Nir Eyal: Beyond Belief and how to change your mind to change your life

17:39You see reality as you are, not as reality actually is.

17:43Evan Kimbrell:This is interesting, and it's a lot like an LLM. You know, we hallucinate like an LLM hallucinates. And there's a reason why we hallucinate with the checkerboard example, because it's too expensive for us to process all of the information all of the time. It would be exhausting. We would never get anything done. It'd be very limiting. So, those priors are actually an evolutionary advantage. It's a shorthand for us to solve some problems. So, that's an advantage most of the time. Some of the times, it's not. And that maybe leads us to this notion of beliefs that are empowering and beliefs that are limiting.

18:23Evan Kimbrell:And when we were preparing for the interview, I confessed to Eli that one of my number one pet peeves, like the thing that really gets my goat is when I encounter people whose lives are so governed by limiting beliefs of like, I can't do this. I can't try this. There's a lot of I cannot in their life. And I pride myself on trying to be on the opposite side of that spectrum. Talk to us about limiting beliefs, how we identify them, define them, recognize them. And the interesting thing is that we all have them. We all have them. I interviewed billionaires and I interviewed people who were broke.

19:02And it turns out we all have these limiting beliefs. The problem is that our limiting beliefs are like our face. That if I told you, look at your face, how do you look at your face? You can't look at your face. You can look at your hands. Unless you're on Zoom

19:14Evan Kimbrell:and then you're like always looking at your face, right?

19:16Nir Eyal:Yeah, exactly. You need something outside of yourself. You need a mirror. You need Zoom. You need to reflect in order to see your own face. Just like we can't see our own limiting beliefs. They're hidden to us. We have to reflect upon them in order to see them. Interestingly, we can see other people's limiting beliefs. You can tell me your colleagues and your kids and your parents and your spouse, you can see all their limiting beliefs. You just can't see your own. And so what we have to do in order to uncover them is to have some kind of process to reflect. We have to take them out, to unpack them in order to see them.

19:49Now, you know, the question is, why do we have them? Why is the brain intentionally limiting us from our true potential? Well, the fact of the matter is your brain doesn't care about your potential. The brain doesn't care if you're flourishing. And the brain doesn't care if you're happy. And the brain's primary job is to keep you alive. And what's the best way to keep you alive?

20:09Nir Eyal:To keep you doing and thinking exactly what kept you alive before. It's predictive processing. It's based on probabilities. Well, what did you do in the past? Did you survive? Were you hurt or not? And if it worked for you in the past, just keep believing it in the future because that's what worked. And so your brain is there in order to keep you safe and new behaviors, new beliefs can be dangerous. They're risky. So your brain is constantly pulling you into passivity, constantly pulling you into whatever it is that you did in the past. That's what you're going to continue to do in the future.

20:44This really overturns what used to be a really kind of gospel in the psychology community, this concept of learned helplessness. We used to think that the brain had to learn to be helpless. And this was a theory proposed by Seligman and Meyer, and it was gospel. Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association. Everybody believed it, that it explained generational poverty. It explained all kinds of social maladies that, you know, if you try and try again, you keep failing, well, then you learn that you're helpless. Turns out, to their credit as good scientists, Seligman and Meyer completely reversed their conclusions.

21:20Not only did they determine that there is no such thing as learned helplessness, but that the conclusion was 180 degrees the opposite of what they originally thought. You do not learn helplessness. You are born helpless. We all are. That helplessness is our default state.

21:40Nir Eyal:Think about it. A baby is born into the world completely helpless. They need help from their caregivers to survive. That's how we come into the world. And that's how we stay unless we learn hope. Hope is what we have to learn, not helplessness. Helplessness is our default state. So knowing that, we have to constantly be on guard to our brain's default state, constantly reminding ourselves. I still, I mean, again, I write books for me. This was my problem. I had constantly these voices in my head saying, who are you to talk about this? You don't know enough about this. You're not ready for this.

22:14Nir Eyal:People are going to find out that you did something wrong. What are you doing sticking your neck out, right? Go back to doing what you've always done. That's the voice I would always hear in my head. And it wasn't serving me. And it wasn't until I realized, wait a minute, this is by design. This is what evolution gave me, that I was able to take out those limiting beliefs, examine them, and figure out a better way to work with them. So I'll give you a very detailed example of how my life changed with these limiting beliefs. I get very passionate about the work I'm doing, and I like to share it with people.

22:42And so I remember when I started my public speaking on my first book, Hooked, I used to have terrible stage fright, terrible stage fright. Right before I would go on stage, I'd feel my heart beating in my chest, and I'd get the sweaty armpits, and I'd get the cotton mouth, and I'd get all these terrible symptoms of stage fright. And I'd have this dialogue in my brain of, I'm not ready for this. This is too big of a crowd. And what if they don't like it? And what if I stumble over my words and I'm not gonna do very good at this? And I would just start getting down this anxiety cycle about my presentations.

23:11And it really wasn't serving me. You know, sometimes I would actually back out of speeches because I would think, oh, I'm just not ready for that size of a crowd. I wouldn't do it. So I was limiting myself based on this conversation I was having in my head. Well, I don't do that anymore. Now I have a liberating belief. What's interesting is that I experienced

23:28Nir Eyal:the same exact physiological symptoms, okay? I still, like right now, guys, You're a big deal podcast. I still get the palpitations in my heart. I still get the sweaty armpits. I still get the cotton mouth. I feel them right now, but I interpret them completely differently. Now I don't tell myself, oh, I'm not ready for this and this is going to go horribly. Instead, I tell myself, okay, my heart is beating in my chest because my brain needs more oxygen so I can deliver my best possible presentation about something I really care about. Now, is that true? Is that physiologically, medically true?

