A few days ago I was talking to a client who has been dealing with IBS for years. She had tried everything. diets, herbs, medicines, tests, protocols, and still woke up every day trapped in the same symptoms. While I was explaining to her how we can train the brain to heal, I suddenly remembered something from that very morning. I had tea. Just regular tea. The same tea that used to burn my gut so badly I’d be in bed for hours. And it didn’t hurt me. It made me think of a moment when I was somewhere outside and brought a cup of tea to my lips, and the second the smell hit me I remembered the pain I would go through afterward. I put the cup down.
That tiny moment pulled me straight back to late 2022.
after going through one more betrayal maybe my body said enough and everything fell apart. My nervous system cracked open. My gut went rogue. And my entire second center felt like it was burning from the inside. I’m not exaggerating… the inflammation, the pain, the swelling, the way my uterus literally developed stretch marks from the pressure. it was the kind of suffering you don’t forget even when you try to.
And the sickest part? My labs came back “almost normal.” As if a piece of paper could tell me more about my body than the way I was curled up at 3 a.m. crying because I couldn’t breathe through the bloating and pain.
For months, I couldn’t eat without fear. One wrong ingredient and my organs felt like they were about to explode. My constipation was so bad I’d go four or five days without a single bowel movement unless I took a laxative. My gut and my body didn’t feel like mine anymore.
And somewhere in the middle of that nightmare, I knew it was all because of the unhealed wounds of having a narcissistic mother, betrayal from her that aged me, shame that hollowed me, regret that lived like acid in my stomach for years.
But something unexpected happened, and not in a glamorous way. I had actually been reading and practicing the meditation work for a long time, but somewhere along the road I forgot about these placebo studies completely. I was doing inner work for other parts of my life, not realising that maybe the gut crisis was life’s way of dragging my attention to the one place I had avoided. One day, after coming back from a hospital visit feeling defeated, I grabbed my laptop and reopened You Are the Placebo. I started rereading all these studies… people healing from pain with saline injections, soldiers surviving surgery with saltwater instead of morphine, elderly men reversing their biological age by living in a monastery designed like the 1950s.
And I remember sitting there thinking, honestly a little pissed, “If they can heal with inert substances, then why can’t I?”
This became the beginning of one of the biggest shifts of my life.
Expectation, I realized, isn’t just a mindset. It’s a biochemical command. It’s the brain’s most dangerous drug, and the most healing one too.
Expectation lives in your biology
I know people love to talk about mindset like it’s the whole solution. But expectation is not a cute affirmation you whisper in the mirror. It’s not about thinking positive. Expectation is a neurological forecast, a prediction your brain makes, and your body prepares for.
Your brain doesn’t wait for proof. It starts producing chemicals based on what it expects to happen.
Dopamine, cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, these aren’t random. They’re forecasts. They’re your body’s way of preparing for an event before the event arrives. This is why expectation can heal or harm with the same intensity.
What the studies showed me
The first study that shook me was the Parkinson’s placebo study. Patients were told they were receiving a treatment that would improve their motor control. They were actually given a saline injection. Yet their brains released dopamine, real dopamine, measurable, powerful, the same chemical their disease lacked. simply because they expected improvement.
Their bodies didn’t wait for medicine. Their biology moved first.
Then there was the experiment on the elderly men. They were taken to a monastery recreated as if it were 1959. Everything around them, the furniture, the music, the newspapers, told their brains they were younger. And their bodies followed. Their posture improved. Their vision improved. Their strength improved. Their biological age markers reversed.
Their bodies obeyed the expectation of youth.
Another study involved forty dental patients having their wisdom teeth removed. They were all given a placebo but told it was a powerful painkiller. Their bodies responded by releasing endorphins strong enough to numb surgical pain. And when the researchers gave them naloxone, a drug that blocks endorphin receptors and the pain returned instantly.
Pain relief wasn’t imagination. It was chemistry.
And the asthma study? This one blew my mind. Forty asthmatic patients were part of a study where they inhaled plain saline water vapor. At first, researchers told them it was an allergen that would tighten their airways, and many of them actually started wheezing, coughing, and gasping for breath even though the substance was harmless. Later, the same patients inhaled the exact same vapor again, but this time they were told it was a bronchodilator that would open their lungs. And it did. Their symptoms eased, their breathing relaxed, and the panic disappeared, even though both inhalers contained nothing but water vapor.
Their lungs responded to expectation, not reality.
