1295: Nir Eyal | Why Your Beliefs Matter More Than Your Willpower

18:12Nir Eyal:It's more than the effect of exercise. And yet for all we talk about exercise, diet, and smoking, we never talk about positive views about aging. Now, why did this happen? It's not magic. It's not that they were vibrating at the quantum field vibration, whatever. No, it was that people who have positive views about aging behave differently, right? So somebody who has the view of aging involves inevitable decline, and that's a negative view of aging. Aging involves inevitable decline versus someone who says growth is possible at any age. Now, Jordan, which one of those is true? Aging involves inevitable decline or growth is possible.

18:49Nir Eyal:Both of them are true, actually. That's exactly right. So both are true. So beliefs are tools, not truths. The person who repeats themselves, oh, my achy back, oh, I'm having a senior moment, what are they going to do versus the person who says growth is possible at any age? The person who says growth is possible at any age, they go work in the garden, they go see their friends, they exercise a bit, they take walks, they do things that actually increase their lifespan. man, but that emanates from that positive belief.

19:18Jordan Harbinger:Honestly, I'm kind of excited to be old. You can get away with so much more when you're older. Anything you do is kind of amazing. Wow, look at you. You're going for a walk. You're like, yeah. In order for me to get that kind of reaction, I'd have to run a marathon. Oh, you ran an ultra marathon in the desert? Wow, that's pretty impressive. Meanwhile, you're 80 and it's like, oh, look, he's driving. There, he's driving.

19:39Nir Eyal:Yeah, you know, like what's amazing about this too is that the beliefs, it's not something that if you wait until you're that old to change your beliefs, we don't know, but it could be too late because this study was done where their beliefs were tracked when they were in their thirties. That's when they started tracking your beliefs at a young age around aging. That's when it's important to change them. So taking out these limiting beliefs, like why do we say to ourselves, I'm not a morning person or I'm a Sagittarius or, you know, whatever, like these labels that we attach to ourselves, they become our limits.

20:06Nir Eyal:They become these cages that we've designed for ourselves.

20:09Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, that's funny. There is a person that I know that they're often in a bad mood and they kind of joke about it, but really they're in a bad mood. They're just trying to play it off because it's more fun that way. And I'm always like, what's Tommy, what's the deal? I'm an Aries and today my horoscope said, you know, and it's like, oh God, not this crap. You know, you can just not read that and be in a good mood if you want to, right? It's all optional, man. But it's Part of his identity is I'm a grump. I'm a sassy grump. And it's just got to be kind of a miserable way to live. He's like a sassy, petty, grumpy guy.

20:43Jordan Harbinger:And it's like, ha ha, just joking. But it's also totally your personality most of the time. Yeah.

20:48Nir Eyal:And if he's happy and if he's flourishing that way, hey, who am I to tell him to change it? He is not. That's the thing. If you're not, why do we do this to ourselves? We do this to ourselves. I know why. because it turns out that our default is to revert to passivity. We used to have this theory in psychology called learned helplessness, Seligman and Meyer. And so we were all taught that, oh, you see, when people have hardships in their life, they learn to just give up. And so this explains a lot about why people are stuck in cycles of poverty, because if you try and you learn nothing works, you just default into passivity.

21:22Nir Eyal:Turns out a couple of years ago, didn't make any waves. Nobody really heard about it. But it turns out that Seligman and Meyer, these giants in the psychology research literature, changed their mind. They decided that the exact opposite was true, that when they actually looked at their research, and now they had research that they could update based on new technologies that we have, they were able to determine that from the data they collected that we don't learn helplessness. Helplessness is our default state, that we will always go back to, this has been safe for me in the past, so I'll continue to be safe with this limiting behavior in the future.

21:54Nir Eyal:What we have to learn is not hopelessness. What we have to learn is hope. That is actually what we have to teach. We have to teach ourselves agency constantly, or we will revert into passivity. And frankly, that's what most people do. They just revert into, well, this is the way I've always done it. My least favorite words in the English language are that's just how I am. Now you're in stasis. You're stuck. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. I'm a this, I'm a that. If you've decided, case closed. We're not changing nothing.

22:20Jordan Harbinger:Speaking of learned helplessness or hopelessness, Tell me about that wild rat experiment. I feel like the reverse of this particular process. Learn hopefulness.

22:29Nir Eyal:Yeah, so this study was done by Kurt Richter back in the 1950s. It's an amazing study where he took these rats, wild rats, and he put them into a cylinder of water. It's filled about halfway full with water. And he sat there and he timed, it's a pretty cruel experiment. You can't do something like this anymore, but the rats are already dead, so I can tell you all about it. He put the rats in a cylinder of water and he sat there and he timed how long the rats could swim for. Turns out a wild rat, if you put it in a cylinder of water, can swim for about 15 minutes. Okay, so 15 minutes of swimming before the rat gave up and died.

22:59Nir Eyal:Now, he knew this and he did another round of experiments. So now he took a new batch of wild rats, he put them in a cylinder of water, and he allowed them to start swimming. And he measured right before the 15-minute mark, right before he knew they were about to give up, he pulled his hand in, he pulled out the rat from the cylinder, dried it off, let the rat catch its breath and plunk back into the cylinder the rat went. And he did this a few times. He conditioned the rat to expect that salvation might be possible. And now he wanted to see would that intervention change how long the rat would swim for.

23:33Nir Eyal:You know, there's a trick. There's always going to be a trick here, right? In every psychology study, there's a surprising result if I'm going to share it with you. And so the rat went from 15 minutes. So most people think, Okay, maybe the rat swam double, 30 minutes, maybe four times longer, 60 minutes, which would be insane. If I could give you some kind of intervention that would increase your perseverance 4x, run the marathon for four times longer, work on that hard project four times longer, take that hard exam four times longer. Wow, that would be earth shattering if I could give you that kind of invention.

24:03Nir Eyal:But the rats didn't swim four times longer. They didn't swim from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. They went from 15 minutes to 60 hours. That's crazy. 60 hours. They became 240 times more persistent. Now, what had changed? Nothing in their body. They weren't better physically conditioned. They didn't suddenly, you know, gain strength in their bodies. The experiment didn't change. Nothing changed in the environment. Same experiment. We can't ask them what they believe, but the only variable left was that something must have changed in their minds. Some switch must have been flipped. And now what was already in them, they had the 60 hours in them the whole time, but something flipped in their brains once they knew, hey, I might be saved, that kept them going, that kept them motivated, that kept them persevering.

24:50Nir Eyal:And so that's what this is all about. When you understand the power of beliefs, and it's not just about positive thinking. In fact, there are very negative repercussions to positive thinking if you don't have the right beliefs, if you don't do it the right way. We could talk about that in a minute. But the point here is when you can unlock this motivation, wow, there's a whole nother world that you can find for yourself.

25:09Jordan Harbinger:Placebo works even when you know it's fake, which means your brain is powerful. Also, it means it's incredibly gullible. Now, let's put that gullibility to use. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. March includes International Women's Day, and it's had me thinking about how much women carry that most of us don't fully see. I look at my wife, Jen. She's the architect of fun in our house, birthday parties, little adventures, special outings that make life feel bright. She's also running the behind-the-scenes operations, schedules, school logistics, all the moving pieces that keep everything from falling apart.

25:40Jordan Harbinger:there's an invisible mental load that's basically always on. And because she makes it look effortless, it's easy to forget it still has weight. I think a lot of women operate like that, capable, organized, steady, while quietly carrying more than anyone realizes. Therapy can be a space where you don't have to hold everything together. You can talk through what you're carrying, set boundaries, find some balance. BetterHelp connects you with licensed therapists who follow a strict professional code of conduct. You take a short questionnaire. They match you based on your needs, and you can switch any time.

26:05Jordan Harbinger:with over 30 ,000 therapists, 6 million people served, and a 4.9 out of 5 rating from 1.7 million reviews. It's helped a whole lot of people. Your emotional well-being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy.

26:17Nir Eyal:Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash Jordan. That's better, H-E-L-P dot com slash Jordan.

26:23Jordan Harbinger:This episode is sponsored in part by Bombas. One of the goals this year and all year round is to stay comfy, and Bombas is leading that charge in my house. We love Bombas so much, it's all we wear. We even gift it to our family and our friends and our nanny. We're big fans of the grip socks so we don't slip around on our floors. Bombas just launched their new sports socks, which are amazing for whatever you're into, running, golf, hiking. We're planning to do more snowboarding this year, and these things are cushioned, sweat-wicking, and packed with techie features that make it feel like your feet are finally on your side.

26:51Jordan Harbinger:Around the house at night, I'm living in their Sunday slippers, which keep my feet cozy during those cold winter nights. And Bombas also has underwear and tees, buttery soft, breathable, the kind of base layers that ruin every other brand for you. Plus, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates an essential clothing item to somebody facing housing insecurity. One purchased, one donated. Over$150 million so far. Head over to Bombas.com slash Jordan and use code Jordan for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash Jordan. Code Jordan at checkout. Don't forget about our 6-Minute Networking course.

