The Invisible Limits Holding You Back (And How to Change Them)

Summary

The Art of Manliness Podcast

Episode: The Invisible Limits Holding You Back (And How to Change Them)

Date: March 10, 2026
Guest: Nir Eyal, author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results
Host: Brett McKay

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Overview

This episode explores the core role of belief in human motivation and personal achievement. Host Brett McKay speaks with Nir Eyal, who shares scientific insights and practical tools from his new book on how our invisible, often unquestioned beliefs either limit or liberate us. Together, they discuss how consciously revising these beliefs can unlock lasting change in health, relationships, work, and life satisfaction.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Motivation, Belief, and Personal Change

• Motivation isn’t only about desire or knowledge. Nir shares his decades-long personal struggle with weight loss and how traditional advice failed until he addressed his core beliefs about change.
  • “Every diet worked, until it didn’t. Because as soon as my belief was shaken in that plan… I’d abandon the plan altogether.” (Nir, 05:32)
• The “Motivation Triangle”:
  • Benefit (the desired outcome)
  • Behavior (what you need to do)
  • Belief (the foundation; confidence that change is possible)
  • Belief is the crucial but often missing third element.

“Motivation is not a straight line…at the base of that triangle is the belief.” (Nir, 07:08)

2. What Are Beliefs?

• Beliefs vs. Facts vs. Faith:
  • Fact = objective, independent of you.
  • Faith = conviction requiring no evidence.
  • Belief = strong conviction open to revision with new evidence.
  • “Beliefs are tools, not truths.” (Nir, 11:48 & 12:10)
• We rarely scrutinize our limiting beliefs, but doing so can transform our lives.

3. The Three Powers of Belief

a. The Power of Attention

• We don’t see reality clearly. Our beliefs filter what we notice.
  • Example: “The brain can only process 50 bits of information consciously, out of about 11 million bits entering the brain each second.” (Nir, 15:35)
• Experience is shaped by what we expect to see—fans at a game, optical illusions, and even personal conversations are all interpreted through our beliefs.
• “Believing is seeing.” (Brett, 19:00; Nir, 19:03)

b. The Power of Anticipation

• Our expectations shape our internal state and motivation.
  • Placebo effects (like “placebo steroids”) can physically change outcomes as beliefs alter effort and persistence: “People who took the placebo steroid did another rep, pushed a bit harder, and…packed on more pounds of muscle.” (Nir, 43:25)
  • Aging beliefs: Those who believe they can grow at any age live up to 7.5 years longer.

c. The Power of Agency

• Internal vs. external locus of control:
  • Internal locus (belief you influence outcomes) is linked to better health, relationships, and life outcomes—even under tough conditions.
  • Labels and diagnoses can serve as helpful maps but not rigid definitions; when taken as identity, they become limiting.

“Labels can become our limits…when your diagnosis becomes your identity, it becomes a limitation.” (Nir, 53:50)

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Memorable Stories, Quotes, and Examples

• The “What-the-Hell Effect” in Dieting:

  • “Ah, what the hell, I already had a slice of pizza…” — using this as a metaphor for how shaken beliefs sabotage persistence. (Nir, 05:23)

• Public Speaking Nerves:

  • “We have this limiting belief—these people want to see me fail and they’re going to pay attention to my weaknesses. But, like, that’s not happening.” (Brett, 22:42)
  • “Never apologize to an audience…People want to cheer for you.” (Nir, 22:48)

• Mother’s Birthday Flowers & The “Turnaround”:

  • Nir recounts a fight with his mother over wilted birthday flowers and how “The Turnaround” exercise helped uncover better beliefs, ultimately improving their relationship.
  • “The beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question.” (Nir, 38:17)
  • The Four Questions to Challenge Beliefs:
    1. Is it true?
    2. Is it absolutely true?
    3. Who are you with that belief?
    4. Who would you be without it? (See story: 29:43–37:59)

• Ruminating as Self-Sabotage:

  • Venting and rumination reinforce negative beliefs and worsen relationships, especially with those closest to us. (Nir, 27:34–29:10)

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Practical Tools and Takeaways

- Examining and Updating Beliefs

• Use tools like “The Turnaround” and regularly question default assumptions. Gather a “portfolio of perspectives” to consciously choose liberating beliefs that serve goals and well-being.
  • “You’re not trying to change your mind… you’re just trying to collect what I call a portfolio of perspectives.” (Nir, 37:00)

- The Experience Loop

• Belief → Anticipation → Experience → Confirmation
  • E.g., Wine study: believing wine is expensive makes it taste better and the brain actually experiences it as such. (Nir, 46:01–47:50)

- The Power of Placebo/Nocebo

• Beliefs can both heal and harm. Self-limiting diagnoses become self-fulfilling. Use labels as guides, not identity. (Nir, 53:12–54:11)

- Beliefs as Motivation Levers

• Opt for beliefs that boost persistence and agency, even in the absence of “proof.”
  • “Beliefs are tools, not truths.”
  • “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”—William James (Brett, 54:35)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Nir’s Personal Diet Story / Motivation Triangle: 04:13 – 08:01
• What is Belief? Fact vs. Faith vs. Belief: 10:14 – 12:21
• The Power of Attention: 15:10 – 19:03
• Public Speaking & Limiting Beliefs: 22:40 – 24:18
• Rumination, Relationships & the “Turnaround”: 27:15 – 38:05
• Physical Pain and Belief (Hypno-sedation): 38:17 – 40:38
• Power of Anticipation & Placebo Effects: 40:57 – 45:48
• Experience Loop & Wine Study: 46:01 – 47:50
• Agency & Nocebo Effects: 49:54 – 54:11

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Where to Learn More

• Nir Eyal’s Book: Beyond Belief
• Free Resource: Five-Minute Belief Change Plan at nearandfar.com/beliefchange (54:56)

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Key Takeaway

Limiting beliefs are often invisible and unquestioned, but they are the most important thing to change if you want better results in any area of your life. Treat beliefs as tools, choose them intentionally, and persist—because liberation starts in the mind.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Thanks man. Great to be here. Brett.

