The Psychology of Limiting Beliefs | Nir Eyal

Summary

Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais Episode: The Psychology of Limiting Beliefs | Nir Eyal (March 18, 2026)

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Overview

In this episode, Dr. Michael Gervais sits down with Nir Eyal, acclaimed author of "Hooked" and "Indistractable," to discuss the psychology of beliefs and, more specifically, how limiting beliefs shape and often restrict our potential. Drawing on research, personal narratives, and practical tools from his new book "Beyond Belief," Nir and Dr. Gervais explore how beliefs differ from facts and faith, why so many of us struggle to implement what we already know, and actionable ways to replace limiting beliefs with liberating ones. This episode is rich in psychological insights, neuroscience, and real-life applications for anyone seeking to move “beyond belief.”

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Key Discussion Points

1. What is a Belief? Distinguishing Fact, Faith, and Belief

• Belief as an Operating System: Beliefs are the "software of our minds," quietly shaping perceptions and behavior. (02:17, Nir Eyal)
• Definition:
  • Fact: An objective truth, unaffected by belief.
  • Faith: Strong conviction needing no evidence.
  • Belief: Conviction open to revision based on new evidence.

  “A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.” (09:09, Nir Eyal)

• Beliefs as Tools, not Truths:

  “Beliefs are tools, not truths.” (10:04, Nir Eyal)

2. Limiting vs. Liberating Beliefs

• Limiting Belief: Saps motivation or increases suffering.
• Liberating Belief: Supplies motivation or decreases suffering.

  “A limiting belief is defined as a belief that either saps motivation or increases suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or decreases suffering.” (01:16, Nir Eyal)

• Process: To really change, you must identify and examine limiting beliefs before adopting liberating ones.

  “It’s very difficult to take out those limiting beliefs. It’s even more difficult to flip them around into a liberating belief. But that’s the process we have to go through.” (01:30, Nir Eyal; 17:41, Nir Eyal)

3. Why We Don’t Do What We Know (Triangle of Motivation)

• Despite access to endless information, many fail to follow through. Nir describes motivation not as a straight line but a triangle:
  1. Understanding the behavior
  2. Wanting the benefit
  3. Belief holds motivation together

  “Motivation isn’t a straight line… it’s a triangle.” (03:48, Nir Eyal)

• If you lack belief in your ability to succeed or that the benefit is real, you self-sabotage.

4. The Psychological Immune System & Resistance to Change

• We’re wired to cling to existing beliefs—even when self-defeating:

  “We have these immunities to change. We hate changing our beliefs.” (07:36, Nir Eyal)

• Great teammates, therapists, and coaches hold up a mirror (sometimes even through “selective deception”) to help us see our invisible limits.

  Story of Serena Williams’ coach using “selective deception” to break her limiting belief at Wimbledon. (11:43, Nir Eyal)

5. Stories & Research: The Power of Belief

• Kurt Richter’s Rat Study: Hope (belief in rescue) made rats persist swimming 240x longer than those without — a metaphor for the dramatic, often hidden power of belief. (19:31, Nir Eyal)

  “What we think is that when they tasted hope... their motivation suddenly changed and they could persevere much, much longer.” (20:39, Nir Eyal)

• Learned Helplessness Revisited: Seligman & Maier’s reversal—helplessness is default; hope is learned. We must actively build hope and agency. (24:14, Nir Eyal)
• Role of Agency & Efficacy:
  • Agency: "I can choose."
  • Efficacy: "I believe my choices make a difference." (27:41, Dr. Michael Gervais)

6. Predictive Processing: Beliefs as Reality Filters

• The brain processes 11 million bits/second but is only consciously aware of 50. Beliefs filter what gets through—fundamentally shaping interpreted reality. (31:31, Nir Eyal)
• Example: Riddle of the surgeon and built-in biases; shows how beliefs blind us to certain possibilities. (32:21, Nir Eyal)

7. Practical Exercises for Uncovering Limiting Beliefs

• Byron Katie’s Four Questions with Turnaround:
  1. Is it true?
  2. Is it absolutely true?
  3. Who am I when I hold that belief?
  4. Who would I be without it?
  5. Turnaround: Try the diametric opposite to hold a “portfolio of perspectives.”

  “What I know is that that one belief... only had one solution. She had to change so I could be happy. The other three beliefs gave me options.” (46:16, Nir Eyal)

8. Attention, Anticipation, Agency — The Three Powers of Belief

• Pain vs. Suffering: Pain is a signal; suffering is an interpretation.
• 3 A’s as tools to reprocess experience:
  • Attention: What do I focus on?
  • Anticipation: What do I expect?
  • Agency: What can I choose or do?

  “The three powers of belief: of attention, anticipation and agency — this is how we manipulate our beliefs in order to increase motivation to go further.” (25:55, Nir Eyal)

• Application in chronic pain: “Pain reprocessing therapy” (74:16, Nir Eyal)

9. Societal Application: Beliefs in a Polarized World

• The value of holding “a portfolio of perspectives” for less suffering and more rational discourse.
• Calls for a social movement demanding extreme nuance and less emotional reactivity:

  “Liberating beliefs give us more motivation to do what we really want and give us greater peace. They reduce suffering.” (51:21, Nir Eyal)

• Media and culture often drive us into rigid, defensive belief systems (“psychological immune system”).

10. Most Common Limiting and Liberating Beliefs

• Top Limiting Beliefs:
  1. “I don’t have time.” (58:36, Nir Eyal)
  2. “It’s too late.”
  3. Identity-based: “People like me can’t do that.”
  4. Labels/diagnoses: “I have ADHD,” “I’m not a morning person,” “I’m an addict,” etc.

  “We have to be very, very careful...when it becomes an identity...this is when it leads to disaster.” (59:31, Nir Eyal)

• Powerful Liberating Beliefs:
  • “Growth and adaptation is possible at any age.”
  • People with positive beliefs about aging live 7.5 years longer on average. (60:44, Nir Eyal)

11. The Science of Placebo, Nocebo, and Mind-body Effects

• Placebo effect is growing stronger—even with open-label placebos.

  “It was as effective as the leading medication.” (70:47, Nir Eyal)

• “Our beliefs become our biology because of behavior.” (62:14, Nir Eyal)
• Chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and more are often magnified or sustained by attention, anticipation, and agency patterns.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Beliefs

  “A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.” — Nir Eyal (09:09)

• On Changing Beliefs

  “We are already lying to ourselves. Serena [Williams] was telling herself that she was bad at the net and she made that reality true.” — Nir Eyal (12:01)

• On Motivation & Suffering

  “Pain is a signal. Suffering is an interpretation.” — Nir Eyal (25:55)
  "You have these limiting beliefs that are creating more suffering in your life unnecessarily.” — Nir Eyal (72:57)

• On Having Options

  “The point is that we can try on that liberating belief for a set period of time... and see how our life changes.” — Nir Eyal (47:16)

• On Labels as Limits

  “When it becomes an identity... this is when it leads to disaster. And this is why, you know, in the community, we don’t call people addicts anymore...” — Nir Eyal (59:31)

• On Agency and Persistence

  “Successful people are losers. Why do I say that? They lose more. That’s what makes them successful. Because they failed more along the way.” — Nir Eyal (80:48)

• On Societal Discourse

  “I want a social movement of rational people in the middle, which is the vast majority of us, who want to demand extreme nuance.” — Nir Eyal (51:21)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening Framing of Beliefs: (00:00–01:33)
• Why We Ignore Good Advice: (02:17–05:40)
• Motivation & The Triangle: (03:48; 80:41 summary)
• Defining & Revising Beliefs: (08:21–10:04)
• Selective Deception/Serena Williams: (11:39–14:42)
• The Rat Study on Hope & Motivation: (19:19–21:41)
• Learned Helplessness Revisited: (23:24–24:31)
• Brain as Prediction Machine: (31:31–31:58)
• Surgical Riddle & Bias: (32:21–33:22)
• Excavating Limiting Beliefs: (38:05–41:41; 46:11–47:18)
• Byron Katie’s Turnaround Example: (40:35–47:18)
• Chronic Pain, Placebo & Nocebo: (64:11–72:57)
• Applying Belief Work to Society & Politics: (51:04–53:11)
• Most Common Limiting/Liberating Beliefs: (58:36–62:14)
• Liberating Beliefs & Longevity: (60:44–62:14)
• Secular Prayers/Mantras: (76:10–80:09)
• Closing "Three Powers of Belief" Recap: (80:41–81:42)

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Summary Takeaways

• Beliefs are malleable operating instructions, not hard truths.
• Our capacity for motivation and change is often dictated—not by knowledge or willpower—but by unexamined beliefs lurking in the background.
• Real transformation requires identifying, testing, and replacing limiting beliefs with liberating ones.
• Tools like Byron Katie’s questioning, reframing, and adopting mantras or secular “prayers” can interrupt cycles of reactivity and open up possibility.
• The three levers of belief—attention, anticipation, and agency—shape how we interpret pain, challenge, setbacks, and potential.
• In a complex and polarized world, the ability to hold multiple perspectives and challenge the rigidity of our beliefs is vital for personal success and collective harmony.

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Further Exploration

• Download Nir’s 5-Minute Belief Change Plan: nearandfar.com/beliefchange
• Books Referenced:
  • Beyond Belief (Nir Eyal)
  • Indistractible (Nir Eyal)
  • The Work (Byron Katie)

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This episode is essential for anyone wrestling with invisible limits, seeking higher performance, or simply wanting a more resilient, peaceful, and empowered mind.

