Just how powerful are our thoughts? More powerful than most people would ever imagine. What we believe to be true influences every aspect of our lives, from how we interpret, events to what we perceive in the first place. Belief shapes our expectations. Belief forms, shapes and changes our memory. Belief provides the mental scaffolding that we filter every experience through. Therefore, belief is the very reality that we experience.

“Science teaches that we must see in order to believe, but we also must believe in order to see.”
– Dr. Bernie Siegel

Research into the power of belief provides a mountain of evidence that what we think to be true can be equally as powerful as the tangible constraints of the physical world. The most famous example of this is the placebo effect. (Niemi, 2009; Lipton, 2005; Erdmann, 2008) Placebos (fake medicine) frequently and repeatedly work better than the actual drugs produced by the miracles of modern science, on regular people just like you or me. They do so for two reasons: 1) The body and mind are interconnected, therefore what goes on in the mind (our thoughts and beliefs) bring about physiological changes in the body. 2) The power of the mind exceeds the power of the input of our body. It is the central computer for our very essence, receiving input from the outer world through our senses and deciding what to do with that input, and then sending signals back to the body to inform it how to respond. “The connection between mind/body is seamless,” says Linda Rosenberg, CEO of the National Council for Community on your physical well-being. “General good health means good mental health.” (Kornblum, 9-17-08)

When a person believes they are receiving a helpful medicine that will cure their ills, the brain forms that expectation, and those thoughts induce a physiological response in the body that produces antibodies and other natural drugs that often work better than the real thing. A person who believes they are drinking alcohol (which is in reality only tonic water) will behave just as a drunk might. This belief can actually cause the brain to respond accordingly, bringing about very legitimate mental and motor impairments. Meanwhile, those who are given actual alcohol to drink but who believe it is tonic water will tend to behave more normally, and actually outperform their tonic-water drinking counterparts on impairment tests. (Lang et al., 1975) So belief can not only work just like a drug, it can actually counteract it.

Pregnant women who were complaining of nausea were told about this wonderful new anti-nausea drug that worked miracles. They were then given Ipecac syrup, something you probably know is a drug given to induce vomiting, used when a person has swallowed a poison. Despite this, their belief about what the drug would do caused their body to override the chemical agents of the drug itself, and most of these women felt significant nausea relief after taking it. (Wolf, 1950)

In other studies, a person who is told they are receiving a shot that is going to make a painful procedure more painful will actually experience more pain than a control group who received no shots, even though the shot they received was a local pain killer that should have numbed their pain. As psychiatrist David Spiegel points out, “it all boils down to expectation. If you expect pain to diminish, the brain releases natural pain-killers. If you expect pain to get worse, the brain shuts off the processes that provide pain relief. Somehow, anticipation trips the same neural wires as actual treatment does.” (Erdmann, 2008, p. 26)

Under clinical hypnosis, someone who is told that that he is being touched with a red-hot object will actually produce a burn blister on that area of the skin, even though the object touching him was at room temperature. (Moss, 2008) The suggestion formed a belief, and that belief sent signals from the brain to the area touched that brought about a biological response. Worse still, belief can even induce a person to death. (Komaroff, 2/23/2009; Robins, 1997) Studies of indigenous tribes which practice voodoo show that when a ceremony is performed in front of an individual that casts a “death spell” on that person, it can actually bring about foaming of the mouth and induce physiological shock that eventually leads to death. Even today, in the modern world, a person can “believe themselves to death” by inducing themselves into a state of shock or panic that leads to heart failure or other deadly medical problems. A recent example: following a prior school collapse that had occurred several weeks earlier, an 18-year-old girl at a different school with no known pre-existing medical problems collapsed and died when a panic-inducing rumor spread that the building they were in was collapsing.

Because our brains perceive stimuli that is believed or suggested in virtually the same manner as it does real stimuli, things believed are no less powerful than things real. As Dickerson & Kemeny (2004) note, “the moment you think of something, you create an internal representation, which in turn acts on the brain” every bit as much as reality does. An audience in our head can be no different than an audience of peers. When we imagine sounds, activation is shown in a sensory area of the brain called the auditory cortex, normally activated only when we hear real sounds with our ears. (McGuire, Shah & Murray, 1993) In another example, why do amputees still feel “phantom pain” in their missing limbs that is every bit as real as pain to an area of the body they still have? The answer is that the source for pain resides in the brain, not the limb, and those old circuits are still firing randomly.

All of this boils down to an important realization: All of our experiences (real or imaginary) enter the same brain and are molded by belief and expectation. If it gets in the brain, it’s all the same. Imaginary things can bring real hurt. Furthermore, our beliefs form the basis of our physical actions, so when we act upon a belief, we bring consequences into the real world. Just as gas converts to energy that makes your car go, beliefs are converted into actions that get acted upon in the real world.

This means that the most powerful threat to a person’s welfare is not something that can be touched or easily measured. It’s the beliefs that guide our actions and our mental states. As Carl Jung remarked almost a century ago, “If a man imagined that I was his arch enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics or earthquakes. Not even the medieval epidemics of bubonic plague or smallpox killed as many people as certain differences of opinion…” (Jung. 1990, p, 494)

This material is an excerpt from the eBook The Resilient Mind. Get the full book packed with tons of other helpful psychology information for just $7.99. All proceeds from your purchase go to help kids in need!