[A]

So we had you on way back in 2019. You're out with a new book called Beyond Belief the Science Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results. And this is about human motivation and you think you found a missing factor that we need to consider when we think about motivation. How did your struggle with losing weight lead you to explore human motivation? What's that story?

[B]

Yeah, so let's go all the way back to the beginning. So for me, I struggled with my weight for a good chunk of my life. Chunk being the right word that would have been descriptive at the time. I was the kid who never went into the community pool. You know, when I was a kid we had like one pool in our condominium complex and all the kids in the neighborhood shared it and I was the one who never went in without my shirt on because I didn't want anyone to see my belly rolls. And I Was super embarrassed by that and finally decided to do something about it. And I wasn't just overweight bread, it was. It was much worse than that. I was actually clinically obese. And I started dieting. And over the next 30 years, my bookshelf became this graveyard of diet books. First, I started with low fat. And I don't know if you're. You remember those days of low fat everything and snack wells.

[A]

Snack wells, the devil cake.

[B]

Yeah. All right, so we're about the same age, if you remember snack walls. And I would scarf those down. And then after that, we determined that was not a good idea anymore. So I became vegetarian and I ate nothing but tof and potatoes. And then after that, the pendulum swung and now it was low carb everything. And I went keto. And then after that, let's see what came after that. After that, it was intermittent fasting. That was the way to go. And honestly, every diet worked until it didn't. And I was on this, you know, roller coaster ride of yo yo dieting. Because as soon as my belief was shaken in that plan, as soon as someone said, oh, keto is bad for you because it's bad for your kidneys, or vegetarians don't get all the nutrients they need, or whatever the plan was, as soon as my confidence was shaken, I'd abandoned the plan altogether. And I'd go for a slice of pizza thinking, ah, you know, it's not going to hurt, whatever, one slice of pizza. And then, of course, the what the hell effect kicked in. That's the real name of that psychological phenomenon where I would say to myself, ah, what the hell, I already had the slice of pizza. I'll start on a new plan tomorrow. So let me go ahead and chase it with the french fries to complement the pizza. And what I realized was that, you know, after 30 years of dieting, that I got control of my weight Finally. I'm 48 years old, and it's the first time in my life that I'm in the best shape I've ever been. And I, for the first time, consistently watch what I eat and see results. It's because my beliefs changed, is that I had a new conviction that I could do something about the next thing that goes in my mouth, as opposed to the what the hell effect that kept saying, okay, I'll start tomorrow, I'll start next week, I'll start in the new year, et cetera. And this has kind of led me to this discovery around why we don't put good knowledge into action and we see this all the time. You know, we have all kinds of advice books, we have the Internet, we have now we have AI to answer our questions around what we should do. And I think the main problem is that it's not that we don't know what to do, the answers are all around us, right? I, I basically know what to do. To diet, you have to eat, right? And exercise. Like for the vast majority of people, unless you have some kind of severe hormone imbalance, that's pretty much the plan. But we don't implement. And so I think before, you know, I wanted to read another self help book that I didn't do anything with. I wanted to fundamentally understand what was missing. And what was missing is that motivation is not a straight line. We tend to think of motivation as if I want the outcome, if I want the benefit, I have to do the behavior, right? It's kind of a straight line, do the behavior, get the benefit. But there's definitely something missing here because I can want the benefit and I can even know what to do, what behavior to do. But if I don't have the beliefs in place to support what I call this motivation triangle of on one side is the benefit, one side is the behavior. At the base of that triangle is the belief. For example, if I don't believe that my boss has my best interest and is going to give me that promotion, for example, if I don't believe in my own ability to do the behavior and that the behavior will reach those outcomes, then the behavior triangle falls apart because the beliefs aren't there. And I think that was what was missing for me and I think for millions of other people who basically know what to do and yet we don't implement what we know is good for us. And I think that is the reason that we miss out on these powers of belief.

[A]

That's interesting because I can see that in my own life. So I've had instances with my physical practice of weightlifting where I get injured, attendant injury, and I'll go to the physical therapist and they'll recommend, okay, you need to do this stuff for rehab. And I do it. And I'm like, I'm not seeing anything. This seems so piddly. Like, why am I doing these little dumb stretches? And I stopped believing. I'm like, yeah, this is not going to work. And I stopped doing the thing. And then I don't get better. And then finally I have to go back to my physical therapist and he has to tell me, look, I know it doesn't seem like it's working in the short term. But I promise you, if you keep doing it, it will work. And once I believe him, like, okay, I'm going to trust this guy, I'm going to do the thing, and then the rehab works. It might take a while, but it does work.

[B]

Bingo. I. You really hit the nail on the head here. Because what you've identified is the key determining factor between who reaches their goals and who doesn't. If you look at, okay, why do people not reach their goals? The number one reason is not that they don't know what to do. It's not a lack of resources. It's not bad timing. The number one reason people don't achieve their goals is that they don't persist. How obvious is that? We quit. That's why we don't achieve our goals. Why do we quit? Even though we know it's good for us, even though we know what to do, why don't we do it? And the reason is, is that there's a fundamental lack of belief. And so if you don't know how to use these powers of belief, what I call the power, the first power of belief is attention. The power to change what you see, power of anticipation, the power to change what you feel. And then the third power, power of agency, the power to change what you do. If you don't harness those beliefs and realize how powerful they are, how essential they are to get you where you want to go, you're going to quit. And that's what I did. Year after year, goal after goal. Not that quitting is always bad. I'm not anti quitting. Lord knows I've. I've quit diets. I've quit book projects. I've quit businesses. I've quit relationships. It's not that quitting is necessarily the wrong thing. It's that quitting too soon is a problem. That's terrible. When you know persistence could have made a difference and you quit and now you regret looking back and saying, oh, man, if I just had persisted a little bit longer, I would have had all these benefits. That's when we are destroying human capital. And that's really what I'm fighting against.

