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

Nier AL. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Chris. Great to be back. Dude, twenty nineteen, episode a hundred and four, all the way to now. I'm gonna take credit for all your success since then. It was it was built on the Is that okay? Was I the lucky charm? It you it was built on a foundation of you and indistractable. That's exactly correct. Uh new one, all about belief.

Why is belief so important? Okay, so beliefs turns out to be the lens with which we see the world. And I had no idea how profound this research that's been coming out over the past several years has 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 coffer illusion. You can look at this piece of paper and I can show you it to one person based on where they grew up. And 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.

Uh beliefs not only shape what you see, like not 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. What 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, uh kind of hardcore, quite sterile almost in a way, very sort of uh uh r frameworks, rigid structures. Um belief sounds very w almost whimsical. as a topic to get into. You know, that that is a great point because uh there is a lot of bullshit out there. And so part of what I wanted to do with this uh 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 I'll give that crowd some credit. A lot of it works, but not for the reasons they say it does. That that like You know, I hate to burst anybody's bubble, but no nothing is is is vibrating and quantum whatevering and like the universe really doesn't give a shit. It is not, you know, the the the all the the manifesting stuff. It it it can work.

kind of. And and I I do dive into some research around how turns out positive thinking can have a very negative effect if you don't do it properly. Uh so I kinda 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 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.

Uh and so there's there's 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 methodologic methodologically and you realize, oh, they're kind of crappy studies too.

So it was a lot of sorting through the the the wheat 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 used to know before, right? We used to think that placebos had to have some kind of deception effect, right? That you had to t do y y both people, the 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 Kapchuk at Harvard showed this with IBS patients. He gave people a

uh a a 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 to uh uh help some people with s symptoms of IBS. Turns out it performed just as well as the leading medication. No not only that.

Not only that, wait, the story gets better. People called up Dr. Kapchuk ever afterwards and said, hey, that placebo pill was amazing for my symptoms. Can I get some more of those? So oh I think that's the same thing. Because if you change the strain, the gut microbiome won't respond. But I well Dude, it it is wild. I remember reading a study about uh branded Hyperproof in

being m br branded painkillers being more effective than own label painkillers. You don't want to get the CVS own brand, you want to get the the Neurofen version of it. For the same reason, that despite the fact that people know it's the precise same structure that's inside of there at the same dose. Just the the expectation effect that David Robson wrote about, which I'm sure you're familiar with, like it's just across everything. It's crazy. That is that is that that is wild.

Yeah, yeah, it j and it just goes on and on. And th this is just the tip of the iceberg. So not only does it affect uh our our bodies and in fact how our our biology becomes our beliefs in many ways. It's it's much more nuanced and much more practical than I used to think. That, you know, I think a lot of people think that there's some kind of like magic to placebos and placebos can heal you. It turns out that's not really true. That uh there's a difference between sickness and illness.

Sickness is in the body, some kind of physical malady, some kind of physical disease, some kind of something that's not working properly in the body. Illness is the psychological perception of symptoms. So placebos don't work at all when it comes to sickness. They're really effective when it comes to illness. And so you can actually practically use many of these tools, both, you know, things that look like pharmaceuticals like pills and injections and treatments and potions.

But also rituals, right? So for the first time in my life, I started to pray. I I didn't pray since I was a little kid, and now I started adopting prayer in my life because it's incredible. Like if you look at the research.

People who pray, uh, they live longer, they are a lot healthier, they are happier, they have lower lower incidence of uh depression and anxiety. Now, what's really crazy is that Turns out the studies show that you actually get a lot of the same benefits from prayer, even without faith.

And that really blew my mind. And I think this is exactly what I'm trying to address here. This this crisis, this epidemic uh that I think we're seeing of loneliness, disconnection, anxiety, uh uh all kinds of maladies, I think are coming from the the fact that we become more secular, you know, in the States.

thirty percent of Americans today identify as nun. It's the largest religious group in America. N O N E, not N U N, not the Catholic nun, but N-O-N-E, people who don't affiliate with any religion. And uh in fact, many of them call themselves spiritual but not religious. You probably heard this a ton, right? You're in Austin, you you have a lot of people around you who call themselves spiritual, not religious. Well, those people are the worst off.

they have the highest incidences of anxiety and depression disorder than other uh groups. So you're you're more likely to suffer if you say you're spiritual and not religious than if you just say you're a free thinker or agnostic, or of course if you are religious. So it turns out you can get a lot of the same benefits. And this is what I discovered.

by using prayer with ritual almost as a placebo. That maybe you sto uh stop questioning even as I did whether I need it to be an absolute fact that everything I'm saying is actually true the way that the religious leader would say it. And rather just go about the actual rituals that have been around for thousands and thousands of years. And so that's part of what I discovered on this journey as well. What do you think is the reason for spiritual but not religious having the worst outcomes?

I think that it loses the fundamental tenets of of what religion gives us. So, you know, n the the the story that I went on, the jour the journey that I went on, I should say.

was that I uh I went to f well let me back up a second. Let me let me tell you about the study that inspired this. So I read this study that showed That uh They they took they they called people in the lab and they had a group that was uh religious and spiritual, people who had a faith practice that believed in some kind of higher power, some kind of supernatural.

And they also had a group of people who were not spiritual at all, didn't have any faith tradition. And then they had a control group. And they taught the the people who didn't have a faith tradition how to pray. And the control group they said do whatever you want. They brought those people later on i into a a lab later on and they asked

all three groups to put their hand inside very cold water. Now this is kind of a standard assessment. It's a pain tolerance test and we see how long you can last in that very, very, very cold, almost freezing water. And they also measure like facial grimaces and, you know, different expressions. And if you say anything about the pain, so they're measuring your pain tons and how long you can finally stay in the water.

Well, no surprise the people who prayed, who've had a faith based prayer practice. They lasted much longer than the control group. But even the people who were taught how to pray, who were did not have a faith, background, if they could substitute some other word, okay? The universe, the sum of all forces, mother nature, something that was meaningful to them, they also had higher pain tolerance than the control group.

And so this fascinated me. And so I went to five religious leaders, and this is gonna sound like the setup of a of a joke, but this is exactly what happened. I went to a rabbi, an imam, a priest, a monk, and a swami, and I asked them all the same question. How do you pray, even if you have doubts about God?

And uh I took away from each of them practices that I think anyone can use, whether you have a a a belief in the supernatural or not. If you do have a faith in the supernatural, that's fantastic. Turns out that a lot of us, I was missing out because I wanted to have the facts that I'm not gonna pray unless I absolutely believe exactly what the religion says.

And now I've been able to release that. That now every time I go by a place of worship, whether it's a church or a mosque or a synagogue, if they'll have me inside. I go in and pray. And it doesn't cost me anything. And it helps me refocus. It helps me become gr uh um grateful and it it it uh sometimes engages me in a community. All these practices that religion teaches

uh have have kind of escaped us. By the way, and interesting phenoty asked, you know, why is why is spiritual but not religious, why does that have these negative outcomes? Not every country is the same when it comes to that regard. In fact in Japan, I just got back from Japan a few weeks ago. In Japan it's the exact opposite. They are religious but not spiritual.

So the Japanese, they absolutely will go to the Shinto shrines, they'll go to the Buddhist temples, they do all the rituals. But when you actually ask them, do you actually, you know, do you really have faith in this supernatural animism? You know, w wh Not really. Uh not not so much. But they do the ritual and they have they they gain all these psychological benefits that that come from it.

That's so interesting. That is so cool. I I can imagine a lot of people thinking, oh, this is perilously close to wishful thinking. You're asking people to um like delusion themselves. into see it, believe it, wish it, achieve it, but don't actually have to do anything about it. Um square square the circle of being a pretty grounded agentic guy who wants to make things happen and realizes that you need to row the boat with not wanting to rely too much on

Delusion and whimsy. Totally. So for okay, let's address those separately. So first of all, uh you're already gaslighting yourself. You're already delusional. In fact, none of us actually see reality as it is. Uh how do we know this? The brain is absorbing about eleven million bits of information per second. So right now, listening to my voice, your brain is actually taking in 11 million bits of information. The sound of my voice in your ears, the the uh uh

light entering your eyeballs, the temperature of the room, your brain is actually absorbing all this, 11 million bits of information. But conscious processing only has the capacity for about 50 bits of information. So 11 million bits of information to put that in perspective, that's like reading War and Peace twice every second. Okay, tremendous amount of information.

