Nir Eyal: Why Positive Thinking Isn't Working (& What Actually Does)

25:15Nir Eyal:The only thing that changed, we can't ask the rats, obviously, but we think the only thing that changed was a belief that there was some kind of flip, sorry, some kind of switch flipped in their mind that suddenly kept them swimming, that they believed something different. And so you see the metaphor here, right? We are those rats that so many of us, we have the 60 hours within us. The rats, nothing changed within them. They always had the 60 hours within them. It was there. They just kept quitting at 15 minutes because they didn't know. They didn't know why they should persist. They didn't know that salvation might come.

25:50So that's kind of

25:52Nir Eyal:the, the, the, one of the most important studies I think in the book, because it's such a great metaphor for us that we constantly quit at the 15 minute mark based on our limiting beliefs even when we have so much more inside of us so that's that's really my goal is to show people that one your brain doesn't see reality clearly and that two we can do so much more than we know based on these self-limiting beliefs so if we can free ourselves from that do you know what i talk about this in a really different study in my book which is really interesting because this This is a human RCT by Leah Crum at Stanford, who's one of my favorite scientists.

26:29And she talks a lot about perception. And she did this where she, you know, if you've done a DNA test where you've got your kind of genetics back, how they're distributed to you affects, right, what you're thinking. So if someone says you're at a high risk of the FTO gene, which is the fat gene, your belief at that point is, oh, I'm not going to metabolize food very well. I'm more likely to become fat. Oh, you haven't got the endurance gene. What does that mean? oh, I'm not going to be as good at, can't have endurance exercise. So she literally put participants on a treadmill. She got them to run.

27:01She took their blood work. And she said to one group, you have the endurance gene. You're great at running. A bit more descriptive than that, but basically top line. The other group, she said, you don't have the endurance gene, so you're not actually very good at running. The next time they went on the treadmill, their lung capacity changed. The people that are told that they didn't have the endurance gene came off a lot earlier. the other ones that did overcame their pb yeah the week before and it was the same with the food the people that were told they had the fto gene hormonally responded totally differently to the same meal a week later than the ones that were told oh you don't have the fto gene hormonally

27:37Nir Eyal:so not just physiology right it's it's it never ceases to amaze me so when i'm looking at this with clients and stuff that come to see me as a nutritionist. And for myself for years, I was like, I am telling somebody who sits off at me, this is good food, this is bad food. Do this, don't do this. This is changing the way that they're even like seeing and perceiving the food that's in front of them to hormonally and physiology respond to the belief about this food. It's, for me, it was completely eye-opening. It's remarkable. On how we see things so silo. Yeah. And, you know, I think about the productivity world, you know, and all the things that we have to do and we're never kind of keeping up.

28:23How do we change that belief from the overwhelm of what we kind of are meant to be doing? Right. And I can feel that right now in the midst of my book tour, the overwhelm of all the things that I should be doing. Right. And I think many people might feel that with the overwhelm of like family life or the overwhelm of like wanting to get that promotion or the overwhelm of trying to stay connected socially or the overwhelm of. How can we change that belief into something that's more, I don't want to say positive, because as you said, it's not always about having a positive belief, but one that's more liberating and going to actually move the needle.

28:56Nir Eyal:Yeah, man, there's so much I want to respond to because the the where you started is so, you know, the whole idea of how your beliefs can become your biology. That's the entire book that I wrote. It's mind blowing. It is like that study, that Yale study about how having a positive view of aging helps you live seven and a half years longer. Yeah. Seven and a half years. That is more than diet. That's more than exercise. That's more than smoking. I know. But, you know, we see all these campaigns and, you know, don't smoke, eat right, exercise. Nobody tells you have a positive view of aging, which is going to increase your lifespan more than any of those things.

29:31Yeah, pro-aging, not anti-aging.

29:33Nir Eyal:Right, right. Having a positive view, right? One belief, the negative, I think the negative condition was something to the effect which we hear all the time. I'm too old for this. There's my, you know, there's my senior brain. I'm having a senior moment. So basically one condition was, I think it was, aging involves inevitable decline. That was basically how they categorized those negative beliefs. Aging involves inevitable decline. Versus growth is possible at any age. Which one is true? They're both true. Well, I want to say this one. Right, right. So that's your default, right? When you forget your keys.

30:08Nir Eyal:Is it a senior moment or this always happens, right? Or it happens to everybody. Or maybe I'm just overwhelmed, right? Yeah, or variability. They're like, that's life. That's part of being human. I was thinking about other priorities. So those two groups, the difference between aging involves inevitable decline versus growth is possible at any age. It's not that that belief affects your mitochondria or your genes. There's no magic vibrations happening. It's simply that beliefs do change your biology via behavior, that it all changes what you actually do. So how likely is the person who believes growth is possible at any age to volunteer in the community or to talk to their neighbors or to work in the garden and get some extra exercise?

30:56Nir Eyal:So your beliefs really do become your biology, but it's because it changes what you do. And so I think that's so empowering by understanding, by constantly questioning. And it's the tip of the iceberg. There's a chapter in the book where I talk about this guy in the case literature called Mr. A, where Mr. A, he's anonymized because he does something that you'll see why. He decides one day he's having this terrible breakup with his girlfriend, and he decides to commit suicide. He's going to end it all. And he goes to his medicine cabinet. He opens the medicine cabinet. He sees this pill jar of antidepressants, and he swallows the entire bottle of antidepressants.

31:36Nir Eyal:And as he's swallowing the last pill, he changes his mind. He decides he does want to live after all. So he rushes to the neighbor's house, bangs on the door, says, you have to take me to the hospital. They rush him to the ER. He collapses on the floor of the ER and says, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. He gives the nurse his pill bottle. They rush him into the operating room. They're trying to figure out what he's overdosed on. and they look at the pill jar, and it doesn't say the name of the medication. It says a phone number. They call the phone number, and they determine, they look him up on the computer, and it turns out that Mr.

32:07Nir Eyal:A was in a clinical trial for these antidepressants and that he hadn't taken the antidepressants because he was in the control group. So he had taken an entire bottle of an inert substance. All his symptoms, his falling blood pressure, his slipping in and out of consciousness, his low heart rate, all these physiological symptoms, which were recorded. They saw that he was having an overdose. He had all the physiological symptoms of an overdose. When they tell him this, his blood pressure stabilizes, his heart rate goes back to normal. He walks out 15 minutes later, completely healthy, maybe a little embarrassed.

32:46Nir Eyal:And so if our beliefs about what is happening to us can do this, right? That I like to say the most dangerous words in the English language are whatever come after I am. So I am having an overdose. Turns out there are physical, you will start experiencing those physiological symptoms. So if you believe I am someone who carries the fat gene, that's going to have physiological symptoms. I am someone who struggles with ADHD. I have been diagnosed with ADHD. I know you have as well. I have as well. Yeah. You know, I used to tell myself this story that I have a chronic brain disease. And every time I would get a bit distracted, oh, you see, there's my ADHD.

33:21Nir Eyal:And And how come I have to suffer this? And other people don't. How am I going to finish on my deadline? And what if I can never focus? It's never going to go away. And I would go down this anxiety spiral that meant all my attention was focused on my ADHD and none of it was on the thing I was supposed to be doing. I was making my symptoms worse. So now I changed the belief. It's not based out of thin air. I found studies that show that about a third of people who are diagnosed with ADHD as children don't have the diagnosis as adults. that they can actually learn their way out of it based on skills that they gain.

33:54Nir Eyal:So now, whenever I get distracted, I don't say there's my chronic brain disease. There's no blood test for ADHD. There's no x-ray. It's based on subjective symptoms. It's a Likert scale. How often do you feel distracted? Never, sometimes, often. It's self-reported. So now I tell myself, I don't tell myself I have a chronic brain disease because that wasn't helpful. I tell myself this is a skill I'm learning. This is a skill I'm learning. Is it true? I'm not a doctor. This isn't medical advice. I'm telling you what worked for me. What worked for me is thinking it's a skill. So I like to say that a diagnosis or an identity is like a map.

34:35That here's you, here's the treasure.

34:37Nir Eyal:Okay, X marks the spot. And to get to where you're going, a map tells you a path. Now it could be that other people are at different places on that map. Maybe people who don't have ADHD are closer to the treasure and maybe they don't have to do as much as I do. But I'm not the map I'm not the identity So when I shed the identity of well, I'm just a fat guy That's who I am That's my personality I'm a Sagittarius This is my Myers-Briggs, this is my anagram It's so harmful We don't understand, it's very comforting It's very comforting We love to think, ah, this is the answer to all my problems Now I know what type of person I am Turns out your labels Become your limits that's so powerful and so important for people to understand like when you just said about that treasure map i have a different one where i'm at the top of a mountain i'm about to ski down a mountain right and i'm standing there and my belief that there can be one run right my belief is that i'm going to get down this one run to the end but there's also five other runs at the top of that mountain and if i go down the one to my right i might go by an apresky bar and i might have a drink there and I might meet three other people that can then help me get down the last part of that slope.

35:49Or if I go down the middle slope, there's a different outcome to a different village that I might not know about. And so I always think about that when I'm in that moment of trying to challenge a belief where I'm at, that there's not just this one run, there's not one way down the mountain. There's five other runs and they all have different paths and different endings. And I think that lens view is so important because so often we would just project you know, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who was one of my favorite guests on this show about prediction machines in our brain, you know, all she told me about how important it is that the predictions of our brain is literally what a lick is that emotion.

36:28You know, emotions are, they can change literally from what you're thinking and believing. And so thinking about the ski runs, I always think about that now. It's great. When I'm standing there, I have one small ask while you're watching this show. If you're enjoying it, please hit subscribe on whichever platform you're listening on. This really, really helps the show more than you can realize. It helps people that have never listened to the show before come across it and see all the incredible episodes that we have with the amazing guests. So if there's one small favor today, if you're not already a subscriber, please do subscribe.

37:00Nir Eyal:It actually, you asked me earlier and I didn't answer it about, well, how do we change these limiting beliefs? There's a process, there's steps. And the most effective protocol I've found is called inquiry-based stress reduction. Inquiry? Inquiry, sorry. I'm saying with an American accent. Two dyslexics here as well. Inquiry, inquiry, not easy words. Inquiry-based stress reduction, to inquire. And it's actually, I've never heard the metaphor of skiing down a mountain with multiple paths, But you'll see why it's very apt. It's a great metaphor. So the best way to explain how to do this is to tell you how I did in my own life and how I'm writing this book.

37:42Nir Eyal:The thing that changed most that I applied to my day-to-day life is how I see my relationships. And so here's how it works. Here's how I changed my life. So one belief that I've always grown up with is that my mom is very judgmental. She's very hard to please. That's just the way she is. And a few years ago, it was my mom's birthday, and I wanted to send her some flowers. The problem was I was living in Singapore, and she was in central Florida, so literally the other side of the planet. And getting flowers to the other side of the planet was not so easy. I stayed up till 1 in the morning, calling the florist, making sure they had the perfect bouquet and would deliver it to her on time so she would finally be happy and have her flowers that I knew she was going to love.

