I’m just going to say it the way it lives in my head. Most people don’t heal because they’ve outsourced all their power to a bottle, a doctor, or a diagnosis that was handed to them like a life sentence. And the wild part is the human brain is sitting there like, “Girl, I can drop prescription‑level chemicals without even trying, if you’d just stop acting like I’m useless.”
I didn’t understand this until I read that research study in Dr. Joe’s book where Parkinson’s patients, people whose brains literally don’t make enough dopamine, suddenly produced up to 200 percent more of it…because they believed they were getting a real drug. Their bodies didn’t wait for proof. Their brains didn’t ask for a second opinion. Their chemistry responded to expectation the way your phone responds to your fingerprint, instantly.
That study flipped something in me because it made me see how I’d been training my own body without even realizing it. I spent years waking up already braced for the worst, so my body learned to tense before anything even happened. I’d expect people to leave, so my breath would shorten the second someone took too long to reply. I’d expect old symptoms to come back, and my body would act like it had a schedule to keep. If expectation alone can spike dopamine in Parkinson’s patients, imagine what long‑term, automatic fear teaches a body to do.
But let’s slow this down and walk through it the way I wish someone had done for me.
Your brain isn’t reacting to reality, it’s reacting to your forecast
The Parkinson’s study was simple. They told patients they were getting a powerful drug. They actually got saline injections, literal saltwater. But their motor function improved anyway. When researchers scanned their brains, the dopamine surge was so strong it would’ve taken an amphetamine dose to create the same effect.
That’s the moment that made me sit back and ask myself, So what else have I been unconsciously dosing myself with? Because if the brain manufactures healing chemistry when it believes in healing, it also manufactures stress chemistry when it believes in danger. And most of us believe in danger more than possibility.
You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to feel this in your body. Think about the last time you expected a panic attack. Your stomach tightened before anything even happened. Think about expecting rejection. Your chest dropped before the message even got delivered. You didn’t react to reality, you reacted to your prediction of it.
That’s what Dr. Joe meant when he says the conscious mind initiates the thought, but the subconscious carries out the biology. The minute you accept, believe, and emotionally surrender to an idea, your autonomic nervous system starts doing whatever it needs to do to make that idea real.
The subconscious isn’t poetic — it’s literal
this gets painfully clear through another experiment that honestly scared me a little when I first read it. A man named Santiago was hypnotized and told that when he stepped into a freezing ice bath, he would feel warm water. Now, any normal person thrown into 35-degree water would gasp, shake, choke, maybe scream. Your autonomic nervous system reacts before you even know what’s happening.
But Santiago didn’t flinch. His heart rate didn’t spike. His breathing didn’t change. His body behaved like he was submerged in comfort, not ice. In his mind, he wasn’t cold, he was in a warm bath. And because his subconscious bought the idea, his physiology obeyed.
This is the part that makes people uncomfortable. We love believing we’re rational creatures. We’re not. We’re conditioned creatures. The subconscious doesn’t judge, debate, or analyze. It takes whatever you emotionally accept… and runs the program.
The placebo effect isn’t magic. It’s mechanics.
The three-step recipe your brain follows
When Dr. Joe breaks it down into Acceptance, Belief, and Surrender, he’s not being motivational. He’s being scientific.
Acceptance is when you let the thought in. Most people never get past this part because they’re addicted to familiar emotions. Even the negative ones. Especially the negative ones.
Belief is when you emotionally feel the outcome before it arrives. Your brain only changes when your body feels what your mind says.
Surrender is when you stop overthinking how and when it will happen. The moment you overanalyze, you bring the conscious mind back in and block the subconscious from carrying out the biology.
Every placebo miracle in medical health industry followed the same formula. People stopped obsessing about “how will my body heal?” and slipped into “this is already happening.” And the body followed.
Your environment is shaping you more than you think
One thing I’ve learned on this journey is how much our environment shapes our biology. People walk into hospitals and automatically start healing… not because the building has magic walls, but because their past experiences taught their brain to associate that place with getting better, and there’s real research showing this. Studies have found that patients recover faster, need fewer pain medications, and even show measurable changes in immune activity simply from being placed in a hospital setting or a room with healing cues. The body isn’t imagining it, it’s responding to conditioned signals that have been reinforced for years.
Think about what that means for people who grew up in chaos. If your childhood home trained your nervous system to expect danger, your adult body still prepares for danger whenever you return to anything that resembles that environment. Smells, tones, faces, rooms, all of it becomes a chemical trigger.