Transcript

[Nir Eyal]

A belief is not a fact. A fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether you believe in it or not. On the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a strongly held conviction that does not require evidence. In the middle is a belief, a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What if the biggest barrier between you and your potential isn't talent, but a belief that you've never questioned?

[Nir Eyal]

If you've got two people are running a marathon and one says to themselves, I cannot do this. The other says, I think I can do this. Let's say they have the exact same physical ability. The belief is not a fact. The belief is just perception. Who are you going to bet on to win the race?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I AM your host, Dr. Michael Gervais.

[Nir Eyal]

A high performance psychologist named Michael Gervais,

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

who Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks, famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos project.

[Nir Eyal]

Olympic athletes depend on something more than

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

just training and talent.

[Nir Eyal]

They have to stay mentally tough.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Today's conversation is with Nir Eyal, best selling author of Hooked and Indistractible. And in this episode, it centers on his new book, Beyond Belief, which explores how the hidden assumptions we carry shape what we see, what we feel and what we're capable of achieving.

[Nir Eyal]

A limiting belief is defined as a belief that either saps motivation or increases suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or decreases suffering. It's very difficult to to take out those limiting beliefs. It's even more difficult to flip them around into a liberating belief. But that's the process we have to go through.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

As you listen, consider this. Are your beliefs expanding your potential or quietly defining your limits?

[Nir Eyal]

I can tell you how a belief that helps people live a much longer life. And this research blew my mind. This came out of Yale a few years ago.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Nir Eyal. Nir, what a treat to sit with you.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank you. This is a huge honor. I appreciate you having me.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, yeah, for sure. So I've loved all of your books.

[Nir Eyal]

Thanks.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. And this is number three in the stack.

[Nir Eyal]

Number three.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And let's maybe start with why you wanted to go after beliefs. And let's start at the ground floor. You know, like, what is a belief? But first, why did you want to

[Nir Eyal]

Understand beliefs, I think beliefs, it turns out, are the operating system, the software of our minds that we don't even realize we have this operating system running in the background. For me, it was a little bit of the frustration from my past two books. And here's what would happen with Indistractable. You know, I spent five years writing it. I really wanted to dive into the psychology of distraction. I started with first principles. And every week I do these office hours where anybody can call me and we can talk about whatever they want to talk about if they read one of my books. You know, I love, I love talking to readers.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

And so I. Every single week, so I do an hour every week, 15 minutes of four calls and maybe, you know, one out of every 20 calls would sound something like this. Somebody would call me and say, hey, Nir, I read Indistractable. Great book. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't work. I'd say, oh, wow, tell me more. You know, changed my life. And I spent five years researching it. 30 pages of citations to peer reviewed studies. And I really wanted to make sure it worked. Tell me what happened. Let's talk about step one. How did step one go for you? Well, you know, Nir, I read step one. I read it. I just didn't, I just didn't do that one. No problem. I'd say, you know, let's go to step two. How did step two go for you? Yeah, you know, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't get to that one either. I didn't do it. And at first I was kind of offended. You know, I spent so much of my life writing this book about a problem that everybody says is so awful, is so insurmountable. The world is so distracting. Here you go on a silver platter here. Here's the answer. Just do these four steps. It changed my life. Take you an hour and a half to read it. It'll change your life. And then I realized I do this too, that I have books on the shelf piling up that I haven't read, that I've talked to coaches and gurus and experts and heard their advice, but not acted on it. Why? Why is it, especially today when we are drowning in information, we all basically know what to do? You know, if you want to get in shape for 99% of the population, eat right and exercise, not much has changed. If you want to have a start a business, you have to do the things that other people don't want to do. If you want to Have a great family and relationships. You have to be fully present with the ones you love. We know what to do, so why don't we do it? And what I realized is that it's not enough just to know that you can have the behavior, know the benefit, but you still won't do it. You still will lose motivation to follow through. And I think it's because we have a fundamental misunderstanding of how motivation works. We think it's a straight line right between here's what I want and so here's what I have to do. Kind of classic economics. But motivation isn't a straight line, it's a triangle. And so this is where the inspiration for Beyond Belief came from. When what I discovered is that you not only have to have an understanding of the behavior, here's what I have to do. You not only need to want the benefit, but holding the triangle together is the belief. For example, if I don't believe that I will get the benefit, maybe I work for a boss who I don't think has my best interests at heart. Well then I don't believe I'm going to get that promotion or that raise much more common. And this leads into the limiting beliefs that we have in our life. If I don't believe that I can do the behavior, if I don't believe that I'm capable for whatever reason, I will self sabotage and not do even what I know what I'm supposed to do. And so this was the big conclusion, that if we want to sustain motivation, which we know that perseverance is the number one most defined trait that leads to success, perseverance and adaptability. Well then what is the secret behind motivation? It's not good enough just to know what to do or why you want to do it. There's that missing piece of belief that we don't really explore.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Well done. I think two things that I want to highlight. One is you are writing for yourself.

[Nir Eyal]

Absolutely right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Because you didn't have an easy upbringing when it came came to like the emotional part of your life. And so I would imagine that that scar tissue and feel free to share whatever part of this that you want to. I know you wrote about it in your book. So I'm just bringing chapter one forward almost maybe paragraph one four. And I would imagine because of that scar tissue and call it trauma or micro traumas that you're like, wait, hold on. I built some beliefs before I really had a formed understanding of what I was capable of. Before I had an understanding of how beliefs worked and how Powerful they were. I adopted other people's beliefs. I kind of corrupted some ones that maybe were going to give me a good shot. I need to go excavate those, reexamine them and repair and. Or rebuild a belief system. Does that sound like why you wanted to write this book?

[Nir Eyal]

So for me, I don't write about what I know. I write about what I want to know. And that happens with all my books. So with indistractable, when I found that I was constantly checking my phone as opposed to being fully present with my daughter, there was a problem here. I need to figure out why with beyond belief. Same story that before I was going to read another self help book, I need to figure out why I didn't implement all the other self help books I've already read.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And you thought that that was based on a belief system?

[Nir Eyal]

Well, I went to first principles. I went to look, you know, I'm very data driven. I need, I don't want just platitudes. I need to see the studies, show me what works.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It's one of the reasons that I wanted you here is because you are first principle driven. And I talk about first principles a lot. They're really important to me and I think that they are pretty effusive. I think they slip point past people in life because we're onto doing things, being busy if you will, taking actions if you will, even if they're not the actions that will lead to our best potential outcomes.

[Nir Eyal]

And the psychological immune system that we have to not want to change our beliefs. That when you go to first principles, it's a tactic we use in order to challenge our beliefs. But one of the things we learned is that we have these immunities to change. We hate changing our beliefs.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right. Okay, so let's do a couple things. I think we would benefit from defining a first principle, maybe even defining or articulating how you get to a first principle. I think it would benefit us to articulate your working definition of a belief.

[Nir Eyal]

Of a belief. Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And how that belief sits in the stack of not the triangle of motivation you just spoke of, but where it sits in the stack of helping people be better in life. Sure. So let's go first principles, arrival of first principles, belief definition, and then how that fits. Right.

[Nir Eyal]

So when it comes to beliefs, I think the best way to understand a belief is, is to compare it to what it is not. And we often confuse these terms. So a belief is not a fact. A fact is an objective truth. It is something that is True. Whether you believe in it or not, the world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That's a fact. It doesn't care. Flat earther is sorry. It doesn't care what you think. On the other end of the spectrum from a fact is faith. Faith is a strongly held conviction that does not require evidence. What happens in the afterlife? God rewards the righteous. No evidence is required for something like that. In the middle between fact and faith is a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I like what you just said. Can you say it one more time?

[Nir Eyal]

The definition of belief.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yes.

[Nir Eyal]

A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. So it's actually not that far from what's in the dictionary. That's where I got it from Merriam Webster. There's more possible definitions. Right. It has multiple definitions, but that's the definition, the context of this psychology.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What I like is though, that you're adding a layer to it which is open to revision.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's the part that I think you're adding something to the mix that's important because some people's belief systems are quite rigid.

[Nir Eyal]

That's. So that's exactly. That was my. Aha. That's in my mind. Is that because it is open to revision based on new evidence. It's not a fact. It's not faith. We can choose them. Which. What blew my mind is that these beliefs that I had carried for my whole life, I could examine them, I could look at them and realize that they are not truths. Truth is the requirement for a fact. Beliefs are not necessarily truths, they are tools. Beliefs are tools, not truths. So what that means is that we can choose the ones that best serve us. It's like a carpenter doesn't say, oh, the hammer. This is the one and only true tool. No, when it's the right tool for the job, sometimes you use a saw, sometimes you use a wrench. But our beliefs, especially these hidden, limiting beliefs, which we all have. I have yet to meet anybody who does not have a hidden, limiting belief. We all have them. I still have them.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And it turns out this might be the first person.

[Nir Eyal]

The first.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I've got so many invisible limits and blind spots.

[Nir Eyal]

Right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

What's amazing, though, it's like. It's. It's like our face in that you can't see your own face, Right. You can see your hand, you can see your feet. You can't see your own face. What's amazing, and I can prove this, is that we can all see others limiting beliefs, even though our limiting beliefs are hidden to us. Why? Because we think that our beliefs are facts, but we can all identify when it comes to other people in our life. Think about your closest people. You could probably think of at least one limiting belief that everybody you know has, but we can't see them in ourselves.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

This is what I think a great teammate does. And that teammate, I use that loosely. It could be a spouse, you know, and I don't want to butcher the romance of a loving relationship, but just hold this idea for a minute like somebody. It could be a psychologist, it could be a head coach. It could be a lot of different roles. It could be a best friend, it could be a therapist, could be a lot of roles. They hold up a mirror because they're really paying attention. And if they can do it non judgmentally and sometimes thorny, sometimes, you know,

[Nir Eyal]

warmly, sometimes deceptively even.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What does that mean?

