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Your mindset matters. As I write this, I’m conscious it sounds like the title of an obnoxious self-help book or a soundbite clipped from a questionable podcast, but it’s true. There’s a growing body of evidence that your attitude – the way you approach the world – makes a big difference to your health. In fact, the effect is so strong that people with a rosier view of the future tend to live longer than those who are pessimistic, 7.5 years longer on average. There’s a more dramatic example that comes to mind if you still need some convincing that your brain can cure your body: sham surgeries. Under lab conditions, there are procedures for which the placebo surgery – an operation with all the elements of real surgery, from receiving anaesthesia, getting an incision and going through recovery – has the same recovery rate as the real surgery. The placebo is as effective as treatment. In fact, placebo painkillers can be effective too when it comes to chronic pain. It’s a take on medicine that’s well explored by the late Dr Michael Mosley in his film on placebos, which you can find on iPlayer (bit.ly/MosleyPlacebo). So it begs the question: if a positive mindset can lead to being healthier, can it also help slow the effects of ageing? Is there something to growing old ungracefully? Instead of expecting and resigning ourselves to aching joints and weary muscles, what if we adopted a more positive attitude, one that presumes the best years of our lives are still ahead? In this issue, David Robson examines what he calls the 'Expectation Effect.'

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