38:24Nir Eyal:And I really thought that she was going to call me the next morning and say, Nir, you're such a great son. amazing flowers thank you yeah incredible that did not happen what happened Sarah is that the next day I call her up and I say hey mom happy birthday did you get the flowers I sent you and she says yeah I got the flowers but just so you know they arrived half dead so don't order from that florist anymore to which I said after deep breath I said well that's the last time I buy you flowers. Shut down. Straight away. Yeah. And I said it. I'm not proud of it, but that's exactly what I said. And my wife, who was sitting next to me and was on this call to my mom for her birthday, she turns to me.

39:07Nir Eyal:We work together. Her name's on the book. Oh, I love it. I didn't know that. Yeah, Julie. That's my wife. And she knew all this research that I've been working on for this book. And she turned to me very lovingly. And she said, Nir, would you like to do a turnaround on this? to which I said, no, I do not want to do your mumbo jumbo hocus pocus. I want to vent, right? That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to speak our truth. We're supposed to tell people how we feel. If people hurt our feelings, we're not supposed to let them. We're supposed to tell them, don't do that. Right, exactly.

39:41Nir Eyal:We're supposed to vent. Thankfully, I knew enough about what the literature says that venting does nothing but reinforce what we believe about people, that we don't see people as they are. We see them as we believe them to be. Just like we don't see reality as it is. We see people as we are, not as they are, how we believe them to be, especially the people who are closest to us. She always does that. That's so like her. There she goes again. We say these things all the time. We're reinforcing this effigy of who they are, not how they actually are. So I took a step back. I said, fine, okay, fine.

40:16Nir Eyal:I'm not gonna vent. And I did this exercise. So this is anybody can use. This is how we do it. This is how we find our limiting beliefs, which are not so easy to find. The tricky thing about limiting beliefs. You've got to be self-aware to do this, though. Well, yeah. Not only do you have to be self-aware, you have to start from the understanding that your limiting beliefs are always hidden by design. Yeah. It's kind of like your face, right? We all have a face. But if I told you, Sarah, can you please look at your face right now? Look at your face. You have a face. Someone give me a mirror. Right, exactly.

40:45Nir Eyal:You need a mirror because you have to reflect. Yeah. You need something outside of yourself to see you. Is this your wife? It's this incubate stress reduction. That's what she was leading me towards. It was this turnaround. You married the right woman. I did. I did. I'm just saying. No, I can't agree with you more. There's another reason on why having the right partner is so important for your belief system, by the way. But we'll get to that. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. So just like our face, right? We can see everyone else's face. We can see everybody else's limiting beliefs. So, oh, yeah, I can tell you my kids, my boss, my spouse.

41:18Nir Eyal:I can tell you everybody else's limiting beliefs. My own, I can't see. It's hidden to me. And so what you have to do is you have to reflect. You have to use a process. So here's what you do. Step number one, you ask yourself where you're suffering. Okay, where in your life are you suffering? I like to call it where is the muck? The muck is where you are stuck. How do you find that, though? Oh, I don't know about you. I got tons. Where do we start? Sometimes we can tell ourselves a narrative like, oh, no, I'm fine. Or like the reason why I say that is because I'm sorry to interrupt you. The reason why I say that is because I think a lot of people will feel that that's quite a large question.

41:57And when I was modeling in my previous life many, many years ago, I had the success in the outward. So I couldn't ever say I was suffering because to me, I was like, oh, well, I've got the things that's meant to make you happy. And I'm just being very ungrateful. and therefore I cannot address that because that makes me seem very ungrateful. So I should be very happy that I have this lifestyle. Vice versa, somebody else could be having a really tough time being like, this is just life, so I have to be in that.

42:24Nir Eyal:But if I asked you, let's say in your toughest moments, or even in your not tough moments, if I asked you to yourself, let's say, or a very, very close trusted friend, your most trusted friend, and asked you like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Do you think those uncomfortable sensations, the I'm not fulfilled, I know I can, something's not right, were they there, those uncomfortable sensations? Or even now, we just talked about how you hit the list, you're doing incredible, but you also were saying, this is tough, this is hard, I hurt some suffering. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exhausted.

43:06Nir Eyal:Yeah, exhausted, right, right. Yeah, so that's what we want to look and look for right where in your life because again What we're trying to do is to separate the pain from the suffering the actual What's happening in the world, but you cannot change right lots of things will happen to you bad things happen That's life. That's life versus the interpretation of what's happening. You can't change the pain the pain is gonna happen Yeah, it's the suffering we're look for right. So where is the suffering in your life? a lot of times when I talk to people it's I'm not spending enough time with the people I love.

43:37Nir Eyal:I feel like you said it earlier around how I feel like I should be doing all these things and I'm not. I have that goal that's been my New Year's resolution for years to get in shape, to write that book, to repair a broken relationship. Where is that thing in your life that's causing you some kind of suffering? And day to day, I think we all have that. Maybe it's the minor annoyances of I get pissed off in traffic when someone cuts me off or I'm at the airport. Yeah, exactly. I'm not patient. Too reactive. Yeah, that's suffering. So you just think about one of those simple areas, right? The last time you got annoyed, for example, what was causing you the annoyance?

44:15Nir Eyal:I was in line to buy coffee and it was a long line. It could be as simple as that. Great. For me, it was what was causing me suffering was my mom is too judgmental. That was causing me. She was on the other side of the planet. She wasn't in the room. And yet it was pissing me off that she was so judgmental over this nice thing that I did. So I wrote it down. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. That was my belief. Now what we're going to do is we're going to ask ourselves four questions that come from the work by Byron Katie, which I'm a huge fan of. Yeah. And what she did, yeah, so that's actually the origin of inquiry-based stress reduction.

44:49Nir Eyal:It was kind of this technique that she developed. But then the scientific community took it seriously and turned it into inquiry-based stress reduction. And now it's been actually scientifically validated in a few studies. But to give proper credit, it's actually a 2 ,000 year old technique that actually Aristotle did something very similar. So Byron Katie took what has been done by dozens of different people, and she turned it into a very practical four-step process. And so here's what the work asks. It asks you, first write down that belief. Question number one, is it true? My mother is too judgmental, hard to please.

45:25Sarah, what a stupid question.

45:27Nir Eyal:clearly if somebody sends you flowers from halfway across the world you say yeah thank you right you don't complain so clearly that's a fact my mom was too judgmental yes yeah i agree with you yeah thank you we're good friends now excellent you're backing me up all right i appreciate it maybe question number one is a stupid question let's skip first question second question Is it absolutely true? Absolutely is the key difference. It sounds like the first question, a little bit different. Is it 100 % absolutely true? My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. What happened in that instance can only be explained because of my belief.

46:11Nir Eyal:Well, could I be 100 % sure? There might be another reason. I don't know what that reason is. But I had to admit it's not a law of physics that my mom is too judgmental and hard to please So maybe it's not a fact It's not an objective truth It's my perception So I had to admit I I couldn't be a hundred percent sure it's true And now the third question Who do I become when I hold on to that belief? When I believe that my mom is too judgmental and hard to please how do I feel? I feel impatient I feel annoyed I'm short-tempered I'm this 13-year-old version of myself that I don't really like. And now finally the fourth question.

46:51Nir Eyal:Who would I be without that belief? So if I just entertain the idea that the belief doesn't exist, it never existed, just let's pretend. I have a magic wand, poof, that belief disappears completely. How do I feel? Well, I instantly felt lighter. I felt better. I felt calmer. I felt more at ease. I felt more like me So what I determined in just four questions and what 30 seconds that the thing that I was sure was a fact My mom is too judgmental and hard to please wasn't really a fact It was just a belief that holding on to that belief left me worse off felt bad and that letting go of it made me feel better Okay, I mean just four questions.

47:35So now it's time for the turnaround the turnaround asks us

47:40Nir Eyal:Could the opposite be true? Could the opposite be true? Not to change your mind. This is where people get stuck. They say, well, are you telling me to gaslight myself? Are you telling me to lie? Are you telling me to delude myself? No, your metaphor is wonderful about skiing down that mountain. You're just collecting options. You're just collecting routes. I call it a portfolio of perspectives, just like you have a stock portfolio or maybe Pokemon cards or basically, you're just collecting different perspectives. And you do that by asking yourself, could the opposite be true? It doesn't mean you have to change your mind.

48:12Nir Eyal:You have to realize that your brain hates changing its mind. Your brain hates changing its mind. Your brain is quite lazy, actually. It's lazy, but it's also trying to protect you. Yeah. Evolution. What's that? From evolution. That's right. Your brain's primary job is not to make you happy. Your brain doesn't care if you're flourishing. Your brain doesn't care if you're meeting your full potential. Your brain cares if you stay alive. That's what your brain is trying to do. So we should thank our brains for having these limiting beliefs because we have limiting beliefs. so that the brain is making a bet that whatever you believed, whatever you did in the past, got you here and you're alive.

48:48Nir Eyal:And so if it worked for you in the past, keep doing in the future. So your brain will constantly suck you back into passivity. It will constantly tell you, keep doing that, keep thinking that because it worked for you in the past, got you here, didn't it? And so knowing that, that your brain hates changing its mind, you should anticipate this reflexive pushback. And you hear it all the time. You're going to hear this voice that says, yeah, but that can't be true because this is the way it is. This is a fact. Your brain will fight tooth and nail to keep you believing whatever it is you believed in the past.

49:20Nir Eyal:But we're going to do it anyway. Could the exact opposite be true? Not is it true, could it be true? So let's do it in my case. My belief was, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. What's the opposite? How could the opposite be true? The opposite would be, my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. Felt funny, didn't want to believe it, but let's try. How could it be true? Well, she did thank me for the flowers after all. She was just saying a statement of fact, right? The flowers weren't so nice. So maybe she was trying to help me. Maybe she just didn't want me to get scammed by this florist.

49:59Nir Eyal:Could be true. I don't have to believe it, but it could be true. Okay, now I have two beliefs. Let's try a third. The opposite of my mother's two judgments on hard to please could be I am two judgments on hard to please. Projection. How could that be true? Right? I didn't like that one at all, but how could that be true? Well, wasn't I the one who had stayed up till one in the morning rehearsing word for word the script that I had anticipated that my mom would tell me because I deserve to hear what a great son I am? And when I didn't hear those exact words, I lost it. So who was being judgmental?

50:36Nir Eyal:I was. That's a hard pill to swallow, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Here's the hardest to swallow. Let's do a fourth one. The opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please towards me, could be I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. And that was actually the most true because what had happened, this is called the misattribution of emotion. It's a wonderful concept in psychology. Misattribution of emotion is when we feel bad on the inside, so we look for something to attribute it to on the outside. It's what they said to me. Can you believe what they said? It's what's happening in the news.

51:08Nir Eyal:It's this conflict that has nothing to do with me a thousand miles away. That's why I feel crappy. That's why I'm annoyed. That person cut me off in traffic. There was a line that was too long. Somebody was rude to me. All that stuff outside. That's why I feel bad on the inside. That's exactly what I did to my mom. I had misattributed the fact that I'd spent all this time and money doing something and it didn't work out. And so I felt like an idiot. I felt like I'd done something wrong. So I was attributing it to her. Now, Sarah, I have four beliefs. I used to have one. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please.