[A]

Okay, so you have this motivational triangle. Benefit, behavior and belief is the foundation of that triangle. How are you defining belief? Like, how is belief different from fact and faith?

[B]

Great question. So a fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether you believe in it or not. So the world is more round than it is flat. That's an objective truth. It doesn't Care what you think. Sorry, flat earthers, it's a fact. Faith is the other end of the spectrum. Faith is a strongly held conviction that does not require evidence. So what happens to you in the afterlife? No evidence is required. God rewards the righteous. If that's something that you have faith in, no evidence is required. That is an element of faith. Now, a belief is something different. A belief is something in between a fact and faith. It is a strongly held conviction open to revision based on new evidence. A strongly held conviction open to revision based on new evidence. And so the big aha, the thing that blew my mind doing this research was that beliefs, unlike facts or faith, beliefs are tools, not truths. I'm gonna say it one more time. Beliefs are tools, not truths. So many of our problems are interpersonal problems. Our personal issues, our geopolitical issues as well, it goes all the way up there, are caused because far too many people think that the things that they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs. And we are bound by these beliefs that we refuse to look at, that we refuse to consider thinking that they are facts. And we put ultimate faith in many of these things. Unfortunately, sometimes while we restrict ourselves to have the freedom to take out these tools, look at them, assess them, and say, hey, are these helping me or are they hurting me? So, for example, it's like a carpenter. Would a carpenter say, oh, this hammer, this hammer is the one and only ultimate hammer. No, a carpenter says, okay, sometimes the right tool for the job is a screwdriver, sometimes it's a saw, sometimes it's a hammer, but not always. And so what? What I've learned is that being able to look at those beliefs critically and understand which ones serve me and which one hurts me is a life changing practice. It absolutely has changed my business, it has changed my relationships, it has changed my physical fitness. Certainly all of these things have have been revolutionized because I am now able to get out of my own head. Consider the things that were invisible to me. I mean, I think the metaphor to think about your limiting beliefs. And by the way, limiting beliefs are beliefs that SAP your motivation, while liberating beliefs are beliefs that supply motivation. And the best way to think about these limiting beliefs is that they're like your face. You carry around your face all day long. You know, other people see your face, but you can't see your own face unless you look in a mirror. You can't see your own face. And that's exactly the same case with our beliefs, that the beliefs we most need to change are the Ones we refuse to question. They're the ones we can't even see. We don't even realize. Just like you can't see your face the way you could see your hands or your feet, you can't see your limiting beliefs. Of course, other people can see them, and I can prove it to you. Think about any random person, you know, close, like somebody you know well, your family member, a good friend. I guarantee you, you could probably think of at least one limiting belief. They have something that saps their motivation to do the things that they know they want to do. We can see them in others, but we can't see them in ourselves. And that is a huge impediment. The good news is we can learn to take out those limiting beliefs, examine them, and then choose the ones that serve us.

[A]

This idea of beliefs as tools, and you look at your beliefs and ask, is this serving me or limiting me? It reminded me of William James and the American philosophy school of pragmatism. Are you familiar with pragmatism?

[B]

Yes. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. So their. Their whole idea is. I mean, the extreme version of pragmatism is truth is determined by what works in the world. But I think you can take a modified view. It's like, okay, you look at your beliefs and say, does this work for me?

[B]

Is it.

[A]

Is it allowing me to achieve my goals, to live a flourishing life? Is it? If yes, that's a good belief. If not, bad belief, you need to change your belief. So I think I thought it was interesting I made that connection when in chapter describing beliefs.

[B]

So many good things that we in modern psychology come from William Jaynes. I mean, he's really the granddaddy of all this. And I think the wisdom there is that the vast majority of the decisions we make in our life, they're not based on fact. They're not even based on faith, really. They're based on beliefs. They're based on these convictions that we stay open to revision based on evidence. You know, should I marry this person? Should I take that job? Should I move to this city? Should I read this book? These are all not based on facts. We like to think they're facts, but they're not. They're based on beliefs. And so you better choose those beliefs wisely, knowing that they have such an outsized impact on all the important decisions we make in our life.

[A]

All right, so you mentioned earlier there are three powers of belief. Attention, anticipation, and agency. Let's go deeper into the attention aspect of belief. How do our beliefs shape Our attention.

[B]

So this research really blew my mind. It all starts from the fact that we don't see reality clearly. If there's one thing I wish people understood about their beliefs, it's that your perception of reality is a simulation that we all live in a simulation. We don't live in the same simulation. We all live in our separate simulation. So it's not quite like the Matrix, but we are creating a simulation in our minds every single second. Because the brain can only process about 50 bits of information consciously. That's about one sentence per second. 50 bits of information, that's your conscious attention. However, your brain is taking in, it's absorbing about 11 million bits of information per second. So 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information. So you're only consciously processing 0.000045% of the information entering your brain. What kind of information is not being processed, at least not consciously? The sound of my voice right now, compared to the hum of the room or the light entering your ret, the temperature on your skin, this information is being collected. And in fact, if you focus on it, if you place attention to those things, you will actually experience them. They will enter conscious control, kind of like a security camera going through a surveillance of different cameras. You can pay attention to those things. But the problem that the mind has in terms of conscious attention is that it simply is too much information. It can't process all this information that's entering the brain consciously. So what it has to do, it has to create a simulation. It has to predict what it's going to see. This is called predictive processing rather than what actually is. So we all live in the simulation in our own minds and what the brain decides to filter. And here's really the key takeaway is how the brain decides what 50 bits of information are entering your conscious attention. Are beliefs, your past experiences, what we call priors, these lenses with which we see the world that determines your conscious attention, all determining this power of beliefs, of attention, which means that two people can see the exact same thing, literally the exact same thing in front of them, and come up with completely different explanations as to why they're seeing. For example, there's an optical illusion. It's not really an illusion. It's just an image called the coffer illusion. And I can show this image to one person. And based on where they grew up, they will see rectangles. I can show the exact same image, the same exact image to someone else. And they'll see circles. Okay, we know that people who are on A diet see food as larger. People who are afraid of heights see distances as further away. We've all probably experienced going to some kind of athletic event, right? A football game, and the ref makes a call, and one team, all the fans, see the call one way, and the other team, all the fans, see it a different way. Of course, when you think about geopolitics, the same exact thing can happen in the news. And based on your nationality, you will have completely different interpretations of what just happened. So this goes on and on and on. I mean, interpersonally. There was an instance a few weeks ago where I came home and I wanted to have a glass of water. And my wife saw that I was looking for a glass of water. And she said something like, all the glasses are in the sink. And I immediately felt judged, like she was saying something as if I was supposed to have washed all the dishes. But really she was just saying a statement of fact. But I heard it differently. I experienced that. I perceived what just happened completely differently than how she did. She was just saying a fact, and I was seeing it as being judged. So this goes on and on and on. So how we, what we pay attention to, what we believe is happening literally can change what we see. And so unless we gain power over that, we are essentially blinded to what is actually happening. We're blinded to reality.