[Nir Eyal]

Do you know about this selective deception idea? The Serena Williams. Have you heard about this? No. So Serena Williams at Wimbledon, okay, her coach, she was playing very badly and she was kind of psyching herself out and she wasn't going up to the net fast enough. She was hesitating. And you know that the milliseconds of hesitation can lose you a match. So her coach tells her, he pulls her aside, he says, hey, I have some new information here. You know, when you rush the net, you score 80% of the points. She says, really? I thought I sucked at the net. And he says, well, you know, the statistics don't lie. I mean, look, that's what it says 80% of the time you score a point when you rush the net. She says, okay, and guess what? She goes on to win Wimbledon. And what does he say, you know, when he says he knows he lied to her, it was selective deception. And he says, yes, but guess what happened? She was already lying to herself. And this is what we all do. We think that we see reality as it is. We do not. We are already gaslighting ourself. We are already lying to ourselves. Serena was telling herself that she was bad at the net and she made that reality true. So what did he do? What did the good coach do? He knew what she was capable of. He flipped the script. He allowed her to crack open this possibility of another thing that is also true, which is what defines a belief, is that you can pick it as a tool. It's not a truth, it's a tool. And allowed her then to make the lie into reality.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It's interesting. I did not know that story. I feel like I've heard it. Did you write about this? Yeah, yeah. Maybe you introduced it to me or I can't remember, but I wasn't the first one to. Right, yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember getting. Having a little bit of rash to it because this is the debate. One of my colleagues, Mark Awiagi. What's up, Mark? He and I will talk about beliefs a lot. He and I have. And we also talk about, like, the ethics and the position that you hold with people. And is there a duty to be honest? Is there a duty to, like, stretch the truth in that respect? And I get a rash to, like, placebo and nocebo? And what did you just call the tactic?

[Nir Eyal]

Selective deception?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Selective. I mean, it's a lie.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's a clever. It's a fancy word for saying lying.

[Nir Eyal]

Is it a lie if you're lying to yourself already? Yeah, she was lying to herself already. That she wasn't capable.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What I would say the position. I get the tactic in that moment.

[Nir Eyal]

And by the way, I don't know if I'm recommending this. I tell that story to show you how your beliefs can shape your reality.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I believe I'm not good at the net, so I'm hesitating. I believe I'm getting burned. Yeah. And that if I do believe, if there's factual evidence that I am good at it, maybe I adopt a new belief that I can do special things at the net. So let me just rush into that. It's tricky. There's a lot of gray in this. I'll tell you where my rash is. Fake it till you make it, I think is a flawed approach because we don't want anything fake.

[Nir Eyal]

Right. Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And you know you're faking it. So what that coach did is didn't try to hype or whatever, wanted to ground it in false reality.

[Nir Eyal]

Well, but only in that moment, though, because she. He knew what she was. If fake it till you make it is there's no evidence you can do this, but just fake it. What he knew is that she was capable and she was psyching herself out. I think that's the difference. And so the takeaway lesson for ourselves is not necessarily fake it. It's find the belief that serves you that if you say to yourself, you know, if you get two people are running a marathon and one says to themselves, I can't. I cannot do this. The other says, I think I can do this. Let's say they have the exact same physical ability. Right. That's the truth. The fact. Let's say they have the same exact physical ability. The belief is not a fact. The belief is just perception. Who are you gonna bet on to win the race?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, of course the person has a belief.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. So both of them might not finish the race because many people don't finish marathons. But the one that's much more likely to finish is the one that holds the belief that is liberating versus limiting

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

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[Nir Eyal]

I don't know how to build a fresh system without removing the liberating beliefs.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I don't know either. Yeah, that's. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

So that's what I've done in my life is to look for the muck. Look for the New Year's resolution that's been there year after year. Look for that relationship that continues to annoy you, that you somehow can't seem to fix. Look for the goals that you've had for years, and somehow you're stuck. They're not happening. And it turns out that when you get to it, at the core, there's always some kind of limiting belief. That's where we start. So step number one is examining those areas of our life, taking out those limiting beliefs, examining them. Right. Looking in the mirror, like we talked about earlier, where you can't see your own face. And then step two is to come up with the liberating beliefs. And so the difference between a limiting belief and a liberating belief, A limiting belief is defined as a belief that either saps motivation or increases suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or decreases suffering. And so it's very difficult to take out those limiting beliefs. It's even more difficult to flip them around into a liberating belief. But that's the process we have to go through.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. The way I feel about it is, like, I use this analogy that let's say there's an inner fire. Okay. Just for a visual. And a limiting belief system is like this heavy blanket that sits on the fire. It might smolder under there, but, like, that belief system is really putting out the fire. It's a useful image for me. And what I'm trying to do is, like, remove that thing, because the fire's already there. And I've built and corrupted the way that I hold myself and the future potentials. And I'm trying to get out of my way in that respect. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Do you know the Kurt Richter rat Study this one.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, yeah, That's a great one.

[Nir Eyal]

Right. I think it demonstrates kind of what

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

you're saying from John Hopkins. John Hopkins. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell the story. This is. This is a really good one.

[Nir Eyal]

So Kurt Richter in the 1950s, takes these wild rats, and he's trying to measure how long they could survive floating in water. Right. Paddling in water. So he takes a rat, a wild rat, puts it in a cylinder of water halfway full, and he sits there and times how long the rat can swim for. And he sees that in about 15 minutes, the rat seems to just give up and falls under the water and dies. Then he wants to see if an intervention might change how long the rat can swim for. And he takes a new group of rats, he puts them in a cylinder, and right before he knows they're about to give up, right around the 15 minute mark, he takes out the rat. He dries it off, let it catch its breath and plunk. Back into the cylinder it goes. He does this a few times. So he conditions the rat and now he notices that the rat, once it's been conditioned, doesn't swim for 15 minutes. It doesn't swim for 30 minutes, it doesn't swim for an hour. Which if you, you know, people know there's some kind of surprising result here. And so when I ask people, they say, oh, maybe twice as long, three times as long, maybe four times as long. I mean, think about that. That would be insane. If someone could come up with an intervention that could make you four times more persistent. That would be unbelievable, right? Unprecedented. Well, the rats didn't swim for 30 minutes. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 minutes. Hours. Not 60 minutes. 60 hours of swim time. Now 240 times more persistent. What changed? Their bodies hadn't changed, the experiment hadn't changed. We can't ask the rats what they believed, obviously, but that's kind of the only variable left. And so what we think is that when they tasted hope, when they thought that salvation might be possible, something was unlocked, just like the blanket that was suddenly removed, their motivation suddenly changed and they could persevere much, much longer. And so what does that mean for us? The big message for me is that we are capable of far, far more. I mean, you know, from the people you work with, they're human beings like the rest of us and they do things that the average person would think is superhuman, impossible. There's no way they, the people you work with, these are the examples of people who are the super persistent, 240 times more type of people versus the average person. You know, we give up at the 15 minute mark.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Two things. I really enjoyed how you told that research.

[Nir Eyal]

Thanks.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, I don't know if you practiced that well.

[Nir Eyal]

I've been sitting with it for six years, so I've been thinking, yeah, but

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

you reduced it down to the essential components and then brought me along for a ride and didn't, didn't kind of cloud it with extraneous variables. Like, I really appreciate how you just told that story, which I think is why your books work so well.

[Nir Eyal]

Appreciate it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And okay, that's first and foremost, that was a treat. The second is, you know, we can't ask the rats. And so we are Attributing a belief that changed. And in actuality, we don't know really what it is. So Kurt's research was around hopelessness and hope. You know, that idea. And I do appreciate that. It's like, that's a good example of exploring capability. And I say this to myself, and I say this to others who are interested. Like, if you knew what I knew, your life could be very, very, very, very different. You are not even coming close to your potential, your sense of joy, your sense of flourishing, the capabilities that you have, if they're grounded in the interests that you hold, how far you can actually go. And we need a team. No one does it alone. So there's a social components that are really important, but. But it begins with your vision, a set of beliefs. And with that set of beliefs, you can carry things really far. You do need some psychological skills to navigate tricky environments. And those rats, I don't think had anything other than, like, oh, I can keep going. I'm not sure how that happened, you know, and I don't know if you're. If you dug around that research to know how it actually happened. I don't think anyone does.

[Nir Eyal]

But there's actually more recent studies that confirm the 1950s result. So, you know the concept of learned helplessness.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right, yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Seligman, Seligman and Meyer. Right. And this has been around for decades, and it was considered the orthodoxy. I mean, the whole social programs were planned based on this idea that people learn helplessness over time. So this is why there's persistent poverty, that people have been ground down. And once you learn that nothing will help your circumstance, you give up. And of course, you know, they had this on animal models that showed something similar that you could get dogs to just, you know, take shocks, the painful shocks.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

They give up because they learned that. That no matter what I do, it's futile. There's no point, because I keep getting these terrible, painful results. So I'm just gonna take it, even though I could walk out of the room.

[Nir Eyal]

And it turns out that as of two years ago or so, Seligman and Meyer said that they were completely, totally wrong.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yes.

