Change Your Mind, Change Your Life

A brief dispatch on how our expectations can improve or wreak havoc on our lives.

The Shinto Japanese have a concept, kotodama, that loosely translated means “the spiritual interior of the word.” Kotodama presupposes the inherent power of spoken language to affect external circumstances. To speak of something is to conjure into being from innumerable future possibilities a certain outcome. According to these terms, words must be chosen carefully—one would not go to sea while casually mentioning a tsunami, for instance. Kotodama is grounded in the animistic belief that all things possess an invisible vitalizing power, a notion that strikes the standard western diabolical materialist as superstitious.

As is often the case, what defies our immediate understanding is worth closer inspection. Neuroscience has revealed, empirically, that positive thinking—what is called a growth mindset (positive being something of a psychobabbly misnomer) in psychology circles—actually correlates to the fruition of more desirable outcomes throughout all areas of life, decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood, and even shrunken amygdalae, the hot seat in our brains for perceiving threats, both real and imaginary. On the other end of the spectrum is the fixed mindset, which is the tendency to think of one’s life as largely determined by a series of characterological limitations.

With a growth mindset, an individual is willing to work harder, more consistently, and to field setbacks during the pursuit of goals as part of the process rather than as cosmological proof of their inadequacy. Bottom line: the lump of tofu between our ears processing these words is an organ with surprising hocus-pocus qualities, so beware what thoughts you allow yourself to ratify.

Laboratory studies have shown that we can increase muscle strength simply by visualizing their use. The gains are not marginal, either; they come close to the gains in strength made by performing the motion under load in the gym. Want cantaloupes for biceps? Picture yourself doing pull-ups for eleven minutes a day. You will not get ripped. Believe it or not though, the mind will relay the message to your biceps that they need to prepare for exertion, blood flow to the area will increase, neurons will waken from slumber, and even angiogenesis—the development of new blood vessels—will be induced in your pipes.

Obviously, the Shinto Japanese were onto something with kotodama. It’s one of those ancient insights into the mysteries of the universe that after enduring haughty dismissal for being unscientific proves to be actually not so bonkers. Go figure. Hegemonic dismissal of indigenous ways of knowing is part of the long, toxic legacy of oppression.

Recently, I listened to a podcast with science writer David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect, and was more than a little alarmed by the evidential data revealing just how much our personal expectations determine not only our behavioral responses to stimuli but actually alter our physiology. The simplest and most digestible of this modern example of kotodama in action is the placebo effect. Even when medical patients know they are ingesting an inactive substance to treat their respective conditions, but expect that placebo to help them, biomarkers improve—that is, health increases. Patients surreptitiously given a placebo who are told to expect negative side effects tend to experience those very same side effects.

During the podcast, Robson mentioned a longitudinal study that demonstrated something simultaneously unnerving and empowering about how mindset—which we think of as abstract and intangible and inert and irrelevant and inconsequential—shapes our lives tangibly and concretely. According to the study, people who associate old age with senility and feebleness live almost eight fewer years than people who correlate aging with wisdom. They also experience far greater rates of dementia.

When I shared this with a sciencey friend of mine, she took umbrage because she is a charts and graphs and variables type who embodies the adage that skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. Robson, not incidentally, is a Cambridge-educated mathematician, an apex predator of facts who mainlines evidence and thrives on the razor’s edge of correlation and causation. Besides, it’s not that certain geezers live self-fulfilling prophecies, one day magically ending up within their own worst visions (though it is a bit of self-fulfilling prophesying), but that certain geezers, long before they become geezers, behave for decades in ways that don’t tend to stave off loss of brain and body power because their expectations prevent them from doing so.

Friends of mine in their late thirties and early forties who routinely refer to themselves as old had better buck up here and pick up what I’m putting down, or go down under too soon. To bray a bit like a stubborn mule, I intend (that is, expect!) to be competing in ultra endurance events until my precious particles are rearranged in the Higgs field, because willingly turning into an atrophied blob of couch-potato tissue is about as boring and unappealing a plan for life as can be imagined. The point is to set the bar high, and to keep striving toward the fulfillment of individual potential.

This kind of nifty stuff is what I file in the funky folder in my own tofu. Kotodama rings an awful lot like those buzz words manifestation and visualization that one encounters ad nauseam in the bottomless archives of the Internet’s lucrative self-help pages, but there is, indisputably, something to be said about the power of language. Bruce Lee said, “Words are energy and they cast spells,” and modern science is finally catching up to what ancient cultures have known for millennia, which is that we are what we speak.

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If you are a self-propelled information junkie who enjoys learning about the powers of such things as suggestibility, mindset, expectations, and the placebo effect to harness the powers of the mind in order to live a better, happier, more fulfilling life, here are some links to resources:

On Being with Erik Vance

David Robson on the Modern Wisdom Podcast