#130 How To Stay Focused, Beat Distraction, and Get Things Done | Nir Eyal

Summary

BigDeal Podcast #130: How To Stay Focused, Beat Distraction, and Get Things Done | Nir Eyal

Host: Codie Sanchez
Guest: Nir Eyal
Date: March 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this revealing episode, Codie Sanchez sits down with bestselling author and behavioral design expert Nir Eyal to dig into the heart of focus, distraction, and the beliefs that silently shape our actions and outcomes. Eyal unveils powerful, science-backed techniques to become “indistractable,” change limiting beliefs, harness discomfort for growth, and build habits that last. Through stories, studies, and practical tactics, the conversation challenges long-held assumptions about willpower, motivation, attention, and what it really means to take charge of your own mind in today’s hyper-distracting world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. You Don’t See Reality—You See Your Beliefs

• Illusions and Perception:
  • Nir opens with a striking optical illusion to show how our brain interprets reality based on prior beliefs—not just direct sensory data.
    • Quote – Nir (00:30): “Your eyes are lying to you. You do not see reality... You can change what you see and ultimately what you do.”
• Marathon Metaphor:
  • Belief—more than objective reality—dictates how far we can go. Those who believe they can, persist.
  • Quote – Nir (01:45): “Who are you going to bet on, the person who says, ‘I cannot finish this marathon’ versus the person who says, ‘I might be able to’? They persist because they try.”

2. Learned Helplessness vs. Learned Hope

• Default Setting:
  • We don’t “learn” helplessness; we are born helpless and must learn hope.
  • Curt Richter’s rats: just a few ‘rescues’ transformed rats from drowning in 15 minutes to swimming for 60 hours, simply by changing their “belief” about rescue.
  • Quote – Nir (04:57): “What changed? Same experiment, same body. We think the only factor left was something changed in their mind.”

3. Persistence, Adaptability & the Power of Hope

• The most successful people aren’t those who fail the least, but those who persist and adapt the most—failure is a prerequisite for growth.

4. Discomfort, Motivation, and Pain Management

• Discomfort Drives Behavior:
  • Motivation is not the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain; all behavior is an escape from discomfort (desire, worry, boredom, pain).
  • Quote – Nir (09:30): “Time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It’s all about managing discomfort.”
• Hypnosis Story:
  • Daniel Gisler endures surgery through self-hypnosis: If the mind can bypass the pain of surgery, what else is possible?

5. Relationships: Perceptions, Not Problems

• Perception Problems:
  • Quote – Nir (11:28): “You don’t have relationship problems. You have perception problems.”
  • Difference between physiological emotions and psychological feelings—context/interpretation matters.
• Practical Tip: Take the other person’s perspective—and actively “steel man” (argue for) their side in disagreements (see also [13:33])
  • Quote – Nir (13:33): “Have a good faith effort to steel man her argument... nine times out of 10, that’s actually what the argument’s about.”

6. Training Your Brain for Luck & Opportunity

• Attention to Luck:
  • You can “train” your brain to spot opportunities (luck surface area) by gratitude, talking to strangers, making new connections, and embracing failure as part of the process.
  • Quote – Nir (16:25): “That’s absolutely what the research shows… The lucky people finished the task in about 11 seconds because they saw the opportunity that others missed.”
• Belief Mantras:
  • Family traditions and personal mantras (“everything good happens to us”) rewire the brain to see and act upon positives.

7. The Science and Power of Prayer, Even Without Faith

• Prayer increases pain tolerance—regardless of religious belief; beliefs are “tools, not truths.”
  • Quote – Nir (22:42): “Beliefs are tools, not truths. I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me.”

8. The 10-Minute Rule and Overcoming Distraction

• The Technique:
  • Allow yourself to give in to any distraction—but not immediately. Wait 10 minutes (“I’ll check it in 10 minutes”), and surf the urge.
    • Quote – Nir (25:48): “The 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, but not right now… Your job during those 10 minutes is to surf the urge.”
• Taming Internal Triggers:
  • Most distractions (90%) are to escape internal discomfort, not due to external triggers (dings, rings).

9. Entrepreneurial Alertness: Daily Habits for Opportunity

• Expand ‘Luck Surface Area’:
  1. Stretch beyond your comfort zone (talk to strangers, try new things)
  2. Practice gratitude (thank-you notes, small gestures)
  3. Learn to relish failure (each failure brings you closer to success)
• Quote – Nir (29:30): “If I told you... all you have to do is fail five more times… would you then say, I don’t want to do those failures anymore? Of course not. Let’s fail quick—so I can get to the sixth success.”

10. Limiting Beliefs vs. Liberating Beliefs

• We often gaslight ourselves with limiting beliefs (“I’m not a morning person”, “I have ADHD”). These stories begin as maps but should not become our identities.
• Quote – Nir (36:56): “You’re already gaslighting yourself—you’re just lying to yourself with a limiting belief. So you could choose a different belief. Try it on like a pair of glasses.”

11. Agency, Locus of Control, and Opportunity

• Internal vs. External Locus of Control:
  • Internal locus—belief that you shape your outcomes—correlates with more success and better well-being, even for those with “objectively” harder circumstances.

12. Belief Shapes Biology and Longevity

• E.g., Positive views of aging correlate with living 7.5 years longer; even more than effects of not smoking, eating right, or exercising.
• “Your beliefs become your biology.”
  • Quote – Nir (42:34): “Your labels become your limits, and even more so, your beliefs become your biology.”

13. Challenging Media and Distraction—Why Indistractibles Win

• Media Monetization:
  • Both traditional and social media seek your attention because “if it bleeds, it leads.” Negative headlines, colors, and threats grab our attention because of evolutionary negativity bias.
  • Quote – Nir (38:35): “There will be two types of people in the world—those who are distracted, and those who are indistractable, and the indistractable will win.”

14. The Surprising Truth About Willpower

• Willpower isn’t a depleting resource—unless you believe it is.
  • Quote – Nir (58:59): “There’s one group of people who really do run out of willpower. Those... who believe that willpower is a limited resource.”

15. Hedonic Adaptation & Maintaining Joy

• Hedonic adaptation: As circumstances improve, we adapt and want more—leading to perpetual dissatisfaction unless we practice active gratitude.

16. Practical Tactics, Rituals, and Mantras

• Precommitment Devices:
  • Ulysses Pact: Add friction to mindless behaviors—e.g., set your WiFi to shut off at bedtime to reclaim intimacy.
  • Quote – Nir (64:44): “We bought this $5 outlet timer… Every night, the Internet router shuts off. Now, there’s effort [to turn it back on], so I have to ask: Is it worth it?”
• Uncovering Limiting Beliefs:
  • Identify negative patterns (“I can’t do this”), write them down, turn them around, and gather evidence for their opposite.
• Disconnecting Pain from Suffering:
  • In pain (physical or emotional)? Reinterpret the signals and create empowering mantras:
    • Quote – Nir (56:53): “My mantra is, ‘This is what it feels like to get better.’ Just remind—oh, it's painful? Good. That means I’m getting better.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On perception:
  • “We don’t see reality as it is. We see reality as we are.” — Nir (02:11)
• On luck & optimism:
  • “Pessimists sound smart and optimists make all the money.” — Codie (17:58)
• On internal narratives:
  • “When you have that senior moment... are you thinking about what you just forgot? No, you’re thinking about the label you’ve attached to yourself. In this way, your labels become your limits.” — Nir (42:34)
• On willpower:
  • “Willpower is not a resource; it’s a feeling. Sometimes we have more, sometimes less. But it’s only limited for people who believe it is.” — Nir (59:05)
• On liberating beliefs:
  • “Choose beliefs that supply motivation or ease suffering. Try them on. You’re already wearing limiting beliefs you didn’t choose.” — Nir (37:38)
• On seeing opportunity:
  • “Successful entrepreneurs have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the hundred dollar bills all over the street.” — Nir (00:30)
• On identity and suffering:
  • “Some people find their identity is the suffering. And I’m not here to change anybody.” — Nir (36:56)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Optical Illusion & Perception: 00:30 – 01:28, 12:07 – 12:24, 68:18 – 70:53
• Beliefs, Hope, and the Rat Experiment: 02:22 – 07:40
• Pain vs. Suffering (Hypnosis Story): 07:55 – 10:50
• Relationships & Perspective Reframe: 10:50 – 15:17
• Training for Luck, Luck Studies: 16:02 – 19:43, 29:30 – 32:18
• Mantras and Power of Prayer: 19:29 – 23:27
• 10 Minute Rule & Taming Distraction: 25:48 – 28:59
• Practical Focus Habits & Systems: 29:08 – 32:31
• Memory & Personal Stories: 32:31 – 35:02
• Challenging Limiting Beliefs: 35:14 – 37:39
• Willpower as a Belief: 57:38 – 59:27
• Precommitment Device/Intimacy Time: 64:44 – 66:57
• Surgeon's Son Riddle (Seeing Reality): 68:18 – 70:53

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Actionable Takeaways

• Try the 10-Minute Rule for distractions: Promise yourself the indulgence, but delay for 10 minutes and observe the urge.
• Identify Your Limiting Beliefs: Write down beliefs that hold you back; literally “try on” the opposite and gather evidence for it.
• Expand Luck Surface Area: Connect with people outside your routine and practice proactive gratitude.
• Adopt Empowering Mantras: Use phrases like “This is what it feels like to get better” when facing difficulty.
• Precommitment to Intimacy/Focus: Add barriers to digital distractions—timers, limits, or removing devices from key environments.
• Practice Intellectual Humility: Assume your current point of view could be wrong—deliberately steel man (best version of) opposing arguments.
• Remember: Your beliefs are shaping your biology, success, and happiness—be ruthless about which ones you let grow.