50 bits of information is about one sentence of information per second. So 50 bits versus 11 bits. That's 0.000045% of the information you're receiving are you able to absorb? the brain just can't deal with it. So what does it do? It has to use what we call predictive processing. It doesn't see reality as it is, it sees reality as it expects it to. Appear.

There you go, right? As you expect it to appear, as you expect it to be. How did you know that that was the next word? Because your brain predicted it based on what we call priors, based on your prior experience, your prior belief.

And so based on those factors, you are seeing reality not as it actually is in a second. You're seeing it based on a prediction. So you're already living in a simulation. It's not the matrix that we all live in, not like not like the movie. We all live in our own simulation inside our own. heads at every single single second. Now what we don't realize is that our beliefs are already d deluding us through what we call limiting beliefs.

These are beliefs that sap your motivation and and delude you into doing things that oftentimes you later regret, right? I'm not a morning person, uh, I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm too fat, I'm too thin, it's too late, I have no time, right? Like all these limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves all the time. they're already a delusion. You're already gaslighting yourself. What I'm advocating for, what I've discovered, is that you can actually choose your beliefs.

Because beliefs are not facts. Okay. Facts are something different. Facts are defined as objective truths. Okay. It's something that's true whether you believe it or not. Uh the world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat Earth, there's the fact. Uh on the opposite end of the spectrum is what we call faith. Faith is a con is a conviction that does not require evidence.

Okay. What happens in the afterlife? Uh God rewards the righteous. These are matters of faith. They do not require evidence. Do you see these as kind of two opposite ends of the same spectrum? Yeah. Yeah. Because of the evidence. Now in the middle is a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. So you can choose your belief.

And these beliefs shape what you see, what you feel, and what you do. And we carry them around as if they are ultimate truths, as if they are facts. The vast majority of our personal problems, our interpersonal problems, our political problems come from the fact that we see these. Truths, these facts as immutable when really most of them are beliefs. And those are the beliefs that guide our life. If you think about the decisions we have to make.

Uh, should I move to this city? Should I take this job? Should I date this person? All of these questions are based on beliefs, not facts. We don't have perfect certainty about answering these questions. They're based on beliefs. And so if we take a step back, we can observe our beliefs for the first time for most of us because you can't see your own limiting beliefs. It's like your face, right? You can't see your face, even though you have it all day long, unless you look at the mirror.

So unless we sit down and observe what are these limiting beliefs holding me back? you you don't even know you have these limiting beliefs. Of course you can see everyone else's limiting beliefs. Like I bet you every single person you know, well, you could probably say, oh, I know that person's limiting beliefs. You just can't see your own limiting beliefs. And so that's why we have to pause.

take them out and figure out, are they serving me or are they hurting me? So the big aha for me and what's absolutely changed my life over the past, you know, the years that I've done this research, is this, is that I constantly remind myself that beliefs are tools, not truth. Beliefs are tools, not truths. You can use them.

And once they don't serve you, you can put them down. Like a carpenter. A carpenter doesn't say, oh, uh, a hammer. Hammer is the one and only true tool. No, a carpenter says, sometimes I use a hammer, sometimes I use a saw, sometimes I use a wrench. And you use the right tool for the job, just like you can put down those old beliefs, pick up new ones. What comes first, evidence or belief?

Uh evidence. Because uh all of our beliefs are based on past experiences. So if you're defining evidence as past experiences as priors, then yeah, they come from from our past experiences in some way. Okay. In that case. How do we get escape velocity from just this is a pattern from my past? I want a belief that isn't necessarily associated with that. I uh have struggled to maintain going to the gym in the past, therefore I am the sort of person who doesn't really go to the gym consistently that

seems to be a a dead end, right? If our beliefs are based on past patterns and that is the evidence and that's well, until we change the pattern, the belief can't change. Is that right? Well we can we can recognize that none of these things are laws of nature. Now they're up here.

Right, that we are making these up. So when we say I'm the kind of person who, you should have a big red flag. By the way, also with other people. We don't see other people, just like we don't see reality as it really is, we don't see other people as they really are. We see our beliefs about people.

And the it's it's interesting, the more you know somebody The more you see their beliefs, which is why maybe I don't know if you've had this experience, I have this all the time, where I'll meet somebody and they'll be so nice to me, and then their family member will come around and they're absolute

schmucks to their family member. They treat them like garbage. I see that all the time because it tends to be the people we know best that we say, Oh, she always does that or that's so like him, right? And we start building these these uh uh effigies of people. Because of how we see them and of course how we see ourselves. So how do we what do we do about this? What's the practical tip here? We look for the areas of our life where we consistently get stuck.

The New Year's resolution that has been there for ages. The pain and suffering in our life that we can't seem to escape. And I'm talking even the most extreme types of pain. I I I did this amazing research on hypnosedation, like people who literally have. scapples opening their bodies and they can do it without any uh uh any anesthesia whatsoever. Uh chronic pain, right? People who can who have overcome chronic pain, fibromyalgia, all through the power of beliefs.

So so where we look for, we look for these these these recurring problems that we seem to get stuck on. And that's where we look for underneath what we find are typically these limiting beliefs. And then we have a process to what what do we do next with that? This episode is brought to you by Woop. I have been wearing Woop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over sixteen hundred days of my life with it, according to the app, which is

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Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop five point oh and that thirty-day trial by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop dot com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash mod. Modern wisdom. What's wrong with the traditional view of behavior, motivation, and change? Like what if motivation collapses without belief?

Why do most productivity systems just ignore that layer entirely? If belief is the root of success, why aren't we taught to build it like we do with discipline? Because uh mo the the way we think of motivation, I think is com is incomplete. That we think of motivation in the traditional economic sense, that it's all about incentive.

That it's kind of a straight line that if I want the benefit of a behavior, then I'll do the behavior to get the benefit, right? It's classic like that that's how we pay salaries, right? If you if you uh do the job description, you get the salary.

But there's something clearly missing. Motivation is not a straight line. Motivation is a triangle. You have behavior on one side. Here's what I need to do. Then you have the benefit. Here's why I want to do it. But the thing missing, holding the whole thing together, the triangle together, is belief. that if I don't believe in the outcome. So for example, if I'm working for a boss who I don't think has my best interests at heart,

But I don't believe I'm gonna get that promotion. I don't believe I'm gonna get that raise because I don't trust my boss. I don't believe in them. I'm not gonna get the benefit. And so I lose trust in that benefit. Much more likely, and what I see is is quite often the case for all for everyone. is a lack of belief in myself to do the behavior. Right. That for whatever reason I don't trust myself to do that thing. And if I lose

faith, if I lose the belief in myself, then I also won't do the behavior. So for for for motivation to persist over the long term, and we know that persistence is this defining trait, persistence and adaptability, two most important traits in achieving your goals. You will quit unless you have not only the the the belief in what you are doing and the belief in the benefit. That's what holds it all together. And I think that that's the piece that's oftentimes missing.

the set point that we're coming into this with around belief is it doesn't feel quite as in our hands. Mm. It doesn't it doesn't feel like the sort of thing that we can engineer because again, it it is further away from the the discipline, the productivity system, the five steps to get you there. I can you engineer belief is a question that probably a lot of people have had I wish I could believe in it.

Um but they've struggled with it. So yeah, I think we've got a bit of conceptual inertia coming in from where we were previously. To me, that's that's the fun part is that you can try on the craziest beliefs. And they always sound crazy. Whatever that liberating belief is. It always sounds ridiculous because we love our limiting beliefs. They served us at one point. They're comforting. We don't have to change. And we don't want to see any other potential way.

I and I'll I'll I'll share I'll share what happened to me uh doing a similar exercise. Uh, and this this has to do with uh a very personal relationship with my mom. Um she had her birthday not that long ago, uh her seventy-fourth, and I called her I I and I wanted to do something nice for her, so I wanted to get her some flour. Problem was I was in Singapore at the time. She was in Central Florida where I grew up.

And uh I wanted to to do something special. So I I I I stayed up till one in the morning calling up florists, making sure that I found the right one, that had good reviews, that they could get there in time, that despite the Florida heat they wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't shrivel, that they would get there.

I went to sleep, 1 a.m. I patted myself on the shoulder and I said, okay, good job, Nier. You, you, you, you, you did it. You're a good son. And uh I called my mom up the next morning and I said, uh, hey, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers? And she says, yes, thank you very much. I got the flowers, but you should know that they were half dead. And you really shouldn't order from them anymore.

