Mind Over Matter
Imagine that we’re a pair of doctors who are visited by our friend John. John complains about a headache, and we tell him that, sure, we have a pill for that. But instead of giving John a pain reliever, we deceive him. We tell him he’s getting a drug, but it’s actually just a sugar pill. John thanks us and swallows the pill with a glass of water.
Now, the sugar pill should have no medical effect whatsoever. But soon, John starts lightening up and he thanks us for curing his headache. Is John a liar?
No. What John is experiencing is a classic effect in medicine called the placebo effect. This is a phenomenon where one’s expectations end up having an actual medical impact. In other words, it’s when a drug works not because of some high-tech molecular reason, but because patients think it works. There’s a lot to suggest the placebo effect is an important part of most medical treatment, especially when there’s a mental component involved. As a result, the placebo effect can be enhanced in accordance with the strength of a patient’s belief. It works even better if the patient thinks the drug is brand new, if it is expensive, if the pill is really big or – for some reason – if it is red.
Treating headaches with sugar pills is interesting, but there are also far more bizarre examples out there – for instance, the use of placebo surgery. In one study, a group of researchers were treating patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. This is a painful condition that is hard to treat, but which can sometimes be alleviated using surgery. Doctors put osteoarthritis patients under anaesthesia and then made surgical incisions in their knees. However, only a few of the patients had the actual surgery. The rest were simply sewn back together with no intervention other than the original cut. The doctors didn’t tell the patients, who assumed that they’d had an actual surgery. And incredibly, during the following months, the placebo version of the surgery worked just as well as the real surgery, with the two patient groups reporting an equal decrease in pain.
There are even studies where doctors are completely honest about their use of placebos. They tell patients, ‘This is just a placebo treatment, we’re not actually doing anything. However, previous studies show that placebo treatments work.’ And then the treatment does end up working. In one study, for example, doctors gave sugar pills to patients with irritable bowel syndrome and were open about what they were doing. Nevertheless, patients’ symptoms improved.
I guess the good news is that the advice in this book will help you live longer providing I’ve managed to convince you I’m right. Okay, living for a long time might require a little more than ‘believe, achieve’, but studies do show that people who feel younger than their actual age tend to live longer. Similarly, we also know optimistic people tend to live longer.
The placebo effect illustrates that our mental state is in the driver’s seat of the body. It can even affect how we react to food. In a fascinating study, scientists made participants drink a sugary drink. Some were told the drink was a high-sugar beverage, while others were told the opposite. Then, even though both groups drank identical drinks, their bodies reacted differently. People thinking they were drinking a high-sugar drink had higher blood sugar spikes than those who thought they were drinking a low-sugar drink.
And this is the flipside of the placebo coin. The placebo effect also has an evil twin: the nocebo effect. Here, negative expectations become self-fulfilling. A good example is a study where researchers purported to measure people’s genetic potential for getting in good physical shape. Scientists told some of the research participants that they were predisposed to being in bad shape, even if it was a complete lie. Subsequently, those people performed worse on physical tests than people told the opposite.
* * *
Owning a dog is associated with living longer. The same is true of having close family relationships and friendships. In one study, researchers reviewed autobiographies and compared how often words for social roles appeared in the books; for instance, words like father, mother, siblings and neighbour. The authors who used these kinds of words the most lived over six years longer than those who used them the least.
We see this connection because all the tips and tricks in this book are not enough. Eating a healthy diet, exercising, and experimenting with your lifestyle will get you a long way. But it won’t take you to the finish line.
The final ingredient we’re missing is our social relationships. We now know how important our psychological state is to our physical health. And as human beings, one of our deepest psychological needs is belonging somewhere. For this reason, loneliness is actually among the factors most strongly associated with an early death – more so than being overweight, for instance. The need for close social ties is so ancient that we share it with our distant relatives. Even among baboons, the individuals who have stronger social ties live longer than individuals with weak and unstable social ties.
In addition to the happiness and comfort being with other people gives us, we also derive great meaning and a sense of duty from our social relationships. Field studies on longevity consistently find that long-lived people have powerful senses of meaning and purpose, and are exceptionally engaged in the world at any age. Instead of dividing life into ‘work’ and ‘pension’, they continue to take on tasks and responsibilities throughout their lives, even at the point where this has dwindled down to ‘cook for my grandchildren every Sunday’ or simply ‘sweep the stairs every day’. A curious example is that death rates rose right after the turn of the millennium. It’s as if people were kept alive by their goal of experiencing the new millennium, and didn’t give in until they’d got there.