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This episode is a mind-expanding masterclass for anyone ready to challenge their assumptions, upgrade their focus, and rewire their future—one belief at a time.

Transcript

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[Nir Eyal]

Let me show you. This will blow your mind. Which square looks darker? A Definitely a 100%. Your eyes are lying to you. You do not see reality. Successful entrepreneurs have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the hundred dollar bills all over the street. You can change what you see and ultimately what you do.

[Cody]

Nerial has spent six years to figure out first to not get distracted and now to change your belief systems. He's been sought out all over the world to change. Do exactly what he is going to teach you today.

[Nir Eyal]

The 10 minute rule says you can give in to any distraction. But not right now. I don't know what to do right now. I got to do something that's the cause of distraction. What you will find is that the 10 minute rule becomes the 12 minute rule. The 20 minute rule. You're proving your self efficacy in your agency. Right now you are processing 11 million bits of information per second. You can only attend to this tiny keyhole of attention.

[Cody]

We have to be so careful about

[Nir Eyal]

what we let in here more than ever. But how exactly do we do that for? Turns out it's actually not that hard. That's the superpower that most people have no clue that they could unlock within them. Right now there's four steps to becoming indistractable. But the firewall against distraction is

[Cody]

when you are fighting with somebody else. How do you take a step back and say oh wait a second, I might have just perceived that wrong.

[Nir Eyal]

So this is a big part of the revelation for me was realizing that I don't see reality as it is. If you believe no, no, no. Absolutely 100% I'm certain, done deal. You can't change my mind. That becomes your reality. Right? Think about it as somebody running a marathon. Who's more likely to finish a marathon? The person who says I can't finish this marathon or the person who says I think I can finish the marathon. Now the objective Fact could be either way. Neither of those are facts. They are beliefs. Right? The fact could be that some people don't finish a marathon. But who are you going to bet on, right? Are you going to bet on the person who says, I cannot finish this marathon?

[Cody]

You.

[Nir Eyal]

In which case they quit, they're out, versus the person who says, I might be able to or I think I can finish this marathon? They do. Or they're more likely to because they persist because they try. So the beliefs that get people the most upset, that get people the most agitated, that get people to say, that's ridiculous, those are the beliefs we most need to explore. The ones that we say, that cannot be true. That person is definitely evil. That business definitely will not work. That idea is the stupidest thing ever. We don't see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. And so the more agitated we get by the idea of thinking differently, it's because there's something in us that we are desperately trying to protect. It's called an immunity to change. Your brain does not want to change its beliefs because our default setting. We used to think in psychology that there was a thing called learned helplessness. It's kind of a very prevailing theory. And it explained why poor people stay poor. It's because they learn helplessness that over time, if you keep trying and failing and trying and failing, well, you just give up. A few years ago, the authors of that study, and they did this with animal studies where they taught, seemingly taught animals to kind of give up and learn hopelessness. Those authors, Selingman and Meier, declared that they had gotten the study 100% backwards, that the study results were 180 degrees the opposite of what they thought, that we don't learn helplessness. That's our default. Our default state is helplessness. We constantly want to retreat into passivity. Think about it. When you're born, a baby is perfectly helpless. There's nothing they can do. They rely on others to help them. We don't have claws. We don't have sharp teeth. We can't run fast. When we're born, we're completely helpless. So that is your default state. What we learn is hope. We must learn hope. 1950s, Curt Richter takes these wild rats and he wants to see how long they can swim for. So he puts them in a cylinder halfway full of water, and he sits there with a timer and he watches the poor little rat swim, swim, swim. And he sees that in about 15 minutes, the rat gives up, slips under the water, dies. You can't do these kind of studies anymore. It's kind of cruel. But the rats are already dead, so let's learn from them. Then he decides to change up the experiment. He gets a new group of rats. Same cylinder, same water, puts the new group of rats inside these cylinders. And he knows that they're gonna last for about 15 minutes. And just as his stopwatch reaches 15 minutes and they begin struggling and starting to give up, he reaches in, pulls out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath and plunk. Back into the cylinder it goes. Now he does this a few times. So he conditions the rat to do something amazing. Now he wants to see how much longer the rat can swim for. When I ask audiences, they know there's something amazing that's about to be revealed. And so I ask them, how much longer did the rat swim for? Once the rat was conditioned to this new belief set. How much longer did it swim? People say double. They have three times, four times longer, right? Wouldn't that be amazing if you could be four times more perseverant? That would be incredible, right? Running a marathon four times longer or sticking with a hard project four times longer, that'd be amazing. The rats didn't swim four times longer. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 240 times. More persistent. 60 hours of swimming. Now what changed? Same experiment, same body. Nothing changed physically. So they didn't have super strength. All of a sudden we think we can't ask rats what they believe, obviously. But we think the only factor left was something changed in their mind. That when they suddenly had the hope of salvation, that something could save them from their death, they persisted, they changed their belief and then kept going. That's the unlock, that's the superpower that most people have no clue that they could unlock within them. Right. Now that we need to be very humble. We don't see reality clearly. We don't feel things as they really are either. And our beliefs greatly influence what we do. So we call this attention, anticipation and agency. See, feel, do, those are the three powers of belief. So that's the most important thing, that if you can harness what you believe, you can change what you see, how you feel, and ultimately what you do. So just like those rats had the 60 hours in them all along, right? It was there. Their belief changing unlocked that potential. And we know, you know, that there's several studies now that find that the defining trait of success in individuals, it's not necessarily intelligence. Right? It's not how smart you are. It's really two things. It's persistence and adaptability. And I would argue those two things go hand in hand that successful people, and I'm guessing you can attest to this if you want to find who are the losers who fails a lot. It's not the people who are not successful. Successful people are the biggest losers, meaning in terms of number of failures. It's the successful people. Why? Because they persist. They keep going. If you can unlock that, if you can suddenly change in your brain, the pain, the suffering that comes along with difficult tasks, and now all of a sudden, you can persist way longer without having to suffer through it. Man, what can't you do?

[Cody]

Speaking of what can't you do, I was fascinated by. By the section that you wrote about how powerful your mind is and a word called hypnosidation. And you gave an example of a guy by the name of Daniel Gisler.

[Nir Eyal]

And it's not just Daniel. So here's what happened. So this guy was a commodities trader, okay? Also very buttoned up. Like, very analytical. The opposite of anything supernatural. Mumbo jumbo. He's very, very analytical guy. And the guy has this freak accident, and he has to get screws put in his ankle. A few years later, he has to get them removed. And he comes across this technique on YouTube called hypnosudation, which is a form of hypnosis, not stage hypnosis. That's a whole nother thing going on there. It's basically harnessing the power of the mind to focus deeply through its attentional filter. So you're basically using that keyhole of attention we talked about earlier to only let in certain signals and not others, right? Because pain is just information. Just like the light entering your retinas right now, it's just more information. So he takes this course. He learns how to hypnosudate himself. He starts with these clamps that are very painful pinchers on his hands. And he trains himself over time to tune out those pain signals. And by the time he's finished with his course, he goes into the operating room and the doctors for 55 minutes, cut into flesh and bone, pull out metal screws from his body with zero local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, all through the power of his mind. So why do I tell this story? I'm not advocating for hypnosudation. You don't have to go do that. But the reason I want people to know about this and the reason I use it in my life is that if the Brain has the power to change our perception of the pain of surgery without anesthesia. What are we complaining about exactly?

[Cody]

What else can it do?

[Nir Eyal]

What else can it do? Right? Like when things get hard, it's just pain management, right? We used to think that motivation was about carrots and sticks. You've heard this metaphor, right? That it's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Well, now we know that's not true. That when you actually look inside the brain, what we can see happening is that the brain is only motivated by one thing, that the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick. What does that mean? That even when we are pursuing pleasure, wanting, craving desire, lusting, hunger, those things are psychologically destabilizing. So the carrot is the same. When we want to feel good, it's because wanting hurts. You know, they say love hurts. Remember that song? It's exactly true. So what that means, therefore, if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means, therefore, that time management is pain management, money management is pain management, weight management is pain management. It's all about managing discomfort. And so what we learn, what the literature shows us, the research finds, is that pain and suffering are two separate things. And that's exactly what Daniel did. He was able to separate the signals coming into his brain telling him about the pain and separate it from the suffering, from the response that most of us feel.

