Nir Eyal - NYT Bestselling Author & Fmr Stanford Lecturer | The Science Behind Why You Can't Trust Your Own Thoughts

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Success Story with Scott D. Clary

Guest: Nir Eyal — NYT Bestselling Author & Former Stanford Lecturer

Episode: "The Science Behind Why You Can’t Trust Your Own Thoughts"

Aired: May 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features behavioral scientist and bestselling author Nir Eyal, who joins host Scott D. Clary to explore the psychology of belief, habit, and attention. Drawing from his new book "Beyond Belief," Nir delves into the science behind why our minds trick us, how our beliefs shape our reality (and sufferings), and practical frameworks anyone can use to reprogram limiting thought patterns. The conversation moves fluidly between personal anecdotes, psychological research, and actionable steps while maintaining a candid, often humorous tone.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• The Nature of Belief: Exploring beliefs as tools, not immutable truths.
• Happiness, Suffering, and Motivation: Investigating why seeking constant happiness is unproductive and how beliefs can help us remain motivated without suffering.
• Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs: Identifying and replacing subconscious thought patterns that inhibit growth.
• The Science of Habit vs. Routine: Why forming habits isn't always the answer, especially for challenging or meaningful pursuits.
• Practical Tools for Change: Introducing inquiry-based stress reduction and the power of ‘turnarounds.’

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Beliefs as Tools, not Truths

[00:56 & 06:19 & 19:43]

• Nir’s central insight: “Beliefs are tools, not truths. They don’t necessarily have to be true in order to be useful. So now I pray because it works.” — Nir Eyal

• Explains that religious or secular practices (like prayer or meditation) offer measurable psychological benefits, regardless of one’s underlying faith or skepticism.

• Study discussed: People who pray (even non-religiously) gained greater pain tolerance and psychological resilience. [02:30–06:19]

2. Why Suffering Matters (And Happiness Isn’t the Goal)

[01:17 & 12:14]

• “I’m actually not happier, I just suffer less. I don’t think evolution designed us for happiness…What you want is motivation without suffering.” — Nir Eyal [01:17]

• The drive for constant happiness is counter-evolutionary; it’s dissatisfaction that fuels growth and achievement.

• Quitting (not lack of intelligence or resources) is the #1 reason people don’t reach goals:
  “It’s not that persistence guarantees success. It’s that quitting guarantees failure.” [12:14]

• Shares the Kurt Richter rat experiment: rats, once “saved” from drowning, swam 240 times longer due to a belief in possible rescue—a metaphor for human grit. [16:10]

3. Habits vs. Routines vs. Beliefs

[19:43–22:57]

• Nir critiques the current obsession with “habits,” noting they only govern autopilot behaviors and can’t apply to inherently hard, conscious activities (like writing, working out intensely, or repairing relationships).

• “Habits are impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. You can’t write with little or no conscious thought…What we want is a routine.” — Nir Eyal [21:10]

• The real X-factor is the belief system that sustains motivation, not just “hacking” habits.

4. The Brain’s Filters — Why We Don’t See Reality

[27:00–32:12]

• “You do not accurately perceive reality…Your conscious awareness can only process about 50 bits out of 11 million entering your brain every second.” — Nir Eyal [27:12]

• Our brains default to existing beliefs because it’s more efficient and “safe” for survival; change feels threatening and uncomfortable, fueling resistance.

5. Identifying and Changing Limiting Beliefs

[33:00–44:00+]

• Limiting beliefs: “beliefs that decrease motivation and increase suffering.” Often rooted in past experiences, but “it’s not your fault—it’s your responsibility.”

• The danger of venting: “Venting does nothing but reinforce what we believe about people…You see people as you believe them to be.” [39:35]

• Introduces inquiry-based stress reduction (Byron Katie’s four questions) as a practical tool:

  1. Is the belief true?
  2. Is it absolutely true (always, 100%)?
  3. How do I feel or become when I hold this belief?
  4. Who would I be without this belief?

  Followed by “the turnaround”—actively considering opposite perspectives.

• Memorable story: Nir’s “half-dead birthday flowers” for his mother and the emotional cascade that followed, illustrating how reframing his belief about her changed his emotional reality. [37:37–49:17]

6. Choosing Your Beliefs Intentionally

[49:17–54:09]

• “Beliefs are tools, not truths. Who cares if it’s ‘the way it happened’? If a different belief reduces my suffering and increases my motivation, why wouldn’t I adopt it?” — Nir Eyal [49:23]

• We’re already “lying to ourselves”—might as well construct beliefs that empower, not limit us.

• Try on new beliefs and stick with the ones that serve you (“portfolio of perspectives”).

7. Labels, Identity & the Power (and Danger) of Diagnosis

[56:08–61:00+]

• Labels (e.g., ADHD, “I’m not a morning person”) can become cages: “Your label will become your limit.”

• The placebo/nocebo effect demonstrates how expectations shape experiences—even physical sensations (see "Mr. A" case: [58:00–61:00]).

• Redefines diagnosis as a “map,” not a fixed identity: “I’m learning a new skill,” rather than “I have a chronic brain disease.”

8. Prayer, Reflection, and Self-Compassion

[66:39–69:03]

• Prayer, for Nir, has become “a reminder of the attributes I want to strengthen—patience, wisdom, humility—not asking for things.”

• “It doesn’t get easier, you get stronger. When I pray, what I pray for is the attribute to overcome the thing.” — Nir Eyal [67:03]

9. The Cascade Effect of Changing One Belief

[69:47–73:37]

• Shifting one core belief (“My mother is hard to please”) led to a domino effect—changing how Nir related to his daughter, others, and ultimately himself.

• “Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. We’re all babies who just got bigger—everyone’s operating with the tools they have.” — Nir Eyal [71:47]

10. Where to Start & Last Encouragement

[73:37–75:02]

• Advice for listeners: Accept that nobody sees reality perfectly, including yourself. “We see through the filter of our beliefs. And if you don’t see your own reality clearly, you definitely don’t see others’ clearly.”

• “You can do way more than you know. Your limiting beliefs are keeping you from being the kind of person you’re actually able to become…but they can be unlocked.” — Nir Eyal [75:02]

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Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “Beliefs are tools, not truths...They don’t have to be true to be helpful.” — Nir Eyal [00:56, repeated at 06:19 & 49:17]
• “I’m actually not happier, I just suffer less.” — Nir Eyal [01:17 & 12:14]
• “It’s not that quitting guarantees success—it’s that quitting guarantees failure.” — Nir Eyal [12:14]
• “You do not accurately perceive reality. You see reality through your beliefs.” — Nir Eyal [27:12 & 75:02]
• “Your label will become your limit.” — Nir Eyal [56:08]
• “Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt.” — Nir Eyal [71:47]
• “You don’t create reality, but you do create your perception of reality.” — Nir Eyal [52:47]

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Actionable Steps, Tools, and Takeaways

• Start with reflection: Identify a single area in your life where you feel stuck. Articulate the belief behind that stagnation.
• Try the Four Questions (Inquiry-Based Stress Reduction): Is it true? Is it always true? Who are you with/without the belief? Try on the opposite.
• Construct ‘liberating beliefs’: Keep beliefs that serve your motivation and reduce suffering, drop those that don’t.
• Labels are not destiny: Reframe diagnoses and identities as maps, not cages.
• Practice regular reminders: Through prayer, journaling, or reflection, reinforce attributes you wish to embody.
• Practice intellectual humility: Acknowledge the severe limits of your perceptions—be gentle with yourself and others in the process of change.

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Notable Segments

• Beliefs as practical tools—prayer and pain tolerance: [02:30–06:19]
• The Kurt Richter Rat Experiment—power of belief in persistence: [16:10–19:43]
• Inquiry-based stress reduction/turnaround example with Nir’s mom: [37:37–49:17]
• The impact of labels/diagnosis, placebo & nocebo effects: [56:08–61:00]
• Prayer as daily self-reminder and conscious upgrade: [66:39–69:03]
• Cascade effect of changing core belief: [69:47–73:37]

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For more details and practical belief-change tools, visit Nir’s website: www.nirandfar.com/belief-change.