[Nir Eyal]

It is totally backwards that in fact, we don't learn helplessness. Helplessness is our default state. What we learn is hope. So exactly what those rats before their default state was passivity. Fifteen minutes, give up. It wasn't actually physical exhaustion.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And I want you to keep going. Don't lose your thread here, but I want to just highlight that they died. Those rats chose because they were Fatigued that they chose to die, there's no point. And maybe choices are strong here, but that's what happened. And if you can think about that, and I wanna just mark the central governor for a minute, there's this quote unquote mechanism. We haven't found where it lives. But this idea, let's just use the central governor as a metaphor, as an idea, is that at some point we reach a experience in ourselves that we say, this is too much. Lactic acid is coursing through our body. Brain kinase is like this very scratchy neurochemical that's in our body that says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, our heart is pounding. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We shouldn't go any further. This is like, we can't go any further is the message that we interpret those signals from. So lactic acid is like agitating, right? And so is the brain. It's an agitating neurochemical. But we make, the way we make sense of that is like, this is too much. Slow down. If you can address that. I don't know if it's 240 times the resources that we think, but those rats certainly did. You can go far, far further.

[Nir Eyal]

This is the big aha is that when you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

This is a huge one.

[Nir Eyal]

Huge, huge. That when you can separate the signal of pain with the interpretation of suffering. People think that pain and suffering is the same thing. It is not the same thing. Pain is a signal, suffering is an interpretation. So the three powers of belief, of attention, anticipation and agency, this is how we manipulate our beliefs in order to increase motivation to go further.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Let's do that. Let's close the loop on hope. If you can take us home there.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So the big takeaway is that it's no wonder that we constantly default into these limiting beliefs. That's what we have to actually actively fight. We have to show ourselves through small acts of agency that we can do something. Because our, our default state is always passivity. And I think most of us.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What does that mean to you? Or default is passivity.

[Nir Eyal]

I don't know what that means. We don't learn hopelessness. Hopelessness is our default. So when we are born into the world, we're completely helpless. There's nothing we can do. We have to rely on the care of others that maintains our default state. So this is the Seligman and Meier reversal of learned hopelessness, that we are born hopeless. What we have to learn, in fact, is hope.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

When I read that, I think you said it, but it was relatively recently and I didn't really understand it. You know, you're reminding me to go back and scrub that a little bit. Like there's something about that that doesn't square initially with me. And that's fine, you know, Are you capturing that? Their take on it is that the most natural state is to have to be passive.

[Nir Eyal]

That we learn throughout our lives to where we have agency, where we have the opportunity to change.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I nod my head intuitively, not from a research position to say that. And agency is defined like I choose.

[Nir Eyal]

Yes.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right. And efficacy is I choose. Yeah. Well, I think agency in my mind is just like I, I, I can choose.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. That you can change your circumstances.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. There's things I can do. And, and efficacy is when I choose. And what I choose, I believe I can influence it.

[Nir Eyal]

Does it work?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So that's a. Efficacy is a word for power. Agency is a word for choice, if you will. When you put those two together, you got something really special. So I think we're going to close this loop with beliefs around those two in just a moment. But let me just wrestle with this for a minute. That we, by default, hopeless. I don't get that. I see a baby and an infant, and I see big eyes, wonder, and I see, like, curiosity, and I see exploration, and I see risk taking, and I see frustration when it doesn't go the way that I hope it would go. And I see agency, like the screaming for AI attend to me. I see young ones with this incredible will, for the most part, a will and a strength for survival, not like a passive hopelessness.

[Nir Eyal]

I think it's in the context of challenge that we know we have a severe negativity bias that humans are constantly scanning from an evolutionary basis.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I call it survival bias. Just to strengthen that a little bit. The negativity.

[Nir Eyal]

The negativity bias.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. I see it as like a survival bias.

[Nir Eyal]

Sure. Of course.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Scan the world and find the danger, Right, Exactly.

[Nir Eyal]

Because good things are nice, bad things will kill you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

So the news doesn't tell you, here's all the nice things that happen in the world today. The news is blood and gore, Right. The war.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

If it bleeds, it leaves.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. If it leads, it leads. If there's a war 3,000 miles away has nothing to do with you. That's the headline. Terrible things. Why? Because we are hypervigilant for danger. And so because we have that default state of always looking for danger, always having that negativity bias. This is part of that reflex of the default state, the default state is safety. You know, if I go back to what I know is safe, that is much more likely to lead to my survival than risking, than going above and beyond. And so we shouldn't beat ourselves up that we keep holding these limiting beliefs. Those limiting beliefs are there because they kept us safe at some point. They served us at one point. And so now it's our job to figure out, do they still serve us? And most of the time they do, but once in a while, they don't. We should take them out. Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Are you embedded in that? Are you thinking that beliefs, they arise naturally or they are taught and learned?

[Nir Eyal]

They arise naturally after they are taught and learned. Right. Whether it's our society, whether it's. But once they are there, they don't realize their beliefs anymore.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So it's not like we're born with a belief set. We have instincts. Right. And some biological imperatives. But beliefs are learned.

[Nir Eyal]

They become our lenses with which we see the world. And so why does this happen? Why are beliefs so powerful? Because our brains can't take in all the available information. So right now, your brain is processing 11 million bits of information per second. 11 million bits of information per second is about the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. So the light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice entering your ears, the ambient temperature, Your brain is collecting all this information. It's 11 million bits of information. But conscious awareness is only 50 bits of information. So 50 bits is about one sentence per second. Your brain, your conscious mind, just can't handle all that information. So what does it have to do? It has to filter information through this tiny keyhole of attention that colors your whole world. And we call this predictive processing. This is kind of the new way of understanding how the brain works. The new metaphor is that the brain does not see reality as it is. None of us are seeing reality. We are seeing our interpretation of

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

reality.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. How did you know I was gonna say that? Because of what I already said.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right, yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

And so everything is a prediction. So your entire life is a very elaborate simulation. Not like in the Matrix. It's not one simulation. We all have our own simulation running inside our brains. And so those beliefs dictate what you're able to interpret right now, what you're able to feel. Right. In your internal states. And of course, what you're able to do.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What you're pointing to also is what. You know. One of my mentors I never got to meet, Viktor Frankl, is like, it's not. And Carl Jung had something to do with his understanding of this too, which is the experience in of itself is only based on your interpretation of it.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And you're saying that that interpretation rests on a belief. Beliefs.

[Nir Eyal]

Right. I'll give you a great example, actually. I could show you visual illusions, but that's not going to be useful for people tuning in. But there's a good riddle that illustrates this that 83% of people don't get. The riddle goes like this. Don't answer it if you've heard it before. Okay. The riddle is blue. That.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, no. Oh, Derek, I'm joking. Yeah, keep going.

[Nir Eyal]

The riddle is, there's a father and son driving on a dark, deserted road. And all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, all of a sudden, a deer jumps out in front of the car. Car slams into the deer. The father's instantly killed. The son survives, but he's in critical condition and he has to be taken to the hospital immediately, where 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, 83% of people who hear that riddle can't figure out the answer. The answer is that the surgeon was the moment. Okay?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Now, when I say that, there's a bias that's embedded.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. We can't even see the reality of what could be because our brains has blocked that. Based on our prior understanding, based on our prior belief. Now, by the way, doesn't mean you're sexist. 83% of women also don't get this answer. And even if they have mothers who are surgeons, oftentimes they don't get the answer. It's just that the fact is that 80% of surgeons are men, 20% are women. And so we have this prior view of the way the world works, and our brain makes those assumptions of what's possible. So if you said earlier, when you point out someone's potential and they just can't see, can't come to mind. You can't convince them. And you'll see how they'll make every possible excuse why it can't be done, it's because they literally can't see it. Their brains won't allow them to see current reality, let alone a future reality.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

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[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And then I'll say, I'll ask, this is super applied. Right? And then I'll say, next, say we see each other tomorrow and you were thinking about overnight, maybe you wrote it down, but you spent some time Thinking about it. And then I'll say, do you want me to go or do you want to go first? It doesn't matter, actually, what I'm looking for. When I say my version of what I think, I'm just looking for pupil dilation or constriction. I'm looking for micro movements, like when they reflexively move back. Like, what? Maybe I was too big.

[Nir Eyal]

When you do this exercise, is your future always more optimistic, more grand than theirs, or do you find that it kind of calibrates?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Oh, I think that I'm wildly wrong on much of it, but it's more about the calibration. I try to go as big as I possibly can stretch, but it's limited by my beliefs, my understanding. Let's say I go too small, and they lean in and they go, what? Like, that's it. So I'm more interested in the calibration. And then from that point, you know, we have a conversation. Like, oh, so, okay, so listen. No, I'm pretty. Say it's me. And I went big. No, I'm pretty clear. Like, I can see a pathway for that. I can see it for you. Like, let's work the plan. And they're like, they do what you're doing right now. They start nodding in their head. Like, that could get good. And if I'm too small, they're like, look, dude, I don't know if we can hang out again. And there's a laughter with it. Like, wait, hold on. And then I say, wait, show me what you see. Let me understand. Is it this? Is it. That is. Oh, it's this.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay, so let's work the plan.

[Nir Eyal]

I love it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So I. I call it invisible limits.

[Nir Eyal]

Okay.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Not limiting belief, but invisible limits.

[Nir Eyal]

I love it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

And so what do you. So I'm. What do you do after that, after you have those limiting beliefs?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

First, I calibrate. Is that of interest? You know, and then we try to get the clarity of it. Right. Like what? Like, almost like the tinsel strength is the fabric and the details of what we're talking about. So we want to. We want to almost, like, be able to feel. And I'm using, like. I'm using my hands. Like, there's a tactile sensation of what that thing is. So it's not just this foggy picture, but we're trying to get it really clear of what it mechanically would look like. And then how do we excavate the limiting beliefs? It's a little bit of a messy process, but it's just digging. It's like, where'd that come from? Yeah, like, what do you think's getting the way? What's holding you back? Where'd that come from?

