Chapter 1

Unlocking the Power of Your Mind: Introducing Creative Visualization

In This Chapter

Understanding how visualization works

Considering the power of creative visualization

Examining the connection between body and mind

Over the years many techniques have been invented to help people with their personal development, including activities such as meditation, relaxation, hypnotism (and self-hypnosis), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and many, many more. But all these different techniques have one major thing in common: they require the use of imagination, generally through visualizing yourself in particular ways or situations.

Without referring to ‘creative visualization’ by name, developers and proponents of personal development programs have always understood that (when suitably directed) the mind contains the power to help make dramatic changes in a person’s life. Only recently, however, has creative visualization become a technique in its own right, fully equal to (and some say even more effective than) many other personal development systems. This chapter talks you through the power of the mind and how you can use it to visualize creatively.

Discovering How Creative Visualization Works

Creative visualization is the basic technique underlying positive thinking. It is used to bring changes you desire into your life, such as achieving goals you set, modifying unwanted behaviours (for example quitting smoking) and enhancing feelings and emotions (for example becoming happier and more self-confident). It is also a good tool for improving physical performance (as used by many top athletes) and enhancing your physique.

Creative visualization is something you probably do quite often (to one extent or another) without even realising it. For example, when was the last time you daydreamed? If you’re like most people, it was probably today (perhaps within the last hour or so), because daydreaming is one of the most common human activities – but daydreaming is really nothing more than unguided or unstructured visualization.

When you daydream, your thoughts tend to flit about, resting on one idea after another, in a similar way to dreaming when asleep. Often, if something is on your mind, your daydreams keep returning to whatever that thing is and then drift off again before later coming back to that subject. Usually the flitting is guided by connections between ideas with each new thought reminding you of something else, so you follow a thread of thought.

Daydreaming allows you to achieve many things because you’re generally relaxed when you do it: when you’re waiting for a bus, taking a coffee break, being a passenger in a car, and so on, you distance yourself from your thoughts and let them take their own journey. And in doing so, in your mind’s eye you see (or visualize) these daydreams, noticing the faces of people you think about, places you’ve been, and things you’ve done, like little mental movies.

It is believed that the purpose of daydreaming is to help people make better sense of the world as they encounter it. Unlike sleep dreams, daydreams tend to be somewhat more logical in their flow and based around actual people, things, and events. By running them through your mind over and again you sort your experiences, saving them in your memory in such a way that the important details are more easily recallable.

We can harness this natural pastime to our own ends by learning to replace unguided daydreaming with guided creative visualization. By doing this we have much greater control over our visualizations, the effects they’ll have, and how effective they’ll be at bringing changes we want into our lives.

Humans are very good at pattern recognition and quickly notice (and make a mental note) when things are somehow related to each other. For example, have you noticed how often you see a new actor in a movie and think to yourself ‘that person is just like so and so’? This sensation is your mind automatically recognising similarities between the two people, and daydreaming is one of the times when this type of recognition occurs. With daydreaming you build a better understanding of the relationship between things in the world. Pattern recognition is used in creative visualization to connect two or more ideas, people or emotions together in order to bring about changes you desire.

Using the power of affirmations

One of the simplest personal development techniques and a superb companion to creative visualization is using positive affirmations. Affirmations repeated daily have helped numerous people, due to the fact that people’s unconscious is always listening and likes to believe what it hears (another reason to try to be always positive).

The term unconscious mind was coined by Sigmund Freud and is used in psychology to refer to the thoughts we have that are out of reach of our consciousness. However, outside of psychological circles the phrase subconscious mind is often used in its place, probably because it has connotations of greater awareness than the former term. Therefore wherever I use the word ‘unconscious’ in this book, please feel free to exchange it with the word ‘subconscious’ if you prefer.

Researchers found that in meetings just one person repeating his opinion twice is sufficient for participants to later recall that person’s point of view as the main agenda or theme of the meeting – often without remembering who brought that subject up. That’s something worth remembering next time you’re in a meeting and have an important issue to discuss!

If you take the time to re-affirm your ambitions and desires every day, you start to believe every word you say and your unconscious mind helps to slightly reform your personality so that the beliefs, emotions or intents behind the affirmations become a part of your personality, helping your goals to become actualised. This happens because your mindset changes each time you use your affirmations so that you become more motivated and more confident that you can make the changes you desire, and so you put more effort into and spend more time working on these goals.