To which I blurted out something that I would have said when I was thirteen. I said something to the effect of, Well, that's the last time I ever buy you flowers. And Chris, that went over about as well as you think. It didn't go over very well at all. Now, after the call, uh my wife turned to me and she said, uh, hey, do you want to do a turnaround?

And I said like I I definitely did not want to do the turnaround. This mumbo jumbo, you know, hocus pocus, uh, touchy feely crap. I didn't need that. I wanted to vent. I wanted to tell her why my mom was being way too judgmental. And uh I wanted her to let me vent. Well, it turns out the research shows that venting does not work, that venting does nothing but cement

the vision that you have of people, the beliefs that you have about people, it just makes them m more more vivid. So venting we know does not work, even though that's kind of the conventional advice that you have to blow up steam, you have to say how you really feel. Don't hold things back. Turns out it's not so great. I knew that at the time, and so I did one of these turnarounds. So I took out these four questions.

And uh I started with, you know, what what is the belief? The belief was very clearly, I wrote it down, My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay. Now the first question, like we just did with you, is it true? Obviously, Chris, you're on my side here, right? Right? My mother what what mother doesn't thank their son for for the flowers? Who says that? Clearly she was too judgmental and hard to please. Absolutely, it was true.

Second question, is it absolutely true? Meaning, is there no other possible explanation other than my belief? Well, if I'm honest, m maybe, okay, whatever. Maybe there's another explanation. Okay, I don't want to think about what that explanation could be, but perhaps. Then the the third question, who am I when I hold this belief?

Well, when I believe my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I'm kind of a jerk. I'm judgmental, I'm short-tempered, I'm not myself. I'm embarrassed about what I do. And then the fourth question is who would I be without that belief? And I if I'm honest, I would be much happier. If there was a magic wand and I could erase that belief from my head, that'd be great. I wouldn't be so judgmental. I'd I'd be me.

And then I did this turnaround. So I took that belief, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, and I I turned it around. I asked myself, could the exact opposite be true? As as ridiculous as that sounds, I mean, to your question, how do we possibly believe something if we just don't believe something? You we're confusing facts with belief. It doesn't matter if it's true. That's how we do it, to answer your question. So

Is there any possible truth in it? Could it, could there possibly be a way that my mother was not being too judgmental on heart? thought about it for a few minutes, and I had to admit, maybe she was just trying to save me some money. Maybe she just didn't want me to be scammed from this florist. So okay, that could be true. There might be another explanation. Then I did another turnaround. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Could that be true? I am too judgmental and hard to please? Well

kind of did demand in my head in the script of when I called her and said, Hey, happy birthday. How are the flowers? I had already scripted out exactly the way I wanted her to respond. I wanted her to say effusive thanks. And when she didn't do that, I lost it. So who was being judgmental and hard to please? Me. And then the third turnaround. I was being am I not my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself.

that really what was happening, this actually turned out to be the most true, even though I did not want to accept it at all, was that when the flowers didn't arrive exactly the way I wanted them to, I took that as a statement on my competency, that I had done something wrong, that I messed up. So really, I was being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. Now, when you take out those four beliefs, the original belief and these three new ones.

Those three new ones sounded absolutely ridiculous. I did not want to accept them at first. But that first belief of my mother's shoe judgmental and hard to please only left me with one option to get through it. She had to change in order for me to be happy. Right.

You know, like with your example around life having to change, that's pretty tough, right? For for her to change was not a possibility. Now at least I had other options. So what did I what did I start doing? I started trying on those beliefs for side. You know, for a week. I I'm not I'm going to take that perspective of that I was being too judgmental and hard to please and all of a sudden

This weight was lifted. Like I didn't have to believe that anymore. I didn't have to have these standards because I didn't even see I was holding myself to those standards. And all of a sudden I did become more patient. I did become nicer to my mom. I I was a better I was more of the person that I wanted to be. And so the way you change these beliefs is you try on a different belief.

as an experiment. Just try it on for size. You see what happens, and as ridiculous as it as it feels at first, when you start building more agency, when you start proving to yourself in small steps that, hey, that could also be true. You can choose at some later point to keep that belief or chuck it for yet a new one.

Why why does rumination feel productive? when it's actually destructive then? Like what what is it that's happening inside of our minds that causes us to want to do that? Yeah. It's a it's a few things. So one, rumination feels like problem solving.

But it's rumination about the past, right? Rumination comes from what cows do to their cud, right? They they ruminate, they chew, chew, chew on a problem uh endlessly. And oftentimes that can feel productive because it feels like we're putting time and attention towards something.

But when it becomes rumination, when we're talking about the same thing again and again, and people we see this all the time when people think about their past, right? Rumination is always about something that has happened in the past.

it it moves from constructive problem solving into uh some many times an escape from reality. That if I'm constantly thinking of a problem, I don't have to do what's currently in front of me, right? That it's something that that that almost becomes a a a pacifier in a way. So a very practical solution, what I've started to do, which also sounds nuts at first, is I've actually started planning time to worry.

So now my brain doesn't have to ruminate about the problem. It doesn't have to ruminate just as much about when will I have time to think about and solve this problem because now I have time in my calendar for worry. Now here's what happens nine times out of ten. You know, I'll write down

Here's what I need to worry about. Very, very important thing. I keep ruminating in my head about this thing that I definitely, definitely need to need to think about. Very, very important. This thing that I messed up on in the past. And I need to think about how do I fix it. And then when that worry time comes,

Nine times out of ten, what what what the heck was I worrying about? Why did I keep uh ruminating on it? I didn't mean to. In fact, you know, it it it's something that got crushed under the weight of of some other priority. Yeah, it the the addiction to venting and and rumination is um it feels so satisfying. You know, it's the same as as uh stretching that torn or uh strained muscle.

You just keep on checking, checking, checking. We'll go back to it, we'll go back to it, we'll go back to it. So I have to imagine that rejection and failure when it comes to belief is uh Uh somewhat of a challenge, right? How how do people rebuild belief after repeated failures? Yeah. So uh it if you are failing, that's not necessarily a bad thing. that uh i y uh y y what I what I want to change in uh my life

Way and what I hope I can help with uh others is to give them more persistence, because we know that persistence is the defining factor. You've met lots and lots of successful people in your life. I've I've interviewed billionaires for this book, I've interviewed people who are broke for this book. And what I discovered was is that. Unsuccessful people are not those that fail more. Unsuccessful people are those who fail less.

Successful people fail more. It's the billionaire who tried again and again and again and again until they hit it big. They do more of these experiments. They have more shots on gold. And so that's turns out to be a a defining trait, that persistence. There's a there's a wonderful study that uh really blew my mind, uh this Kurt Richter study back in the nineteen fifties, where he took these wraths.

and he put these rats in two cylinders of water and they were filled about halfway full. And he took these these rats, he put them in the cylinder of water, and he stood there with a time wa a timer to see how long the rats would swim for. It turns out, in case you were curious, a wild rat can swim in a cylinder of water for about 15 minutes before it gives up and dies.

Very nice. Then he wanted to do another study. He did a follow up study. By the way, you can't do these kind of unethical studies anymore, but we they did it so we can learn from it. Then he took these w a new batch of wild rats. And he put them in the cylinder of water and he watched them swim, swim, swim for uh for about fifteen minutes. And right before he knew they would give up and sink under the water, he reached in.

pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its catch its breath for a minute, and plunk back into the the cylinder it went. And now he wanted to see if he did that a few times and he conditioned the the wild rat to know that salvation might be possible. What would happen? Could the rat swim for long? Now you've read the book, I know you know the answer, but when I asked people how much longer did the rat swim for? People say maybe double.

Okay, maybe triple, right? Maybe four times longer. Wouldn't that be amazing if the rat went from fifteen minutes to sixteen minutes an hour? Think about that, right? If if you're running a marathon and now you have four times the endurance, if you're on working on that hard task, if you're whatever that challenge is, you can sustain four times longer.

