In this 55-minute video, where I talk about three aspects of recovery from anxiety and depression that are often overlooked.
- Using the power of placebo effectively (or not accidentally nocebo-ing yourself)
- Desensitising your body at a cellular level
- Finding and releasing stuck energy from trauma or stuck emotions
In this practical video, I explain how these work and take you through the methods I used on myself that enabled me to escape anxiety, OCD and depression.
Information about this video
I have called this video Placebo is your new best friend. And I would like to share how to practically use placebo to expand your calmness, optimism and trust.
Plus, I will teach you one of the most potent meditation routines I know, enabling you to shift negative emotions (or trapped traumas) out of your body.
And though I’ve talked a lot about placebo, it’s my experience that only a few people consciously engage with (or even glimpse) its true power.
So, please allow me to drill down into more detail and explore examples of how you may benefit from this incredibly effective mindset that we were never taught how to exploit to our significant advantage.
If I were to describe what placebo means (to me), it would sound something like this:
It is the ability of the conscious mind to trick the unconscious mind into positively believing something is true or has happened (even if it is not true or hasn’t happened), whereby this thought (or action) initiates an internal transmission, be that biological, physical, chemical, emotional or energetic, which influences the body (as a whole system) to react in some positively, measurable manner.
Or if that conscious suggestion is negative, the same process is initiated, but with adverse outcomes – and in that scenario, we call it nocebo, the opposite of placebo, yet still as effective!
Now, I’m not interested in going into all the thousands of studies that prove placebo works – I’ll leave that down to your research, but I will tell you it is a fascinating topic, a game changer and something I use all day long with myself and those around me.
And the bottom line is (as nonsensical and illogical as it may seem) the effects of placebo-ing your mind and body can bring about changes between 20 to 50 per cent effective, depending on how that message is consciously delivered to your unconscious mind.
I’m asking you to trust me, don’t ask why it works; just accept that it does work (and apply it to your life) without having to go down the doubtful anxiety-driven rabbit hole of having to understand why something works before you take action, which of course, is a procrastination trap as I mentioned in video 31.
We’ve all seen a trusted hypnotist ‘suggest’ something to a person whose senses and bodily responses immediately respond as if those suggestions were true (like eating a potato but being told it was an onion), and they respond mentally and bodily to that suggestion.
One word for that reaction is hypnosis, and another is placebo! And it is so amazing and so powerful that it is almost unbelievable, though it’s true and totally provable that it works.
So, if the hypnotist can do something as profound as completely tricking a person’s brain and body – what if we could learn how to do the same thing to ourselves?
I think the reason placebo (or hypnosis) works is – simply because our senses are clumsy and easily fooled (as I detailed in video 17) – our senses are not the truth of anything; they are just signals our brain receives, then interprets into a guess of what might be happening to you.
Remember when I said that we are not looking out of our eyes, light is coming into our eyes, and an area at the back of our head creates a virtual reality image of what that light is reflected from?
That image is then revised for our preferences, beliefs and Reticular Activating System programmed preferences – and we foolishly think we are observing the truth of any situation – when it is just our detached, virtual reality, ego-driven, photo-shopped story of that situation.
Plus, our body automatically responds emotionally to what we see in the image behind our eyes, believing it to be true.
You could jump back and rewatch video 17 to remind yourself of how easy it is for our senses to be misled; at one level, we experience those deceptions every night because our dreams feel real though they are just films running on our mind screen.
So if a trusted hypnotist tells a suggestible person, “you won’t be able to see that scar on your face anymore – and if the unconscious mind takes that suggestion onboard, it may stop adding that feature to the virtual reality image it creates in the brain.
Therefore, as your mind is not obsessing about that scar and the RAS is giving it less relevance, its prominence within the virtual reality image the brain produces when you look in the mirror subsides, which may allow for an increase in your self-confidence.
That’s why running a new conscious and loving story is so powerfully effective each time you see your reflection in the mirror, to overwrite old negative stories.
Equally, a trusted doctor might say, “well done, you’re healing nicely; there is nothing else to worry about.” Therefore, your unconscious mind might stop worrying regardless of the truth of his statement, yet influenced by the degree you believe him.
Or the degree you trust him rather than doubt him will be the degree that your unconscious mind will stop questioning everything, and your body might be tricked into new chemical behaviours influencing different biological responses.
This is why – how we consciously talk about ourselves to others (or to ourselves) does matter, as the unconscious mind will grab onto those ‘suggestions’ (regardless of their truth) and act out the subsequent stories they allude to, which will affect our chemistry, actions and memories.
And we are all suggestible – though those with more complex anxiety or OCD (currently) are more biased to believe the negative stories that their anxious (and doubting condition) suggests to their conscious mind (which we call nocebo) – rather than to use the conscious mind to suggest more positive (and trusting) stories to the reprogram the unconscious mind – which we call placebo!