Do you need to be gently encouraged or driven hard?

Clinical trials demonstrate that if we believe we are taking a real medication, then something as simple as taking a sugar pill can lower our blood pressure, reduce anxiety and pain, and boost our immune system. Placebos work by triggering a host of specific neurobiological effects. As Alia Crum explains it, The power is not in the sugar. The power comes from the social contexts that shape our mindsets in ways that activate our bodies' natural healing abilities. Think of a mindset as a lens or frame through which we view the world. Our mindsets orient us to particular associations and expectations. Our mindsets don't just color our reality. Rather, the way that we look at reality changes what we pay attention to, and what we expect. You are more than just a checklist. The following disorders are not an exhaustive list, nor are they presented in their pure technical definitions. There are a lot of different criteria for determining these disorders and I really just want you to get the gist of it. Let's start with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). GAD is really a pain in the ass, because it is pretty hard to pin down. A hallmark feature of GAD is that it is non-specific. Unlike some of the other disorders that I will talk about, there is typically no identifiable stressor that is causing anxiety. Instead you basically have a persistent sense of fear and worry and become overly concerned with everyday matters to the point that the worry interferes with your ability to function well in life. If you have GAD, you will likely have a difficult time making decisions or remembering important things. Think of it this way. Which persuasion techniques does Big Brother use? Repeatedly exposing consumers to a persuasive message may have another benefit for advertisers.

The mere exposure effect shows that the more we are exposed to a novel stimulus, the more we tend to like it. Zajonc (1968) first studied this phenomenon by showing American participants pictures of Chinese characters, a novel thing for most Americans. Participants rated the characters they viewed many times as being more aesthetically pleasing than characters they hadn't seen or characters that they had seen only a few times. The mere exposure effect occurs even when people are unaware of having been frequently exposed to a stimulus. In fact, research suggests that the mere exposure effect actually might be strongest when exposure happens outside of awareness (Bornstein, 1989). The more often people unconsciously perceive the stimulus, the more they tend to like it, prompting Zajonc (1980) to claim that preferences need no inferences. Mere exposure effect An effect that occurs when people hold a positive attitude toward a stimulus simply because they have been exposed to it repeatedly. Believe it or not, those expectations and associations actually change that reality. Mindsets impact objective reality Take this study involving hotel cleaning staff. Early in her academic career, Alia worked with Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer on a study that involved women hotel-room attendants. Cleaning all day involves lots of physical activity, but the women doing that job didn't think of their work as good exercise. The researchers divided the hotel-room cleaners into two groups. In one group, they did no intervention. But with the second group, they showed the women how the work they did cleaning actually more than met the US surgeon general's recommendation for daily physical exercise: detailing, for example, how fifteen minutes of vacuuming burns fifty calories, fifteen minutes of scrubbing sinks burns sixty calories, and so on. They posted this information in the staff areas at the hotels where only those room attendants in the second group would see it. A month later, the researchers checked back. Remember how I told you anxiety is like a fire before? Well, with GAD you are basically roasting yourself like some low and slow BBQ.

Woody Allen is someone that comes to mind as being on the highly neurotic side of this disorder. Everything is a big deal and all big deals lead to stress. One of the shitty things about GAD is the associated physical symptoms. Panic attacks, which I will talk more about in a sec, are terrible, but they are also awesome in that they usually come and go in a matter of minutes. With GAD you aren't so lucky. You have many of the same features of a panic attack, typically to a lesser degree, but for a really long period of time. Your body isn't designed to be under that sort of stress reaction for those extended periods and so you may find that you constantly have an upset stomach, muscle soreness, difficulty sleeping, constant fatigue etc It's not fun. Next up on the A team, we have panic disorder (PD). The best general explanation for the mere exposure effect is that the more people are exposed to a neutral stimulus, the more familiar it feels, and people generally prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. Debate continues regarding why the familiar is preferred, but there are two likely explanations (Chenier & Winkielman, 2007). First, as novel stimuli become familiar, they seem less strange and more safe. Second, familiar stimuli are easier to perceive and grasp fully. THINK ABOUT The mere exposure effect is one reason corporate sponsors pay gargantuan sums for repeated presentations of their logos, spokespersons, or jingles. How many articles of clothing do you own that clearly display a specific brand name? Another subtle method of repeated exposure is product placement. As we discuss in more detail later on, this essentially involves having a product appear naturally in everyday contexts in movies and television shows (eg, having various characters in a movie drinking Coca-Cola). Mere exposure effects can serve noncommercial purposes as well. That simple intervention--no changing of diet or exercise regime, just promoting the mindset that work is good exercise--produced dramatic results. Hotel-room attendants in the second group lost weight and lowered their blood pressure on average by ten points.

