“You Are the Placebo”: Rewriting 95% of the Unconscious, The Mechanism by Which Thoughts Change the “Material” Body

“If you take this pill, your illness will be cured.”

Even if what was handed to you by the doctor with those words was just a lump of sugar (placebo), if the patient believes it is “real medicine” and takes it, the symptoms may actually improve.
This is the “Placebo Effect”.

Are we not perceiving this phenomenon as something somewhat vague, like “sickness is in the mind”?
Just “imagination” or “temporary assumption”.

However, what if that “assumption” has physical power enough to actually rearrange neural circuits in the brain, change hormone balance, toggle gene switches, and make tumors disappear?
That would no longer be “imagination” but reproducible “science”.

Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book “You Are the Placebo” is exactly a book that challenged this taboo.
He attempts to thoroughly logically elucidate the theme that “thoughts become matter (body)”, which tends to be talked about spiritually at first glance, using the latest findings in neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum mechanics.

This book is not just a health book.
It is the strongest text that biologically backs up “redesign of life by control of attention” advocated by Mindset Design, and a practical manual for us to create reality with our own will.

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You Are Casting a “Curse” on Yourself Every Day

The opposite of the placebo effect is the “Nocebo Effect”.
This is a phenomenon where believing something is “harmful” actually causes adverse effects or death to the body, even if it is harmless.

A shocking case is introduced in this book.
A man was declared by a doctor to have “terminal cancer and a few months to live”.
He believed those words, weakened rapidly, and died as declared.
However, as a result of autopsy, almost no cancer was found in his body.
It was a misdiagnosis, but what killed him was not “cancer” but the too powerful “belief” that “I will die soon”.

This may be an extreme example.
However, we are doing the same thing to ourselves on a daily level.

• Wake up in the morning and predict “Today will be the worst day”.
• Look in the mirror and sigh, “I look old” or “I have no charm”.
• Give up before trying, saying “I can’t do it anyway”.

These are all negative rehearsals for oneself and nocebo effects.
Triggered by these thoughts, the brain secretes stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.
What happens if that continues every day for years?
The body adapts to that “emergency”, lives constantly in alert mode, and eventually realizes it as illness or disorder.

“Your biography becomes your biology.”

As long as we keep ruminating on past memories and trauma, our bodies continue to live in the time called “past”.
While wishing “I want to change”, we are desperately protecting “not changing” at the cellular level.

Why Can’t We Change Even Though We “Want to Change”?: Addiction at Cellular Level

“Let’s think positively”
Even if you decide so, before you know it, you are dominated by anxiety and irritation again.
Why is willpower so powerless?

That is because our cells are addicted to “negative emotions”.
This book vividly explains this from the perspective of cell biology.

On the surface of cells, there are docking stations called “receptors” to receive specific chemicals (molecules of emotion).
If you feel “anger” every day, cells increase receptors dedicated to anger so that they can efficiently receive “anger” chemicals.
It is the same logic as a store increasing cash registers when the queue for a specific product becomes long at a supermarket.

Conversely, receptors for “joy” and “gratitude” that are rarely felt degenerate and decrease because they are not used.

Thus, your body is remodeled into a structure (hardware) specialized in feeling “anger”.
Does it get even scarier? Cells get used to that emotion completely, and senses become paralyzed (downregulation).
They are no longer satisfied with the same stimulus and come to seek stronger anger and stronger anxiety.
They start sending request signals to the brain saying “Give me more materials to get angry!”

This is the biological reason why we cannot get out of negative thought patterns.
We are addicted to our unhappy emotions like drug addiction.

Trying to “be positive” in this state is like a heavy smoker trying to quit smoking only with fighting spirit.
It is natural that the body (unconscious) resists fiercely and screams “Be anxious”, “Get angry”.

Epigenetics: Genes are Not “Destiny”

Here, what becomes hope is the knowledge of Epigenetics.
Once in the scientific world, it was believed that “genes are determined by birth and cannot be changed (genetic determinism)”.
It is the idea that “because my parents had cancer, I will also have cancer”.

However, the latest science denies this.
Genes themselves are just “blueprints” of information, and it turned out that which genes are turned on and which act off are determined by signals from the environment.

And for humans, what is the most powerful “environmental signal”?
That is “Thought” and “Emotion”.

When you feel hope and gratitude, the chemical signal reaches the cell nucleus, turns on healthy genes (immune strengthening, repair), and turns off disease genes.
Conversely, when you feel fear or stress, inflammation and disease genes are turned on.

