In 1995, a 29-year-old construction worker arrived at an English hospital with a six-inch nail through his boot.

He was screaming in pain. Every attempt to extract the nail just made the screams louder.

Finally, the team sedated him and removed the boot. They looked at the nail. No blood.

They looked at the foot. No wound. The nail had pierced nothing but the empty space between his toes.

The physical injury wasn't real.

Only the pain was.

You've probably heard of the placebo effect.

You take a sugar pill and your insomnia goes away.

But the effect can also work in the opposite direction, a nocebo effect.

The expectation of relief or pain can create its own relief or pain.

This principle does not apply for everything.

If you have a torn ACL or Achilles, sugar pills will do absolutely nothing for you.

But if you're suffering from an illness with a psychological layer, pain, insomnia,

depression, anxiety, expectation itself can be its own medicine. The science podcaster, Shankar,

Vedantam, wrote this in the Washington Post several decades ago. Quote, after thousands of studies,

hundreds of millions of prescriptions, and tens of billions of

dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression.

One, antidepressants like Prozac work. And two, so do sugar pills.

Plescebo effects fascinate me because they seem to touch on some really profound truths about life.

We do not live in the world as it, quote, unquote, is.

We live in the world as we expect it to be.

We often see the world, just as we expect it to look.

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