Setting, re-affirming, and achieving goals

Creative visualization allows you to start taking control over aspects of your own life that you want to develop or modify, such as your emotions, actions, habits, phobias, and so on. You do so by choosing specific goals that you re-affirm continually through visualizations and affirmations, until you begin to achieve them. If you choose to try and conquer your fear of heights, for example, you need to hold positive visualizations in your mind when going to a high location, so that your fears are minimised. When you do this over time you become desensitised to the fear and the positive visualizations have an ever greater effect. Chapter 11 explains more about how this works and provides several visualization exercises.

Don’t worry if you believe that you have difficulty in visualizing because anyone can visualize. For example, what colour is your front door? And how many rooms are there in your house? In order to answer these questions, almost without realising it you visualize your house and take a good look at it with your imagination. This is the process used in creative visualization, in which common things and experiences you can easily recall or imagine are used as seeds and then expanded upon.

One of the keys to using visualization successfully is to understand that you aren’t trying to become someone else, or to change other people. Instead your aim is to focus on yourself and your psychological makeup, and then to develop your own personality in order to have a richer and more fulfilled life. By doing so, your relationships with others and interactions with the world prosper.

If you don’t currently have any specific goals in mind, use an exercise to help you locate aspects of your life that you want to change. Take a look at Figure 1-1, the Cartwheel of Life. This tool helps give you a quick overview of the extent of your personal development to date.

Imagine that the cartwheel represents how you travel through life. It comprises a central axle with 12 spokes attached, each of which represents a different aspect of your psychological makeup. Each spoke is divided into eight parts. The farther along a spoke a particular attribute extends from the axle, the more complete that quality is in your personality.

Ideally, to travel as far as you can in life you want each of these qualities to reach to the wheel’s rim, because if only one or two of them make it to the edge, the rim falls off, the wheel breaks, and you aren’t going anywhere. On the other hand, with three or four attributes extending to the rim you can progress through life (although somewhat carefully), but any bumps in the road that you encounter may well cause the wheel to break and bring you to a crashing halt.

For example, without sufficient resilience you may give up too quickly when you encounter difficulties. Without optimism you may be less likely to set out on difficult projects. And without motivation you may find it hard to achieve your goals. The same goes for all the various qualities in the wheel. Although they are all emotional or psychological traits, they are all needed not only for your emotional wellbeing, but also for you to succeed materially in life.

If you can get half a dozen or more of these qualities sufficiently matured in your life to reach the cartwheel’s rim, the wheel is much stronger and better able to travel over rough roads. As you progress through life’s journey and invest the time into extending more spokes towards the rim, you find that you can travel faster, farther, and through far more rugged terrain.

Certainly it would be a very rare person indeed who had all 12 cartwheel spokes reaching to the rim – like most people I’m probably only halfway there. But the point is that this metaphor allows you to get a feel for how far you’ve come, and how far you’ve yet to go.

Spend a few minutes examining the cartwheel and, if you can, make a copy of it and shade in each spoke with a pen or pencil up to the point at which you feel you’ve progressed so far. After completing all the spokes, you have a basic diagram of your current personal development, which you may want to retain so you can refer to it in the future and see how you’ve progressed. You also now have a very good idea of areas in your life that you may like to work on, and for which you may want to set goals.

Improving skills with mental practice

Most people have effective imaginations and their daydreams often branch out into ‘what if?’ scenarios in which they visualize things that they want to experience. If you have something negative on your mind, sometimes your daydreams revolve too much around these thoughts and you can become anxious or depressed. Negative thoughts can predominate because whatever is current in your life tends to get the most attention and analysis, which shows just one reason why thinking positively as much as possible is so important.

By following the thread of thought in a daydream, you tend to analyse the ideas, events, or people you think about and, each time you move your attention to a related new thought, the connection between these thoughts is reinforced in your mind. As you can see in the later section ‘Connecting your brain with your body’, this reinforcement and the connections made between your thoughts are stored physically in your brain.

Creative visualization aims to replace unguided daydreaming with structured visualizations to build new connections or neural pathways – but only those you want to create. In essence, when you use creative visualization techniques, you’re consciously reprogramming parts of your brain, creating new connections where you want them (or reinforcing existing ones) and allowing unwanted connections to wither. This is the process that occurs in our brains throughout life as we learn things in the normal course of living. But with creative visualization we can harness the process to learn new behaviours and modify emotions.