Book Mentioned:
Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal (out now)

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This engaging episode offers a science-backed, compassionate, and deeply human perspective on why we get in our own way—and how nearly anyone can learn to rewrite the script in their minds for more motivated, less painful living.

Transcript

[Scott Clary]

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[Nir Eyal]

The big aha moment for me was that beliefs are tools, not truths. They don't necessarily have to be true in order to be useful. Now I pray because it works.

[Scott Clary]

What if the world around you is designed to distract you? Nir Eyal has spent years studying the psychology of habits, how products hook us, and why we keep coming back.

[Nir Eyal]

I'm actually not happier, I just suffer less. I don't think that evolution designed us for happiness. You don't want to be happy all the time. It's that disquietude that keeps us hunting, makes us want more, that makes the world better. What you want is motivation without suffering. The studies find the number one reason that we don't achieve our goal. We quit. We all tend to quit at that 15 minute mark, way before we're actually exhausted.

[Scott Clary]

He didn't just study distraction, he helped build the systems behind it. Today he breaks down how to take back control of your attention, build better habits, and become truly indistractable.

[Nir Eyal]

How do I decrease suffering but keep motivation? It turns out you need to learn how to use your beliefs in order to change what you see, what you feel, and ultimately what you do. About 40% of your behavior is done on habit. People who are high achievers in every field are able to do the things that the rest of us think is really hard without suffering. You don't create reality, but you do create your perception of reality.

[Scott Clary]

Near. You haven't prayed since you were six years old. Now you pray every day. What happened?

[Nir Eyal]

Well, you know, I. I grew up very secular. And When I was 6, my family went through some really tough times. They got scammed by some con artist for pretty much every dollar they had. And my parents argued every day. I can still remember the sound of their screaming at each other. They almost got a divorce, and we were days away from having to leave the country because they ran out of money. But thankfully they. They pulled it together and. And we were able to stay. But that's when I started praying. When my parents were going through this really tough time and I felt super alone. I remember I would go outside. I grew up in central Florida. I would go outside and I would lay on the driveway and I'd wake up before my brothers. And I would lay there and I would look up at the sky and I would talk to a voice. And I remember that that voice was super comforting. And to me, I called that voice God. But as I grew up, I became more skeptical, and I didn't feel a connection to any particular faith tradition. And I stopped praying because I thought, well, if nobody's listening, what's the point? And I never lost the skepticism. I still don't think of myself as very spiritual. And I kind of lost touch with that. And it turns out I'm not alone. The largest religious community in America today are the nones, not the Catholic nones, the N O N es, the people who don't affiliate with any particular faith. And the data is overwhelming that people who don't have some kind of faith tradition, particularly those who call themselves spiritual but not religious, have higher incidences of depression, of anxiety disorder and other mental illnesses. And it turns out that prayer, the power of prayer, is highly psychologically protective. It has these extreme benefits, and we see it in study after study. And so I just thought, well, that's just not for me, that if I don't have a particular faith tradition, well, I can't pray because I don't, you know, think that everything in the Holy Book is true. So it's not for me. And then I came across a study that blew my mind. And what happened was in this study, they had three groups. One group of people who didn't pray and they didn't teach them to pray. Another group of people who did pray, and they prayed with some kind of faith tradition, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, they had some kind of faith practice already. The third group was the most interesting. The third group, they taught them how to pray, but they told them, you. You can substitute the word God for whatever you Want whatever's meaningful to you, Mother Nature, sum of all forces, the universe, whatever's meaningful to you. You can substitute that word. And then they had these three groups do this standard pain tolerance test. And it turns out that people who prayed, not only did they have much higher pain tolerance than the group that didn't pray, but even the group that prayed without faith, just the practice of prayer, greatly increased their pain tolerance as much as the group that prayed with faith, but way higher than the group that didn't pray at all. So in study after study, people who pray live longer. They have more friends, they're happier, they have fewer incidents of mental health issues, they make more money, they contribute more to their community. All these good things happen to people who pray. And my kind of revelation, if you will, I didn't become spiritual. I didn't start believing the supernatural, but. But rather I changed my mind about the purpose of religion, that I stopped holding religion to this matter of fact or faith. You see, facts are things that are objectively true. They are true whether or not you believe in them. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat Earthers doesn't care what you believe. That is a fact. It's an objective truth. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence.

[Scott Clary]

Okay?

[Nir Eyal]

God rewards the righteous. That is not something that I can convince someone to not believe in if it's a matter of faith, right? Nor should I. Beliefs are in between. Beliefs are not facts, and they're not faith. They're in between. Beliefs are conviction that are open to revision based on new evidence. And so the big aha moment for me was that beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths that they don't necessarily have to be true in order to be useful. So now I pray because it works, because it makes me better. And I don't have to believe that every single thing that is in some holy text or when I go into a religious institution, that I have to think that everything is fact. That I have to have blind faith. No, that I can still get the psychological benefits of prayer, still be a member of a community, still connect with something bigger than myself and get all those psychological benefits even if I have doubts. And the way I came to this conclusion, I actually went to five religious leaders. This sounds like a setup for a joke. I went to a rabbi, a priest, an imam, a monk, and a swami. I went to five religious leaders, walk into a bar, and I asked them all the same question. How does one pray if you have doubts about God and essentially they all told me that doubts. Everybody has doubts. Even people that we think are super religious, they also have doubts. That doubt can be a very healthy thing. That blind faith in fact doesn' necessarily serve you. I'm not a big fan of blind faith. I think that makes you sheep, right? That makes you do whatever the religious leader wants you to do. But we don't have to have blind faith. We can actually use these practices that are thousands of years old that I rejected that I just thought wasn't for me because I can't prove they were true. Well, they don't have to be true, they just have to be helpful.

[Scott Clary]

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[Nir Eyal]

They're not.

[Scott Clary]

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[Nir Eyal]

I did a webinar recently for people who bought the book, people who subscribed to my newsletter, and one of them asked this question that this was after the book is now done. And this is someone who bought my previous two books. They've known me for 15 years, since I started my writing career. And they asked, nir, why do you seem so much happier? You seem different. Why are you happy? Are you happier after writing this book? And I'm actually not happier. I just suffer less. That's what I was looking to understand, that big picture. It's how do we enjoy life more? Not by thinking we have to be happy all the time. I actually think that's the wrong approach. I don't think that evolution designed us for happiness. Right. If you think about if there was ever a tribe of people who were blissed, you know, blissed out, and they were contented and they were super satisfied with life, and they were totally vibing with happy thoughts all day. If our ancestors. What would have happened if our ancestors would have come across those people, what would they have done? I tell you exactly what they would have done. They would have killed them and eaten them. Because you need that bit of dissatisfaction. You don't want to be happy all the time. Being happy all the time is not evolutionarily beneficial. It's that disquietude that keeps us hunting, that makes us want more, that helps us invent things, that helps us overturn dictators, that makes the world better. So it's not that you want happiness all the time. What you want is motivation without suffering. That's what I was looking for. How do I stay motivated without suffering? Why is that so important? Because if you think about it, why don't we achieve our goals, whatever they might be? I want financial wealth. I want to get in shape. I want to write a book, whatever it might be. I want to start a successful podcast. Why don't we reach our goals? The number one reason, it's not intelligence, although that helps. It's not resources, although that helps the studies find. The number one reason that we don't achieve our goals. It's super obvious. We quit, of course. I mean, yeah, so what if you could unlock motivation to sustain yourself long enough to succeed at whatever you want for yourself? It's not that persistence guarantees success. It's that quitting guarantees failure. And so let me tell you, the one study that. That absolutely blew my mind and actually really inspired me to. To. To dig deeper. There was a study done in the 1950s by a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter. And Richter had a very simple question. The question was, how long could a wild rat swim in water? Biologist. He wanted to know. So he took a wild rat, he put it in a cylinder of water, and he stood there with a stopwatch and, you know, waited until the rat died, until it drowned. And turns out that a wild rat dies after about 15 minutes floating in water, just paddling. It's a kind of an unethical experiment. You can't really do these kind of studies anymore. But the rats are dead, 50, you know, since the 1950s, so might as well learn from them. And so now that he knew that the rats would kind of give up after 15 minutes, he wanted to see, could he lengthen that time? Could he get them to be more persistent? So here's what he did. He took a new group of rats, he put them in the same cylinders, and this time, right before the 15 minute mark, just as the rats were starting to struggle, he reached into these cylinders, took out the rats, dried them off, let them catch their breath, and then plunk back into the water it went. Now, he did this a few times. He conditioned the rats to expect that if they persisted, that salvation might be possible. Something might save them. So I want you to guess, Scott. Maybe you know the answer already. I'm not sure. Maybe. Do you know the answer? How much longer he could get them to swim? Don't say it if you know it.