51:40Nir Eyal:Now I have four. Which one is true? All of them? Which one is false? None of them? Who knows? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Beliefs are tools, not truths. The first belief, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am bad at Matt. There's no time. I'm overwhelmed. Go on and on and on and on and on. Right? The reason that you think is a fact why you're suffering, there was only one way out. She had to change so I could stop suffering. You don't know my mom, Sarah, but that's not going to happen. No, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. You can't change people. Exactly.

52:19Nir Eyal:You can't. And why should I depend upon it? And how many of us sit there and wait? You don't understand when you said that thing you meant to her It's it's perception. Yeah, it is we don't even see our own reality clearly as we talked about earlier How do you possibly think you can see reality through someone else's eyes? You have no clue When I accepted that and I didn't demand her to do anything But I realized one of those other beliefs I could use as a tool to stop my own suffering I Was free I was liberated Now does it mean I have to be best friends with her? No Do we have to take long walks in the park and jump and skip every day?

52:55Nir Eyal:No, none of that. It doesn't mean any of that. It just means no matter what she does, I don't have to suffer. It doesn't mean I have to be with her every day, right? I can remove myself from the situation. That's also fine. It doesn't mean I have to suffer, though. And that changed everything. Where does ego come into this? Say more. So to me, that can sound also like a bit of a deflation of the ego because a lot of that is like a protective mechanism, right? if my mom at least validates me for doing this I feel like a good son and I can think about that even in relationships and your partners right when you kind of having arguments and it's like if you could just see my side of this story and you know the biggest part of relationship breakdowns is communication right and sometimes it can be ego statuses where does ego come into this I think asking yourself that same fundamental question of why am I suffering here?

53:53Nir Eyal:What's causing me suffering? Is it my partner doesn't validate me? My partner doesn't love me? Go on and on. We could probably think of 20 reasons why I feel disrespected and I deserve to be treated differently. And asking yourself those same questions of is it true? Is it absolutely true? who am I when I hold that belief and who would I be without that belief no matter what the belief if it's causing us suffering looking for that different perspective can help us deal with that suffering I think in a much healthier way does that kind of answer your question or is that still it does I can just think that a lot of people with with strong ego because to me when I was listening to that it did I felt a weight lift as you were telling that story right even just for yourself I can kind of go wow you've all of a sudden come out of this like wall right right the protection wall with the reaction that your mom didn't kind of open you like kind of greet you with open arms right and it was like this suffering had gone but it was it felt to me like a deflation of ego that was kind of my interpretation and it's kind of like that strong wall that we can all hold which in business can get you quite far um it can also not make you lose your whole team but like that strong ego can be helpful to an extent but it can also completely barricade you inside your own inside yourself yeah yeah and you kind of build like a fortress around you with like dragons and you're like no one's getting in yeah but the moment that you kind of like release that and actually don't try to use the external changes and go towards i mean the the kind of reflection back the projection is hard for people to see it's hard for people to go well no it's not me it's that person right it's so much easier to blame and say well it's them it's not me of course and sometimes it's really hard for people to even just see that you know i think about therapy and therapy is a really interesting one when it comes to this because sometimes you're telling a story to a therapist that maybe is confirming a narrative that you want to hear right like how true is what you're saying in therapy actually true yeah is the therapist as just reconfirming your beliefs or are they challenging your beliefs?

56:09It's a great, very controversial point

56:12Nir Eyal:that a lot of people will not like you for saying. I know. Because I think therapy, and of course there's a million different flavors of therapy. It's like a religion. There's all kinds of different sects and practices. I remember when I started my neuroscience master's program, the first paper I did, the very first paper I did, was, I thought, a ridiculous question. The question was, is talk therapy better than a placebo? So talk therapy being CBT, ACT, all kinds of talk therapy. Is talk therapy better than a placebo? And I looked at this and I said, are you crazy? Of course it's better than a placebo.

56:49Nir Eyal:That's what we all do. We've all been told to go sit with somebody and talk about our problems, and we work through different methodologies. It's not better than a placebo. Wow. And I got an A on the paper. I got top scores. Turns out that what we think is happening, it's very hard to measure. Okay, the caveat, caveat, asterisk, asterisk. There's lots more here. But turns out what's really giving us that benefit is a friend. It's just someone to listen to us to help us talk about our problems. That's where we get the majority of the benefit from dog therapy. So I've been actually a bigger fan lately of something that's kind of gone out of style, which is group.

57:32Community.

57:33Nir Eyal:Yeah. Well, group therapy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Having, you know, like an Alcoholics Anonymous, it's kind of gotten a bad name because I think, you know, people think, oh, you must think I'm really messed up if I go to group therapy. And I don't think so. You know, I did. Also, what's important about that? Sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, please. You're hearing other people's perspectives. There we go. There we go. It's not, and you're being challenged. And I talk about this in the book. So there's a weight loss group in the UK that's funded by the NHS. I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan. Because I'm not a fan of the foods.

58:02I don't like point systems. I don't like being told that this is a good food and this is a bad food. And it's not nutritionally dense, which is another problem. The thing I do like is that they go in and they share their struggles every week. When they feel like they're not enough, somebody else says, I also feel that way. There we go. This is the problem, the step that I made wrong. Right. This is how I got over it.

58:24Nir Eyal:Right. You're not you're having those different slopes that are going down. So you're actually like when you feel low, someone can lift you up. And you see your own face reflected to you in someone else's experience. Absolutely. Because we all make up. Oh, that's that's fine. You got it wrong about your mom being judgmental. You haven't met my mom. My mom. Right. Like that might be. Yeah. Diet would work for you, Sarah. I mean, look at you. That's going to work for you. It's not going to work for me. I've got funny genes. I've got big bones. I've told myself, as someone who used to be obese, I know all the reasons.

58:54Nir Eyal:I came up with the food industrial complex is conspiring to keep me overweight. And it's this and it's that. It's my trauma. I live in America. Yeah, all the reasons. All the reasons. And I think what's so powerful about listening to other people is two things. One, you hear your story reflected in other people. And so you can see your limitations without having to blame yourself. because I think one thing that people can sometimes misinterpret about these limiting beliefs, they think that what I'm saying is it's your fault. It's not your fault. You didn't choose these beliefs. They were chosen for you in your childhood, your experiences, your culture.

59:30Nir Eyal:You didn't choose these beliefs. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. That is the best line. Yeah. Responsibility is the number one key thing. Because who else could it be? We're going to wait for the food companies or the government to fix it for us? Who else could possibly do it? So the idea here is, wait a minute. These beliefs were installed. This is the software I'm running. Why do I have to keep it? Why can't I upgrade those beliefs? Why can't I take those out and say, and especially the ones that keep me stuck, right? The victim mindsets and the stories and the, no, we're the innocent one.

1:00:03Nir Eyal:They're to blame. Is it serving you? It's not based on what's true. That's the thing. We look for the evidence to show us this is a fact. This is an objective truth. really the question should be, is it helpful? That's the most important question. It's not, is it true? It's whether or not it's helpful. And this is where sometimes I get some pushback and people say, well, are you just telling people to lie to themselves, to gaslight themselves, to just delude themselves? Did you ever notice, this is a coincidence, but it's an interesting coincidence, lie is in the word. Do you notice that? You can't spell belief without a lie.

1:00:36Nir Eyal:I love that. It's like you can't sell diet without dying. That was a stretch, but I'll take it. Take the tea off and you get a diet. That's why you shouldn't be on a diet. So it's a coincidence, but it's also a reminder, I think, because the thing that people don't realize when they say, okay, well, are you telling people just to pick whatever belief they want? Remember, the definition, again, of a belief is it's a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. So it's not out of thin air. It's based on evidence. But also, we're already lying to ourselves. You think you're not lying to yourself?

1:01:06Nir Eyal:We're all lying to ourselves. We just pick the wrong belief. I don't have enough time. This is overwhelming. I'm not ready for this. I'm not good at math. This is too hard. We're already lying. We just pick the wrong lie. We pick the limiting belief versus the liberating one. So it's already something worth doing. We just need to pick better. Well, talk to me about faith. Because in my book, I talk about the self-compassionate prayer. So I'm not religious. Do I? You know, I'm a scientist. I'd love to believe that there's energy and something happens I don't know but I'm a big ritual person right yeah um but the self-compassionate prayer is one of the tools I have in the book and I was very inspired by Robin Schwama who came on the show and he talks a lot about um MVP and about doing kind of a prayer in the morning and again he says I'm not also religious but this is something that helps set my mindset up for the day you talked about fact versus faith talk to me about how important it is and I don't want this obviously there is religion involved um but it doesn't always have to be religion faith I think faith we automatically connect it to a religious belief but I actually just kind of connect it just to a maybe hope or ritual is the way that I call it yeah how important is kind of faith in our lives to help our beliefs yeah so I um when I was six years old, that was the last time I prayed.

1:02:36Nir Eyal:And I remember my family was going through a really tough time. We were in America for only three years, and my parents got scammed. Some local American saw there was a family that barely spoke English, and he took them for a ride, and they lost everything. And they had to rebuild from nothing. I remember they had these terrible fights. They were on the verge of divorce. I can still kind of hear their shouting matches in my ears. And I remember I'm the youngest of three boys, and I would wake up early, and I would go outside on my driveway, and I would just look at the sky, and I would pray. And at the time, I thought I was talking to God.

1:03:07Nir Eyal:And it was very comforting, because this voice told me things were going to be okay. And as I grew up, I stopped praying, because I thought to myself, you know, if I can't prove as a fact that anyone is listening, then who am I talking to? And I stopped. I also consider myself a scientist and I want to see the evidence and I want to, you know, so I, I, I, and I didn't really grow up with any kind of strong faith tradition at home. So I just, I stopped. And then as I was writing this book, you know, it's a book about beliefs. And I kept seeing evidence about the power of faith, the power of prayer.

1:03:43Nir Eyal:And it was kind of annoying because it turns out people who pray live longer, they make more money, they have more friends, they contribute more to the community. all these good things happen to people who pray. And I was kind of jealous that, you know, well, that's nice, but I can't have that. And then I read a study that changed everything. They did a study where they had three groups of people. One group of people didn't pray, didn't do anything. That was a control group. Another group of people were people who prayed through some kind of faith tradition. So they were Christian or Jewish or Muslim, Buddhist.

1:04:15Nir Eyal:They had some kind of faith tradition and prayed. A third group were people like me who didn't have a prayer practice, and they taught them how to pray. But they said, instead of the word God, you can substitute whatever you want that's meaningful to you. Mother Nature, sum of all forces, the universe, whatever is meaningful to you, please substitute that word. And what they found was that people who prayed with faith, and people who prayed even without some kind of conviction in the supernatural, both had significantly higher pain tolerance than the people who didn't pray. So there seems to be some kind of psychologically protective effect to the practice of prayer.

1:04:56Nir Eyal:So that's what I call that prayer is possible even without faith. And the reason I think this is so important is that in America, the largest religious community today are the nuns. Not the Catholic nuns, the N-O-N-E, nun. Like, no, don't have any religious affiliation. That's the largest religious denomination today. The trouble is that people who classify themselves as spiritual but not religious Actually have higher rates of anxiety and depression disorder than people who are spiritual and religious tell me more I get all time. Well that that can't be true. And first of all look it up I mean, this is what the studies show I didn't make this up.