For the longest time, whenever I spent time away from my mother and then had to return to her, my body would go into severe panic. People couldn’t understand how a child going back to her own mom could look like she was walking into danger, but my stomach would twist itself into knots every single time. Even after growing up and going separate ways, the moment I knew I had to visit her, anxiety would hit me in the chest even though I knew consciously she wasn’t going to bite me. Years of narcissistic abuse had trained my body to associate her with threat, while my conscious mind kept insisting everything was fine.
This is why some people feel calm in a therapist’s office and suffocated in their bedroom. The body remembers what the mind doesn’t articulate.
And it works both ways. You can condition your environment to become a trigger for healing too. When I first began inner work, I used the same prayer mat every morning at 5 a.m. for meditation. Over time, my body learned: “This is where we regulate, this is where we become safe, this is where we build our future.” Now the moment I sit there, my nervous system shifts before I even close my eyes.
Healing becomes easier when your environment starts doing some of the work.
Everyday life is full of accidental placebos and nocebos
You already know how this works because you’ve lived it. When you expect the painkiller to work, your pain drops before the pill dissolves. When you expect the date to go bad, your chest gets tight before you even meet the person. When you expect a depressive spiral, your body releases the chemistry for it hours before your thoughts arrive.
And sometimes the smallest things become rituals that shape physiology.
Like the glass of milk before bed that makes you sleepy, not because milk sedates you, but because your brain associates that ritual with rest. Or the moment you open your laptop and your shoulders tense, not because the laptop is dangerous, but because your history with it wired stress into that object.
If a sugar pill can improve motor function in Parkinson’s patients, imagine what your rituals are doing to your hormones, immune cells, and brain chemistry every single day.
You can train your body to become your own chemistry lab
The best part of this understanding is realizing you can program your biology the same way those placebo patients did, intentionally, not accidentally.
Here’s a simple way I teach this now:
- Sit down, slow your breath, and bring your heart into coherence by feeling gratitude, relief, love, or safety until your chest softens.
- Choose one clear health outcome you want. don’t pick ten things at once. and picture it as if it’s already happening.
- Stay with that one scene and rehearse it without wandering, without jumping to doubts, and without changing the script.
- Let your heart fill with the emotion that matches that outcome. ease, freedom, strength, whatever healing would feel like in your body.
- Carry that feeling through your day like it’s your new baseline. Live from it, act from it, breathe from it. The more you practice this, the less you’ll wait for healing and the more you’ll embody someone who is already healed, and your biology will follow.
That’s how people heal because their identities change and you become your own placebo.
And this isn’t spiritual bypassing or optimism with glitter on top. This is neuroscience, epigenetics, and psychoneuroimmunology. When the internal experience is stronger than your past external experiences, your biology cannot tell the difference. It changes according to what it feels.
I’ve watched this happen in my own life. I’ve watched pain disappear without pain killers. I’ve watched PMS dissolve without medication. I used to have such low immunity and such sensitive tonsils that I’d get a sore throat and cold almost every month, like clockwork, and it would knock me out for a week. Now, without any immunity boosters or supplements, I haven’t had a cold or flu in over two years. Not because I’m special, but because the brain and body are designed to obey the stories we repeat with enough feeling.
You’re not waiting for a miracle — your brain is waiting for instruction
If there’s one thing you take from this, let it be this: your chemistry is not fixed. neither your emotions are fixed. Your brain isn’t locked. Your body isn’t your enemy. You’re not broken… you’re conditioned.
And conditioning can be rewritten.
Your brain wants clarity. Your body wants consistency. And your future wants you to stop living from the biology of your past.
If Parkinson’s patients can create dopamine on command, and a man can sit in an ice bath like it’s a spa day, then you can definitely change the chemistry behind your moods, habits, cravings, stress patterns, and emotional cycles.
It doesn’t matter how long you’ve carried them. It matters how deeply you’re willing to teach your body a different future.
Final thoughts
You and I aren’t that different. We both know what it’s like to live inside a body that reacts before we even think. We both know how heavy a nervous system can feel when it’s been trained by trauma instead of truth. Reading this science didn’t save me, but applying it did. And I want you to feel that shift too, the moment your body finally stops fighting you and starts following you.
If you want to go deeper with this work, I offer one-on-one sessions where we untangle these patterns from the root. You can book a session directly from my homepage. And if you want more writing like this, subscribe to my newsletter and come hang out with me on Threads where I share the raw, human side of healing every day.