That'd blow your mind. That'd be amazing. What kind of crazy intervention would that be? Well, the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes. They ended up swimming for 60 hours. They swam for 240 times longer. And that

ability was in them the whole time because their bodies didn't change, the experiment didn't change. What changed was we think we can't ask uh these rats what they believed. We think that something must have changed in their minds. The fact that they saw that hope and salvation were possible.

kept them persisting, persisting, persisting. And so it all of a sudden became unlocked because of a belief. They believed that salvation maybe might be possible. And so the goal here is to realize the practical application of this. is not to quit at the fifteen minute mark. That for the vast majority of us, myself included,

When it gets uncomfortable, when it gets difficult, when it gets painful, that's our limit. But your limit is so much further than you actually think. So the most important thing is to quit when it's the right time. That not that quitting is not wrong. There's nothing wrong with quitting. Quitting too soon.

is a destruction of human capital. That's what we have to prevent, right? Quitting too soon. I've quit many things. I've quit relationships. I've quit businesses. I've quit all kinds of things. It's not that quitting is wrong. It's quitting when it's too soon that's the problem. So in one of those criteria for when not to quit. is when it what it hurts. Right, that pain is just a signal. Remember we talked about eleven million bits versus fifty bits of information.

that those pain signals, that's just information. That's not necessarily a bad thing. So if we can disconnect the pain from the suffering, the interpretation of that pain, and only quit when it's time. So for example, one of the criteria for when is it a good time to quit? Is not when you're failing. That is a bad reason to quit a task. The failing is not the right reason. It's when you stop learning.

That if the failures are teaching you something, keep going. Right? That's not necessarily there's two other criteria about when when is the proper time to quit. But failure itself, in and of itself, is not necessarily the right criteria for when to quit.

What are the other criteria? The other two criteria, number one, is you have to meet a checkpoint. So e wh so most people don't set checkpoints, they set deadlines.

And that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about a deadline. We're talking about a checkpoint, is when I say I will endure this suffering for a fixed period of time. Now, why do we do that? Because if we don't do that, as soon as it gets uncomfortable, we're going to interpret the pain as suffering and we're going to want to quit.

Instead, when we say, I'm gonna try this perspective, right? I'm gonna try this crazy view of my mom, like I was describing earlier, or this crazy view of my life that life is not for ticking off tasks. Okay, doesn't sound right. I don't agree. Maybe it's not true, but I'm gonna try it. for one week, 30 days, whatever, you make up the number. And I'm not gonna stop until I hit that checkpoint. Then at that checkpoint, I can say, okay, let me let me take a step back.

would I continue this experiment past that checkpoint if I were to start today. But don't quit until the checkpoint, right? Whatever that that hard task might be. 30 days of exercise, 30 days of posting YouTube videos, 30 days of writing your book, whatever it is. Make sure you have that checked away. That's criteria number one. Criteria number two is: are you still learning through failure? We talked about that earlier. And then the third and the most important criteria.

is does persistence make a difference? Many things in life, persistence does not make a difference. If you're in a crappy work culture, And it's awful. And the people are sucking out your energy. And you, uh, on Sunday evening, you are dreading waking up on Monday morning because you know you have to go to work.

Persistence ain't gonna help. Those people are not gonna suddenly leave just because you stuck around longer, right? You're gonna die by the time those people leave. So persistence is not gonna make a difference. However, when it comes to fitness, for example, you're you're a jack guy, you know this, you hit plateaus.

And then if you persist, hey, you'll bust out of that plateau. You'll make progress eventually. Right. So there are certain things in life where persistence really does make a difference, even if you're not seeing progress. But if you meet those three criteria, that's fine. The most important thing is that you're not quitting too soon. You're not quitting at the fifteen minute mark like those rats, even when you have the sixty hours of potential.

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Shipped right to your door. Right now you can get fifteen percent off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com slash modern wisdom. That's athleticbrewing.com slash. Modern wisdom. It feels to me like there's a relationship between luck and the rejection thing here that people are always trying to engineer it, and some people in life seem to be a little bit more lucky. What did you find out about luck?

Yeah. That luck is not chance. That luck in fact uh can absolutely be engineered. The most th like let's let's be honest here. The the most lucky thing is your birth, right? That if you are lucky enough to be born in an industrialized democratic country. You won the genetic lottery, right? As uh uh um Warren Buffett used to say.

Other than that, after you're born, it turns out there's no such thing as like a particularly lucky people. We see we we see successful people who say, oh, they just got lucky. And of course, lucky things happen to all s kinds of people. But it turns out what's much more important is how they manufacture their luck. Uh that that uh we know that entrepreneurs, they have this phenomenon called entrepreneurial alert.

where we know that that successful entrepreneurs literally see the world differently. They metaphorically see hundred dollar bills all over the floor. And there's uh there's actually a wonderful study that that showed this. They took two groups of people, One was self-identified pessimists, and one were self-identified optimists.

And in this study, they asked people to look at a newspaper. And this newspaper was was specially designed for this experiment. And the goal of the experiment, they asked them, we want you to count for us. how many photos there are in this newspaper. Okay, how many photos do you see in this newspaper? Count as quickly as you can, and then tell the the proctor and you'll get a monetary prize. Now

People who were self-identified optimists took about eleven seconds to finish this experiment. People who were self-identified pessimists took two and a half minutes. Why? Why the difference? That's a huge advantage. What happened? Turns out that on page two of this newspaper was a a photo that said there are forty-eight photos in this newspaper. That's all it said. Then halfway through the the paper, it said there are forty eight photos in this paper. Collect your prize.

Optimistic people saw that. They saw this thing staring them in the face. They got up, they said there's 48 pictures in the in the newspaper, and they collected their their prize. They walked off in eleven seconds on average. The pessimistic people sat there and said, one, two, three, four, they didn't even see the opportunity staring them in the face. They were completely oblivious to it. And so this is a wonderful b example of how we don't

See what we believe. That's kind of what what we think is common knowledge. We see what we b we have to uh see something in order to believe it. Turns out the exact opposite is just as true. That in order to see something, we have to believe it. That's wild.

That is so crazy. What um Sip of the Iceberg. What other ways does this show up in people's lives? All over the place. I mean we know that people who are on a diet physically see food as larger. they see d uh that uh people who are afraid of heights see distances as farther away. Right? So i i i i th back to the to this keyhole of attention, that when we are forced to see reality through this itsy bitsy teehole, uh keyhole of of reality,

We we we can't help it, right? That coffer illusion I talked about earlier. It's crazy. I'll show it to people and they will absolutely swear there is nothing here but squares, right? Whereas you show it to other people. And they'll say there's nothing there but circles. And it's completely determined. We think we don't exactly know why this is happening, we think it's because of where you grow up. That people who grew up in urban environments

see sharp edges, right? Buildings and streets, they see sharp edges. These are not natural. But people who grow up For example, where they did the study that that they showed the coffer illusion to people in uh in sub-Saharan Africa, and they see circles because that's what they have been conditioned to see. They see organic shapes, they don't see hard edges.

And so it absolutely affects time and time again what you are able to see based on your past experience. And of course, uh, you know, we we we make up problems for many of us where they don't exist. Right. That that it's no coincidence that this is I mean, p people are gonna think I'm crazy and when I say this, know that the crazier you think an alternative belief is, the more you should actually explore it.

Right, because that's your brain with your br with your uh uh belief immune system is trying to keep out foreign antibodies, it's trying to keep out these uh these beliefs you don't like.

The fact is the world is getting better. And it's in fact better than it's ever been. Right? But the average person, if you say, is this the best time in history? The average person will say, no, it's terrible. We have wars. We have crime. We have this, we have that. Things are terrible and they're getting worse.

Well, that's not true. And if you don't believe me, read this wonderful book uh by Hans Rosling, Factfulness, where he interviewed university professors and he gave them an exam about the state of the world. The state of all the things we care about, the state of education, the state of the environment, the state of the state of female empowerment, the state of democracy. These professors on this exam did worse than if monkeys would have taken this test.

They did worse than chance on a realistic portrayal of how the world is. because of this negativity bias that we all have, because of these existing beliefs that we seek to confirm time and time again. So if you are looking for negativity, if you believe that the world is getting worse, you're gonna see all the ways the world is getting worse. You're gonna tune into the media that does nothing but reinforce that fact because

You know, if it bleeds, it leads. You're going to see all the crime stories, the hatred, the the animosity, the wars, because that's what you're turning into. That's what you're paying attention to. Um I'll give you one more quick study that I love is the uh the Dartmouth Scar study.

Where they took women and they uh they they said, we're gonna do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements. We wanna see how people are treated differently, how are they discriminated against. So we're gonna put this fake scar on your face.

