Description

The Power of Your Mind

A placebo is an inert (inactive) substance, typically a tablet, capsule or other dose form that does not contain an active drug ingredient. Placebos are often used in clinical trials as an inactive control so that researchers can better evaluate the true overall effect of the experimental drug treatment under study. In these clinical trials, one subset of patients would receive the placebo and one group would receive the experimental drug, but neither group is aware of which treatment they have received. In addition, researchers in the study would not know which patients have received active or placebo treatments.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want to introduce and talk about the Placebo Effect. The Placebo Effect is defined as “a beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient’s belief in that treatment”.

Let’s look at and well-known placebo study.  I first heard of this study in Vishen Lakhiani’s book, Code of the Extraordinary Mind. This study and corresponding article titled “Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect” was lead by Harvard University Psychology professors, Alia Crum and Ellen Langer.

In a study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one’s mindset, 84 female room attendants working in seven different hotels were measured on physiological health variables affected by exercise. Those in the informed condition were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Your Mindset

Let’s look at a few ways you can grow, change, and control your mindset.

1. The world around is filled with both absolute truths and relative truths. Absolute truths are the things that are… well absolutely true. An absolute truth is the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. No matter who you are, this is true. A relative truth would be there are 2 political parties. This is true in some sense, yet only relative to U.S. politics. In other political systems, there are two political parties. To constantly grow and expand your mind, you can challenge these relative truths. Doing so will make you look at things in new perspectives, possibly even solving challenges with new solutions.
2. Growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is one that doesn’t change. The way things are now is the way they’ll always be in a fixed mindset. With no perception of abundance, one with a...