24:01Nir Eyal:I don't know. I don't care because beliefs are tools, not truths. I feel much better. I don't suffer anymore. Same symptoms, same information, same 11 million bits of information are still coming into my brain. Same things are happening in my body, but completely different interpretation. It's no longer suffering. I've changed the belief that it's hurting me. Now I believe it's serving me.

24:24Evan Kimbrell:Our audience of designers in some way should have a natural advantage here because part of what we teach as human-centered design is first gaining empathy, so going out to the field and observing people, and then defining a problem. But that often involves reframing what we might have thought as the original problem into something that's actually closer to the core problem. And to walk through a quick example, many years ago, this industrial designer, Doug Dietz, he was tasked with sort of redesigning one of GE's big MRI machines. And he was at first thought the problem was, oh, this thing is just kind of ugly.

24:57Evan Kimbrell:We have to make it look more cool and updated. But luckily he took a class at the d.school. He went into the field and he observed that there was a young child about to be scanned and she was just terrified. She's in tears. And he learned that about 80 % of pediatric patients have to be sedated just to go through a scan. And he realized that the problem is an ugly machine. It's the whole experience is bad for kids. And so he redesigned it such that it was like an adventure. So the kids now are told that they're about to go on a pirate shift. And there's gonna be some loud noises, but they're kind of positioned as the hero.

25:29Evan Kimbrell:And it drastically reduced the number of patients that had to be sedated. So you'd think that designers should understand this idea of reframing and be able to reframe these beliefs. But I guess as many of us don't. So might there be a way that we could take the skill that we have for other people and apply it more to ourselves? For sure. Absolutely. So I call this the experience loop. And I talk about this four step process that we can use in our products, but also in terms of of our own lives. So the experience loop goes like this. So it's believe, anticipate, feel, confirm. Believe, anticipate, feel, confirm.

26:00And I give several examples of various products. So there was an experiment where they took people, funny enough, in an fMRI machine, something similar to what you described. And while they were in an fMRI machine that scans blood flow in the brain, they gave them two kinds of wine. So they had a little tube in their mouth and they said, okay, now we're going to give you the first sample of wine. This is a$5 bottle of wine. Okay.

26:21Nir Eyal:What do you think of it? And people said, ah, you know what? The wine's all right. It's a little bit flat. It's a little bit harsh on the finish. Not a big fan. Okay. Then they flushed their mouth out with water. They had a little spritz. Then they said, okay, now we're going to give you the second bottle of wine. You ready? Okay. Here's the second bottle of wine. This bottle of wine is a very expensive bottle of wine. It's a Chateau de something, something. What do you think of this wine? And people said, wow, this wine is very delicious. It's so much better than the other wine. It's so smooth and I really enjoy it.

26:51And they started saying all the things that wine snobs like to say about wine, you know, the oakiness and the wine snobbery type stuff that they would describe. And of course, you know, there's a trick coming. The trick was that it was the same exact wine. Now, what's interesting is that not only do people describe the more expensive wine as better, not only did they say they liked it better and that it tasted

27:12Nir Eyal:it better, the researchers could see in their brains as they were sampling this wine that the reward centers of their brains became more active when they were sampling the wine they believed was more expensive. So they had a belief that confirmed an experience that created a feeling that then they said out loud by confirming it to other people as wine people do when they sample wine that confirmed what they already believed in this created this cycle. Because one of the fundamental expectations is that price is a signal of quality. Many times it is. Many times it's not. That it's just the price.

27:51But here's the thing. It's not a trick. I used to think that, ah, those suckers who buy luxury handbags and fancy cars and expensive wines, you know, they're just wasting their money. I don't believe that anymore.

28:02Nir Eyal:Because if we can see that the expectation of a more expensive wine actually makes you enjoy it more, it should probably make us take a step back and ask ourselves about the role of marketing. What is the role of positioning your product? You're not putting lipstick on a pig. You're not just fancing it up or just getting more attention to your product. That's not the role of advertising and marketing. You are actually incepting how the product will be experienced. You are creating the value of the product through the marketing, through the expectation of the product. That's the job, right? So it's not just the product itself.

28:40Nir Eyal:Another example that I profile in the book is a product called Liquid Death. Do you guys know Liquid Death? The water, the canned water? Yes. And I am mystified by it. It's water. Water. And they tell you, they don't even try and market it as special water. Okay, it comes from Austria. But the only reason it comes from Austria is because that was the only place that the CEO could find to put water in a can. Everybody else insisted on putting in plastic bottles, but his whole thing is death to plastic. That's why it's called liquid death. It's all about death to plastic. I don't know how people know that there's kind of this covert environmental message, but that's what it's all about.

29:16Nir Eyal:Now, here's the thing. It's water in a can. The company doesn't tell you it's artisanal. It doesn't try and make it frou-frou water. It's just water. And yet people will tell you the water tastes better. And they're not lying because just like the expectation of expensive wine makes it taste better, the expectation of this edgy, you know, heavy metal water that if you know, you know, if you're part of the brand cult, it probably does taste better. Give you another example. They gave golfers a putter that they told them was used by a famous golfer. I don't know. They probably mentioned some famous golfer's name.

