You Can Use Placebo Effects to Your Advantage — Mindset as a Service

“The total effect of anything is the combined product of what you are doing and what you think about what you are doing.”

— dr. Alia Crum

Placebo and nocebo effects do not merely apply to medicine, but also to our daily existence. Our belief system has a massive impact on the way we think, behave, and navigate everyday life. We can mold our belief system by taking care of the information we consume, the people we expose ourselves to, and the way we intend to think about the past, present, and future. This is our mindset. Our mindset is the collection of our assumptions and competing commitments around specific domains (e.g., stress, growth, relationships, love, work, sports, etc.). As Stanford scientist dr. Alia Crum put it in this conversation on the Huberman Lab Podcast, “Mindset is a portal between conscious and subconscious processes.”

Your mindset ultimately determines your behaviors and the way you process the events happening in your daily life. Not only that. Your mindsets can also impact your body’s physiological responses to stimuli (see the Milkshake study). In the “Milkshake” study (2011), dr. Crum and colleagues analyzed ghrelin response to the different perceived caloric content of the same milkshake. There was a significant difference between the groups examined: if you believed your milkshake contained fewer calories than it actually did, your ghrelin response (the hunger hormone) was significantly lower than the group being told the actual caloric intake of the beverage.

Stress is a shared domain where our mindset can make a huge difference. There is a widespread belief that stress is bad for you—at least in Western society. What if stress is neither bad nor good? The way we conceive stress makes a difference in how we deal with it. Stress is a manyfold physiological and psychological mechanism. How can we utilize stress to enhance the quality of our work, relationships, and life? This is a growth-oriented question worth examining in order to reframe the way we think about stress and do something about it. It’s not what happens to us that upsets us, it’s how we respond to it—as the Stoics would put it.