[Cody]

You know, it's fascinating because, to use it tactically, you talk a lot about relationships in the book. And, you know, intimate relationships, familial relationships. But you have a line that I loved, which was, you don't have relationship problems. You have perception problems. And so can you apply this to a relationship today? And like, we were kind of joking about this beforehand, but I'm sure nobody can relate. But imagine that you're having a fight and you are convinced that your husband is wrong and judgmental, and this is all their fault, trying to hurt you 100%. And yet maybe that's true or maybe it's not.

[Nir Eyal]

Right?

[Cody]

So what do you do to use this practice to help in your relationship and your marriage?

[Nir Eyal]

So the most important thing is to realize that you are only seeing reality through this keyhole of attention. And so you can't possibly. You can. You can't even process your own reality. Right. Your brain is predicting what is happening based on its prior understandings. Right. Actually, let me give you an example. You have that optical illusion. Oh, yeah. Let me show you. This will blow your mind, and this will be directly relevant for Relationships. So, okay. Okay. So in this illusion, can you explain this? Yeah, absolutely. So look at this and tell me which square looks darker, A or b?

[Cody]

Oh, a.

[Nir Eyal]

A. Definitely a.

[Cody]

100%.

[Nir Eyal]

100% a is darker than B. But of course, if you look at the bottom image and I put a strip of the same color, you will see that A and B are in fact, the same color. Now, look back at the first image on the top. Does it look any different?

[Cody]

It still looks.

[Nir Eyal]

It still looks the same. Of course your eyes are lying to you, because you don't see with your eyes. You see with your brain. Based on priors, based on what's happened in the past, your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works. So it's predicting a future that doesn't really exist. Now, why does the brain do this? Because it can't keep up with the 11 million bits. It has to do this in order to process all the information that's coming into it. So all of us need to bring down that certainty a notch and say, okay, I need the intellectual humility to understand that I only see things the way I see them based on my prior understanding. I only see reality as I am. I only see others as I am. And once we have that intellectual humility, then we can open up other possibilities, because people don't understand that there's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. Those are two separate things. An emotion is a physiological response. A feeling is an interpretation of that physiological response. So feelings are psychological. Emotions are physiological. So, for example, if right now you started getting heart palpitations, you started breathing quickly, we have to go to the er that's something to be really worried about. That should not happen right now. But if you're at the gym and you're experiencing the exact same physiological reaction, hey, I'm having a good workout. You're happy about that? What changed the context, Right? So that's the key to these relationships, is understanding that we don't see reality. That's the first step. And then when we get into these interpersonal conflicts, forcing ourselves to intentionally take the opposite opinion to do that turnaround we talked about earlier that I did with my mom, to force ourselves to say, okay, clearly a smart person that I respect disagrees with me. Let me take the opposing argument. So my wife and I are celebrating 25 years this year together. 25 years married. Thank you. Thank you. And we don't fight. We honestly. We don't fight. We disagree. We disagree. We do not fight. Fighting is bullshit. There's no need to fight. Because if I respect this person and I know she's no dummy, I wouldn't have married her. She's a very, very smart person. If she has an alternative perspective of what's happening in the world. Right. With our daughter or with our relationship or with our business, she should be listened to. Right. So it's not a fight. It might be a disagreement. But my job, if we, and sometimes we definitely disagree, we have very different opinions. But one of the things we'll do is intentionally take each other's perspectives that to have a good faith argument where we say, okay, I'm going to try my best to not just to mirror what you're saying, blah, blah, blah. Cause that feels very fake to me, but to actually have a good faith effort to steel, man her argument to make the best possible display of what she's trying to say. And nine times out of 10, Cody, that's actually what the argument's about.

[Cody]

Interesting. It's such a good point because you're right. I've done the mirror thing before and it does feel, it feels, it's parroting.

[Nir Eyal]

You know, all of a sudden somebody actually feels heard. Right?

[Cody]

Right. Then it goes away.

[Nir Eyal]

Right.

[Cody]

That's so fascinating. I'm going to use this because you're right. I think often the other person you're just listening to kind of get your words in. Right. And you're like, or to win. Yeah, or to win. And you know, and I think increasingly in a world where everybody's telling you, you know, have your boundaries and, you know, you hold the line and don't get walked over and don't become a rug. Well, there's good parts to that, but there also is some sort of forgetfulness about the fact that you might be on the same team with this person. And so if you've chosen to spend your life with them, then maybe it makes sense to listen to what they're saying.

[Nir Eyal]

Right.

[Cody]

You know what's interesting too is you talk about this in regards to luck too. And so I had never thought about the fact that you might not just be a lucky person, you might just have a different attention to luck.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right.

[Cody]

Is that true? If we pay more attention to luck or if you pay more attention to luck, could you in fact be luckier?

[Nir Eyal]

That's absolutely what the research shows. And the study that really demonstrate this, they took two groups of people. One were self identified lucky people, people who called themselves, hey, I tend to be pretty lucky. And people who said, no, I tend to be pretty unlucky in life. And they gave them a very simple task. The task was to look through a newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper. And they said, if you do that, we'll give you $250 as soon as you finish. Finish as quickly as possible. The unlucky people, again, self identified. Unlucky people finished in two and a half minutes. The lucky people finished in about 11 seconds. Why? Because when they flipped to page two, one of those images said, There are 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize. So the unlucky people didn't even see the ad. Again, their reality was different. Their beliefs didn't let them see the totality of information that 11 million bits of information, that bit of information didn't even get in. Whereas the lucky people, ah, bingo. And they went to collect their prize. Right. And so this is a classic hallmark trait of entrepreneurs. What Walter Isaacson called about Steve Jobs, he called it the reality distortion field that entrepreneurs do. Successful entrepreneurs have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the hundred dollar bills all over the street and they have this crazy belief in themselves that they can go and make an enterprise that nobody else sees possible. Right. I mean, you did this in spades. Right? How many people said, ah, that can't be done, That's a silly idea.

[Cody]

No, it's so true. I mean, one of my favorite quotes is that pessimists sound smart and optimists make all the money. And I think you're like literally. Well, I didn't realize there was research to back it, but it does seem, I mean, we talk about turning on your reticular activating system and how, and that's not really probably a right way to say it from a science perspective, but just when you train your brain to look for something, apparently you find it more.

[Nir Eyal]

That's so true. I mean, we have a mutual friend, Vanessa Van Edwards.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

And I love how she, I hadn't heard it before, but I love how she says, don't say how you doing. What do people say when you say, how you doing? I'm busy, things are tired. Okay, good, fine. She said, what's good? Right. What a simple way to help us refocus on the good things in life. In my family, since I did this line of research, whenever something good happens, somebody in the family will say, ah, everything good happens to us, we just say it out loud. Right? It's just like a family phrase, everything good happens to us. Now what we don't say, which a lot of I used to say all the time is, ugh, that's just my luck. Or, why does this always happen to me? Or, you know, again, I'm stuck in traffic. This always happens. Or she's always like that. Or that's so like him. Right? What do we. Why do we do that? We are doing that to reinforce the comfort of these limiting beliefs that essentially keep us stuck. Whereas if we refocus our attention on the good things, guess what? Not only do we see more of those things, more of those good things start happening to us as well.

[Cody]

So you actually have lines that you tell your family to say consistently.

[Nir Eyal]

I don't tell them to do anything. That just become kind of a family tradition.

[Cody]

You have lines that your family says continuously, and then you have lines that you guys do not say. Is that right?

