We have met the enemy and it is us.
The comic strip Pogo
Walt Kelly
1913 – 1973

How powerful are your thoughts? I’m not sure if you’ve ever contemplated that question, but I invite you to take a moment and think about just how your thoughts influence your life.

Now let me share a story that demonstrates just how much power your thoughts can have.

In January 2010, a 29 year old British construction worker had an accident: he jumped down from a scaffold and landed on a 15 cm nail. (For those of you not used to metric measures, that’s about 6 inches.) He was wearing steel toed shoes, but the point of the nail was visibly protruding from the top.

The worker was in excruciating pain and would not let the emergency medical team perform any first aid. They had to take him to a hospital emergency room where he was administered midazolam — often used prior to surgery — and then fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times more powerful than morphine.

Once he was sedated, the doctors were able to remove his footwear. At that point, they made an amazing discovery: the nail had passed between his toes. It hadn’t even broken the skin. The pain the construction worker experienced was all a result of his thoughts. He believed the nail had punctured his foot and therefore knew he should be in great pain.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the placebo effect, where patients have positive reactions to sugar pills. But you may not know about the nocebo effect — the medical term for the experience of pain or other symptoms absent of any physical cause. The nocebo effect is what the construction worker experienced, and it can produce severe reactions. Both the placebo and nocebo effect serve to illustrate the power of our thoughts.

Your brain is capable of making the body react to what your mind holds true. The construction worker thought he was badly wounded, so his brain prompted his body to experience that level of pain.

This story is interesting, but how does it impact our daily lives?

Any belief, any thought we consider true, can have a very real influence on our behavior. If we believe we aren’t capable of performing certain activities, we won’t be able to do them. This phenomenon is known as self-limiting beliefs. What we hold to be true has much more impact than you might think on what we actually accomplish (or fail to accomplish) in life. We often attribute our lack of success to external factors, but if we carefully examine the underlying causes, we may find that it’s our own thoughts creating the roadblocks.

If you continue to struggle with obstacles in your life, try looking at your beliefs about the situation. You may be surprised to discover that your thoughts are the real problem.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge; both poverty and riches are the offspring of thought.
Napoleon Hill
1883 – 1936

Copyright © 2017 John Chancellor