27:23Jordan Harbinger:I'm too lazy to shill it right now. I'm just tired. If I'm tired of it, you're tired of it. 6minutenetworking.com. Alright, back to Neerael. Obviously, we can't do this and nobody should, but imagine your boat sinks and you're treading water. Do you tread water longer if you see helicopters and airplanes looking for you in the sky? Or do you think, oh, they're so close. They're going to eventually see me down here. Look, that's the third plane I've seen in two days. You're just sitting there treading water trying to float on your back. I would be so curious about something like that. I hope I never have to find out that particular scenario firsthand.

27:56Jordan Harbinger:But it's crazy to me that that's an unbelievable increase in motivation to be able to do it. But it proves your earlier point, right? Our default state is learned helplessness. If they only swam for 15 minutes and then they were like, ah, screw it. The rats had been conditioned to humans. I thought, no, no, no. They always pull me out of this mess. They always pull me out of this mess. It's just a matter of time. That's so interesting. I love that one. I thought that was fascinating in the book. The good news is that beliefs can be learned, right? I mean, even rats can do it. All they had to do is be pulled out of the water.

28:24Jordan Harbinger:Was it one time before they learned, hey, this might happen again? It was a few times.

28:28Nir Eyal:It was a few times. Okay. And so this actually can relate to us. I didn't write the book for rats. I wrote it for me and I wrote it for my fellow humans. But essentially what we do is we have to condition ourselves to expect that difficulty, that everything worth having in life is on the other side of hard, right? You want to build a beautiful family? Well, it's going to be hard, right? Raising kids is not easy. You want to build a business? It's going to be hard. You want to get in shape? It's going to be hard. So the critical trait becomes, can you learn how to persevere through that difficulty?

28:56Nir Eyal:Or do you think it's pointless and you give up? And so what successful people are able to do is that they're able to believe something different about that difficulty. They're able to see it from a different perspective. And we can do this in every facet of our life.

29:10Jordan Harbinger:Knowing what to do and why isn't enough. Because if it were, we'd just all be successful at everything, but that's not the case. We always have to believe that something will happen or we just won't persist. Is that an accurate statement?

29:21Nir Eyal:Exactly. So when we think about motivation, most of us, you know, we think about it in the economic sense of, if I want this benefit, I have to do this behavior. It's a straight line. If I want to get paid, I got to do this job. I got to do my work function. So we've got behavior and we've got benefit, but there's something missing. If it was that easy, if all we had to do was do the behavior to get the benefit, we'd all have six pack abs and be multimillionaires because we all basically know what to do. Who doesn't know? If you don't know how to do something, you ask ChatGPT, you ask Google, you can find the answer to do pretty much anything and everything.

29:50Nir Eyal:But what we're missing is that motivation is not a straight line. Motivation is a triangle. That you have the behavior, you have the benefit, But then you have the belief as well. So for example, if I want the benefit, let's say I want that raise, I want that promotion at work. But if I don't believe that my boss has my best interests, what's that going to do to my motivation? I'm not going to be very motivated to work for that boss. Now, what about the behavior? Let's say I know what to do, but I don't believe in my ability to do it. Maybe I think I have imposter syndrome. I have whatever. There's no time in my day.

30:23Nir Eyal:Someone like me couldn't possibly do this. If I have those limiting beliefs about the behavior, I also won't persist. I'll lose motivation. So underlying the behavior and the benefit is the belief. You need all three.

30:35Jordan Harbinger:We can't always act on fact. I suppose belief is somewhere between total faith with nothing behind it versus there's facts where it's like the earth is round whether people like it or not. And then there's arguments of faith. I don't mean religious faith necessarily, but a lot of flat earthers will say... Things that don't require evidence. Yeah, and there's no evidence that the earth is flat other than your weird cognitive bias and lack of understanding of how your own perceptions work. So belief is what, somewhere between those two things?

31:03Nir Eyal:It's a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. So it's something that is changeable, as opposed to a carpenter uses a hammer and doesn't say, oh, this hammer, this is the one and only true tool. No, a carpenter says, okay, sometimes I use a hammer, sometimes I use a wrench, sometimes I use a saw. There are different tools for the job. But when it comes to our beliefs, oh, it worked for us in the past, so we're going to hold on to it forever and ever. And so most people never take out those limiting beliefs, look at them, see if they serve them or hurt them, and they just keep using them year after year.

31:34Nir Eyal:And then they wonder, why am I still stuck in the muck? Why does this relationship still suck? Why does it still annoy me? Why can I still not accomplish that goal? Why do I still have this New Year's resolution that's been there for years and years and years? It's because underlying all of that muck is always some kind of limiting belief that hasn't been examined.

31:51Jordan Harbinger:Beliefs, they don't necessarily have to be true, right? Because many times they are not.

31:57Nir Eyal:And they're in the future. How could they be true? Should I marry this person? Is that a fact? How do I know? It's based on the best possible evidence I have. Should I start this business? Should I move to this city? We don't know. It's based on a belief open to revision based on new evidence.

32:10Jordan Harbinger:There's a world in which having slightly but not too delusional beliefs is a good thing,

32:16Nir Eyal:right? I would argue we're actually all already delusional. Yeah, for sure. That's true. We're already gaslighting ourselves because the brain just cannot process all this information. So right now your brain is taking in 11 million bits of information. 11 million bits of information is the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. That's the information going into your brain right now. The light entering your eyeballs, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room, that information is being processed by your brain. But your conscious attention can only process about 50 bits of information.

32:50Nir Eyal:So 50 bits versus 11 million bits. So that means that only 0.0045 % of the information going into your brain is actually your view of reality. So you don't see reality. You see a simulation of reality that your brain is inventing every minute to predict what is going to happen next. There's just too much happening. So how does your brain come up with these predictions? How does it know what keyhole of attention to look through? It's done through your beliefs. And in fact, we barely can handle the information that we're processing. It's really impossible to try and think how other people see reality.

33:27Nir Eyal:And this is, of course, why we get into conflicts. It's because two people can see the exact same event, hear the same exact words being said, and interpret what just happened completely differently.

33:37Jordan Harbinger:What are some elements then of good beliefs, right? Beliefs that serve us. In fact, good and bad. Let's talk about good and bad. beliefs because I feel like there's clearly two categories here, some of which serve us and some of which don't. It's that whole liberating versus limiting beliefs.

33:53Nir Eyal:Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. Limiting belief is one that saps motivation. It makes you less likely to pursue whatever it is you're out there to go get. And it increases suffering. Whereas a liberating belief is one that increases motivation and decreases your suffering. But it also, what is an attribute of a good belief? It must be open to revision, right? It's not something that we say, oh, I found the perfect belief. That's all I'm going to ever believe for the rest of my life. What the research literature shows us is that we want what's called cognitive flexibility. We don't necessarily have to change our mind all the time.

34:24Nir Eyal:The smartest people, the people who do best in life are the ones who can look at a portfolio of perspectives. They can look at a variety of different viewpoints and then they can pick and choose. They're not glued onto just, this is the way things are. Maybe I can relay, to make this concrete, I want to relay a quick story of what happened with my mom. There was no better example of how this stuff has changed my life. This research has changed my life other than the relationships I've had with my family and people around me. I'm just so much better off now. I'll share a quick example. So a few years ago, my mom had her 75th birthday and I wanted to send her some flowers.

35:01Nir Eyal:I want to do a nice thing for her and send her some flowers. Problem was I was in Singapore and she was in central Florida where I grew up. And that wasn't easy to get flowers for her delivered, but I stayed up till one in the morning. I found the best florists. I called around I made sure that they were going to deliver on time And I went to bed that night And I said, alright Nir, good job You did a good job there She's going to love these flowers I woke up the next morning I called her up for her birthday And I said, hey mom, did you get the flowers I sent? Happy birthday She said, yes, I did get the flowers Thank you very much But just so you know They were half dead And I wouldn't order from that florist again And I said something to the effect of That's the last time I ever buy you flowers Ouch, dang.

35:42Nir Eyal:She was probably just telling you the flowers were dead. I don't know. I feel like I'd want to know. I know, right? Well, yeah, exactly. So it went over about as well as you'd expect. And then after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, hey, Nir, do you want to do a turnaround on that? To which I said something to the effect of, I don't want to do your hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo, touchy feely. I need to vent. What are you talking about? I'm not going to do this silly psychology stuff. Like you heard what she said. That was rude. And yes, okay, maybe I didn't respond perfectly appropriately, but clearly it was her fault.

36:11Nir Eyal:And I just was reacting to what she was doing. And I wanted to vent. But of course, at that point, I'd known enough of the research literature that shows that venting is actually not good for you. It doesn't help the situation. Venting does nothing more. It turns out that venting about somebody does nothing more than solidify this effigy that you've built about somebody because we don't see reality as it is. We don't see people as they are. We see our past beliefs about them. That's what we see in others. I have a lot of friends, this always disappoints me, but I have some friends who are super nice to me, are super nice to strangers, are super nice to those around them.

