Beliefs Over Biology

One of the most overlooked groups in the whole self-help world are the people who don’t really like change. If you don’t enjoy upheaval, trying new things or disrupting comfortable patterns you are not alone and there’s nothing wrong with you. The problem is if an area of your life is not where it needs to be you don’t take action, you procrastinate, then only act when things are already bad or it is like a week before your holiday.

A better way to see this situation, is that change is already happening. Your behaviours, fitness and health are edging in a direction whether you choose to act or not. These drifts are subtle, hard to spot, and usually negative if you let them just go with the flow. The good thing is to change course you don’t need to flip your whole life on its head. Often the difference between a successful you and a failing you is a handful of small changes.

I read a couple of interesting studies this week on another aspect around belief, that is, how your pre-existing beliefs heavily shape the outcome you get. While this is nothing new around general goals achievement, these studies focused on how the beliefs about the thing you’re doing can change the actual physical response by your body… which is groundbreaking!

In one study people were given the same milkshake on two different days. One day they were told it was a 620 calorie indulgent shake, the other day a 140 calorie sensible shake. Exact same drink. When people believed it was indulgent their hunger hormone dropped much more after drinking it, so they felt more satisfied. When they believed it was sensible their body basically kept them feeling hungry. The label in the head changed the response in the body.

Another study looked at hotel housekeepers. These women were on their feet all day but many didn’t see their work as exercise. Researchers simply told half of them that their work met the health guidelines for exercise and explained how pushing carts, scrubbing, walking corridors etc helped. Four weeks later that informed group showed improvements in weight and blood pressure, while the uninformed group did not, all without changing what they were doing.

The latest breathwork models are also leaning to the influence of the mind, they are seeing that the speed and depth of your breathing is not just affected by physiological markers such as carbon dioxide, but rather the interplay between this and perceived need for upcoming breath from your mind.

A study on stress also found similar influence. If you are taught that stress can be useful, that parts of the stress response can help focus you, grow, or reach high performance you respond more adaptively than if you are taught stress is always bad. It was shown this influenced a more moderate cortisol response and showed markers linked to better adaptation. The stressor is the same, simply your views around it are shaping how it affects you.

I guess these results shouldn’t be too surprising as they are just another variation of the placebo effect. I feel as a society we don’t give the placebo mechanism enough attention, credit or acknowledgement. In literally tens of millions of people, they have created a positive change in their body by simply being told that a behaviour (taking a pill, a routine etc) will help. They thought it would help, so it did, even though nothing else actually changed. Derren Brown did a show on this which was worth watching.

What This Means For You

You have to be careful around such beliefs talk to not go too wild in convincing yourself that every problem as zero physical influences, that you can bend the laws of physics or make yourself fly (like in this great Key & Peele Sketch). While that is an extreme example in the anything is possible direction, plenty of people are sitting at the negative extreme in the everything is impossible camp. If this is you, then what if one of these were true:

-That you can lose weight even though your hormones are out.
-That you can get fit even though you have never done exercise.
-That your pain could just disappear despite the diagnosis you have.
-That you could get really fit, really fast.
-That your hunger is not that strong & you can manage it.
-That you can be in your best shape ever despite being ___ years old.
-That you could choose to feel not stressed yet still act optimally
-That you can feel content after eating smaller portions.
-That you can break your addiction to a behaviour despite your personality type
-That you could create the life you want even after going through _____.
-That you can change your behaviour in an instant, like….right now!
-That change can be fun and easy despite what has happened in the past.

No one says that changing your belief’s are easy to do, but maybe that is just a limiting belief in itself. an easy hack to this, is to be around other people who already think differently to you, have support from someone while going through this process and by opening your mind to new thoughts / viewpoints.

Video – The Key & Peele sketch “You Can Do Anything” 

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