Harness the Power of the Placebo Effect

Can ordinary people make use of the famous 'placebo effect' for their own benefit?

And can it be used in contexts other than illness and healing?

Many people are skeptical about the claims that are made about placebo response - the phenomenon whereby people 'get better' when treated with a non-drug substance, typically a sugar pill, which they think is a real medication. "If placebo is that powerful," they say, "how come doctors don't prescribe it for everything?"

It seems like a reasonable question. But it misses the real point.

The placebo effect is not a panacea for all ills

It is not the case that sugar pills will heal anything and everything.

However, it is the case that living organisms, which includes us humans, show a remarkable capacity to self-heal from injury and sickness and to develop protective immunity against disease.

All medical treatment, whether applied to humans or animals or even plants, is essentially an attempt to assist or boost the organism's innate ability to get better when it gets into trouble through illness or injury.

Expectations influence outcomes

What the placebo response reveals is that this ability, in humans, has an extra dimension. 'Getting better' is not just about physical processes and chemical interactions taking place in the body. It is significantly affected, in terms of both pace and extent of recovery, by what we expect to happen, by our attitude.

It is important to point out that this is not at all the same thing as saying that if you just believe it enough, you can get better from anything. This proposition is widely-peddled, but it is actually no different from saying that sugar pills can cure anything.

Instead, what the placebo response tells you is that where a 'treatment', whether by medication, surgery, physiotherapy, exercise or any other means (including doing nothing), is likely to benefit you anyway, the level of benefit you gain is likely to be enhanced where you yourself have a positive expectation of the outcome.

It's not just about medicine

And the same is true of almost everything you do. If you do something which is likely to be beneficial for you in itself - for instance, learning a new skill, eating apples instead of doughnuts, joining a community group - having a positive expectation of the outcome is likely to make the benefits even better than they would have been anyway.

So it makes sense to tap into this amazing capacity of ours and make the most of it.

Hypnosis can help you tap into the power of the placebo effect

Placebo Effect Primer is an audio hypnosis session developed by psychologists that will help you do just this.

As you relax and listen repeatedly to your hypnotherapy session, you will

• focus on one particular thing you are doing for the benefit of your health (in the widest sense)
• connect with one or more of the benefits that it will bring you
• hypnotically experience what it will be like to have those benefits
• create a powerful symbolic representation of your benefits to effortlessly augment your unconscious expectations
• harness the placebo effect for your own goals

Download Placebo Effect Primer and see what your body can do. You can listen on your computer or device or via our free app which you can access when you have completed your purchase.