[Nir Eyal]

I don't spend much time on the where did it come from? Part, but I do spend a lot of time on doing these turnarounds.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Keep going. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

So this comes from the work of Byron Katie, which I'm a huge fan of. She's great. She's great. And she's really channeled. You know, the more I dug into the work, she has these four questions that she really concisely put it together. And turns out Aristotle did the same thing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Same process.

[Nir Eyal]

It's not that different. Right. It's just she articulated it really, really well. And so I kind of adapted it as well. And so one of the most powerful ways to not necessarily change your mind. I think that that is. I think something people get really hung up on is that they get stuck with what is the truth. And so if I'm gonna change my mind, I need to change my mind from what I currently believe to something else. And again, that's not the goal. The goal should be to collect a portfolio of perspectives. I find that that's much more helpful. It's not. This is one truth. This is my truth. Which truth is Right. Those are facts.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

When I think of Byron's the four step, like step two, I'm hazy on all four steps, but step two is like, is it a fact? Do I have that right? Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Right. So number one is, is it true?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, Is it true?

[Nir Eyal]

Do you want me to actually give you an example of how I use this in my own.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, it's good. And there's a reason that it's hazy because I haven't found it useful for me personally. So I don't use it with others. But. So walk me through it. This will be fun for me to re examine it.

[Nir Eyal]

I'll tell you how it was incredibly helpful for me in interpersonal relationships.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

By the way, I really like this conversation.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, me too. This is fun. I love being able to ask you a lot of questions.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Thank you.

[Nir Eyal]

So curious, you know, you work with my book is. Is not necessarily for the super high performers like the superhumans you work with.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I think it is, but yeah, I think it is. I think. I think there's all more. There's further territory for us to go.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Wherever you are on the. On the frontier. Absolutely. More. More to go. So. Okay, keep going.

[Nir Eyal]

So. So, so I'll bring it into a very Relatable situation, I hope, for folks around the relationship with my mom. A few years ago she had her 74th birthday and I wanted to do something nice for her. And so what did I do? I wanted to order her some flowers, but I was in Singapore, she was in central Florida, where I grew up. And I called all the florists I could find the best reviews for them. And I make sure, I call them to make sure, okay. Although the flowers gonna arrive on time, they're not gonna wilt in the van. And I stayed up till 1am and I went to bed and I said, okay, good job. I'm a good son. I did this nice thing for my mom. I call her up the next morning and say, hey, mom, did you get the flowers? Happy birthday. She said, yes, I got the flowers. But just so you know, thank you very much. But just so you know, they were half dead and you should probably call the florist because, you know, don't order from them again. To which I said something to the effect of, well, that's the last time I buy you flowers. It went over about as well as you expect. After the call, my wife turned to me and she said, hey, do you. Do you want to do a turnaround on that? And I said, no, I do not

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

want to change my mind.

[Nir Eyal]

Your hocus pocus, touchy feely woo woo nonsense. I need to vent. You need to sit here and I need to tell you why. I need to get my feelings out. Right? This is what we're supposed to do. If somebody annoys you, you can't keep it bottled in. You have to share your emotions. You can't keep them in. Right? You have to tell people how you feel. Venture Turns out at that point I knew that the literature says that venting is very counterproductive. Venting does nothing but solidify the effigy of the beliefs around a person. We do not see people. We see our beliefs about people. And no truer than the people who are closest to us, like our parents. And so I knew that at the time, I said, fine. Okay, good point. I sat down and I did this turnaround, which is question number one was is the belief true? The belief was that I wrote down, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. By the way, you can use this with My boss is too judgmental. My colleague did this. This annoyed me. You can use this with all kinds of different circumstances. Anything that you have a belief that you're afraid may not be serving you. And by the way, the beliefs that you most need to challenge are the ones that feel most certain. Right. The ones that you're like, no, that's definitely true. When I told my wife, clearly answer question number one, of course it's true. Didn't you just hear what she did or you heard what she just did? That she is clearly too judgmental and hard to please? Right. I need validation. So question number one. Easy. Is it true? Yes, it's true. Clearly. Then comes question number two. Question number two is, is it absolutely true? Absolutely. Under all circumstances, 100% of the time. That's what absolute means. No exceptions. Could there may be. Potentially may. Okay, right. Okay. Maybe in some other universe, maybe she wasn't being judgmental. I don't know how, but potentially. Okay, let's go. Question number three. Who am I? When I hold that belief? Who am I? So I'm not very patient, I'm not very loving, I'm not my best self. I acted like a 13 year old when I said that and I kind of regretted what I said. Question number four. Who would I be without that belief? So if I had some kind of magic wand and I could, poof, make that belief disappear, who would I be? I'd probably be more at peace. I'd probably be nicer to my mother. We'd probably have a better relationship. I'd be myself. So what do we establish with just four questions? And you can do this about any limiting belief? You established it may not be true. It's not serving you, and there might be a better way. Now comes the turnaround. The turnaround asks you to consider the exact opposite, not to change your mind.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

This is what you added to the mix?

[Nir Eyal]

No, this is part of it. But my. From Byron, Katie's work?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Well, no, she's always been about turnarounds. That's the goal of the four questions. But this is how I've applied them. And I may be missing some of her specific language, but this is what's worked for me. So I took my existing belief. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Now, how do you do a turnaround on that? You look for the exact opposite, which will always sound totally preposterous. It's going to sound ridiculous and you will want to reject it because we have this psychological immune system that wants to keep us safe, wants us to default into passivity. We don't want to change our minds because changing our minds is dangerous. What's the opposite? My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? Well, Maybe she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful. Maybe she was just trying to not get me scammed by this florist. Could that be true? Maybe. Could be true. I'm not looking for truth. I'm looking for a portfolio. I'm looking for other options. What's another belief? The first one was, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Another turnaround. This is called turnaround to the self, what Byron Katie calls it, I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? Well, I had rehearsed in my head because I put in all this effort that when I called my mom, I expected effusive praise. And when that didn't come, I lost it. So who was being too judgmental and hard to please? Me. Right. That I expected her to respond the way I wanted. I wanted the praise. So I was being too judgmental, wasn't I? Now, there's a fourth belief, and this one was the hardest to cope with, but turned out to be the most true. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. That when I put on this effort into something and it didn't work out the way I planned, I took that to mean that I was somehow deficient, that I had screwed up, that I wasn't good enough, that I was a bad son. And this is called the misattribution of emotion. We do this all the time. I'm feeling crappy. Who's the nearest person I can attribute that emotion to?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right.

[Nir Eyal]

That's exactly what I did.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Now, which one of those four beliefs are true? Which one is a fact? All of them. None of them. Who knows? Who cares? What I know is that that one belief that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please only had one solution. She had to change so I could be happy. That's not gonna happen. The other three beliefs gave me options. I could do something about that. And that's what it's all about. So with all our limiting beliefs, whether it's our athletic performance, our business performance, our interpersonal relationships, if we can look at the diametric opposite of that limiting belief, it gives us options to choose from. And even if they are not true, and they will feel ridiculous, the point is that we can try on that liberating belief for a set period of time, just like we have glasses that we try and say, it doesn't really fit my face. Let me try another one and see how our life changes. And so I do this probably 10 times a day, and I am so much more at peace. I'm so much happier. I am so much more contented because I don't have to suffer the way I used to suffer with these limiting beliefs.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I love that. I find that to be a little complex to walk through, like to carry with me. I will say that I totally see how that's useful. I think that there's somewhere. Maybe I picked it up somewhere or I don't know. Somebody helped me at an early age by default. And my wife. This drives Lisa bonkers because I love alternative possible explanations. And I've found that to be in inoculation to cognitive distortions. Somebody cuts me off and flip me off. And I don't want to take it over personalization as the response like why do people do that to me? Or the attribution that, you know, that guy's a jerk or that person's a jerk. I like to find and play with multiple kind of parallel paths of what could be. Yeah, they're late.

[Nir Eyal]

This is the problem with being interviewed by very successful people. Very successful people already do this.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

But people who are not that successful. This sounds crazy. What does the average person say when someone cuts them off?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Jerk.

[Nir Eyal]

That guy's a jerk. Why does this always happen to me? I'm stuck in traffic again, just my luck.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And you just mentioned it. But what happens is there's a physiological response. Being cut off. Fight or flight kicks up. That's an agitating, scratchy internal experience. We don't like how that feels.

[Nir Eyal]

It's pain.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It's expensive.

[Nir Eyal]

Doesn't have to be suffering, but it's definitely pain.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Pain, it's expensive. Right. There's a biological mandate to make sure we recover throughout the day so we have enough resources. Even if there's a. I don't know.

[Nir Eyal]

But I don't think it's as complicated. Driving a car is complicated. When you first start driving a car, you're white knuckling it when you're a teenager because you have to follow all the steps. Over time it becomes part of your. It just becomes an instinct. It becomes a habit. When something annoys me, this is just my default state is what's the alternative explanation? What's the 180 degree opposite of what I think is happening? And could that also be true?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

But here's why Lisa gets frustrated when I do that is because that's bad behavior. Let's say, quote unquote, bad. Like Mike, you're explaining away bad behavior. I can see that if there's a repeated pattern where. Let's say a cousin constantly steps in line to eat in front of me. I'm making something up. I don't even know where that's coming from. I'm thinking like a family dinner or something. And then I'm like, oh, you know, doesn't understand or I'm explaining away bad behavior. And she's like, you need to address that. And I'm like, ah, it's fine. Like what do I care? And so like the minimization is something that I learned as a survival tactic and it's not good like minimizing. And so there's a slippery slope for me personally on counterfactual multiple explanations for an event to take place that it also can minimize the impact or intensity that's actually happening.

