Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Nir Eyal, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Chris. Great to be back.
Dude, 2019, episode 104, all the way to now. I'm going to take credit for all your success since then. It was. It was built. Is that okay? Was I the lucky charm? It was built on a foundation of you and Indistractable. That's exactly correct. New one, all about belief. Why is belief so important?
Okay, so beliefs turns out to be the lens with which we see the world. And I had no idea how profound this research that's been coming out over the past several years has on our day-to-day lives, how beliefs shape what we see, literally shape what we see. I can show the same exact image to two different people and they will see completely different things. It's called the Khafre illusion.
You can look at this piece of paper and I can show you to one person based on where they grew up and their priors, their beliefs, and they'll see circles. I can show it to somebody else based on where they grew up, they'll see rectangles. It's incredible. Beliefs not only shape what you see, not just figuratively, but they actually shape reality that you see.
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Chapter 2: Why is belief so important in shaping our reality?
They shape what you feel, your internal state, and most importantly, they affect what you do. And so everything comes upstream from these beliefs. And so you better get these beliefs right if they're going to run your life.
What... I think one of the challenges people have when they hear the word belief is it gets perilously close to Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, Manifestation. You know, you've come from a productivity background, same as me, kind of hardcore, quite sterile almost in a way, very sort of frameworks, rigid structures. Belief sounds very almost whimsical as a topic to get into.
You know, that is a great point because there is a lot of bullshit out there. And so part of what I wanted to do with this research that I've done over the past six years for Beyond Belief was to really separate what works and what doesn't. And a lot of it, frankly, I'll give that crowd some credit. A lot of it works, but not for the reasons they say it does.
Right?
that like, you know, I hate to burst anybody's bubble, but no, nothing is vibrating and quantum whatevering and like the universe really doesn't give a shit. 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the myths surrounding traditional behavior change?
Now, this is kind of a standard assessment. It's a pain tolerance test. And we see how long you can last in that very, very, very cold, almost freezing water. And they also measure facial grimaces and different expressions. And if you say anything about the pain, so they're measuring your pain tolerance and how long you can finally stay in the water.
Well, no surprise, the people who prayed, who had a faith-based prayer practice, they lasted much longer than the control group. But even the people who were taught how to pray, who did not have a faith,
background, if they could substitute some other word, okay, the universe, the sum of all forces, Mother Nature, something that was meaningful to them, they also had higher pain tolerance than the control group. And so this fascinated me. And so I went to five religious leaders, and this is going to sound like a setup of a joke, but this is exactly what happened.
I went to a rabbi, an imam, a priest, a monk, and a swami, and I asked them all the same question. How do you pray even if you have doubts about God? And I took away from each of them practices that I think anyone can use, whether you have a belief in the supernatural or not. If you do have a faith in the supernatural, that's fantastic.
Turns out that a lot of us, I was missing out because I wanted to have the facts that I'm not going to pray unless I absolutely believe exactly what the religion says. And now I've been able to release that, that now every time I go by a place of worship, whether it's a church or a mosque or a synagogue, if they'll have me inside, I go in and pray. And it doesn't cost me anything.
And it helps me refocus. It helps me become grateful. And it sometimes engages me in a community. All these practices that religion teaches have kind of escaped us. By the way, and interesting, you asked why is spiritual but not religious, why does that have these negative outcomes? Not every country is the same when it comes to that regard.
In fact, in Japan, I just got back from Japan a few weeks ago. In Japan, it's the exact opposite. They are religious but not spiritual. So the Japanese, they absolutely will go to the Shinto shrines. They'll go to the Buddhist temples. They do all the rituals. But when you actually ask them, do you really have faith in this supernatural animism? Not really. Not so much. But they do the ritual.
And they gain all these psychological benefits that come from it.
That's so interesting. That is so cool. I can imagine a lot of people thinking, oh, this is perilously close to wishful thinking. You're asking people to delusion themselves into see it, believe it, wish it, achieve it, but don't actually have to do anything about it. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How can limiting beliefs sabotage our success?
It doesn't see reality as it is. It sees reality as it expects it to... Chris? Appear. There you go, right? As you expect it to appear, as you expect it to be. How did you know that that was the next word? Because your brain predicted it based on what we call priors, based on your prior experience, your prior beliefs.
And so based on those factors, you are seeing reality not as it actually is in a second. You're seeing it based on a prediction. So you're already living in a simulation. It's not the matrix that we all live in, not like the movie. We all live in our own simulation inside our own heads at every single second. Now, what we don't realize is
is that our beliefs are already deluding us through what we call limiting beliefs. These are beliefs that sap your motivation and delude you into doing things that oftentimes you later regret, right? I'm not a morning person. I'm too old. I'm too young. I'm too fat. I'm too thin. It's too late. I have no time, right?