In other words, by changing thoughts, we can even change the expression of genes we were born with.
We can be managers of genes, not victims of genes.

Scientific Method to Take the Placebo Called Yourself

So, how can we cut off this powerful addiction and install a new self?
The solution presented by Dr. Dispenza is very specific.
It is to change brain waves through “meditation” and directly access the operating system (OS).

1. Crossing the Wall of Analytical Mind

When we are usually awake, brain waves are in the state of Beta waves (logical/analytical thinking).
In this state, attention is directed to the outer world (environment, time, body), and new information cannot be accepted deeply.
There is a thick wall called “analytical thinking” between consciousness (5%) and unconsciousness (95%).

By slowing down brain waves to Alpha waves or Theta waves through meditation, you can cross this wall.
There is a highly suggestible state where verbal suggestions are directly written as programs.
Here for the first time, we are ready to delete the old program (past self) and write a new program (ideal future).

2. “Remembering” the Future

What to do next.
“Mental Rehearsal”.

This book introduces an episode of actor Jim Carrey when he was still unknown.
When he was not selling, he parked his car on Hollywood hills every night and vividly imagined “himself succeeding as a famous actor”.
And he wrote a check for “acting fee: 10 million dollars” to himself and carried it in his wallet.

The important thing is not just imagining the image.
It is feeling the “emotion (joy, gratitude, freedom)” when that dream comes true right in this moment.

The brain cannot distinguish between what is actually happening and what is vividly imagined.
Furthermore, for the body, “emotion” is a chemical substance.
Even if nothing has happened in reality yet, by continuing to bathe the brain and body in chemicals of gratitude and joy, the body begins to have the illusion that “that future has already happened”.

Then, gene switches are toggled.
New proteins are made, neural circuits are rearranged, and your body biologically changes to “successful future self”.
The author expresses this as “remembering the future”.

3. Stay in the State of Gratitude

We usually live reactively, “grateful because something good happened”.
However, in the world of the quantum model, it is the opposite.
“Because I appreciate, good things happen.”

A woman named Candace appearing in this book was diagnosed with thyroid disease and told she would need to take medicine for the rest of her life.
However, she woke up at 4:30 every morning to meditate and continued to rehearse “healthy and energetic self”.
At first, her body resisted and was attacked by pain and discomfort, but she did not give in.
She continued to choose the new placebo “I am healthy” over the past suggestion “I am sick”.

As a result, she regained a completely healthy body that needed no medicine at all.
Her own consciousness cured the disease that the doctor said “will never be cured”.

Model of “Reality Creation” from Quantum Mechanics

Why does reality change just by rehearsing in the head?
Here, this book presents one model incorporating the perspective of quantum physics.

According to the “observer effect” of quantum mechanics, elementary particles (micro world below atoms) are in a state where they “can exist anywhere” like waves until someone observes them, and appear as “particles” in one place only by observing.
In other words, the interpretation is that the observer’s consciousness (attention) condenses one reality from infinite waves of possibilities.

According to this model, when you wake up as “usual self (past)”, do the same routine, meet the same people, and feel the same emotions, you continue to observe “known reality”.
Therefore, that reality continues to be reproduced today.

However, when entering a deep relaxed state (state of pure consciousness) in meditation, you access the “unknown realm (quantum field)” of “no one, nowhere, no time”.
When you focus your consciousness on new possibilities (healthy self, wealthy self) there and pour energy called emotion, you are observing that possibility and attracting it to the real world.

Matter does not create thought.
Thought (consciousness) creates matter.
This is the physical basis for Mindset Design’s definition that “attention is life itself”.

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Conclusion: Attention is Your Life

When reading this book from the perspective of Mindset Design, the most important message is this.
“Energy flows where attention goes.”

When you are paying attention to “past failures”, “future anxiety”, or “grudge against someone”, you continue to leak precious life energy to them.
That is the same as dedicating your life to the ghost called past.
So there is no energy left to create a new future.

However, when you return attention to “here and now” and focus on “desired future”, energy returns to you.
The 95% unconscious program is powerful, but not unrewriteable.
Because we have consciousness as an “observer”.

Whether the story at the quantum level is physically “correct” may not be important now.
The important thing is the “Functionality” that adopting that way of thinking and changing one’s consciousness actually moves life in a good direction.
What Mindset Design emphasizes is not “correct” but “functional”.

The best medicine is not in hospitals or pharmacies.
It is waiting for you to open the seal inside your skull even now.
You yourself are the strongest placebo.

What future do you pay “attention” to today?
That choice creates your body of tomorrow and creates your life.