[Nir Eyal]

Well, that could be another limiting belief. If your limiting belief is that everything needs to be minimized in order for it to be okay.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, I think that they're like cousins. These two are cousins. And so I agree it's a limiting belief. The limiting belief is that I don't want to confront or challenge in situations that are uncomfortable. Say, okay, and so I'm going to

[Nir Eyal]

find confrontation and challenge is always bad.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

So that could be a limiting belief.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It's interesting because I actually am pretty good at knee to knee conversations, is what I call them. Like, you know, this, let's go through this together as opposed to. So I've had to, but I've had to learn it. Yeah, but so I'm splitting hairs in here for a reason. Because it's not clean.

[Nir Eyal]

It's not about minimizing, it's not about gaslighting. It's not about lying to yourself. It's about the belief that serves you best, the one that reduces suffering and increases motivation.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And how does the thinking that we're talking about, about examining limiting beliefs and how does that apply to our current climate right now?

[Nir Eyal]

Which part of it?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Just the idea that there's a lot happening where let's say we're on different political sides of the.

[Nir Eyal]

Oh, I see what you mean.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay.

[Nir Eyal]

Political disagreements.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. Like how does our belief system and examining our belief system apply to our current climate?

[Nir Eyal]

So back to why do we want to adopt these liberating beliefs? Is that liberating beliefs give us more motivation to do what we really want and give us greater peace. They reduce suffering. Boy, is that what I'm looking for. Aren't we all. As the world becomes more crazy and there's all these disagreements and we can't keep track of everything that's happening. But we feel like we should be on top, be having an opinion about everything. It is not a very peaceful time. It feels like we have to suffer through this. And the fact of the matter is we don't. We don't necessarily have to suffer through this. And ironically, the way we reduce our suffering through this very difficult time is by increasing our capacity to hold alternative beliefs. So personally, I think what I'd like to see if I would like a social movement. I don't want a social movement to support the right or to support the left or this political cause or that political cause. I want a social movement of rational people in the middle, which is the vast majority of us who want to demand extreme nuance. We need to be intolerant of people who refuse to allow other people beliefs and other perspectives. And that's what's been happening. Our media sources are becoming people who agree this way only listen to this. And people who agree the other way only listen to that. And we're not allowing ourselves different perspectives, and that's greatly harming us. And so when you understand that beliefs are tools, not truths, and you can see that the beliefs that we are holding are these tools that we keep bashing our heads in with that are making us miserable, we are suffering constantly because the president did this and my neighbor did that, and this thing was in the news and this war 3,000 miles away and is making us suffer. We are making ourselves miserable. You can invite in alternative perspectives.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Finding Mastery is brought to you by AG1. Spring is. It's just a natural time to reset. You know, the days are getting longer, at least for the northern hemisphere. And there's just an energy in the air that shifts. There's a kind of pull to simplify for me, to recalibrate what's working, what isn't. And one area I come back to regularly is my daily routine. It's not about overhauling it, but it is about scrubbing the material of it to really making sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. So I look at it all and I reexamine it. AG1. It's been one of those foundations for me for over a decade now. I'm still using it. I like what they're doing. What I appreciate most is how much it simplifies the equation. One scoop covers a lot of ground. They've got some multivitamins in there. And more than anything, it's the pre and probiotics that I appreciate that they've done. It's all in one glass of water. So if you're taking a bunch of supplements, you don't have that pill fatigue that so many people talk about. I'm traveling a lot right now for our corporate clients, and that means shifting time zones and schedules. That's when consistency really helps. The AG1 travel packs, they've been a game changer for me. I throw a few in my bag and I don't have to think twice about it. I'm giving my body what it needs to keep showing up for work for the people I care about. For the long game, really. Visit drink ag1.com Finding Mastery to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 free in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. That's a $72 value for free. Again, that's drinkag1.com Finding Mastery I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to to switch on my mind to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my morning. That's always in my control. That's always in your control too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business and the arts are using. And the best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do so. Just head over to findingmastery.com/morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to findingmastery.com morning to get your morning mindset routine that alternative perspective one. I like the agitation for a movement, for discernment, for nuance. For nuance. I like the agitation there. I think though that there's I would question the first premise that majority of people are rational. I actually think the majority of people are unskilled emotionally and doesn't allow them to really get to rational discernment because emotions are running the show and they're unskilled with them because our culture doesn't really value skilling up on emotions.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, this might be an existential question. I hope to God that we have the basic functionality to be able to reason through things. Now. Not everyone. There's definitely some extremes. I think unfortunately that's what we see

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

the most of the well, so I'll take it a step further is that this is what I think is happening as soon as the emotions get on board. And most emotions are pretty tricky to navigate. They're prickly. I'll use that word again. They're agitating, if you will, happiness and joy or not. Those are pretty easy. That kind of type of emotions are easy. But sadness and irritation and fear, those are prickly. And as soon as those start to get online, what we do, I think, is anchor back to a belief system that feels safe. And. And then we anchor there and we

[Nir Eyal]

look to confirm it.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right. Like we're looking for reasons that we're feeling agitated to your earlier point, or we're confirming our belief system to be able to feel safe again. And that's not allowing us to get to the rational piece, which is to explore rationally thoughts or patterns of thoughts that would lead to a better future.

[Nir Eyal]

Right.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I just think the emotion piece is what gets in the way. That's huge.

[Nir Eyal]

And I think that that's another one of these things that people don't understand are different. That an emotion is not a feeling. That an emotion is a physiological response. The feeling is the interpretation of that response.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right. So you're anchoring to Damasio's position, Antonio Damasio from usc, his interpretation. Yeah, and I'm completely aligned with that.

[Nir Eyal]

And so we need to realize that it's never going to be comfortable. The most comfortable thing when people become most agitated is when they see something that challenges their existing beliefs. And so that immune system, that psychological immune system to change, causes us to go find all the reasons why that person's wrong. And in fact, I think what we have to do is instead lean into before we are going to espouse our beliefs and get all upset about it and induce all this suffering within us. Can we, with good faith, argue the other side? I think that should be a prerequisite before you go spouting stuff. I mean, I don't talk politics because I realize that there's a lot of nuance that I just don't understand that I'm not able to argue very well both sides. And so you know what? I should probably shut up. What I stick with is the stuff I can argue both sides on. I can tell you why.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

You know what?

[Nir Eyal]

If you wanted to poke a hole in my theory, yeah, this is probably how you would do it. I can steel man that stuff. And so I think that gives me a lot of peace to know that it's not my responsibility to necessarily have an opinion about everything. I'm gonna have an opinion about things that I can argue both sides on.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I love that framing. What are the three to five most consequential, limiting beliefs that You've come to

[Nir Eyal]

understand the most common is I don't have time or some version of that. It's too late. And then limiting beliefs around identity. People like me can't do that, or my background precludes me or whatever. Something a personal, this is who I am. I think that's one of the worst sentences in the English language. I am what I am. Or the second worst is that's how she is. Or he's always like that. Or you know, there goes that person doing that thing again that they always do. So some identity based beliefs I think are very common limitations. And then I think there are limitations around these labels which I think are similar to identities, but they're a little bit more nuanced in that many times they come from diagnoses, they come from some kind of label that we've adopted. Sometimes it's because of a real diagnosis. A lot of times, especially today on social media, people pick up things that they think are diagnosis that aren't diagnoses. Imposter syndrome. People think imposter syndrome is in the dsm, that it's a clinical kind of diagnosis. It is not nothing but it. But because, you know, and I have adhd and I used to say this to myself all the time, that when I had a moment when I was distracted, first thing in my mind, there goes my adhd or a lot of people my age now we say I'm having a senior moment. Why do we do that? It's so limiting because what are you doing? When I would say to myself, there goes my adhd. Now my brain is thinking about this limitation, not the task that I was actually trying to focus on. So now I've become even more distracted and we hear it all the time. I'm not a morning person, I'm a Sagittarius, I'm a this, I'm a that. We have to be very, very careful sometimes. These can be liberating. Right? We know that diagnosis can be very liberating as long as it's the map. When it becomes an identity, when you become the map, this is when it leads to disaster. And this is why, you know, in the community we don't call people addicts anymore. We say people struggling with impulse control. We don't assign these labels because we know that labels can become our limits.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And what are some of the most potent and powerful beliefs that help people live a great life?

[Nir Eyal]

I can tell you how a belief that helps people live a much longer life in this research blew my mind. This came out of Yale a few years ago that people who have positive beliefs about aging at age 30 live on average seven and a half years longer. Is that not seven? That is more than the effect of diet, more than the effect of exercise, more than the effect of smoking. Is positive views of aging. What does that sound like? A negative view of aging is what we all hear. Aging involves inevitable decline. That's a negative view of aging. Positive.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I get ugly, I lose my strength inevitably. I believe that, like, this is the future is, you know, a decline.

[Nir Eyal]

Right. And we say to ourselves all the time, right? Oh, I'm having this ache and pain because I'm getting older. Yeah. We say to ourselves all the time, a positive view is something as simple as growth and adaptation is possible at any age. That would be an example of a positive view of aging. Growth and adaptation is possible at any age. Now, which one of those is true?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

They both can be.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. Exactly. They both are kind of true. And both maybe not. They're beliefs. They're not facts.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right.

