THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING

You've likely heard of the placebo effect, in which people feel genuine benefits after being treated with drugs or therapies that in fact aren't doing anything for them. Well, the reverse is true too-you may be feeling poorly because that's your unconscious expectation. Here's how to guard against the "NOCEBO EFFECT."

- STACEY COLINO

The COVID pandemic was, of course, hard on every single one of us in different ways. But for those with chronic health-related anxiety-that is, people who worry excessively even when there's nothing going around-the stress was heightened. When she'd go out on an errand, Lauren Quinn would often feel a tickling sensation in her throat and worry that she'd just caught something; her symptoms would then disappear. It happened so often that in 2022 she decided to start taking medication for her anxiety, but things didn't go the way she'd hoped. "Within minutes of swallowing the first dose, I felt light-headed and jittery and had massive heart palpitations before I had even absorbed the medication," says Quinn, 47, a science writer and a mother of two in Urbana, IL. "I didn't make it past the second day with the medication," she says, because the symptoms were so distressing.

Quinn didn't know it at the time, but she was experiencing the nocebo effect. In this phenomenon, your negative thoughts or expectations about how you'll feel after a health-related action may elicit unpleasant symptoms. If you've ever walked out of a crowded restaurant with a suddenly stuffy nose, thinking you've just caught a cold, or felt unwell immediately after swallowing a medication, you're familiar with the nocebo effect. "One way to describe it is as the evil twin or the dark side of the placebo effect," says John Kelley, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of psychology at Endicott College in Beverly, MA, and deputy director of the program in placebo studies at Harvard Medical School.