[Scott Clary]

I've listened to a few podcasts, but go ahead.

[Nir Eyal]

Okay, so you know it already. Okay, so if you didn't, if you didn't know it, I wouldn't, I would ask you to guess. But most people guess. Okay, how much longer? Twice as long, three times as. Maybe four times as long. Maybe they went from 15 minutes to an hour. That would be incredible. Unprecedented. Imagine if you could, you know, run a race for four times longer or work on that hard task, take that test for four times more persistent. That'd be amazing. How much more successful would we all be if we could stay persistent four times longer than we're actually able to? But the rats didn't go from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. The rats went from 15 minutes to 60 hours. 60 hours of non stop swimming. Why? Well, nothing changed in their bodies. Same rat bodies, Nothing changed in their environment. Same exact experiment. The only variable left is that something changed in their mind, that some flip was switched. And suddenly these rats became way more motivated to persist 240 times longer than they originally had when they originally gave up. So I think that study demonstrates what's in all of us, what we don't realize and what I didn't know until I spent six years researching this book is, is that we all have these hidden powers within us. Nothing mystical, nothing spiritual, nothing woo at all. We have these powers to persist in ways we can't imagine. We can do things that you wouldn't believe. And I have documented cases after documented cases of people curing chronic illness, people going under surgery without anesthesia, people sustaining themselves way, way longer than they ever imagined, doing things that most of us would, would think are impossible, things that are beyond belief, that actually are within all of us, that we all tend to quit at that 15 minute mark way before we're actually exhausted. And so, so, so backing up, right? What, what was I really trying to answer? How do I decrease suffering, but keep motivation? And to do that, it turns out you need to learn how to use your beliefs in order to change what you see, what you feel, and ultimately what you do.

[Scott Clary]

It's so interesting because for years you actually spoke about habit formation and habit formation seems to be a very trendy topic. How to achieve like the life you want, right? Like, we all figure out like, you know, there's a couple books behind me, I'm sure, that talk about habit formation as well, which are very good guides, but it seems like they don't work for everybody. I think you, you even wrote about how, like, we all know what to do, but knowing is never the problem. We all know the habits we should take. We all, you know, whether or not it's the baby steps or setting the goals, or like we know the action more often than not that we should take next in pursuit of whatever it is we want to do. But for some reason we wake up 10, 15 years later and our lives are more or less still the same as they were when we first set out on whatever journey we set out on. So this is the missing component. The belief system is the missing component, the X factor in achieving. Now that begs the question, if the belief system is the missing component, how do we form a belief system? Because even at the beginning you said, well, belief systems aren't as popular as they once were because people don't really know how to define belief systems. In a modern era, belief systems used to subscribe to a God, not some sort of life goal. So how do we, how do we build a belief system that increases our motivation, decreases our suffering, and actually allows us to accomplish what we want to accomplish long term?

[Nir Eyal]

I get frustrated sometimes because, you know, I'M a big proponent of habit. My first book was all about habits, but I think we have kind of reached peak habit. You know, when people talk about habits, they basically what they're really saying is, I'm looking for the autopilot button, right? Like, I want to form a writing habit because I hate writing. I want to have written. I don't like writing, so can't I turn that into a habit? I hate exercise, but, you know, I want to have exercised, and can't I just push autopilot and just make it happen? And so we're looking for hacks.

[Scott Clary]

We're looking for, like, hacks, and we're looking for hacks.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. And it's true. So 40% of your behavior, according to Wendy Wood, a researcher, about 40% of your behavior is done on habit, is done on this autopilot. But here's the thing. What is a habit? Right. Let's start with the definition, first principles here. The definition of a habit is the impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. How exactly, Scott, do you write with little or no conscious thought? How do you do anything? You can't. How do you meditate? I want to form a meditation habit. I want to form a gratitude habit. I want to form an exercise habit. You can't. There's certain. Okay, some things, like if I take a walk, okay, that's exercise. And I can do it with little or no conscious thought. I can be on the phone talking to a friend, you know, while I'm walking. But if I'm trying to break a pr, Right. That's not a habit. That's hard work. And a habit technique will fail us.

[Scott Clary]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

And so, like, you know, doing anything difficult in life, things that are painful, Habits don't work, habits don't work. This is what people don't realize, because habits are impulses to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. Like, if you're. If you're meditating with little or no conscious thought, you're doing it wrong. You're asleep. Right? Because meditation requires conscious thought. It's the exact antithesis of a habit. What we want is a routine. A routine is just a series of behaviors frequently repeated. Now, you say semantics, right? Who cares? Tomato, tomato. What's the difference? Well, here's the problem, is that when people believe that, hey, I can just build a habit out of something, and then if I do it for X number of days, there's all this false information out there of if I do it for 28 days or 44 days or 60 days, then poof, it's gonna become a habit. There's no such number. What happens is once they reach that day count and it's still hard. The writing's still difficult. The relationship that you're trying to repair still sucks. The exercise is still really hard. Who do people blame? They don't blame the technique. They blame themselves. They think that they're broken. They're not broken. It's this technique that's misapplied. So what we want is a routine. And a routine looks at something completely different. A routine doesn't care if it's easy. It's just a series of behaviors frequently repeated. So I think what we need is a different skill set. And what we see with high performers is that they don't require it to be easy. That's the secret that people who are high achievers in every field, the arts, sports, business, entertainment, doesn't matter. These people are able to do the things that the rest of us think is really hard and we give up on, they are able to do without suffering. That is the magic unlock.

[Scott Clary]

Quick question. What's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? For me, it just used to be whatever I could grab, which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage. That's why I'm partnering with Huel. This black edition ready to drink is a complete meal. So it has 35 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, 35 essential vitamins and minerals. It is no sugar added, gluten free, under five bucks. I always keep a few of these in my fridge and honestly, it solved the whole back to back meetings. Go, go, go, non stop, no time to eat problem. Super well. And this one's new for me. It's Huels Daily Greens. I had the blueberry this morning. Honestly, first impression, it was way better than I expected. It's developed by registered nutritionists and dietitians. There are 42 vitamins, minerals and superfoods. Only 25 calories, 4 grams of fiber and just 1 gram of sugar. I throw one back first thing before my morning calls. Every single morning. Look, if you're running a business, time is the most valuable asset. HU makes healthy eating simple. And they also just launched into Target stores nationwide so you can get it everywhere. Try both products today with 15% off your purchase for new customers with my exclusive code [e-mail] Scott tried both products today with 15% off your purchase for new customers. With my exclusive code Scott S C [e-mail] Scott Use my code fill out the post checkout survey to help support the show that is hu.com Scott they really make healthy living taste amazing. Even if you're on the go. Healthy eating, healthy lifestyle doesn't have to taste bad, it doesn't have to suck. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP. It's trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It's a unified suite that pulls your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into a single source of truth. That connected data is what makes the the AI smarter. It doesn't just guess. It knows. It can automate routine tasks, it can deliver actionable insights. And it can help you cut costs and make fast decisions with confidence. And now with the NetSuite AI connector, you can use the AI of your choice to connect to your actual business data and ask every question you've ever had. This isn't just another bolted on tool. It's AI built into the system that actually runs your business. So whether your company earns millions or hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead. If I needed something like this for my business, I'd use NetSuite. And you should too. So if your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide demystifying [e-mail] ScottClary the guide is free to you at netsuite.com ScottClary Netsuite.com ScottClary okay, so I'm going to use myself as an example because this podcast is a ton of work and I put a lot of energy into the research and finding the guests and doing the homework and then obviously all the marketing of it. It's not like there's no suffering. Like there's like a, there's like a fair amount. Like some days there's a fair amount of suffering. So what do you mean by, what do you mean by no suffering? Because I, I don't want people to misconstrue things being hard because anything they're going to do, it's going to be hard. Like, I have a big belief system in why I'm doing this. I enjoy it, I love it. I wouldn't give it up for the world. I could do it till I die. But, but there's like day, there's days where I feel like, unless that's the wrong definition of suffering, I don't know.

