Your Beliefs Are Sabotaging You | Nir Eyal

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19:08Johnny:And then when that didn't happen, there was the judgment.

19:13Nir Eyal:I'm telling you what happened. So this is part of my book. And I had to share this with her because it was going to be published. And hopefully millions of people will read it. And so I had to share the chapter with her. This isn't in the book, but I'll share with you because it's funny. It just happened not that long ago. So she reads the chapter about this thing that was really hard for me, right? Like I'm admitting that the suffering was caused by me, wasn't caused by her, essentially. And she reads the chapter and she says, I told you those flowers were half dead.

19:47Nir Eyal:So it just goes to show you that what causes our suffering in life is not what happens, right? Are you going to tell me that these words that my mom says that are nothing more than vibrations in the air that my ear is registering that causes me suffering? What the hell? Like it's, it's, it's just waves. It just signals, just data. It's my interpretation. It's what my brain does with those words that gets me all upset and makes me feel like I'm suffering. But it's all up here, right? That pain is not suffering. There are two different things, physically and psychologically. Pain is not suffering.

20:25Nir Eyal:Pain is signal. It's my interpretation that causes me suffering. All suffering comes from the difference between accepting what is and thinking that it should be different, that I'm expecting things to be exactly how I want. That's where suffering comes from. But how do I filter what I expect?

20:43Johnny:It's just my beliefs. You mentioned earlier the powers of belief. So unpack those three powers, because I think that really starts to shape how we can now start to choose the right beliefs for us instead of being stuck with the initial beliefs we had or the limiting beliefs, which are even worse. Exactly. So we've got these three powers of belief.

21:01Nir Eyal:So beliefs shape what we see, like literally what we see with our eyeballs. We can see things based on our beliefs that other people can't see. This is why entrepreneurs, if you want to know what makes entrepreneurs successful, the number one trait is that they can see opportunities others can't. Like literally, Lee, they can see opportunities as if there were$100 bills on the street that everybody else was ignoring. Entrepreneurs see those opportunities. It's called what Walter Isaacson, when he wrote about Steve Jobs in his book, it's what people used to say about Jobs, that he had a reality distortion field.

21:31Nir Eyal:He literally could see things differently because of his beliefs. There's some beautiful studies where they took people who were self-identified as lucky. So they had a belief that they were lucky or people who identified as unlucky. And they asked them to do a very simple task. All they had to do was look through a newspaper that they were provided and count the number of images in the newspaper. One, two, three, four, five. How many pictures in the newspaper? People who believed they were unlucky took two and a half minutes. People who believed they were lucky took 11 seconds. Why? Because on page two of that newspaper, one of those images said, there are 43 images in this newspaper.

22:14Nir Eyal:collect your prize. The people who thought they were lucky, who believed they were lucky, saw it immediately. The people who believed they were unlucky, they didn't see it. It didn't enter their conscious attention. They weren't able to process it, even though it was right there in front of them. Just like two people can see the same business opportunity, one says that'll never work. The other says, I believe it will. And guess who tries? The ones who believe it will. So beliefs change what you see, beliefs change what you feel, and beliefs change what you do. We call it the power of attention, anticipation, and agency.

22:47Johnny:Let's start to unpack how we can recognize these limiting beliefs. Some of them obviously seem pretty clear, like, hey, if I feel like I can't do that or if I feel like I'm unlucky, I should probably push back on that belief. But some of these limiting beliefs are quite invisible to us and hard to point out.

23:03Nir Eyal:Well, you want to do a little case study? You want to be my guinea pig? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So let's let's think about maybe a limiting belief that you might have. What's what's something where we want to start? Step one is look for the muck. right? If your life is perfect, go listen to another episode. But if you know that you're capable of more, if there's something in your life, a relationship that keeps bugging you a, a goal, something on your, Oh, here's a good place. A new year's resolution that you have year after year. I still, I'm not getting in shape. I'm still not working on that novel.

23:35Nir Eyal:I've always wanted to write. I'm still not, you know, close with my kids. Like I'd like to be whatever it might be. What's that thing that keeps coming up again and again? Is there anything just for sake of demonstration here that comes to mind for you?

23:46Johnny:In hearing your story, I struck me right away, the relationship with my sister and the place that I'm at now with the anticipation of her negative responses to my effort, leading me to want to try less and put in less effort.

24:01Nir Eyal:Fascinating. Okay. So this is a great demonstration of what defines a limiting belief. And you said, I could not have said it better. It's something that decreases your motivation. You didn't say the word motivation, but what did you say? It decreases your something effort.

24:13Johnny:Yeah. Wanting to try more, put in more effort.

24:16Nir Eyal:So, yeah. So the definition of a limiting belief is a belief that decreases motivation and increases suffering. And I can hear already it's causing you suffering. And what's interesting about it, that limiting belief of what we'll get to what it actually is, we'll get you to say it out loud, is that it makes you less likely to want to try. You're retreating into safety. And that's that's a hallmark of the human condition. We all want to retreat into what served us before in the past, what kept us safe, that We are all by default passive, not active. We are our default is is helpless, not hopeful.

