I want to start with something most people don’t like admitting out loud, but it ruled my entire life for years: my body lied to me every day. And I believed it. I believed the shame, the unworthiness, the “you don’t deserve anything good” story that didn’t even come from my mind, it came from my body. For the longest time, I suffered from this deep, heavy sense of not being enough. It didn’t stay in my head. It lived in my breath, my stomach, my muscles, my voice. It shaped how I walked, how I talked, how I reacted, how I disappeared.
And the worst part? I couldn’t explain the damage it did because the list is too long. If I started describing all the places unworthiness touched, this blog would turn into a damn novel. All I can say is this: whenever life gave me an opportunity, I didn’t feel excited, I felt small. My chest dropped. My stomach twisted. This wave of “I don’t deserve this” hit me before I could think a single logical thought. (The reason was my narcissist mom!)
My mind was trying so hard. I’d tell myself I was capable. I’d tell myself my work mattered. I’d tell myself I was worthy. But my body always reacted the other way, like it was stuck in an old script from a past I didn’t choose.
That’s why my blog sat at zero for so long. Zero reach, zero growth, zero movement. I worked hard, but somewhere inside, I believed my work was garbage. And the body always broadcasts the truth it believes, not the truth you wish it believed.
This is when I learned the most important truth of my healing: you’re not reacting to your life, you’re reacting to your conditioning.
How conditioning shapes your body
We talk a lot about trauma and mindset and healing, but nobody warns you that your body is basically living yesterday on repeat. Your nervous system learns faster than your conscious mind ever can. Your body memorises the emotions, sensations, smells, tones, patterns, and responses of your past until they become a built-in program.
This is what scientists call conditioning. And it’s the same mechanism behind the placebo effect that my previous blog breaks down so clearly. Just like Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell because they learned to associate it with food, your body reacts to cues it has linked to fear, shame, pain, rejection, loneliness, or danger.
Your body will react to:
- a tone
- a face
- a room
- a smell
- a comment
- a notification
- a silence
…even when nothing dangerous is happening.
It doesn’t check the present moment. It checks the past.
The science behind the automatic reactions
Your subconscious mind is always two steps ahead of your conscious mind. That’s how survival works. You react first and think later.
Conditioning happens when a repeated emotional experience wires a specific response into your nervous system. And it’s not only repetition, if the intensity of an event is high enough, your body will memorise it after just one experience and start reacting before your mind can judge whether the threat is real or not.
This is why you can feel anxiety in your body even when your mind says, “Calm down.” It’s why you can feel unworthy even when you logically know you deserve better. It’s why your body tenses when someone texts you, even before you know what the text says.
Your body remembers the emotional truth, not the logical one.
Neuroscience has proved this again and again. Repeated emotional states form stronger neural connections. In fact, Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel showed that when a neural pathway is repeatedly stimulated, the number of connections between neurons can double. That means the more your body feels something. fear, shame, stress, pain, the stronger those circuits become.
Your body learns faster than your mind.
The placebo angle: conditioning is not imagination
People think placebo is about blind faith or “believing hard enough,” but the truth is it’s conditioning at work. When your body expects a result, it starts creating chemistry to match that expectation. And in one of Dr. Joe’s book, one story hit me so hard I had to stop reading…
During World War II, Harvard-educated American surgeon Henry Beecher ran out of morphine while treating badly wounded soldiers on the battlefield, and in desperation, a nurse injected one of them with saltwater while telling him it was morphine. The soldier relaxed, his pain decreased, and Beecher safely performed the procedure without anesthesia. This kept happening, soldiers responded as if they’d been given real morphine, not because of imagination, but because their bodies released their own painkilling chemicals in response to the expectation of relief.
Beecher even performed a complicated surgical procedure on one soldier who should have gone into fatal cardiovascular shock from the pain without painkiller, but he didn’t, because the saline injection convinced his body that morphine was flowing through his veins. That wasn’t imagination. That was biology responding to conditioning.
Your body learns healing the same way it learns fear.