1:05:33Nir Eyal:This is based on the study So, you know as good as you think the studies are they seem to show that spiritual but not religious has much higher rates of mental health issues and I think part of the reason is you know they say don't remove a fence until you know why I was put there and so what we're doing and by the way this is coming from the most skeptical secular person you've ever met I have a really tough time with anything supernatural but yes because you want some evidence I want I want it to be a fact I want it to be a fact so here's what I did I went to five religious leaders this is going to sound like the setup of a joke this is exactly what I did I went to five spiritual leaders, a rabbi, a swami, a monk, an imam, and a priest walk into a bar.

1:06:18Nir Eyal:It sounds like a joke, right? I went to five religious leaders and I asked them all the same question. Can I pray even when I have doubts about God? And I thought that they would kick me out. I was kind of hesitant. I thought they would say, heretic, get out of here. What are you talking? And you know what? They didn't do that. Yeah, they welcomed you, right? They welcomed me. And in fact, I remember the rabbi, Rabbi Mordechai, he says to me, I'm sitting in his office and he's full of, you know, books and he's got this tiny space. And he tells me, he looks at me, he says, so there's this omnipotent, omniscient, eternal being.

1:06:56Nir Eyal:And you don't have any questions. He's like, you don't have any doubts. So he tells me about how in the book of Exodus, the Israelites, when they're receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, God gives them the Ten Commandments. They're Moses. And the Israelites say back, they say, which means we will do and then we will hear. And he's like, and he tells me, that's backwards. Think about that. That's backwards. Because first, you know, if I want to convince you of something, first I have to tell you, hey, here's what you should do. and then first you hear it, then you do it if you agree with me.

1:07:32Nir Eyal:But that's not what they say. They say first we will do and then we will hear. And so he says the believing part, the having the faith, isn't necessarily the requirement. And I thought that was amazing. That is amazing. That we can still pray. Like nobody has a monopoly on prayer. Why can't I pray? I can pray. I can still have those protective effects. I can still benefit. It doesn't mean I have to have perfect faith in everything that the Holy Book says I have to buy hook, line, and sinker, I don't have to have blind faith. Why would I have to have blind faith? The problem is twofold. One, people like me, previously, I would tell myself, well, if I can't believe everything, then I want nothing.

1:08:10Nir Eyal:I don't want anything to do with it. If I can't prove everything's a fact, I think that's pretty closed-minded because I was missing out on all these benefits. Secondly, the religious institutions, you know, nobody's asking the Pope if he believes everything, right? So why is it that when I step into a religious institution, I need to have also a faith test? I need to buy everything? The way that that religious leader says it is, but the religious leader down the street thinks it's a completely different interpretation? No. So I think we're really missing out. And I think the answer to this question of why do people who affiliate as spiritual and not religious, why do they have these worse mental health issues?

1:08:41Nir Eyal:Because they're not participating in the community. The father told me, the priest told me, he said, you know, people come to church and they think it's like a cosmic slot machine, that they say they pray for this, they pray for that. I want this. I want that. You know, I need, my business is not doing well. I need money. My, somebody's sick in my family. I want them to be healthy. I want love in my life. I want, I want, I want, I want. And he says what they don't realize is that by coming to church, that's where God fulfills miracles. That's where he fulfills his request. Because the person down the pew, if you're looking for love, that might be the love of your life.

1:09:17Nir Eyal:The person who's, you know, who you meet could help you with your business. That's where God makes these wishes happen. And I think for people like us, these secular communities, they don't last. The Sunday Assembly, the atheists, they don't have that bonding community. So I'm kind of on a crusade, for lack of better words, to help us say, hey, you know what? We don't have to have blind faith in everything in order to have a belief that the practice is beneficial, that participating in the community, to going somewhere where you know that people in that congregation have an obligation to take care of you and that you have an obligation to take care of others.

1:10:00Nir Eyal:That's incredibly healthy. And I think we should go back to that. I think we're losing that, right? We're losing because we're becoming more isolated than ever before. And I think that is the incredible part about faith. And I was similar, right? So I grew up with a very atheist father and a Christian mother. So I was kind of in this household where it was like, you decide. And so I had both shapes. The thing that I connected to a lot was Buddhism because I'm very into philosophy. And so I found that very interesting. And when I went to Japan, I absolutely loved Japan. And a lot of my book has a lot of Japanese philosophy in it.

1:10:35Do I still know essentially what I believe in? No, I'm kind of figuring it out as I go. But the rituals I find incredible.

1:10:43Nir Eyal:Japan is actually an amazing case study in that. Because unlike in the West, where there's a lot of people who are spiritual and not religious, the Japanese, the Shinto, are religious but not spiritual. Yes. Right? Yes. They do the rituals because it's part of their – it's what it feels like to be Japanese to them. But the spiritual, when you ask them, wait a minute, do you actually believe there's a supernatural thing that works this way? No. But they do the ritual. Exactly. This is a thing. And I think that's why I put it in the book, because I put it in the book by saying I grew up watching American films where people say grace and I couldn't connect to it.

1:11:17You know, I was very much in a similar mindset to you. But uncovering the research that you can live like four to 14 years longer with some of the research from Harvard. I was like, well, why are we doing this? Have I missed out on this massive?

1:11:30Nir Eyal:If it was a vitamin, we would all be taking it. Exactly. And I just think also, do you know what it gives you? It gives you just a moment for yourself. Mm-hmm. Yes. Even if, you know, we're thinking not about the, it just gives you a moment to connect to being a bit more mindful. We live in a very mindless world, right? We're constantly doing. And just having that moment of whatever that ritual is and whatever practice you are, whatever, you're doing something for you and you're becoming mindful. Right. And when we're more mindful, we make 90 % more logical decisions. You know, when we're mindless, we make 90 % more emotional decisions.

1:12:11Nir Eyal:Right, right. And it's different from meditation. I think meditation is great. It's got its own practice. Very different. But it's a very, very different practice. Prayer seems to be a form, done correctly, is a form of problem solving almost. Like sitting with an idea, with a thought, thinking through it. When I ask and people say, well, if I'm not praying to the supernatural, what do I pray for? And I don't pray for things. I pray for beliefs, for mindsets that help me overcome no matter what comes. So I'm not asking for things to be worked out. I'm not asking for good things to happen. I'm asking for patience.

1:12:47Nir Eyal:I'm asking for the right beliefs. I'm asking for strength to overcome whatever might happen. And that's just that daily reminder, you know, wishing for patience, reminding myself. So when I pass by a temple or a church, if the door's open, I'm going to go in. There's no requirement that I have to agree to everything. In order to step inside, there's that feeling that you get in a house of worship that I think is a beautiful first step. Or even just taking 10 minutes in the morning and focusing on that time to problem solve through what you can do about it. well sometimes what i also pray for is i i it connects me to the gratitude because we have a very big negativity bias in our brains right and we'll normally remember all the things that have gone wrong or all the things you've got to do in the day and sometimes when i just sit down i'm like you know just give me a minute like what what am i grateful for today right because that is also really important practice to help change your beliefs right right the gratitude doesn't have to be grateful for everything but it's it's really important just to try and connect to one thing that happened today that you can be grateful for.

1:13:55Nir Eyal:That's way bigger than you are. I always like to do this cosmic reflection of when I go into a house of worship and I think of what am I grateful for. The math, the probabilities of why you're here right now. Maybe it's just me, but when I reflect on that. It's a ridiculous number, right? About that the sun has to be a certain distance away from earth so that we are not frozen or all burned up and that 3.4 billion years of evolution got us here, 200 ,000 years of human history, that the sperm had to find the egg within your mother and father just so that it could happen exactly this way and that you're alive today to be here and listening to the sound of my voice.

1:14:38Like the odds, just the odds. Well, this brings me to luck. Yeah. Like some people say, well, that person was just lucky. You know, some people think that, you know, people are more lucky than others. I mean, I feel like maybe being born is luck.

1:14:54Nir Eyal:The ultimate luck, right? Yeah. But what about after that? Are people more lucky than others? Do people not have more of a luckier life? Well, regardless of, okay, there's definitely a, I think you'd have to be blind to say that there isn't a distribution of good fortune, right? If you're lucky enough to be listening to this podcast on your smartphone, you won the cosmic lottery. You won the human lottery because there are billions of people who are in poverty today, living hand to mouth. So, yes, there is definitely a distribution of where people fall out. What's interesting, though, is that we can also make our own luck.

1:15:33Nir Eyal:And I like to say luck isn't chance. It does look like Warren Buffett. Is it? Does he say that too? I didn't know that. What does he say? I can't remember the line. Let me find it. And the reason I say that, that you can actually make your own luck, is that they did this experiment that I love where they took two groups of people. One group of people were people who identified as lucky. It wasn't a fact. They didn't follow them around to see if they were lucky. They just asked you, do you think you're a lucky person or an unlucky person? People who said, I think I'm a lucky person. Versus another group, people who said, I am an unlucky person.

1:16:07Nir Eyal:Self-identified. Totally a belief. Then they asked them to do a very simple task. The task was they give them a newspaper same newspaper both groups and they said we want you to look through this newspaper and just count How many pictures you see in the newspaper? How many images do you see? Okay? The unlucky group to do this task took on average two and a half minutes The lucky group took just 11 seconds. Why the difference huge difference massive difference massive difference on page two of this newspaper one of the images said in big bold letters, there are 43 images in this newspaper. Collect your reward.

1:16:46Nir Eyal:The people who believed they were lucky opened the newspaper on page two, saw the image, read what it said, got up from the chair, collected their prize, and were out the door in 11 seconds. The people who believed they were unlucky sat there and counted one, two, three, four, five for two and a half minutes. Now what's fascinating, they counted correctly. We know they saw that picture because they counted 43 images But remember those 11 million bits of information? That information of what was in that image never crossed through their conscious attention It never made it through those 50 bits of information of conscious awareness So even though they saw it, it never processed Their brains saw that information, but it never crossed the conscious awareness So this is how we make our own luck because something about their beliefs oh, stuff like that never happens to me.

1:17:35Nir Eyal:It can't be that easy, right? When we think that about ourselves, I'm an unlucky person, we literally see reality differently. They didn't see the opportunity that was right under their nose. So you would say then that an optimist is way more lucky than a pessimist? We know that entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, way more optimists than pessimists, right? We call this entrepreneurial alertness, that entrepreneurs have this quality where they can see things, literally see things that other people can't see. You know, we know that people who are on a diet see food as larger, that people who are afraid of heights see distances as further, that your brain warps its perception of reality, just like that checkerboard illusion or the coffer illusion.

1:18:18Nir Eyal:Your brain will warp what it thinks is reality based on what you believe. And so that's why some people, you know, some entrepreneurs see dollar bills all over the floor. They just see opportunity everywhere and the rest of us see nothing because of their beliefs. How do you become less pessimistic then? I think you constantly remind yourself of those four questions. I think inquiry-based stress reduction is the way to go, is reminding yourself that you don't see reality clearly, asking yourself if this belief, if your source of suffering is causing you, is true. And then the more you do it, the more you find that your world expands.