29:50Nir Eyal:I don't know who they said. They said this putter was used by a famous golfer. It wasn't. And yet the The golfers on their game when they use this putter did better when they believe that this was somehow a magical putter that some famous golfer had used. So is that a lie? Not really. I mean, if it does affect your performance, then the lying away becomes reality. Why? Because you expect it to be so.

30:19Evan Kimbrell:We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

30:25Evan Kimbrell:Design Better is supported by Upwork. One thing that we learned by running this show and honestly building anything creative is that the fastest way to level up isn't just working harder. It's finding the right person for the right tasks. We've used Upwork ourselves, and what's impressed us about it is how much it's evolved. Beyond just posting a job and hoping for the best, their Business Plus tier actually uses AI-powered shortlisting to match you with the top 1 % of talent in under six hours. And for us, that kind of speed really matters. When you're in the middle of a project and you hit a skills gap, you can't afford weeks of recruiting.

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31:44Evan Kimbrell:Upwork dot com. Design Better is brought to you by User Testing. What does it look like to thoughtfully integrate AI into your design process? Well, at User Testing's upcoming events, called Crafted, you'll have the chance to explore exactly that. In Seattle and London, my pal and co-host Eli Woolery will be running a 90-minute interactive workshop called AI and Design Thinking. designed to help you use a host of new AI tools, not as a shortcut, but as a thought partner so you can build with confidence using the tools shaping tomorrow's creative workflow. If you care about the craft of design and the role that AI should be playing in it, this is a conversation worth being part of.

32:27Evan Kimbrell:Visit events.usertesting.com slash crafted and use the code designbetter100 to save$100 off your workshop ticket. That's events.usertesting.com slash crafted. Use the code DESIGNBETTER100 to get$100 off the workshop. Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang-on-the-patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope?

33:08Evan Kimbrell:It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic.

33:15Nir Eyal:Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia.com slash VisitScotland.

33:47Evan Kimbrell:And now, back to the show.

33:55Evan Kimbrell:So, beliefs are something that can be a liability when you're going through a big change in your life. We recently started a conversation with our community on Substack, just asking, like, how are you feeling about AI and everything that's happening? Do you feel a sense of anxiety or overwhelm? And it was insane. Like, the moment that I posted that message, it was just bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, constant responses of, hate it, exhausted, I want to get out of here. One person even said, I would be happy to let the world pass me by, which I found sort of heartbreaking that there's so much stress and anxiety that's happening right now.

34:38Evan Kimbrell:It's AI, there's a lot of other uncertainties in the world and so forth. But what beliefs should designers, creative thinkers, illustrators, filmmakers, anyone that's pursuing a creative life, what should they be holding onto right now? And what needs to be reframed? How could they use the power of beliefs to guide them through a transition? Let me start with a different example. It's going to seem off track. I'm going to bring it back, I promise. Sure. So a fascinating area of studies around longevity. How do our beliefs shape our health? Turns out that there's a study at Yale that found that people who have a positive

35:18Nir Eyal:view of aging live on average seven and a half years longer. Now guys, seven and a half years, to put that in perspective, that is greater than the effect of diet. It's greater than the effect of exercise. It's greater than the longevity effects of quitting smoking. And yet how much public effort, right? How much media, how many dollars have been spent trying to convince people to eat right and exercise and stop smoking compared to changing their beliefs? Seven and a half years longer. Isn't that insane? That's crazy. That's such a huge impact. Now, what does that actually practically look like?

35:54Nir Eyal:People who have a positive view of aging will believe something like growth is possible at any age. People who have a negative view of aging will believe something like aging involves inevitable decline. And you've probably heard something like this. Oh, I'm having a senior moment or I'm getting older. Oh, it's expecting bad things to happen because aging involves inevitable decline. So based on your default belief, whichever one you go to first, aging involves inevitable decline or growth is possible at any age, that will determine how long you live. Now, which is true, guys? Which is false? They're both true, right?

36:31Nir Eyal:Aging does involve inevitable decline and growth is possible at any age. But what's your default belief, right? When you have some pain in your back or you forget something, is that a senior moment or is it just part of life and you're getting better. So based on that fact that you can choose which belief you default to first, now why does that change your lifespan? One theory, what you'll hear from some people, is that, well, your beliefs are changing the vibrations of your mitochondria and they're touching the quantum field. That's rubbish. None of that's true, at least nothing that we can observe in any kind of scientific measurement.

37:06Nir Eyal:What's actually happening is that beliefs really do become your biology. In that respect, the woo-woo community is right, that your beliefs can become your biology, but not the way they say. The way your beliefs become your biology is via your behavior. So the big secret here is that people who have a positive view of aging, growth is possible at any age, how likely is that person over the person who says aging involves inevitable decline, how likely is that person to go volunteer in their community and make more friends or go out and tend the garden and get some exercise. They're much more likely to do these healthy behaviors when they believe growth is possible at any age versus the person says, eh, aging involves inevitable decline.