[Nir Eyal]

Well, we don't. Nothing is enforced. It just has become kind of like a family mantra. I have a lot of mantras that I repeat to myself all the time as well. And that's something that's changed in my life quite a bit because I found this research around the power of prayer. And I stopped praying when I was six years old. I prayed when my family came to America. A few years after they came here, they got scammed out of every penny they had. Literally, like some American guy saw that my parents barely spoke English and he took every cent they had. And my family had to start over. And we had some really, really hard times. And that's the last time I remember praying. And I remember it being very helpful. But then I got older and I stopped believing in the supernatural. And I just didn't find any organized religion that really spoke to me. And so I stopped praying. And then while I was doing this research, I came across this really difficult to ignore evidence around the power of prayer. And what blew my mind is that prayer works even without faith. That for it turns out the biggest religious community in America today, the largest religious group, are nones. Not the Catholic nuns, not n u n n o n e. People who don't affiliate with any religion like I used to be. And it turns out that those people, many of them, call themselves spiritual but not religious. You hear that a lot. I'm spiritual but not religious, meaning I have some kind of belief in some kind of supernatural that there's something bigger than me, but I don't attend any kind of faith tradition. Turns out those people are much more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do affiliate with some kind of Religious community. So I kind of got jealous, to be honest. Like, I wanted some of those benefits incontrovertible. And then I came across this amazing study where they test. There's a standard protocol to test people's pain tolerance. Basically, what they do is they put people's hands in very, very cold ice water, and they see how long they can last. And they monitor when they grimace, strain. And then eventually, when do they say, okay, I can't take it anymore? They take their hands out. And they had three groups of people. One group was a control group, so nothing changed with them. The second group were people who prayed with some kind of faith tradition. They had some kind of religious background. The third group were people who didn't have a faith background and who were taught how to pray. And they were told that if you don't want to say God, substitute it for anything of meaning. Mother Nature, the universe, the sum of all forces, whatever is meaningful to you. And it turns out that the people who learned how to pray and the people who prayed out of a faith tradition had a much higher pain tolerance than the people who didn't pray at all. So there are these psychologically protective effects to prayer. And so one of the things I did, I went to five faith leaders. It sounds like a setup of a joke, right? A rabbi, an imam, a priest, a swami, and a monk all walk into a bar. And I actually interviewed all five of them. And I said, how does one pray, even if you have uncertainties about God? And so I took away these five lessons from them, and I've adopted them in my life and found that, you know what? They're incredibly beneficial. So now, for the first time in my life, I pray. Because beliefs are tools, not truths. I don't need to have perfect certainty. I used to say, well, I can't pray because I'm not sure if everything in that book is 100% true. And if I can't prove it, I can't step into church. I can't go to synagogue, I can't step into a mosque. No, it's not true. I've relaxed that. Because you know what? Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me. It's improved my life. It's made me more patient, it's made me more calm, it's made me more at peace. And so I've stopped really asking, can I prove it's true? And rather asked, does it serve me? Does it improve my life? And the Life of those around me.

[Cody]

The most successful people in the world know exactly what near IL is telling us, which is that success is not actually a discipline. It is a habit and it is a belief. And if we can build systems around our beliefs, then they become habits. And this is what I have found over and over again in my life, is that I don't have to have more willpower. I don't have to be more disciplined. I just need a system that makes it so I get to be thoughtless, have no thought at all. Which is why I'm obsessed with this company, Beehive, that helps us create systems systems around email and our newsletters. We don't have to come up with something wild and crazy to sell our audience. We can actually send out an email every single week from a third party provider that already does all the monetization, all the design work, all of the ads inside of it, all of the data so we can see who we're sending to and when we're sending it. You know why most companies don't have a good email list or a newsletter anybody wants to read? Because they don't have a system that makes it easy as 1, 2, 3, send in order to get one. That is why I'm obsessed with this company, Beehive, and with systems thinkers creating a way where newsletter reading, creating and writing becomes so habitual, you do it no matter what. In fact, I asked Beehive for a code for you guys. So if you don't already have a newsletter or if you do and you want a better one, go to beehive.com b h I I v.com use code CODY30 and you get 30% off your first three months. Because making money should be a system, not a discipline. Is interesting about this is we're talking here about beliefs, but your work kind of compounds it seems like your first book was about how to get people obsessed with something, in some ways hooked, right? How to how to hook people to a product which is near and dear to my heart. Your book was about distraction, right? And how to not be distractible. And then this third book kind of gets to the core of it, which is like in order to not be distracted or get hooked, like what do you believe in your head there's something deeper, right. So I want to go there too. But I also want to talk about your 10 minute rule and what it does to help with distraction in a world that is very distractible.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

What is it? Can you talk to us about it?

[Nir Eyal]

So the 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, but not right now. You're going to give into that distraction in 10 minutes. Now why is this so powerful? Because we know that abstinence backfires, that sometimes abstinence can work if you can remove what we call the external trigger. Right. When people are trying to get off of some kind of addictive something they're addicted to. If you can remove that substance and all the things associated with it, right, Your peer group and all that stuff, the paraphernalia, yes, that can be very helpful. But how exactly do we do that for technology? Right. You can't just stop using technology, nor would you want to. Right. It's incredibly empowering. So that's not a good solution. So telling yourself no doesn't work. It releases what's called psychological reactance. Psychological reactance is when someone tells you what to do. Your reaction will be, don't tell me what to do. Right. F off. If your boss micromanages you that reaction, don't tell me what to do. Or if your parent told you to put on a coat, don't tell me what to do. I know what to do. That's psychological reactance. Now the crazy thing is that you can elicit psychological reactance even when you tell yourself what to do. Right? That's how weird our psychology is. So a better way than no, don't do it, and I'm a bad person if I check social media too much and I shouldn't do it, no, no, no, stop doing it is not to say no, it's to say, not yet, I will do it. I'm a grown up, I can do whatever I want, but I choose to do it in 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes are too long, make it the five minute rule. The two minute rule doesn't really matter. So whether it's I'm trying to quit smoking, whether it's I'm trying not to give in to that chocolate cake, whether it's I'm trying to focus on an important project rather than checking email every three seconds. So if I tell myself, I will do it, but in 10 minutes. And then your job during those 10 minutes is to do what's called surf the urge. Because these emotions, we think that they're gonna be there forever, right? We feel boredom, we think we're always gonna be bored, lonely, tense, uncertain, stressed, anxious. We feel like it's always gonna be there, but that's never the case. These sensations are like waves. They crest and then they subside. And so if you can ride out that sensation for just sometimes a few seconds. You can refocus your attention because again, what causes us to get distracted? We think it's the external triggers. We think it's the pings, the dings, the rings, all this technology. That's only 10% of the cause. Studies have found. 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of some kind of ping, ding or ring? 90% of the time it's because of an internal trigger. Remember, time management is pain management. What is an internal trigger? Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is 90% of the time you check your phone, it's because of a feeling. I don't know what to do right now. I got to do something. That's the cause of distraction 90% of the time. So if you can just ride out that sensation like a surfer on a surfboard, what you will find is that the 10 minute rule becomes the 12 minute rule becomes the 20 minute rule. And over time you're proving to yourself, wait a minute, I'm not addicted to these things. I'm not addicted to distraction. I can wait for a minute. I have control over them. You're proving your self efficacy in your agency.

[Cody]

What's the flip side of that? Like you talk about something else I really liked, which is. So we're gonna stop the distractions here maybe with this 10 minute rule, plus a few other things I wanna go into.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, that's just like one teeny tiny technique.

[Cody]

God, they're so good. We're gonna go through all but the next was like you had a whole section about how to basically increase your luck surface area and about daily habits you can do to train your brain to see things that other people cannot. Can you talk about what daily habits you put into place? So you train your brain to find luck.

[Nir Eyal]

Sure. So this is called entrepreneurial alertness. That you can literally create your own luck. And so there's a few things you can do. And these are traits common among entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. It's funny, don't understand why everybody doesn't do this, but they're very common traits. So one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone. And we can do this in all kinds of small ways. I think one of the best is to talk to people. You spread your luck surface area when you just talk to folks on the flight here. I just came from Barcelona, talk for an hour and a half in the galleyway of the flight. Right. Where people buy the restrooms, where they give out drinks. Talk to this lady for an hour and a half. Now we're friends, we're keeping in touch, just. But I don't know what's going to come out of that. But that's something that I think before doing this research, I would not have done and now I'm very open to. So pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Another thing we do is to express extreme amounts of gratitude that you increase your entrepreneurial alertness when you become attuned to ways to thank people in your life that even the small Atina Selig taught me this at Stanford. She has a big old stack of these thank you cards that she just whips off, you know, as soon as she can write, hey, thanks for that pleasant good morning greeting today. Or I really appreciated your comment in class today, or whatever. Thank you for doing that. Like, she never, ever skips an opportunity to tell someone that they had a positive effect on her life. And of course, what happens is that the more surface area you spread with gratitude is the more you are thought of when good opportunities arise. So if your thank you note is on someone's desk next to, hey, here's a business deal, or here's an opportunity, or here's something to talk about, well, maybe there's a connection there. So you're creating luck. You're provoking luck by showing more gratitude and entering into that daily habit. And then the third thing is to intentionally fail more. That if I were to tell you whatever it is that you're stuck doing, let's say you're trying to, you know, start a podcast or make your sales calls or whatever it is, find love, for example, and I told you, I took a time machine and I looked into the future and I found that all you have to do is to fail five more times, go on five more dates, and then you'll find love, make five more sales calls, and then you're gonna close that big deal. If I told you that, would you then say, well, I don't want to, I don't wanna do those failures anymore?

[Cody]

No.

[Nir Eyal]

You'd be like, come on, let's fail quick, let's go, come on. I wanna fail five times so I can get to the sixth success. And so that's one of those daily habits, is to relish the failures, to look forward to them, to teach your brain again, there's a difference between pain and suffering. Something can be difficult and yet meaningful. You don't have to suffer from it. So if you can teach your brain through the power of beliefs to want to get through those failures and learn to relish those Failures, that is a habit that will increase your luck surface area.