Minimising and removing negative emotions

When you’re mastering creative visualization, your life is a ‘glass half full’ kind of life. For example, when you focus on what you don’t want, like being less fat, you’re still thinking about the concept of fatness, and as a result your unconscious focuses in on it. Instead, visualize being thinner so your unconscious thinks about thinness. In the same way, for example, the cartwheel exercise in the earlier section ‘Setting, re-affirming, and achieving goals’ works best when you use it to consider how far you’ve progressed in each area of your life, not how little.

Whenever you find yourself tempted to think negative thoughts, try to visualize something positive instead. If you feel sad, remember a happy time and think about it. If you’re angry, visualize something peaceful, such as relaxing on a deckchair at the beach. Or if you’re susceptible to feelings of low self-worth, remember one of your positive achievements and dwell on that.

Your own psyche is also helped if you don’t have negative thoughts about other people. Yes, I know, everyone loves a good gossip, but speaking or thinking negatively about someone else just sends negative messages to your unconscious, and in the long run you feel worse not better. Therefore the old saying ‘If you have nothing good to say about someone, say nothing’, makes a lot of sense.

Engendering a positive and motivating attitude

You can reduce negative thoughts and emotions by building an automatic response so each time you notice an unwanted thought you take the time to deal with it. Of course, it’s not always that easy. For example, if I say to you ‘Don’t think about chocolate’, that’s going to be the only thing you think about!

Instead you have to be sneaky to get past your unconscious and the best technique to do so is to acknowledge your negative thought or emotion, accept it, and let it go without acting on it. Go to Chapter 8 for exercises on letting go of negative thoughts.

At the same time, remind yourself that this thought isn’t the real you (or the you that you want to be) thinking, and use your affirmations, which soon become your new way of thinking. Your attitude then markedly improves over time. You’ll notice it, and so will other people who may even remark on your improved outlook or change in demeanour.

Making Changes in Your Life with Creative Visualization

The changes you desire may include becoming a calmer and happier person, overcoming procrastination, increasing your motivation, and so on. Or they can be physical changes such as losing weight, reducing aches and pains, or increasing stamina.

Before you use creative visualization, decide to make real changes that can be measured in terms of results in your own life (seen both by you and others) and in terms of performance, whether academic, physical, or otherwise. That way you can attain the most benefit and, when you come to look back at the results, you know for certain that the visualizations worked (and can continue to do so).

Listening to your inner self

The best way to start making changes in your life is to listen to your inner self. By this I mean try to understand what it is that you truly desire from life, and the things you do and don’t like about yourself and how you interact with the world. To do so, you want to achieve a calm and detached state of mind so any painful thoughts can be considered without too much discomfort, and to avoid being overly swayed by strong emotions. Chapter 3 includes advice on how you can quickly relax yourself and provides techniques for reducing stress and anxiety to help with this.

The first few times you visualize you may have difficulty getting started because thoughts are racing through your mind and your concentration wavers. If you experience this problem, try the following simple relaxation exercise:

1. Take a few deep breaths and then clench all the muscles in your body. Include your face through your body to your arms, legs, hands, and feet.

2. Hold this position for a few seconds and then slowly exhale. As you do so think to yourself ‘toes relax, toes relax’, and then ‘feet relax, feet relax’, and feel your feet become light and comfortable.

3. Proceed slowly with ‘calves relax, calves relax’, followed by ‘knees relax, knees relax’, and ‘thighs relax, thighs relax’. Carry on until your legs and feet feel pretty good.

4. Continue through your pelvis, stomach, chest, shoulders, neck, mouth, eyes, forehead, and mind, in that order. Each time, think the relaxation command twice while all the time breathing gently and steadily.

This exercise is very effective when you feel highly strung and you can also use it when you have difficulties getting to sleep at night. Properly performed the process takes up to five minutes, after which (if you still aren’t relaxed) you can repeat it again if necessary.

Setting goals that you want to achieve

When you’re relaxed, you can use this state of mind to accomplish many things. To start with you’re in the best frame of mind to start choosing the goals that you want to visualize about. Try thinking about things in your life that you want to change, whether relationships, finances, health, or something else, and then try to narrow these down to a handful of goals. Go to Chapter 2 for more information on identifying areas in your life that you want to modify.

I can’t tell you specifically what these goals should be because everyone is different, but the numerous visualization exercises in this book cover a very wide range of typical goals and ambitions. If you’re still having difficulty deciding exactly what to change, have a browse through the book – whatever stands out to you is likely to be something that deep down you have an interest in; so go ahead and explore it.

When you’ve come up with a handful of goals that every time you consider them seem more important to you, you’re ready to start. Any goals that seem to get less important are either already being achieved or not really of that much interest to you, so you can ignore them.