24:47Nir Eyal:So what would be the belief with your sister?

24:50Johnny:Can you say it out loud? I think the belief is that she's selfish. And then in listening, that exercise you just shared with your mom, recognizing that my anticipation in a lot of ways is creating this suffering that I'm expecting her to react in certain ways. And then I'm reading her reactions as her being selfish and self-centered. and maybe what I'm actually doing is being selfish and wanting those reactions from her and wanting her to act in a specific way to please me.

25:16Nir Eyal:There we go. Okay, so is there a specific instance that you might be able to share? She might listen to this, so you don't have to get too personal, but is there something you could share that like happened in particular, like with my mom and the flowers?

25:28Johnny:Yeah, it was very similar. It was sending a thoughtful message after a really important life event and just not hearing a response and then also having a pretty important life event of my own. And again, not hearing a response. So reading both of those is, wow, she's just really selfish. And here I am trying to, you know, reach out to her, connect with her and celebrate her and have an important moment in my life be celebrated. And it didn't happen.

25:55Nir Eyal:Okay. So she was selfish when she didn't reach out. Yes. Okay. You want to do this? Yeah. Okay. Question number one. She was selfish when she didn't reach out. Is it true?

26:14Johnny:I feel it's true.

26:15Nir Eyal:Sharing, yes. Great. Question number two. Do you know it's absolutely true that she was selfish when she didn't reach out? Is there absolutely, meaning 100 % of the time, there's no alternative explanation in any way, shape, or form that anyone could possibly see, her or you or anyone else, that she was not being selfish when she didn't reach out.

26:36Johnny:No. Okay.

26:38Nir Eyal:You want to say more?

26:39Johnny:How could it, what could be another explanation? There's a variety of different reasons that I would not get a response. That's not just that she's choosing herself or choosing to ignore it or choosing to hurt me. Like what? Can you think of anything that comes to mind? She was busy, didn't see the message, got a lot of messages. Okay, cool.

26:57Nir Eyal:Now, number three, who are you when you hold onto that belief that she was selfish when she didn't reach out?

27:03Johnny:I'm grumpy, frustrated, Not the best version of myself.

27:06Nir Eyal:And finally, who would you be without that belief? If I have a magic wand and I tap you on the head, AJ, and poof, you do not think and you never knew you thought that she was selfish when she didn't reach out.

27:16Johnny:I'd be more connected to my family. I'd be more upbeat, less holding on to it. Awesome. More connected, more upbeat. What was the last one? Lighter, holding on to less.

27:27Nir Eyal:What do you mean holding on to less? holding the grudge against her over, you know, this event and previous events in a similar vein. Right.

27:37Johnny:Trying to see a pattern that might not be there.

27:39Nir Eyal:Fantastic. All right. Well, let's do a little turnaround here. What's the opposite of she was selfish when she when she didn't reach out? What's the opposite of that? She was busy. She didn't see it. She missed it. So she was not selfish. Right. She was not selfish. And you've you've already named some reason that could be true. Maybe could it be true? Do you think that do you feel that could be true or is it just like making up a reason? Like, could you see that she was she was just busy or had another reason?

28:06Johnny:Yeah, I could. I think obviously, you know, with relationships with family. And that's why these examples, I think, are so stark for people. We tend to have a lot of history. And again, as you said, you know, our brain is looking for patterns. And the second we can map on to a pattern that feels comfortable for me, it's easy to map onto that pattern of selfish versus busy.

28:27Nir Eyal:Can you think of any other turnarounds?

28:29Johnny:Anything else that could be the opposite of she was selfish when she didn't reach out? She could have completely missed the message. And I only sent a text message. It wasn't a phone call that she ignored or a voicemail that she didn't listen to. It was a simple text. And there's also a lot going on in her life. And I know that I miss texts and don't always respond perfectly to everything that I receive.

28:54Nir Eyal:What about changing that belief, flipping it around another way? So that's you're reinforcing that maybe she was not selfish, that she had another reason. It wasn't selfishness, selfishness. It was some other reason. What about flipping it to yourself instead of she was selfish by not reaching out? What about I was selfish expecting her to reach out? Could that possibly be true?

29:17Johnny:Absolutely. How so? In any of these situations, part of us reaching out is to feel good knowing that it gets responded to and knowing that the other person received it and felt good in receiving it. So there is a bit of selfishness and an expectation around a response, feedback. A thoughtful wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last. That's where Quince shines. Premium fabrics, considered design, everyday essentials that just feel effortless to wear.

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32:20Nir Eyal:What is selfishness? Like to you, when you say she was selfish, what does that mean? Putting herself above others, just focusing on herself. How do you feel thinking about Maybe what you're asking for is for her to focus on your needs. How does that land? That by you asking, by you thinking, expecting her to reach out, that that actually is the definition of selfish, right? Because that's what you need.