[Cody]

Is there actual science that shows that people who are successful don't remember the failures as much? Is that a thing? Like, do you train your brain where eventually you don't even mean to and you kind of can't recognize remember all those failures?

[Nir Eyal]

Yes. We see others by how we think of them. But we judge ourselves differently, that if somebody messes up, it's because they're incompetent. But when we mess up, we have a story. Right? Like, you just don't understand. If somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're being a jerk. But if you cut someone off in traffic, it's because I'm in a hurry. And it's very important, right? So we look at our beliefs, even our memories, actually. We know that memory is incredibly vulnerable to revision, that every time you think of a memory, you are actually revising it in your brain. Actually, there's a friend of mine, Chris, that I was telling him about my research and he says, you know what? There's a very. There's a perfect example in my life. You know, for years I couldn't cry. I couldn't cry. And it really hurt my relationships with my girlfriends because they would say I wasn't emotionally available because we would have a difficult time. And I just couldn't cry. And you know why I couldn't cry? It's because when I was a kid, I went to a funeral at 6 years old and it was really traumatizing. And ever since then, I can't cry. And he told his sister this story. Chris told his sister that, you know, this is, you know, it's another breakup, another reason. Here's why I'm not emotionally available. It's because I can't cry. And I went to this funeral and she says, chris, you didn't go to that funeral. Mom and dad thought you were too young. You were at home with the babysitter. It was his older sister. She remembered it. And he had been living with this memory that never even happened. And we do this all the time. Memory is incredibly vulnerable to revision. That Elizabeth Loftus has these amazing studies where she implants memories of people going on a hot air balloon ride that never happened. And they'll describe the wind in their hair and the color of the balloon completely made up. And this is. Where does this get back to that based on those memories that we think are so true. You know, we think of memories as like a video camera. It's not a video camera. At all. It's incredibly vulnerable that, you know, people will take it two different ways. Some people will say, oh, this terrible thing happened to me. This person did this thing to me. And maybe it happened. But 100% sure it didn't happen the way you think it did. You have revised it since, for sure. Second example is when people who have a positive outlook on life, they can look at the same exact events. And you see, because that happened, that's why I have to prove others wrong, or that's why I succeed, is because I had to show them. So same exact thing can happen. You can have post traumatic stress. Right. And that can cause people a lot of suffering. Or for some people, you have post traumatic growth. It was because that terrible thing happened. That's why I'm so driven today.

[Cody]

Do people ever push back on your research? And they're like, you must have never been through anything very hard because how could you say, I couldn't have PTSD instead of having, you know, ptg?

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. Do you get that kind of pushback? I'm not. I'm not saying that. I would never say to somebody that they're not in pain. All pain is real. All pain is real. The pushback I oftentimes hear is that, are you telling people to lie to themselves? Are you. Are we. Are you telling me that I should gaslight myself and make up a different truth? Because you're saying that beliefs are just tools. I can make up whatever I want. And my response is, guess what? You're already gaslighting yourself. You are already lying to yourself. You're just lying to yourself with a limiting belief. So you could choose a different belief. Now, the whole point here. What is a limiting belief? What is a liberating belief? A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation or causes suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or eases suffering. And that's a choice. That's a choice even when it sounds crazy. So I never tell people to change their beliefs. I tell people to try on different beliefs. So what you're doing is just like you try on a pair of glasses and you say, it doesn't fit my face. I don't like it. This is weird. Okay, let's try on a different pair of glasses. You're already wearing those glasses, that keyhole of attention, those 50 bits of information that's already there. You just didn't choose it. Your society chose it. Your background chose it. Your history chose it. All these other things chose it. You didn't choose It. It's kind of like your face that you can't see your face. We all have these limiting beliefs, but they're always hidden to us. And the ones you most defend are the ones you most need to examine. So when people hear this and say, that's crazy, you don't understand what happened to me. That's what needs some digging. That's what needs some examination if they want to stop suffering. Look, some people don't mind the suffering. They find their identity is the suffering. And I'm not here to change anybody.

[Cody]

Right.

[Nir Eyal]

I'm telling you what worked in my life. I found that I started living when I disconnected the pain from the suffering. The pain can still be there, but just like Daniel Gisler, that could use the power of his mind to not interpret the pain as suffering. And we can do that. Not just with surgery. I mean, if we can do it with surgery, we can certainly do it with our past experiences and with our challenges and tribulations.

[Cody]

That's so good. Yeah. My husband and I always say to each other, do you want to be right or do you want to win? And it's true. Like, do you need to prove your point all the time, or, you know, do you want to move forward in the world?

[Nir Eyal]

Right.

[Cody]

And so. But I like this differentiation of liberating beliefs and limiting beliefs, because if you do get to try on two hats, that just means you pick one.

[Nir Eyal]

Right.

[Cody]

And if that's true, and if we have all this research to suppose it, then why not? The other thing that I think's really interesting about this is, you know, you started your career by essentially figuring out how attention worked with tech products. And so if today we're feeling overwhelmed by a lot of the things in front of us from technology, I think we have a lot of reasons, excuses. You could use whatever word you want to say that it is not in my power to be undistracted, or it is not in my power what I focus on. But you had this line from one of your. It was from. No, it was from your last book that was, there will be two types of people in the world. There will be those who are distracted, and there will be those who are indistractable, and the indistractible will win. To summarize your statement, what do you mean by that? And do you still believe that's true?

[Nir Eyal]

More than ever. Because the world is becoming an increasingly distractible place, that with the dawn of AI, we know where this is going, and it's not. It's not all Bad. I'm quite the tech optimist. I have to be, because I know history. I know that the world is terrible and there's a lot of suffering. And also, it's better than it's ever been, and it's getting better. And even that idea, I bet you right now people are thinking, this guy's crazy. Like, isn't he watching the news? Doesn't he see all the terrible things happening in the world today? Yeah, those things are happening and things are getting better. And I'm optimistic about the future because we can create the future unless we give up. So when you believe there's nothing to be done, what do you do? Nothing. And this is exactly the message that has been spreading in mainstream traditional media tells you technology is addictive and it's hijacking your brain. And they have documentaries, ironically, on Netflix, telling you how technology is melting your brain. There's nothing you can do. Yeah, that's exactly what the tech companies want you to think. They want you to think there's nothing you can do for your children. They're all addicted, that there's nothing. It's hopeless. Because what are you going to do? Nothing. That is the message of passivity. They are trying to default us into. That is our default to do nothing. Because now I've absolved responsibility, right? It's not my fault Zuckerberg is doing it to me. Maybe that could be a truth, right? I don't know. Is that a fact or is it a belief? I choose to believe I can do something about it. Turns out it's actually not that hard. There's a few steps anyone can take to become indistractable to themselves and to teach their kids to be indistractable. And if you don't teach your kids how to be indistractable, they will be part of this mass of people who can't control their attention because they don't want to and they don't learn the skills. I mean, we're not taught in school how to focus our attention. And I think those who do not learn how to be indistractable will be at the whim of whatever is happening, right? The gossip in the office or whatever's happening on Twitter or whatever happening in the news or some war 3,000 miles away. It's got nothing to do with me, but that's what I keep paying attention to, as opposed to, how can I make people's lives better in my family, in my community? How can I affect change? Right now, right here, I'm paying attention to all this other stuff because, frankly, the media wants me to. Right? They make money. I don't care. People rag on social media. How exactly do you think the New York Times makes money? Or Fox News or cnn? They're all in the same business. They're monetizing your attention, so you better hold onto it carefully.

[Cody]

It's such a good point. I was thinking about. I heard a quote yesterday, and I can't remember who said it, but the summary was basically when David asked for a bigger life, a bigger challenge, more. God didn't just give him easy. He gave him Goliath. And you know, part of me, what your work makes me think about. In some ways, if we want to go super optimistic, it's, well, what if, you know, this next level of what I would consider to be superhuman, which is I don't feel pain, which is I could 240x my ability to withstand treading water, aka you know, what happened to the rats. If we wanted to become more superhuman, well, then we kind of need bigger challenges, which might just be this AI in front of us, this tech in front of us. And if you could see it instead, not as defeatist, but what if this is the opportunity? If you know whether you believe in God or not, but if God's like, all right, you're ready for the next level of the game.

[Nir Eyal]

That is a real life hack. And that was not my natural. I was kind of highly anxious, kind of, you know, ran hot. And was that kind of person who repeated, why does this tend to happen to me? And I mean, just today, right, like, I was preparing some food and it dropped on the floor. Okay, you're talking about, like, big AI challenges. I'm talking about like, day to day as well. The food drops on the floor before it'll be like, why does that happen to me? I'm late. I've got this interview with Cody. Now. I say, all right, I have an opportunity to practice patience. Right?