Changing unwanted behaviours to desired ones

No doubt you have behaviours that you’re unhappy about. For instance you may have decided that you shout at the kids too often when they misbehave and would rather reduce that knee-jerk reaction. Or maybe you’re in the habit of having a bowl of ice cream each evening while watching TV, which isn’t helping your weight, and so on.

Behaviours such as these tend to start simply and then over time become habits that you find hard to break. Humans are creatures of habit, and forming habits is something everyone does. So the answer isn’t simply to stop doing the behaviour, because most people find that next to impossible. Instead you need to establish new habits to replace the old ones.

One of the more powerful visualization techniques is the interrupt – also known by psychologists as a pattern interrupt – in which a new pattern replaces the old one. For example, to shout less at the kids you would visualize a situation in which this happens, such as one of them kicking a football into a window and smashing it (which would make most parents angry).

To discover and develop the interrupt technique, imagine a scenario that makes you so angry that you’d shout at someone. Visualize this event right up to the point at which you begin to shout, but instead see yourself exhaling as rapidly and deeply as you can, followed by counting slowly to ten. Now repeat the visualization over and over again, each time breaking away from the point at which you would shout into the breathing routine. After a few run-throughs this interrupt becomes natural and fast and you’re ready to imagine another circumstance that makes you shout, with which you can also visualize the interrupt and switch to deep breathing.

After you’ve visualized a number of these situations, you’ll find that any new scenario that you think up has you going straight to the breathing without even considering the shouting. Practised over time you can find that you do indeed shout less and less. And the same goes for breaking the ice cream habit, teaching yourself to swear less, or any other behaviour you want to change. Visualize an interrupt, in which you do something else, just before (and replacing) the behaviour; the interrupt can be as simple as having a glass of water or blowing your nose.

Achieving goals you previously thought impossible

As long as you’re realistic and keep your goals within the realms of possibility, you can find that creative visualization helps you to achieve even the most seemingly impossible ambitions.

A quick search of Google reveals that the range of people using creative visualization to achieve amazing results is huge, which goes to show that everyone can use the same techniques to achieve major changes in their lives.

For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger used visualization techniques to become a seven-times Mr Universe, a movie star, and Governor of California. He says:

I visualized myself being and having what it was I wanted… Before I won my first Mr Universe title, I walked around the tournament like I owned it... I had won it so many times in my mind that there was no doubt I would win it. Then when I moved on to the movies, the same thing. I visualized myself being a famous actor and earning big money... I just knew it would happen.

The more frequently you visualize something that may appear impossible to achieve, and the more you increase your positive expectations of attaining it, the greater the chance you have of doing so. Only by consistently focusing on the positive outcome you desire, and strongly believing you’ll obtain it, will every fibre of your being work towards this outcome, so that you’ll be ready to seize any and all opportunities that come your way, and even make your own. The point is to never give up as giving up is the only way of confirming to yourself that you’ll never be able to achieve your goal.

Exploring the Mind/Body Connection

Although much of the human nervous system is under automatic control – for example, controlling of the heartbeat, regularity of breathing, core temperature, and so on – the body is also highly connected with the brain. You can therefore communicate with your physical body using creative visualization, to help improve fitness, combat fatigue and illness, and decrease pain.

Connecting your brain with your body

Reflexologists say that the soles of your feet have different parts (or zones) corresponding to various organs in your bodies (and that hands have similar zones too). Acupuncturists take this idea further, claiming that hundreds of points on your body (when stimulated with needles) have effects on other parts of the body. Certainly, all nerve endings lead directly to the brain via long connections and therefore all parts of the body are connected via the brain to all other parts of the body.

In several studies, patients undergoing treatment who have been asked to visualize, have become healthier far more quickly than those patients who only received treatment. Examples of visualizations that have been tried include imagining your white blood cells as being warriors being set loose on cancerous cells to destroy them, or imagining healing nutrients being sent via the blood directly to a wound to help it heal more quickly.

Now I would never advocate using creative visualization in place of following prompt and professional medical advice. But used in conjunction with the latest medicines and treatments, creative visualization has been shown to enhance the results and speed up healing.

So considering your whole self when using creative visualization makes good sense. And if your goal is to feel happier, achieving this state benefits your mind and body; after all, depression can lead to aches and pains and bad posture, resulting in other physical ailments.