32:49Johnny:It feels painful, like you said, because our brain is rationalizing things to be the other way. But I could see the truth in that as well. So try that on for a minute.

32:58Nir Eyal:Let's say let's say for the next day, two, three, maybe a week. What would it feel like that whenever you get that little pang of so annoying that she didn't reach out? Instead, you replace it with. I don't I don't need her to reach out, I think I'd feel lighter.

33:13Johnny:I think it would evoke less negative emotion and certainly wouldn't cause resentment.

33:18Nir Eyal:Do you want to try it? You want to give it a shot for the next few days? Is that something you'd consider? What is there?

33:23Johnny:I think, you know, in reading the book, one thing that stood out about the work, is the impact it has on relationships. And that was one of the big reasons I wanted to have you on the shows because obviously we're focused on relationships. And I think a lot of times when people think about limiting beliefs, they think about self-centered goals. Like, oh, I wanna run faster. I wanna lose weight. I wanna earn more money. And these are things that we want. And we often don't think about the limiting beliefs, the impact that they have on the relationships that matter to all those things in our life.

33:52Nir Eyal:One of the things I like to remind myself, so I have these like secular mantras that I repeat, these little prayers. and um one of the things that i remind myself whenever i have these type of interpersonal conflicts is that love is measured by the benefit of the doubt do you love your sister yeah absolutely you know we say to each other a lot i love you so much or i don't love you a lot or like how much do we measure love how much do we love somebody and i think how much we love somebody is measured by the benefit of the doubt what do i mean by that i remember when my daughter was born. I held her, I was the first person to wash her after she was born.

34:29Nir Eyal:We took her downstairs and I was allowed to hold her as I was washing her hair and stuff. And I remember just thinking like, I love this little person who didn't exist a few minutes ago, right? She was in my wife's womb, but now she was here in the world and I just loved her so much. And I remember, you know, every time she would cry, it was, it was painful to hear a baby cry was painful, but it wasn't suffering because the story I was telling myself wasn't that she was trying to annoy me, right? Like babies don't try and annoy you. That's the best tool they have. Babies don't do anything for you.

35:01Nir Eyal:They don't, like, why do you love your baby so much? Why do you love your child so much? They don't make you feel good. They don't send you flowers until they grow up, hopefully. But why do we love them so much? Because we give them ultimate benefit of the doubt. We know that they're not trying to annoy us. That's just the best tools they have. And yet when babies grow up and they become our parents or our sisters or our brothers or our relationships, we kind of stop giving them the benefit of the doubt, even though we all just are operating with the best tools that we have, right? It's like expecting you to speak Russian.

35:36Nir Eyal:Well, you don't speak Russian. Like why would I expect you to speak Russian? So your sister, my daughter, my mom, all of us, me, you, we're just operating with the best tools we have. Now, does that mean we have to be buddy, buddy all the time? Does it mean I have to hang out with my mom all the time that you have to hang out with your sister all the time? No, it doesn't mean any of that stuff. It just means we don't have to suffer. It doesn't have to nag at us. It doesn't have to, we don't have to ruminate on and say, well, why did my mom do that? Or why did my sister do that? It frees us to say, well, I can think of something differently, right?

36:11Nir Eyal:That, that I was demanding too much of my mom because that was the best tools she had at the time. Now I'm free. I don't have to suffer anymore.

36:21Johnny:And in my example, you know, finding the motivation. So, you know, having that limiting beliefs, that limiting belief around my sister makes me want to invest more. I'm less motivated to invest in a relationship. Well, of course, the relationship is going to suffer. And I think when many people think about motivation, they just think about discipline or willpower. and they don't think about, as you say, pain management and the role that beliefs have. So what's actually going on there? And how can we start to change that conversation around why people quit? It's such a great point.

36:53Nir Eyal:I mean, you just demonstrated it's not just work hard and stay motivated. It's the small bits of I'm going to be motivated to give this person a clean slate every time we see them, every time I see them, that I don't have to come into that interaction thinking that's so like her. she always does that. There she goes again, right? The things we keep saying in our head, right? I mean, you see this all the time where I have friends who are so nice, right? They're so nice to me, to strangers, to, you know, to business people that they interact with. They're so nice. And then you see them around their families and they're awful.

37:28Nir Eyal:They treat their family like crap because they don't see their family. They don't see the people they know best as who they are. They see them through this lens of belief. So staying motivated and reducing our suffering through our beliefs really comes down to being conscious of where am I creating this problem for myself? Where do I see problems that don't exist? There's a wonderful study at Dartmouth where they put, they took a group of women and they asked them to help them with a study on how people treat those with scars, with facial disfigurements, you know, expecting that there'd be some kind of prejudice when people have a very large scar.