36:46Nir Eyal:And then you go to their house and they are just complete jerks to their family. Have you ever met these people? They're short with their children, they're mean with their spouse because they don't see the people closest to them in their life as they really are. They see the past history they've had with those people. They see their worst traits. They see their beliefs about them. So I had known that venting was not something I wanted to do. The literature is pretty clear that it's not a healthy behavioral pattern. So instead, I did this turnaround. Now, what is a turnaround? A turnaround is a technique that comes from the work of Byron Katie.

37:16Nir Eyal:And she did a beautiful job. I need to give her credit for creating what I'm about to share with you. I've adapted it a bit. And she essentially channeled Aristotle. So this is a very old technique. It's 2 ,500-year-old type of technique. And essentially what it does is it allows us to collect this portfolio of perspectives. So I took the belief that I came out of that conversation with my mom with was my mom is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay. Clearly that's what I believe. That's a fact in my mind. The first question that we pose to ourselves, is that belief true? Okay. Is that belief true?

37:50Nir Eyal:Obviously, Jordan, back me up here. My mother was, who does that? I just spent all this time buying you flowers. And the first thing you say is that the flowers weren't very good. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I just did something nice for you. you should say something nice back, right? Clearly, you are being too judgmental. Okay, next question. Number one is a stupid question. Let's do number two. Second question, is it absolutely true?

38:10Jordan Harbinger:Okay, absolutely. No, she could just be tactlessly telling you, hey, by the way, this florist dropped the ball, but I appreciate the flowers is what she should have said, but she didn't lead with that. So you felt, I don't know, 47 years of pent up grievance against the way she communicates came out in that particular response. I don't know.

38:29Nir Eyal:Could be, yeah. So the goal of that question is just to ask yourself, by the way, you can do this with everything. You can do this with any relationship, any belief that's holding you back, anything that you think I'm stuck in something. And it's because of this situation, it's because of this belief that I have that I think is a fact. Let's test if it's really a fact so that we don't have to change our minds. We're just creating that portfolio of perspective. So is it absolutely true that my mother is too judgmental? Based on that one comment? No, I can't really say that. Can't be right. Maybe there's a 1 % chance because absolute means always, never.

38:59Nir Eyal:Without exception, it's always that case. And there could be a 1 % chance that there was another factor at play that I didn't realize. Okay, fine. I'll give you that. Now, the third question. Who are you when you hold on to that belief? So when I held on to that belief that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I was short-tempered. I wasn't very nice. I said something I later regretted. So that belief, when I was honest with myself, wasn't really serving me. Now, the fourth question. who would you be without that belief? If I had a magic wand and I could suddenly tap my brain and dissolve that belief forever, I'd probably be better off, honestly.

39:38Nir Eyal:Like, I can't see how I could do that, but wouldn't that be nice? If I could magically get rid of that belief, I'd be more patient, I'd be more myself. I wouldn't be a 13-year-old and say something I later regretted. So in just four questions, I showed myself that one, this belief may not be true. something that I thought, absolutely, that's a fact. My mother's clearly being too judgmental, right? I showed myself that belief was actually not serving me, that it was causing me suffering, and that I'd be much better off without it. Okay, so now comes the next phase. The next phase is to do the turnaround.

40:10Nir Eyal:The turnaround asks us to consider something completely ridiculous. Not to convince ourselves of changing our mind, but the thing we're trying to do that's ridiculous is to ask ourselves, could the exact opposite be true? Could it be true if the exact opposite thing, so what's one example of a turnaround? My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. A turnaround could be my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be? You said something very smart. You said, you know, maybe she was just trying to give you some information. She was just making a statement of fact. The flowers were wilted.

40:41Nir Eyal:Maybe she was trying to help me not get scammed by this florist and not necessarily hurt me.

40:46Jordan Harbinger:What's funny is I can totally see myself saying the same thing. I can see my wife getting me a cake or something and be like, this cake was smashed. And she's like, you don't appreciate anything. and it's, no, no, I'm telling you, the cake was, why did I start with that? Why did I leave with that? They're telling you the cake came with a dent in it. It's not that I don't appreciate it, it's that these knuckleheads delivered it after they dropped it. I can totally see myself slipping into that position. That's, now we have two beliefs. I sympathize a little bit with your mom, I think.

41:11Nir Eyal:Yeah, you might be on her side of this argument. Let's do another turnaround. Another turnaround could be, I am too judgmental and hard to please. That's the opposite. How could that be true? I sat with that for a minute I realized, you know what, if I'm honest, I had rehearsed in my head that I wanted a very specific, profuse sign of gratitude from my mom. And when those exact words didn't come out of her mouth, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? I was being judgmental. Now there's a fourth turnaround. I am too judgmental and hard to please to myself. And that one actually stung the most and was the most true, it turns out.

41:50Nir Eyal:That really, because I had put so much effort into getting her the perfect flowers and it didn't work out, I took that to mean that was a sign of my own incompetence, that I had messed up, that I was somehow inferior, that I couldn't do this simple task correctly. And I was being judgmental towards myself. And this is what we call a misattribution of emotion. When we feel shitty about something that we've done, we look for the first person's face in front of us and that's who we're going to take it out on. And so I put that emotion on her and I blamed her for how I was feeling. So now, which one of those four beliefs is true?

42:23Nir Eyal:All of them, none of them, who cares? I'll tell you what, that first belief, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, only had one way out. The only way out was that she had to change so I could be happy. It's not gonna happen. No. Don't hold your breath. You're gonna suffocate. The other three beliefs I could do something with, now they were on my side of the net. I could change in order to make myself happy. So it's not about which is true. Let me prove to you. This is how most of our arguments go. No, I'm going to prove to you that I was right and you're wrong. Well, that doesn't get us anywhere.

42:56Nir Eyal:Versus how can I collect a portfolio of perspectives that now reduce my suffering? And so what I've learned to do, and I do this technique probably 10 times a day in different situations. Whenever I get annoyed, whenever I find myself suffering, this is a very quick practice that I've done now. It takes me now maybe a minute because now it's on autopilot. I can quickly run through this. And it has brought me so much more peace and so much more motivation to get through the hard tasks and hard situations in life. That's just one example of how you can use these beliefs to find your liberating beliefs.

43:27Jordan Harbinger:It's interesting. It's almost like our judgments of others are just judgments of ourselves a lot of the time. I mean, it sounds like when you turn that around, it's got to be quite uncomfortable to do this to yourself. I don't know if I'm interested.

43:39Nir Eyal:Yeah, no, this is exactly right. I wish I could figure out how to help people through this, because I've been through this very much myself, that your brain has this immunity to change. If you've got a splinter in your finger, your biological immune system is going to send white blood cells and it's going to fight that invader. Any kind of bacteria that gets in there is going to get inflamed so that it can protect your body from these foreign particles. Your brain does the same thing. Your brain will trick you into believing nonsense, into believing stupidity, into believing things that are actively harming you.

44:11Nir Eyal:And you won't let yourself change because you will be cocksure that it's a fact. and it will do everything it can to try and protect you from having to change your mind. Because again, we default into passivity. Our passive state is helplessness. We want to stay static. And so it's only by shoving yourself out of the mud. You're like, if your foot got stuck in mud, it's hard, you gotta pull it out, right? Ooh, it takes some effort. And that's that emotional effort that I think is very difficult for us to do, but it has huge payoffs. And look, 99 % of people, they're gonna hear this message. They're gonna be like, man, I don't wanna do that.

44:42Nir Eyal:I'm good thinking my mom's a jerk and this person traumatized me and I have this and I do that and they're going to get stuck in the mud. That's cool. If that's good for you, stay stuck. But if you want more, if you know you're capable of better, trust me, take out those limiting beliefs. The goal is not to change your mind. The goal is to collect the portfolio of perspectives and then choose, hey, let me try this on for a week. How does the world look when I look through the world through this set of lenses versus this other pair of glasses? Sometimes it's going to look better. Sometimes it's going to look sharper.

45:10Nir Eyal:Sometimes it's going to look fuzzier, but I can choose the right lenses that I can look at reality through so that it serves me rather than hurts me.

45:17Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, it's interesting how beliefs filter how we see and communicate with other people and you can just choose a different filter. I think most people, myself included, hadn't really thought about that. Me neither.

45:29Nir Eyal:Took me six years of writing this to realize it.

45:32Jordan Harbinger:Wait, you can just choose a different way of looking at things? Like that's pretty darn cool. I would love to separate this from regular old garden variety positive thinking. I mean, you touched a little bit on this earlier where it's like you have to change your behavior. You can't just sort of will something into existence with beliefs. And it reminds me, there used to be this guy who was really trendy, and I refused to interview him because something didn't sit right with me, and now it's obvious why. I'm going to name check him because who cares? He's a bullshitter. His name's like Joe Dispenza, and he's like, you could heal your mind, quantum something, whatever.

46:04Jordan Harbinger:I healed my spine with beliefs. And it's like, no, you didn't. You're full of shit, and you're a grifter.

46:09Nir Eyal:He is full of shit. I talk about him in a chapter of the book where I talk about the negative side of positive thinking. By the way, he's just an example. This type of bullshit has been around for a very long time about the manifesting and the vibrating at the universe at the quantum level. And if you vibrate correctly and if you send out positive thoughts and good things will happen to you. And what exactly happens when you get sick? Does that mean you didn't vibrate hard enough? Of course you didn't. Now you have to buy my upgraded program so I can teach you how to vibrate properly.