Adopting an upright posture and a smile while visualizing does wonders for increasing the results and your general feeling of wellbeing. This approach is known as positive biofeedback. Check out the later section ‘Using biofeedback to change your emotions’ to find out more about positive biofeedback.

Thinking with your heart as well as your mind

Looking more deeply into the mind/body connection, if you ask someone where he feels sadness, he very often points to his heart, as people do when asked about where joyful feelings come from. You rarely see people point to their head unless they have a headache.

This behaviour is easily explained, because a universally accepted sign for love is the heart, because people often feel emotions deep within their bodies, not inside their heads. When you’re in love your heart goes all a flutter, and when afraid you can feel sick to the pit of your stomach. Emotions have a real physical effect as well as a mental one.

Therefore when visualizing you’ll substantially enhance your results by imagining that you’re physically feeling and engaged with the visualization, and not merely performing a mental exercise.

This is understood in several personal improvement techniques. For example, there’s a concept in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy called the ‘ABC Model’ which states that our thoughts and actions create our emotions, which result in our behaviours – both wanted and unwanted. First comes an activating event, which is interpreted according to our beliefs, resulting in a given set of consequences. An example of this could be as follows:

Activating event: Your boss asks whether you’ve completed a piece of work.

Beliefs: You may think: ‘My boss thinks I’m not working hard enough and is trying to catch me out.’

Consequences: You say defensively, ‘I have nearly finished’, although you still have a lot more to do. This results in you feeling annoyed and resentful, which causes stress.

In this instance it’s most likely your boss simply needs the piece of work and has not formed any conclusion about your work ethics. With a different set of beliefs you can understand this and not end up feeling accused and stressed out.

Using biofeedback to change your emotions

Biofeedback is the process of becoming aware of physiological functions with the aim of being able to manipulate them at will. Processes that can be controlled include brainwaves, muscle tone, skin conductance, heart rate, and pain perception, and biofeedback may be used to improve health and physical, mental or emotional performance, with changes often occurring both physically and to thoughts, emotions, and behavior.

Because your body and mind are so closely intertwined, your creative visualization is always more effective if you use as many of your senses as you can. The techniques in this book often suggest that you imagine touching or smelling something, perhaps even tasting it too, and you’re often asked to look around and listen as well, making full use of the five classical senses (see Figure 1-2).

But did you know that you have more than five senses? In fact, another five are generally recognised, as shown in Figure 1-3:

Balance and acceleration are sensed using a maze-like structure in the inner ear called the labyrinth, which contains an intricate system of loops and pouches within which liquid sloshes about as you move. By detecting where the liquid goes you can tell whether you’re tipping over or your body is accelerating or decelerating.

Pain and temperature are sensed via nerve endings all over your body and are considered different from simple touch sensations.

Position (also known as kinaesthesia) is your ability to know where parts of your body are with respect to others.

Each of your ten senses brings information into your mind, telling you something about your surroundings and the world around you. In fact they are the only way you perceive the world. Therefore, to make your experience of life as rich as possible, try to use as many senses as you can – whatever you’re doing. For example, when you look at something, take a moment to really look. Listen intently rather than just hear, and touch things the way you did as a child, feeling their texture. If you’re missing any of these senses or they’re limited, make up for this by using the senses that are available to you even more.

The aim of personal development is to improve yourself in the future, but when you get to the future it’s going to be your present. If you have difficulty fully appreciating your present now, you may also have difficulty enjoying your future when it becomes your present.

Appreciating your senses here and now makes achieving your goals through creative visualization easier, because your brain connects neurons to each other (thus ‘programming’ your mind) according to the things you learn and the experiences you have. Therefore by providing as many different types of input to your brain as you can when visualizing, you’ll increase the number of connections relating to the subject at hand, creating neural pathways for the types of thinking, emotional responses, or whatever you wish to reinforce.

Why not try and sharpen some of your additional senses by testing them out?

You can test the position sense by touching your finger to your nose while your eyes are shut – see how easy it is?

To test for balance you need a friend and a seesaw. One of you closes his eyes and sits right in the middle of the seesaw, over the pivot, with the seesaw parallel to the ground. The other person quietly tips the seesaw from one end, whilst the person with his eyes closed tries to determine the direction he is being tipped.

To detect acceleration and deceleration try closing your eyes when riding as a passenger in a vehicle. Try and feel for when you’re slowing down or speeding up.

You most probably already know what pain feels like but have you ever tried filling a few bowls of water with different combinations of hot (but not too hot!) and cold water and dipping your hand into them? Have a go at sorting them in to order of warmth using your sense of temperature.