[Nir Eyal]

They're beliefs. It is also true that decline is inevitable and that you can grow and improve at any age.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So I like that because I can see decline in certain aspects. And I'm really excited about the divergent thinking and the complexity and nuanced thinking that I'm moving into.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That feels really opening and exciting.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So.

[Nir Eyal]

But by the way, I just want to make sure if someone's listening and they just stopped, they would say, oh, wow, there's this magic belief that's going to make my cells in my body live longer, and then I will, you know, live seven and half. That's not how it works at all. That's not how it works. There is no magic vibrations that cause beliefs to enter your cells. That's not what's going on here. What's happening is that our beliefs become our biology because of behavior. So the people who at 30 believe growth and adaptation is possible at any age versus aging involves inevitable decline. Who's more likely to get out there and garden or to see their friends or to volunteer in the community? They do things that make them healthier.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So a friend of mine just sent me a text. He's a strength coach, and the text he sent was, remember to lift heavy things when you're on the road. It makes you harder to kill. And I chuckled and I was like, that's an interesting framing.

[Nir Eyal]

Remember to lift heavy things when you're on the road. It makes you harder to kill.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Okay, so what he was saying is, like, Yoga's good, you know, whatever. Do do some of those things. But when you're also traveling a bunch. Yeah. Make sure you're lifting heavy weights. It makes you harder to kill. So the framing is that like you're gonna die.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And if you're being hard to kill

[Nir Eyal]

is a good thing. Being tough is a good thing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's right. It's just a weird framing of it as opposed to like lift heavy things. It's the foundation for vitality. Or it's a foundation for vitality. It's a different way to frame the belief system. And so when you hear it based on your research on belief and belief systems, do you like that type of framing? Do you see value? Because it's an aging lens that he's looking through. Like you're getting older, you're going to die. And being strong makes you harder to be killed.

[Nir Eyal]

I like the liberating beliefs that decrease suffering. And so if you can disconnect the pain from the suffering, that to me is a plus. And the research is incredible. Part of the research I looked into was around hypnosudation, which I'm a very skeptical guy. I need to see the research, I need to see the studies, I need to see the tapes. This is real.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

This is real.

[Nir Eyal]

This is real.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

This is like.

[Nir Eyal]

This is beyond belief. That's part of the title of the book.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I am so glad that you're bringing this piece up. This isn't hocus pocus. There's real research here. I have family members who have gone down this path. It is real and it's powerful. And it takes a ton of courage to invest in the way that your mind works to navigate potential future physical pain.

[Nir Eyal]

And the reason I share this research is not because I want people to go do hypnosudation. I'm not advocating for it. I'm trying to show people the power. Oh yeah, I am. It's incredible. And so in Europe, tens of thousands of people do this. What's so remarkable is that how unremarkable it is. So I met this guy, Daniel Gisler, and. And he is the most straight laced. He's a former commodities trader. Very straight laced, very numbers guy. Not the opposite of woo woo. And in his early 50s, he has this freak accident where he breaks his fibia around his ankle and he has to get these metal screws put into his bones. And then a few years later, it's time for them to come out. He's healed up and he learns along the way, he learns about hypnosudation he watches a YouTube video, he learns about it, becomes fascinated by it. He starts training himself by getting these medical clamps on his hand. And he tries to, you know, learn how to manage the pain of these medical clamps. Over the course of this time, he learns this technique that allows him to go under surgery for 55 minutes where doctors are cutting into flesh with scalpel, they're taking out these metal screws from bone. And for the entire 55 minutes, he has no general anesthesia, no local anesthesia, nothing. And it's not just that he's faking it. We can see his heart rate, his blood pressure, everything is stable. How does that happen? It happens through the power of the mind, through the power of attention, that keyhole of attention. He's not letting all that information go in. So just like right now, you're only absorbing 50 bits of information versus the 11 million bits. He has trained his mind through hypnosudation to not allow all that information that comes with the suffering of pain to come through to his conscious mind. And so if we can do with surgery, what else can't we unlock?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And there are a subset of folks that are interested in natural birth and it's not that fringe in that world, like the hypnosis for that. And so there's something there as well.

[Nir Eyal]

It's amazing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

There's a gentleman named Matt Hoffman, and Matt was a BMX action sport athlete, world class amazing. And he's well documented that he's gone through surgery without any drugs. And so what you're sharing, I'm nodding my head to in two ways. The birth piece and also other surgeries of folks. I know it's wild to think that the way that we think changes everything.

[Nir Eyal]

It really does. And the idea here is that we should apply it to far more areas. And that's how we can use it to block out suffering through the power of the mind, through the power of our beliefs. Turns out that at the core of chronic pain and many of these chronic conditions, these exclusionary diagnoses, when we don't know underlying causes, fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a, is an exclusionary diagnosis. When we can't figure out what's wrong with you, you get this label. And it turns out that these mind effects, these belief effects, these expectation effects, they can influence the outcomes to an amazing degree. So when it comes to chronic pain, we now know that chronic pain is when the mind over fixates, it over pays attention to pain and makes this erroneous connection between pain and suffering. We call it the fear pain, fear loop. That I'm scared of that sensation, and so I pay more attention to it, which causes more pain, and that pain causes me to be more scared of it. And so this is this cycle that

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

happens, this hyper vigilant loop.

[Nir Eyal]

A hyper vigilance.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Exactly. Do you remember Dr. John Sarno's original research?

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. Back pain.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, yeah. And so I had the chronic condition that was really pretty heavy. It was a surfing injury. I completely lived that loop.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I would. I would get into. I want to go get into somebody else's car and look at the seat first. Like, oh, I don't know how long I could sit in that seat. I mean, it was. And it's real, so intense. Like how I was filtering everything to not be in pain and addressing that was one of the ways through it. And I'll share this with you. I think you'll appreciate this. Oh, you know, it was Dr. David Spiegel from Stanford. That's who did. Who's done all the original research on hypnosis.

[Nir Eyal]

He has that app, right?

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. Reverie. Yeah. It was long ago when surgery was not a really good option. 30 years ago.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank goodness, by the way.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah, thank goodness.

[Nir Eyal]

Because it turns out to have cured.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. So what I did, though, one of the things. So I addressed it from, like, finding a way through that loop that we just talked about. And the second thing I did is I used imagery, healing imagery. This was on the fringe in research, and it's still kind of out there, but I saw my spine heal. I saw the discs in my spine heal just by using imagination, by focusing my attention on what I wanted my body to do internally, even though I couldn't see it.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. And these effects, these are accessible and it's not magic. I think a lot of people think that. They hear about placebos, they think that placebos have some kind of magic power. Placebos don't fix sickness. They don't fix physical damage. Placebos fix illness. They fix the perception of.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Of the perception of it.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

That's nocebos as well. This doesn't work. This won't. A nocebo and a placebo placebo is

[Nir Eyal]

like, I will heal versus I will hurt.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. The sugar pill. Tricking you to believe that has had some potency in what it can do, but it's only just sugar. Right. And nocebo is the exact opposite. Like, this won't work. This doesn't work.

[Nir Eyal]

Oh.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And then. So when people adopt that belief that this Won't work.

[Nir Eyal]

What's interesting is that we used to think that placebos always involve deception, that you had to believe that you were getting a real drug in order for it to have the placebo effect. This is why we have the double blind control studies where the person administering the drug and the person receiving it, nobody knows what they're getting. Then a few years ago, Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard had this study on ibs, irritable bolus syndrome. What would happen if people got what they knew was a placebo? Dr. Kaptchuck would go to his patients, these study participants, and say, okay, here is a placebo pill. I want you to take this. It says placebos across the bottle. By the way, you can buy pills today on Amazon that say placebo and it has five star reviews. People say it's fast acting, amazing relief. I'm not kidding, Go look on Amazon. But anyway, he gives his patients this placebo pill and he says, look, this is a placebo. It is completely inert. There are no active ingredients. However, it has been shown to help people with the symptoms of ibs. It was as effective as the leading medication.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

I did not know this recently.

[Nir Eyal]

Not only that, people came back to him after the study and, and said, Dr. Kapcha, can I have some more of those placebo pills? They were amazing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

It impacted directly their belief system even

[Nir Eyal]

when they knew it was a placebo. In fact, we know that the placebo effect is getting stronger. Why would the placebo effect be getting stronger? And this is a big problem, by the way, for pharmaceutical companies. You know, pharmaceutical companies need to show that the drugs, whatever they produce, is more efficacious.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. Than a sugar pill.

[Nir Eyal]

But the placebo effect keeps getting stronger

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

and stronger, so the drugs have to

[Nir Eyal]

be more and more efficacious. And by the way, 80% of our healthcare spending is not sickness. 80% of our healthcare spending is not spent on sickness. It's spent on illness. The symptoms, right? Sickness is in the body, illnesses in the mind. It's the perception of those symptoms which are all real. I'm not saying pain isn't real. Pain, all pain is real. But all pain is also in the brain. Where else could pain be? Pain isn't here. Pain isn't here. Pain is a signal that the brain is interpreting as suffering. And the more fearful you are of that signal, the more you're saying to yourself, is it always going to be here? Am I ever going to get out of this? When is it going to go away? The more fearful you become. The higher the implication of the pain because of your beliefs. The power of attention, anticipation and agency. When you take those away, when I focus on something more, the power of attention, when I anticipate it might get worse and that I think I don't have agency, that's when pain is amplified. The body says, pay more attention to this, feel it more, suffer more.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So people with the inability to guide their attention, people that don't have a sense of agency, which they get to choose, and they are chronically anticipating negative things, bad things, you know, things go wrong in their life, those three are equal. What?