38:08Nir Eyal:So they took these women, they said, okay, you're going to participate in a study with us. And they had a professional makeup artist from Hollywood come in and, and, and, uh, uh, have this, this put this big latex scar that looked like a big gash on their face. And they showed these women, this scar that looked very, very realistic. And they said, okay, now you're going to go in this room. There's going to be a stranger in there that you're going to have a conversation with. And we want you, notice how they treat you. Pay attention to how you're treated. You know, do they, do they look at you different?

38:35Nir Eyal:Do they act different? Do they judge you differently? How do you feel in that room? Come back and tell us, but wait, wait, wait, wait, before you go in the room, just come here for a quick second. We have to do a quick adjustment to your scar, to the makeup. And unbeknownst to these women, they didn't just do a little touch up. They completely removed the scar, but they didn't show these women that they had done that. They didn't let them look in a mirror again. So for all those women knew, they were walking to this room with this large scar that didn't exist. Okay. So they were sitting down with a stranger and having a conversation thinking they had the scar, but there was no scar.

39:07Nir Eyal:What's amazing is that these women reported that they were looked at funny, that they were treated differently, that some of the people got disgusted trying to have a conversation with them because they treated them so awkwardly. And meanwhile, none of this was happening. There was no scar for the stranger to react to. And so this is a great example of how we make problems that don't exist because of what we expect. So if you expect that the world is falling apart, that the world is crazy, that people are awful, that we treat each other terribly, that war and famine and environment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that becomes your reality.

39:44Nir Eyal:You're suffering because of what you expect. Meanwhile, the truth, the fact of the matter, the world's never been better. And I know people are thinking, you're crazy. What? You're nuts. This guy's crazy. Go read a book right now called Factfulness and then tell me if I'm wrong. Hans Rosling, wonderful book. He shows how he goes through every single metric that matters about human flourishing. Turns out the world is more prosperous, healthier, greater rights, even cleaner than it's ever been. But of course, if all we look for and all we digest in the media is terrible things, that's what we see.

40:20Nir Eyal:So if we expect the people in our lives to be terrible, they will be because that's what we're looking for. If we if we expect people to be selfish, they will be because that's what we're looking for. And we become less motivated to see it any other way the more we suffer. So we have to break that cycle. We have to be conscious of those limiting beliefs, these these things that color how we view reality so we can finally escape this cage that we've made.

40:43Johnny:So walk us through the motivation triangle, because for many of our listeners who are super analytical. They look at it like, okay, I really want this goal. I have a strategy to reach this goal, but they can still end up finding themselves stuck because they're missing that third part.

40:58Nir Eyal:I used to think that if you just knew what to do, you could do it, right? That all, that's all I needed, that I just needed the right information. I needed the right book. I needed the right guru. I needed the right consultant. Just tell me what to do and then I can fix this problem. That's not true. Like we all know what to do. Okay. You're overweight. You're telling me that people don't know how to diet. Really? It's all out there, right? Okay, eat less, exercise more. And if you can't, then okay, there's Ozempic. We know that there's solutions to this, right? If you want a good relationship with your family, you have to be fully present with them.

41:30Nir Eyal:If you want to start a business, you have to do the hard work that other people don't want to do. Google it, ask ChatGPT, you're going to find the information. The information is out there. That is not the bottleneck. Used to be generations ago, yeah, you had to go to a library to learn some special information. Today, it's all at our fingertips. So it's not that we don't know what to do. It's that even when we know what to do, and even when we want the benefit, there's something missing. So motivation is not a straight line between do the behavior because I want the benefit. Motivation is a triangle that I can know the behavior and I can want the benefit.

42:06Nir Eyal:But if I don't believe in those two things, I don't sustain my motivation. So for example, let's say I want a promotion, right? I want to raise, but I don't believe that my boss has my best interests at heart. Well, then am I going to keep working for that person? Am I going to stay motivated to do my best work now putz around and, you know, do the bare minimum. If I don't believe that my boss has my best interests at heart, right? Cause I don't believe in the benefit. Conversely, if I don't believe in myself to do the behavior, even if I know exactly what to do, if I don't believe I'm ever going to finish that book I've been working on, if I don't believe I'm going to succeed in my business, if I don't believe I'm going to, you know, consistently hit the gym or whatever the case might be, if I believe I have low willpower, short attention span, whatever, you name it, you know, you can come up with a million different diagnoses that people put on themselves, labels they put on themselves.

42:58Nir Eyal:If I don't believe I can do the behavior, I'm also not in a sustained motivation. So I don't just need to know what to do, the behavior. I don't just need to know the benefit of why I'm doing it. I have to have the belief. Belief is like, or motivation is like a triangle. You have to have all those three parts in place.