[Nir Eyal]

So we're talking about the people, the top of their game, right? What, what we find with those folks is that they do things. They pers. They succeed because they persist. Right there. There. There's no such thing as an overnight success, right? When you look at the, you know, like, you look Mr. Beast or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or like, just name. Name your athlete, name people who are at the top of their game. There's no overnight success. They work their butt off for a really, really, really long time. And so the way they did that is that they see the. They see the same signals that the rest of us feel the pain, that pain doesn't become suffering. Why is this so important?

[Scott Clary]

Difference between pain and suffering. That's the difference.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. The difference is the difference between pain and suffering. Now, what is the difference between pain and suffering? You know, one of the biggest myths that the brain tells us is that we see reality clearly. We don't. None of us do.

[Scott Clary]

You have. No.

[Nir Eyal]

You do not accurately perceive reality. Why do we not accurately perceive reality? And I can prove it to you. I can show you optical illusions. If you look for the checkerboard illusion, the checkerboard illusion, you can see that square A, there's two squares. Square A is darker than square B. But then when I show you that, in fact it's just an optical illusion, that they're exactly the same color. And I can prove it to you by. I'll put a strip that's the same. Same shade of gray through both squares, and you'll agree with me and say, yeah, I guess it is the same shade of color. The thing is, if I show you that first image, square A still looks darker than square B. Like, do you understand the implicate, like, how crazy that is? That even when you know the truth, your brain continues to lie to you? That's the power of beliefs. Why? Because of your priors. Because of your prior beliefs. That's the way checkerboards are supposed to work. And so you can't see it any differently. So the reason this happens is because your brain can't process reality as it is. None of our brains can. Because your brain is currently processing, right this second, 11 million bits of information. Right now, 11 million bits are entering your brain. The light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room. Your brain is processing all that information. That's about the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. It's a tremendous amount of information. But your conscious awareness can only process about 50 bits of information. 50 bits of information is one sentence per second. So war and peace flashing in front of your eyes every second, twice versus just one second at a time. So your brain can't take it all in. So what does it have to do? It has to see reality through this tiny pinhole of attention. And what it focuses on is based on your beliefs. So some people take in information and process that same data as suffering. They judge it as bad as, as something that hurts that they don't like and they try and escape. While other people take the same exact data that is pain can be pain. Pain is just signal. Pain is just data. And they process it differently. They see it as something that excites them, that encourages them, that tells them they're getting better. And that's what makes them sustain over the long term. And of course, sustaining over the long term increases their odds of success.

[Scott Clary]

So we have these. It's not that we don't have belief systems. It's that we have these subconscious pre encoded belief systems that are shaping our entire worldview. And we don't have the mental bandwidth because we're human to actively apply a belief system to a given situation. We just default to what we already have.

[Nir Eyal]

We default to what we have? Why? Because the brain doesn't care if you're happy. The brain doesn't care if you're flourishing. The brain doesn't give a shit if you're meeting your full potential. No, your brain has evolved to keep you alive and procreating. That's it. That's all the brain wants to do for you, right? I mean, that's what evolution has. That's the way evolution works, right? It's keeping you alive so that you can make more babies. So the safest thing it can do is to keep you doing what you have always done because you survived before. So just keep doing what you've done before. So keep believing what you've done before. Because that's how the brain sees the world. The brain doesn't see the world as it is, it sees it as it predicts it to be. That checkerboard looks the way it looks. Square A looks darker than square B, even though you know they're the same color. Because that's how checkerboards are supposed to work. You've seen tons of checkerboards. That's the way they always work. And so your brain cannot see it any other way. And so in your own life, when you're in an argument with somebody, when you have a business disagreement, when something is hard and it's causing you suffering when you're stuck, it's always because there's some kind of what we call a limiting belief. What is a limiting belief? A limiting belief is a belief that decreases motivation while increases suffering. And so to answer your earlier question of like, well, what do we do with this? How do we use beliefs to help us rather than hurt us? The trick, and this is what the book is all about, this is what took me six years to figure out, is to identify those limiting beliefs. They're always hidden to us. It's very difficult to see them. We always need a tool to see them to identify those limiting beliefs, see them for what they are, and then reprogram ourselves with what's called a liberating belief.

[Scott Clary]

I would assume there's also the reason why it's so difficult for us to change our limiting beliefs. And I think people have heard this term before, but I've never heard somebody actually explain what it actually is outside of just something that doesn't serve us. But on a subconscious sort of biological level, I'm assuming there's an efficiency there, too, because a belief that we already have probably takes less energy for the brain to run that function than to adopt a new one. And I think. I think the brain is all about efficiencies and, and not doing more than it has to from a survival perspective. So.

[Nir Eyal]

That's exactly right.

[Scott Clary]

Okay, so brain is, Is. Is. Is. Is helping us survive, not necessarily helping us pursue our goals or our dreams or getting, you know, getting back into the gym if we have to get back into the gym. The brain is not helping us get there. So we got to figure out a way to, like, reprogram. How do we. I. I would say to reprogram, we first have to figure out what we actually believe that we don't even know we believe. So we can, like, understand what those belie. And I'm assuming it's coming from, like, parents, you know, guidance counselor in grade 12, like a friend that made fun of you in, you know, grade three. Like, I'm sure there's belief systems that are probably rooted in trauma. Like, you got to find a way to unpack all that stuff, so then you can actually adopt a belief system that actually benefits you. How do we. How do we go through this process?

[Nir Eyal]

So, first of all, so you're right that they do come from our past, but it's not. It's not the past's fault, so to speak. It's not your fault either, right? Because what happened to you happened to you. The reason that checkerboard illusion, you can't see it as it is is because you've seen checkerboards that way your whole life. It's your prior belief about how the world works. And so that came from your past. Now that's not your fault that your past happened to you, but it is your responsibility. So one of the things that we've seen increasingly in the psychology community is that trauma focused therapy, that dwelling on the past, blaming the past, blaming our parents, blaming whatever has happened to us in the past really doesn't work. It's not very effective. It doesn't have the best track record. It works for some people. And whatever works for you, this is not medical advice. So whatever works for you, if it's working, do it. But in general, what we're seeing is kind of this, the pendulum swing the other way. More of a focus on the present moment. And to do that, what we have to do is to realize that our limiting beliefs, and everybody has them. Limiting belief is like your face, right? We all have a face. But if I told you to look at your face, you can't look at your face, right? You can't look at your. Not the way you can look at your hands or look at your feet. In order to look at your own face, you have to look in a mirror. You have to reflect. So you need something outside of you to show you your own face. Same thing goes with our limiting beliefs. What's interesting is we can see other people's limiting beliefs, right?

[Scott Clary]

I told you, I said very easily. Sometimes. Yeah, we can't look inside.