37:48I'm going to sit here at home on the couch, watch TV and eat some Cheetos because our beliefs really do change our behavior, which really does change our biology. So to answer your question, to bring this all back around when it comes to AI or any technological change, well, of course, if you say, I'm going to sit this one out and I wish it would all go away. And I wish, you know, we could roll back to the good old days and everything is getting awful and AI is going to take all our jobs and we're all going to be. Well, guess what? That's

38:15Nir Eyal:going to be true for you because your behavior will change based on your beliefs versus someone who says, amazing, AI reshuffles the deck and creates new opportunities that I can take advantage of. Now, which one is true? They're probably both true. AI will eliminate jobs and is going to create amazing opportunities. We don't know what's true yet because it hasn't happened yet. What we do know is that one set of beliefs will make you much more likely to succeed and actually take advantage of those opportunities versus the other belief, which will make you much less likely. It's like asking me if you've got two runners, two identical runners, they're identical twins, and they have trained exactly the same amount since day one.

39:00Nir Eyal:Physically, they are perfect match specimens. The only difference is that racer number one says, I don't think I can finish this race. The other one says, I'm pretty sure I can finish this race. Where are you going to put your money? Of course, you're going to bet on the person who believes that they can succeed. And so if we don't know the future, nobody has a crystal ball and can tell me with any kind of certainty what AI is going to do to the economy. And if everybody has certainty, they're full of hot air. They don't know what they're talking about. Nobody knows. We just have guesses. It's not a fact, it's a belief.

39:31Nir Eyal:And so you can choose the belief that's going to make you more likely to succeed. It doesn't guarantee success. Perseverance does not guarantee success, but quitting guarantees failure.

39:41Evan Kimbrell:It's interesting because on this topic, there's sort of two interesting diverging schools of thought. And I'll talk about a specific subset of our audience that might be illustrators. And we have friends who are illustrators and people who've been on the show. And there's kind of like two paths that I've seen them taking. One is, this is terrible. It's taking client work away from me, which it legitimately is. It was trained on my work. I don't want anything to do with this. It's awful. And I respect that because many of these folks spent decades working on their craft, and now they're seeing machines ingest it and able to spit out a really cheap imitation of what they do.

40:15Evan Kimbrell:And then there's another path that's like, yeah, I kind of believe all that stuff, but I'm using it for all the work that I have to do that is not my creative work. That creative work, that drawing, that sketching, that's still me. But now I can kind of offload all this other stuff onto the AI that I previously had to deal with and I don't anymore. And to me, that's an interesting spin on it where you can kind of segment the belief, I guess, in some ways where, yes, I think this is negative, but I'm going to take the parts that are positive and use it to my advantage. Yeah. And that's the definition of a limiting versus a liberating belief.

40:48A limiting belief is a belief that saps your motivation and increases your suffering.

40:53Nir Eyal:So when I believe, I believe that AI is going to take my job, how motivated am I to find new opportunities? I've closed the door. AI is going to take my job. Done deal. I believe it. I'm not very motivated. And how much suffering have I created for myself? A lot. Because now I have no agency in the matter. Whereas if I do what's called a turnaround, this comes from inquiry-based stress reduction, which is a technique that we use to uncover these liberating beliefs. And the way we do that is we ask ourselves, how could the opposite be true? Now, I guarantee you somebody's listening to me right now and says, no, this guy does not understand my situation.

41:31He doesn't know what's going on. He's out of touch. It's definitely going to take my job.

41:36Nir Eyal:I'm telling you, that person who's listening right now, I'm talking to you. That is your brain doing everything it can to not change its mind. The brain hates changing its mind. You don't want to change your mind. Your brain hates changing its mind because what it believed in the past kept it perfectly safe. So that resistance that you feel is very normal. Your brain is doing its job and it's probably not serving you. Because if you stay with that old belief that you've always had, you're going to get the same results, probably worse because you're not adapting. Whereas if you just open up the opportunity, the possibility of this question, could the exact opposite be true?

42:14Nir Eyal:You don't have to adopt that belief. Just a question. Just consider it. Could the exact opposite be true? By the way, you can do this with any limiting belief. For example, I have terrible stage fright. What I told you earlier, what would I don't have terrible stage fright look like? And that's how I came up with this new liberating belief of actually, this isn't stage fright. This is my body preparing me to deliver a great talk. But I wouldn't get there unless I consider the possibility of could the exact opposite be true. I could have stuck, no, no, no, I definitely have terrible stage fright.

42:45Nir Eyal:Oh, by the way, I also have been diagnosed with ADHD. and dyslexia. I could pick any one of these things and say, oh, you see, these things are holding me back. Or I could say, actually, I'm learning a new skill. That's a liberating belief that makes me much more motivated to persist versus, I can't do it. No way I could become a three times bestselling author. I have ADHD and dyslexia. Sorry. Versus this is a skill I'm learning to overcome. And in fact, my ADHD gives me the ability to super focus on things I'm really interested in. Amazing. Now, what's biologically true? I don't know. I'm not a doctor, but I know what serves me.

43:19Nir Eyal:I know what keeps me motivated. So if I say to myself, AI is taking my job, 100%, okay, what could the exact opposite be true? Is there any possible universe where AI is not taking my job? I guarantee you, if you think for five minutes, you'll probably come up with 10 different ways that AI is not taking your job, that AI is giving you opportunities. Now, what you choose among all these new beliefs, that's up to you. That's where you can do what's called collecting a portfolio of perspectives. You look at all these different beliefs, and maybe you try one on, kind of like if you need a new pair of shoes, right?

