rational thought when we were young, or maybe it’s just part of our nature. (Nevertheless, you can have a significantly broad analytical mind and still learn how to get beyond it—I certainly did—so there’s hope.)
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A more developed analytical mind (represented by the thicker layer in the illustration) is less suggestible.
As I said before, neither of these types is more advantageous than the other. I think a healthy balance between the two works very well.
Someone who’s overanalytical is less likely to trust and flow in his or her life. Someone who’s overly suggestible might be too gullible and less functional. The point I want to make is that if you’re continually analyzing your life, judging yourself, and obsessing about everything in your reality, then you’ll never enter the operating system where those old programs exist and reprogram them. Only when a person accepts,
believes, and surrenders to a suggestion does the door between the conscious and subconscious minds open. That information then signals the autonomic nervous system and—presto!—it takes over.
Now take a look at Figure 6.8
. The arrow represents the movement of consciousness from the conscious mind into the subconscious mind,
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where the suggestion is biologically embossed into the programming system.
This figure represents the relationship between brainwave states and the movement of awareness from the conscious mind to the subconscious mind, moving past the analytical mind during the practice of meditation.
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.
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