Using your Brain to End Your Pain

Have you ever heard of the placebo effect? Do you know where it came from? Do you even know

what it means? A placebo is a substance that actually has no pharmaceutical substance in it. They are usually used as a control in clinical trials. However, studies are showing that the placebo is capable of causing positive health effects on certain sick individuals – especially when they do not know that they are receiving the inert substance (i.e. water, sugar) and believe it’s a real medication. After this effect was discovered, researchers decided to take it a step further and see if people would still heal, even if they knew they were receiving the placebo.

The first study was conducted on people with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). The result was that twice as many people who knowingly received the placebo pills reported experiencing symptoms of relief compared to those who received no treatment. In addition, the patients who took the placebo doubled their rate of improvement, equaling the effects of two IBS medications commonly used.

When it comes to taking placebos, a certain number of people will accept, believe and surrender to the thought of being healed or feeling relief from their symptoms without any analysis. As they do this, they begin to program their autonomic nervous system to create the exact pharmacy of chemicals equal to the substance or treatment they think they are receiving. This begs the question: is it the inert substance that’s doing the healing? Or is it the body’s innate capacity to heal by thought alone?

What this demonstrates is that the act of taking pills over time to reduce symptoms becomes the subconscious belief that a substance will heal us. When you combine this idea with the constant barrage of commercials designed to further program us into believing that we need something outside of us to change how we feel inside of us, maybe the conscious mind is not so important after all.

When we are exposed to this type of information over time, a subconscious belief forms that we are all limited, dependent, and powerless. By the time we’re 35-years old, ninety-five percent of who we are becomes a set of automatic behaviors and subconscious beliefs, which means five percent of our conscious mind has nothing to do with what we’ve been subconsciously programmed to believe. Thus, even though people were aware there were no active ingredients in the placebo, their subconscious mind would accept the outcome because they had been programmed to be that way.

So what does this mean for you? Your brain is even more powerful than you believe. With the right mindset, you can heal your body from the inside out.

Interested in learning more? Schedule a call with our neuroscience specialist by clicking here. We’d love to discuss how you can use your brain to end your pain.