Senia writes a great arti­cle on How You Tell the Story of Your Life in Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy News Daily. As part of the story, she men­tions a very fun study on the power of the Placebo effect.

From Senia’s post:

“In the Feb­ru­ary, 2007 issue of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Langer and col­league Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel work­ers and told one group that “the work they do (clean­ing hotel rooms) is good exer­cise and sat­is­fies the Sur­geon General’s rec­om­men­da­tions for an active lifestyle. Exam­ples of how their work was exer­cise were pro­vided. Langer and Crum told the con­trol group noth­ing. Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some mea­sure­ments of both groups: the con­trol group hadn’t changed phys­i­cally, but the test group had decreased all of the fol­low­ing: weight, blood pres­sure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as sup­port­ing the the­ory that exer­cise affects health at least partly due to the placebo effect. Fur­ther­more, we can ask, what are the sto­ries that these hotel work­ers are telling them­selves? Why do the hotel work­ers sud­denly believe that they actively affect their exer­cise regiment?”

Impli­ca­tion: the placebo effect is real, and it can help our health.

A few fun ques­tions to consider:

- How do we pre­vent other peo­ple from sell­ing us stuff that only works based on the placebo effect?

- Once we decide to do some­thing, shouldn’t we try to “placebo” our­selves in order to get the most of it? this is another man­i­fes­ta­tion of the impor­tance of emo­tional self-regulation.

Enjoy the long weekend

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