Mark Dawes' Podcasts

Life or Death - The Placebo and Nocebo Effect

The way you chose to think creates either a placebo or nocebo effect inside you.

One improves your health and the other doesn't.

Choose the way you wish to think

Where you are in life now is directly attributable to the decision and actions that you have taken in the past.

Being angry and having massively hostile thoughts about another person is the equivalent of drinking poison in the hope that it kills someone else. This type of toxic thinking ages a person prematurely and and literally takes years off of their life. In short, they are killing themselves. That’s why such behaviour is a ‘Conversation with Death’.

Today I helped a church deliver a service over zoom to it's congregation and I found the Minister's sermon very interesting.

It was an open and honest talk about how he had at times lost his way and had days when he couldn't see any point in carrying on. 

The sermon also reminded me of a book I have read and regularly re-read. It's called 'Man's Search for Meaning'. It was written by Viktor Frankl and tells his story about being a longtime prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps, where his father, mother, brother and wife were all killed and where his existence was stripped naked to the point that he could be killed at any moment, for no reason whatsoever. 

This podcast reflects on that and also draws on the hope that can spring from finding meaning in our suffering. 

I hope it helps those of you who are finding things hard right now.

In this podcast I answer the above question and to do so I have to take you back a number of years when I was on a speaking tour around the UK when someone raised their hand and told me that I shouldn’t be telling people what the can do.

There are also other reasons too, which are consistent with my personal beliefs and values and I believe that if you live your life true to what you truly value then your life’s purpose becomes much easier, especially when it comes to making difficult decisions or when facing certain challenges.

Now we hear a lot about the importance of mental health in the workplace and it is great to see this being talked about more openly, but if we don’t give people the right information and skills to enable them to deal with difficult and potentially violent situations and tell them what they can do as opposed to what they can’t do, how can we say we are looking after their mental health?

I also value you and your family, some of whom may be placed at the risk of violence and aggression by the nature of the work you do and each and everyone of you has the right to come home safely each day.

Anyway, I hope this podcast helps someone and if you have any comments or questions, please do leave them below and I’ll get back to you.

I received an email today that asked me the above question and having checked this out fully before answering it I (with the permission of the person who sent it to me) thought I'd share it with you in the hope that it may help some of you out there.

In this podcast I talk about what our life's purpose is and the difference between happiness and pleasure.

For example, how many of us know someone who has everything but are unhappy.

I also talk about conventional truth vs ultimate truth.

The fact of the matter is we are all connected. Our actions affect every living organism out there.

We are all part of one race - the human race. 

Have a great day.

This scientific fact will literally blow your mind.

Every breath you take connects all live, past present and future, so we all all connected in a way that transcends space and time.

Have a great day.