You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
Download 5.46 Mb. View original pdf
|
| The Power of the Environment Just changing your beliefs and perceptions once isn’t enough. You have to reinforce that changeover and over. To see why, let’s return fora moment to the Parkinson’s patients mentioned earlier who improved their motor skills after receiving a saline injection that they thought was a powerful drug. As you’ll recall, the moment they moved into a state of better health, their autonomic nervous systems started to endorse this new state by producing dopamine in their brains. That didn’t happen because they were praying or hoping or wishing their bodies would make dopamine it happened because they became people who made dopamine. Unfortunately, however, thee ect doesn’t stick for everyone. In fact, for some, the placebo effect only lasts fora certain amount of time, because they go back to who they were before their old states of being. In this case, when the Parkinson’s patients went back home and saw their caregivers, saw their spouses, slept in the same beds, ate the same food, sat in the same rooms, and maybe played chess with the same friends who complained about their pains, their same old environments reminded them of their same old personalities and their same old states of being. All of the conditions in their familiar lives reminded them of who they were before, so they just slipped right back into those identities, and their various motor problems recurred. 8 They reidentified with their environments. The environment is that strong. 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 Their conscious minds have no control over that. It’s automatic. Let’s examine this concept a bit further. You’ve learned that the conditioning process creates strong associative memories. You’ve also learned that associative memories stimulate subconscious automatic physiological functions by activating the autonomic nervous system. Think of Pavlov’s dogs again. Once Pavlov conditioned the dogs to associate the bell with getting fed, the dogsbodies were immediately physiologically changed, without much control from the conscious mind. It was the cue from the environment that (via associative memory) automatically, autonomically, subconsciously, and physiologically changed the dogs internal states. They began to salivate and their 171 digestive juices turned on, because they were anticipating a reward. The dogs conscious minds couldn’t do that. It was the stimulus from the environment that created the associative memory from the conditioned response. Now let’s revisit the Parkinson’s patients and the former drug users. We could say that the instant anyone of these individuals returned to the familiar environment, the body would automatically and physiologically return back to the old state of being—without the conscious mind having much control over it. In fact, that past state of being, which has been thinking and feeling the same way for years on end, has conditioned the body to become the mind. That is, the body is the mind that responds to the environment. That’s why it’s so hard for anyone in this situation to change. And the greater the addiction to the emotion, the greater the conditioned response is to the stimulus in the environment. For example, let’s say you were addicted to coffee and wanted to break your addiction to it. If you were visiting my house and I started making a java, and you heard the blast of the espresso machine, smelled the coffee brewing, and saw me drinking it, here’s what would happen The moment your senses picked up those cues from the environment, your body, as the mind, would subconsciously, automatically respond without much help from your conscious mind—because you conditioned it to be that way. Your body-mind would then be craving its physiological reward, waging a war against your conscious mind, trying to convince you to take a sip or two. But if you truly broke the addiction to coffee and then I made a cup in front of you, you could have some or not, because you wouldn’t have the physiological response you had previously. You’d no longer be conditioned (your body would no longer be the mind, and the associative memory of your environment would no longer have the same effect on you. The same holds true for emotional addictions. For instance, if you have memorized guilt from your past experiences and unconsciously live that way everyday in the present, then like most people, you’ll use someone or something at someplace in your external environment to reaffirm your addiction to guilt. Try as you might to be consciously greater than it, the moment you see your mother (whom you use to feel guilty) at the house where you grew up, your body will autonomically, chemically, and physiologically return to the same past state of guilt in the present moment, without your conscious mind being involved. Your body, which has been subconsciously programmed to be the mind of guilt, is already living in the past in that present moment. So it’s more natural to feel 172 guilty when you’re with your mother than to feel any other way. And just as in the drug addict, a conditioned response has altered your internal state based on your association with your present-past external reality. Break the addiction to guilt by changing the subconscious programming, and you can be in the presence of the same conditions and remain free from your present-past reality. Researchers from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand examined thee ect of environment using a group of 148 college students who were invited to take part in a study set in a bar-like atmosphere. 10 The researchers told half the students that they would get vodka and tonic and told the rest they’d receive just tonic water. In reality, the bartenders in the study didn’t pour a single drop of vodka all the students got just plain tonic. The bar-like atmosphere the researchers fashioned looked very realistic, right down to the resealing of the vodka bottles that had been cleverly filled with flat tonic water. The bartenders rimmed glasses with limes dunked in vodka fora more realistic effect, before proceeding to mix and pour drinks as though they were serving the real thing. The subjects became tipsy and acted drunk, with some even showing physical signs of intoxication. They didn’t get drunk because they drank alcohol they got drunk because the environment, by associative memory, cued their brains and bodies to respond in the same old, familiar way. When the researchers eventually told the students the truth, many were amazed and insisted that they really did feel drunk at the time. They believed they were drinking alcohol, and those beliefs translated into neurochemicals, which altered their states of being. In other words, their beliefs alone were sufficient tore up a biochemical change in their bodies that was equal to being drunk. That’s because the students conditioned themselves enough times to associate alcohol with a change in their internal chemical states. As the subjects expected or anticipated the future change in their inner states based on their past associative memories of drinking, they were cued by the environment to physiologically change, just as did Pavlov’s dogs. There’s a flip side, too, of course. 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. 11 Our states of mind, created from the environment, can most definitely contribute to healing our brains and our bodies. 173 So, then, do you need a sugar pill or a saline injection or a sham procedure or a picture window—something or someone or someplace in your external environment—to move into anew state of being Or can you do it just by changing how you think and feel Can you simply believe in anew possibility of health, without relying on any external stimulus, and make the thought in your brain anew emotional experience to the degree that it changes your body and you become greater than the conditioning in your external environment? If so, what you’ve just read suggests that it would be a good idea to change your internal state everyday before you getup and face your same old environment so that it won’t pull you, as it did the Parkinson’s patients, back to your old state of being. Remember Janis Schonfeld, from Chapter 1 , who made physical changes in her brain by thinking she was taking an antidepressant Part of the reason the placebo worked so well for her was that taking that inert pill was a daily reminder to change her state of being (because she associated taking the pill with her optimistic thoughts and feelings about getting better—as do more than 80 percent of people who take an antidepressant placebo). If you could access anew 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 everyday, you’d finally start coming out of your resting state. You’d then be in anew 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 anew 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. I want to take a moment to point out here that not all sickness and disease starts in our minds, of course. Certainly, babies are born with genetic defects and conditions that clearly couldn’t have been triggered by their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. And trauma and accidents do indeed happen. Furthermore, exposure to environmental toxins can definitely wreak havoc in the human body. My point is not that when these things come up, we’ve somehow asked for them— although it’s true that our physical bodies can be weakened by stress hormones and made more susceptible to disease when our immune systems shutdown. My point is that no matter what the source of our ills, 174 |