Why Your Beliefs Are Running Your Life And How To Change Them

0:00Tell me, why is it that we have these beliefs about ourselves when the evidence is sat in front of us that is actually telling a completely different story?

0:10Nir Eyal:Because we don't see reality clearly. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we believe them to be. We see things as we are. And I don't mean metaphorically. I don't mean figuratively. I mean literally, that I can show two people the exact same image, and based on where they were born, one group will see circles, the other will see squares. Same image. Is that like urban versus countryside? That's right, the coffer illusion. That's right. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a checkerboard illusion in the book where you can see this checkerboard, and it looks like square A and square B are the same color.

0:52Nir Eyal:but they're not the same color. Sorry, it looks like square A and square B are different colors. In fact, they're the same color. What's amazing is that not only does square A look darker than square B, even though it's not, what's really amazing is that even when I tell you the truth, even when you experience it for yourself, even when you say, okay, I agree now, they are the same color. When you block out the space between the two squares, you can see, yep, 100%, for a fact, they are the same color. When you look back at the first image, you still can't see it differently. Your brain continues to lie to you, even when you know the truth.

1:25Nir Eyal:Like, we should all be rioting in the streets over this. This is the closest to realizing that you're in the matrix that you could ever find. And it's not that you're in a simulation created by robot aliens. That's not what's going on. But you are definitely in a simulation inside your own head, that your brain is not seeing reality clearly because it can't. There's too much information out there. In fact, we know that the brain is processing 11 million bits per second. 11 million bits per second, that's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. So imagine 2 ,000 pages of text every single second, tremendous amount of information.

2:04Nir Eyal:But your conscious awareness, what you call the real world, can only process about 50 bits. So that's one sentence per second. So 2 ,000 pages of text versus one sentence. So what does your brain do to compensate? Because it can't absorb all that information. It has to see reality not as it is, but through this filter of beliefs. And so beliefs shape what you see, literally what you are able to see with your eyeballs, what you feel, not just your feelings, but your physiological state, how you experience pain and suffering. And finally, your sense of agency, what you are able to do. And so all this wrapped up together means that your beliefs directly affect who you become.

2:46Nir Eyal:And so I think, you know, after this is my third book now, after giving people very practical advice, solving problems, you know, here's exactly what to do, step one, two, three, none of it matters. None of it matters unless you understand beliefs because beliefs are upstream of our behavior, of our identity, of how we perceive the world. So if you don't understand beliefs, nothing else will make a difference. beliefs like before we even get into like why you wrote this book like how would you actually define a belief oh yeah great question so i'm as a fellow dyslexic word nerd i know you are as well yeah definitions really matter yeah uh and we many times conflate beliefs for facts and that's not true people say i believe this to be true that that's i don't think it means what you think it means that a fact has a specific definition a fact is an objective truth it is something that is true whether or not you believe it.

3:38Nir Eyal:The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. I'm sorry, flat earthers, the world doesn't care what you believe. A fact's a fact. You cannot change facts. Beliefs are something different. Beliefs are also not faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So God rewards the righteous. That's a matter of faith. There's no amount of evidence that I could present to somebody that would change their mind on that conviction, nor should it. It's a matter of faith. But between fact and faith is something very special. between fact and faith is a belief. A belief is defined as a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence.

4:13Nir Eyal:And where beliefs are so useful and so important is that they oftentimes determine how we see the future, things that have not happened yet. So things that cannot be facts yet because they're not here yet. And so what makes them so special and why I think they're undervalued is that unlike faith, which people almost never change, unlike facts, which you cannot change, beliefs are open to revision based on evidence. You don't pull them out of thin air. They do require evidence, but they are open to revision. So the most important lesson I learned from the six years of research into this book is that beliefs are tools, not truths.

4:51Nir Eyal:Beliefs are tools, not truths. That's the mantra that I say to myself all day long. Beliefs are tools, not truth. that they're malleable, that we can use them to serve us rather than hurt us. But of course, most of us live our lives every day with all these beliefs that were imprinted upon us from childhood, from our past experiences, from something somebody said, and we never assess whether they're useful. We just take them to be facts. But they're not facts. They're not objective truths. They're predictions about the future. And many times those beliefs are holding us back. We call these limiting beliefs.