And we're gonna put you in a room with with somebody else, the the the person we're doing the study on, and we want you to report how you're treated with this facial scar. And they made this very realistic, you know, like one of the ones that you would see in uh in a horror film, this huge gash on their face. And they said, okay, now you're going to walk into this room and we want you to take careful notes on how people treated you when you had a conversation.

Except wait wait wait come back here for a quick second before you go into the room. Let me s just do a quick touch up. And what these women didn't know in the study is that they completely removed the scar. Now the women didn't know that. They saw the scar in the mirror, but then when they did the touch up and removed the scar, they didn't know that the scar didn't exist. It wasn't there.

And yet these women in the study reported that they were stared at, that they were discriminated against, that the people they were talking to seemed disgusted and averted their eyes many times, and they felt very uncomfortable. all for a scar that didn't even exist. It wasn't even there. Because they expected a response, and when you expect something to occur, you will see it.

It's like living in a simulation. It's like we create a simulation of the world and kind of disregard what the actual world is showing to us. That's right. Now we don't have to, right? So that through this consistent practice of making ourselves see the world uh differently, we hopefully can see truth. I mean, how isn't it crazy how uh at least in in in many cultures, not all cultures, Disagreement is seen as root.

Right. That like when someone disagrees with you, they're kind of you don't like that person, right? When someone challenges your feelings, ugh, that's that creates a little icky feeling. Or if someone does change their their perspective, they're called a flip flopper. Is that not the stupidest thing ever ever? I mean, now that's become my love language. Like if you can change my mind about something.

Can you think of a better gift? Like I was lying to myself about reality, about myself, about my relationships. And now you've helped me see the world more clearly. Can you like what better gift could there possibly be? Yeah, it's a strange one that

were so attached to our points of view that losing them or letting go of them is kind of tantamount to destruction, at least to the ego. And uh I'm thinking about beliefs that people have now which might be useful But that's Or that creates success or whatever, but in the future quietly limit you later on or beliefs that people hold now, that previously were effective or or helpful in some sort of a way, but now are holding us back.

that kind of blind spot with regards to belief and the tool where it was then, where we are now, how do you come to think about updating beliefs over time in that sort of a way? Yeah, where do we begin? I I think one of the uh challenges that I think is is becoming more and more prevalent is that we have these cultural nocebos. So placebos come from the the Latin I will heal. Nocebos come from I Will Hurt. And it turns out these nocebo effects are contagious.

that when we tell people that they might be suffering from some kind of malady it spreads. I'll I'll give you a great example. There was this case in uh I think it was Portugal, if I'm not mistaken, where uh on one particular night there was this epidemic. The hospital rooms were filling up with young girls

with intense intestinal discomfort. They were filling up the ERs and people thought it was some kind of virus. People thought there was something in the water. Like what had happened? It was really weird that it only affected girls of a certain age and nobody knew what it was. Turns out there was a very popular TV show. I think it was called Strawberries and Cream. And uh on that show, the main character, the protagonist, had

some kind of similar intestinal dys uh malady where she was very sick and that actually caught on and created this this kind of mass nocebo effect. And this goes We see this repeated again and again. Every few years, somewhere in the world, there will be some kind of outbreak of some kind of psychosomatic disorder. Uh w in the literature, one one case that really blew my mind, there was this guy, uh, they call him Mr. A. He became he was anonymized.

And Mr. A, uh, had a very difficult breakup with his girlfriend. And he decides that he wants to end his life. So he takes a bottle of pills, opens it up, he takes the entire bottle of pills, swallows everything. And a few minutes later he changes his mind. He decides he wants to live. So he rushes over to his next door neighbor. He tells him he took all his pills. Neighbor rushes him to the ER.

Mr. A barges through the emergency room, crash crashes on the floor, he's almost unconscious, and he says, I took all my pills, I took all my pills, help me. They rush him into the operating room. His blood pressure is dangerously low. His heart rate is plummeting. And they're trying to figure out what he overdose.

Well, they they look at the the the jar of pills and all there is on the jar of pills is a number to call. It turns out that Mr. A had been part of a clinical trial for depression and he took all these pills that he was he was given in the study. They called the number.

And they say, what is this drug? What did he just overdose on so that we can try and resuscitate him? And again, all the physiological symptoms of overdose, the the heart rate, the plunging uh uh uh blood pressure, all the things that you would expect with an overdose are happening to Mr. A. On the other line, the doctor says this person took placebos. He did not get the active ingredient.

They tell Mr. A this, that he took nothing but placebos. Within 15 minutes, Chris, Mr. A is completely revived, his heart rate is back to normal, his blood pressure is back to normal. And he's fine. He's ready to walk out of the ER. Now, if we can have these incredible physiological effects,

solely based on our beliefs, solely based on our expectations of what we think will happen in this crazy simulation that's running in our heads. If that can be done to this extent, What does that mean for all the other nocebos in our life? What happens when we assign ourselves all kinds of labels that we keep tossing around? If you open up social media, People are prescribing the hell out of each other with all kinds of maladies.

let alone have no s you know, actual psychological basis. Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is not a thing. It's not in the DSM. There's nothing that makes the imposter syndrome. You can't get diagnosed for imposter syndrome, but it sounds so official, people think it's a diagnosis. Well when you think you have imposter syndrome. Guess what? Now you have imposter syndrome.

You've manufactured it. Whether it's true or not, that's not what I'm arguing about. What I'm arguing about is does it serve you? I'm a morn I'm not a morning person. I'm uh I I'm having a senior moment. Uh uh I'm no good at public speaking. I'm whatever. I when we create this identity, that's the problem out of a label. That label becomes our limit. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because I am Dependent on it.

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The example that you used with the mouse. Uh it believed. that it was going to be saved. I have to assume that in order to work out how long a mouse swims for before it drowns, you have to let it drown. So in a lot of these studies it actually didn't get saved. So it had an erroneous belief. And that erroneous belief it was a new it was a new group of rats. Yes. Uh that it it lifted the ceiling on uh when the rat was was going to be able to swim for. Right. So you can spiral belief up.

toward a version of you that you want, one that broadly gets better outcomes in life, but you can also spiral it down, which is I took sugar pills and now I think I'm having a heart attack and my m m my brain's gonna explode. In both situations, the interpretation and the belief is causing an effect within the person. Right. And both are very powerful. I think when it comes to something like imposter syndrome or um

concerns about public speak sexual performance, right? Some guy that gets real nervous before he gets into I think that's like psychos not psychosomatic. impact on guys struggling to get it up. Is a vicious spiral that happens to dudes and then they can't get out of it. They're worried about it and this thing's gonna happen. It goes all the way down. Yeah. Insomnia, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic uh fatigue, IBS.

Many of these things are highly responsive to both nocebo and placebo effects. But sorry, I interrupted you. Continue. Just someone is on the spiral going in the wrong direction.

Mm-hmm. How do they intervene? How do they intervene and reverse that direction to go back in the other? Because one of the things that I imagine a lot of people think is, Oh God. Well, yeah, there's Some contributing elements that are grounded in reality, but much of this is filtered through my perception, my expectations, my own simulation, my belief. What a piece of shit am I that I can't fix.

It's all on me. I'm causing this problem. This means I'm even worse than I thought I was. So I think getting practical about okay, someone feels that they have one of these beliefs and it is spiraling in the wrong direction. It's their Erectile dysfunction or inability to wake up on a morning or it's their mood or it's their whatever. Yeah. Take me through the steps that someone goes through to to halt the downward spiral and turn it into one that works for them.

Absolutely. So this comes a lot from the research around chronic pain. And there's uh we we've the the medical community is really uh in the in the middle of a doing a one eighty on how to approach pain. And there's this uh uh new technique that's been quite validated called pain reprocessing therapy.

And and the reason I like to talk about this extreme version is because if we can do it in the most extreme versions, right, when people are suffering through chronic pain, like the kind of debilitating pain that comes from from these type of conditions. Then we can also do it for more minor maladies like erectile dysfunction or insomnia or anxiety, right? So so I that's why I like to talk about those more extreme cases. But the the way pain reprocessing therapy works.

starts by understanding that Pain is not the same as suffering. Okay. Pain is always real. Even though all pain is in the brain. All pain is in the brain. Where else could pain live? Pain is not in your arm, it's not in your back. It's not pain, all pain receptors lead to an interpretation in your brain. Okay. But pain is nothing more than signal.

Pain does not necessarily mean that anything is broken because there's a difference between a sickness and an illness. Sickness is in the body, illness is in the mind. So for many c conditions, there is some something broken, some kind of of of malady that has to do with with sickness, something in the body. But you can be sick without being ill, and you can also be ill without being sick. How can that happen?