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44:13Johnny:A big part of instilling the belief is starting to get the experience. So many of us will consume all the information. We'll read everything that we can online. We'll listen to this podcast. We'll go on YouTube. we'll learn everything there is to know about fat loss and what all the gurus say. And then we can really wanna lose the weight, but we haven't created the opportunity for the belief because we haven't actually put any of that into action. And I think a big part of this for many of us is recognizing the experience loop and then using that to build the beliefs that empower us.

44:49Nir Eyal:That in fact, finding out more information can be a form, another limiting belief. that if I just knew what to do, I'm not ready yet, that I need all the information before I can make a decision. These are just limiting beliefs and we can flip them around. And whether they are true or not doesn't really matter. What matters is does it serve you? Does it increase your motivation? And does it decrease suffering? And so when we recognize that, when we can say, wait a minute, is it true that I need more information? Maybe I don't need information. What's the turnaround there? I don't need more information.

45:23Nir Eyal:I can learn as I go, for example. So we can, by doing that same process of that turnaround, we can many times find out that the operating system that we've been running on is false, is not helping us.

45:36Johnny:Let's talk about starting to build these new beliefs, recognizing that we have a limiting belief that I need more information, right? I think so many in our audience are probably shaking their head relating to that because it feels good to consume information. We get a dopamine hit from learning the new tactic, the new hit, the little strategy that we can use to get us closer to the goal. But there's pain and suffering in the experience of trying and failing and not reaching the goal. And there's pain and suffering and, oh, well, will other people think of me if I don't reach the goal? And there's pain and suffering in the anticipation of, well, it's harder for me than others.

46:11Nir Eyal:That's the trick that in the short term, a limiting belief eases suffering, that it makes you feel better in the short term because it helps you recede into passivity. That we used to believe in something called learned helplessness, that you learn to be helpless. But in fact, the authors of that study that kind of became gospel in the psychology community turns out that they were 180 degrees wrong, that a few years ago they actually came out and said, we got it completely backwards, that we don't learn helplessness, we're born helpless, that all of us are born helpless. that when we, you know, babies are helpless.

46:47Nir Eyal:And so they need help from others in order to do anything. And so all of us, when we have our passive state, we always want to shrink into safety, into whatever we believed in before is what we're gonna continue to believe in the future. That's why the brain hates changing its mind. And so we love to find ways that we're helpless. We love to find ways that keep us safe because again, the brain is not trying to help us succeed. The brain is just trying to keep us alive. So, you know, good things are nice, but bad things can kill you. So it's trying to prevent you from harming yourself, which is great.

47:18Nir Eyal:So the way we get over this is that we realize that we are far more capable, we're far more powerful than we think we are, that we have self-imposed limits. Let me tell you about a study that really blew my mind and can show us how we can unlock our innate capabilities. So there was a study done back in the 1950s by Kurt Richter. And he wanted to find out, he's a biologist, and he wanted to find out the answer to a simple question. How long could a rat swim in water? Okay, pretty simple. This was back in the 50s, early days of these type of experiments. So he took a rat, he put him in a cylinder of water, he sat there with a timer, okay?

47:57Nir Eyal:He let the timer run until he saw the rat was giving up until the rat drowned. 15 minutes, that's what he concluded. A wild rat can swim for 15 minutes before it gives up. Now, he wanted to do a follow-up study. He took a new group of rats, he put these rats into cylinders of water, same exact cylinders. And this time, right about the 15 minute mark, because he knew that's when they were about to give up, he could see them struggling. He didn't let them die. He put his hand in. He took out the rat, dried the rat off, let it catch its breath, and then plunk back into the cylinder the rat went. Now, he did this a few times to condition the rat to expect that salvation might be possible, that this magic hand might reach in and save the rat from drowning.

48:44He did

48:45Nir Eyal:this a few times. And now he wanted to see how much longer the rat would swim for. So how much longer? You know, there's a trick here. You know, there's some kind of solution. AJ, you already read the book, but the average person, when I tell them this story, they say, okay, maybe how much longer the rat swim for twice as long. Oh my God. That'd be amazing. If you could double your persistence, maybe three times or four times. Imagine if there was an intervention where a rat, where you, for example, not just the rat, let's say there was something that I can do for you that would increase your persistence 4X.

49:17Nir Eyal:That would be incredible, right? That would be remarkable. Four times, running the marathon for four times longer, persisting on a big project or studying four times longer. That'd be amazing. But the rats didn't swim four times longer. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. Not 60 minutes, 60 hours of continuous swimming. From 15 minutes to 60 hours. That's mind blowing. Now, what changed? Why did that happen? Their bodies didn't change. They didn't suddenly become super rats. Nothing changed biologically in their bodies. The experiment, the environment didn't change at all.

49:56Nir Eyal:What changed? We can't ask the rats, obviously, but the only variable left is that something changed in their brains, that there was some kind of switch that was flipped. And all of a sudden, this capability that was always within them, something that they could always do. They always had the physical ability to swim for 60 hours. all of a sudden became possible. That's exactly what happens with us, that we have these limiting beliefs that keep us stuck, that make us only able to do what we think we are able to do. And we give up after 15 minutes, just like those rats did. But when we change our beliefs, we're able to persist.