[A]

All right, so seeing isn't believing. Believing is seen.

[B]

That's exactly right. That's perfectly said. Or at least as much, you know, we like to say that I'll believe it when I see it, but really just the opposite is also true, that you'll see it when you believe it.

[A]

How can our faulty beliefs limit ourselves and create problems for ourselves that don't really exist or may not exist all the time?

[B]

We have extensive research around how people see problems that aren't there. There's some beautiful, classic studies. So, for example, they showed people angry faces. A series of angry faces mixed with neutral faces, real images of people. And all you had to do was click a button every time you saw an angry face. And in this experiment, they showed, you know, it would be angry face, angry face, neutral face, neutral face, neutral face, angry face. Right. So it got some kind of random appearing order. What the participants didn't know is that they actually reduced the number of angry faces over time. And yet people saw a consistent number of angry faces in this study because they started creating a reality that wasn't really there. They literally saw things differently. And we've seen this repeated time and time again. You know, we Want to replicate these studies? We see this when we show people different colors. So based on what they expect to see, they saw a circle that was more purple or more blue because they were different gradients based on what they expected. I'll give you another wonderful example that demonstrates this. There was a study done at Dartmouth where they took women and they told them, we are going to do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements. And so they created this very realistic scar, realistic looking scar on these women. And they got them all ready and they said, okay, you see this scar? They showed them in the mirror. Here's the scar we put on you. Now we're going to put you into a room with a study participant and we want you to observe how you are treated. Okay. Note how you are treated because of this scar. But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you go to do this, can you just sit back here for just a quick second? We just want to touch up the scar. And what they didn't know was that the study was on them, was on these women with the scar, not the people they were talking to. Because in that instant they actually removed the scar without the participant knowing. They didn't show them what their face actually looked like in the mirror. So these women went into a conversation with someone, they thought they were observing how that person would behave based on their scar that did not exist. There was no scar in their face. And what many of these women reported was what they expected to find. They saw reality differently. They reported that they were discriminated, that people looked at them funny, that some people couldn't stand looking at their scar and looked away and fidgeted and did all these things that made them feel very uncomfortable because of this scar that didn't exist. And so in many ways we, we see what we believe we will see. We experience reality in a way that we expect based on what we pay attention to. So many of us unfortunately create problems that don't even exist.

[A]

I'm sure people experience on a personal level. I know public speaking is, you know, the biggest fear for a lot of people. And I think what happens is you get really self conscious about something, about the way you speak or the way you look. And so you go into the event thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to be paying attention to my stutter or how I say a lot. And then you're looking out in the audience and because you have that belief, like I am a bad public speaker, you think, oh, that person smiled because they're Laughing at me, or they, that person fell asleep because they're bored because I'm boring. And usually it's not that people aren't really paying attention to those things. In fact, I think studies have shown people in audiences, they're actually rooting for the public speaker. They want you to succeed all the time. All the time.

[B]

So true. And that's so true.

[A]

But we have this limiting belief, oh, these people want to see me fail and they're going to pay attention to my weaknesses. But, like, that's not happening.

[B]

No, not at all. I mean, one of the first rules I learned about public speaking, which I do quite a lot now, is never apologize to an audience. Most people, they get up on stage, oh, I'm sorry. I have trouble preparing this presentation. I'm sorry. And that's not what people want, because people want to cheer for you. You're exactly right. And in fact, what's so important about this? Even if an audience doesn't like you, I don't know why. Right. Like, let's say you're delivering bad news and you think, oh, people are going to hate this message. What the research shows. And this is really the takeaway of the book. Beliefs are tools, not truths. Even if that is true, let's say that's true and it's a belief we don't really know. Right. Does that mean everybody in the room is not cheering for you? No, you don't have that kind of evidence. That's not a fact. But let's say you have this hunch. It serves you to choose the opposite. It serves you to use these beliefs as tools, not truths and belief. Everybody in this audience wants me to succeed because how much better will you perform will change in how you perceive reality and therefore how you act when you believe what serves you. So, for example, if you're running a marathon, is it true that you may not finish? Yeah, that's true. A lot of people don't finish marathons. Right. So thinking to yourself, I can't do this. You're guaranteed not to finish the marathon as opposed to, I can do this. You're going to persist. So that that's a perfect example of a limiting belief versus a liberating belief. A limiting belief is the one that saps your motivation, whereas a liberating belief is one that gives you more motivation, enhances your performance, helps you persist longer, and, of course, eventually accomplish that goal.

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

And now back to the show. So something that can amplify these limiting beliefs that will change what we pay attention to and kind of create this vicious cycle of poor performance is rumination. For those who don't know what rumination is, what is it? And then how does that just entrench ourselves more in limiting beliefs?