If you have cancer, you know, we all have tiny cancer cells, but let's say you have some kind of malignant tumor, but you haven't you don't know you have it yet. God forbid that this should happen anyway, but it does. You can be sick, but not realize that you have any symptoms, so you're not ill. Conversely, and what is very, very common, in fact, that accounts for about 80% of our healthcare expenses, is the symptoms, the illness which is in the mind.

And many times, for example, in the case of chronic pain, which is defined as pain that persists for more than six months. with no known physical causes. So the most important thing is to eliminate those possible physical causes. But if you continue to Okay, so you you wouldn't have or they you wouldn't be diagnosed with chronic pain if you had a s a big bit of wood sticking out of your leg.

Exactly. Exactly. We we know okay, that's the cause. Exactly. Exact. Although as a little tangent here, I mean there's cases, you know, wh where did placebo science first come from? It came from after World War One when there was reported cases of soldiers dragging their buddy on the battlefield to the medic and saying, Medic, medic, I you need to help my friend. My my friend just got shot. Help my friend, help my friend.

And the medic turns to this guy pulling his buddy and says, Soldier, you're missing an arm. And the the soldier was completely unaware that they were that half their arm had been blown off because of the power of attention. They'd been so focused on their buddy that they didn't pay attention. They turned off that information that was coming to their brain from their conscious mind. Right? Because again, eleven million bits versus fifty bits.

Well. So um so so back to this this this question around chronic pain and how that teaches us, what that tea teaches all of us about about how do we uh uh manage ma changing our beliefs per your question. What pain reprocessing therapy tells us? Is that neuroplastic pain is the kind of pain that persists even with no physical causes. And the key is shutting off what is called the fear, pain, fear loop.

That at the heart of these chronic conditions, which are real, I'm not saying pain is fake. I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm not saying it's in your head. All pain is real. There is no such thing as fake pain. All pain is real. And it is also true that all pain is in your mind. Turns out that the brain has this amazing ability to turn down the pain or turn up the pain dial based on what it thinks is important, based on what it pays attention to. So for example, in the case of hypno sedation,

People and I I've seen the tapes I and tens of thousands of people have done this. This this this guy that I interviewed by the name of Daniel Gisler, the most analytical, no woo-woo, no nonsense type of guy, used to be a commodities trader.

This guy went under surgery and I've seen the video of operation. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it. This guy had metal bolts wrenched from his bone scappel cutting into his skin with no anesthesia, no general anesthesia, no local anesthesia for 55 minutes.

his heart rate didn't uh didn't increase, his blood pressure stayed level. He did not experience these physical symptoms, these the the uh uh of pain or or the suffering that cause that comes from pain, he didn't experience it because he had He had learned this amazing ability to focus his mind through the power of beliefs. And so he trained himself to not feel this intense discomfort. Now, if we can do that, with surgery without requiring anesthesia.

We can do that for all kinds of things. On the flip side, by the way. It makes surgery without anesthetic makes your erectile dysfunction feel uh like limp, actually. Yeah. But but it's it's uh it It it but'cause the E D question around like can it can it cause this negative spiral? Well, when you think about these chronic conditions like, you know, fibromyalgia, that's a that's an exclusionary diagnosis, or chronic pain, or E D or insomnia, or anxiety, I mean the list goes on and on.

of these of these maladies.

It turns out that that what's at the center of these are these this fear, pain, fear loop. that what the conversation sounds like. And by the way, I used to have terrible back pain as well. And the first thing that happened in my mind was every time I would feel back pain, the conventional wisdom is

Pain means damage. Pain means harm. Well, if it's damaged, if it's broken, how long is it going to last? Uh is this always gonna be this way? What if it never gets better? What does that mean for my future? And I start spiraling and ruminating, spiraling, and and it would drive me crazy. And and guess what? it would turn up the pain dial. Because that experience of feeling that fear is incredibly uncomfortable. It creates physiological responses, right? You start sweating.

uh your mouth gets dry, you start uh your heart starts palpitating, all these physical sensations feel shittier and shittier. And so your body pays more and more attention thinking it's under threat. So what you have to do Step one is to realize that your body is not broken. And we're where this is after you've excluded everything. Okay. After you've done the tests and looked at and make sure there is nothing physically wrong where the problem is this neuroplastic pain.

Now you have to convince yourself that you're assuming that the body is not broken, that this is just information. That's all it is, just information. The next thing we do is we stop trying to fix the pain. Part of our problem is that we we have this urgency that I must fix this problem because that because we live in a time where we expect this to happen. By the way, this has never happened before in two hundred thousand years of h human history.

You know, like the f the French kings used to have all kinds of tooth decay and and syphilis and all kinds of they were constantly in severe what we would think is today severe pain. But people for two hundred thousand years had this ability to tune out discomfort because it was just information. They didn't walk around constantly moaning and groaning. I'm sure they were in a lot of pain and suffering.

But because they that that was always part of the human condition, it didn't it it was something that they carried on with, we think. Whereas today, because we live in an age where we have so much modern medicine, we have the ability to turn off a lot of our suffering like a switch when it comes to sickness rather than illness.

We become hyper-fixated when we think that there's a problem that can't be solved and we expect it to be urgently addressed and to go away immediately. So the step step two is to stop trying to fix that pain. And then what you want to do is to prove that you're safe. Prove that you're safe and con so to constantly remind yourself this isn't danger. This is a pain signal. It's not danger. One of the things that pain reprocessing therapy does is advise people to add light.

To add some kind of humor. So telling yourself, ah, I see what you're doing there, pain response. Not going to give me this time. I know this is nothing to be worried about.

What I used to do when I felt my back pain, and this was pretty bad back pain. I mean, I have to lay on the floor and I got followed all the conventional advice of, you know, I have to you you have to ice, no, you have to warm, no, you have to immobilize, you can't do anything. What I started doing was every time I felt that twinge in my back. I would intentionally do whatever caused that pain ten times. Okay. And again, disclaimer.

after I known that there was nothing actually physically wrong, it came from an injury originally that I had in the gym. Yeah. Yep. Right, exactly, exactly. But after the splinter's out, it's healed, we can't detect any kind of of actual physical damage. It was just neuroplastic pain. I had to teach my brain over and over and over again, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. Pain is just a signal. I'm not in danger. And then over time, lo and behold, it went away.

And the same I imagine would be true um for people with chronic fatigue, M E C F S. Uh uh again, assuming that you've not got underlying whatever that's going on. I feel like we need to do this throat clearing so it doesn't sound like fucking victim blaming all of the people who Right, right. Let's say that you've uh good example. I I mean half of Austin apparently live in houses that have got toxic molds. Toxic mold is

particularly brutal for certain people with a genetic susceptibility to it and it causes them to be really tired. You get out of the houses, you follow a shoemaker protocol, you detox all of the mold or most of the mold from you. And now, oh hey, the system is more functional. But my expected work capacity hasn't caught up to where my real gas tank is. And that repatterning of The pain.

Of the fatigue, of the lack of fatigue, the inability to sleep. I I I'm not a good sleeper. I I I wake up lots of times throughout the night. Um, I need to go to the bathroom all of the time. That's the a kind of a a a real common one.

for people who just think I I I need to wake up and go to the bathroom two or three times throughout the night, even if I haven't had that much to drink, even if I know that when I go to the bathroom, oh, th it's a problem, it's a prostate, it's a whatever. It's like, well, you know, if you've had all of the things checked, it No, it could just Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean it w one of the things that I've adopted

is these mantras, these prayers that uh they're not I maybe they're not prayers'cause they're they don't have a religious connotation, but I have many mantras that I repeat throughout the day. And I used to have terrible insomnia and I tried everything. I tried the pills. I tried the I I tried all kinds of things.

And then as I was as I was doing this research around the power of the mind and and beliefs to to change our bodies, that your beliefs really do become your your biology. And it I'm sorry it took me you know so long. I'm forty eight now, but uh it took me a long time to realize this. I I try to eliminate the fear. And when you eliminate the fear, you also eliminate the suffering. So my mantra, when I wake up at two AM,

And uh and I I I start ruminating about oh my gosh, if I if I don't get to sleep soon, I'm gonna have an awful day tomorrow and I've got this big interview with Chris and what if I don't do well and uh I better get to sleep and I can't get to sleep. Well it turns out the number one cause of insomnia Is worrying about insomnia. That is the number one cause of insomnia. And so we take medication to knock us out, so we stop worrying. But really,

I found the most effective thing I ever did was to replace the fear with a new belief. That new belief is, and this is what I literally say to myself every time I wake up at two AM. I close my eyes and I repeat to myself and I take a deep breath on the way in, I say it, and then then I I say it again on the way out. I say as I take a deep breath, I say the body gets what the body needs if you let it. The body gets what the body needs if you let it. So that's a deep breath in, a deep breath out.