Hospitals heal before medicine begins
I didn’t understand conditioning until I learned that simply walking into a hospital can trigger healing in people. Not because hospitals are magical, but because your body has learned that hospitals mean “help,” “treatment,” “care,” “recovery.” The smell of antiseptic, the sound of instruments, the doctor’s coat, all these cues activate old associations. But in my case it was the complete opposite, because every time I went to a government hospital I experienced the most disgusting treatment, neglect, rudeness, carelessness, so my body learned that hospitals meant danger, disrespect, and survival mode instead of safety. My conditioning wasn’t shaped by healing; it was shaped by humiliation and fear.
When you walk into a private hospital, the environment itself often signals safety, clean spaces, calm staff, organized systems, people who actually look at you like you matter. Your nervous system recognizes these cues and settles because the place carries the meaning of care. But step into a government hospital and the conditioning flips. The overcrowded halls, the shouting, the chaos, the smell, the lack of attention, all of it tells your nervous system the opposite story. Instead of relief, your body prepares for survival. Two hospitals, same purpose, completely different conditioning. Your body doesn’t respond to the idea of ‘medical help,’ it responds to the environment it has learned to trust or fear.
Your body obeys what it has learned.
The dark side: when conditioning becomes nocebo
Just like healing can be conditioned, so can illness. And this is the part nobody wants to talk about. Your body can get addicted to the chemistry of stress, sadness, overthinking, rejection, and fear.
Before I even explain this part, let me tell you about a study that still shocks me. In one experiment, forty asthmatic patients were told they were inhaling a substance that would either help or worsen their asthma. In reality, they were only inhaling saline. When researchers told them it was an allergen that would tighten their airways, many of them actually started wheezing, coughing, and struggling to breathe. Their bodies reacted as if the threat were real. Later, when the same saline was presented as a bronchodilator that would open their airways, their breathing eased. Same substance, different expectation, completely different biological reaction. That’s how powerful conditioning is.
You know those times when your stomach flips before a conversation? Or when your throat closes before a conflict? Or when your whole body shuts down before anything even happens? That’s biology reacting to memories.
Your body isn’t lying to hurt you. It’s lying to protect you using outdated information.
And the worst part? You can live like this for years without ever knowing your subconscious is running the show.
Breaking the old program
Here’s the good news: the same mechanism that wired your pain can wire your healing.
Conditioning doesn’t care whether the stimulus is positive or negative. It only cares about repetition and emotion. So when you give your body new emotional experiences again and again, you start to rewire the old program.
This is how I changed my life. Not by overthinking. Not by forcing positivity. But by teaching my body a new emotional baseline.
How to start rewiring your conditioning
Here’s the step-by-step process I used, and still use, to build new conditioning:
- Identify the trigger. Notice what sensation, cue, or situation activates your old program.
- Slow your breath. This stops the automatic fight-or-flight response and shifts your brain into slower theta waves, which are crucial for reprogramming old patterns. Without this shift, whatever you do next stays at the surface level as a conscious act instead of becoming a subconscious change.
- Create a new cue. A word, an image, a song, a breathing pattern, something that signals safety.
- Pair it with an elevated emotion. Gratitude, relief, joy, peace. Feel it in your body.
- Repeat the pairing daily. This is how the new association forms.
- Use the new cue in the real trigger situation. This teaches your body a new response.
- Stay consistent. Conditioning needs repetition.
This isn’t complicated. It’s biology.
When the inside changes, the outside follows
When I started doing this work, everything changed. My body stopped reacting like danger was waiting around every corner. My immunity improved. My mood stabilized. My relationships became less chaotic. My work finally started reaching people because I wasn’t carrying the energy of “I don’t deserve to be seen” anymore. And a big part of this shift came from doing guided meditations by Dr. Joe. the same ones you can buy from his website. because they helped me drop into the state where my subconscious finally started listening instead of fighting me.
The outside world didn’t magically transform. I did. And the world simply adjusted to match it.
Final thoughts
You’re not broken. You’re conditioned. And conditioning can be rewritten. The body that once lied to you can learn to tell the truth. The truth that you’re safe. You’re capable. You’re worthy of every good thing you’ve been running from.
If you want to go deeper into this work, I offer one-on-one sessions where we untangle these patterns from the root. You can book an appointment directly on my homepage. And if you want to stay close to my writing and the real behind-the-scenes of healing, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Threads where I talk every day about the emotional, scientific, and spiritual work of becoming who you were always meant to be.