[Nir Eyal]

Super easy. Yeah. You know, whether it's your spouse, your siblings, your co workers, your boss. Oh, you can see all their problems, easy peasy. But when it comes to our own, not so easy. Why? Because to us, our beliefs feel like facts. They feel like objective truths. Yeah, you don't understand, like, see, my situation is different, right? The reason I can't do that thing that. The reason I'm not ready, the reason I'm not good enough for it, the reason I have imposter syndrome, I've got this diagnosis, I've got this going on in my life. I've heard it all, I've said it all to myself, right? Like, I wrote this book because I wanted to figure out how to overcome my own limiting beliefs. So it turns out you need a process. It's not something you can just say, oh yeah, there's my limiting belief. I'm done with it. It takes for most people and everybody has it, right? Like, you know, the person I interviewed, people who are Billionaires and people who are broke. We've all got these limiting beliefs. And what's interesting is we have them in different areas of our life. Right. The person who's super successful in business neglects their health or their family or you know, or you can swap any of those, those variables. Typically, you know, people who are doing well, are doing well in one area and then there's that other area. Whether it's the relationships, whether it's something that they're neglecting that they're just stuck in. And that's usually what's at the core is some kind of limiting belief.

[Scott Clary]

Is there a meta skill that makes us better at identifying these.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, exactly. So one of my. There are many, many techniques and it's definitely not dwelling on the past.

[Scott Clary]

So that's the wrong way to do it. Okay, gotcha.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. Another wrong way to do it is the positive thinking stuff. And I hate to tell. Yeah, this is not positive thinking. And in fact positive thinking has turned out to have psychological backfire effects that manifest that vision boarding that, you know, these things that everybody is talking about on the Internet. There are really good studies we can talk about about why that stuff backfires. But let me get to your question about how do we do this? How do we actually like, what's a technique that we can actually use to improve our day to day lives? So this is called inquiry based stress reduction. And so what this, this is a technique that came out of, was developed by a woman by the name of Byron Katie, decades ago and now has had a lot more scientific validation. Actually what she was doing was channeling a technique that's thousands of years old. Aristotle did something very similar. And what this technique does, it essentially asks you to ask yourself four questions in order to develop what's called a portfolio of perspectives. Because you see, your brain hates changing its mind. Your brain hates changing its mind. Right. It's much more comfortable believing what it's always believed and doing what it's always done because that's what protected you in the past. So it is going to fight tooth and nail against any proposition of you changing your mind. Now these four questions force you to, to, to question these beliefs and then you do what's called a turnaround. Maybe I can, I can share a story of how I did this in my own life.

[Scott Clary]

Yeah, please.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So it was my. And then we can do your story. I would love to see if you have any limiting beliefs. But with me I have no doubt. Near.

[Scott Clary]

I have many.

[Nir Eyal]

No, none. Totally.

[Scott Clary]

Yeah, none at all.

[Nir Eyal]

None.

[Scott Clary]

None at all. Totally none at all.

[Nir Eyal]

You're turning a little red there. What's going on there? Scott, you're all right. I won't put you on the hot seat if you don't want to, but okay, so here's what happened to me. I'll share my embarrassment here. So a few years ago was my mom's birthday, and I wanted to do something nice for her. It was her 74th, and I wanted to send her some flowers. The problem was I was in Singapore, where I am right now, and she was in central Florida, where I grew up. And so sending her those flowers wasn't so easy. I had to look around, call a bunch of florists, figure out who could deliver on time. I had to make sure that they had the right arrangement. It was a lot of work. Anyway, I go to bed around one in the morning. I pat myself on the back, say, oh, you're a good son. She's going to love them. She's going to thank you so much the next day. But that's not what happened. What happened was that I called her up the next morning and I said, hey, mom, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers I sent? And she says, yes, I did. Thank you. But just so you know, those flowers were half dead, so don't order from that florist again. To which I said, well, that's the last time I buy you flowers. And it didn't go over so good. About as well as you'd expect. My wife, who is on the call as well, after the call, she turned to me and she said, would you like to do a turnaround on this? To which I said, no, I don't want to do your touchy feely, hocus pocus mumbo jumbo. I need to vent, right? I need to. That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to get things off our chest. We're supposed to speak our truth. We're supposed to tell people how we feel. You're not supposed to hold your feelings inside. Well, I knew enough at that point, looking at the psychology literature, that that is exactly not what you're supposed to do. That it turns out that venting does nothing but reinforce what we believe about people because we don't see reality clearly. You know, that pinhole of attention. We don't see reality as it is. We definitely don't see people as they are. We see people as we believe them to be. So it. It's not that we see things, so it's almost like we See things as we are.

[Scott Clary]

Doubling down on the negative perception. When you've had.

[Nir Eyal]

Okay, that's exactly right. You're reinforcing this effigy of the person every time you say she's always like that. There she goes again. She always does this kind of thing. Yeah. Because that's what you see. Like I have. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever had a friend who I. Sometimes I have a friend who I'll meet and they'll be so nice to me and like. Like super generous. And then you meet their spouse or their kids and they just become a completely different person. Right. They're just like terrible to their family. Like you. You met people like that?

[Scott Clary]

100%. Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

How is that possible? This person's so nice? Well, because to them, they don't see the family as they are. They see all this history, all this baggage, all these priors that literally shape how they interact with the people around them.

[Scott Clary]

So anyway, I have a question on that quickly. If, just, if you are, if you are venting, is that like further encoding a negative belief system?

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. It's confirming what you believe to be true. And here's the crazy part. It literally shapes what you see. Like, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, like when I've been married for 25 years now, but I remember when I was dating and I'd see this gorgeous woman, right. Like, I'd see this girl who was just a knockout and then they'd start talking and they would physically become ugly. Right. Once their personality came out.

[Scott Clary]

That is definitely happening.

[Nir Eyal]

Right?

[Scott Clary]

That's definitely.

[Nir Eyal]

And I'll tell you, the opposite also happens. You know, when I met my wife, my. My wife was always good looking, but now she's gorgeous. Like now I just, I'm just. She's the most beautiful woman in the world to me because we, we built so much together. We have this amazing relationship. Now. Physically, she probably looks different to other people. Because your beliefs literally shape what you're able to see. Just like that checkerboard illusion. Just like the fact that people who are on a diet see food as larger, that people who are afraid of heights see distances as further. Their subjective perception of reality is skewed based on our beliefs.

[Scott Clary]

That's wild.

[Nir Eyal]

And so the same goes with our relationship.

[Scott Clary]

Absolutely wild. When you're going through this with your mom, you're venting. So if you aren't careful, because that's like you mentioned the healthy thing that people say you should do. You vent, you get it off your chest, something bad happens, you grieve for a little bit, but then hopefully you move on. But what you're doing if you aren't careful is you're actually further encoding this belief system that is painting your mom in a bad light, whatever the thing is. So what do we, what do we do in a negative situation to not further encode a negative belief system? Because I think that's outside of. Outside of replacing those beliefs. Because there's, There's. There's steps to this thing, right? So we gotta make sure we don't further encode negative. And then we gotta eventually identify negative and then replace with positive. But, like, that's, that's the optimal outcome. But that's. Obviously, that takes a little bit of work.

[Nir Eyal]

How the hell do we do that?

[Scott Clary]

Exactly. So we gotta, like. We gotta, like, stop doing the negative, not just move towards the positive. We gotta do the whole thing.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. That's right. So that's right. So most people stop right there. Ah, she's such a this and that. Like, I hate that person. Oh. And of course. And then now they're suffering, right? So what? Why? Because they have a belief. So my belief in that instant, what I wanted to vent about was my mother is too judgmental and she's impossible to please. That's what I believed in that moment. Right? And I wanted to vent that. I wanted my wife to confirm it so that I could be right. Right. The definition of a limiting belief. Because when I believe my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, one, I suffer even when she's not in the room. I'm suffering from that, even at the thought of her. And what happens to my motivation level, Scott, to work on that relationship? I'm assuming it would take judgment and hard to please. Yeah, I'm done. Like, why would I want to be with somebody? Why would I want to work on a relationship with someone who's judgmental and hard to please? And that's why people are miserable. What's the alternative? What do we do instead? And you can do this with your coworkers. You could do this with your annoying boss. You could do this with your kids who are driving. You're crazy. You can do it with yourself. If there's anything in your life, the same exact questions I'm about to share with you. This process works for anything where you are stuck.