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Like, I can find an opportunity here. Is it a fact? No, it's a belief. I choose to believe that there's something and you can. I literally do this 10 times a day with, like, whenever something happens, a little funny in my life that before would. Would bring me down. And of course, you know, it takes a toll. It. It drains that battery throughout the day. The more you tell yourself, there it is again or there it's. I used to do this with my adhd. I was diagnosed with adhd and I used to const. Every time I got a bit distracted or you know, I said, there's my ADHD again. And now, you know, people my age, we start saying that all my. My peers, oh, that's. You know, I'm. I'm. That's what happens when you get old, right? Like it's inevitable, right? Oh, this hurts. That hurts. Like it's inevitable. That's what happens. And so when you're having that senior moment, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about where your keys are? Are you thinking about what you just forgot or what the distraction is? No, you're thinking about this label you've attached to yourself. And so in this way, your labels become your limits, and even more so, your beliefs become your biology. There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. Now, to put that in perspective, Cody, seven and a half years longer. That is more than the effect of exercise. That's more than the effect of what you eat. That's more than the effect of smoking. Think about how much time and attention we hear about. You should eat right, don't smoke, exercise. Who tells you the best thing you can do for your longevity and lifespan is to believe differently is to have positive views about aging. Now, why is that happening? Are the beliefs magically changing the cells in your body? Nope, that's not how it works. What's happening is that two beliefs about the world can be equally true. So, for example, a positive view of aging sounds like this. Growth is possible at any age. That's a positive view about aging. What's a negative view about aging? Aging involves inevitable decline. Okay, two perspectives. Which one is true, Cody?

[Cody]

Both.

[Nir Eyal]

Both. Exactly. Which one is gonna make me more active?

[Cody]

The growth.

[Nir Eyal]

Growth is possible at any age. So why do we tell ourselves this stupid stuff like, I'm not a morning person. I'm a Sagittarius. I have adhd. That's why I can't. This. This. These are all limiting beliefs. Now, sometimes they can be a map, right? So, for example, an ADHD diagnosis can guide you to work on something that you weren't aware of, that there's a path to help you get some kind of guidance, but it cannot become your identity. Once it becomes your identity, it stops becoming the map. You become the map, and then it's useless because that becomes your default state. Why you can't. Why you can't. Rather, you need to reinforce why you can. That becomes the empowering belief that keeps you motivated and reduces suffering.

[Cody]

God, this is so important. Because I could never put my finger on the point of why I got so annoyed many times in my career, but especially these last couple of years where people would say, well, you know, Latinas, I'm Latina. Latinas and women, you know, they just aren't as successful as men Overall. And Latina CEOs you know, can't. Oh, and you know, female CEOs aren't paid this way. And don't you. Wasn't it hard when you were in a male dominated industry and like, you can't progress very much and I'd just be like, take your victim labels off me. This is not helpful to me at all. In fact, couldn't the opposite be true? Couldn't it be true that it could be really useful to be in a male dominated field where it's Tom, Dick and Larry every seven seconds everyone's wearing blue, black or gray suits and I stand out differently. That could be helpful too.

[Nir Eyal]

Absolutely. I mean, that's. And that's. I can hear in your voice that that's motivating. And you don't seem to be suffering.

[Cody]

No, I like, but I do like the chip on my shoulder, you know, I like a little.

[Nir Eyal]

But that's a belief.

[Cody]

Yeah. Which is interesting.

[Nir Eyal]

And is it true?

[Cody]

I don't know.

[Nir Eyal]

Who cares? Who cares? Is it useful?

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

You seem to be getting a lot of traction, a lot of motivation. You're not suffering, you're invigorated based on this belief that you chose. And what's crazy is that we know that even when you have every reason to objectively say the cards are stacked against me, it turns out that people who have an internal locus of control. Internal locus of control are people who believe that their actions affect change in the world versus an external locus of control. An external locus of control is someone who believes that things happen to them. Right. It's my environment, it's my upbringing, it's society, it's whatever's happening in the world. That's what affects my life. Turns out that all the good stuff happens to people with an internal locus of control. Okay, that's not that surprising, right? That like they make more money, they live longer, they contribute more to the community. All good things happen to people with internal locus of control because they have more agency in the world. What's fascinating is that even if you objectively have all the reasons to claim victimhood, it still serves you more to have an internal locus of control. You still will go farther and be happier, have less depression, less anxiety. All the good Things come from having that agency. Now, what's interesting, it's important to have an internal locus of control about yourself, but to see others with a different perspective, that you have more peace when you think, you know, what if others aren't doing what I think they should do, it's because they have their own constraints. They're doing the best they can with the tools they have. But for me, I'm going to effect change. I believe that I have agency and control.

[Cody]

You know, it's fascinating. Back in the day, we lived in D.C. and my husband's a former ex Navy Seal, and he was one of the first people to try on the whoop, that little bracelet thing. And so they ran it through the teams back then and they studied them. And so one day, one of the heads, I believe it was Kirsten Holmes, but one of the heads of WHOOP came to D.C. and wanted to meet with him. And he was like, this is incredible. I must be a specimen. She wants to meet with me because my stats, right? So he goes to meet with her. They sit down for coffee. They sit down, they start talking normal things. And she goes, hey, I need to talk to you.

[Nir Eyal]

It's like, great.

[Cody]

What do you want to know? And he is fit, jacked, and all the things. And he's. She's like, well, I think you might have a heart attack. And he's like, excuse me, I'm in. Like, I have, you know, 7% body fat. I am. She's like, something is happening to you every day where you are off the charts with your stress levels or your HRV or some measurement that they were able to tell biologically between, you know, 7:15 and 7:45 every morning. And like, I. I think you need to chill out your workouts. And. And that is, like, too much. Your heart is not gonna be able to sustain this. And she's like, so what are you doing from that time? What kind of level of workout is this? And he thinks about it and he's like, I'm driving to work because. Because he works out every morning at

[Nir Eyal]

6am not the workout, the driving, just the drive. Wow. Stressing him out.

[Cody]

It was stressing him out. And he would have these stories to me every day that he would kind of, like, proliferate. Like yesterday, he'd cut me off. And the drivers in D.C. and the terrible drivers. And it was sort of fascinating. And then he changed his perspective. For some reason, he was talking to her, and he just said, I'm just gonna assume everybody's pregnant. And they're going to the hospital, and, like, if they cut me off, they're either not gonna make it, the baby's popping on the dashboard. Like, that's what's happening. And he was able to sort of drop his hrv, but, you know, it was a funny story then, but I think about it now, because if it can literally raise your heart rate or lower your heart rate just based on his belief of what was happening with the same exact drivers every single morning to his commute, what else, again, can you do?

[Nir Eyal]

Okay, I'll give you a similar one up here. There's a case of a guy by the name of Mr. A. He was anonymized, and Mr. A was in a study. This really happened. This is a real study. He was in a group that was trying a new antidepressant medication. He broke up with his girlfriend, bad breakup, and he decides he doesn't want to live anymore. He takes the entire pill jar. Pill jar. What's the word I'm looking for?

[Cody]

Jar of pills.

[Nir Eyal]

Jar of pills. He takes all his pills. Then after he swallows all these pills, he decides he does want to live. He rushes to the neighbor's house. He says, take me to the hospital. I need to go to the er. I just swallowed all my pills. By the time he gets to the hospital, he falls on the floor. He manages to tell the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. They rush him into the er they start monitoring his heart rate. His heart rate is dangerously low. His blood pressure is falling. He passes out. And they look on the pill jar, and they can't figure out what he took because it doesn't say the name of the medication. Because he was in this clinical trial. All it has is a phone number. They call the phone number, and they say, this guy took all these pills. What is this medicine? They say, give me one second. They look up on the computer, say, oh, okay, this. He was in the placebo group. Nothing in those pills could have caused this. It's completely inert. They tell Mr. A this. In 15 minutes, his heart rate is back to normal. His blood pressure is back to normal. Everything is physiologically exactly where it should be. He's revived. He walks out in 15 minutes. Talk about the power of the mind, right? He had this expectation. He anticipated something to happen, and it did. And again, if that can happen physiologically, what happens when we keep telling ourselves the same limiting beliefs? I'm having a senior moment. I'm too old for this. I'm too young for this. The world Sucks, the exercise is hard, people are annoying. Whatever. The limiting belief that we keep telling ourselves again and again and again, it has a physiological effect on us, just like Mr. A did.

[Cody]

So what else do we do to not have this? You've given us a bunch of tools. Are there other, like, do you stick a little sticky note on the mirror? Does that work? Do you put it on your computer? Like, what else can we do every single day to make sure that we are not inadvertently giving ourselves our own version of a heart attack?