And what I'm doing is reminding myself that you know what, if I don't get a good night's sleep tonight, my body will We'll make up for it the next. Right. That that if I let it. Now the biggest problem is, why do I say if you let it? Cause if you went to bed at one AM and you need to get up at six, that's on you, right? You didn't plan properly. But if you let it, if you give your body the time it needs to rest,

It's gonna rest or it doesn't need it. And if I stay up for an hour or so and I read my Kindle in bed, that's okay too. That's fine. That there's nothing that's wrong with it, because it means the next night I probably will get.

So repeating those simple mantras and I I read the Kindle after I've tried that mantra and if it doesn't work, then I read the Kindle. That it works 99% of the time. I always have a boring book on my Kindle, by the way, which is amazing because it scrambles that rumination cycle, and then you can finally get back to sleep.

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Talk to me about the neuroscience of agency, because we're talking about an interesting balance here. Mm. One element is almost a letting go. It's my body will give me what it needs if I let it. So that's a relinquishing of the need to be the person that's pushing specifically around something like sleep. Right. Or I I I don't need to check on the pain. Uh but at the same time we know that agency is the thing that most people desire.

It's w one of the top three, even if nobody knows what it means. Uh I think it's uh it's what they want. Right. They want uh i independence, action, the ability to happen to life as opposed to let happen uh life happen to them. Talk to me about the neuroscience of agency.

Yeah. So agency is what I call the third power belief, that beliefs can change not only what you see, we talked about how they can sh how beliefs shape your vision of reality. They shape how you feel internally, if it's whether it's chronic pain, whether it's uh going through surgery w without anesthesia. And most importantly, beliefs change what you do. Now it changes what you do based on what you think is possible.

for you to do. And so uh not only can you have these nocebo effects that we talked about earlier, just as uh as a quick recap of how your labels can become your limits and make you more I sorry, make you less agentic because you think, well, that's impossible. I can't do it. Certain beliefs allow you to be more agentic. Uh so for example, uh one of the one uh I I interviewed this guy by the name of David Fagenbaum who had this Incurable disease. And uh uh

He he he was uh I mean he tells me how the a nurse came in and told him, Hey, guess what? You have this disease, I've never ever heard of it, but at least it's not cancer and then he does a Google search and he figures out actually the mortality rate is even worse than cancer for this disease that he has. Oh God, you've got super cancer. You've got super cancer, exactly. And so he finds the one expert in the world who is knows this disease backwards and forwards and he told me that he

Yeah, exactly. He well it kind of. He he tells me about how he had this Santa Claus theory that h his whole life he thought, Well, if I just find the right person to send my wish into, just like Santa Claus, well surely they'll have a solution. So this doctor recommends a medication, does not work, and uh and and then he asks the doctor, Well, okay, what's the next course of treatment? Nothing.

Uh, well, but what's the research that's being done about this? There is no more research. Says, well, what are next steps? There are more no more next steps. And so his whole Santa Claus theory that someone's gonna save him never materialized. And he decides that night that he has to do something. And he spends the next several years combing through all the research he can possibly find.

throws away this this theory that someone's gonna come and save me and he does everything he possibly can. And it turns out he finds a medication that has been already approved for years that's sitting on the shelf that nobody tried for his condition and it saves his life. And now he actually has a foundation that does this through AI and has saved countless thousands of people through a similar methodology. Now, what David demonstrated was.

understanding that there you have a lot more agency that you think. Then most of us kind of accept. Well, a good patient should just take lessons from the doctor. They should do what the doctor says. You shouldn't do your own research because we're the experts. Well David said BS, and he tried to do his own research, and he tried his own experimentations, even when he wasn't sure if they would work. Big picture.

we have a lot more agency than we think. And so there's two kinds of of agency. We call this an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. And so this is this, you know, people kind of know this research already that Uh external locus of control is about thinking that your your life is controlled by things outside of you. Internal locus of control means you think you can affect change in the world. Now, what's interesting about this.

is that even when the cards are stacked against you. Even when you have all the right in the world to say that things aren't going well and uh, you know, external factors are controlling you, you still are better off that having an internal locus of control.

People with an internal locus of control live longer, they have more friends, they contribute more to the community, they're happier, they have fewer mental health issues. Internal locus of control seems to be protective in i in so many different ways. Even when the cards are stacked against you, the only case where it's not helpful to have an internal locus of control is when you judge other people.

So for yourself, you want to have an internal locus of control. For others, you want to try and give them the grace of thinking, well, they must be operating on under circumstances that they can't control. That turns out to be a much a much healthier uh point of view. Why does the brain default to helplessness then? If helpfulness and agency is so great. W why is that not a set point? Yeah. Well this is what what you just said is actually the exact opposite of what

everybody thought for fifty years in psychology because we we thought that helplessness was learned. We called it learned helplessness. Um uh Seligman and Meyer did these studies with dogs and they could show that you could train dogs to give up, that they would learn helplessness. that we were born hopeful and then life beats us down and we give up. Just a couple of years ago, these same researchers

Completely changed their mind. I saw that. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oops. Fuck sorry, just half a century. of learned helplessness being in the lexicon. Who was it? It was Scott Barry Kaufman uh on his pod that that first talked about this and uh learned hopefulness is exactly dude fucking wild. Wild, wild, because we built entire philosophies about, you know, why why the poor are poor and why, you know, the these conditions lead to the

uh built out of this research that everybody thought was true. Well it turns out that we don't learn helplessness. That's our default state. I mean, if you think about it, that's how we come out of the womb. For human beings, we are absolutely defenseless. We require. our parents to take care of us. A baby doesn't have claws, doesn't have teeth, can't run away. We need

someone to take care of us. So maybe the what we we think, perhaps the evol evolutionary adaptation is that you want when a baby is in danger, you want a baby to be passive and helpless so that they can be taken care of. uh perhaps and that there is safety in passivity because safety is what you know, right? So there is this fight, flight, or freeze response. And so that freeze response is that passivity response. What that means, however, is that we have to learn hopefully.

You have to learn hope. I mean, it would kind of make sense that in a tribal environment, you almost don't want people to be too radical. Like if you think, you know, if you you don't want too many people to challenge the the the tribe chief and to, you know, think that they're uh that they can

change things up. You kind of want stability in a society. So maybe that's where that comes from. I don't really know. I'm not a evolutionary psychologist. But what we do know is that there is a circuit in the brain that Seligman called the hope circuit that Is it is how we learn our agency that we have to learn through tiny steps what is possible, what we can do. But that must be, in fact, taught.

George, my housemate, is currently writing his book, which is all about agency. And uh The the idea that The idea that you don't alwa you you're not always in control, but you can believe that you are to me. Like'cause I'm just hearing him unload these stories over and over again. There's another one from um Johan Hari. Did you look at that Study of the pain wand? Was it in the eighteen hundreds?

So there was a a special wand where it was wood wrapped in metal with wires around it and an electric special electricity box. Oh, the mesmerism stuff. Is that what this is? And they'd wave it over people and then they slowly they slowly took away one element.

of the wand and they took away they unplugged the electricity, then they took away the box, then they took away the wires, then they took away the metal, then they took away the wood. And it was just a guy waving his hand over patients. And it had the same effect. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I used to poo poo this stuff and think, oh, this is crazy. These are stupid people. They're gullible. I don't say that stuff anymore because uh if it works and it's cheap and it's not hurting anybody

Maybe it's okay. Maybe those placebo pills that are on sale on Amazon are not such a bad idea. I'll give you I'll give you another one about a non pharmaceutical one that blew my mind. Do you know the story of uh of Serena Williams at Wimbledon and her her coach Patrick? Have you heard about this one? No, no. So uh Serena Williams was not doing well at w at Wimbledon. Uh she was gonna lose. And her coach.

comes up to her and he says, I have some amazing news for you. When you rush the net, you make 80% of your of the point. She says, What are you talking about? I suck at the net. He's like, Wait, look, hey, uh, I don't, you know, the stats don't lie. The stats said that when you rush the net, you make 80% of the points. Now, what he had noticed.

is that she was lying to herself. She was already delusional. She her confidence was broken because she wasn't doing well and she wasn't doing what she had to do. And so she was telling a story in her head. She had a limiting belief that I shouldn't rush the net. Okay. So he he knows this. He can see it in his player. And he tells her what turns out to be a hundred percent fabrication. It's not true. She is not scoring 80% of uh of the points when she rushes the net.

