Not all information is helpful information.
Nocebos are the mirror side of placebo, and the shadow of all personal development.
Nocebo is a worsening of an experience or condition after learning that a stimulus (supplement, activity, or action) has a negative effect on you. And this impact is beyond whatever the stimulus's actual physical impact is.
Nocebo impact is real - it's not "just in your head." For example, is "pain" just in your head? Does that make it any less "real"? Not at all.
What can this look like?
- You learn a specific food is "bad" for you and start getting negative symptoms after eating it (e.g., sugar, antinutrient like oxalates, fat, etc.)
- You come across the news that picking something up the wrong way makes it more likely that you can strain your back. You start being much more protective of your back and then next time you pick something up the "wrong" way, you "blow your back out"
- You see a tweet that says less than n hours of sleep per night results in poorer performance at work, and you do start noticing how much worse you do on those days
But aren't these just biological impacts?
Yes - each one of the points above are "biological," they produce a real physical outcome. Nocebo however is the difference between the biological impact of the stimulus itself, and what your expectation of the impact is.
Let's make up something called the stimulus impact scale, where 1 = no impact; 3 = moderate impact; 5 = high impact.
And let's assume that the actual physical impact of a poor night's sleep on you personally is 2/5. However, you learn from Twitter and health influencers that poor sleep is terrible in many ways. And so your expectation and perception of poor sleep brings you up to an experience of 3.5/5. That delta of 1.5 is nocebo. And it's everywhere.
What does this mean?
Nocebos are part of the broader world of mindbody or psychosomatic medicine. This world explores the interplay between mind and body in creating certain conditions and experiences.
A truism from that community states that many things the body can experience, the brain can generate as a symptom. And so - it's fair to assume that any "negative" impact you might learn about a stimulus might actually be made worse by nocebo. And while some nocebo is a learned response, often it comes from trusted information sources.
This is why it's the shadow of personal development. To believe an influencer that something is harmful might cause you overall more suffering than the thing itself. It might also teach you to make your world increasingly smaller, by avoiding certain experiences, activities, and behaviors.
Does this mean you should start drinking from lead bottles, running into walls, and injecting yourself with mycotoxins? No. But it should leave you wondering.
To leave you with a set of questions:
- Which stimuli do you have high conviction cause physical harm versus harm via nocebo?
- In what way does knowing about nocebo make it more or less likely that things will cause you harm down the road?
- In an attention economy increasingly driven by fear porn, where does that leave you in terms of making decisions about which actions to take? And what information to consume?