[B]

Yeah, so rumination is when we have intense focus on some type of past event that we keep thinking about again and again and again. It comes from, you know, how a cow chews its cud. Just keep chewing and ruminating and chewing and chewing. And it turns out the research shows it's not very helpful. It's associated with all kinds of, of bad psycholog symptoms to continue to ruminate over and over and over. And the more we ruminate, this also happens with this bad advice that I'm very guilty of venting, where we've been told from the popular psychological interpretation out there that you have to get stuff off your chest, you have to tell people how you really feel. You know, you're not supposed to keep things inside. Turns out in many cases that's terrible advice that in fact, when we vent about people, when we ruminate about how we've been injured in some way, it makes us more likely to see those bad elements in people. Because just like we don't see reality as it is, we see our beliefs about reality. We don't see people as they really are. We see our beliefs about people and we think that's how people really are. And the really tragic thing is that this happens to the people we are closest to. I see this all the time. You know, I'll meet, I'll meet somebody who's so nice, who's so kind to me as a stranger, and yet when I meet their spouse, when I meet their family, oh my God, they're So rude to them. They're rude to the people who they're closest to because to that person, they see the worst aspects of that person. They don't see the person as they really are. They see what they have been conditioned over and over. He always does that. She always says that. There she goes again. And they've built this construct, this effigy of this person that doesn't really exist.

[A]

Yeah, you have a whole chapter about how this rumination on our negative beliefs can really mess up our relationships. You talk about this experience was funny with your mother. You sent her some flowers for her birthday.

[B]

You want to go there, huh?

[A]

Yeah. Well, talk about how your faulty beliefs about your mother got in the way of you having a good relationship with your mother.

[B]

And then.

[A]

Then we talk about how can you. How can you mitigate our tendency to ruminate on faulty beliefs so that things improve for ourselves personally and with our relationships?

[B]

For sure. Yeah. So. So this was. This has really changed my life in many ways, but it was a long, painful road to get there. So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday, and I was in Singapore. She was in central Florida, where I grew up, and I wanted to send her some flowers for her birthday. And getting flowers from Singapore is not easy. And so I had to stay up till one in the morning finding the perfect florist with good reviews to make sure they could get it there on time, just the way I wanted it. So that it, you know, I make sure they were. The flowers were fresh and they wouldn't burned in the car and, you know, the Florida heat and all that. And I went to sleep at 1am I patted myself on the shoulder and I said, okay, near. Good job. You know, that. That. That you're a good son. I called her the next morning, and I said, hey, mom, did you. Did you get the flowers I sent? And she says, yes, I did. Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead, and I wouldn't order from that florist again. To which I saw what she said through a particular lens of belief, and I blurted out something to the effect of, well, that's the last time I buy you a birthday present. And, Brett, that went over about as well as you think. That did not go over too well. And to be honest, I regretted that. That was not what I intended to say, but that's what came out in a moment. So, anyway, after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, hey, would you like to do a turnaround on that to which I said, no, I don't want any of your psycho blabble hocus pocus nonsense. I want to vent. I want to tell you how my mom was rude and wrong and how I was right. And yes, maybe I didn't say the exact right thing, but can you blame me? I mean, come on, print. You heard what I just said. Like what mom tells their son that the birthday present they just sent didn't meet expectations. Right. Clearly my mom was being too judgmental and hard to please. Right? So I sat down with that for a minute. I didn't vent because I'd done the research on how venting is not actually all that helpful. And I sat down reluctantly with a piece of paper and a pen and I did this process called the Turnaround, which comes from work by Byron Katie. And Byron Katie really channeled thousands of years of practice, even Aristotle. Actually this is a over 2000 year old practice, starting with Aristotle, of inquiring about your beliefs and seeing are there alternative interpretations. So here's how it works. It's basically four questions that Byron Katie has developed and I kind of have updated some of them to better suit our needs. But here's what the four questions are for. Question number one starts with first you write down the belief. Okay? The belief is my mother was too judgmental and hard to please. Now the first question is, is it true? Duh. Did I just tell you what happened? Clearly. I mean, I just told you my mother was very clearly too hard to please here and very judgmental because of what she said. Okay, next question. Come on, let's keep moving here. Next question Was is it absolutely true? So in that instance, was she actually. Is it absolutely? Absolutely means every single time, without exception,

[A]

beyond a shadow of a doubt.

[B]