46:37Jordan Harbinger:There's a whole industry built on sprinkling real neuroscience on top of absolute nonsense. It's kind of like putting a lab coat on a fortune cookie. Sounds smart. Still empty calories. Fortunately, our sponsors deal in reality. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Progressive. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it, so your dollar goes a long way.

47:11Jordan Harbinger:Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. This episode is also sponsored by The Perfect Gene. There's a big difference between these jeans technically fit, and I look good in these. Most denim makes you choose, comfort or style. If they're comfortable, they look sloppy. If they look sharp, they feel like medieval armor. The Perfect Gene nails it with a clean, tailored look, but they stretch like performance gear so you're not adjusting all day. You're not having to suck it in.

47:39Jordan Harbinger:You're not avoiding stairs. And here's what I like. They're built for real bodies. Six different fits. Waist size is 26 to 50. Lengths up to 38. Over 5 ,000 fit combinations. So whether you're lean, lifting, dad bod in progress, or thick thigh king, or blessed with a little extra height, you don't have to force yourself into some weird fashion template. They start at$79.99, which compared to the$150 I've spent in the past on premium jeans that later betrayed me, it's solid value. Highly recommend The Perfect Gene. Our listeners get 15 % off their first order plus free shipping at theperfectgene.nyc or Google The Perfect Gene and use code Jordan15 for 15 % off.

48:14Jordan Harbinger:If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. That is, take a moment, support our amazing sponsors. They make this show possible. And they're all searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Nir Eyal. Okay, so the kids in Africa who are starving, they just didn't manifest hard enough because they're not vibrating at the right frequency.

48:45Jordan Harbinger:This whole country, 97 % of the people who are living on a dollar a day, it's just their vibration issues. It's like, I'm not one of those people who usually says stuff like this, but I got to say, that is some suburban, white-ass, white people shit. Like, it really is. maybe stretch this out beyond Saratoga, California, where you live and apply this to people who are really going through some actual stuff, not somebody who lost a golf tournament last weekend or something. And maybe, just maybe, this person had spina bifida because of bad prenatal care, not because their parents, something, something, vibration, the universe, whatever.

49:19Jordan Harbinger:That's what just bugs me about the secret and the law of attraction. It's okay. So everybody who's not doing well, somehow this is just their fault because metaphysics, some nonsense thing.

49:30Nir Eyal:So not only is it ridiculous, it actually backfires. So Gabrielle Otogen did this wonderful research where she had people do these visualizations. They did the manifesting, they did the vision board. They were thinking about the outcomes of what they wanted. Standard gobbledygook in this space. And as they were doing this, she connected them to these blood pressure monitors and track their heart rate and their blood pressure. And what she found was that when people were visualizing the outcomes of their efforts, the things they were dreaming of, the things that they wanted to manifest, they became more relaxed physiologically.

50:03Nir Eyal:And when she followed up with them, they were less likely to do the things that would get them to those goals. They actually were less likely to achieve those goals. Why? Because the brain was receiving the message, ah, I already got it. I can see it in my mind's eye. It's already here. And they became less likely. So students who had visualized doing really well on a test studied less when they did this visualization. Now, but you say, okay, I hear a lot. Yeah, but look, athletes visualize. But they're doing something different.

50:34Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, exactly.

50:35Nir Eyal:What are they doing differently? Athletes don't visualize outcomes. They're not visualizing, oh, I'm going to stand on the podium with my shiny new medal. No, an athlete, when they visualize the obstacles in their way. So if I'm on offense and defense is coming at me, what am I going to do? If I'm skiing down the mountain and I take a wrong turn, what's going to happen? They're visualizing what they will do when difficulty rears its inevitable head. And that's what we forget. And so this is called mental contrasting. What you want to do, the right way to visualize is to prepare yourself for the negative sensations that are going to come.

51:09Nir Eyal:So here's what I did when I started losing weight. I didn't visualize myself with a beach body and six pack abs. That doesn't work. What does work is I would rehearse to myself, okay, when I go to that party and someone offers me a drink too much, or someone asks if I want a piece of chocolate cake, and I feel uncomfortable around saying no, what am I going to say? How do I get through that discomfort? You're having a mental rehearsal of the exposure to that difficulty. Okay. You're imagining that worst case scenario is going to happen. By the way, this is what I do when I'm on stage. I'm a professional public speaker.

51:40Nir Eyal:I do these talks all the time. I rehearse what happens when I mess up and I look for a different viewpoint point. I look for a perspective that actually serves me. So the other day I was on stage and the day before I had this awful cold, right? Like snot running down. It was terrible. It was really disgusting. And I couldn't do anything about that, right? Out of my control. What I would have done before I did this line of research, it's freaked out. Okay. I'm not prepared for this. I can't do it. It's going to be, I would have catastrophized the whole thing. Rather, I decided to collect a portfolio of perspectives.

52:10Nir Eyal:One of which included, I'm glad I'm sick. I'm glad it's an extra challenge because now I know I can do it. If I can rock this talk, hey, I've proven to myself this is no longer a barrier. It's nothing to get scared of. So by having that mental rehearsal of what is it going to be like when it's difficult, that's the right way to visualize. That's the right way to change your beliefs to serve you.

52:29Jordan Harbinger:I think this is worth highlighting that whole idea that fantasy, which is really what that is, saps our energy and takes focus away from our goals because that really is one of the core false promises of this magical thinking industry. They twist real science and they blend in their nonsense Because if you talk to the guy we mentioned before, Joe Dispenza, he just spouts buzzwords, right? He's just quantum this, quantum that. If you hear somebody talking about quantum anything and they are not a physicist, you can safely tune out anything else they say is going to be complete, utter bullcrap.

53:00Nir Eyal:Even the physicists, when they talk about quantum, don't really understand what they're talking about. But at least they will tell you they don't understand. They will tell you it's a big mystery. Exactly.

53:08Jordan Harbinger:So the whole idea that you start high and crash, man, that's a real nail in the coffin of this magical thinking industry. Anytime you go to a seminar and they say something like, visualize yourself in the car that you want. What does it smell like? I don't go to these anymore. But at that point, 10 years ago when I did, I would just get up and leave. Because that's how you know they read a couple of self-help books and, I don't know, threw it into a PowerPoint. And here we are. It's really, I'm quite shocked at how the whole magical thinking industry took off. But I guess it's comforting to people to just think, you don't have to do anything.

53:39Jordan Harbinger:You just have to believe hard. Which is somehow also quite American. I mean, there's a lot of people making decisions based on essentially just faith in our society. Do you find that to be an American thing or is it a human thing?

53:51Nir Eyal:I think we like easy answers, although I do think that America tends to lead the way. And I'll tell you something. I can come on your show and say this stuff. I wouldn't say this on most people's shows because it would be too controversial. But I think we're cut from the same cloth of being very skeptical, not cynical. I don't think either of us are cynical, but we're both pretty skeptical. I think when you say like, OK, what does America lead the way at? But we lead the way in looking for easy solutions. And I think, unfortunately, I think we will see that a lot of psychiatry these days has gone the way of pseudoscience as well.

54:22Nir Eyal:And particularly when it comes to these kind of exclusionary diagnoses, these diagnoses that when we can't see it on a blood test, we can't see it on an x-ray, we can't see it in any way, shape or form, we will medicalize, we will over diagnose. There's a wonderful quote. I can't remember who said it. He said, one day medical science will advance to the point where we're all sick. And that is exactly what's happening. There's no check and balance on this industry of continuing to diagnose. I don't want people to think that I'm anti-psychiatry, quite the opposite. There's a lot of benefit to it, but we need to look at these diagnoses as maps.

55:00Nir Eyal:When someone says I have ADHD, which by the way, I have been diagnosed with ADHD. Yeah, same. Yeah. So what I used to do, I don't know if this happened to you when I was first diagnosed and before I started along this line of research, whenever I would have the smallest distraction, whenever I would go off track, there's my ADHD.

55:14Jordan Harbinger:I'm ADHD. Yeah, exactly.

55:15Nir Eyal:I'm ADHD. I've got this stupid thing. That's what's causing this. And so what would happen in that second? I would be thinking about my diagnosis rather than the thing I was trying to concentrate on. And people do this all the time, right? I'm not a morning person. I'm having a senior moment, I'm this, I'm that. As soon as you do that, as soon as your diagnosis becomes your identity, it focuses your attention away from the things that you have agency over. And so the right way to look at these diagnoses and to not look for the easy answers, because there's what's called a Rumpelstiltskin effect.

55:45Nir Eyal:Remember the story of the princess and when she names the little gnome guy, she remembers Rumpelstiltskin's name. That's when the spell is broken. She has power over him. And so that's what we do psychologically. We love to name our troubles. When we have a nice little package, oh, that's why I've been struggling. I'm a so-and-so, I'm a this and that. That gives us a lot of comfort. Now, oftentimes that is super, super helpful, especially when we're so lucky to live in an age where you could say, oh, you have this condition here. Here's the medication that will cure you. The problem is there's a lot of things that can't be cured through a pill.

