Placebo yourself

If there’s something that you’d like to do or some condition you’d like to be true, let it happen.

Believe it’s going to happen.

Write it down.

Start talking about it with yourself.

I’ve got this.

You (I) can do it.

That’s what most of journaling is about for me.

Placebo-ing myself.

Yes, there’s levels here.

Sometimes such beliefs and self-talk can border on the edge of insanity.

But anyone who’s ever done anything of note has dipped their toe in the pools of madness before.

The same could go for a quiet life, you can placebo that too.

Lay low for a while, lay low forever and enjoy the simplicity of existence.

The point is the same.

Like taking a sugar pill has almost the same effect as many well-researched and well-funded drugs.

Do some medicines work because they work or because they taste bad?

Is it the chemical makeup or the weird reaction your body has to the taste that kicks off recovery?

Knowing this, you can create your own placebos in life.

If you’d like to lose weight, start considering yourself a healthy, less overweight person. Start the activities you think your less overweight self would do. Keep doing them until it becomes true.

Sometimes you have to get the body moving before the brain catches up.

If you’d like to write a book, spend an hour a day staring at a blank page until something spills out.

If you’d like to be cured of some ailment, start believing you’re cured of it.

If you’d like to start a business, what would you do if it was already running?

Of course, there’s limitations to knowledge, it’s hard to do something you’ve never done before.

But again, this is where you’ve sometimes got to trick the brain into motion.

Placebo yourself in the conscious and let the subconscious catch up.

And ho ho!

When that happens, well, that’s about as close to magic as a sugar pill curing an incurable disease.