Transcript of Beyond Belief What's Holding You Back - Nir Eyal

Welcome to the Proven podcast, where we don't care what you think, only care what you can prove. On this episode, you get the answer to what happens when you take two people who are absolute data dorks who love human behavior and set them free for about two hours. Now, you're only going to get about an hour and change of the recorded time because some of it we had to edit out because it's intense. This goes into your belief systems, what's holding you back, and it's all based on science. Nier is one of those people who just doesn't care about anything that's based on opinion. Him and I are cut from the same cloth. If you can't prove it, if it's not backed in science, we just don't care. In fact, he disproves the illusion of willpower. That all is in this episode. The show starts now. All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. Nier, I'm excited to have you on the show, man.

Me, too. Thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely. For the two or three people in the world who don't know who you are, we'll talk more about who you are, what you've done. I mean, you've written so many books and your stuff is based off. I love what you do. Let's get the world caught up on who you are and what you Well, thanks, man.

I appreciate that. My first book was called Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products. That book was all about how I stole the secrets of Silicon Valley to teach companies how to build habit-forming products for good. How can we get people hooked to an exercise app, to a language learning app to health care products, financial services products, anything that uses the psychology of Silicon Valley, the same way that they get us hooked to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. How can we use that psychology to get people hooked to good habits through the products and services they use? Then I looked at the other side of the story. I wrote Indistractable, which is all about how to control your attention and choose your life. We want to get hooked to the healthy products, and then we want to disconnect and stop getting so distracted by the things that aren't so healthy, whether that's drinking too much or smoking too much or clicking too much or scrolling too much. How do we make sure that we live our life with intent and without regret? And so that's what Indistractable is all about. And then I have my third book just published, which is called Beyond Belief.

And so that explores how beliefs shape our reality.

So the first two books I've already gone through, and I did the audiobook blast through both of those. I love what you do because they're based on science. They go through and like, Hey, this is what this research has shown. This is what it is. It's things that are purely based on proven techniques and tactics. I love that you got through the two sides of it, which is, Hey, they're coded to hook us in. Now this is how you unhook from that environment. You get disconnected from that. Tell me more about the new book and what we're walking through and how we can implement it.

Sure. The The genesis of Beyond Belief was that I do these office hours. Every week, any one of my readers can sign up to talk to me. I do four of them every week, so it's an hour. You get 15 minutes. If you have a question about one of my books, I'd love to hear it. After Indistractable was published, I started getting these calls, not every call, but maybe one out of 20 calls, would sound something like this. They'd say, Hey, Nier, I read Indistractable. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't work. I'd say, Oh, wow, it didn't work. That's it. You As you said, I'm really research back. There's 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. It changed my life. It took me five years to write this thing. I'm so curious. Tell me what didn't work. How did step one go? They'd say, Oh, yeah, step one. So step one. I didn't do step one. I didn't do step one. Okay, no problem. No problem. Maybe you skipped that one. Tell me about step two. How did step two go? You know, Nier, I read step two. I totally read step two. I just didn't I didn't do it.

I thought, Oh, my goodness, what's going on here? What mistake did I make here as an author? Are my readers just stupid? Then I realized, wait a minute. No, I'm stupid because I do this, too. I have mountains of books filled of advice that I didn't follow. I've hired consultants and gurus to tell me what to do, and I didn't do it. Why? Is that an interesting question? Despite knowing what to do, why don't we do it? I've met billionaires, I've met people who are broke, and everybody has an area their life that they know what they need to do, and somehow it just never gets done. They never get in shape. They never write that book they dreamed of writing. They never start the business. They never have that relationship. They never repair the relationship that's broken. They have that thing they haven't done, even when they know exactly what to do. That question fascinated me. Why is that? Especially in an age where if you don't know what to do, ask Google, ask ChatGPT. All the answers are out there. There's no more secrets. We know what to do. Why don't we do it?

What I discovered was that there's a missing element that we tend to think of motivation as a straight line. That if you want the result, you do the behavior. You have the behavior, here's what I need to do, and then you have the benefit, you just do the action and you get the results. That's classical economics. You show up at your job, you do your job description, and we pay you a paycheck. We give you incentives. But there's something missing. The thing missing is that even when I know what to do, I know the behavior, and I want the benefit, I don't do it unless I believe. If I don't believe that I will get the benefit, or, and much more likely, that I don't believe in myself to continue to do the behavior, it doesn't happen. So motivation isn't a straight line, it's a triangle. You have to have the behavior, the benefit, but also the belief. The belief holds it all together. And so beyond belief, explores what we call limiting beliefs. A lot of people are familiar with limiting beliefs. People aren't familiar with what I call liberating beliefs. Limiting Liberating beliefs, sap motivation.