56:19Nir Eyal:So for example, with my ADHD, I had to figure out how to use the diagnosis as a map. Here's something that I am struggling with. What can I do about that to overcome it so that I no longer feel these symptoms? The problem is a lot of people, they become the map. The diagnosis becomes who they are. And now they've built this cage of their own creation. So their labels have become their limits.

56:44Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, this is interesting. I don't take medication for my ADHD because at this point, it's like a personality trait, right? So I have it and I can just structure my life around it. Luckily, I'm my own boss, right? If I don't want to work on something, I just move to something else, cancel something. But I can see that one is a little bit of a position of privilege. I just don't like the idea of taking amphetamine for my entire life so that I can maybe focus better on things that I don't want to focus on in the first place.

57:12Nir Eyal:I don't know. And look, I want to be very clear because I know I'm going to get shit for this. I'm not saying that ADHD is not real. I'm pretty sure it's real in the extreme cases. I do think it's way overdiagnosed. Yes. I think if you want a diagnosis for ADHD, it's not that hard. It's pretty easy to get. But there are some cases. There's clearly something going on. I'm not anti-medication. What I am worried about is, does this belief serve us? Let's say I'm completely full of crap. Discount everything I've just said. Does it serve you to believe that this is a chronic condition, that I can't do things that other people can do?

57:47Nir Eyal:Does it serve us? What does that do to your motivation? What does that do to your suffering around finding a new answer, about finding behavioral solutions? The quick solution is take a pill. There are dozens and dozens of behavioral interventions, skills you can learn, scheduling your time, you know, something, things like emotion regulation. These are not sophisticated techniques. But when we foreclose in our identity and believe, oh, this is who I am, it only gives us a very, very narrow path. What I'm advocating for is to consider these other perspectives, to ask ourselves, I don't know for a fact.

58:19Nir Eyal:The test you took for ADHD that I took for ADHD, it's a subjective test. How often do you get distracted? Sometimes, never, often. Compared to who? I've never been inside your brain. Feels like it's a lot to me, but what is a lot? I don't know. So if you have interventions that could change how often you feel those things, you wouldn't score on that test. You wouldn't have that diagnosis. So it's just a change of belief. It's just a change of perspective to see which one serves us best.

58:45Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, I like this. I'll be honest. My diagnosis for ADHD, the first one anyway, the doctor goes, you are tapping your foot a lot. How often do you get distracted? Yeah, all the time. All right. Try these amphetamines, I guess. Now they take it way more seriously. back then, the reason I even went in the first place was my girlfriend goes, you are ADHD. And I go, no, I'm not. And she goes, I am. And all my brothers are. Trust me, you are too. And I was like, no, I'm not. She goes, take this pill and tell me how you feel. So I took one of her Adderalls and I was like, whoa, this is how normal people feel all the time.

59:17Jordan Harbinger:What is going on here? I just did all my homework and paid attention in class and went home and cleaned my room. And I was like, this is unbelievable. So I got a prescription for that and made it through law school. And then I was like, you know what? Maybe this isn't good for me because I forget to eat for 12 hours and I get a headache. Maybe this isn't good for me because my resting heart rate is 120 BPM. They're amphetamines, man. They're not good for your body. So I just decided this is unsustainable. I can't take this for 50 years. I just can't do this to myself. So yeah, I think now maybe there's a test that's actually more substantial for it.

59:49Jordan Harbinger:I literally told my doctor, I took my girlfriend's ADHD medication and it worked really well. And he's like, well, you are tapping your foot a lot. Here's a prescription. I was just like, that's it. One of the doctors at the University Health Services back in the University of Michigan, he followed me out of there and was like, please don't take this prescription. It can kill you. And that's when I was like, I'm done with this. He said, look, this killed a kid in Canada. He was like 17. He had a heart attack. Please do not just keep taking this. And he wrote me the prescription, but he like begged me not to take it.

1:00:19Jordan Harbinger:And so I've never had a doctor look like they care that much. Maybe I should look into this, this whole please don't take it thing. So that was my last bottle of Adderall.

1:00:27Nir Eyal:Yeah, I think we've become smarter around it. It's because we've seen the consequences that there are studies that show that children who took Adderall in younger age become actually shorter. They actually can see this physiological effect of shorter later in life. There's a lot of now questioning of how good is it to medicate this way. Psychologically, too, what does it teach someone that, hey, there are no behavioral interventions that I could do right now. I just jump straight for the pill, especially when you're child. What does that do to our psyche? What does that do to our self-perception, our image of what we're capable of that I can't concentrate without a pill?

1:00:57Nir Eyal:And now we're starting to see that actually performance doesn't improve. Your perception of performance improves with Adderall, but your actual performance on cognitive tests, turns out many studies are showing isn't actually any better. I did not know that. That's crazy to me. That's good to know. Partially because of the placebo effect. When we give people a placebo and we tell them this is a concentration pill, they do better and they feel better because placebos are incredibly effective. Doesn't mean they're fake. It's that you feel what you expect to feel.

1:01:24Jordan Harbinger:It reminds me of when you tell people drinking wine, this is bougie, fancy wine. It comes from this region of France. And they're like, oh, it's delicious. And then you're like, just kidding. It's two buck chuck from Trader Joe's. And then they're like, I knew it, I think. And you're like, dude, you're a sommelier. You're fired.

1:01:40Nir Eyal:What's fascinating about that study. So that study was that at Harvard, where they gave them a cheap bottle of wine, an expensive bottle of wine, and they asked them about what they thought about these two different wines, which turned out to be the same wine, they were just told they were different prices, is that they were monitoring inside their brain what was happening to the blood flow in their brain. So they could actually see what areas of the brain became more active when they received the cheap wine versus the expensive wine. So the kicker is that when they received what they thought was the more expensive wine, even though it was the same wine, they didn't just say it tasted better.

1:02:11Nir Eyal:Their brains became active as if it were better. If they were enjoying it more, so they weren't lying. They weren't making it up. Their brain was actually expecting it to taste better and then delivered the signals to their conscious attention that, wow, this wine is better, even though it's the same wine.

1:02:29Jordan Harbinger:I was talking with a guy who makes supplements. He goes, can you try this? And I go, dude, I gotta be honest with you. This tastes terrible. It's sour. It's bitter. it's everything I would not want to eat. And he's like, okay. And then he gave me another version that was sweetened with stevia, like way too much stevia. And I go, now it's bitter and disgusting and way too sweet. And he goes, okay. I won't tell you what other ingredients are in there. Can you take it for a few days and tell me which one you think is better? Not just taste, but works better. And I was like, I can't really tell, but unfortunately I think it's the one that was more disgusting, works better.

1:03:03Jordan Harbinger:And he goes, great, same ingredients. I just wanted to see if people thought that this supplement that's supposed to do something would be perceived as more effective if it tasted like absolute crap as opposed to just absolutely bitter. And I was like, yeah, it's more palatable when it's too sweet because it doesn't make me like want to spit it out, but it's actually an objectively worst or subjectively, I suppose, worse taste. And he's like, perfect. That's the one they went to market with. And I was like, oh, interesting.

1:03:28Nir Eyal:Yeah, we know that big pills are more effective than smaller pills. We know that injections are more effective than pills. We know that sham surgeries where they'll open you up, do nothing, and then just suture you up, actually are more effective than that and can be incredibly effective. These sham surgeries, when they do these placebo surgeries, they can be incredibly effective at curing people's subjective symptoms. Now, what's important to realize is that there's a difference between sickness and illness. Sickness and illness are two different things. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the brain.

1:04:01Nir Eyal:That sickness is when you have a broken bone, cancer. Placebos suck at that. Placebos do nothing to cure any of that stuff. What they are very good at is illness. Illness is in the mind. Pain is in the mind. Where else could pain be? Pain isn't in here. It isn't here. It isn't in your back. Pain, all pain is in the brain. All pain is real. And also all pain is in the mind. And so what we've learned through these powers of belief, the power of attention, anticipation, agency, is that when you can control these dials and we all have it within us, you can do amazing things. Like for example, this guy, Daniel Gissler, who has an operation for 55 minutes where scapel is cutting into his skin, where screws are being pulled from his bone.

1:04:45Nir Eyal:And I've seen the video, Jordan. I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see the video. And he's doing all of this with zero sedation. No general anesthesia, no local anesthesia, nothing. He's completely conscious and awake. And it turns out the crazy thing is that it's not that crazy. Tens of thousands of people have done what's called hypnosedation. They do it in Switzerland. France, Italy. It's not that uncommon. And they do this by training their power of the mind, that keyhole of attention we talked about earlier, to focus on just a few of those data points. So as the brain is getting in 11 million bits of information, they're able to shift that keyhole of attention.

1:05:19Nir Eyal:It sounds crazy, but I've seen the tapes. They're actually able to do this. I'm not advocating for anyone to do this. I'm not going to do this. I'm telling you this because if a human being has this power, right, the same with those rats who kept swimming for 60 hours, If humans can do this, and this is documented, there's tens of thousands of people who have done these operations. We not only don't hear them screaming in pain, we can actually see in their blood pressure, in their heart rate, their vital signs, totally normal. They just stay completely calm. If humans can do that, what are we all capable of?