[Nir Eyal]

So this is what we call neuroplastic pain. And just to be very clear, it's very different from actual physical pain. Chronic pain is defined as pain that persists after six months with no known physical causes.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Wait, what are the three A's?

[Nir Eyal]

Attention, anticipation, agency.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And when you have a dearth of those three, you have, you're going to suffer more. You suffer more because your belief system is not robust enough.

[Nir Eyal]

You have these limiting beliefs that are creating more suffering in your life unnecessarily.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And if you have high agency, you're highly skilled with attention, and you anticipate good things to take place in your life. Right. What happens there?

[Nir Eyal]

All these good things happen. Yeah, because you're seeing things that you couldn't otherwise see. You're feeling things you didn't feel before, and you're doing things you couldn't otherwise.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And those three, are you suggesting that those three are the building blocks for a belief?

[Nir Eyal]

These are the three powers of belief. This is what beliefs can do for you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And you can train or tune each one of those. You can become more tuned to what you want to attend to. You can become more attuned to the agency that you hold, and you can be more tuned to the what you are anticipating that could be favorable in your life.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. I'll give you a perfect example. So one of the newest and most exciting treatments for chronic pain is called pain reprocessing therapy. And pain reprocessing therapy kind of sounds like the exact opposite of what I was told when I had, you know, terrible back pain. I was told, ice it. And then, no, you have to heat it and don't move. You definitely don't want to move because you don't want to cause more damage because you probably have a slipped disc and if you move the wrong way, oh my God, terrible things will happen. You have your whole life, it's never going to go away. And you know, we Used to have pain scales. Remember the pain scale? It was another vital sign that you had to say, how much pain do you have? So we were hyper fixating on pain all the time. Now there's been a serious reversal to try and reconsider. Is this the best way to treat pain? Pain reprocessing therapy says that the first thing you need to do is to focus on the fact that you're safe. Attention.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Right.

[Nir Eyal]

Am I safe right now? That's the first step. Second is to reduce the urgency that because we live in this age of modern medicine, we expect. I need this pill. It needs to work. And if it doesn't work, oh my God, it's never going to go away. And what if we never find a treatment instead? It doesn't need to go away right away. Reduce the expectation that you have to have instant relief. And then the third part is to prove to yourself that you are safe. Agency. So how do you do that? One of the best. I still feel back pain from time to time. But now I don't say, oh, I can't move right now, Sorry. I can't move because I have back pain. No. You know what I do if I feel back pain? I do the same movement 10 times and I tell myself, ah, okay, pain. I see you there. I see what you're trying to do, but you're just a signal. You're not suffering. You're just a signal. You're just data. And so this is essentially what pain reprocessing does. And it's incredibly effective. It's been shown to be more effective than other treatments, including medication.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Well done. I can recognize 20 years ago or even 30 years ago, the manual therapists that would help me would reorganize my body, body's felt sense of safety by keeping me right under the threshold of pain. Then what they would do is move me into a compromised situation. The signal would pop up and they'd be like, yeah, just play with it.

[Nir Eyal]

I love it. Yeah, it's. It's amazing.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Yeah. And the theory, they were not working from that theory. They were just incredibly intuitive. And that's come to inform the therapy that you're talking about, which is basically prt, right? Pain reprocessing therapy. Okay, so is there a belief that you are working on yourself that like, you really want to get right or you're really interested in having it to be more robust?

[Nir Eyal]

Where do we begin? I mean, let me take out my portfolio of.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Do you write down your beliefs? The beliefs that are working and the beliefs are Limiting.

[Nir Eyal]

When I have annoyances, yeah, I try. I constantly look for them.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

So you don't have like the 200 page index of beliefs that work and beliefs that don't work.

[Nir Eyal]

I don't keep the limiting belief. Once I've identified it, then I don't want to think about it again. But I constantly have the liberating beliefs, so I can give you dozens. One of the most effective methods I found are secular prayers. I haven't prayed since I was 6 years old. I just didn't identify with anything metaphysical. It just didn't speak to me. But then I did this research and I couldn't help but come across the amazing power of prayer. That it turns out that prayer has incredibly protective effects, that people who pray live longer, they're healthier, they make more money, they contribute more to the community. All kinds of good things happen when people pray. But I thought to myself, okay, that's nice, but I can't pray unless I have some kind of religious tradition. Turns out that's not true. There was a study done where this is just one of many, but there was one study done where they have a standard pain protocol. And one of them is that you have to put your hand in very cold water and they see how your face, how you grimace. Oh, I'm struggling. Oh, it's very painful. And then ultimately, how long you can last in that very, very cold water when you pull your hand out. And they took three groups of people. One was the control group, so no intervention. One was a group that prayed but had a faith tradition. Another was a group of people who did not pray and had no faith tradition. And they taught them how to pray. Okay. They taught them how to follow some kind of prayer protocol. And they said, you don't have to say God. You can say whatever's meaningful to you. Sum of all forces, Mother nature, whatever you want to say, you can substitute that. Turns out that the people who prayed with or without faith both had significantly higher levels of pain tolerance. So prayer seems to have some kind of protective effect psychologically. We also know that people who call themselves spiritual but not religious have the worst outcomes. Turns out the majority of Americans, it's the largest group of Americans today. We call them nones. N o N e. The largest religious group in America today. Nones. Nones. People who are spiritual but don't have any kind of religious home. They have higher rates of depression and anxiety than people who pray and have some kind of religious tradition. So that's the worst of all worlds. So what I'VE adopted in myself to answer this question, a little bit too lengthy. But I've adopted these secular prayers in my life to remind me throughout the day of my liberating beliefs. So, for example, I'm a professional writer. I've been writing now for over a decade, and writing sucks. Writing is hard work, right? It is painful. But I am conscious of my tendency towards the suffering around writing. And so I've installed these practices of reminding myself of liberating beliefs. One of the liberating beliefs is that I repeat this mantra, this little prayer, whenever I feel like I want to get distracted by something. Let me just go check email as opposed to doing my research, or I want to check my phone when I really want to be with my family, whatever the case might be. I close my eyes and I say, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better. So I'm relishing that signal, the pain, and I'm reinterpreting it as not suffering. That's great. Awesome. I feel this as painful, right? This is what it feels like to get better. That discomfort I'm feeling, that means I'm getting better, and if everybody could do it, it wouldn't be special. So I'm reminding myself of that limiting belief. Another prayer that I say very often is, I remind myself, I say, it doesn't get easier. You get stronger. Because I used to always tell myself, I used to be that guy who's like, ugh, just my luck, right? Oh, that's happening to me again. I would say things like that. And now I never say that anymore. Instead, I remind myself that this is what it feels like to get better, that that discomfort is part of the process, that it's not going to get easier. I kept expecting things to be perfect, no chaos, that things would just be smooth someday if I could just figure everything out. I'll create systems and no more chaos. No, that things never get easier. It's never gonna get easier. I'm gonna get stronger. And so by repeating those mantras, by repeating those secular prayers, it increases my pain tolerance. I reinforce these liberating beliefs, and I'm able to do much more than I ever could.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

What a great investment that you have given us.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

And so I really appreciate how you scrub research, how you can bring it to life, how you can make it applicable, on how we can use the enhancement of beliefs by the models that you have, the three A's that we've talked about, and maybe you can take us back home. Where earlier you were talking about three variables, beliefs, actions and benefits and behavior, and how that gives us a better chance to explore our potential. Take us back home to those two.

[Nir Eyal]

So if we know that the defining trait of success, or I should say the most likely factor that that predicts success is persistence, it's actually not intelligence. It's persistence and adaptability. Those seem to be the most two important traits. So how do we persist? How do we keep on? Right. When you interview successful people, they're actually the losers. Successful people are losers. Why do I say that? They lose more. Successful people have more failures under their belt. Why? That's what makes them successful. Because they failed more along the way. Whereas people who are actually not that successful don't even try. They give up. They stop trying completely. So the whole point here is how do we unlock this seemingly magic feature that we all have in our brains? Just like those rats who went from 15 minutes to 60 hours, how do we unlock what's already within us? And we unlock that motivation to persist by understanding our beliefs, by understanding how we can leverage the power of attention, what we see, the power of anticipation, what we feel and the power of agency, ultimately what we do.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Well done.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank you.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Thank you for the great conversation, for the time and thank you for all of the books that you've written and I'm really excited for people to read this one. Where would you like them to follow along in your research and your writings?

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, so we actually have a free 5 minute belief change plan that anybody can get. You don't even have to buy the book. Nothing. You just. It's ready for you to download and that is at my website, nearandfar.com near spelled like my first name, N I R and far.com belief change. So it's belief change and you can get that free guide and the book where you can find all this research and many, many more we didn't have time to discuss. The title of the book is Beyond Belief.

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

Well done, mate.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank you so much. Next time on Finding Mastery. We're joined by neuroscientist, philosopher and author Sam Harris. In this conversation, Sam explores the mechanics of the mind, why so much of our suffering comes from becoming entangled with our thoughts, and how mindfulness can help us step back and see them more clearly. We also dive into the power of radical honesty, why refusing to lie can reshape your relationships, and what it means to pursue truth in a world increasingly shaped by tribalism and misinformation. Join us Wednesday, March 25th at 9am Pacific only on Finding Mastery

[Dr. Michael Gervais]

all right, thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.comnewsletter to sign up. This show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously and the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you can heard about in this episode, you can find those [e-mail] sponsors and remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional, so seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode. Be well, think well, keep exploring. Come on.