43:58Your old set of shoes, they're stinky, and they've got holes in them, so you go to the shoe store, and you know you need a new pair of shoes. Do you walk in there, and you take the first pair you see? No, you ask for the right size, you try it on, you walk around the store, you make sure it fits right. And that's exactly what we do with our beliefs. We've got beliefs that are stinky, that have holes in them, and we keep wearing them.

44:18Nir Eyal:And when we want to adopt a new one, we try it on. So what would it look like if just try a day, maybe a week, of AI is not taking my job. AI is creating opportunities for me. What could that look like? What could that belief look like? Try it on. Just try it on. What's the harm? You would be amazed at what you will see. You will physically, literally see things. Your brain will see opportunities you never thought possible. Let me tell you one quick example that, again, one of these studies that I can't stop thinking about. They ask people to do a very simple task. They ask them to look at a newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper.

44:58Nir Eyal:Just count. One, two, three, four, five. How many images are in this newspaper? Now, they split people into two groups. One group were people who were self-identified, people who believed that they were lucky. It wasn't a fact. The scientists didn't follow these people around to determine if they were lucky. They just asked them, do you believe you're lucky or unlucky? They took the people who were lucky, separated from people who thought they were unlucky, and they gave them the exact same task. Again, they believed they were either lucky or unlucky. The people who believed they were unlucky to do this task, to count the number of images in the newspaper, they took two and a half minutes.

45:34Nir Eyal:Okay, two and a half minutes. Okay, one, two, three, four, two and a half minutes to do the task. The people who believed they were lucky took 11 seconds. Why the difference? Well, on page two of this newspaper, there was one image that said, there are 43 images in this newspaper. Collect your reward. The lucky people saw the image, read the text, got it from the table, went to the proctor, collected their reward and were out the door in 11 seconds. The unlucky people, despite correctly counting the number of images in the newspaper, they counted the 43 images, but they never read the text. They never saw the answer was right there on page two because that kind of thing doesn't happen to me.

46:17Nir Eyal:It is what it is. I am what I am. How many times do we hear that? That's just the way I am. The most dangerous words in the English language is whatever comes after I am. If you believe that's the way it is, that's the way it is. And so that tells us this amazing fact that we see based on what we believe. We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. So if you believe there are no AI opportunities out there, guess what? You're right.

46:41Evan Kimbrell:I'd like to put another common limiting belief in front of you that we have seen many times over throughout our careers from designers. So designers often say, I'm not a business person. So this is part of their identity is I'm a creative person. I don't pay attention to all of that stuff, like the math, analytics, all of that stuff. These words have come out of my mouth. I know it to be true that I've said that. I'm not good at systems. I'm not good at operations, meetings, et cetera. Creative people don't work that way. How do these beliefs shape what work actually gets done? And could we maybe just use the same methodology to pull some of those apart for those listening?

47:27For sure. I used to say that stuff all the time too, right? And if you believe designers just can't think that way, right, as if we were born this way, well, that's not like our brown eyes or blue eyes, right? It's just a skill that you haven't developed. I'll give you another fascinating study. I love these studies. So there was a guy by the name of Mr. A who was anonymized in the literature. And Mr. A had a very bad breakup with his girlfriend, and he decides to swallow an entire pill jar of antidepressants. And just as he's swallowing this entire bottle of antidepressants, he decides to change his mind after he swallowed the very last pill.

48:02He rushes to the hospital. He collapses on the floor of the emergency room, and he tells the doctors in the ER, he says, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. The doctors pick him up. They put him on a gurney, and he's showing all the symptoms of an overdose. His blood pressure is dangerously low. his heart rate is falling, and he's slipping in and out of consciousness. Now they're trying to figure out what did Mr. A overdose on? So they take this pill jar and they look at the pill jar

48:28Nir Eyal:and it doesn't say the name of the antidepressant. Rather, it just has a phone number. They call the phone number and it turns out that Mr. A was enrolled in a clinical trial. And when they look him up on the computer, they realize that he hadn't taken the antidepressant, he was in the placebo group. What he had taken was an entire bottle of nothing. Nothing he had taken could have possibly caused these physiological symptoms. The falling heart rate, the blood pressure, none of that stuff could have been caused by the placebo. They tell Mr. A this, and within 15 minutes, his blood pressure is normalized, his heart rate returns to normal, he walks out of the hospital perfectly healthy, maybe a bit embarrassed.

49:08So why do I tell you this story? if believing that I have overdosed

49:15Nir Eyal:can cause these physiological symptoms that were completely psychosomatic, it was just his beliefs creating those symptoms, you can't tell me that believing I have a whatever, I'm not a morning person, I have ADHD, I have anxiety, I have such and such, which I have, right? I've been diagnosed as well with ADHD. Believing that that has this negative consequence, there is no way it doesn't create physiological symptoms in you. No way. Because your labels will become your limits. So there's a right way to look at a label and there's a wrong way. The right way is to look at your labels as a map. Okay.

49:56Nir Eyal:A map, you're on this map and here's the treasure, right? X marks a spot. And so the map shows you, hey, you're here, you're going to get to there. That's the right way to look at a label or a diagnosis. So with my ADHD, if I want to get better at something, here's a path I can follow. Now, other people might be closer to the treasure. Maybe the fact that they don't have ADHD means it's easier for them in some way, or they don't have to learn this skill that I have to learn. But I am not the map, okay? Telling yourself something like, I'm not a business person. Creatives can't be analytical. You're the map.