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, no other interpretation could possibly be true other than my mother was being too judgmental and hard to please. Is that absolutely true? I mean, that's a tough one, right? Because maybe, maybe there's another interpretation. I don't know, maybe, Maybe there's a 1% chance that she was trying to be helpful. Maybe she was trying to not be rude. She wasn't being judgmental. She was just trying to maybe protect me from getting scammed. Could that be possibly, maybe in some kind of alternative universe true? Okay, all right, fine. Okay, I'll give it to you. Maybe there's an alternative explanation. Okay, question number three. Who are you when you hold these beliefs? So how do you feel? What do you become when you hold on to that belief? Well, to be Honest. When I held onto the belief that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I was short tempered. I can't say I was nice. I was probably pretty rude. And frankly, I was a little embarrassed that that's what I said, that I regretted, that I would prefer to not have said that. And then the fourth question is, who would you be without that belief? And if I could let go of that belief, if I really thought about it, I would probably be at peace. I wouldn't be so angry with her all the time. I would probably be more myself, to be honest. And so what we established with just those four questions, which, by the way, you can not only use with relationships. I do this at least once a day in some kind of interpersonal relationship. Whether it's with a client, a business customer, you know, whether it's somebody on the street who did something annoying to me, it doesn't matter. You can ask those four questions to very quickly ascertain that the way you saw things, that your belief one may not be true may not serve you. And getting rid of that belief and adopting an alternative perspective may benefit you. Okay, so what this does is basically just crack open the possibility that there might be another interpretation of what happened. That's all it does. So now the next step is to actually do the turnaround. And so the turnaround asks us to think about the exact opposite of that belief. It's not to change anybody's mind. You're not trying to change your mind here. You're just trying to collect what I call a portfolio of perspectives, just alternative points of view, whether or not they are true. It doesn't matter if they're true, because again, beliefs are tools, not truths. Okay, so we're just going to collect a portfolio, other tools in our toolkits. So what's the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite is my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, so in that instance, could that be right? That she was not too judgmental and hard to please? Well, the more I thought about it, I kind of had to admit that maybe she wasn't being too judgmental and hard to please. Maybe she was actually trying to help me just not get scammed. Maybe that was her real intent. So it could be true. I may not agree with it, but there might be an alternative explanation. Okay, so now let's do another turnaround. This turnaround might sound something like this, I am too judgmental and hard to please. Oof. How could that possibly Be true. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Not my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? Well, if I'm honest, Brett, you know, when I called my mom and she didn't respond exactly the way I had scripted in my mind that a mother is supposed to respond, I kind of lost it. And so who was being hard to please? I was right. Because I didn't get the kind of reaction I had rehearsed in my head that I expected. And when that didn't happen, I was disappointed, and I lashed out. So I was actually being hard to please. All right, there's another turnaround here. There's a third one. A third turnaround might sound like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. Oof. So what would that. How could that possibly be true? The more I thought about it, what really happened was that I had these very high expectations of how I was supposed to do things for my mom and how I should do things in general. And when I spent all this time and effort and things didn't go exactly the way I'd planned, that was a statement on my competency. That was a sign that I was not doing a good job at this thing, that somehow I was lesser because I had screwed up. And so what really I learned was that I had these unrealistic. It wasn't my fault that the. That the flowers didn't appear exactly as I'd wanted. And that doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It just means sometimes stuff happens. It didn't have to get worse from there. I didn't have to make all these assumptions, all these beliefs that says that's. You know, that it's called the misattribution of emotion. That I was feeling crappy about myself about something that had happened, and then I had attributed that crappy feeling with the thing that was right in front of me. My mom. And so I had, through my lens of belief, I had misattributed how I was feeling and placed blame on her, which did not help the relationship at all. Now. Now I have four beliefs, not just one. That one belief of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please wasn't serving me. Why? Because the only way out, the only way that I could be happy was if she changed. She had to do something different so I could be happy. That's not gonna happen. The other perspectives now gave me freedom. Now I could stay on my side of the net. Now, I could do something to interpret that situation differently so that it served me rather than hurt me. Even if it wasn't true, even if it wasn't true, it doesn't actually matter. What matters is, does it serve me better? And so that type of thinking, that type of practice that now has become part of my daily life has changed everything for my business, for my relationships, for my health and well being. That type of turnaround again and again has absolutely brought so much peace, joy, happiness to my life in a way that I never thought possible.

[A]

Yeah. So what these questions do, it gives you a portfolio of perspectives to choose from. And you'd be like, well, that one's probably better in this situation. I'm going to go with that one.

[B]

And again, the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. The easiest thing to do, and what the vast majority of us do, the vast majority of the time is we never question these things because it feels so comforting, right? Of course that person's being a jerk. Of course that person messed up. I didn't mess up. That person messed up. But of course it's our problem. It's in our head. It's causing us suffering needlessly. So what I constantly do is to question whether the suffering is needed. And this goes super, super deep. You know, we think about emotional suffering, but it doesn't stop there. I mean, we have incredible research around how this affects your perception of pain, of physical pain. For the research for this book, I documented these cases of hypno sedation, which is where patients will go under the knife. They will have full fledged surgery. There's this gentleman that I followed who I saw the entire recording of his surgery where this guy by the name of Daniel Gisler, 54 years old, I think he was, he had this freak accident. He broke his fibia and his tibula. He had to get metal screws put into his leg and then a few years later, he had to have them removed. And in that time he learned this practice of hypnosudation. And he managed, he started practicing by just watching a few YouTube videos. And then he started practicing by having this clamp on his hand to test his pain tolerance. And he progressed over time to be able to have these screws wrenched out of his bone. Scalpel cutting into flesh, and with zero anesthesia, not even local anesthesia, nothing, no general, no topical, nothing for 55 minutes. He went under the knife and he didn't as much flinch. And not only does he report that he didn't experience the kind of pain that you and I would expect to make an experience. We know his vitals never spiked, his heart rate never went up, his blood pressure never went up. All the things you would expect to happen when there was extreme stress didn't occur. Now, why do I tell this story? Like, why. Why is this research so important? Because if our beliefs can tune out the suffering through the power of attention, can tune out the suffering of surgery without anesthesia, well, then certainly we can learn from that. Certainly when I have this interaction with my mom, I can also choose, wait a minute, is this suffering necessary? Is this something I actually need to suffer from? Or is there another belief that can allow me to not have to suffer through this?

[A]

All right, so that's the belief power of attention. What you believe will determine what you pay attention to. And so we want to make sure we choose our beliefs carefully because it will frame how we interact with the world, whether in a useful or not useful way. You talk about the belief power of anticipation. What do you mean by that?

[B]

So anticipating what we think is going to happen next. So if. If the power of belief, of attention, is about what is happening right now, what we see in reality, anticipation is what we expect to happen. It's about our internal states. So seeing is about what's on the outside, anticipation, what we feel is on the inside. And it turns out that people think that what they are feeling is the truth. I feel the way I feel. I am what I am. Right? No. No more damaging words have ever been uttered than I am what I am. Right? And we hear it all the time. That's just the kind of person I am. That's my personality. That's my identity. That's who I am. And of course, that has all kinds of terrible consequences as well, because again, that can be a very limiting belief. I'm a. I'm not a morning person. I'm a Sagittarius. I have a short attention span. The list goes on and on and on.

[A]

I'm an introvert. I hear that one.