[Nir Eyal]

Well, I think one we need to identify the beliefs, that's the hardest part, is because we have that immunity to change. I mean, I'm sure if you were listening to us talking right now, there's gotta be at least one thing, you're like, no, that won't work for me. Perk up. Listen to that. If you are telling yourself, if anything we've said that sounds ridiculous won't work for me, pay attention to it. That's your psychological immune system saying, I don't want to change my beliefs. I want to resort to passive.

[Cody]

So do you write those down and then apply your turnarounds to them?

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly, exactly. So write it down, come up with turnarounds, think of the opposite. And it's always going to sound ridiculous. If it doesn't sound ridiculous, you didn't do it. Right, Right. It's always going to sound ridiculous. And then step number three, look for ways that it could be as true. So that's basically how we do this now. Sounds easy. I wrote this book for me. I have to constantly remind myself how to do this. And then there's all kinds of ways you can do that. One of the things that really impacted me is I'm really working on disconnecting pain from suffering in all facets of my life. There's amazing research around how chronic pain, pain that doesn't have a physical cause that lasts for more than six months. So we're talking fibromyalgia, we're talking insomnia, we're talking chronic back pain. All these things turns out they are what we call neuroplastic pain. All pain is real, all pain is real, but all pain is also in the brain. Pain isn't here, pain isn't here. Pain is up here. And so it turns out that we can learn practices to quiet that signal. So just like Daniel Gisler quieted that signal when he had surgery. Chronic pain, these symptoms are a hyper focusing of attention. When I'm constantly thinking about what's wrong, what's causing me Pain, I turn up the fear dial, and the more fear I feel, the more pain I feel, and it becomes this vicious cycle. So if you can detach that, if you can realize one, you're safe, that's the most important thing, that I am safe right now. Okay, so. And that can apply in a painful situation. If it's physical pain, it can also be stress. Right. In a business situation. You know, I used to have this with public speaking. I would go on stage and I'd get the sweaty armpits, and I get the heart palpitations, and I get the dry mouth. And I still get that. I'm getting it right now talking to you, but I interpret it completely differently. So I used to say, well, you know, if my heart's beating and my mouth is dry, then I'm going to do a terrible job. And if I was a real public speaker, I wouldn't have these. Now I don't say that anymore. Now I say I have a different story. Now, my story is that I tell myself, you see, the reason my heart is beating so fast is because my brain needs more oxygen so that I can deliver my best possible presentation. Is it true? Does it matter? It works. Maybe that is a psychological placebo that I'm using, but I've told myself a different story. So just like you can constantly remind yourself, when you're stressed, when you're anxious, when you feel like, oh, I need an escape, I'm safe, I'm safe. Second, reduce the urgency when we have a problem, whether it's, you know, I used to struggle with insomnia, anxiety, adhd, all kinds of things. I wanted to fix it right away. Why isn't this fixed? Right? Give me a pill, give me a solution. Right now there needs to be an urgent solution that increases the fear cycle. Why? Because if I can't find an urgent solution, am I going to have this forever? Right? Then I start getting into this rumination loop of, like, when is it ever going to go away? And what causes many of these problems? Again, it's that pain, fear, pain cycle. The more I fear something, the more pain is caused, the more I fear in the future. So reduce the urgency and then look for examples of how your safety is validated. Right? Bring, for example, you can bring humor to the situation, bring levity to the situation, or repeat the situation. So I used to have back pain, and the standard advice is, if you have some kind of pain, ice it, heat it, don't move, immobilize, rest, right? Don't stress. It turns out that's not always the best advice. Now, if there is an actual physiological cause, different story. But if it's chronic pain that lasts for more than six months without a physical cause, that's not the right idea. So what do I now? Do I still get that back pain? Right. I'm 48. I'm going to get it from time to time. Now, I don't immobilize and say, oh, my God, I'm going to be in pain. No, I do the same movement ten times. I literally. I just felt it as I was sitting down here. Okay, then that means I need to do it 10 times to teach my brain, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. And so I use it in the example of chronic pain. But we can do that for all our limiting beliefs, to constantly remind ourselves again and again. So, for example, when I'm writing, writing is really hard. I've written three books now, thousands of articles. I've been to the New York Times, I've been to the Atlanta. I've been in a lot of places. It's always fricking hard work. So with the mantra I've developed, the secular prayer, if you will, that I develop, that, I tell myself, is when it's difficult. When I'm in pain and I want to reduce my suffering, I disconnect the two by telling myself this mantra. You can steal it. You can make up your own. My mantra is, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. Just remind. That's a simple mantra. I can say it a couple times a day. And now I'm relishing that feeling. Oh, it's painful.

[Cody]

Good.

[Nir Eyal]

That means I'm getting better. If it didn't feel painful, everybody could do it. But I'm developing this superpower. Right? Just like you were saying, that because I'm Latina, because I'm a woman, I have an opportunity here. I'm N of 1. I've got something special here. So I'm leaning into that discomfort as opposed to trying to run away from it by scrolling it away or clicking it away or emailing it away. Good. That's a positive now versus something I should run away from.

[Cody]

I recently thought that willpower was a depleting asset. I've heard that recently. I didn't know that that was one way or another. And then now that I have that as a belief, I've thought, oh, okay, well, that means that I need to make less decisions in this certain way. I need to Do X or Y or Z. In your research, have you found that willpower is a depleting asset? Do we only have so much of it in a day?

[Nir Eyal]

We used to think that there was this research, it was called ego depletion. That your willpower runs out like gas in a gas tank or battery charger in your phone. That the more you use up your willpower, you're done with it. And I used to totally believe this. And I would come home from work and I'd say, oh, I'm spent. I'm going to go on the couch and have a jar of ice cream and watch tv because I've got no more willpower. It's spent, it's gone, right? You use it up. Well, it turns out it's not true that when we try and replicate those studies, and this happens in the social science, this is how science works. Science doesn't say anything. Science is the process of doing repeated experiments and seeing if they replicate. And then we can draw conclusions based on evidence. But the evidence doesn't show that ego depletion exists. You do not run out of willpower like you run out of charge on your phone. Unless there's one group of people who really do run out of willpower. Those group of people are only people who believe that willpower is a limited resource.

[Cody]

God, that's such a mind fuck.

[Nir Eyal]

I know.

[Cody]

What? We have to be so careful about what we let in here.

[Nir Eyal]

So true. Because if you believe I'm spent, guess what? You are. But if you don't let that enter your mind, that willpower is not a resource, it's a feeling. But you don't say to yourself, oh, I'm always gonna be happy, or I'm always gonna be sad, or I'm always. No, it's just a feeling. And it comes and goes. So, yeah, sometimes we have more willpower, sometimes we have less. It's not a resource unless you believe that you're gonna run out of it.

[Cody]

This is just so good. I mean, I already told you this, but I was like walking through all my notes this morning. I was on the treadmill, I was on a run, and I just was picturing everybody I was gonna send this to. I was literally picturing and yeah, I mean, starting with myself and then starting with everybody else that I want to have this tool in their life. Because it's very seldom we hear shit like this. I live in Austin. Everybody's into crystals, you know, fucking astrology, whatever else we've got going on. But it's very Seldom that you hear this stuff in such a clinical way and without so many shoulds in it. A lot of, hey, this is what I'm doing. Here's what the science says. But you're very particular. Like, I've tried to get you a few times to say, will you do X, Y and Z? And you're like, no, I'm not telling them. I'm saying, this is what we do. And I think it's really powerful. I also want to uncover one other thing that I found interesting from your research. I hadn't ever heard the term before. Hedonic adaptation. Can you tell me what is hedonic adaptation and how could it ruin your focus?

[Nir Eyal]

So hedonic adaptation is when our circumstances improve to a point where we no longer appreciate them, and so we need more and more and more and more. If you think about, for example, how today the middle class doesn't feel particularly well off, right? But if you compare the middle class today, the assets that they have, the color television, the iPhone, all the plumbing, if you look back two generations, certainly three generations, the kings of France didn't have indoor plumbing. The kings of France didn't have antibiotics. They constantly had tooth decay and syphilis and all kinds of terrible things that even though they had all the money in the world, they didn't have the luxuries that we have today through modern medicine and all these things. But we have adapted, so we have so much more, but we don't feel any happier because of it. And so that's something to watch out for. Now, the antidote to that is, again, beliefs and beliefs powered through gratitude. And so taking that pause to realize that I'm alive, like I can breathe today like that, we keep thinking we need more to be happy. These things have to happen. But if we actually put things in perspective, and it's very difficult to do because we are so inundated with how terrible things are all the time, all the news. The news doesn't tell you all the great things that happen today. I went to journalism school. The first rule of journalism is if it bleeds, it leads. It's not to inform you. The news media is not there to inform you. The news media is there to make money. And it's not a political issue, it's a business issue. Now, there's anything wrong with that, right? It's okay to consume the news. It's all right to be informed. If that's how you want to spend your time, that's fine. But when it becomes something, you have to do. When you become enthralled in that story and you have to keep up with the latest, everything that's going on, everybody else is suffering. You become distracted from what really matters in your life. And so it's very important to refocus, to actually bring perspective back to what really matters. And be very careful with that media diet that is designed in a way to constantly keep you unhappy, to constantly keep you unsatisfied.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's fascinating. YouTube, we know that if you have a negative versus a positive thumbnail and title, you have a 23% higher click through rate.