50:29Nir Eyal:You've decided on your identity. This is called identity foreclosure. That when we decide we are a kind a person who, done deal, nothing more to discuss, foreclosed. That's it. That's who I am. And so, guess what? We don't try, we don't change, and we never will be anything but who we currently are. So now I don't tell myself what I used to tell myself about my ADHD, that, oh, this is a lifelong condition. I'm never going to get over it. What happens if I don't meet my deadline? And why can't I concentrate? And why am I always distracted, et cetera, et cetera. Now I just tell myself, this is a skill I'm getting better at, right?

51:03Nir Eyal:Just like I didn't know how to ride a bike at first. I didn't know how to write a book at first, and now this is just another skill I'm getting better at. So that's a much healthier method. Now, you could also say, I would not like to do that thing, right? Maybe I don't currently enjoy it. Maybe it causes me suffering. But that's also a limiting belief. You know, pain is not suffering. Those are two separate things in the brain. Pain is not suffering. Pain is the signal. Pain is the 11 million bits of information. That's all it is, just information. But suffering is the interpretation of that signal.

51:37Nir Eyal:So all of this is malleable. You know, there are people who all of a sudden, when they free themselves of these limiting beliefs, they find that they actually can enjoy things that they never thought they might enjoy. As opposed to saying, I can never enjoy business. If you say, actually, I bet there's some things I could love about business. I think I could be analytical. And when you free yourself from that, you might actually find that you enjoy it much more than you ever thought.

51:59Evan Kimbrell:That was a really great segue into the question I was about to follow up on, which is one of the things that surprised me a bit about the book. I find the frameworks and techniques you share very fresh and new, but this idea of a placebo has been around forever. It's been around since the 1950s or before in clinical trials. Why haven't we latched onto this more? Like what has held us back from understanding that the beliefs, yes, shape actual physiological things in our body. And why haven't more of us already realized this essentially? I'll tell you the biggest reason. We used to think that placebos require deception.

52:31And that was a big problem because it's unethical for a healthcare practitioner to lie to their patients, even if it's for their benefit. There's a lot of ethical issues with that.

52:43Nir Eyal:Until the placebo researchers learned that placebos don't require deception. Ted Kaptrick at Harvard told me that he did this study where for IBS patients, people with irritable bowel syndrome, which is highly influenced by the placebo effect, as are many maladies, insomnia, depression, anxiety, ADHD. A lot of things are influenced by placebo. Some things are not, by the way, just to be very, very clear. Illness and sickness are two different things. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. Just like pain and suffering are two different things, sickness is not illness. Placebos are terrible at sickness.

53:14Nir Eyal:Placebos don't cure cancer. Placebos don't heal a broken arm. Placebos are amazing for illness because illness is in the mind. Where is pain and suffering? Pain and suffering is not in your elbow. It's not your back. Pain and suffering is always in the brain. It doesn't mean that pain and suffering is fake. All pain is real. All pain is real. Nobody's faking it. Nobody's lying, okay? And yet, even though all pain is real, all pain is in the brain. So that means that we have some degree of control over our pain and suffering, of that interpretation of the signal to the suffering. So what's new is what Dr.

53:48Kapschick did is that for these irritable bowel syndrome patients, he gave them what's called an open-label placebo or an honest placebo. He gave them this bottle, and it said placebo right on the bottle. And he said, this is a placebo. It's an inert substance,

54:02Nir Eyal:but, and here's the important part, he said, it has been shown to help some people with their symptoms of IBS. So again, that expectation, right? Belief, anticipate, feel, and confirm. So he gives this expectation of it has been shown to be effective for some people. And wouldn't you know it, in his study, he found that giving someone an open-label placebo was as effective as changing their perception of their symptoms as the leading medication, as the leading pharmaceutical, even though they knew it was a placebo from day one. In fact, we know the placebo effect is getting more effective. Over the past 50 years, the placebo effect has become more effective.

54:41Nir Eyal:Why? Why would that be? By the way, this is a huge problem for the pharmaceutical companies because when you want to get FDA approval, you can't just show that the medication works. It has to be more efficacious than the placebo, right? That's why we have to do these placebo trials. So it's a big problem because a placebo, even though the drugs work, because they have to outdo the placebo, it's a higher and higher bar. Now, why is a placebo effect getting stronger over the past 50 years? Well, because more people have heard how effective placebos are. So they keep getting stronger. So it just goes to show you that the placebo effect, I think, is way underutilized.

55:17Nir Eyal:You know, we know that 80 % of healthcare spending is on illness, not sickness. 80 % of healthcare spending today is on the perception of the symptoms of sickness, not the sickness itself. So I think we should be using placebos way, way more in lots of shapes and forms. And the good news is you can go on Amazon today, you can buy placebo pills, pills that say on the jar, placebo, and you will find underneath that Amazon listing at the bottom, you will see five-star reviews for fast-acting relief from these placebo pills.

55:48Evan Kimbrell:This makes me think of hypnosis, which is starting to come back into vogue. My wife went to architecture school, and I think anyone who knows anything about architecture school knows it's the gauntlet. You don't sleep, it's very challenging. And so my wife got hooked on drinking Coke, caffeine to try to stay awake. And of course, after architecture school, long after she still was craving Coke because it had become part of her life. And so she went to a hypnotist just as an experiment, like, let's see if this will work. And the hypnotist just sort of gave her a message. You're not the type of person who drinks Coca-Cola.

