Placebo And Nocebo: How Belief Changes Biology

If a sham knee operation once outperformed the real surgery for pain and mobility, it forces a bigger question: what if expectation is not a side note, but a biological input your nervous system is using all the time? I’m Naomi Mills, and I’m digging into the placebo effect and the nocebo effect as proof of how tightly linked the body, brain, and healing really are. This is not about pretending you are fine or “thinking yourself well”. It is about understanding how meaning, belief, and repeated inner stories can shift physiology in measurable ways.

We look at how nocebo can creep in through side effect lists, scary predictions, and the familiar line of “nothing can be done”, then how those messages can organise the nervous system around threat, fear, and increased pain. I share examples from my work and from firewalking, where attention and expectation can amplify sensation long after an event, and we connect it all back to survival wiring: your brain keeps asking “Am I safe?” and “What should I prepare for?”

From there we move into what helps: genuine hope, clearer language, and practical nervous system support like sleep, hydration, food, daily regulation practices, and connection. I also share how learning about epigenetics changed my relationship with a personal fear after losing my mum to cancer, and why your “future self” is shaped by the filters you live through today. If you have ever felt betrayed by your body, this is a reminder to make it a friendlier place to be. 

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Transcript

You Are The Answer Welcome

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer. I'm Naomi Mills, and this is the podcast where I love to explore the connection between body, brain, and healing while I invite you to reconnect with the wisdom that's already living inside of you. So what that means is I like to talk all things central nervous system, which is our main wiring system that's controlling really how you experience your life. We've dedicated the first 10 episodes to talking about the system as a whole, then went deep into embodiment and using the body as a real gateway to finding more calm, safety, regulation, health, and happiness. And this arc has focused more on the brain and what is going on in our minds and how that is affecting the filters that we see the world through.

Why Placebo Matters For Healing

Naomi Mills 1:47

So today I want to talk all things placebo, nocebo, and the stories that shape our bodies. Because what if the thoughts that you repeatedly think actually change your physiology? Have you ever thought about what you expect for your health and your life? How it has biological consequences for the future? And what if healing is not all in your head, but actually deeply connected to what your brain and nervous system even believe are possible. So today's episode, we're going to explore some of the stories we might be telling ourselves and drawing from some wonderful research and work by other fantastic humans that help us better understand how our mindset shapes the responses that our bodies have. And this isn't about thinking yourself well. And we, if you want to go back two episodes to the mindset myths that interrupt your healing, that's a great one to pop back to after this. But it's really about how profoundly connected your body and brain are.

The Sham Surgery That Worked

Naomi Mills 4:04

But placebo is awesome. There's a study I read about many years ago that in America, one of the insurance companies had run a study of knee surgery and the long-term outcomes for the patients in terms of their pain and their mobility, and found that the placebo, the sham surgery, actually had better outcomes than the real surgery itself. Because placebo doesn't mean fake, it actually relates to the genuine action where your brain creates the positive impact in your body that it expects. So the placebo effect is when the power of your brain creates what we would consider a positive or healing response in the body. A nocebo is the same mechanism, but it's the negative effect. Think of when you read the side effects list to medication and suddenly you might experience all of them. That's a nocebo effect. That is the expectation in your brain creating a physical manifestation in your body. I talk about it a lot in my firewalking because, as was reported to me by my instructors, it is possible to develop a blister days or even weeks after you have firedwalked if you believe that you have done so. So I know that, you know, you might get a little hot spot on your foot or something that you feel like, oh, it's a bit not 100% sure about that. And the more energy you give to it and the more store you give to it, suddenly it gets redder and it gets hotter and it gets more uncomfortable until eventually a blister could form. And that would be the nocebo effect. And the the placebo one that I often bring out at the same events is imagine you've been to a barbecue and you've really enjoyed the chicken drumsticks, and then somebody tells you that they weren't properly cooked, and you are just going to give zero energy to that story at all, and you are going to tell yourself that they are absolutely fine, and therefore you are absolutely fine, and therefore you don't get an upset stomach and feel really terrible afterwards. These are our sh our beliefs, our perceptions that we hold in our brain do have real physical, measurable consequences in our bodies. And what placebo research really shows is how the brain and your body are constantly listening to meaning and expectation and how you perceive the world. So we've gone through