5:26Nir Eyal:And so what I try to do with this book and my research is how can we take those limiting beliefs, see them for what they are, and turn them into what we call liberating beliefs. And that's a transformational process because it affects every area of your life, your health, your career, your relationships. There's no area of your life that's not touched by these limiting beliefs converted into liberating beliefs. I think that's so powerful because I guess it's just saying that you can have autonomy over your life right you can have autonomy over your mind where I think a lot of us can get stuck in this like rumitation cycle right the negativity spiral that we can all fall victim to I mean that's literally being human at the end of the day how do you you know I can't focus I'm not smart I'll never be successful I'm not a math person I'm too old I'm too young I'm too fat I'm too thin it just goes on and on There's so many, right?

6:16Nir Eyal:So many, yeah. How do you like catch yourself out of that downward spiral that so many of us can do? Because you said something that really interesting, right? Fact is the world is round. Faith is, you know, maybe I believe in an afterlife or I believe in X, Y, Z, or, but again, hope. It's kind of maybe how I connect to faith. But the belief, as you said, is the intersection in the middle of that. How do you transform a negative belief into a more positive, liberating belief? So I would change a little bit of what you said in that we can't necessarily affect everything that happens to us. Right.

6:53That we – a lot of stuff happens. Yeah.

6:56Nir Eyal:And one of the things I'm taking issue with in this book is the positive thinking mindset. I go against that, too. It sounds like a good thing, right? Like, well, who can be against positive thinking and who can be against manifesting and who can be against vision boarding? well I you know given the promise I I fell for it too I I love the idea of well just think positive just be an optimist all day just vision board you know just manifest it's very very seductive and I fell for it too the problem is the data doesn't support it that when you look at the studies what I didn't want to admit but what the studies have found is that just the positive thinking just the manifesting and it's so popular these days it's the biggest buzzword It's so much so.

7:42But the science is.

7:44Nir Eyal:Is pretty damning, right? That you look at the work of Gabrielle Otogen. She took people and she asked them to do a visioning exercise, right? To manifest abundance, to manifest a beach body, to manifest good grades on an exam. And it turns out the people who did that, she attached them to blood pressure monitors. And as they were doing this visioning exercise about some kind of outcome they wanted, their blood pressure dropped. They became more relaxed. And in follow-ups she found they actually did less of the steps that it would take to get what they wanted So they became less likely to get the outcomes Now why would that be because when you're putting in your order, you know You're calling up your uber or doordash and saying hey, please universe I've been vibrating at your cosmic vibrations stuff's on the way, right?

8:26Nir Eyal:And so you become less likely to do the things you have to do because you've already put in the order I've already asked for abundance. I've already asked for the beach body. It's coming And then, of course, what invariably happens is when it doesn't come or when it gets difficult and you stop, who do you blame? Do you blame the guru? Do you blame the program? Do you blame the bad advice? No, you blame yourself. You think, well, I must not be vibrating hard enough or whatever. And it turns out so that's been really bad advice. And so I'm trying to help people see that there's a right way and there's a wrong way.

8:55Nir Eyal:And this is very science-backed, that the right way is called mental contrasting. Mental contrasting uses what athletes have been doing for decades. You know, when we think about, well, how can visioning be wrong? How can manifesting be wrong? Isn't that what athletes do? No. You know what athletes do? Athletes don't vision the outcome. Professional athletes don't vision the gold medal and the trophy. That's not what they do. That's what manifesting tells us to do. You know, picture, I want abundance. I want love in my life. I want, I want, I want. Which, by the way, trains us to believe that we cannot stop suffering until we get those things, right?

9:33Nir Eyal:We think that the only way I can stop suffering is when I have. So please, cosmic slot machine, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. It trains us to need things. So back to where we started originally, stuff happens, right? If you get sick, God forbid, if something happens in your life, that's not your fault. It's not because you didn't vibrate hard enough or because you didn't wish for it or you're bringing bad things into your life. That's sick to tell people. It's very harmful. It's not your fault you didn't do those things. But what is in your control is how you respond to those things based on your beliefs.

10:04So the big revelation is to do what athletes do, to get back to what really works.

10:12Nir Eyal:Athletes won't vision the outcome. That's useless and, in fact, very harmful because when you vision the outcome and then something bad happens, oh, my gosh, what's going on? Something went wrong. I must not be doing it right. So what athletes will do is that they will vision What they will how they will respond physically and most importantly psychologically when something hard happens When something unexpected happens so michael phelps tells a story of when he was in the olympics And he was in this race and his goggles fell off in the middle of the race while he's in the water For most of us.

