You're listening to Doing It Right with me, Pandora Sykes, a podcast where I talk to experts about the myths, anxieties and trends of modern life.

There's no such thing as the right life, but what

might we be getting wrong? In this series, series three, I'll be exploring sleep, the

science of emotions and fast fashion, and I'll be asking my guests questions like, is

baby brain a real thing? Is everything we've been told about skincare wrong?

And why aren't we talking more about dementia? This is a podcast that asks, what can we do to live

life better? Not just for ourselves, but for everyone. Can the way you think about your body change the way it works?

Can a positive outcome about ageing actually cause you to live longer?

I've been curious about the mind-body axis for a while,

and then I read the expectation effect by the award-winning science journalist and author

David Robson about how our expectations can shape our experience, and I have not been able to stop

thinking about it. And so I called David up, and luckily he was up for an interview. In short,

using dozens of jaw-dropping studies throughout history, many of which we'll talk about in this episode, David explores how thinking a certain way about something can change the way your body responds.

Now, you cannot think yourself fitter, happier and richer. This is not the secret. But you can harness the power of your brain's predictive machine,

says David, to live a healthier, longer life. David and I discuss the power of reframing,

the effect of placebo's and the incredible impact of self-affirmation in young people

and how it can shape their entire future.

I hope this episode gives you some tools to take away too.

David, thank you so much for coming on to doing it right. Oh, It's completely my pleasure, you know, I'm a big fan.

I'm so excited to talk to you about the expectation effect which blew my mind.

So can you start by telling us what the expectation effect is?

I define it as this phenomenon where we create our own self-fulfilling prophecies, three different

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