Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.
During World War II anaesthetist Henry Beecher ran out of morphine while treating wounded soldiers. Desperate to help he tried injecting them with salted water instead. Amazingly, as long as the men believed they were getting morphine, they experienced 90 per cent of the pain relief of the real drug. This is the placebo effect.
Everyone knows that a day of mentally taxing work leaves your brain exhausted. But does it? There is strong evidence that your expectation that this will happen is making it so. Studies show that with a different mindset people doing the same activities get the opposite effect. They are energised by prolonged focus and gain improved concentration after multiple tasks. A hard day's work doesn't have to be hard.
These types of phenomena are the subject of award-winning UK science writer Dave Robson's The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life. Robson specialises in the extremes of the human brain, body and behaviour. In the book he shares vast amounts of research that demonstrates our mindset toward happiness, exercise, ageing and dieting can change us physiologically. He claims our expectations can form our realities.
It's the middle of the night New Zealand time when I Zoom him at his London home. As a breakfast radio host, writer, average sports commentator and TV producer I had been mentally taxing myself since 5am. Luckily, with my new mindset, this hard day's work has invigorated me and I feverishly punish Dave with questions. Far too many for a 1000-word column. So I've split it in two. This is part one.
Q: Dave your book explores how visualising positive outcomes makes it more likely that those outcomes will become your reality. How's this different from dodgy self-health books and bollocks, magic-based theories like The Secret?
A: It's evidence-based for one thing. It cites over 450 peer-reviewed papers. There's a lot of scientific research here.
It's not just positive thinking it's trying to look at situations more objectively and avoid overly negative, catastrophic thinking. I'm not telling people to visualise becoming rich and then loads of money will just come into their life. There's no real mechanism by which that could occur.
Similarly, I'm not claiming you can cure a terminal illness by just imagining yourself getting better. Because again, we don't know any physiological mechanism by which that could happen.
That being said, there's a lot that your expectations can achieve. It can improve our attitudes to food and change the whole experience of dieting so we find it easier to keep to our goals. It's grounded in science and evidence and it's not claiming miracles, but what you can achieve is really impressive, nonetheless.
Q: If your mindset can change us physiologically, what are the bodily processes that, make that happen?
A: We know our expectations have an effect on our physiology. It's been studied and documented for a century through things like the placebo effect. In everyday life, we see this happening as well. So if you imagine your favourite meal your mouth is gonna start watering and your stomach rumbling, that's a physiological expectation effect. That's your brain preparing your body for digestion.
Expectations and outlook can also shape things like the balance of stress hormones within the body. That's gonna have really important outcomes. It can change the levels of inflammation. We know that inflammation in the short term can make us feel very ill. In the long term, it can cause heart disease.
We know that our expectations can shape the expression of neurotransmitters in the brain. And that's really important for things like pain signalling. So if you expect to feel a lot of pain, your brain actually produces this chemical called CCK that amplifies your pain signals and makes it a lot worse.
If you expect to have pain relief, your brain starts to produce its own opioids. Chemicals that are very similar to the drugs, like morphine that we would take for pain relief, and reduce those pain signals.
Q: How do our expectations impact our happiness?
A: I think there's an important distinction here from the non-scientific self-help approach where you are encouraged to be an optimistic Pollyanna who's always imagining the best-case scenario.
What the research shows is that the more people try consciously to be happy, the less happy they become. You're striving to be happy, so then you feel disappointment or frustration or stress or sadness rather than accepting those emotions as an inevitable and helpful part of life. That they're teaching you a lesson and helping to adapt your behaviour.
You see the feelings themselves as being inherently damaging or dangerous or a sign of your failure. You catastrophise those emotions. You're actually forming negative expectations of the negative emotions and their effects on you.
In that way, you have overly negative feelings about the feelings themselves. It adds another level of stress that makes you more unhappy and makes you more vulnerable to mental illness.
If we want to be happier we have to be more realistic about the need for these emotions and more positive about what those emotions can actually do for us. We have to recognise that each of those emotions has a purpose, a meaning in our life.
Research shows if you lean into that if you accept that they may be teaching you something and try to see the value in that, you recover in the moment more quickly and in the long term, your mental health is better.
Dave Robson knows and loves his subject matter and delivers it with fun, compelling enthusiasm. He might be getting high on his own supply.
Next week in part two we look into how a change in expectations can have positive effects on dieting, the effectiveness of medication and ageing. We also see how ordering a fake placebo, that you know is fake, can do wonders for your health. If you can't wait till next week buy the dude's book. The audio version is excellent.
• The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life - Dave Robson
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