[Scott Clary]

If you binge out when you've had a great three months on your diet and then you go to an all you can eat buffet. Then you're like, well, I'm never going to lose weight. And I can't believe I did that to myself. So it's not just about relationship with other people. It's the story about everything in your life.

[Nir Eyal]

So true, right? So I used to be clinically obese. Not just overweight, but clinically obese. And for 30 years I yo yo dieted because I had these limiting beliefs of diets don't work for people like me. And it's hard as a bigger person to exercise and this is never going to work. It's too difficult. These are all limiting beliefs, right? They're not facts, they're not Newton's laws, They're beliefs. They're up here. So here's what you do. Here's the solution that we've all been waiting for. Here's what you do. According to inquiry based stress reduction, this technique developed by Byron Katie. You start by asking yourself four questions. You write down that belief, right? Whatever it is, I'm not ready for this. This is too hard. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Whatever that limiting belief, wherever you're stuck in your life, you start with that belief that's preventing you from. From not suffering. So I wrote down the belief. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Now here's the first question. The first question is, is that belief true? Scott, that is a stupid question. Obviously my mother was being way too judgmental and hard to please. Am I right? Rhetorical question. Just agree. All right?

[Scott Clary]

Just I don't know your mother, right?

[Nir Eyal]

Obviously it's a fact, Scott. Like who your son buys you flowers from halfway around the world and you tell them how the flowers are half dead? Come on. It's a fact. She was way too judgmental. Dumb question. Let's go on to question two. Question number two. Is it absolutely true? Is it absolute? Absolutely. Means 100% of time is not sometimes fear.

[Scott Clary]

There's a little bit of doubt in there because what if the flowers did suck?

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly. Yeah, maybe. Maybe they did really suck. Maybe there might be a million different explanations if I'm honest with myself. It's not that it's a fact, it's a belief. So I had to actually say, maybe it's not absolutely true. Maybe there could be a little bit of doubt that it's not absolutely true. Okay, third question. Who am I? How do I feel? Who do I become when I hold onto that belief? When I believe my mother's too judgmental and hard to please? How does that affect me? Well, I'm short tempered, not very nice. Kind of act like this 13 year old version of myself that I'm not really proud of. I don't really like how I behave when I hold onto that belief. Now the fourth question. Who would I be without that belief? So if I had this magic wand and poof, I touched my brain and that belief disappears forever, how would I feel? I'm not saying I have to do that, but what would happen if I'm

[Scott Clary]

probably happier, Better relationship with my mom?

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Scott Clary]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

I'd be more myself.

[Scott Clary]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

So in four questions, what do we determine? Okay. One, that that belief that we were absolutely sure was a fact. Not so much. Maybe it's just a belief. Two, that holding onto that belief doesn't serve us. And finally, that letting go of the belief makes us better. So now we've cracked the door open to creating what's called a portfolio of perspectives. To see things potentially different, not to change our minds. We don't want to force ourselves because again, our brain hates changing our minds. So we're just going to collect different options. Okay. Like Pokemon cards or basketball, you know, baseball cards or whatever. Just a portfolio. Like stocks. Right, Just a portfolio. So what do you do to do this? You ask yourself, could the exact opposite of my belief also be true? Now this is going to sound nuts, right? That's what it did to me. So because I believed it was a fact that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please and you're telling me the opposite could be true? What does that even mean? What would that sound like? The opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please is my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? Well, maybe she was just saying a statement of fact. She did thank me after all. Maybe she was trying to protect me from not getting scammed by this florist. Maybe she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful. Could be true. I mean, I'm not saying it is true, but it could conceivably be true. Now let's do a third one. Another opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite of that could also be I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be? Well, to be honest, I had rehearsed in my mind that if I'm going to do something nice for you, I deserve effusive praise. And when that praise didn't come, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? I was. Here's A fourth turnaround, the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Could also be I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. And this one turned out to be the most true. This is called a misattribution of emotion. That when I felt crummy, when I felt incompetent, that this simple task of getting my mom some flowers didn't work out, and that felt shitty inside. I wanted to find someone who caused that suffering in me. And so my mom got it right. We do this all the time. We feel crummy inside. It's classic bullying. We feel crummy, we're looking for someone else to pin it on, whether or not that's a fact. So now I have four beliefs. Okay? I had one. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Now I have four. Scott, which one is true? Which one's the right one?

[Scott Clary]

Well, I would say that depending on what serves you, they could all be true.

[Nir Eyal]

They could all be true. They could all be false. Who cares? Because beliefs are tools, not truths. That one belief that I had at the beginning, that, to me felt like a fact. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. She had to change so I could stop suffering. You don't know my mom, Scott. It ain't gonna happen. Right? Like, people will not change. So you can stop suffering. That's not how people work. They've got their own suffering. So why was I holding onto that belief? Because I felt it was true. It was the fact. It was the way it happened. I had to convince her that she needed to apologize for offending me. Who cares? Who cares? When I took one of those other beliefs, my motivation level to have a relationship with her, to continue to work on our relationship, to make peace with my mom, increased and my suffering decreased. So why the hell wouldn't I adopt one of these other beliefs? Because it's not true. It's not the way it happened. Are you gaslighting yourself? You're lying to yourself. Guess what, people? We're already lying to ourselves. You're already gaslighting yourself. You're just picking the limiting belief instead of the liberating belief. There is a choice here.

[Scott Clary]

Blinkist is a success story, partner. Now, here's something I think about a lot. I interview some of the smartest people in the world on this show. So authors, founders, investors, and every single one of them reads a lot. But the problem is, most of us don't have three hours a day to sit down with a book. We know we should be reading more. We want to, but we just don't. That's why I use Blinkist. It takes the best non fiction books out there and breaks them down to the 15 minute reads or listens. We are talking over 9,000 titles. Business, Leadership, productivity, finance. The stuff that actually moves the needle in your life and your business. I'll pull up a title like the Psychology of Money or Atomic Habits while I'm at the gym or in between calls. That's 15 minutes and you can walk away with the core ideas. You can even download them offline. So there's really no excuse. If you are the type of person who listens to this show, you already want to learn. Blinkist just removes the friction. Get your free trial and save an additional 30% by going to blinkist.comclary that's blinkist.com/clarity. HubSpot is a success story. Partner now if you're looking for a new podcast, one of my favorite shows right now is Demand Decoded. If you're in the B2B marketing space, you need to be listening to this. It's hosted by the team at Blend. They are a demand gen agency. They know what they're doing. They're also part of the HubSpot podcast network. What I love about it is they skip all the theory and they just tell you what's actually working today. So demand gen marketing, content, LinkedIn, ads, attribution. They talk about real strategies that they are using that you can use today that are working. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're building a business, if you're really selling anything to anyone, go search Demand Decoded wherever you get your podcast. I love this. I love this so much because I, I fully, I fully, fully believe, I fully believe that we can architect our own reality. That's something that I've always believed. We can architect our own reality, we can architect our own life. And I think that this, I've said it without understanding the psychological basis for why that's why that's my truth. Right. And I think that a lot of this comes down to like what we're talking about today. But I think the question that people would have would be I understand how to objectively see a scenario in multiple different ways, but how do I figure out what my truth should be so I can align one of those four potential outcomes with something that serves me.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So I would refine what you said a tiny bit. You can't create reality like the manifesting stuff, the vision boarding stuff. Yes, it really does Hurt people. You don't create reality, but you do create your perception of reality. That is a fact that based on what you believe, you will literally see things differently, feel things differently, and do things differently based on what you believe. So that is absolutely true. And at the end of the day, we don't live in everyone's reality. We live in our perception of reality. Right. So you're not going to necessarily will outcomes differently that are not in your control. There are lots of things that the universe doesn't give a shit how you feel, but you can shape how you feel. And so to answer your question, which one of these beliefs we pick? This is what's so beautiful about beliefs. Beliefs are tools, not truths. It's like saying to a carpenter, you know, a carpenter uses a hammer and successfully builds a house. Now, does that carpenter say, hey, this hammer served me that one time when I built a house. I only can use this hammer. The hammer, it's the one and only true tool. No, sometimes you need a saw, sometimes you need a tool, you need a wrench.