10:44Nir Eyal:I don't know about you. I would panic Oh my god, this terrible thing happened But he had rehearsed it so many times that when something uncomfortable happened. Hey, no big deal Right. Well, what changed? He had a different belief about what that means. Same event, different belief. To most people, goggles falling off in the middle of a swimming race would be disastrous. But to him, he practiced it so many times. Okay. Expected it. That's mental contrasting is to prepare ourselves. So for me, for example, you know, I used to be clinically obese, not just overweight, but clinically obese. Like I remember the doctor said, okay, here's normal weight.

11:17Nir Eyal:Here's overweight. This is the yellow zone. Here's you. You're in the red zone. When was this? This was from I I remember going to fat camp at eight years old. Oh, that word fat camp is just so destroying. I know, I'm sorry, but that's what it was. There's no way to hide it. That's what it was. And at eight, we were going to fat camp. Yeah. And, you know, my parents did the best they could. Yeah. But and then it all into early adulthood. And so and I still struggle with I still have to be conscious of it. But what helped me wasn't sitting on the couch and saying, you know, I want six pack abs.

11:53Nir Eyal:Gimme, gimme, gimme. That's not what helped. What helped was doing this mental contrasting. Asking myself, okay, I'm gonna go to this party on Friday night and I know someone at the dinner party is gonna offer me a piece of chocolate cake. And I know I'm gonna want the chocolate cake. I love chocolate cake. And I also am gonna feel uncomfortable saying no to that person. So how can I prepare? just like how the the athlete uh says to themselves okay if i'm on offense and defense is coming at me if i'm skiing down the mountain and i i slip what am i going to do just like michael phelps prepared for what happens when the goggles fall off what am i going to do when something feels bad that's the trick what are my beliefs about pain because one of the most important lessons i learned and i this is the unlock to life, is that pain is not suffering.

12:44Nir Eyal:Pain is not suffering. And this is, I didn't invent this. This is an ancient practice. Buddhism said this a long time ago. Many other religions have said it as well. That pain is just signal. Pain is part of that 11 million bits of information we talked about earlier. It's just information. Just information. Suffering is the interpretation of that information. So the stuff happening to you, you can't control that. Pain is going to happen. The suffering part, the story we tell, that's what we can change. So for me, when I would go to that dinner party, how will I respond to that invariable pain, to the hunger pangs of I want the chocolate cake, to the difficulty of saying no when I really want it?

13:21Nir Eyal:That's what I had to prepare for by telling myself a different story. What did you tell yourself? Well, what I still tell myself is this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. Now is that a fact? No. It's a belief. But it's a tool, not a truth. So I used to say, I'm feeling hungry. I got to eat. It's terrible. Hunger is bad. I got to escape this. I got to escape this. I don't want to feel this way. And then I realized that, wait a minute, pain is just signal. And sometimes pain can be a very good thing. That pain without suffering is purpose. Pain minus suffering is purpose.

13:59That when I was doing something that was meaningful to me, that was getting to me where I wanted

14:06Nir Eyal:to go. That's why the mantra that I constantly repeat to myself, whether it's when I'm writing, which is really hard work, whether I'm watching what I eat, which is really hard work, whatever it is that would be difficult. And before I would escape, I would scroll it away. I would drink it away. I would click it away. I'd escape, escape, escape. I don't want to feel bad. Rather, the story I now tell, this feeling, same sensation, same pain, completely different story. This is what it feels like to get better. So when I'm writing and all I want to do is check email or the news. You've written a book, right?

14:38Nir Eyal:Took me eight years. Took me six years. I know. All you want to do is something else. But now the mantra I constantly repeat to myself, hey, you know what? Who said feeling bad is bad? Like if you can adopt that thought, feeling bad is not bad. Feeling bad is not bad.

14:57Nir Eyal:It's one of the most powerful lessons I learned writing this book, that pain is not suffering. In the brain, it's not the same. It's different areas of the brain process pain versus suffering that suffering is a cognitive process Versus pain is a biological process that sickness is not illness. Those are also two separate things and and once you understand that you can Not only change your feelings how you think about things Literally your physical physiological responses how you experience suffering in the first place completely changes and that is a massive massive unlock