This Is Why Negative People Make You Sick
There's a phrase people throw around a lot, "get rid of negative energy," and for a long time I thought it was just a nice sounding idea, a bit fluffy, a bit self-help-poster. It isn't. There is real, hard science behind why negative people don't just bring your mood down, they can genuinely make you physically ill. It's called the nocebo effect, and it's the evil twin of the placebo effect you've probably heard of. Where a placebo can make you feel better simply because you expect it to, a nocebo does the opposite. Expecting something bad, being told something bad, being surrounded by bad, can make your body produce a genuinely bad outcome. Not imagined. Measurable. If words and expectations are powerful enough to make you sick, they're powerful enough to make you well too. Your body believes what it's told Researchers have found that a huge proportion of people who experience side effects from medication weren't actually reac...