Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at LifeHacker, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Alice Bradley, editor-in-chief of LifeHacker.

And I'm Jordan Calhoun, LifeHacker's deputy editor.

And first, let us just say, Happy New Year.

Yes, we are so happy to have made us in 2021.

How you feeling, Alice?

Oh, my God, I'm amazing.

I mean, nothing bad can never happen again because 2020 is done.

And yeah, we're good now, right?

That's what I'm telling myself.

But seriously, thank you all for sticking with us.

We have so many plans for upgrading your lives in 2021.

And to start us off, we are tackling the power of suggestion.

That's right.

And we're learning how to use things like the placebo effect and hypnosis to our advantage.

And we're getting help from science journalist Eric Vance.

Your brain just says, let's just do that.

Rather than having to reevaluate all the expectations around pills, let's just make the pain

go away.

And that's basically what the placebo effect is.

It's just your brain adjusting reality so that it meets an expectation. Eric is an award-winning science writer and a staff editor

for the New York Times Well section. His work has appeared at outlets like Harper's Magazine,

...