1:18:56Nir Eyal:So, for example, I started with my mom. That was one of the most tangible breakthroughs, that the bad feelings I constantly had around her. You know, who wants to be around a person who's judgmental and hard to please? What did that do to my motivation level to work on that relationship? It went way down, even as my suffering went up. Conditional love, right? Say more? So conditional love is when you become loved by what you achieve or how you're perceived, right? So if you're growing up in a household, you get love when you get a good grade or when you do something good. but nothing else you get this like condition so every time somebody says this is amazing i'm so glad that you did this for me or well done on this achievement it's it's a constant kind of perpetual of conditional love so you kind of learn that unless i get you know love from what i've done yeah your kind of self-esteem plummets otherwise yes and you're a grown-up yeah you don't have to believe that anymore exactly that's a limiting belief right that my suffering is determined based on what my parents do or did.

1:20:02Nir Eyal:This is my big beef with trauma and how the body keeps the score. Oh boy, this is a whole other can of worms that we can open up here. That today, trauma used to mean something very different. Trauma used to mean shell shock from war. PTSD was something that you experienced when you had been to battle. And then it kind of went into everyday life. And now somebody says something that I didn't like. that was trauma, that my parents set high expectations for me, somebody yelled at me, somebody did something bad to me, and it's become trauma, trauma, trauma. And it turns out that that's problematic because we can't change the past.

1:20:46Nir Eyal:And even the past we think we remember turns out isn't true. That we think human memory is like a video camera, that we record every detail. And that is so not true. The studies find that we are constantly reconstructing our past, that every time you have a memory, you're changing it a little bit. Elizabeth Loftus did this amazing work where she found that she could implant all kinds of memories into people. For example, telling people that they had been on a hot air balloon ride that they hadn't gone on. And not only would they remember the hot air balloon ride, they would tell you about the shirt they wore and the wind blowing through their hair and all these details.

1:21:26Nir Eyal:I remember when I was writing this book, I have a good friend who I meet for coffee every once in a while. And we sat down together and I told him what I was working on and this stuff about memory. And he says, I have to tell you something. My whole life, I've had so much trouble with my relationships with women because they tell me that I'm not emotionally available enough. because you see a problem I've always had since I was eight years old is that I can't cry. I have not cried since I was eight years old. And I said, why? What happened at eight years old? And he says, you know, when I was eight years old, my cousin died.

1:22:03Nir Eyal:I had a young cousin, a child cousin, and I went to his funeral and I saw everybody so grief stricken that I decided from that day forth, I was never going to cry again until I told my sister what I was struggling with. I told her about how this was affecting my relationships, and it's all because of this funeral that I went to when I was eight years old. And my older sister looked at me and said, you never went to that funeral. I was at that funeral. You were home with the babysitter. He had conflated this thing that had never happened, and it had caused him suffering for decades. Now, does that mean that every trauma, everything that happened to you didn't happen?

1:22:42Nir Eyal:No, that's not what I'm saying at all. But what I'm pretty sure about, it didn't happen the way you think it happened. Because every time we rerun that tape, we're changing it a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And so what actually happened many times can be completely different than what actually occurred. And even if, I'll grant you, even if it happened exactly the way you remember, and I've seen some pretty traumatic stuff. I went to a retreat where Byron Katie was working with people who have gone through stuff that you cannot imagine, the worst of the worst. and using that exact same process, is it true what's causing me suffering?

1:23:17Nir Eyal:Is it absolutely true? How do I feel when I hold on to it? And who would I be without that belief? What you realize is that the same exact event, no matter how horrific, one person can take that event and say, you see, my father was an alcoholic and he beat me. And that's why I'm downtrodden. That's why I struggle so much. Another person can take the exact same type of event. My father was an alcoholic and beat me. And you see, that's why I'm successful. I had to prove him wrong. So it's our interpretation. It's our beliefs of whether it serves us to keep thinking that what happened to us back then is why we are struggling today, why we are suffering, or is it post-traumatic growth?

1:23:58Nir Eyal:You know, there's two kinds. It's post-traumatic stress as well as post-traumatic growth. And it's all about the interpretation of that story. And I think that's, I'm not talking about the very severe cases. That's not what we're talking about. But the popularization and most important, what I'm really talking about is the self-diagnoses that we see online, where people saying, oh, this is all happening because of what's happened to me in the past. Is that really serving you? Not sure. How helpful do you think Instagram is with relationships? Because I've got to the point where I feel like I need to unfollow anyone who talks about relationships online.

1:24:33Because one of my friends said the other day, you know, she came to me, she talked about her relationship and she was just like it's driving me mad every time i look online i'm being told a different belief system about what's right in a relationship what's wrong in a relationship the green flags the yellow flags the red flags there's this constant overstream right of all the things on what a perfect relationship looks like or i don't know i'm sure anyone listening to this will will maybe connect to it like the the five things to know you with the right partner and you just kind of get this belief system in your brain that's being fed to you externally that challenges maybe what your gut is actually trying to tell you.

1:25:14Nir Eyal:Super interesting you know this is not something I talk about much but my it's been I've been married for 25 years in September. Congratulations. Thank you and we've known each other since I was 19 so even longer than that and And it's been a while since I've heard. I will tell you, one of the most, one of the things I, well before I started this research on beliefs, I remember with my wife, I hope I'm not offending her saying this, but I did not fall in love with her immediately. Actually, I didn't think she was so wildly attractive. I mean, I know you're not supposed to say that, right? You're supposed to say, oh, the first time I saw her, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

1:25:58No, she wasn't.

1:26:00Nir Eyal:But the longer we spent together, now I think she's the most beautiful person in the world. Now when I see her, like I'm getting goosebumps even talking about her because I literally see her differently. Like she physically, I don't know if, I'm sure this has happened to you. You see somebody and you're like, wow, that person is gorgeous. Like that is an incredibly sexy person. And then they open their mouth. Have you noticed this? Oh yeah. And they physically become ugly. Yeah, 100, yeah. that? Right? It's like the opposite of beer goggles. Yes, literally. Right? Why? It's because of our beliefs, because of how our beliefs shape how we see the world.

1:26:38Nir Eyal:And so I think there's some kind of secret there. There's some kind of magic that happens that when you build that trust with somebody, when you go the years together and you're able to solve problems. Like somebody asked me about my relationship recently and they're like, how do you fight with your wife? How do you get through stuff? How do you fight? I say, what do you mean by fight? Like, what do you mean? Like, you know, when you, I don't know what that means. Like, my love language is changing my mind. Right? We get so defensive when someone disagrees with us. That's a belief. It's a belief.

1:27:14Nir Eyal:And by the way, you can see this in different cultures. I know it's a belief because it's not a universal human trait. That in some cultures, disagreeing is what is great. It's honored. In fact, in my family, that was the case. When we had family dinners, you were expected to come with an opinion to defend so we could argue about it. And in other cultures, no, no, no, no. When you disagree with somebody, that's very disrespectful. So it's just a belief set. So I love it when if someone I trust and I believe is a smart person that I admire comes to me with a different opinion, that's not to fight?

1:27:50Nir Eyal:That's an opportunity, right? I want to see things a little different. I want to see how I'm seeing reality incorrectly because I have the intellectual humility to know that I don't see reality clearly. None of us see reality clearly. And so if somebody else that I trust sees things a little differently, well, that's an opportunity for me to get a better sense of how the real world is. So it's something that I, you know, we welcome that opportunity. It's never adversarial. It's it's something that's an opportunity. So how do you get to that part in conflict then? So you're both kind of coming in from very different sides.

1:28:23How do you get to the part where you agree to disagree or overlap and can see one another's point of view? How do you, how does one ego not become more inflated than the other or trying to prove yourself right? Cause that's a big part.

1:28:36Nir Eyal:I think that's, that's absolutely a big part because once a disagreement goes into this land of trying to prove someone right, we shut down. Yeah. Right? We foreclose on that conversation. Yeah. This is the way I am. You know, we talked about how labels are so dangerous. And once it stops becoming a discussion to find a better way, and yeah, a solution, and it becomes defending positions. So one of the best things you can do, you know, this is kind of my line on geopolitics, on why I don't talk politics. Because if you can't in... If you can't steel man the other side's argument, if you can't present in good faith exactly what the other side would think in a way that would convince someone on your side, shut up.

1:29:26Nir Eyal:You do not deserve to have an opinion publicly. I mean, of course, you can't. I'm not saying, you know, do anything legally. You can say whatever you want. It's a free country, thankfully. But if you can't represent the other side in a way that they would say, yeah, that's exactly what I believe, you should not be spouting your opinion on social media about some geopolitical conflict you don't know jack about. because you can't represent both sides. And the same could be said about our arguments interpersonally. So one of the best things that I've done with my wife in terms of solving this, and we don't always agree.

1:29:52Nir Eyal:We definitely have different perspectives. But it's never adversarial because one of the first things we do is, OK, let me understand this correctly. Is this what you're saying, such and such and such? And until she says, yep, that's exactly what I'm saying, we've got to keep doing that. Unless I can actually say, is that what you're saying? And she says, yes, that's right. because most of it is just that we are talking past each other, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That we assume based on our beliefs. Well, when you said that you tried to hurt my feelings and you're trying to – no, no, no. Almost never – it happens sometimes.

1:30:22Nir Eyal:But if you've gotten to the point where you're trying to hurt each other's feelings, that's already – And you shouldn't be together. It's already in a bad place. What? 99 times out of 100, it's a misunderstanding, right? I remember one time I was looking for a coffee mug or something. And my wife said something like, all the dishes are in the sink. And I heard that as, you haven't washed the dishes in the sink. When she was just saying a statement of fact, all the dishes are in the sink. But you can see how that little statement, right? It was my responsibility after dinner to wash the dishes or something.

1:30:58Nir Eyal:And I took it as, oh, you meant this. But it was because I was coloring reality based on my beliefs. Right. When if I just took a step back and asked myself, even without asking her, just asking myself, she didn't have to do anything. I was causing myself suffering because I had inserted a belief I hadn't done the dishes. And if I hadn't done the dishes, I was doing something wrong, that she was judging me. But really, I was judging that whole situation. I was causing my own suffering. How did I know what she was saying or what the intent behind it? I knew the words, right? We both heard the same exact words.

1:31:28Nir Eyal:But that's not the complete information set. There's so much more to that. And I had projected onto it that she was trying to hurt me, that she was trying to say something. And so one of the, I think, secrets to a long-lasting relationship and one of these liberating beliefs that I now tell myself all the time is an answer to this question. So the question is, how do you measure love? When someone says, I love you so much, what's the so much? What does that mean, I love you so much? Why do you love one person more than the other, like a close family member? Why do you love them more than you love somebody else?

1:32:02And my answer to that is that love is measured by the benefit of the doubt.

1:32:08Nir Eyal:Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. What do I mean by that? I remember the day my daughter was born. She's 17 now. But I remember the day she was born, I was the first to get to wash her. I gave her her very first bath. And they gave me my daughter, and she was exactly as big, from my elbow to my fingertips. That's exactly how big she was. I'll never forget it. I'm going to cry here. I remember the first time I washed her, and I looked at her.