[B]

I'm an introvert. Exactly, exactly. And now we see actually all kinds of labels. This is actually bleeding into the. The third power, belief around agency. You know, all these labels that can become our limits, that when we think we are a certain type of person or now, unfortunately, a certain type of diagnosis, oh, boy. That can have all kinds of consequences. But let's get back to that in a minute. Let's talk about the power of anticipation. So this blew my mind when it comes to the physical Properties that our beliefs have, how our beliefs can actually become our biology through the power of anticipation. And one of my favorite pieces of research around this has to do with the placebo effects. Placebo effects are freaking mind blowing. But particularly what I think is what was a particularly interesting study was how placebo steroids can actually help you put on muscle. Isn't that crazy? Like, we think about placebos as, you know, helping you with a headache or maybe with insomnia or anxiety. Placebo steroids. So people who were told, here's a steroid, but in reality it was a placebo, can actually help you put on muscle. How does that happen? How could that possibly be? It's not that the placebo has some kind of magical powers. It's that it directly affects motivation. How? Well, in this study where they gave young men a pill, they told them, this is a steroid pill. We want you to follow this workout regimen. And then they had a control group that did not receive the placebo steroid, and they had to follow a similar workout regimen. They wanted to then see who would put on more pounds. Now, the difference was that the people who took the placebo steroid worked a little bit harder. They told them what exercises to do, but they didn't tell them how much to do or how much weight to put on. They just told them, work out for this protocol. And so what turned out to happen was that people who were taking the placebo steroids did another rep. They pushed a bit harder, they added a bit more weight, and at the end of the study, they had packed on more pounds of muscle because they believed that they were on this miraculous steroid which they anticipated would give them more muscle mass. So it's not that placebos are some kind of magic. It's that they can increase the motivation. Again, back to persistence, back to what really separates winners and losers and people who achieve their goals and those who don't. It's all about this power of persistence which was driven from the power of their beliefs.

[A]

This reminds me of Dumbo's magic feather, right? He thought the feather. If he had the feather in his trunk, he was gonna fly. And then when he didn't have it, he felt like, oh, no, I can't do it. Yeah, but the feather wasn't magic. I mean, you thought it was magic, so you thought you could fly, but you were actually flying, and you did.

[B]

You could do it all along. And you think, okay, this is. This is a Disney movie. Okay, very cute. It is a matter of life. And Death, Brett. It is literally a matter of life and death. Did you know that people who have positive beliefs about aging. So what does that feel like? So someone who believes aging leads to inevitable decline. Okay, that's, that's one potential belief versus someone who believes something to the effect of, I can grow at any age. Okay. I can grow and adapt at any age versus aging involves inevitable decline. Now, both of those could be true. Both of those could be true. But which one is a limiting belief and which one is a liberating belief? Which one gives you more motivation to go outside and go for a walk as you age? Which one gives you more motivation to join the bowling league? Which one gives you more motivation to garden, to do tai chi, to do the kind of stuff that it can extend your lifespan? And so people who have those beliefs, this came out of a study from Becca Levy at Yale. People who have those positive beliefs about aging live seven and a half years longer. Seven and a half years longer. To put that in perspective, that is more of an effect than quitting smoking, than eating a healthy diet or exercise. Okay. Like, doesn't that blow your mind that your beliefs. Now again, it's not magic, but your beliefs do change your biology, because when you believe certain things about aging, you behave differently. You're more likely to sustain that motivation and keep going and do the things that make you healthy. So for all the talk we have about quit smoking and eat right and exercise, we should be thinking a lot more about these beliefs because they have such an outsized impact on our lifespan.

[A]

Well, you talk about in this section about anticipation, this idea of the experience loop. What is that and how can we use it to supercharge those liberating beliefs and mitigate those limiting beliefs?

[B]

Yeah. So the experience loop goes like this. So first we believe something, then we anticipate what we think is going to happen, then we actually feel it, we have that internal sensation, and then we confirm it. And this can affect so many different things in our life. There was a beautiful study done around wine, where they put people in an FMRI machine. They connected them to a little tube in their mouth, and as they were scanning their brain, they gave them a wine and said, okay, now this wine is a five dollar bottle of wine. Okay? They squirted a little bit of the wine. They said, what do you think of this wine? And people report, you know, it's all right, it's a little flat, not that much of a finish, whatever, it's okay. And then they looked at the blood flow, their brain as they experience this wine. Then they said, okay, now we're going to give you a very expensive bottle of wine. Okay, you ready? Here comes the little squirt of a very expensive bottle of wine. What do you think of it? Oh, this one has, you know, hints of berry. And I can, I can taste the oak. And, you know, this is much smoother finish. They had all these, you know, these, these, these very wine, snobby pronouncements about the wine. Of course, you know, there's a trick here. It's a psychology study. The trick was it was the same exact wine, but because of their underlying beliefs. What was the underlying belief? When you know that something is more expensive, you anticipate because of that belief, you anticipate that it will be better. And because you anticipate it's going to be better, you feel it as better. These people. What's so amazing about this study? It wasn't just, you know, a blind taste test and tell us how you feel. Right. And we would expect people to say to the, to say to the scientists, yeah, expensive wine tastes better. No, we could actually see it in their brain. We could see blood flow increase in their reward centers differently when they tasted the wine that they thought was more expensive. So they weren't lying. They actually experienced the wine differently. They felt it differently in their brains. And then finally is the confirmation step. So when you think about wine, wine is a social experience. And many of the things that we do are social experiences where now we confirm, oh, this is a really good wine, and you tell your friends about it, and you look at Wine Spectator and you look at, you know, so, so it's not that nobody's lying here. It's not a fraud. It's that our beliefs shape the actual experience itself. I think many people misunderstand what marketing is for. You know, people think that advertising is about awareness. And, okay, advertising does increase awareness, but how does that explain why some brands advertise to death? Right? How many Coca Cola ads can we see? How many billions of dollars have they spent on those ads? Well, because it's not about awareness. We all know about Coca Cola. We've tried it already. Well, why do they do that? Because the advertising shapes the belief, which makes you anticipate a feeling, which then you will confirm by seeing this ad of, oh, look how refreshing, look how wonderful. Look how great. It actually changed the experience itself. So the point of display advertising is to actually create that sensation in the first place. And that's what you're paying for. Not just the sugar water.