He tells her this, says, can't lie with the stats. She then goes on to start rushing the net and turns out wins Wimbledon. So he likes to say, he he has this score where he says, you see, sometimes the lies can become reality. And so that's that's the real takeaway here. Beliefs are tools, not truth. Is it true that she wasn't good at rushing the net?

Kinda sorta not really. Is it a fact? No, it's a belief. Is it true that she's good at rushing the net and scoring points? Kinda sorta. It's a belief, right? Neither are facts, neither are laws of physics.

So based on what you believe, you can turn that belief into reality. Not in a metaphysical way. There's no quantum whatever. It's all about motivation. It's all about what those behaviors get us to actually do. It feels like a lot of what Uh l the one of the big mechanisms for humans here is potential and understanding how much of our total capacity we're currently tapping into or not. Um, I am not a morning person. My potential for getting up on a morning is limited. Well

That yeah, there's i circadian rhythms and there tend to be set points. Some people are morning larks and some people are night owls and so on and so forth. Your potential to do this is largely determined. So let's this is a good way to think about it. There is a window.

This window is determined by physical reality. It's determined by how much training you've done. It's determined by how fit you are. It's determined by your reaction time or your height or your genetics or whatever it might be, right? Uh this is the window. This is not within your beliefs control. within this window is almost exclusively within your beliefs control. And uh that uh two step model, I think, of potential and how it works.

um really explains uh people get it confused. They think that their window is n way narrower than it actually is and way lower than it actually is. What they don't realise is they're just looking at a little microcosm sliver of what is a much wider window. And there is probably a lot more upside than uh that's available to them. What was that story about the d the dude with the snake? What was that one? Was he in Australia or New Zealand?

Oh, uh the uh Mortimer? The the Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. Did I I don't Did I put that in the book? I don't think that made it into No, no, no, no. But I've heard you talk about it and I think that it makes a lot of sense here too. Yeah. Oh, that's a good one actually. Now that I think about it, it's back to the talk around uh about nocebos. That's a good one. Yeah. So

Uh this guy is a pain researcher. Mortimer, I think his last name is Gosley, I can't remember. Australian guy. He he goes to the Outback, he's on a camping trip. and uh he gets bitten by one of the most deadly Snakes in the outback. You know, there's all kinds of venomous snakes. He gets bit by one of them, rushed to the hospital, barely survives. He's in days and days of excruciating pain. He I think they had to put him in a coma. It was incredibly traumatic.

months months later, I think it was like six months until he got the courage to go back to the Outback and and and go camping again. He he he uh he go he's he's on a hiking trail and he's he decides to go by the river and he wants to, you know, go in the water or something. And all of a sudden he feels something nip at his at his heel, where he got bitten the the time six months before. He collapses onto the ground. He passes out. It turns out it was nothing more than a twig that's scratched.

But he had this expectation. Again, his body had this belief about what that means. And then he produced this nocebo response, not because of choice. He wasn't a bad person. He didn't lack willpower. He didn't will it on himself. But he had been trained based on priors to have this hyper-vigilant response. And so that's exactly what's going on with many of these other conditions as well.

What is your guide for secular rational prayer? Placebo prayer. Placebo prayer. Take me through the the protocol for placebo placebo prayer. Yeah. So I think w w you have to find what works for you. And what uh worked for me was engaging in some kind of of of regular practice. And and what I was particularly uh curious about is what to pray for. Because I I

I didn't think that uh I didn't want to ask for stuff. I I don't believe in some kind of cosmic slot machine that Santa Claus is gonna give me, you know, give me this, give me money, give me health, give me wisdom, give me all that stuff. Um, what I was asking for was not even for life to get easier. I was looking for ways to get stronger, to reinforce the the tenets, the attributes that I want to cultivate myself. So patience. Tolerance.

Um uh th gratitude. That's what I pray for. You know, I I pray to be cognizant of how incredibly lucky I am. to live on this tiny marble dot in the universe that's swimming around in a vacuum of space, that we live in this time and and and place to even have this conversation in with conscious awareness.

uh you're in Austin, I'm in I'm in Spain and we're talking over the internet right now. Like how amazing is this future that or is this what what I would have thought would have been a science fiction future and today we're actually living it. So to be consciously uh gracious and and humble about that, that's something I try and remind myself through a practice of p prayer. And it turns out that doing that on your own has benefits, of course.

It's a form of it's also a form of problem solving. So many times when I pray, it's a little bit different from meditation. So when I when I used to meditate, I medit I used to meditate quite a bit, and I don't I don't really meditate as much as anymore. It's it's not that I'm anti, I think it has all kinds of benefits. But the the role of meditation, at least the kind of meditation I would practice, was being aware of your thoughts and then letting your thoughts go.

That's not what I do anymore. Um again, not that it's bad. I think it helps lots of people. There's a lot of great research about how wonderful it is. I've kind of moved on to a point now where now prayer almost becomes a form of of problem solving. Where By by just thinking, by just letting my mind Think about the problem in a specific time and place, not in between tasks, not for a minute here, a minute there, but just to contemplate.

Uh sometimes I even do it through writing. You know, that can be a form of of prayer for me. that problem solving of of and even you know religious people who have a faith tradition, when they have that conversation with God. Many times it can open up those those opportunities for them to make change in their life that if they had not made that time to have that conversation with their maker, that they wouldn't have found those opportunities. Now, when you layer on top of that a community.

That's amazing. This is what the Catholic priest said to me. He said, you know, people come to Mass and they come with all kinds of requests. They say, you know, God, please help my uh help my daughter, help my business, uh, help me heal, help me this.

What they don't realize is that many times the way God answers these prayers is with the people next to you, that when you're in church with people in the pew who could help you with the business, could help you with your health, could help you with that relationship you're seeking to to mend or build or find. And so there is a place for that community that I think many times

secular people, free thinkers like like I am, uh, we miss out on. And so what what I now do is to take part in those communities, whereas before I was so wedded to the fact that it had to be true, that I had to believe everything. And frankly, I think congregations also demanded that. Like I I kind of felt that if I don't, you know, it I don't belong unless I believe everything you tell me.

I'm an imposter, but now I've I've kind of relaxed that, right? Like it's don't ask, don't tell. Nobody asks the Pope exactly what he believes, right? Nobody questions him. There's no there's no faith test on the way out to ensure that you Yeah. S some places do that, but I don't want to be part of those places. It's a very utilitarian view of this. Look, it seems to make people live longer and be healthier and and and enjoy life more. Uh

W why why would I not try this particular tactic? Okay, so are you doing it on a nighttime? Are you doing it in the morning? Are you saying it out loud? Are you doing it with a partner? Are you doing it on your own? What what have you found? I do it whenever I pass a religious institution.

So I if the doors open, I walk in. Uh I didn't know you could do that, but you can. You can just walk in, even if you're not a member of that congregation, even if it's not your background, and you can go in and you can pray. Unreal. Dude. I uh I think this is a much needed book. I think it's uh and I appreciate that you managed to balance the

you have got control of this with the way that you feel is not unreal and not fake. And I think that walking that line is a really difficult one because it it switches people off immediately if they feel like they're being victim blamed for something that they feel. And being able to empower somebody to you can make changes to this and also

Everything that you're going through is completely one hundred percent real. Uh, that is a it's it's not an easy one. So congratulations, man. Where should people go to check out everything you got going on? I appreciate it. Thank you. So uh my blog is near nfar.com. Near is spelled like my first name. That's n-in-r-n-far.com.

And uh we actually have a special bonus. We put together a five-minute belief change plan, which you don't have to buy anything, you don't have to sign up for anything. It's completely free. We just couldn't fit it in the book. And that is at nearfar.com forward slash belief. Dash change. That's nearinfar.com belief. Sorry, nearinfar.com forward slash belief dash change. Heck yeah. Nia, until the next time, get writing. We'll talk again. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chris.

If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.

And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of one hundred of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction and there's real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillex.com/slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.