Practising biofeedback visualizations

A biofeedback visualization is one in which you use your mind and body together, enhancing your visualization because many more neural pathways are created in your brain by doing so than if you merely imagine something without incorporating your senses. For example, if you particularly enjoy a certain fragrance such as lavender, you can introduce that into your visualization exercises by imagining its smell – having just mentioned lavender to you, you should have easily recalled its smell because the neurons that govern smell are linked to all other parts of your brain, including memory.

So if you’d like to strengthen a visualization about becoming more relaxed and you find the smell of lavender relaxing, try to imagine that smell during the visualization. If you find that you can’t do it at the same time, that’s all right: you can imagine the smell immediately before or after visualizing and it will still be linked to the visualization.

Likewise, when visualizing while walking in the park you can touch flowers, trees, fences, or any other objects to provide tactile feedback that will provide additional memories and create extra neural pathways to enhance the effectiveness of the visualization.

Biofeedback becomes particularly useful when you use your body to help achieve an emotion or feeling. When you’re happy you naturally smile. But the inverse is also true; by smiling you make yourself happier. Wherever your emotions have an effect on your body, you can reverse this reaction by making your body do the action (or take on the posture) associated with the emotion or feeling, and your mind follows suit.

Believing that a technique is going to work: The placebo effect

A placebo is an inert substance given to a patient who is informed that it’s actually a medicine. Although creative visualization is not directly related to placebos, the fact that placebos work gives a clue as to how creative visualization works, and the connection is positivity.

When a physician hands you a couple of pills and tells you they’ll do something, you have a general positive expectation that this person knows a lot more than you do and you accept what you’re told and believe they’ll work.

With creative visualization you’re using the knowledge that positive thinking brings positive results to formulate a visualization on which you concentrate in order to emphasise your desires to your unconscious mind.

The brain is a mysterious and still only partially understood organ. The mind itself can have a powerful effect on the body and create deep changes, as demonstrated in hypnotherapy, for example, in which the way you use your mind can directly influence your central nervous system.

The placebo effect is enhanced greatly when people start visualizing a desired change. At first, they don’t always believe that the change is going to happen, although they know that it may. As they visualize more and more they come to embody the change they desire, and the belief and the positive effect increases.

By ‘embody’ I mean that the desire to change becomes so entrenched that it transitions from being just a desire into being a part of you. For example, as Chapter 13 discusses, someone who is shy but strongly desires to become more confident, and who practises visualizations and affirmations around this wish on a regular basis, will find that the aim gradually becomes realised. Over time he’ll move from thinking, ‘I wish I were more confident of my abilities in this area’, to ‘I am more confident than I was’, and finally, ‘I now feel completely confident’.

This is particularly noticeable when accompanied by affirmations in which you regularly repeat a phrase such as, ‘I am a confident person’. At first you may not feel this way, but after a few days you’ll feel that maybe you’re a little more confident and that what you’re saying has some truth to it. Eventually, when you repeat the affirmation, you may follow it by remarking to yourself, ‘Yes, I truly believe I am now a confident person.’ And at this point your goal has been accomplished.

Knowing that losing belief can diminish results

Every possibility exists that an anti-placebo effect can be experienced, where a hitherto effective medicine may cease to be effective if a patient loses faith in its abilities. For example, in 2010 a published study claimed that a popular health supplement (used to treat joint pain and arthritis) appeared to have no statistically positive benefit after all. As a result, sales of the product plummeted, with tens of thousands of people who had previously been absolutely certain that it was helping them now believing the opposite.

When my household heard this story, we thought we’d try an experiment because both my wife and I have trouble with our joints. So we also stopped taking the supplement to see if we noticed any change. If the study was correct we shouldn’t have noticed any difference. But we both felt our symptoms deteriorate and quite quickly too.

However, we knew that placebos can work even when known to be placebos, and so we resumed taking the supplements and after a few days we both felt much better. So does this supplement work, or is it simply a placebo? The answer to that question doesn’t matter to us – because (perhaps due to adopting the right frame of mind) we both find it helps, and that’s good enough.

Remember that stopping a prescribed medication without being told to do so by a physician could seriously damage your health. Never stop taking any medicines or supplements you have been prescribed by a qualified professional without first discussing this with him and being given his approval.

If you believe that something is going to help you, the chances are that it will. Even if you lose your belief in the specific medicine, as long as you know that placebos can work anyway, you can still continue to benefit. That’s the power of positive thinking.