These findings demonstrate the capacity of our inner dialogues and self-perceptions to manifest themselves. Objective health benefits depend not just on what we do, but what we think about what we do. These days, many of us know the benefits of a plant-based diet for our health and the environment. So, what's the best way to help someone choose to eat vegetables? The most common method for encouraging healthier food choices is to prominently display nutrition information. But Alia and other researchers at the Mind & Body Lab found that focusing on health but failing to mention taste unintentionally instills the mindset that healthy eating is flavorless and depriving. In 2016, they tried a new approach and applied it to the food sold on the Stanford campus. The researchers chose adjectives that popular restaurants used to describe tasty but less healthy foods, and then used those same words to name vegetable dishes that were both nutritious and tasty. Now this is one that has constantly changing criteria, so I won't get too wildly granular with this description. The general idea has to do with those panic attacks that we talked about earlier in the Your Body is an Asshole, too article. Basically, when you have PD, you experience those panic attacks where you have strong physical symptoms combined with intense fear and discomfort. They tend to peak at around 10 minutes and then cool down. The party isn't over after that, though. The defining feature of PD is that after you have a panic attack, you suffer from intense fear of having another one. PD really sucks because you can start to have anxiety symptoms outside of legit panic attacks because you are so afraid of having another one and not being able to cope. It's really a lose/lose situation, because being so preoccupied about the potential of future attacks makes you more sensitized and vulnerable to them occurring. If you fear them, they shall come. You are probably familiar with phobias. For example, pink ribbons have become a ubiquitous symbol of awareness and support for those affected by breast cancer. The mere exposure effect has been demonstrated for a host of different types of stimuli, including people, music, and geometric figures, but it has limits.

For one, the effect generally plateaus at around 20 exposures; Furthermore, the complexity of the stimulus influences the optimal number of exposures (Cacioppo & Petty, 1979). Simpler stimuli sometimes may be liked more quickly, but the liking will also turn to boredom more quickly. Think of songs that you hear on a Pandora station and initially enjoy, but after a few weeks of hearing the station playing the song all the time, you want to stuff your ears with cotton. Another exception is captured by the idea of attitude polarization (see article 9) (Tesser & Conlee, 1975). Research demonstrating the mere exposure effect focuses on changing people's attitudes toward something that is initially neutral. But if we dislike something initially, we dislike it even more if we are exposed to it over and over. Linking the Message to Positive Stimuli Decadent-sounding labels--like twisted, citrus-glazed carrots and ultimate chargrilled asparagus--persuaded more people to choose veggies. They took the study nationwide, testing the same idea in fifty-seven US colleges and universities. They tracked nearly 140,000 decisions about seventy-one vegetable dishes. It turns out diners put vegetables on their plates 29 percent more often when those vegetables had tasty-sounding labels than they did when the vegetables had health-focused names, and 14 percent more often than when the veggies were given neutral names. Yummy labelling works because it makes eating healthy crave-worthy. Knowing that veggies are healthy and that eating them is the right thing to do isn't enough. We are more likely to do something good when it also feels good. Our feelings about eating vegetables are not fixed. It's not that we either love or hate vegetables; People, too, can exert a placebo effect. They are pretty straight forward, but people misuse the term quite a bit. To have a phobia does not mean that you dislike something strongly.