A Masterclass in Changing Your Limiting Beliefs - Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Chris. Great to be back.

Dude, 2019, episode 104 all the way to now.

I'm gonna take credit for all your success since then.

[laughs] It was, it was built-

Is that okay? Was I the lucky charm?

It w- it was built on a foundation of you and Indistractable, that's exactly correct.

[laughs]

Uh, new one, all about belief. Why is belief so important?

Okay, so beliefs, uh, turns out to be the lens with which we see the world, and I had no idea how profound this research that's been coming out over the past several years has on our day-to-day lives, how beliefs shape what we see, literally shape what we see. I can show the same exact image to two different people, and they will see completely different things. It's called the Koffka illusion. You can look at this piece of paper, and I can show you it to one person based on where they grew up and, and their priors, their beliefs, and they'll see circles. I can show it to somebody else based on where they grew up, they'll see rectangles. It's incredible. Uh, beliefs not only shape what you see, like not, not just figuratively, but they actually shape reality that you see. They shape what you feel, your internal state, and most importantly, they affect what you do. And so everything comes upstream from these beliefs, and so you better get these beliefs right if they're going to run your life.

What-- I think one of the challenges people have when they hear the word belief is it gets perilously close to Rhonda Byrne, "The Secret" manifestation. You know, you've come from a productivity background, same as me, uh, kind of hardcore, quite sterile almost in a way, very sort of-

Mm.

Uh, frameworks, rigid structures. Um, belief sounds very w- almost whimsical as-

Mm.

A topic to get into.

You know, that, that is a great point because, uh, there is a lot of bullshit out there. [laughs] And so part of what I wanted to do with this, uh, research that I've done over the past six years for "Beyond Belief" was to really separate what works and what doesn't. And a lot of it, frankly, I'll, I'll give that crowd some credit. A lot of it works, but not for the reasons they say it does.

[laughs]

[laughs] That, that like-

Yeah.

You know, I hate to burst anybody's bubble, but no, nothing is m- is, is vibrating and quantum whatevering, and like the universe really doesn't give a shit. [laughs] It is not, you know, the, the, the, all the, the manifesting stuff. It, it, it can work kind of, and, and I, I do dive into some research around how turns out positive thinking can have a very negative effect if you don't do it properly. Uh, so I kinda wanted to dispel some of those myths, and yet I've changed my mind a lot a- about a lot of stuff that I didn't used to do, and I used to kind of... You know, I'm, I'm very science-backed. You know, all my books have pages and pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. I have to see the study, not just it worked for me. But I need to see the peer-reviewed studies that show that it worked for others in a controlled study. Uh, and so there's, there's, there's a lot of mythology out there, even in the academic community, to be honest. There's a lot of studies that I look through that I thought were kind of, you know, gold standard studies, and you kind of dig into how they were done mythologic- methodologically, and you realize, ugh, they're kinda crappy studies too. So it was a lot of sorting through the, the, the wheat from the chaff to figure out what we can actually practically apply to our lives. The good news is there's a lot of unbelievable research that has come out over the past several years that just absolutely blew my mind. For example, one thing is that we now know that placebos work even when you know they're a placebo, which we didn't used to know before, right? We used to think that placebos had to have some kind of deception effect, right? That you had to t- you, you, you, both people, the, the person prescribing the medication in a double-blind control study, had to not know who was receiving the placebo, and the person, of course, receiving it couldn't know if it was a placebo. Turns out that's not true, that you can get amazing effects. Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard showed this with IBS patients. He gave people a, a, a, a pill bottle that said "placebos" on it. By the way, you can go on Amazon today and buy placebo pills with five-star reviews that say, "Amazing how fast-acting this placebo was." It's incredible.