Being told you look sick can make you feel sick

Have enough people insist you look ill, and you can begin to feel ill, even if you started the day feeling well.

Miist, a singer and podcast host, offers that example to explain what she calls the nocebo effect. She illustrates it with a crowd of people insisting you look ill, until the repeated comments can bring on the feeling of sickness.

She argues the same weight of repetition can fix an identity in place. When enough people, including yourself, say "that you are a certain person," she says, "you start to believe it," even though, in her view, "you may not be that person at all."

She says that after 20 years of performing to meet expectations, people grow scared of rejection and feel they cannot change. She compares that stuck feeling to being high on a hard climb and feeling the only path is to keep going upward. She adds that social media and conditioning certainly make this worse.

That is where her account ends. My own view, separate from Miist's, is that this raises a question worth asking for yourself. My suggestion, not hers, is to notice which labels may have been assigned by others rather than chosen, and consider whether to keep living by them.