Like all these limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves all the time, they're already a delusion. You're already gaslighting yourself. What I'm advocating for, what I've discovered, is that you can actually choose your beliefs, because beliefs are not facts. Facts are something different. Facts are defined as objective truths. It's something that's true whether you believe it or not.
The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat earthers, a fact. On the opposite end of the spectrum is what we call faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. Okay. What happens in the afterlife? God rewards the righteous. These are matters of faith. They do not require evidence.
Do you see these as kind of two opposite ends of the same spectrum?
Yeah. Yeah.
Because of the evidence requires a hundred percent evidence and one that doesn't require any evidence at all. Okay, cool. That's right. Now in the middle is a belief.
A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. So you can choose your beliefs. And these beliefs shape what you see, what you feel, and what you do. And we carry them around as if they are ultimate truths, as if they are facts.
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Chapter 5: What is the difference between sickness and illness?
So yeah, I think we've got a bit of conceptual inertia coming in from where we were previously.
To me, that's the fun part is that you can try on the craziest beliefs and they always sound crazy. Whatever that liberating belief is, it always sounds ridiculous because we love our limiting beliefs. They served us at one point. They're comforting. We don't have to change and we don't want to see any other potential way. I'll share what happened to me doing a similar exercise.
And this has to do with a very personal relationship with my mom. She had her birthday not that long ago, her 74th. And I wanted to do something nice for her, so I wanted to get her some flowers. Problem was, I was in Singapore at the time. She was in Central Florida where I grew up.
And I wanted to do something special, so I stayed up till one in the morning, calling up florists, making sure that I found the right one that had good reviews, that they could get there in time, that despite the Florida heat, they wouldn't shrivel, that they would get there. I went to sleep, 1 a.m., I patted myself on the shoulder, and I said, okay, good job, Nir. You did it, you're a good son.
And I called my mom up the next morning, and I said, hey, happy birthday, did you get the flowers? And she says, yes, thank you very much. I got the flowers, but you should know that they were half dead and you really shouldn't order from them anymore. To which I blurted out something that I would have said when I was 13.
I said something to the effect of, well, that's the last time I ever buy you flowers. And Chris, that went over about as well as you think. It didn't go over very well at all. Now, after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, hey, do you want to do a turnaround on this? And I said, I definitely did not want to do the turnaround.
This mumbo jumbo, you know, hocus pocus, touchy feely crap, I didn't need that. I wanted to vent. I wanted to tell her why my mom was being way too judgmental and I wanted her to let me vent. Well, it turns out the research shows that venting does not work. That venting does nothing but cement
the vision that you have of people, the beliefs that you have about people, it just makes them more, more vivid. So venting we know does not work, even though that's kind of the conventional advice that you have to blow a steam. You have to say how you really feel. Don't hold things back. Turns out it's not so great. I knew that at the time. And so I did one of these turnarounds.
So I took out these four questions and, uh, I started with, you know, what, what is the belief? The belief was very clearly, I wrote it down. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay. Now the first question, like we just did with you, is it true? Obviously, Chris, you're on my side here, right? My mother, what mother doesn't thank their son for their flowers? Who says that?
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Chapter 6: How do we effectively reframe rejection and failure?
For her to change was not a possibility. Now, at least I had other options. So what did I start doing? I started trying on those beliefs for size. you know, for a week. Okay, I'm not, I'm going to take that perspective of that I was being too judgmental and hard to please. And all of a sudden, this weight was lifted. Like I didn't have to believe that anymore.
I didn't have to have these standards because I didn't even see I was holding myself to those standards. And all of a sudden I did become more patient. I did become nicer to my mom. I was a better, I was more of the person that I wanted to be. And so the way you change these beliefs is you try on a different belief as an experiment. Just try it on for size. You see what happens.
And as ridiculous as it feels at first, when you start building more agency, when you start proving to yourself in small steps that, hey, that could also be true, You can choose at some later point to keep that belief or chuck it for yet a new one.
Why does rumination feel productive when it's actually destructive then? What is it that's happening inside of our minds that causes us to want to do that?
Yeah, it's a few things. So one, rumination feels like problem solving, but it's rumination about the past, right? Rumination comes from what cows do to their cud, right? They ruminate, they chew, chew, chew on a problem endlessly. And oftentimes that can feel productive because it feels like we're putting time and attention towards something.
But when it becomes rumination, when we were talking about the same thing again and again, and we see this all the time when people think about their past, right? Rumination is always about something that has happened in the past.
It moves from constructive problem solving into many times an escape from reality, that if I'm constantly thinking of a problem, I don't have to do what's currently in front of me, right? That it's something that almost becomes a pacifier in a way. So a very practical solution, what I've started to do, which also sounds nuts at first, is I've actually started planning time to worry.
