Nir Eyal

It's not, you know, all the manifesting stuff.

It can work kind of and I do dive into some research around how it turns out positive thinking can have a very negative effect if you don't do it properly.

So I kind of wanted to dispel some of those myths and yet

I've changed my mind a lot about a lot of stuff that I didn't used to do.

And I used to kind of, you know, I'm very science-backed, you know, all my books have pages and pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies.

I have to see the study, not just it worked for me, but I need to see the peer-reviewed studies that show that it worked for others in a controlled study.

And so there's a lot of mythology out there, even in the academic community, to be honest.

There's a lot of studies that I look through that I thought were kind of, you know, gold standard studies.

And you kind of dig into how they were done methodologically, and you realize, oh, they're kind of crappy studies too.

So it was a lot of sorting through the meat from the chaff to figure out what we can actually practically apply to our lives.

The good news is there's a lot of unbelievable research that has come out of the past several years that just absolutely blew my mind.

For example, one thing is that we now know that placebos work even when you know they're a placebo.

which we didn't used to know before, right?

We used to think that placebos had to have some kind of deception effect, right?

That you had to, both people, the person prescribing the medication in a double-blind control study had to not know who was receiving the placebo.

And the person, of course, receiving it couldn't know if it was a placebo.

Turns out that's not true, that you can get amazing effects.

Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard showed this with IBS patients.

He gave people a pill bottle that said placebos on it.

By the way, you can go on Amazon today and buy placebo pills with five-star reviews that say amazing how fast-acting this placebo was.