1:32:33Nir Eyal:And I remember thinking that she could do no wrong. Like, I loved her so much. This human that wasn't in my life the day before, and now she's here. And I remember just my heart feeling, I just, I loved her more than anything. There was nothing that she could do that would possibly upset me in any way. You know, if she cried, or if she pooped, or she needed something, I just, all the benefit of the doubt. You know, when a baby cries, it's insane to say a baby's crying to hurt my feelings, right? Of course, a baby's crying because it's the best they can do. That's all they have. It's the only tool they have is to cry because they need something.

1:33:10Nir Eyal:They can't ask you, oh, please, I'd like some milk now. That's all they've got. And so I gave her all this benefit of the doubt. And you know what, Sarah? We're all big babies. We're all big babies. We all just grow up, and we all are doing the best we can. So my mom, for example, just like I wouldn't expect my baby daughter to do anything but cry. It's the only tool she had. My mom acts the way she acts because it's the only tool she has. It's like me asking her to speak Latin. She doesn't speak Latin. Why would I expect her to act the way I want her to act? She's not trying to hurt me. That's the best tool she has.

1:33:45Nir Eyal:Even when she is trying to hurt me, that's the best tool she has. And so having that liberating belief, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. we're all operating with the tools we have that's a liberating belief so i'll tell you something it's not in the book uh is what happened after i wrote this chapter you know i had to tell her i couldn't i couldn't i couldn't publish the book yeah question like so here's what happened relationship with your mom like now so here's here's what happened so i sent her the chapter because i had to get her approval before i could put it in the book you know i didn't want millions people to read it before she did so i uh i sent her the chapter and she read it and i honestly believe that she was going to call me and say, wow, you know, you really were very introspective.

1:34:24Nir Eyal:You took responsibility for your feelings. Of course, that's not what she said. What she said was, I told you those flowers were garbage.

1:34:34Nir Eyal:So can I tell you, okay, can I be honest with you and tell you it didn't hurt? Yeah. Of course I felt pain from it. Yeah. My initial gut reaction. Yeah. I felt pain. Yeah. But it didn't become suffering. It didn't become suffering. You know why? Because now instead of saying, there she goes again. She's so judgmental. She's doing it again, she's always like this. Why does she do this to me? Why is she trying to hurt me? I had a new liberating belief. The new liberating belief was we're all working with the tools we have. This is the best she knows how. We're all operating with the tools we have.

1:35:03You basically have a compassion.

1:35:05Nir Eyal:That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Because beliefs are tools, not truths. The belief of giving compassion, the belief of we're all operating with tools we have, the belief of love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean to hurt me when you said that. I was doing that to myself. That was my own cage that I was living in, in my own prison. And that liberated me. I'm out of my cage now. I don't have to suffer when I hear that anymore. Still feel pain, but it's not suffering. I mean, I connect to that so much because everything that I think that, I relate to everything that you say about the belief system and the kind of, my writing in this book is the next step on the compassion, right?

1:35:47Getting compassion to yourself and compassion to others to like actually move forward and change those because if you can't if you can't extend the compassion out and you can't extend the compassion inwards you get stuck yeah right and compassion just helps you kind of go right yeah this is where i am and that's why i hate positive thinking because if someone tells me to think positively when i'm pissed off yeah like i'm like well i would if i could that's right like of course i would yeah but also we have 180 emotions we're meant to experience them them all it doesn't and we have to drown ourselves in them, right?

1:36:16Nir Eyal:Yeah, my favorite is when someone tells you to calm down. That is the perfect British analogy. Has that ever worked? Keep calm and carry on. Has that ever worked ever, ever, ever when you said to somebody, calm down? Oh, oh, oh, oh, I never thought of that. Thanks. Didn't think of that. I appreciate that. Calm down, what a concept. I know, it's really annoying, isn't it? Yeah, it is, it is. And I think that's the same thing as like, well, just manifest. Well, like just positive vibes only, bro. like what do you say when you see that online like what do you say when I mean I was in a podcast the other day about my book and somebody kind of interpreted it my work as manifestation which had never been in the but actually I go again I kind of say you know you can't just sit there and and fall in self-pity and kind of go this is all going to happen to me I you know obviously believe and like looking forward and visualizing to things that you know you want if you can't ever see where you're going to go then you're never going to get there you got to have some type of visual to the direction you're heading in, right?

1:37:12Otherwise, it's just like you're kind of just sitting there not knowing where you're going. Exactly.

1:37:17Nir Eyal:Right, right. But then you have to do the work. That's right. And most important, I think there's a step even before doing the work, is what am I going to do psychologically when it's painful? Well, this is why you have to set yourself up for the worst-case scenarios and not always the best-case scenarios, right? That's where I have the willpower argument, which is when someone said to me on the panel yesterday, it's all about willpower. and I said, the problem with willpower is you create willpower without any friction. And friction is part of every single day life. And so when you're looking at setting yourself up for the best case scenario, of course you're going to have quote unquote strong willpower.

1:37:50But your day isn't the best case scenario. You should be setting yourself up for the worst scenarios. And on the worst scenarios, if you can keep that behavior going, on the best days you'll be flying.

1:38:00Nir Eyal:That's right. But we never think about the worst case scenarios. So true. And for me, what really helped was those little things. Like for example, you know, the other day I was at home and I dropped, I dropped a glass. And before that would have really pissed me off. Right, like, dropped this glass, god, why do I always do this? I'm so clumsy, why does this happen? Now I'm late to a meeting. And now, it sounds funny, but it's really helpful. I said, I get to practice patience. I get to practice patience, right? Like, that's an opportunity for me to, it's pointless, it's meaningless, it's a$2 glass, who cares?

1:38:37Nir Eyal:I get to practice patience. And that's driven by belief, right? So this is what it feels like to get better. On my weight loss journey, when I could switch from, you know, we talk a lot about, I'm not sure if you ever experienced this, but a lot of people who struggle with their weight, we feel this food shatter. Food noise. Food noise. And that's what they say that GLP-1s help fix is the food noise. Yeah. I think a big part of that is because we think food noise is bad. I still feel food noise all day. I want to eat everything. Yeah, I of course But it's not bad. It's the belief that it's bad.

1:39:16Nir Eyal:That's the problem. It's not the pain It's the suffering is the problem. It's the interpretation that food noise is bad. What's wrong with food noise? This is an opportunity just like when I drop the glass. It's an opportunity for me to practice patience. Hey It's an opportunity I get to practice this new new belief that this is what it feels like to get better part of getting better is saying, yep, I hear you, brain. I know you want to eat. I got it. That's my evolutionary background. Cool. And this is what it feels like to get better. Because when you practice that, there are those moments when I don't feel food noise, right?

1:39:47Nir Eyal:I don't feel it 24 hours a day. It just comes when I'm stressed, when I'm lonely, when I'm bored. Yeah, when I'm exhausted, when I'm ashamed. Like, that's when I feel the food noise. So knowing, hey, you know what? I just went through that stressful situation and I didn't feel food noise. Okay, this is what it feels like to get better. So you're almost like keeping track. One of the things that the brain tricks us into thinking is that we only remember the worst moments. We give a speech, we give a talk in front of our board members or whatever in front of our boss, and we remember where we mess up.

1:40:19Nir Eyal:We don't remember the entire talk where we did a great job because we have that negativity bias of all the bad parts. And it's the same with food noise or any kind of painful sensation. It's keeping track of, wait a minute, Is it always true? Is that always the case that I always have bad willpower, that I'm never able to do that? Or is it just that, hey, this is something I'm struggling with, this skill I'm improving, and that this is part of the process? Do you think perfectionists struggle with this more? I don't believe in perfectionism. Tell me more. It's a limiting belief. I don't believe in imposter syndrome.

1:40:51Nir Eyal:Imposter syndrome I hate even more because it sounds real. It sounds like, oh, doctor, you know, I have imposter syndrome and gonorrhea. You know, like it's like it sounds like it's a thing. It's not a thing. There's no, it's not in the DSM. It's not in any kind of medical journal. There's no imposter syndrome. It's perfectionism and imposter syndrome is what people like me, and I'm guessing people like you, tell ourselves in order to justify not doing stuff. Oh, you know what? I'd really love to. I really would love to give that presentation. But you see, I'm a perfectionist, and I'm not going to have the time to do it to my standards.

1:41:28Nir Eyal:right or you see i have imposter syndrome so that's why i'm no good at making those sales calls or i'm i don't i don't want to go out and put my neck out for that leadership position because you know i have imposter syndrome it i'm not it's a story it's a belief so you don't think some people are more specific like type a's you don't believe in them either kind of people that are like very diligent in how they do their work and how they see themselves and all of those things and are high achievers, I guess. Well, high achievers, I mean, that's an outcome. That's already happened. Type A, it's not a thing either.

1:42:02Nir Eyal:There's no type A in the psychology literature. Even, you know, the big five personality traits, ocean, you know, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, even that we're now challenging as something that is way less stable than we thought. We used to think that your personality is your personality. Nuh-uh, not true. And in fact, nobody who actually studies personality traits will tell you that anymore, that our personality traits fluctuate. Why do they fluctuate? Based on our beliefs. Based on our beliefs. That if you believe, for example, that people are not trustworthy, you're going to be more neurotic.

1:42:34Nir Eyal:Of course you will be. Yeah. Right? Personality is downstream of our beliefs. So this is called identity foreclosure. When we believe I am this kind of person, that's it. We're done. End of story. And everything we will do will justify. It's basically what we talked about earlier, the lucky and the unlucky person saw reality differently. If you believe that is who you are, I am a perfectionist. You're going to see every piece of evidence to make that true because you're looking for it. You're constructing it basically. That's right. Based on your beliefs. Wow. So what should we be saying to ourselves if we're, well, I guess a lot of people go, oh, I'm lazy.

1:43:13Or I just don't have the motivation that you have. or I give myself too much motivation and I burn out. You know, there's all these different types of labels, which we kind of mentioned earlier that you don't like labels. But, I mean, that is how people identify themselves. So, like, what should one be saying to each other or to themselves instead of saying, I am X?

1:43:34Nir Eyal:Yeah. I think the most helpful step, the best protocol, is not to adopt someone else's liberating belief, but to construct your own. because then it becomes more meaningful. So for me, I showed you how meaningful it was when I came up with love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. That to me really resonated. Or we're all operating from the tools we have. Like coming up with your own belief set. Now, what's magical about this is that you don't have to stick with a belief after you try it on. It's almost like when you go to get a new pair of shoes. You've done enough of the work to recognize that your shoes are smelly and you have a hole in it and they need to be replaced.

1:44:16Nir Eyal:Okay, so you've recognized you have a limiting belief. You go to the shoe store. You don't look at the shoe store window and say, oh, just give me that pair. I like the way that one looks. That's like adopting someone else's liberating belief. Rather, you look at it and you say, you know what? Let me try that on a size smaller, a size bigger. I want to walk around the store with it. I want to see if this shoe feels good. Does it serve me? Is it a good shoe? Same with beliefs. So you're looking first for the suffering. So we know that the status quo isn't working. that does calling yourself a perfectionist or saying you have imposter syndrome or saying you have a chronic brain condition like I have with ADHD, is that actually serving me?

