Gaslighting Yourself

Exploiting your mind's need to believe

It's not just clever phraseology: "mind over matter" is real.

Take placebos, for example. The placebo effect – feeling a real effect from a fake drug or treatment – has been documented and studied by doctors since the late 1700s, when the U.S. was still a fledgling nation.

Nowadays we call this "gaslighting": manipulating or deceiving someone into doubting the truth or believing a lie.

Placebos might be the ultimate gas light: someone slips you a sugar pill instead of real medicine but convinces you so thoroughly of its supposed effects that you literally experience them. We used to think placebos only worked if they were kept "blind" - until they tested "open label" placebos.

Patients given open label placebos are told from the beginning that the treatment is a sham. But they're also told that our minds and bodies are capable of amazing things, and that a placebo taken with the right mindset can promote actual healing.

Essentially, patients are asked to gaslight themselves. And it actually works.

Open label placebos have successfully treated real conditions like back pain, seasonal allergies, depression, ADHD, irritable bowel syndrome, and menopausal hot flashes.

This doesn't mean depression and back pain are all in your head. Rather it illustrates that many forms of disease and healing are the result of internal processes ultimately controlled by our brains and our minds. Psychology can influence physiology.

The physical effect of positive psychology was seen in a huge study on stress and mindset at UW-Madison, where highly stressed people who believed that stress was healthy and beneficial had the lowest risk of death and disease.

Self-gaslighted.

In psychology, self-gaslighting is usually associated with self-criticism, self-doubt, and low self-esteem. But here we've seen two examples of how self-gaslighting can be positive.

You can “Jedi mind trick” yourself in countless other ways, too. For example, did you know you can gaslight your waistline?

Back in 2010, Harvard researchers studying hotel maids gave one group of them a sort of private pep talk explaining the "exercise value" of their work: housekeeping, they were told, was extremely active work that burned a lot of calories. Whether they realized it or not, they were hard core exercisers.

Amazingly, the "pep talk" group went on to lose a significant amount of weight even though they weren't doing anything physically different than the other groups - the only difference was their belief in what they were doing.

Beliefs about what we aren't doing can be equally powerful. Have you heard of "placebo sleep"?

Better sleep means a better mood and stronger cognitive performance. But while measures of deep and REM stages can be used to quantify sleep, feelings about “sleeping well” are very subjective.

Participants in two separate studies were taught about the importance of REM sleep, monitored overnight, then tested on focus and cognitive function.

People who were told they slept great did better on the tests even if their measured sleep quality was terrible. Performance was worse when told they slept poorly, regardless of the truth.

Gaslighted.

Sleep isn't the only area where "little white lies" do us good. Studies show that performance improves by more than 30 percent when someone is told they're "the kind of person who thrives under pressure," even when that encouragement is a sugar-coated placebo.

With how easy it is to gaslight someone else into better performance, imagine how much could be accomplished if you were able to gaslight yourself in the same way.

Well, you can. Turns out our brains are so eager to believe anything that we can literally lie to ourselves.

Henry Ford famously said, "whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're right." The power of positive (and negative) visualization.

Did you know that you can gaslight yourself stronger?

We’ve known for a long time that thinking about a specific muscle activates it more during an exercise. Researchers took this a step further and asked people to imagine contracting their quads without physically doing it. By the end of the study, their muscles were more than 12 percent stronger.

The effect applies similarly to skill-based activities. Positive visualization – imagining yourself performing an action perfectly – has been observed to increase actual performance almost as well as physical practice.

Why does this matter to us as first responders?

Science suggests the most skilled among us think about the job. Not just "think" about it, but regularly visualize themselves performing skills perfectly. Performing a primary search, placing an IV, talking a panicked 911 caller through CPR, even backing up the rig. "Virtual reps" – daily time spent imagining yourself repeating tasks while recalling how the moments and movements feel – reinforce motor systems that help enhance proficiency.

This "positive visualization" can also be exploited in bed. Remember "placebo sleep"? Convincing yourself you had great sleep quality boosts your mind and your mood.

How can you gaslight your own sleep? Well, you could try your own open placebo and imagine it's a powerful sleep aid, but “positive sleep visualization” is far more common and has been used for thousands of years.

The “Military Sleep Method" (search it online) uses specific relaxation techniques and positive imagery to help you fall asleep in minutes. And positive self talk can convince your brain that your bedtime routine works and you're going to sleep great.

I’ve pointed out repeatedly how powerful positive visualization and self-talk are. My March/April 2024 column showed that what we believe, especially about stress, matters greatly. In a job where burnout runs rampant and more of us die by our own hand than on the fireground, mindset techniques like reframing and active optimism can completely transform the effect stress has on us.

Speak mindfully. Think positively.