1:05:50Nir Eyal:This is the 60 hours that those rats kept swimming. We can manage our pain. Oh, you had a little fight. Oh, the exercise is difficult. Oh, that business isn't going so well. It's just pain management. All of these problems we have in our life are about managing the discomfort. And so if our brain has that power, we can deploy it in ways that we never expected.

1:06:09Jordan Harbinger:That's such a cool thing. It's the closest thing to a superpower is being able to do something like that. I wonder, can those people who can go through a surgery without sedation, can they also run an ultra marathon? Is there an overlap between these? Or is it just, yeah, I'm a normal Joe and I just get surgery with no anesthetic. If I could get a root canal with no anesthetic or a surgery with no anesthetic and be totally fine with it, I feel like I'd want to deploy that in some other area other than a party trick that I pull at the hospital.

1:06:35Nir Eyal:We do see lots of documented cases of people who can do that. Like we talked about David Goggins before. David Goggins can do something with his brain that the rest of us can't do. Or at least we haven't learned how to do. We know that there are these monks in Tibet that practice Jitomo where they can actually elevate their body temperature. And this has been studied. Again, I need to see the studies. These guys are able to elevate their body temperature to a fever state, something that we can only do when we get sick because we think, oh, when we have a fever, think about what you do. When you get a fever, you go to the pharmacy and you say, give me a fever reducer.

1:07:08Nir Eyal:Why do we have fevers? Fevers are not caused by the pathogen. It's not caused by the virus. It's not caused by the bacteria. Fevers are caused by your body. Your body creates an inhabitable environment for that bacteria to try and kill those foreign invaders. That's your immune system. So we all have the ability to create a fever. If you ever had a fever. You have that power. But these folks have figured out how to tap into their conscious mind to create that sensation. And they're not running around. They're just sitting there meditating. So we have these hidden powers that we just don't believe we have access to.

1:07:41Nir Eyal:But in fact, humans can demonstrate we can do it means we actually all have access to it.

1:07:45Jordan Harbinger:Speaking of magical thinking, how about something more reliable than a moon charged crystal in a Pinterest quote? We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by ZocDoc. Calling around, getting put on hold, we're not taking new patients, we don't accept that insurance. Then you finally find somebody and the next available appointment is in like three months. At that point, you're back to doom-scrolling symptoms and just hoping for the best. That's why I like ZocDoc. ZocDoc is a free app and website that lets you find and book high-quality in-network doctors so you can find someone you love.

1:08:14Jordan Harbinger:You can book in-network appointments with more than 150 ,000 providers across all 50 states. You need a dentist, you need a derm, you got primary care, eye doctor, they got over 200 plus specialties. And you can search by specialty or by symptoms so you're not guessing which kind of doctor you even need. You can choose in-person, video visit, read thousands of verified patient reviews, see real-time availability, then click and book instantly. No phone tag, no waiting around. And appointments through ZocDoc happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours and sometimes even same day. So if you've been putting off that checkup, this is the easiest way to just handle it.

1:08:45Jordan Harbinger:Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to ZocDoc.com slash Jordan to find and instantly book a doctor you love today.

1:08:53Nir Eyal:That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash Jordan. ZocDoc dot com slash Jordan. Thanks, ZocDoc, for sponsoring this message.

1:09:01Jordan Harbinger:This episode is sponsored in part by The Defender. Most of us like to think we're adventurous, but real life is usually school runs, errands, maybe a weekend hike if we're lucky. That's why I like The Defender. It fits both versions of you. The everyday driver and the let's get out of town version. Defender is engineered for exploration. It's got that tough, purposeful look because it's built with robust materials and a rigid body design that's made to handle real-world challenges. Inside, it's comfortable and functional. Lots of usable storage, plenty of room, and the kind of cabin you actually want to spend time in.

1:09:30Jordan Harbinger:There's a whole Defender family. The two-door Defender 90, the Defender 110, and the Defender 130, which seats up to eight. So whether it's you and a buddy heading for the trail or the whole family plus gear, there's a setup that works. The tech is what dials you in. 3D surround cameras with clear sight ground view so you can see beneath the vehicle and spot obstacles. Clear sight rear view keeps your view clear even when the cargo area is packed. Driver assist features make driving and parking easier. And the PVPro infotainment system gives you customizable, easy-to-use displays. If you're ready to bring a little more adventure into your day-to-day, the Defender is ready too.

1:10:01Jordan Harbinger:The Defender event is on now. Explore enhanced offers at LandRoverUSA.com. Don't forget about our newsletter, WeeBitWiser. It is specific, actionable. You can apply it right away. It's a two-minute read every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a gem from the show, makes it a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Nir Eyal. I've talked to some people who can do similar things, and a lot of them have trauma as a child. And I feel like a lot of this whole, like, I can put pain in a different compartment.

1:10:33Jordan Harbinger:It comes from being forced to endure a lot of pain, unfortunately, at an early age. I think David Goggins is pretty open about this. I think he was like a horribly abused kid. And it's like, is that a coincidence that you can do this as a result of that? I don't know. I'm not so sure it's a coincidence.

1:10:48Nir Eyal:This is one of those things that the perspective of history gives you a new understanding. Where did placebo science come from? Where did it first start? It started on the battlefields of World War I, where soldiers would bring to the medic. They would drag their buddies to the medic and say, Medic, medic, you got to help my buddy. My buddy's been shot. My buddy's been shot. and the medic would turn to the soldier and say, soldier, your arm is blown off. And the soldier would look down and say, oh my God, I'm missing my arm. Because the brain is able to decompartmentalize for 200 ,000 years. Humans didn't have the kind of pain-free existence we have today.

1:11:24Nir Eyal:We live a very special life that we are not in constant pain. The kings of France had abscesses and cavities and parasites and viruses, all kinds of oozing pustules all over their bodies for their whole life. How did they function? How did anything get done? Because they didn't feel the suffering that we do. Whereas if we have a tiny little back pain, oh my God, now I got chronic pain. Now I need all kinds of interventions because we don't have that skill anymore. Thankfully, thank God, I don't want to go back to a time machine to that age. But people have always been able to compartmentalize pain.

1:12:01Nir Eyal:It's only because we don't experience it these days that we have lost that skill.

1:12:05Jordan Harbinger:So this reminds me of like when you read old literature, it's like, oh, what happened? He had something in his belly and the doctor prescribed arsenic pills. And it's like, hey, well, and how did he die? He drank mercury and arsenic. And it's like, whoa, my God, why did he do that? Oh, he wanted to get rid of this parasite. Did it work? No, but he did die. Yeah, so it worked. He died also, though, unfortunately. All those old medical interventions. And yeah, you always think like what happened before dentistry when you had a toothache? And the answer was you had a really bad couple of weeks.

1:12:33Nir Eyal:Really bad. That's right. The people were always in these states of pain. And there's some crazy stories around US presidents. Thomas Jefferson died on 4th of July. And that was considered, wow, what a coincidence. And then it was John Adams after that that also died on the 4th of July. And then there was another third American president that also died on the 4th of July. Three cases are well-documented. There's also documented cases of Chinese women and Jewish people who also have significant days in the calendar when they're more likely to die. They will prolong their life to die on significant dates.

1:13:04Nir Eyal:So it works both ways, that the powers of belief, again, none of this is magic. I am not a woo-woo type of person. I need to see the documentation. I need to see the evidence. And there's a lot of crappy studies out there that are not well run. But there are quite a few studies that show that the brain has way more power than we give it credit for.

1:13:21Jordan Harbinger:I've done episodes on pain, one with Rachel Zoffnist, which is extremely popular, episode 661. And I forget the word she uses, but it's basically not just physical. It's also mental slash mostly mental. it's this holistic way to treat pain. And people who have chronic pain, so they'll have like fibromyalgia, which is, look, I'm not trying to belittle anyone's disorder or like say that a disorder doesn't exist. I definitely believe it does. But to me and others, fibromyalgia, it's almost like a diagnosis you get when the doctor goes, I don't know, I guess it's that.

1:13:51Nir Eyal:And so your pain is real. You're not dismissing it. That's what they call it. They call it an exclusionary diagnosis when we can't figure out what's causing the symptoms. Same with chronic pain, by the way. So chronic pain is defined as pain that persists six months after any kind of physical damage. We can't find any physical damage. And yet you still have it six months later because the brain, I should say, should learn to tune down that pain. Why does chronic pain persist? Why does fibromyalgia persist, the symptoms of it? Which by the way, the illness accounts for 80 % of healthcare spending.

1:14:19Nir Eyal:Only 20 % of our healthcare spending is actual sickness. 80 % is to treat illness. It's to treat the symptoms of those maladies. So why does the brain do this? It's called the fear-pain-fear cycle. that when I have fear that something is going to hurt me, I focus more attention on it. That keyhole of attention starts narrowing on those signals, right? Because pain is just another signal. Pain is not suffering. Those are two separate things. Pain is a sensation. It's your interpretation of that signal that makes it into suffering. So this is what happened to me when I had back pain, that if I had a little twinge in my back, oh, I'm getting older.