1:44:54Nir Eyal:Maybe if I looked at a different perspective. Let me try it on. Let me try on, as opposed to saying I have a chronic brain disease because I have ADHD. Let me try on I'm learning a new skill. Let me try it on. Let me try it for a week. How do I feel? How do I perform? I instantly saw that things change. I was more motivated. So what's the definition of a limiting versus a liberating belief. A limiting belief is a belief that decreases your motivation and increases your suffering. So if you have a belief, if you have a, it's something that you are sure is a fact. Test that by asking yourself, what does it do to your motivation level?

1:45:30Nir Eyal:When I believed that my ADHD was a chronic brain disease. Yeah, of course. It's totally demotivated. How motivated am I? See, I just think of it as a superpower. Right. Like I genuinely do. That's a great example of you're saying, well, how do we adopt this new belief? Yeah. I've written three bestsellers with ADHD. So it's not that I have this chronic brain disease that caused me to get distracted. You know when I get distracted? When I'm working on stuff I don't like to work on. Yeah. So basically it just filters out the stuff that you shouldn't be doing. And you know what? Yeah. Everybody experiences that.

1:46:01Nir Eyal:That's universal. Whether you have ADHD or not, when it's something boring, I don't want to work on it. I get crazy distracted. Yeah. But when it's something I'm really into, so the superpower that comes with ADHD. Hyperfocus. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. which is also a story, which is also a belief, but that's a belief that really serves me. Yeah. Right? So I'm going to keep it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's one of the most important things, right? The superpower analogy I think is so goddamn important because I think, you know, we can always get stuck in the thing. And I think it's important to have awareness on, like, these are the things, for instance, I got a train home yesterday.

1:46:34I was exhausted. I got on the wrong train. I was going on a train to Plymouth. I was actually going back to London. And then I was like, I've got on the wrong train. I'm going the wrong way I know that when I can be very easily distracted because I'm trying to do everything else but I think it's just important to have the awareness because then you can take the responsibility on it so now I checked myself before and I'm like just make sure you check that train because when you're tired your brain just quickly shuts off to something else that doesn't really care where the train's going so I think there's that importance right of having the awareness but you said the most important word of all of it which is responsibility because when somebody blames their behaviors just on their ADHD that's not taking responsibility right it's kind of like you know okay well you know yeah okay we normally have we might be late well I need to make sure that I'm not late because if I know that that's a tendency that I can have I've got to work extra hard whereas like to make sure I'm not totally so like we talked about earlier of uh aging

1:47:28Nir Eyal:involves inevitable decline so having ADHD is causing me all this heartache and there's nothing I can do about it versus growth is possible at any age I'm learning yeah so I missed the train hey I'm learning growth is possible at any age. Yeah, like what does that do to your motivation level and you're suffering? So one thing oh we've adopted in my family Which is not true, but is a great tool is whenever something nice happens We say it sounds silly. I'm kind of embarrassed to share it, but this is what we do we say everything good happens to us Right, so it's not we're not pulling out. We're not we're not faking it Okay, when something even if it's something minor, you know, we get to the airport and there's no line and you know Security is fast Yeah, right everything happens to us or you know some something simple happens I don't know something like some simple pleasure in life.

1:48:16Nir Eyal:We're noticing those moments more right? Is it true that everything good happens to us? Of course, it's not bad things happen in everybody's life But marking those moments makes you actually see more of them because now you're aware of them You're looking for them in your life. So everything good happens to us And you know what? Even if it doesn't actually change reality, you can't change facts. Facts are facts. But you can definitely change your perception of those facts. So the same exact things can happen to you. I missed my train, right? I got on this train versus that train. Okay. Like, what's the opportunity here?

1:48:45Nir Eyal:How do I choose to see this? What's the learning? I'm growing. And growth is possible at any age. I'm going to get better at that next time. Yeah, 100%. I just need to make sure I read the train board properly next time when I'm tired. Yeah. I mean, that's the only kind. And I call my best friend, so it's great. I got to talk to her on the phone for like 20 minutes. Amazing. Which was a massive, great outcome. So I have to leave it. What was the kind of biggest belief that's changed your mind recently? Hmm. The biggest belief that's changed my mind recently. I mean, the one that's had the most impact is the one with relationships.

1:49:20Nir Eyal:Because it kind of radiated from when I changed the relationship with my mom. It also really changed my relationship with my daughter. So my daughter's a teenager and she's 17 now, but when I was writing the book, she was a few years younger. And we kind of had more of a rocky relationship. It wasn't as good as it is now. And I think a big reason why that changed was because when I figured out that I was causing the suffering in this relationship with my mom, I also realized that I was causing suffering in the relationship with my daughter, that I was doing to her what my mom was doing to me, that I was making my daughter feel judged.

1:50:04Nir Eyal:And when I realized that and I started to stop it, I started to repeat these limiting beliefs. I'm sorry, I started to repeat these liberating beliefs in my own life of we're all operating with the tools we have. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. But our relationship completely changed. Like, we are really good friends now. I mean, there is nothing better for a father than a teenage daughter that wants to spend time with him. I mean, there's, like, that's the best. Because there's all these stereotypes about teens. You know, they're rebellious. They're this or that. Like, it's been amazing.

1:50:41Nir Eyal:Like, she's my friend. Like, I like to spend time with her. Like, we have time dedicated to hang out. And if I have an appointment or I have to move to the time, she wants the time. Like, she asks me to spend that time together. And that's been amazing. I think that would not have happened before I learned about this research and before I started practicing this in my life. So that's been the biggest change. I mean, I think it's so powerful. I think, you know, reading your book, I felt so aligned, so aligned reading your book. And I do think that it makes me sad but optimistic that this is now kind of coming out, like the importance of our mindset.

1:51:19and you know you said something either it was on air or off air like how we're going to look at psychiatry in the next 20 years we're going to i think we're going to really change how we're treating people um because i even think about the beliefs that we interpret but also even how our health care providers kind of give us diagnosis and how they treat us and all of those things i think beliefs is one of the most first steps most important constructs of any part of our life whether it's health relationships happiness happiness is fleeting but you know our whole entire lifestyle starts from how we see ourselves and how we speak to ourselves it's like the number one rule so true and for me in in writing my book healthy shouldn't be this hard i was kind of angry in a pot in a point because i was like why have i been learning all of this work around nutrition and health and lifestyle for so long and no one is talking about this yeah no one is putting this like front and center in how we relay information and how we see ourselves because once we do gosh it takes a bit of friction away yeah it makes such a difference yeah and it's so interesting that we both start our books with food but from two totally different belief systems and we both came to the same outcome and i find like that so fascinating that actually you can think you're doing everything right but it's the mindset is like the most integral part to start that journey.

1:52:42Nir Eyal:And we kind of take it for granted. We just think that the way things are the way things are that like and especially if it's someone with authority. You know I remember my oldest brother I have one brother who's 10 years older and he came out as gay back in the 80s. My brother's gay. Oh really? Are we like parallel? What number are you? Three. I'm a third you're the third of three? Me too. This is freakish. Wow. That's crazy and your oldest sibling is the gay one? Yeah. This is weird. How old are you? 36. Okay so I've got a few years on you but anyway so when my. This is weird. It is kind of weird.

1:53:19Nir Eyal:That is kind of weird. Yeah. We based on very similar values. Yeah interesting. Huh. So anyway so when my brother came out in the 80s the first thing my parents did was take him to a psychologist because back then being gay was in the DSM. It was a disorder. And now that's changed. And so we're constantly revising these things. And I think, you know, there's a big part of the book around pain, about how the medical establishment has now completely 180'd on pain. You know, it used to be in the States, I don't know, in the UK. But there was a while where you went to the doctor, and they would take your blood pressure, your heart rate, your temperature, and one of your vital signs was pain.

1:54:02Nir Eyal:They would constantly ask you how much pain are you in pain pain pain and what this did exactly and this actually fueled the opioid epidemic because we constantly told people you you shouldn't be in pain you shouldn't be in pain you shouldn't be in pain no that's not true that in fact the brain for 200 ,000 years the human species two million years of you know when we were back in primates but 200 ,000 years of human of homo sapiens the brain has an amazing ability to tune out pain radio yeah exactly that the more we focus on it based on our beliefs, it's called the fear, pain, fear loop. That chronic pain is caused by, and it's not, so that's neuroplastic pain, which is different from physiological pain.

1:54:42Nir Eyal:So neurological, or this chronic pain is defined as pain that's been around for more than six months that has no known cause. And millions of people suffer through it. And it's caused, we think now, because of this fear, pain, fear loop, that because I'm afraid of how this pain might affect me, it amplifies that pain response, which causes me more fear, which causes me more pain. And the - That could be psychosomatic, basically. Yeah, exactly. Not that it's not real. People hear that and they think they're faking it. No, no, no. But it amplifies it. All pain is real. Yeah. All pain is real. And all pain is in the mind.

1:55:18Nir Eyal:Because where else could it be? Right? It's not out here. It's not in your elbows. It's not in your back. Pain is here. Pain doesn't happen in your back. Yeah, ascending your pain signals. That's right. It's firing. That's right. So pain is not suffering. Sickness is not illness. That sickness is when I have broken bone, cancer. That's something is broken, biologically broken. Illness is in the mind. Illness is the interpretation of those symptoms. And it turns out that 80 % of healthcare spending is spent on illness, not sickness. And so it turns out you can actually cure. It's called pain reprocessing therapy.

1:55:49Nir Eyal:That you can actually cure chronic pain and all these exclusionary diagnoses like fibromyalgia. There's many others. That it's really about our beliefs. It's this fear system we have about, oh, there comes my symptoms again. I used to have this with my back pain that I would, you know, it's happening again. I'm going to have an episode. I'd have to lie on the ground, you know, ice it, cool it, don't move it, immobilize, you know, all this stuff. Turns out that only made it worse because I'm hyperfixating on the pain. Yeah, well, you're becoming hypervigilant basically. That's right. And now I don't do that anymore.

1:56:20Nir Eyal:Now I still get back pain from time to time. but now whenever I get that that twinge of pain instead I have to remind myself and I literally say this in my head I say I'm not in danger I'm not in danger and I do the same I'm safe I do the same thing that ever that caused that pain I do it 10 times yeah so sometimes you know if I'm getting down in a chair and it'll hurt okay I'm gonna do it 10 times to teach my brain I'm safe there's no danger here and my back pain went away it wasn't because of past trauma it wasn't body keeps a score it wasn't any of that it was just that i was freaking out i was associating this this signal this information with suffering you're kind of disassociating basically disassociating what do you mean so kind of like pulling yourself out of your oh interesting basically and going into the hypervigilant state state whereas a lot of us need to become more regulated right and regulating our nervous system and kind of like allowing us to feel safe in our bodies is it's really important not kind of like we kind of look up from our brain with that's disconnected from this.

1:57:20So it's like, all happens here.

1:57:21Nir Eyal:So true. But it's actually putting it together. Yeah. It makes me wonder, you know, they, they, uh, when you look at, at skeletons of people who died before modern medicine, you know how many diseases people used to have, you know, they had like parasites and syphilis and all kinds of stuff happening in their bodies that we don't have today. They were probably in constant. How do they function? You know, we, we get a migraine and we're out for the rest of the day. Right. Somehow people - from infectious diseases anymore because of antibiotics. Right. But it didn't matter your wealth or status, right?