50:31Nir Eyal:We're able to motivate ourselves much, much longer. And it turns out that is the vital trait. What separates those who achieve their goals from those who don't, it's not how smart you are. It's not how much resources you have. It's not what information you have. It's whether you will persist. That successful people are the biggest losers. Successful people lose more than unsuccessful people. You know why? Because they keep trying. They persist. They don't stop swimming. So if you can find that magic, that ability to persist, that's how you meet your goals. There's no magic to it. Other than the magic of when you change your beliefs, you don't see the struggle as something to suffer from.

51:13Nir Eyal:That pain no longer becomes suffering. And that's the secret of people who can sustain their motivation for very, very long periods of time and do very hard things. Start a business, build a family, write a book. I don't know, whatever it is that people dream of, it's because they can simply sustain. Start a podcast, a successful podcast, right? How much hard work goes into producing this podcast? A lot. But if you can separate that discomfort of doing this hard work with the suffering, the interpretation of that pain, you can persist forever.

51:42Johnny:You touched on this earlier. A lot of us have limiting beliefs that are externally focused. The world is out to get me. This person is trying to take advantage of me. And we give away that locus of control. We put it on the other person or the society or the world around us. And I'm just I can't do that because I'm not that person. Someone is conspiring against me. Everyone's conspiring against me. But as we went through that exercise of could there be other beliefs here? Could there be other viewpoints? You start to move from that external locus to the internal locus of, well, it's my sister.

52:16Johnny:No, it's actually like maybe it's the way I'm looking at the situation. Maybe it's my needs in approaching the situation that's creating this pain and suffering. And now that becomes pain and suffering that I can actually manage versus pain and suffering that's completely out of my control. Someone else is holding on to someone else is pushing the button. Someone else is judging me.

52:33Nir Eyal:What's amazing about this internal locus of control versus external locus of control. So external locus of control is when you believe that outside factors determine your life. It's this crappy economy. It's the stuff that's happening in the news. It's my neighbor. It's my sister. It's all this stuff outside me is what causes me to be where I am. An internal locus of control is that I have influence about where I am. Now, it turns out, one, that people who have an internal locus of control do better in almost everything. They make more money. They have more friends. They contribute more to society.

53:06Nir Eyal:They have less depression. Everything good happens to be with an internal locus of control. Okay, so that's kind of interesting. But here's what's really surprising. Even the people who have every reason to say, my life sucks. Okay, even the people who have every reason to say, I'm a victim. I'm at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole. I'm oppressed. even when that is true, even when that is objectively true, that you did not win the birth lottery and you were just born into a low socioeconomic condition, it turns out that even if that's the case, having an internal locus of control still makes you do better.

53:45Nir Eyal:That just believing I can do things, I can affect reality, I have agency, makes you better off. the only situation that doesn't make you better off to have an internal locus of control is when you judge other people. So we call this the fundamental attribution error that when I make a mistake, well, there's a good reason for it. But when other people screw up, they're assholes, right? The guy cuts me off in traffic. What a jerk. When I cut someone off in traffic, it's because I'm in a hurry. Like there's something very important here. So what we want to do is to have an internal locus of control for ourselves, but to give people the benefit of the doubt back to love is measured for the benefit of the doubt.

54:22Nir Eyal:We want to think that that other person has external circumstances that probably made them do what they're doing. So when someone cuts you off in traffic, just give them the benefit of the doubt. Don't get in your stupid road rage and start honking at them. And like, why, why create that suffering? Just tell yourself they probably are, you know, they have a, uh, uh, uh, an elderly parent that they're trying to take care of. They had their, their, their wife is giving birth. I I don't know. Is it true? Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. You will suffer less when you believe the thing that serves you rather than hurts you.

54:52Johnny:So what do you say to the skeptic listening who is like, well, where's the line between a belief and delusion and actually, you know, hurting yourself?

55:01Nir Eyal:Okay. So what are facts? Facts are objective truths. Okay. Facts don't care what you think. A fact is something that is true, whether you believe it or not. beliefs are not facts. Beliefs are convictions open to revision based on new evidence. Okay. So there's an element of evidence in the definition of beliefs. Now, the thing is that in life, we don't make decisions about the big things in life based on facts, because it's decisions about the future. Should I go into business with this person? Should I marry this person? Should I move to this city? Should I work at this place? It's not based on facts.

55:36Nir Eyal:Where's the facts? Where's the objective truth. It's all about belief. It's about a conviction based on the evidence you have available and that evidence can change. Now, when people say, yeah, but how do I just pick my beliefs? Are you telling me to lie to myself? Are you telling me to gaslight myself? I can't just change what I believe about my sister, my brother, my parents, my whatever. You can't just change that. Well, the fact of the matter is you're already lying to yourself. You think you're not gaslighting yourself? No, you're already gaslighting yourself. You just picked the wrong belief to gaslight yourself with.