[Scott Clary]

You need many different tools to build a house. Yeah, of course.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. That's exactly right. But why do we keep sticking to these beliefs that I was aggrieved or this is too difficult and I can't do this, you know, these limiting beliefs that we hear all the time in our brains without actually testing them and taking them out. So the answer is we try them on. We just try them on and it's gonna sound crazy. It's gonna feel super weird. It's gonna. Again, that's your brain, that's you. Evolutionary hardwiring, trying to get you not to. To change your mind because the brain hates changing its mind. So that's supposed to happen. It's called immunity to change. Just like your body, you know, like if you have a splinter, you're going to get an infection to try and get the bacteria out and neutralize whatever's causing that damage. Your brain's the same way. Like weird ideas, seeing things differently. Nobody's open minded. Nobody's actually giving reality a chance. We can't. It's too hard for us. So what we want to do is, one at a time, we take out, let's say, these four beliefs that we did in this very quick exercise with my mom. And I just tried them on. I tried one. Didn't seem to really work very well. It was causing me a lot of suffering, my original belief. So I tried another one. And then if that one works, awesome. If it doesn't work, I got another

[Scott Clary]

one or another one adding on the idea of labels and identities. So we spoke about limiting beliefs. We spoke about sort of your brain defaulting to, you know, these, these subconscious belief systems that were ingrained in us from again, society, parents, whatever. History, past is what, what, how do labels and, and, and identities play into this idea? Are they just sort of like this super ingrained version of, of a belief that is just like sort of, you know, accrued over time? Like what is, what is this? And does it serve us or not or.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, so labels can serve us, but we have to be very, very careful. In large part, they can, they can hurt us. And we know this, especially with this diagnosis epidemic that, you know, everybody knows about the placebo effect, right? The placebo effect is very, and I talk about, in the book about, and it's all belief driven. It's all based on expectations. And it's amazing what placebos can do that. Placebos, you know, even when you know you're taking a placebo, they're still effective. You can go on Amazon right now and buy pills, call placebos, it sells placebos on the jar and you will see five star reviews for fast acting relief. And these people aren't crazy. It is, there's study after study. Now. Placebos don't fix sickness, they fix illness. So sickness is in the body. Like a placebo won't cure cancer. A placebo is not going to fix a broken arm. But they will change the symptoms, the perception of those symptoms. Again, you can't change reality. You can change your perception of reality. So just like we have placebos, we also have what's called nocebos. Nocebos are the opposite of placebos. There are these negative effects that when we believe we are going to experience, we really do experience. And it happens time and time again. There was a very famous case in Portugal where on one evening hospitals across the country were full of teenage girls who had intense intestinal discomfort. Only teenage girls, all of them had these terrible symptoms of stomach pains they thought. Was there food poisoning? Was there some kind of, you know, weird virus going around? Nope. Turns out that there was a very popular TV show called Strawberries and Cream that was, it was like a, like a soap opera kind of thing, like a telenovela type of thing where the main character on the show was a teenage girl who had some kind of terrible stomach illness. And so it became this, this illness that kind of suddenly everybody got. And it was, it was real. They had real physical symptoms, diarrhea and vomiting. All Those symptoms so our expectations can shift shape what we do. And there's another really startling case study of this guy by the name of Mr. A. He's anonymized in the. In the research study. Mr. A has this really bad breakup with his girlfriend, and he decides he's going to commit suicide. He doesn't want to live anymore. So he goes to his medicine cabinet, and he takes an entire bottle of antidepressants. Takes the antidepressants. Then all of a sudden, just as he's swallowing the last pill, he decides he changes his mind. He wants to live after all. He rushes to his neighbor's house. He knocks on the door. He says, I need you to take me to the hospital. They rush him to the emergency room. By the time he gets there, he's passing out. He's super weak. He passes out on the floor. And just before he does, he tells the nurses, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. And he gives them the pill jar. They put him on the gurney. They rush him to the operating room to try and figure out how to get this. Whatever he's taken out of his body, because he's clearly overdosing. His blood pressure is dropping. His heart rate is critically low. He's fading in and out of consciousness. And they're trying to figure out what antidepressant did he take. They look on the pill jar, and it doesn't say the name of the drug. It says a phone number. They call the phone number. The person on the other end of the line tells them that, in fact, Mr. A was in a clinical trial for these antidepressants, and he hadn't actually taken the antidepressants at all, that he had taken a placebo, that he was in the control group. And so they tell Mr. A this. They tell him, hey, nothing you took could have possibly caused these symptoms. You were in the control group. You didn't take the antidepressant. You're not going to die. Within 15 minutes, Scott, his heart rate is back to normal. His blood pressure is stabilized. He walks out of the hospital perfectly healthy, maybe a little embarrassed, right? And so here's the thing. If your expectation can create these physiological symptoms like they did for Mr. A based on. If you think you are poisoned, don't tell me that having a label about who you are or what you are isn't also creating your own symptoms. It happens all the time. That when we think. For example, when I got my adhd diagnosis, I've been diagnosed with adhd, and when I first got my diagnosis, I would constantly tell myself, every time I got distracted, there I go again, there's my frickin adhd. I've got this chronic brain disease that I'm never gonna get rid of. And if I can't focus, how am I gonna finish my deadline and then my editor's gonna be mad at me? And why does this always happen? Why do I have this stupid thing? And guess what? I wasn't focused on the work because I was spinning out, full of anxiety about this label that I created for myself, that this is a chronic thing that I can never get over. I became the diagnosis. And that's not helpful. It's called identity foreclosure. When we say this is who I am, I'm not a morning person, I'm a Sagittarius, I'm an entj, I'm an anagram, I'm a whatever the frick. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do that? It's comforting. It was very comforting that I had a diagnosis. Ah. That's why I've been struggling all these years. But then if it becomes your identity, if it becomes your label, your label will become your limit. So the right way to look at a diagnosis or a label is like a map. Okay? A map tells you, here's the treasure, here's where you are, here's how to get to the treasure. Now maybe somebody else might look at the map and they're in a different place in the map. Maybe somebody without ADHD is closer to the treasure. But that doesn't mean that I am the map. The map is the path. The map teaches me how to get better. So now my limiting belief of I have a chronic illness is instead, I'm learning a new skill. I'm learning a new skill. That's what I tell myself. Why? Because telling myself a new limiting belief is, increases my motivation to work on this, to fix this problem for myself. And I figured out all kinds of techniques to do that over the years and reduces my suffering and helps me embrace the things that are great about the way my brain works. Because look, I've written three best sellers. So it's not that I'm always distracted and I have a chronic brain disease. It's that when I'm interested in something, I hyper focus on it, right? So this is again, which beliefs serve you. So having a label that becomes your limit, that's a cage of your own creation, but having a label that empowers you, that, that, that, that makes you

[Scott Clary]

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[Nir Eyal]

Limitless in terms of your limiting beliefs. That's empowering. That's what we want to adopt.