Nocebo Fear And The Safety Brain

Naomi Mills 6:49

what is a placebo, and it's is your body responding to an expectation? And that does make complete sense from a survival perspective because your brain is always asking, Am I safe? What should I be prepared for? What do I believe is happening in my life? And this is a really important point when it comes to just appreciating how your brain and nervous system are organized. And it's a conversation I had just this very morning in my own practice, was actually because of the blessed lives that we typically lead, and I mean that in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, because we have food and we have shelter and we have safety, our brains are still very old school wired in case we don't have those things. And so when we have that level of comfort, if you like, that's why our brains are often still looking for things to be wrong, even though we have quite good lives. It is simply a matter of wiring. And understanding how placebo works, especially, I think is a wonderful thing because you can use it to your advantage. And the opposite of that, of course, being the nocebo effect, where somebody starts to believe their body's falling apart. I've been told I'll always struggle with this, I can't get better, my spine's degenerated, there's nothing that can be done. And their nervous system will organize around that belief system, and symptoms can get much worse, pain can get more intense, they obviously experience fear and the belief that there isn't a relief for them. There's there's nothing that can be done. And they come into my office and we start looking at what can be done, and maybe you can't reverse everything they're experiencing, especially when somebody has a diagnosis. But here's what you can get back, and here's what is possible. And it is remarkable how much more function, how much better somebody becomes, just when you give them hope, when you give them the under, not false hope, genuine hope, genuine knowledge that okay, we can't fix this problem, but it doesn't need to look like this. Because too often in our society it is told, well, this is the most that can be done. But that may only be true in that particular line that that person is going down. But there's always other areas, all the areas we talked about in arc one about things that support the nervous system. I'm talking about food, daily practices, sleep, hydration, mindset. There's always a little in. But when you shift the mindset, the expectation, that is such a powerful place to start. And I'm not talking only about thinking positively or manifesting healing. You can't, as I've just said, think yourself out of every condition, especially when there is a pathophysiology, an actual disease process happening in the body. But how you perceive your ability to function with that, to work with it, really does change your lived experience of it. Your body and brain are not separate.

Hope Changes Physiology In Practice

Naomi Mills 10:14

So hope will change your physiology just as much as fear does. Connection will change your physiology, and that is neuroscience. And one of my favourite takeaways that I had personally was that as I shared right in episode one, my mum died very unexpectedly of end stage stomach cancer when she was only 56. And I will be honest, there was a strong part in me that for many years believed that could be me or might be me. And when I started to learn about epigenetics, these tiny parts of your gene expression on your cells that get switched on and off according to environment and also according to belief and expectation, that made me rethink. We go into this really in-depth on my episode on your future self, which is a great one to pair with this if you're really interested in how your mindset and your planning today is dictating your health in the future. And it was a big wake-up call to me that expecting something like that to happen was actually genuinely neuroscientologically, that's not a word, making it more likely to happen. So, really thinking about those filters that you're putting on your mind and taking advantage of this placebo effect, this placebo phenomenon, can be an incredibly powerful way to help your own health.

Epigenetics And Future Health Filters

Naomi Mills 11:54

So I invite you to ask yourself what story is my nervous system living inside? What stories does my brain consistently hold about myself or my ability to create some of the healthy positive changes I want to? Because all of that actually holds within it a great key as to why you will or will not create the outcome that you're looking for. And it's one of the key reasons that I believe healing often begins with changing our relationship to ourselves. And so when someone comes into my office, they are given this big report folder that explains a lot about this stuff and about chiropractic and how it works and why I'm doing it. But it says there right in the front in big letters, make your body a friendlier place to be. Because it's very easy, often, I think, for us to take any sign or any symptom or any negative emotion as our body's kind of doing the dirty on us, and like we're the brain and it's the body, or whatever, or however you see that, it's going to be different from everybody for everybody. And I want to bring it back to the whole and the whole system, and that the system's just constantly

Make Your Body A Friendlier Place

Naomi Mills 13:12

trying to look after and protect itself, and for so many different factors, sometimes it can get a little bit confused or mixed up. So we need to keep coming back to that safety, the regulation, the grounding, and the tuning in. So it's not about pretending something's better or bypassing what's really happening or the reality of a prognosis, but it's also creating enough space and enough safety for your body to come out of fighting so it can regain as much health and as much function, as much goodness as it's possible, both now and in the future. So placebo isn't about fake healing. For me, it's really proof that as humans we are deeply interconnected and that our beliefs can affect our biology because our nervous systems are always paying attention. And when we reach for safety and hope, and this reminder that our body is trying to protect us and to move further towards balance, it can be really healing because then whatever we are facing doesn't have to come with fear or negativity or a sense of kind of self-betrayal. So that feels like quite a big thing to end on, a big thing to say. But actually, all of these phenomena occur within us, and I think it's so important that we just take these small snippets of time to re-remind ourselves. You've maybe heard a lot of this before, you've maybe not put it in this context for a while, and I really want it to lead on to our penultimate episode of the mindset series.

Next Week Teaser And How To Help

Naomi Mills 15:04

Next week, I want to go into how to harness these filters, and we're going to talk about mantras and manifestation and curiosity and staying yet and saying yes, and not in a woo-woo way at all, but in a way that really works with the genuine wiring of your body. So join me for that next week. Have a wonderful day, and maybe keep an eye out this week for where placebo and nacebo are showing up in your life and deciding what you want to do with it. Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparks something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have to.