1:57:53Nir Eyal:The kings of England had all kinds of crazy things happening in their bodies that they just had to deal with. And so there's something to this that we've in a way lost. In the book, I talk about this guy, Daniel Gisler, who he was a commodities trader. He's a commodities trader. And a very numbers guy, very analytical, like the opposite of woo-woo, very cut and dry guy. and in his 50s, he trips and he has this ankle injury that needs pins put into his bones. And it takes two years to heal. And in that time when his bones are healing, he learns, he comes across this YouTube video and he learns about hypno-sedation.

1:58:30Nir Eyal:And hypno-sedation teaches him how to do what we've talked about, how to separate pain from suffering. And we've been talking about psychological pain and suffering. In his case, it was physiological. So Daniel, by the time that his surgery is on the calendar to have those pins removed from his bones, he is able to undergo a 55-minute procedure where scapel is cutting into his flesh, where metal is yanked from bone, and he does this entire procedure without any anesthesia. He's completely awake. No local anesthesia, no topical anesthesia, all through the power of his mind. And I'm telling you, if I didn't see the video, I wouldn't believe it.

1:59:12Nir Eyal:But I've seen the actual video. And what's crazy is that this is actually not uncommon. That tens of thousands of people in Switzerland, in France, in Spain, in Belgium have done hypnosedation, have done surgery without anesthesia. It's actually not that uncommon. What have they done? They are able to focus that pinhole of attention, that 50 bits of information of conscious awareness. they learn to focus it away from the suffering even though they feel the signal you know dan would tell us yeah i could see i knew that they were doing something but by putting himself in this hypnotic trance by self-hypnotizing he it didn't never became suffering he was able to very quite literally separate the pain from the suffering well i think about hypnobirthing though also true yeah also yeah that's what makes it makes me think about a lot of people that have gone into hypnobirthing well you know i think my sister did that and her husband would kept being like how are you feeling she was just like yeah she literally was just in her mind right trying to basically hypnotize herself it's and it and i'm not advocating for it i'm not going to do it anytime soon i'm certainly i can do the hypno pregnancy uh but the reason i tell this story and again i it's one of those things that i thought was you know woo woo nonsense oh it's it's real it is real and the reason i tell that story is because if human beings can do that you know There's nothing genetically different about Daniel or the tens of thousands of people who have done hypnosedation.

2:00:33Nir Eyal:There's nothing special about them. They're not different. It's that they've learned a skill. And if humans can learn that skill, if any humans can learn that skill, it turns out we all can. So that when we're on a diet and we're feeling food noise or hunger pangs, when we're having an argument and we feel hurt, it turns out we have that skill too. I mean, if Daniel can undergo surgery for an hour without anesthesia, what can the rest of us do so now that takes me to my last question which is what i ask everyone and the reason why i ask this question is because i think it very much relates in my mind to how each one of us maybe see our own understanding of what success means um because i think success is defined incorrectly in society today um which is what does live well be well mean to you I think live well, be well, to me, means living in a way that minimizes regret.

2:01:33Nir Eyal:I think what I don't want is to live life and look back. You know, we've all heard these regrets of the dying. But what are we doing to make sure that we don't have those regrets of the dying? I want to look back at my life, not just on my deathbed, but each day, each week, each year. and say, I lived it the way I want to live it. That's the goal, to not be beholden to my reactions. What happens I can't control. I can't control the economy. I can't control AI. I can't control what people say about me or to me. I can't control that stuff. But what's in my control is how I react. No one can take that away from me.

2:02:15Nir Eyal:And that's what I want to live with. Yeah, I love it. A life without regret. It's beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on. What's your answer to that question? I'm so curious. Having written the book and all that. Yeah. I mean, to me, I think, you know, the reason why I started this is because I was so curious about how we can become for ourselves, our best selves, you know, without any external expectations, like what it really means. because I think externally we are so gravitated towards other people's expectations or capitalism or kind of what we're meant to do to succeed in society. And when I looked in the Oxford Dictionary, it defines success as status, money, and fame.

2:02:57And I was like, wow, that is not success in my brain. So live what, be well to me, I think for me it's about having a lot more kind of compassion inwards and compassion outwards. I mean, compassion for me has been like a massive antidote because it allows one to step into the suffering. Being from an English culture, it's a big cringe word. We really struggle with compassion over here. Whereas when I speak in America, people are like, yeah, we love compassion. And I speak here and you just see the audience's face and myself. I really struggled to connect to that word. What do they associate it?

2:03:30Nir Eyal:Weak. Self-compassion is considered weak. Very weak. Like how do they define self-compassion then that it makes you sound weak? The fact that if you just like love yourself, you know, you're going to like fall backward. And you're very victim, self-pity, maybe potentially narcissistic. Whereas I treat it as the friend filter. So like would you treat yourself as someone else you would treat that you love, right? And I talk about this as a child. Like would you feed your child the same food that you're feeding yourself? Like you know inside the balance. I don't think health is as complicated as we make it, which is why the title is healthy.

2:04:03it shouldn't be this hard i think we've completely made it either elitist too expensive and actually just like it feels so out of reach and actually when you really shrift back it's really really not that hard but we've become overwhelmed with where we are right now and we all think that we lack the willpower or lack the motivation and we don't actually we all have that within ourselves because we can do it for our children yeah quite well right or for a friend and we can do it for a friend like how often would you cook yourself the same food that you would make someone that you love that's coming over very rarely.

2:04:32Nir Eyal:Right. And so for me, actually like treating yourself with compassion as you treat outwardly to others, I believe it's like the kind of connection to living well, being well. It's a huge trick. Just asking yourself, if I had a friend who's going through the exact same situation, what would I say to them? Exactly. And it's almost never what you say to yourself. It's never. And it's the same thing with these belief systems, right? You know, saying, oh, my mom's so judgmental. your friend might reflect back and you can say it with a partner in an argument you can go to your friends be like oh you annoyed me so much he did this thing and it really pissed me off and a friend be like did he or you know they might reflect it back to you in a different way but did he really do it that way or like are you maybe seeing a different perspective you know and that's really helpful because you're kind of doing the same thing is it true right right it's coming from a place of love right and a place of like expansion of your perception but we very rarely do it towards ourselves.

2:05:27Yeah, because we think it makes us tougher.

2:05:30Nir Eyal:We think it makes us more motivated but it's perfectly testable of whether it's a limiting belief. When you tell yourself, be tougher and don't give yourself self-compassion and when you say things like that that are not self-compassionate, how do you feel? Do you feel more motivated? If it works for you, great. If it works, don't mess with it. I think it works to a point. This is the thing that I saw with research, three sections but you know discipline is important right to an extent but it's like having a boss where you do a presentation and the boss is like that's not great you're like okay i need to go back and like sort this out but then when you hand that work back in again and the boss four or five times has told you just it's really really not very good and giving you no constructive criticism nothing that's helpful right you are so demotivated to go and do that the sixth time because you're like do you know what i don't i can't work any harder and i'm getting no recognition and I think that's the most important part.

2:06:23Like I think you can 100 % look at your faults. You kind of got to have some type of compassion to be able to be like, no, I can do this and move forward. Whereas if it's all hard plus hard, to a point I think you start to, you actually see it drop off the motivation.

2:06:39Nir Eyal:Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. I mean, I think that there should be a criteria for quitting because hearing some of this stuff, people think, oh, is quitting, should I never quit? Is it always perseverance no matter what? And I think there is a place for quitting, but we tend to quit way too soon. So I'll share real quick. So there's these three criteria. Number one is I think you need to have a mile marker that you're going to say, I'm going to try this new belief, this new behavior, and I'm going to do it for X number of days. And you can just, so let's say you've done all this work, you did inquiry-based stress reduction like we talked about, and you have a new belief, and you're going to try it on for size.

2:07:21Nir Eyal:Okay, I'm going to try with my mom. When she says something I don't like, I'm going to try that perspective. I'm going to remind myself, I'm going to have a Post-it note and every time I'm going to say to myself, as opposed to she's too judgmental, I'm going to say, we're all working with the tools we have. I'm going to try it. So you set number of days, okay? The second criteria, sorry, the second criteria is, are you learning? So I think with a lot of things, when you fail, people interpret that failure as, well, that means I should quit. I've been dating and there's no good guys out there. There's no good women out there.

2:07:56Nir Eyal:I'm failing or I'm trying to start my business. It's not working. Nobody's buying. Well, if I had a time machine and I could zoom into the future and I could see, hey, you know what? If you try this thing five more times, if you fail five times, the sixth time you're going to succeed. If I knew that for a fact, 100 % confidence, What would your relationship with failure feel like? Well, now you'd be like, okay, let's fail. Come on, let's go fail quickly because five more dates, I'm going to meet the love of my life. And five more sales calls, I'm going to close that deal. You'd want to get through that failure.

2:08:26Nir Eyal:So just because you're failing doesn't mean you're not learning. So just failing is not a criteria to quit. The third criteria, and this is the most important, I think, when it comes to health and fitness, is does persistence make a difference? I think a lot of folks don't realize that for some things, persistence does not make a difference. So if you're working at a company that has really bad company culture, banging your head against the wall and staying at that company, even though people are miserable there, everybody's a bummer, it's toxic, I don't want to be here, you're not going to outlive that company culture.

2:08:56Nir Eyal:Persistence does not make a difference. But when it comes to fitness, for example, when it comes to writing a book, when it comes to raising a family, you are going to hit that plateau for a long time in fitness. I know with my fitness journey, a long time, nothing happened. The scale wasn't moving. I wasn't making any progress. you know, no PR, just flat. But then if you persist, eventually something will happen. So in some cases, persistence really does make a difference. But until you hit those three criterias of did I meet my mom marker? Am I still learning? And does persistence make a difference?

2:09:26Nir Eyal:Until then, don't quit. So that's, I think, a useful reminder for me. That's a perfect way to end it. And then you don't live with any regrets. Hopefully. You're still going to live with regrets. Minimize regrets. Minimize regrets. Minimize regrets. I think your philosophy of self-compassion, you know, when I mess up every day, I say something, I'm like, oh, I should have maybe said that differently. Or how can I say that differently next time? What do I learn from it? So I still have regrets. But I'm trying to minimize the things that I can versus, you know, stuff that just happened. So everything's a learning opportunity.

2:09:56Nir Eyal:But you're still going to, of course, mess up. Yeah, because that's life, right? That's life. That's right. It wants to accept that. But is it, I used to say like, oh, I'm such an idiot, right? Like, it just would. It's just not helpful. Roll off the tongue. But I would say to myself all the time, oh, God, I can't believe I did that. I'm such an idiot. That's not helpful. No, it's not helpful. It's not helpful. No, I'm still learning. Yeah, exactly. I'm still learning. Yeah, there's always an opportunity for growth. Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much. My pleasure. This was so fun. So fun. Thank you.

2:10:21And I will link your book in the show notes below. Congratulations on being a New York Times bestseller.

2:10:27Nir Eyal:Thank you. Thank you so much. It was great being here with you. I appreciate it.