56:10Nir Eyal:You're already committed to the limiting beliefs that tell you that that person is the way they are, that I am the way I am, and nothing's going to change it. You just picked the wrong belief, buddy. They're all lies. You don't see reality clearly. I'll demonstrate for you. You know, the brain is processing 11 million bits of information per second. Right now, your brain is taking in 11 million bits of information. That's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. It's a tremendous amount of information. The light entering your eyeballs, the sound of my voice entering your ears, the ambient temperature of the room.

56:43Nir Eyal:Your brain is aware of all this stuff. It's processing it in the background because your conscious awareness is only processing, is only able to process 50 bits of information, 50 bits, okay? So that's about the equivalent of one sentence per second versus war and peace twice per second. So your brain can't process all that information. It has to filter what it's letting in through that tiny pinhole of attention. So your brain is not seeing reality as it is. And what filters what gets in and what doesn't get in is your beliefs. And this is why we see what we expect to see. We feel what we believe we're going to feel.

57:18Nir Eyal:And we do what we believe we are capable of doing, all based on this tiny filter of attention. So you don't see reality clearly. You never did.

57:25Johnny:Now, how is this different than manifesting, which is all the rage?

57:29Nir Eyal:Yeah. OK, so manifesting my least favorite self-help technique out there. This is a big problem because it turns out that the self-help industry took something that is true and made it not only false, but actively harmful. They took visualizing. OK, we know that people visualize quite successfully. For example, athletes, you know, we know that athletes use visualization exercises to up their game, but they do it very, very differently. So there was an experiment done by Gabrielle Otogen where she asked people to visualize success. Okay, this is what manifesting is all about. If I visualize abundance, if I visualize the money in my bank account, if I visualize my beach body, if I visualize my Lamborghini, if I visualize my future spouse, the universe will vibrate and so and so in the quantum whatever.

58:24Nir Eyal:drivers will bring it to me. There's the biggest problem with that is that as soon as it doesn't happen, whose fault is it? Well, you must have not been vibrating correctly. Pay me a bunch of money and I'll teach you how to vibrate correctly. It's a scam. That's the biggest problem. The second biggest problem is that, and this is really distressing, is that in this study, when people were visualizing the future outcomes, their blood pressure dropped. They became more relaxed. And their brains were interpreting the sensation of visualizing what they wanted as having already achieved it. And when they followed up with the people who were doing these visualization exercises, it turns out they became less likely to reach those goals, to get those outcomes, because they became less likely to do the work it takes to get them.

59:14Nir Eyal:So for example, they had students visualize getting an A on the exam. And the students who did the visualization about getting the A on the exam studied less and of course got worse grades. Because they thought, well, I've been manifesting. It's going to come to me. It doesn't work that way. What's the right way to do this? It's not positive thinking. It's not just blind optimism. It's not manifesting. It's called mental contrasting. And this has been very well studied. Mental contrasting is when we contrast the thing we want with the obstacle in our way. That's how athletes do it. An athlete who visualizes doesn't just say, oh, I want the trophy.

59:50Nir Eyal:I want the gold medal. I want the championship. They visualize, all right, when I'm on offense and defense is coming at me, when I'm skiing down the mountain and then I got to go down this trail, they're preparing themselves for what their body will do in that situation. What we have to do is to prevent, is to, is to practice what we will do psychologically in that situation. Because where manifesting falls down, where it doesn't work is as soon as it gets hard, people quit because they're not equipped with the mental wherewithal to know how to separate the pain from the suffering. suffering. So I really want this thing.

1:00:25Nir Eyal:I really want a beach body, but I really want that chocolate cake. And I don't know how to deal with the pain of wanting. So I eat the chocolate cake. So I'm not going to lose weight as opposed to what you're, what you should do. Like, this is how I lost weight. I used to be clinically obese. How I lost weight was that not just overweight, by the way, actually obese was that I wasn't thinking, Oh, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to visualize, I'm going to think positively. And then I'm going to, you know, get skinny. No, I would visualize what am I going to do when I'm at a party and someone offers me a piece of chocolate cake or an extra drink with a bunch of calories?

1:00:57Nir Eyal:What am I going to say? That's not going to be comfortable to say, no, thanks. I don't want the chocolate cake you just made for me. Right. I'm going to, what am I going to say? What am I going to do? How am I going to feel? How am I going to get through that discomfort? That's the right way to, to, to use visualization exercises.

1:01:10Johnny:Many in our audience consider themselves high performers and a lot of their beliefs currently have probably led to some success. What have you found is a belief that might be harming high performers that they're carrying right now. And maybe they aren't even realizing the cost.

