How Your Expectations Can Change Your Life

Happiness is the subject of thousands of articles, podcasts, and scientific studies. Yet all this focus on happiness doesn’t seem to be making people any happier. In fact, the more they try to be happy, especially by fighting to get rid of bad feelings and cling to good ones, the ...  Show more

Books are everywhere. They're so common, they're easy to take for granted. But my guest argues that they’re worth fully appreciating — because the book isn’t just a container for content; it’s a revolutionary technology for shaping culture and thought.Joel Miller is a former publ ...  Show more

a   Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Erik Vance about the power of our expectations Erik Vance is a native Bay Area writer replanted in Mexico as a non-native species. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an ...  Show more

Each year, trillions of dollars are poured into the American healthcare system, yet the rates of chronic illnesses and diseases continue to climb. If we want better health outcomes, we’ve got to stop handing over our power to prescription pads and diagnoses, and instead harness a ...  Show more

In this episode, I discuss placebo and belief and mindset effects — all of which exert a powerful and real influence on our biology and psychology. I discuss how your beliefs and expectation that a certain outcome will occur after taking a substance (or any intervention cause gen ...  Show more

Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research? Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. ...  Show more