And then there’s Henry Beecher in World War II. He ran out of morphine and a nurse injected a soldier with saline, telling him it was morphine. The soldier relaxed so deeply that Beecher performed an entire surgery, cutting him open, removing shrapnel, stitching him back, without anesthesia. The soldier stayed calm through the entire procedure.
Expectation overrode pain, shock, and biology.
When I read all this, I felt something inside me shift. If expectation could do all of that… why couldn’t it heal my gut?
Chronic stress builds the sickness — expectation rewires it
My gut collapsed because of years of chronic stress, emotional suppression, betrayal, shame, and survival mode. When the body stays in fight-or-flight long enough, it dials down digestive enzymes, slows motility, inflames tissues, disrupts the microbiome, weakens the gut lining, and throws hormones off balance.
Chronic stress injures the gut. It injures the immune system. It injures the second center, the area below your navel that holds emotions like guilt, regret, shame, and betrayal. When you feel these emotions in excess, especially for years, this center goes out of balance and the organs linked to it start to reflect that emotional overload.
So no. trauma didn’t magically become illness. Trauma created a survival chemistry that eventually broke down my system.
But expectation is what turned it around.
Rewriting the expectation
Healing started when I began training my brain to expect something different. Not through force. Not through affirmations. But through emotional work, meditation, and conditioning.
Every day, I sat in meditation and let my body release the emotions that had been eating me from the inside. the betrayal, the shame, the regret. I let them come up and move through me.
Then I did something new. I created the emotional state of a person with a healed gut. I felt what it would feel like to wake up without pain, eat without fear, have a soft belly, a calm second center, and a body that wasn’t choking on its past.
I paired those feelings with cues, breath, touch, images, words… so that during the day I could trigger the same emotional state.
Over time, my expectation changed. When the pain rose, instead of spiraling, I’d think, “My gut is repairing. This is part of the process.”
It took months. Four long months of consistency. But slowly my biology began following the new forecast.
My gut started to calm. My bloating reduced. My constipation eased. My organs stopped feeling like they were drowning in inflammation. My second center softened. My fear of food faded.
And now? I’ve been pain-free for more than two months. I eat everything. Even foods that used to destroy me. Sometimes I even eat junk — and my gut stays calm.
It still shocks me.
Expectation as medicine
Expectation isn’t a mood. It’s a signal. It tells your body what story to follow. And the body follows the story with brutal loyalty.
But here’s the catch, the body is neutral. It doesn’t care if the story is healing or hurting.
If you expect danger, your body produces stress chemistry. If you expect rejection, your body closes down. If you expect pain, your body tenses. If you expect sickness, your body prepares for it.
And if you expect healing, consistently, emotionally, physically. your body shifts toward it.
And you’re not alone in this; here are the testimonials of other people who have been through something similar. it has a moment, “Oh, it’s gone”… Don’t miss that.
How to train your brain to expect healing
Here’s what worked for me, and what I teach now:
- Release the old emotions daily. You cannot expect a new future with the emotional chemistry of the past.
- Slow your body into theta with breath. Expectation can’t land when your body is in fight-or-flight.
- Create a sensory-rich image of your healed self. See it, feel it, hear it, breathe it.
- Generate an elevated emotion. Gratitude, joy, relief, something that opens your chest.
- Pair the emotion with cues. A word, a breath, a hand on your heart.
- Rehearse the expectation daily. Not with pressure but with presence.
- Reframe setbacks as repair. This teaches your nervous system that healing is safe.
- Reinforce the new state all day. This is where expectation becomes your default.
Final thoughts
Most of us don’t realise how much our body listens to the stories we tell it, the emotions we rehearse, and the future we expect. We think we’re stuck, but most of the time we’re just repeating a survival pattern our nervous system learned years ago. And the moment we teach the body a new story, with consistency, emotion, and real expectation. it starts moving toward that story whether we believe we’re ready or not.
You’re not weak for struggling or dramatic for being in pain. Your body learned fear before it learned safety. You’re human. And humans can be rewired. If expectation can trigger pain, panic, inflammation, and shutdown, then expectation can also trigger healing, restoration, and balance.
If you want to go deeper into this work with support, I offer one-on-one sessions where we get to the emotional and neurological root of your patterns. You can book an appointment directly on my homepage. And if you want more of my raw, daily insights on healing and human transformation, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Threads . that’s where I share the parts of the journey most people don’t talk about.
It’s fascinating how the brain’s role in conditions like IBS can be so impactful; while researching similar mind-body connections. Do you think this approach could be helpful for other chronic illnesses as well?