1:14:56Nir Eyal:So this is just the beginning of something terrible. I better ice it. I better heat it. I better lay, better elevate it. And what if it doesn't go away? and is it going to last forever? And oh, it's only going to get worse. And I would psych myself up with this constant fear to focus my attention on the pain, which magnifies it, made the pain worse. And then my brain would remember that and the cycle would continue again and again. So pain reprocessing therapy, which is exactly what Dr. Loftus talks about, it's about reversing that cycle. It's about telling your brain, I'm safe. Pain is just a signal.

1:15:24Nir Eyal:And so what I started doing after I learned pain reprocessing therapy is to do the exact motion that caused the pain in the first place. So I used to get pain a lot when I sat down in a chair. That's where I would get my back pain. And before it would freak me out and it'd be terrible and I'd have to lay down for the rest of the day. Now, whenever I feel that tinge of pain, I do the same movement 10 times because I'm teaching my brain pain is just a signal, just data. There's nothing wrong here. Another thing I do is that it's gonna take time. Part of the curse of having instant relief all the time is that when instant relief doesn't come, so you try some kind of treatment, you ice it, you take a pill, you do this, and the relief doesn't come instantly.

1:16:00Nir Eyal:Now that starts to create more fear. What if that treatment doesn't work? Now I'm going to be stuck with this forever. And of course, we know that the fear perpetuates the pain and the pain perpetuates the fear.

1:16:10Jordan Harbinger:You said in the book something that I assume is a common refrain, which is pills don't teach skills. Not that medication doesn't work, but you need skills and medication to regain agency when it comes to something like pain. And it dovetails nicely with this idea of identity foreclosure that you touched on earlier in the show, which is labeling people limits their abilities. If you say, oh, I'm just ADD, I can't do that. Or I have this condition, I can't do that. Or my son or daughter has this condition, she can't do that. It's that dumb self-help quote, like whether you think you can or you can't, you're right.

1:16:43Jordan Harbinger:That's one of those kind of things that, of course, that people say to make things unlimited. This sort of is the inverse of that. But it's a good idea generally not to make trauma or some kind of condition the center of your entire identity.

1:16:55Nir Eyal:That's exactly right. Right. Unfortunately, we see this all too much, I think, with trauma. You said trauma. I think trauma therapy is going through a second, kind of like pain a few years ago. Now we're really reassessing pain. It used to be that pain was considered another vital sign. They took your blood pressure, they took your heart rate, they took your temperature, and they said, how much pain are you in? What did that create? By the way, they don't do this anymore. They used to have these charts at every clinic. How much pain are you in? Rate how much pain? Tell me all the time. The smiley face.

1:17:22Nir Eyal:Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The smiley faces. That's right. And they don't do that anymore because what we were doing was hyper fixating on the pain that was causing more pain. And so we're doing something, we're starting to find something similar when it comes to trauma-focused therapy. That trauma-focused therapy, constantly reliving the source of this trauma and bringing it out, turns out doesn't help everybody. That's to be expected. No treatment can help everybody. But also it turns out that our memories are highly fallible. I was telling a friend of mine about this work that I've been doing this research around beliefs.

1:17:52Nir Eyal:And he says, you know what? That reminds me of something that happened in my life. This is my friend, Chris. He says, you know, I have not had the ability to cry for my entire adult life. And this would really hurt my relationships. I'd get into a relationship with a girl I'd like a lot and we fall in love. And it would invariably, two or three times it would happen that we would get in these big fights because I couldn't cry. We would have an emotional moment and I couldn't reciprocate. I couldn't cry. And the reason I couldn't cry was because when I was a child, I went to the funeral of my cousin.

1:18:21Nir Eyal:And I remember there being so much sadness that everybody was so distraught about my cousin passing away that I decided right there and then that I would never cry again. And ever since I was eight years old, I have not cried once in my adult life. Until I told my sister that this was the reason that I couldn't hold my romantic relationships. And she turned to me and said, hey, Chris, this was his older sister. He said, Chris, I was at that funeral and you weren't. You stayed home with the babysitter. You never went to that funeral. Turns out he had made up this story from somewhere he didn't mean to.

1:18:57Nir Eyal:He believed it was a fact. He believed it was a fact, but it wasn't a fact. It was just a belief. And he had chosen to hold onto it all these years and never actually looked back at the fact that memories are incredibly fallible. Look at the work of Elizabeth Loftus, how she implants memories of balloon ride that people never took. Not only will they talk about how fun the balloon ride was, they'll talk about how the wind was going through their hairs, and they remember the outfit they wore, and they'll have all these vivid details for something that never happened. And so we do this all the time, and that every time we recall a memory, we are reliving that memory and rewriting that memory based on our current mood, based on what's happening in our lives.

1:19:36Jordan Harbinger:Man, this is interesting. I know we're running out of time. I'd love to talk a little bit about the prayer stuff, because I'm essentially an atheist. I have to qualify this with, I'm not one of the atheists who's like, people who are religious are stupid and should be mocked. I'm not that kind of atheist. I'm just an atheist who's like, eh, whatever, not for me. I wasn't raised with it. You have a different take on it. And I'd love to hear the science of prayer. And I know a lot of my listeners are people of faith, and I think they'll be especially interested in this.

1:20:02Nir Eyal:Yeah, so this is something I definitely changed my mind about. I used to pray when I was very young. When I was six years old, my family had come to America and been scammed out of basically every penny they had by an unscrupulous American who saw my parents barely spoke English and he stole everything they had basically. And they went into business together and he scammed them. Anyway, I remember my parents had terrible fights. They almost got a divorce. We almost had to go leave the country because they didn't have any money. And that's when I used to pray. And then as I got older, I thought, who am I talking to?

1:20:33Nir Eyal:Nobody's listening. I became agnostic, atheist. And for years and years and years, I just, I never prayed. It didn't talk to me. And then as I was doing this research around beliefs, I couldn't avoid all the research showing how powerful prayer is. And I thought that was something that just would never be for me because I thought, well, if I don't have faith, how can I pray? Despite the fact that prayer has been shown, that it shows that people who pray live longer, they're happier, they have better relationships, they make more money, they contribute more to the community. All these good things happen for people who pray.

1:21:04Nir Eyal:I thought, well, that's just not for me because I don't connect to a particular faith tradition. And then I came across this study that blew my mind. And in this study, they asked participants to do this standard pain tolerance test that we have, that basically what you do is you ask people to put their hands in a container of very cold water. So super cold water. And we want to test how long you can deal with that cold temperature before you yank your hand out. And in these studies, they look at your face and they measure how many times you grimace and complain. And that's how they assess basically how much pain you're tolerating.

1:21:36Nir Eyal:They had these three groups. One was a control condition. One was a group of people who had a faith tradition and prayed. And another one was people who did not have a faith tradition, who they taught how to pray. And they said, instead of using the word God, use anything that's meaningful to you. So Mother Nature, the sum of all forces, universe, whatever is meaningful to you, but we want you to follow this prayer practice. And they found that when they brought them back in and determined how long they could last in this pain tolerance test, that not only did the people who had a faith tradition and prayed last way longer than the control group, the people who didn't have a faith tradition but prayed also had that increased pain tolerance.

1:22:17Nir Eyal:So the very act of prayer seems to have this amazing placebo response. It seems to do something to us that allows us to tolerate pain longer. It's probably the fact that we are doing exactly what we talked about earlier. You're rehearsing in your mind the pain you're going through. So when people pray, they're thinking about their problems. They're thinking about the things that they're challenged by and they're gaining meaning from some kind of higher being from some higher power to help them get through that circumstance, right? They have a mechanism to deal with that discomfort, but they're imagining they're doing kind of the mental contrasting we talked about earlier to problem solve their way through that discomfort.

1:22:53Nir Eyal:So I took that research and I thought, wow, that's really cool, but how do I pray without faith? So what did I do? This sounds like a setup for a joke, but this really happened. I went to a rabbi, an imam, a priest, a monk, and a swami walk into a bar. I went to all these five religious practices, and it wasn't a scientific survey. I just went to five religious leaders, and I asked them all the same question. The question was, how do I pray even when I have doubts about God, even when I'm not certain about God? And I took away these five practices that anyone can do, including people who are questioning, Even if maybe you don't believe at all in a supernatural power, which I don't believe in a supernatural power.

1:23:31Nir Eyal:Maybe you have some faith tradition. Fantastic. If that benefits you, wonderful. The worst category to be in, turns out, are people who are spiritual but not religious, which is actually the biggest religious community today. Today, we call them nuns, N-O-N-E, right? Not N-U-N, not the Catholic nuns, N-O-N-E. This is actually the largest religious community in America are people who have no faith. And it turns out that people who have no faith tradition and call themselves spiritual but not religious, they have higher incidences of phobia, they have higher rates of anxiety, and higher rates of depression.