56:25Evan Kimbrell:That's it. She knows that that was the message. She is conscious of that. She does not drink Coca-Cola because of it. I think that is fascinating. That is fascinating. A lot of these discoveries of the past several years are connected. You know, the explosion in psychedelics. You know, psychedelics for mental health, it's not that psychedelics heal the brain. It's not that, you know, you're fixing a miswiring or something. What you're doing, what psychedelics allow people to do is to see things from a different perspective, to feel things that they otherwise could not have felt or considered or believed before.

56:57You know, this intense feeling of love, love, and gratitude that people feel on certain substances, that's not creating the healing.

57:04Nir Eyal:It's giving them a new perspective so that they can release this old belief. So releasing the belief that I'm addicted to Coca-Cola by saying to yourself, actually, I'm not the kind of person who gets addicted to Coca-Cola. That's a new belief. It's exactly what we talked about before. Exactly. That's what inquiry-based stress reduction, that turnaround we talked about earlier. AI is taking my job. AI is not taking my job. I'm addicted to Coca-Cola. I'm not addicted to Coca-Cola. That's exactly what it's doing. And so whether it's through hypnosis or the turnarounds or inquiry-based stress reduction or hallucinogenics, it's all basically fundamentally the same process.

57:40Now, the good news is, I don't think, in some severe cases perhaps, but for the vast majority of people, for the vast majority of our problems, We can do it ourselves. There's a lot of things that we can do ourselves here that can make us a lot better off and reduce our suffering.

57:53Evan Kimbrell:This is fascinating. And I hope that people will check out the book and dive into this because this is eminently useful regardless of where you are in your life. Before we wrap up though, I wanna just dive into a sidebar because you've mentioned ADHD multiple times. And this has been fascinating to us that we have seen a theme. Eli, we've done more than 240 interviews over the past eight years. We've talked to so many different types of people. And there is a red thread that seems to run through not all, but many of the people that we've talked to because we talked to a lot of creative thinkers.

58:28Evan Kimbrell:We have observed in companies we worked for, consulted with, been involved in, that Silicon Valley seems to be full of ADHD. I did a little poking around and I saw that the U.S. National Institute of Health did a study, roughly 7 % of global population is diagnosed with ADHD. I have a conviction, I have a belief that that is underreported big time. And it's framed as a disorder, attention deficit disorder. My hunch is that it is not a disorder if that large of a cohort of the population continues to carry this gene forward. I'm curious what you've learned about ADHD personally, how you manage it, how it serves you, and how it holds you back, and what you know about it more broadly.

59:18It's a controversial topic because it's one that's full of people who hold a faith around it versus beliefs or even facts that the science is definitely not settled. There's a lot of open questions that even ADHD researchers who are steeped in the latest research will tell you there's a lot of gaps in the research. My best assessment is that it's a confluence of a few things. One, I'm not convinced it's a disorder. I'm not saying it's not real. There's definitely a spectrum of severity. When you say ADHD, it's such a loaded term because like many different disorders, it depends how severe it is.

59:52Some people have very few symptoms. Some people have very severe symptoms. But I think that it could very well be a confluence of symptoms that are maladaptive to a certain environment. I don't think that when I was six years old, that sitting in a classroom and being told to sit still all the time and listen to somebody blah, blah, blah, at the front of the classroom was really serving me. And that at six years old, as a little boy, I needed to do what little boys have done for 200 ,000 years, which is go out there and play. I see that with a lot of kids. You know, I have a 17 year old now, but I could see with a lot of kids, I don't know if it was a medicalized thing.

1:00:29It was maladaptive for what society was asking them to do. I'm not sure that what we ask of kids these days is what we've evolved to do. It's no surprised if you put people in cages all day, they're going to behave like animals. I dare you to try and sit through your kid's high school education. You will be bored to tears. It is so boring what they make kids do today in institutionalized education. So of course, you're going to get kids who can't sit still and who want to rebel because they're told what to do all day. That's part of it. I think there's another phenomenon that's going on at the same time.

1:01:02As one of the doctors I spoke with researching the book told me, he said, one day medical science will advance to a point where we're all sick. Today, you know, in the United Kingdom, there are more neurodivergent people than non-neurodivergent people. It's reached 51%. 51 % of the UK population is neurodivergent.

1:01:21Nir Eyal:Shouldn't that set up some red flags? If there's some kind of industry that's so good at diagnosing people without a check and balance, to go get a diagnosis for a lot of these things is not that hard, especially if you have some money. You know, you pay a few thousand dollars, I bet you that the reject rate, if you go in and say, I have ADHD, you're going to have ADHD. It's not that hard to get a diagnosis. And frankly, you're kind of an idiot for not getting a diagnosis. If you're a kid these days, if you're a parent of a kid, I should say, why haven't you gotten your kid a diagnosis? They get special treatment.

1:01:53They get time and a half, if not double time. They get to take their test in a special room. They get so many advantages that it's kind of silly not to go do it. And there's no check and balance. It's the Likert scale. They say, how often do you have these symptoms? Often, sometimes, never, always. Well, to me, I feel like I'm always distracted, but I've never been inside your brain. I've never been in a brain that doesn't have ADHD. So what do I compare it to? There's no blood test. There's no x-ray. So I think there's probably a confluence of, there is such thing as neurodivergence, clearly.

