Can one trick oneself into being sick?

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Do you ever have a hard time telling whether you are sick or not? Sometimes I wonder whether I'm actually physically sick or whether I just somehow trick my body into thinking it's sick and showing the symptoms when I really just don't want to go to work.

There are days when I really don't want to go to work because I either don't feel like being around people, don't want to take the sensory overload at work, really want to stay home doing my hobbies or am just really tired. On such days I usually feel physically sick in some way (I get real symptoms of physical sickness, but they usually don't last very long), but it happens so often that it's hardly a coincidence. This leaves me wondering whether I'm actually sick and should stay home or whether I'm just trying to give myself an excuse to stay home and should really push myself to go to work. On those days I really can't tell whether I'm actually sick or not.

Do any of you have a similar problem? Is it possible to trick oneself into being sick?

Absolutely. Why do you think so many people are sick. I was sick almost everyday from the time I was around 6 years old up to around 13. It got me out of school. I know people are are 'professional' sick people as sick as that sounds.

Sometimes people lie about being sick when they know they're not, but is it common that people really think they're sick when they're not?

What I'm saying is that the mind can make the body do almost anything.

I've been diabetic since I was 5. When I was a teenager I noticed that if I was trying to follow my diet the presence of chocolate cake could trigger symptoms of an insulin overdose. When I said to myself, "oh, come ON now" the symptoms would disappear.

I'm afraid to drive in snowy or icy conditions, which are not infrequent here in Boston. On a bad-weather workday I would feel nauseated and headache-y until I called in sick to work. Then my symptoms would magically disappear.

So, yeah, you can trigger psychosomatic ailments for reasons that have nothing to do with your health if your conscious mind has decided to make yourself do something your subconscious has decided not to do.

well besides hypochondria i think you could just suffer from some sort of detachment from your own body, i have a similar issue, but for me its not sickness so much as the confusion around the signals i get from my own body....

I don't know if you can do it deliberately, but I have experienced psychosomatic illness.

Yeah, there are a couple of classified "disorders" around that... hypochondria, etc...

There's a fair amount of information about placebic effects (which go both ways) in a book called Predictably Irrational by MIT professor of behavioral economics Dan Ariely. I've actually done a bunch more research on that subject -- there are a whole range of physiological effects from anxiety that can produce legitimate injury in the body, not to mention ret*d healthy brain development even in adults. The reverse is also true of positive emotional states (which you can also train yourself to experience more often). Check out some work by a woman named Frederickson - "the undoing effects of positive emotions" -- she's developed a body of work they're calling a "broaden and build" model. In the undoing effects study she first has to describe a number of the physiological effects of negative emotions that they were testing for reversibility.

That's fantastic! I'll bet your body was actually producing more insulin in response to your thinking about the cake... It's been shown in lab studies that the brain can produce actual morphine in some cases and that for example in a hospital a nurse can bring in a syringe filled with water and if they tell the patient "here's your morphine", they'll experience the same amount of pain relief as if they had received actual morphine. The brain produces endorphines (basically morphine -- close enough) that bond to the same receptors that the morphine bonds to... Moreover, the brain often doesn't even wait for the shot to be administered, but rather starts to produce the chemical at the first sight of the needle.

Amazing what the mind can do for or to the body.