1:24:02Nir Eyal:So that's actually the worst of all worlds. And so what I discovered for myself is that I can pray even without the certainty in the supernatural. I still get the benefits. I've used these prayer practices in my life. And why not? It doesn't cost me anything. It improves my well-being. I feel calmer. I feel more at peace. And it's wonderful. So that's something I've changed my mind on. That's interesting. Why is it that spiritual but not religious people have it worse? Do we know? Yeah, we think it's because they gave up many of these practices that turns out, hey, what do you know? For thousands of years, people have been doing them, and there must be some kind of psychological benefit.

1:24:38Nir Eyal:For example, connecting with community. So if you don't have some kind of faith tradition, you don't have that place to go to, like a church, a synagogue, a mosque, where you know that if someone's sick, it's your job to take care of them. and if you're sick, they're going to come take care of you. You're kind of left all on your own. So that's one. That they don't have these regular practices. They don't have the rituals in their life that remind them of connecting to something bigger. They don't have those necessarily, those practices because they kind of have to make them up on their own. So what I try to do was to give everyone, whether you're secular or religious, these tenets that I learned from these five great faiths that anyone can adopt.

1:25:13Nir Eyal:For example, from Judaism, I took away what the rabbi told me was a verse from the Bible where the Israelites receive the Ten Commandments and they receive them and they don't ask, hey, is this true? They say, which means we will do and we will hear. So the doing comes first. And the rabbi was funny. I asked, I said, rabbi, how does one pray even when you have doubts about God? He like looks at his fingers like, ah, so there's this omnipotent, omniscient force that is the creator of everything and you have no doubts. Is that right? No doubts at all. He's everybody doubts. It's all right. So you doubt a little bit more than maybe others.

1:25:52Nir Eyal:We all doubt. Doubt is healthy. So he instilled this practice of doing the ritual, doing the practices. You don't have to have certainty about anything. And in fact, what I'm advocating for is for people to go back to their religious traditions, to incorporate that in their life. There's so many benefits to it. And also, these religious institutions need to stop asking you for a purity test. Nobody's asking the Pope if he believes everything in the Bible. We shouldn't ask people when they come to a church, do you believe every single thing? We lose out when we try and hold this standard. That's what I used to do.

1:26:24Nir Eyal:I can't step a foot in a religious institution unless I know it's a fact. Therefore, it's not for me. I was missing out.

1:26:30Jordan Harbinger:That's so interesting. Man, the book has even more social media effects of belief. Social media, I'm convinced that there's social contagion for a lot of things, not just shopping or trends. I'm treading lightly here, but I think a lot of things we're seeing today that some people have strong beliefs or opinions about are maybe caused in part by social contagion. There's a relatively innocuous example of the fainting epidemic. I'd love to talk about that. And then there's the shrinking dicks, which we can maybe end on as well. These are the lighthearted examples because I really think a lot of eating disorders and stuff like that, you can probably find a social contagion element in part caused by social media.

1:27:10Jordan Harbinger:That stuff's dark though, and I'd rather, I think maybe a doctor should handle that. But let's talk about something a little bit lighter, like the fainting epidemic and the shrinking dicks. I like saying shrinking dicks. I think the people who believe that their beliefs are, they think they're the independent thinkers. Those are the people that are in some ways even more susceptible to social contagion.

1:27:29Nir Eyal:Yeah, that's right. Because they're not able to let in those other perspectives, that you have to be able to articulate those other points of view in order to see the validity in them. And then when you do that, you're also seeing how your view could also be incorrect. And these social contagious effects are fascinating. There was an amazing case in Portugal where one night, these hundreds of girls between the age of 12 and I think it was 16 or 15 started flooding hospital emergency rooms. Like all of a sudden, all these girls were getting sick, but they were only in a very specific age range.

1:28:03Nir Eyal:And they all came down with the same condition. They all had these stomach cramps and they were coming into the ERs and nobody would figure out why. Like how could a virus only affect girls of this age? Or was it food poisoning? Nobody knew what it was. Turns out there was an episode of a soap opera where a character on that show had got some kind of weird, rare disease. And she was particularly that age. Everyone who watched that show who was in that age, not everyone, a lot of these girls showed these symptoms as well. We know that there's a similar phenomenon when medical school students go to school for the first year and they hear about all these diseases.

1:28:34Nir Eyal:They're convinced they have all of them. There is this effect. There is a social contagious effect. It makes many, many examples. Of course, the shrinking dicks, which comes out every few years. There's an epidemic where people are convinced that somebody in the community that they think is a witch is stealing their dicks. And this is a very old practice. This belief has been around all over. Now it's confined to parts of Africa, but it used to be in parts of Europe as well. We have documentation of these type of epidemics, fainting spells. It turns out that's exactly what can happen is that your limiting beliefs can actually be contagious.

1:29:04Nir Eyal:And of course, the phenomenon we see today that you mentioned on social media, where this self-diagnosis epidemic, that it's bad enough that psychiatry is feeding us with this, in many cases, over-medicalization of different phenomenon. It's not that you're nervous. No, you have an anxiety disorder. You have a social disorder. Everything is diagnosed. That's not bad enough. Now we have people who are creating out of whole cloth diagnosis that don't exist. Imposter syndrome. That's not a syndrome. That's not a thing. It's a limiting belief. You just lobbed it onto yourself because you think it helps explain.

1:29:36Nir Eyal:It's that Rumpelstiltskin effect. But for many of us, it's not helpful. It becomes a limitation.

1:29:41Jordan Harbinger:It's a pleasure to talk to you. Super interesting. The book, there was a whole lot of stuff we didn't cover from agency and benefits of agency, the internal external locus of control, the pain stuff you go into a little bit more anxiety you get into. There's just a whole lot, including how brands leverage some of this. We didn't even have time to get into that with the whole business aspect of this, which I thought was also quite interesting. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. And I know that a lot of people are going to hopefully be rethinking some of their limiting and negative beliefs based on what we talked about today.

1:30:12Nir Eyal:Thanks, Jordan. I appreciate it. It was fun.

1:30:15Jordan Harbinger:You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a pain psychologist that helps people manage chronic pain when all else has failed. None of us are going to escape pain. Pain is part of being human. All of us at some point, if we haven't already, are going to experience pain. Seems about time we understood it, knew how it worked, and knew what to do about it. So I am what's called a pain psychologist, which no one has ever heard of. People say, oh, well, you must treat emotional pain. The answer to that is no. Pain is always both physical and emotional. That's what neuroscience says.

1:30:49Jordan Harbinger:And in fact, what we know is that negative emotions like stress and anxiety or depression or anger or frustration turn up pain volume in the brain. We think and are trained that pain lives in the body, like in your back or in your knee. It is of course true that things may be going wrong in your back or in your knee, but that isn't where pain lives. Pain lives in the brain. Pain does not always indicate danger. When you have chronic pain and your brain has become sensitive, small bits of non-dangerous input from the body are being interpreted incorrectly as dangerous. You've seen that car alarm.

1:31:34Jordan Harbinger:You're looking out your window and that car, the lights are flashing and the horn is beeping and you're like, bruh, no one's breaking in. You're safe. The glass isn't even broken. That's a brain on chronic pain. So it's just so important for people with pain to know that part of what's happening for them is that their brain has become extra sensitive and it is alarming when it doesn't need to. And it can be hacked. Guess what you and I are doing today? To hear more from Dr. Rachel Zoffness about how pain works in the body and brain, check out episode 661 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Beliefs don't have to be true.

1:32:17Jordan Harbinger:They have to serve you. That's the takeaway. You don't need fantasy. You don't need certainty. You don't need to pretend you can bend the universe with your thoughts. You need beliefs that increase agency, encourage persistence, expand opportunity instead of filtering it out and survive contact with reality. Because here's the thing, if you believe nothing works, you won't try long enough to succeed. And if you believe everything is magic, you'll crash when reality shows up. Belief lives in the middle. And if you build a portfolio of flexible, useful beliefs, you don't just feel better. You see more, you attempt more, you endure more, and that's where the results happen.

1:32:52Jordan Harbinger:So question your beliefs, upgrade the ones that shrink. Keep the ones that build agency. And remember, even expectation can change outcomes. It's not metaphysics. It's psychology. All things near IL will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all searchable and clickable at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well. That's over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. and the show is created in association with Podcast One.

1:33:23Jordan Harbinger:My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in psychology, the science of belief, or just doing better, maybe reframing some of their beliefs, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

1:33:49Jordan Harbinger:And we'll see you next time.

1:34:19Jordan Harbinger:with decades of firsthand experience, so you're getting smart analysis from somebody who's been inside the system. You get straightforward context to help you understand what's happening and why it matters. Follow the President's Daily Brief wherever you get your podcasts and stay ahead of the curve.

1:34:37Jordan Harbinger:Thank you for calling the Bombas Comfort Line. Bombas make socks, slippers, tees, and underwear made with the highest quality materials. Press one for comfort, two for style, three for donation. You chose style. Bombas is styles for whatever you enjoy. You can run in Bombas, lounge in Bombas, dress them up, dress them down, but always give back in Bombas. Because with every item purchased, another is donated. Bombas, comfort worth calling for. Go to bombas.com slash audio and use code audio for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com and use code audio.