1:02:25We look different. We have different heights. We have different, like people are different, clearly. And so I'm positive that people's brains also operate differently. And who knows why? It's always this classic question of nature or nurture. I think when you couple the fact that we spend more time in classrooms at a younger and younger in age over valuing

1:02:47Nir Eyal:institutionalized learning, you conflate that plus the rise in testing. I mean, just the number of psychologists out there has boomed. And it's one of the only professions where more healthcare practitioners has coincided with more mental health issues, right? You would think more doctors in cancer research, more oncologists means less cancer, less death. That's not what's happened with psychiatry and psychology. It's the opposite. More psychologists, more clinicians means more mental health issues. You see where I'm going with this? There's many confluencing factors here. that's not as simple as saying that it's underdiagnosed.

1:03:24I think in many ways it's overdiagnosed, but then maybe for some people, people who don't have means, it's probably underdiagnosed. The homeless person that you see on the streets, there it's underdiagnosed. But for people who have some money and can get their kids a diagnosis, I think it's probably way overdiagnosed.

1:03:40Evan Kimbrell:We definitely see this at elite institutions like Stanford. I think now 40 % of the student population claims some sort of accommodation like this. And I'm not saying they don't have it, But the negative effect is that, like you said, it's a spectrum. And maybe the people that are far into the spectrum that have some real challenges in learning, now a lot of these special accommodations, they're too full. They can't take more people. And so I think there's kind of these knock-on effects where if you are over-diagnosing or treating a very maybe mild case of one of these conditions as the same as a very severe case, you're taking away resources from people that really, really, truly need them.

1:04:16Yeah. I think it started from a good place, right? I think what we saw was people with severe conditions, and we treated it like a disorder that required special attention. Of course, if someone's disabled, if they're in a wheelchair, we want to do everything we can that they feel included, that they don't feel like they can't access what everyone else can access. We don't want to be ableist, but we can't see things the same way because it's all subjective. It's all up here, and so there's a lot of room for interpretation and, of course, abuse. And I think you're absolutely right. This is the real tragedy that the people that these laws were meant to help are the ones that are actually being hurt because it's being overused and abused by people who a generation ago would say, OK, you're fidgety or you just haven't learned how to concentrate.

1:04:57Nir Eyal:Or you're in the wrong place because you're trying to be really good at standardized testing. And really what you should do is work with your hands at first and see, you know, maybe you master skills a different way and that's fine. But instead, you know, everybody has to go to college and everybody has to take the SAT and everybody has to get straight A's and we all have to go to elite schools. And so, of course, if some people aren't enjoying that process, I mean, that's what I learned, right? Like with what I struggle with, you know, when I'm into a topic, oh, I love it. All right. You can't tear me away.

1:05:26Nir Eyal:But if I don't like it, if I'm bored by it, if it's not interesting to me, I have to put in a lot more effort. Now, it doesn't mean it's impossible. I can still do it. But it's going to take a lot of belief work to get me to do that.

1:05:37Evan Kimbrell:The thing I struggle with is I see a lot of creative people that this is the way their brain works. And they're often told that this is, you know, it's a disorder. It's a dysfunction, that it's a disadvantage. And I see it as a superpower. hour. It's just that the world is designed for a certain type of thinker. And it's not really built for people who want to learn a lot of different things or want to be obsessed about a particular thing. And I think the message I would love for our listeners to take away from this is there's nothing wrong with you. There's not a damn thing wrong with you. It's just your brain works the way it does.

1:06:16Evan Kimbrell:And the more introspective and reflective you can be about when your brain is at its best, feels good, operates well, you feel successful, lean into more of that stuff. And that's okay. We don't all have to, as you said, follow the same path. I totally agree with you. And to have those liberating beliefs of, hey, this is my superpower. This is where I can excel. I can do things better than others can because of how my brain works. If that serves you, I think that's wonderful. It's a great example of a belief, whether or not it's true. I don't think it matters if it's factually true. It's a belief.

1:06:52It's a tool that serves you. It doesn't necessarily have to be true. And also, as long as you don't limit yourself to say, well, I shouldn't do anything that is hard, or I shouldn't do anything that I think I can't do, or I shouldn't do anything that my ADHD won't let me do, then it becomes a problem, right? Then your labels become your limits. And so, you know, as long as you can do both, as long as you can say, it makes me really great, the things I enjoy, and okay, maybe I have to acquire some new skills. Maybe it's going to be a little bit more tough for me than it might be for other people, but I can still do it.

1:07:23I can still adopt positive beliefs around that and learn from that struggle as well.

1:07:27Evan Kimbrell:Absolutely. Nir, what have you been watching, reading, listening to that has you excited, inspired, or maybe giving you a new perspective? Actually, I started reading a great book on this very topic. Funny you should mention it called The Age of Diagnosis. That's really good. It's topping the bestseller list in the UK, which is where I came across it, but not many people have read it in the US, but that's what's on my Kindle right now. And where can people learn more about you and get a hold of your new book, Beyond Belief? Thank you. Yeah. So my website is nearandfar.com. And that's spelled like my first name, N-I-R-A-N-F-A-R.com.

1:08:01If you go there, actually, we have a five-minute belief change guide that's totally free that maybe you guys can put in the show notes as well in case anybody has any trouble finding it. It's just a free tool. You don't have to buy anything. Just gets you started on finding those limiting beliefs and adopting those liberating ones.

1:08:15Evan Kimbrell:Nir, thanks so much for coming back to Design Better. My pleasure. Thanks, guys.

1:08:23Evan Kimbrell:This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.