So now my brain doesn't have to ruminate about the problem. It doesn't have to ruminate just as much about when will I have time to think about and solve this problem because now I have time in my calendar for worry. Now here's what happens nine times out of 10. I'll write down, here's what I need to worry about. Very, very important thing.
I keep ruminating in my head about this thing that I definitely, definitely need to think about. Very, very important, this thing that I messed up on in the past and I need to think about how do I fix it. And then when that worry time comes, Nine times out of 10, what the heck was I worrying about? Why did I keep ruminating on it? I didn't need to.
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Chapter 7: What practical steps can we take to change our beliefs?
And that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about a deadline. We're talking about a checkpoint is when I say, I will endure this suffering for a fixed period of time. Now, why do we do that? Because if we don't do that, as soon as it gets uncomfortable, we're going to interpret the pain as suffering and we're gonna wanna quit.
Instead, when we say, I'm going to try this perspective, right? I'm going to try this crazy view of my mom, like I was describing earlier, or this crazy view of my life that life is not for taking off tasks. Okay. Doesn't sound right. I don't agree. Maybe it's not true, but I'm going to try it for one week, 30 days, whatever you make up the number.
And I'm not going to stop until I hit that checkpoint. Then at that checkpoint, I can say, okay, let me, let me take a step back. Would I continue this experiment past that checkpoint if I were to start today? But don't quit until the checkpoint, right?
Whatever that hard task might be, 30 days of exercise, 30 days of posting YouTube videos, 30 days of writing your book, whatever it is, make sure you have that checkpoint. That's criteria number one. Criteria number two is are you still learning through failure? We talked about that earlier. And then the third and the most important criteria is does persistence make a difference?
Many things in life, persistence does not make a difference. If you're in a crappy work culture and it's awful and the people are sucking out your energy and you, on Sunday evening, you are dreading waking up on Monday morning because you know you have to go to work, persistence ain't going to help. Those people are not going to suddenly leave just because you stuck around longer, right?
You're going to die by the time those people leave. So persistence is not going to make a difference. However, when it comes to fitness, for example, you're a jack guy, you know this, you hit plateaus. And then if you persist, hey, you'll bust out of that plateau, you'll make progress eventually. right?
So there are certain things in life where persistence really does make a difference, even if you're not seeing progress. But if you meet those three criteria, that's fine. The most important thing is that you're not quitting too soon. You're not quitting at the 15 minute mark like those rats, even when you have the 60 hours of potential.
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Chapter 8: How does rumination impact our mindset?
And I'm thinking about beliefs that people have now, which might be useful, or that create success or whatever, but in the future quietly limit you. Beliefs that people hold now that previously were effective or helpful in some sort of a way, but now are holding us back. That kind of blind spot with regards to belief and the tool, where it was then, where we are now.
How do you come to think about updating beliefs over time in that sort of a way? Yeah, where do we begin?
I think one of the challenges that I think is becoming more and more prevalent is that we have these cultural nocebos. So placebos come from the Latin, I will heal. Nocebos come from I will hurt. And it turns out these nocebo effects are contagious. That when we tell people that they might be suffering from some kind of malady, It spreads. I'll give you a great example.
There was this case in, I think it was Portugal, if I'm not mistaken, where on one particular night, there was this epidemic. The hospital rooms were filling up with young girls with intense intestinal discomfort. They were filling up the ERs and people thought it was some kind of virus. People thought there was something in the water.
Like what had happened was really weird that it only affected girls of a certain age and nobody knew what it was.
Turns out, there was a very popular TV show, I think it was called Strawberries and Cream, and on that show, the main character, the protagonist, had some kind of similar intestinal malady where she was very sick, and that actually caught on and created this kind of mass nocebo effect. And this goes, we see this repeated again and again every few years somewhere in the world.
There'll be some kind of outbreak of some kind of psychosomatic disorder. In the literature, one case that really blew my mind, there was this guy, they call him Mr. A, he was anonymized. And Mr. A had a very difficult breakup with his girlfriend. And he decides that he wants to end his life. So he takes a bottle of pills, opens it up, he takes the entire bottle of pills, swallows everything.
And a few minutes later, he changes his mind. He decides he wants to live. So he rushes over to his next door neighbor. He tells him he took all his pills. Neighbor rushes him to the ER. Mr. A barges through the emergency room, crashes on the floor. He's almost unconscious. And he says, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. Help me.
They rush him into the operating room, his blood pressure is dangerously low, his heart rate is plummeting, and they're trying to figure out what did he overdose on? Well, they look at the jar of pills, and all there is on the jar of pills is a number to call. It turns out that Mr. A had been part of a clinical trial for depression, And he took all these pills that he was given in the study.
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