[Nir Eyal]

If it's negative versus positive.

[Cody]

Correct. Yeah. And also sort of the scarier it looks often and scariest the right way. I can't remember how they actually determine that one, but dark colors, I believe it's like very dark or very red. And those two things have some sort of signal to us. And those thumbnails outperform as well. And so, you know, if you go to some, you know, creators accounts and you look at their YouTube, you'll find often that the ones that are really viral are like warning, disaster, you know, world ending, it's over. And it's because they have a higher

[Nir Eyal]

click through rate because we have what's called a negativity bias. Again, our default is passivity. We like the negativity. Why? From an evolutionary basis, good things are nice, right? Good things are nice. Bad things will kill you. So what are you going to pay attention to? What's going to be let through that keyhole of attention? The good news? No, that's nice. What do I do with that bad news? Oh my gosh, there's terrible things happening. I have to do something. Warning. Warning, right? Danger. That's what gets our attention.

[Cody]

You had a line that was really helpful to me about tactics versus strategy and how if we only apply the tactics but we don't understand the strategy of why we're using them and our deeper why we probably won't internalize them and actually do it. But you did have one tactic I kind of liked. Well, you have a lot, but, but one in particular was about intimacy time and your wife and cell phones. And I just, you know, I was way back.

[Nir Eyal]

That's great.

[Cody]

I was trying, I was, you know, I was looking at the YouTube comments and seeing what people ask about on this podcast and one of the things I keep seeing pop up is this desire for like a deep, intimate love. And I don't know, I'm not a relationship coach, I have no idea. Like, if you want to help, I can look at your EBITDA numbers. We can try to raise them. Like, that's what I got. But you had at least one tactic that I really liked. And I wonder if you would share this tactic. And it's pretty simple, and I think anybody could use it today.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So this was. This was a long. This was when I first kind of started writing in public, and I wrote an article called the strange Sex Habits of Silicon Valley. And it was basically about this phenomenon that at the time was kind of novel. The Apple app store was three years old at the time. Right. So it was brand new. And I started seeing that every night. My wife was fondling her iPad and I was caressing my iPhone, and we weren't being intimate with each other. And that had some negative consequences on our relationship. And, you know, we've been married now for 25 years. And I learned. One of the things I learned was the power of what's called a pre commitment device. And this is a very old technique. In fact, it's in the Odyssey, written by Homer. It's a very, very old technique where you make a pre commitment. So you remember the story of the Odyssey, Ulysses, this Greek hero has to sail his ship home, and he has to sail by the island of the sirens. And he knows that there's this temptation, he knows that there's this distraction of any sailor who hears the sirens song, crashes their ship onto the shore of the Sirens island. And so he knows this is going to happen. So what does he do? He enters into a pre commitment. He tells his crew to tie him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, don't let me go. And he tells everyone in his crew to put beeswax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song. And it works. And today we call this a Ulysses pact. So what we have to do is, as the last resort, there's four steps to becoming indistractable. But as the last line of defense, the fourth step, the firewall against distraction, is we make a pact that when distraction rears its ugly head, and the first three techniques, for whatever reason, didn't work, there's a fail safe, there's a last line of defense. So what did I do? In order to stop going to bed too late and restore intimacy with my wife? We went to the hardware store and we bought this $5 outlet timer, okay? And this outlet timer will turn on or off whatever you plug into it at a set time of day. Or night. And so what do we do at 10 o' clock at night? Every night, the Internet router shuts off. Okay? Now today, this is many years ago today we actually don't even need it because we've been trained. Now it's become a habit. 10 o'.

[Cody]

Clock.

[Nir Eyal]

All right, Internet's shutting off. Now could I turn it back on? Of course I could turn it back on, right? Like I could tether to my cell phone, I could go under my desk and pull out the timer and put, you know, replug it in. But now there's effort. Now there's friction. So what I've done is to take a mindless behavior and add some mindfulness. Now I have to think about, wait a minute, is this really worth it? Do I really need to check more email or social media or whatever? Or should I go to bed? Right. So adding that bit of friction as a pact, as a pre commitment device in advance, and this is the key that if you leave it to the last minute, you will fail. If you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, you're gonna eat it. If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette's in your hand, it's too late, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, it's the first thing you pick up in the morning, right? But if you plan ahead, there's no distraction you can't overcome. Because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. These problems with distraction, it's not a character flaw, it's not a moral failing. There's nothing broken about you. It's just that you haven't learned how to control these uncomfortable impulses. It's just pain management. So if you plan ahead, right, there's no distraction you can't overcome. If you plan ahead for it.

[Cody]

Is it true that like a lot of times, you can't actually see the opportunities in front of you because of the way you view reality? Or is there something else going on?

[Nir Eyal]

So you remember this, this optical illusion?

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

I'll give you an example of how I can demonstrate how you don't see reality and you can't see even the possibilities that are ahead of you with a riddle. Do you like riddles?

[Cody]

Yeah. You do? I'm nervous, though. Okay, here's a riddle.

[Nir Eyal]

If you know the answer, if you've heard it before, don't say it, okay?

[Cody]

Okay. Deal.

[Nir Eyal]

There's a father and son and they're riding in their car late at Night. There are absolutely no lights on the highway. All of a sudden a deer jumps in front of the car. They have a horrible accident. The father is instantly killed. The boy is in critical condition. He's rushed to the hospital. When he gets to the hospital, he's wheeled into the operating room. The surgeon barges through the door, takes one look at the boy and says, I can't operate on this boy. He's my son. How could that be? Now have you heard this before?

[Cody]

No.

[Nir Eyal]

87% of people who hear this riddle can't get the answer. Okay, so do you have a guess? Now how could that be? You want me say it again?

[Cody]

Yeah, I don't know. He has two fathers. They're gay.

[Nir Eyal]

Okay, that's one possible answer. That's not the answer. That is one possible answer. Can you think of another one?

[Cody]

No.

[Nir Eyal]

You're going to hate the answer.

[Cody]

Oh no.

[Nir Eyal]

The answer is the surgeon was his mom.

[Cody]

Oh my God, that's terrible. You never said it was a man.

[Nir Eyal]

I never said it was a man.

[Cody]

Oh my God.

[Nir Eyal]

Now why did that happen?

[Cody]

Because I'm a misogynist.

[Nir Eyal]

No, no. In fact, even self identified feminists don't get this. Again, 87% of people don't get this riddle. Why? Because they can't see the reality their brain doesn't let them see based on their prior beliefs. Even though 20% of surgeons are female, 80% are male. And so your priors dictate that you can only see reality a certain way. Now if I can do that with a simple riddle that you kick yourself over, is it any surprise that when you're trying to convince somebody to start a business for themselves and they go, that wouldn't work for me. And here's why. And I can't, because of this situation that they can't see it, Cody. They can't see the possibility. Just like you couldn't see until I told you the answer. By the way, if anybody ever tells you this riddle again, you'll know exactly the answer, right? It's so obvious.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's part of the 13%.

[Nir Eyal]

Right. But the fact that all these people, they can't get the riddle because of these prior beliefs. And so this is why we have to be so, so careful about the beliefs we let in and how we need to consciously, actively test ourselves and look for this portfolio of perspective so we can look at other points of view.

[Cody]

It's so useful because actually it's almost a little bit like a magic trick. Like how when you see somebody do a magic trick then it makes you question your own capability. And until then, you almost can't pattern and interrupt enough where somebody could go, oh, I can actually read this book and get it deeply inside. But hopefully we gave everybody enough pause and they had the same thought that I did. And then they're out of their mind to not listen back to this and say, how can I do this differently? God, that was good. I'm glad it worked and also so ashamed that it worked.

[Nir Eyal]

Thanks for having me. There's nothing to be ashamed of. Seriously. It doesn't mean you're oh no, I don't actually care.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, I actually have really nice things that I say about myself in my head, so that has no bearing on it. Nir, this is incredible. I love your new book, as evidenced by the fact that I keep talking about it. And like, in case they haven't seen seen here, there's a lot of bookmarks, there's a lot of tabs in here. So beyond belief, Incredible will be out for sale by the time we do this. And I just want to say thank you for writing it because it's not an easy path.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

[Cody]

You chose the hard path. Thanks there.

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[Nir Eyal]

How quick?

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[Nir Eyal]

Grab that boho.

[Commercial Announcer]

Look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals

[Cody]

that can keep up with you.

[Commercial Announcer]

And hang some string lights to give

[Nir Eyal]

your patio a glow up.

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Spring's calling. Ross, Work your magic.