1:01:25Nir Eyal:You know, what's interesting is that I interviewed a lot of experts and people for this book. And I found that everybody has a limiting belief in some area of their life. So if you're a high performer in one area of your life, let's say you're doing amazingly well in business. What I find is that you have a limiting belief in another area of your life. Maybe it's about your relationships. Maybe it's about health and fitness. Maybe it's some area of your life where you feel like maybe it's spirituality, maybe it's something that you're neglecting in your life. So even if you're killing it in one area, you likely, if you're like most people, I don't know many people who have it all figured out in every area, you probably have a limiting belief in another area of your life.

1:02:02Nir Eyal:And so it's the same process, whether it's in business, whether it's in relationships, whether it's getting comfortable with ourselves, it's finding that area of your life where you keep getting stuck, where that problem persists time and time again. And then running those steps to do these turnarounds to try and identify those limiting beliefs and replace them with deliberating beliefs.

1:02:22Johnny:And recognize the pain management in that is substantial.

1:02:25Nir Eyal:That's the biggest thing.

1:02:27Johnny:In my experience coaching high performers near, I think one of the big things is that we often get rewarded in certain areas of our life for performance. Therefore, we double down on those areas. And really, it's usually the areas that we've been avoiding are the areas that have those limiting beliefs that we have to unpack and work our way through. I know for me at times, it's been some relationships that really matter to me as I've been working as an entrepreneur, growing the business that has led me to focus more on the business and avoid those relationships. But in actuality, as we saw in this episode, I have some limiting beliefs, even with my family.

1:03:02Nir Eyal:You know, what's interesting too, it's not just about the things I actively seek to change. Sometimes it's the things that change you whether you like it or not. Like chronic pain, for example. Chronic pain is a belief problem. It's not fake. It's real. Chronic pain is real. All pain is real. But it turns out that what causes chronic pain is what we call the fear-pain-fear loop. And this happened to me. I used to have really bad back pain. And every time I would feel a tweak in my back, the conventional advice is, okay, got to lay down. Don't move. Don't stress. Put a heat pack on it. No, no, you have to ice it.

1:03:40Nir Eyal:Just don't make sure it doesn't happen again because you may have a slipped disc and you don't want to cause more damage. Turns out that's not true. That actually human beings for 200 ,000 years, you know what kind of pain our ancestors had to suffer through? You're like, I had back pain. Are you kidding me? My ancestors, you know, a few hundred years ago, even the richest people in the world, you know, the kings and queens of France had abscesses and syphilis and parasites and all kinds of crap that was causing them tons of pain. And yet, how did they do the amazing things they did, right? How did they write the constitution and paint the Sistine Chapel and figure out Newtonian physics?

1:04:20Nir Eyal:They were in pain. Why? Because that was life. And so what they did was they harnessed the brain's natural ability to compartmentalize pain. Remember we talked about that pinhole of attention? Turns out you can select what that pinhole of attention is focusing on. And the way you do that is you learn to separate the fear from the pain. The fear causes the suffering and the suffering causes more pain. And so if we can do that, we can do it for all kinds of areas of our life.

1:04:49Johnny:I think that's a beautiful place to wrap. Thank you so much for joining us, Nir. Where can our audience find out more about this great book?

1:04:55Nir Eyal:Sure, thank you. Yeah, the book is called Beyond Belief. And if you go to my website, nearandfar.com, there's a belief change journal, a five-minute belief change journal that's absolutely free. I'll give you the link to put it the show notes as well.

1:05:08Johnny:Great. Thank you so much. Thank you.

1:05:18AJ Jacobs:This week's shout out comes from Chris. Well, I'll let Chris tell you himself. Take it away. Hey, everyone. My name is Chris Rafteri. I'm a financial advisor and I joined X Factor to build better relationships, really, with my friends at work and also with my family. And X Factor really helped me not just with the course material and listening to and reading about all the ways I could improve, but also in helping me implement all of these different teachings, giving me an outlet and a network to practice these things, to troubleshoot in a way a lot of situations I was going through, and really provide some real-world applications and have fun along the way too.

1:06:14AJ Jacobs:So the thing I'm looking forward to the most is continuing to develop. They say iron sharpens iron, and being able to work with the other guys in the group has really proved that. And I'm looking forward to continuing to, you know, build better relationships with the existing folks that I hold near and dear to me, but also meeting new people out there. So, you know, looking forward to hopefully meeting you guys in the future as you join the X Factor. So it's it's worth it. Thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure working with you, too. All right, if you have gotten value out of this or any of our other podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show.

1:07:00AJ Jacobs:It would mean the world to us and it helps others find the value that you have gotten. Go out there and have an epic week.

1:07:20AJ Jacobs:I gave it just a toy. And you sold the world. You sold the tragedy. Cause you had your taste. All black on the yesterday. Yeah, but I remember you. Oh, yeah. I remember you. In the last day. But I remember you. Akamai Cloud. GPUs for agentic AI. Bring AI inferencing closer to users everywhere. Get started at akamai.com slash GPU. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game long.

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