The Power of Suggestion

Want to learn how to manage that stress? I certainly do.

I recently picked up the book, The End of Stress: Four Steps to Rewire Your Brain. With a title like that, I had to give it a look.

The End of Stress examines the harm caused by stress on both your health and happiness and provides simple tips and tricks that you can start using today to undo the damage. Ultimately, it reveals how adopting a peaceful mindset will set you on the path to increased “productivity, creativity, and intelligence.”

One tip offered in the book is to harness the power of suggestion to improve your health. Science shows that the mere thought of a desirable outcome can set into motion the inner resources and actions that will lead to that outcome.

For example, if you know that you have to take a test, you can increase your score by convincing yourself that you’re prepared for the exam.

Of course, this change of mindset assumes that you’ve appropriately prepared for the test. There’s no substitute for preparing for the bar exam. But having the right mindset going into the examination can increase your chances of passing. If you’re well-prepared for the bar exam, then have confidence that you will do well on the exam. If you go into the exam fearing that you will fail, then you’ll likely undo all that hard work and preparation that you put in up to that point.

Convincing yourself of the desired outcome is also known as the Placebo effect—you know, when a medicine produces health benefits in a patient who believes that he was given useful medication when, in fact, he wasn’t. The medication itself, usually just sugar pills, does nothing, but the patient's mind generates a beneficial outcome nonetheless.

Science suggests that the power of suggestion and the placebo effect work in areas outside of the medical field.

In The End of Stress, the author described a study involving hotel cleaning staff. Some of the employees were told that their work constituted heavy physical exercise comparable to going to the gym. After only four shifts, these workers lost both weight and body fat without any diet or increase in activity

The only thing that changed was their mindset. You can listen more about this same study from NPR’s Morning Edition here.

All this is to say that your attitude can influence your outcome. So as I tell my kids—change that attitude!