A Masterclass in Changing Your Limiting Beliefs - Nir Eyal - #1074

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Nir Eyal, welcome to the show.

**Nir Eyal** (0:02)
Thanks, Chris. Great to be back.

**Chris Williamson** (0:03)
Dude, 2019, episode 104, all the way to now.

**Nir Eyal** (0:08)
I'm going to take credit for all your success since then.

**Chris Williamson** (0:11)
It was. It was built-

**Nir Eyal** (0:12)
Is that okay? Was I the lucky charm?

**Chris Williamson** (0:14)
It was built on a foundation of you and Indistractable. That's exactly correct. New one, all about belief. Why is belief so important?

**Nir Eyal** (0:25)
Beliefs turns out to be the lens with which we see the world. I had no idea how profound this research has been coming out over the past several years as on our day-to-day lives, how beliefs shape what we see, literally shape what we see. I can show the same exact image to two different people and they will see completely different things. It's called the Koffer illusion. You could look at this piece of paper and I can show you it to one person based on where they grew up and their priors, their beliefs, and they'll see circles. I can show it to somebody else based on where they grew up. They'll see rectangles. It's incredible. Beliefs not only shape what you see, not just figuratively, but they actually shape reality that you see. They shape what you feel, your internal state, and most importantly, they affect what you do. And so everything comes upstream from these beliefs. And so you better get these beliefs right if they're going to run your life.

**Chris Williamson** (1:17)
I think one of the challenges people have when they hear the word belief is it gets perilously close to Rhonda Byrne, the secret manifestation. You know, you've come from a productivity background, same as me, kind of hardcore, quite sterile almost in a way, very sort of frameworks, rigid structures. Belief sounds very almost whimsical as a topic to get into.

**Nir Eyal** (1:42)
You know, that is a great point because there is a lot of bullshit out there. And so part of what I wanted to do with this research that I've done over the past six years for Beyond Belief was to really separate what works and what doesn't. And a lot of it, frankly, I'll give that crowd some credit. A lot of it works, but not for the reasons they say it does.
You know, I hate to burst anybody's bubble, but no, nothing is vibrating and quantum whatevering. And like the universe really doesn't give a shit. It's not, you know, all the manifesting stuff, it can work, kind of. And I do dive into some research around how it turns out positive thinking can have a very negative effect if you don't do it properly. So I kind of wanted to dispel some of those myths. And yet I've changed my mind a lot about a lot of stuff that I didn't used to do. And I used to kind of, you know, I'm very science-backed. You know, all my books have pages and pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. I have to see the study, not just it worked for me, but I need to see the peer-reviewed studies that show that it worked for others in a controlled study. And so there's a lot of mythology out there, even in the academic community, to be honest. There's a lot of studies that I look through that I thought were kind of, you know, gold standard studies. And you kind of dig into how they were done methodologically, and you realize, oh, they're kind of crappy studies too. So it was a lot of sorting through the meat from the chaff to figure out what we can actually practically apply to our lives. The good news is there's a lot of unbelievable research that has come out of the past several years that just absolutely blew my mind. For example, one thing is that we now know that placebos work even when you know they're a placebo, which we didn't use to know before, right? We used to think that placebos had to have some kind of deception effect, right? That you had to, both people, the person prescribing the medication in a double-blind control study had to not know who was receiving the placebo. And the person, of course, receiving it couldn't know if it was a placebo. Turns out that's not true, that you can get amazing effects. Ted Kapschuck at Harvard showed this with IBS patients. He gave people a pill bottle that said placebos on it. By the way, you can go on Amazon today and buy placebo pills with five-star reviews that say, amazing how fast acting this placebo was. It's incredible. He told people, hey, this is a placebo. It is a completely inert substance. However, it has been shown to show, to help some people with symptoms of IBS. Turns out it performed just as well as the leading medication. Not only that, wait, the story gets better. People called up Dr. Kapchuk afterwards and said, hey, that placebo pill was amazing for my symptoms. Can I get some more of those?