[Scott Clary]

I want to bring this full circle because when I first started this conversation, we spoke about prayer. And I know you don't do anything just to do it. Everything you do in your daily practice, your life, I know there's like a reason and a purpose. So bringing it back, not prayer again from like a traditional religious standpoint, but the act of actually. First, for me, define what your version of prayer is. Is it time with yourself? Is it reflection? Is it, you know, inner work? Whatever it is, define that. But then I want you to tie it into how this actually helps you understand your. Your belief systems, your. Your labels, your subconscious biases. Because I'm. There's. There's a. There's a through line there, for sure, and I know that's why you do it.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So a few things. So I think I misunderstood prayer, that I thought prayer was about asking for stuff. And in fact, when I met with these five religious leaders, they. They all told me that that's kind of the. The simple person's version of prayer, that God is not a cosmic slot machine. So I didn't know that. Like, nobody tells you that.

[Scott Clary]

No, I get it.

[Nir Eyal]

You're right. Right. Like, because that's what we. That's what I thought you did. You're supposed to, you know, you know, please fix this thing for me. Please. I need money. Please. I need to meet my spouse. Please, you know, make me healthy. Please do this, please do that. And there's probably a place for that. You know, I'm not. If again, if something works for you, do it. It didn't speak to me like there was I. That wasn't meaningful to me. So I don't ask for things. I ask for the attribute to overcome the thing. One of my liberating beliefs that I've now adopted is it doesn't get easier. You get stronger. So I used to think that if I did things right, everything would fall into place, that everything would work out. If I was good, then it shouldn't be hard. Right. Like, if I'm the kind of person who's supposed to be good at this kind of thing, then it should be easy. And that's a limiting belief. Right. Who says it never gets easier? You just get stronger. So when I pray, what I pray for is wisdom, is patience, is the things that I'm working on that I want to remind myself that daily practice. So this is what I got from the imam about Islam, about how Islam, you pray the same thing five times a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper times throughout the day. Because when you're off base, when you're impatient, when you're. You need that reminder to be humble, to be more patient. That's what I'm looking for. That's what I'm asking for. I'm reminding myself. I don't know if anybody's listening. I'm reminding myself of the attributes I need to overcome the challenges.

[Scott Clary]

Prayer is almost like a conscious fight against your subconscious limiting beliefs.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. It's a reminder of that.

[Scott Clary]

It's just a constant reminder.

[Nir Eyal]

I'm looking for the answers for how I can strengthen myself. Right. Like where. What do I need to focus on today that can help me be better to others?

[Scott Clary]

You mentioned, obviously you changed your belief about your mom. And then going through this book, it says that when you fix one belief, or fix is the wrong word, when you change one belief, it starts to cascade into other belief systems in your life. So it changes your way of thinking. Right. It. You spoke about, and you wrote about how it changes your relationship with your daughter as well, after you sort of went through this process with your mom. So when somebody starts to go down this journey, they, you know, they read the book, they start to incorporate some of these ideas. How does this one. How does one belief start to unlock another belief and another belief and sort of put you on this flywheel, I guess, for lack of a better term, towards like a help, a healthier, happier life.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, so it started with my mom because that was a very, like, palpable relationship. And I'm telling you, like, kind of the simple story with the flowers. Of course, there's a whole history there.

[Scott Clary]

We all know history, like with all moms, right?

[Nir Eyal]

Right. Yeah, there's always history. But then, you know, when I. When I realized that I was creating the suffering, I. I wasn't Creating her actions. I'm not responsible for her actions, but I was creating the interpretation of her actions of judging, judging, judging, judging. And what I realized eventually is that I. I was doing that to everybody and everything and to myself. Just constantly judging, Just constantly, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Whereas what I learned to do. The reason this became kind of a domino effect is that, you know, when you have a kid, especially a teenage daughter, it forces you to see yourself through their eyes. Like, just as I was judging my mom, I didn't want my daughter to judge me, right? Like, I. I knew that that was our instincts. And when we had friction between each other, that was always the case, that we were judging each other constantly. Whereas I have a new limiting belief as opposed to, you know, letting myself be disappointed by the actions of others, which I was constantly doing, whether I would verbalize it or not. Like, I was constantly judging other people's behavior. Now, my new liberating belief is a mantra that I repeat to myself all the time, which is, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. What does that mean? That, you know, in every religion, this concept of love is. Is central, right? Whether it's God's love, whether it's our love for our fellow man, love is a central pill. But what. What is that? Like, what. What are we talking about here? Like, why is love so important? So to me, mind, I had to think about this. I thought about a long time. So to me, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. I remember the day my daughter was born. Do you have kids, by the way?

[Scott Clary]

Scott? No. Soon. God willing, soon. But not yet.

[Nir Eyal]

Okay. Well, I wish for you that you will feel this, because I remember the day that I held my daughter in my arms and she was exactly the size from my elbow to my tips of my fingers, that's exactly how big she was. I held her for the first time, and they let me wash her to clean her up. And I remember just I had this intense love for her that was kind of the most pure, instant love. Like, falling in love with my wife took a little, you know, like, we dated for a while, you know, but falling in love with my daughter was instantaneous. Like, she was in the world now. And I instantly loved her more than anything in the world. And whatever she did, I would give her ultimate benefit of the doubt. She cried, she pooped, she squirmed. She needed stuff. Like, I don't care. Like, of course she would, because she's a baby, right? Like, you can't blame a baby for doing those things. That's all they can do, right? So she didn't cry to annoy me. She cried because that was the only tool she had. And I loved her because I gave her every benefit of the doubt that what she was doing wasn't to annoy at all. It was the tool she had. And here's what happened, Scott. We're all babies. We just got bigger. We're all working with the tools we have my daughter now, she's 17. She's just working with the tools she has. My mom, she's 47, 48. Now she's also just working with a tool she has, right? Just like those babies, they're crying because that's the only tool they have. And so everybody's just operating with the tools they have. And so my job is to give them the grace to remind myself this liberating belief that reduces my suffering, that when somebody would annoy me before, my liberating belief now is we're all just operating with the tools we have, and my job is to love them with the benefit of the doubt.

[Scott Clary]

If somebody. If somebody is listening to this, they just want to know where to start. They have limiting beliefs, obviously. I think you have a website set up nearandfar.com Belief-Change, and they can probably go there. They can find. They can find the book wherever they get books, Amazon, whatnot, Beyond Belief. It was out in March, if I'm not mistaken. So it's available for purchase now. But if somebody wants to just start, what would be your best advice to them, the thing they do immediately after listening to this podcast, just so they can get on the right. And I also want to say one thing, too. You know, you've been very candid with some of your own stories, and I'm sure there's many more. And I'm sure you still have beliefs that you have to, like, work through, but you study this for a living, and you still, to a degree, have difficulty with it.

[Nir Eyal]

So, yeah, why do you think I wrote the book 100?

[Scott Clary]

So, I mean, I don't want the. I don't want the person listening to be like, oh, my God. Well, if Near. If near had these issues, like, well, you know, who. Who am I to be able to figure this stuff out? But. But in all seriousness, like, just give. Give yourself some grace, because these are. These are things that, outside of going through your work, like, we don't learn these things. To your point, everybody's just a baby that just grew up and we, we don't know what we're doing or how we're programmed or any of that.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. And, and you know, I'm telling you like the. I've, I've talked to so many super successful people you would not believe. And people that you think have it all together, they're all just trying to figure it out. We're all, we all have these limiting beliefs. And even if you're super successful in one area of your life that you think you figured out, there's always some other limiting belief that you're working on in a different area of your life. So the thing I really want to leave folks with is two things. Number one, that we need the intellectual humility to realize that we do not see reality clearly. We don't even see our own reality Clearly. Remember that 50 bits of information versus 11 million bits of information. You don't see reality. You see reality through your beliefs. And if you don't see your reality clearly, you definitely don't see other people's reality clearly. So we need that intellectual humility of realizing that that's number one. Two, you can do way more than you know. That your limiting beliefs are keeping you from being the kind of person that you're actually able to become, the person you know you can become. Those are hidden to you, but they can be unlocked.