[A]

All right. So with the belief power of anticipation, how you expect something is going to be influences how you feel about it, which influences how you behave, which influences the outcome of something. So if you think aging is going to be awesome and you're going to stay vital, then you're going to keep doing youthful things, and then you're going to stay vital. And I can see other applications of this. Like if I think going into a hard conversation that will strengthen the relationship, then I'm probably going to approach it like that and it will nudge me to act in a more positive way and then it will strengthen the relationship. And this also reminded me of that study they did with housekeepers where they're. When they told housekeepers that cleaning constituted valid exercise, they lost more weight because they leaned into the activity more. So let's talk about the belief power of agency. How do our beliefs shape our sense of agency or ability to get things done in the world?

[B]

Okay, so the power of agency is the power to have an effect in the world. And we call this an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. So external locus of control is that the world is happening to me, that things are going on that are beyond my control. And internal locus of control, this high sense of agency says that I can control factors in the world, that what I do makes a difference. And here's the kicker. So it turns out that people who have this tendency towards an internal locus of control do better in life in pretty much all metrics. They live longer, they have more friends, they contribute to their community more. All the good things happen when you have an internal locus of control. Here's what's really amazing. Even when you have every reason to believe the opposite. So even when you are on a low socioeconomic status, even if you're discriminated against, even if you've really drawn a bad deck of cards in life and you have every reason to say the world has beaten me down and I have challenges that other people don't have. Even if that's the case, even if that's the case, you turn out to do better psychologically believing you have a high sense of agency. Again, beliefs are tools, not truth. Isn't that mind blowing that your attitude that you're so much more likely to succeed in life based on these beliefs, that if you believe you could do something to get out of that situation to make your world better, guess what? Not a big surprise, you are much more likely to do something about it. And so that that's where we go into some of the research I talked about a little bit earlier, which I think is absolutely incredible and, and quite jarring, frankly, about the nocebo effect. So we talked about the placebo effect. Placebos, from the Greek, mean I will heal. Nocebos are the opposite. Nocebos are I will hurt. And one of the studies that was just incredible, that really kind of shaped my thinking on this. There's a guy in the research literature by the name of Mr. A. He was anonymized Mr. A. Now Mr. A has this bad breakup with his girlfriend, and he decides to commit suicide by taking an entire bottle of pills. At the last minute, he takes these pills, and all of a sudden he decides to change his mind. He decides he wants to live. He runs over to his neighbor's house. His neighbor rushes him to the ER room. He takes his bottle of pills. And as he gets into the ER room, he collapses on the floor. And all the nurses can hear him say is, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. And he passes out. They put him on a gurney, they rush him to the. Into the er. They take his blood pressure, he's at critically low level. His heartbeat is plummeting. All these vitals are pointing to the fact that he has a severe overdose. The problem is that on the bottle of pills, it doesn't say what medicine he took, what drug he took. All it has is a phone number because Mr. A was part of a clinical trial. And so the doctors have to call this number and ascertain what was it that Mr. A overdosed on. They call up this number, and it turns out that Mr. A was in a clinical trial for an antidepressant and he turned out to have been in the placebo group. So nothing that he took had any biological effect. It was a completely inert substance that he took as part of the placebo category of the study. And yet he felt all these physiological symptoms. They tell this to Mr. A. And in 15 minutes, his heart rate is back to normal, his blood pressure is back to normal, and he's feeling fine. He's fully conscious. Is that not mind blowing?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Does that not make you think all over your life choices here? Because what this means is that our perception, our beliefs can have a profound impact not only to the positive. We talked about some of the positive effects, but also to the extreme negative. And I think what we're doing in many times in society, unfortunately, is that we are using these maybe non pharmaceutical nocebos, when we have these labels, when we have these monikers about what kind of person we are and increasingly what kind of diagnosis we have. It is limiting our potential. So we need to be very, very careful. I'm not anti diagnosis, I'm not anti psychiatry, far from it. But I am anti using these labels to define who we are. Because the common perception is you can't change who you are. And when your diagnosis becomes your identity, it becomes a limitation. And your labels really do become your limits.

[A]

You take on a diagnosis if it's useful. If it's not useful, then maybe don't take that on.

[B]

It's a map, not the terrain. So if it puts you on a path to getting to a place that is helpful, wonderful. But you are not the map. Right. You are not the terrain itself.

[A]

All right, so we talked about the three powers of belief. There's attention, anticipation, and agency, which shape what you see, feel, and do for good or bad. And I think the big takeaway from our conversation is that beliefs can be tools and we got to figure out whether they're serving us or not. And as we were talking, I looked up this William James quote that I really like. He said this, Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. And I think that applies to a lot of things in life. Well, Nir, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

[B]

Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So on my website, nearandfar.com, near I spelled like my first name. We actually have a five minute belief change plan that we're giving away for free. Anybody can get it. It's one of those things that we couldn't fit in the final edition of the book, so we decided to give it away. It walks you day by day by day. A five minute practice that can start you on this path of changing your beliefs and adopting more of these liberating beliefs rather than the limiting beliefs. And so to get that, you go to nearandfar.com belief change. So that's nearandfar.com near spelling my first name nirandfar.com belief change.

[A]

Fantastic. Well, Nir Awal, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

[B]

Thank you so much.

[A]

My guest here is Nir Eyal. He's the author of the book Beyond Belief. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, near and far. That's N I R A N D F A r dot com. Also check out our shownotes at AOM is beyond belief. Refine links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast. If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It really helps out a lot and if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think makes something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you how to listen to a one podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

[B]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Granger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[A]

Hi, you're listening to Meditating with Jan from Toyota.

[B]

Soften your focus and visualize yourself off

[A]

roading in a Tacoma.

[B]

Now engage your senses. What do you here a donkey because you're driving the kids to a farm sanctuary in a Grand Highlander.

[A]

Breathe in, breathe out and go from

[B]

dreaming it to driving it today.

[A]

Dealer inventory may vary.

[B]

See your participating Toyota dealer for details.

[A]

Event ends March 31st.

[B]

Toyota let's Go Places.