Liberating beliefs, supply motivation. It turns out that this body of research just absolutely blew my mind because like you, I'm not into the woo- woo stuff. I'm very skeptical. But there's a whole lot of stuff out there It seems like magic, but it really isn't. I'm talking about the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, the power of prayer, the power of entrepreneurial resilience, where you see opportunities. They used to say that Steve Jobs had this reality distortion field. It's true that beliefs literally shape what you see. That two people can look at the exact same thing. We've done studies where people look at the exact same image and see completely different things. Why? Because our beliefs shape what we feel, what we see, and what we do. I call these the three powers of belief: agency, anticipation, and attention.

There's a wall of questions I have because- All right, bring it.

Let's do it.

I wrote a book, and I'm not putting in my book. It's free. It's yours. I'm not doing that. But there's three lies we believe. The lies of what, the lies of how, and the lie of why. I don't know how to do it. Bs. You've got access to a phone. You know how to do everything. You could build a nuclear one. Please don't. But you could do it. You have access to that information. Do what you love and you're never working on a day in your life. That's a lie of what? Well, we already know that that isn't true because if you make me eat sushi every day for the next three months, I'm going to throw wasabi at you at some point.

It's not going to work out.

And we know that why isn't powerful enough because we sit there and say, I know why I want to make more money, get in better shape, do blah, blah, blah, but we don't do it. I found that I had to shift of the identity because there's one version of me that shows up and has nutty naked time, and there's another version of me who gets on a podcast. And if I switch those versions, this is because of a very different podcast or very, very more naked time. My question I have is, in the research and everything that you've done, so as we talk about changing your beliefs from living beliefs to more of an empowered belief structure. How does identity come into that play? Because when we want someone to stop smoking, we tell them, don't identify yourself as someone who hasn't smoked in 10 days or in 13 days, because all you're doing is counting the number of days until you quit. Instead, I said, sit down and say, I'm an unsmoker. I'm a healthy person. If you want to change your habits of how you are in your relationship with your child, you're like, I'm a good father.

I identify I am a strong father. What does that mean? How would you show up in that? Because I believe the identity that influences the beliefs. How, from the research that you've shown, did the beliefs come into play versus the identity?

There's a lot of nuance here and a lot of misperceptions, a lot of myths out there. I think that the two most dangerous words in the English language are I am. Because whatever you put after I am, your brain begins to believe. Now, it believes it to a point. When we think about affirmations, affirmations have been shown to have positive results until, or I should say, unless they are not backed by evidence. You're absolutely right that having that new identity can be a liberating belief. It's a much more liberating belief than the limiting belief of I'm I am not good at it. If you say, I am not good at that, or now today, we hear a lot of people with labels that limit them. I am too old, I am too fat, I am too skinny, I am too rich, I am too poor, I am too ADHD, I am too whatever. And that becomes then a limiting belief, because when you believe that, you don't even try. A limiting belief saps motivation, a liberating belief supplies motivation. Having that understanding of if I have, I am, followed by whatever comes next, that It becomes something the brain, it looks out for.

And that demonstrates this first power of belief, the power of attention. Now, why is that belief? If I can just back up into the neuroscience for a bit, why is the power of attention so powerful? It turns out that the brain can't process all the information that's coming into it. So your brain, right this second, is processing about 11 million bits of information per second. That's like reading War and Peace twice every second. The light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice, the chair on your butt, all this information is actually entering your brain, but you're not conscious of it. Your conscious attention can only focus on about 50 bits of information. So 50 bits compared to 11 million bits. That's 0. 00045% of the data that your brain is actually taking in are you conscious of? The brain has to constantly make a judgment around what it sees through a little keyhole of attention. It's constantly looking through a keyhole. Now, That keyhole, what gets in and what doesn't get in, is determined in large part by what you believe, by what's called prior, your prior experience, your prior understanding, your prior beliefs.

When you have a history of telling yourself, I am this, I am this, I am this, I am this, that colors what you see in the future. So you attend to what you pay attention to. If you expect things to be a certain way, especially if you expect yourself to be a certain way, a la your identity, you will then oftentimes conform to that belief. Number one, make sure you choose those labels very, very carefully. I'm a big critic. There's a big section in the book that I'm sure I'm going to get criticized for around why your labels are your limits and why I think we way overdiagnosed, way overmedicalized. I think the pendulum is really going to swing, and I have ADHD, or at least I've been diagnosed with ADHD, and I've got a lot to say about that, about how that can become your cage. But having that empowering identity also needs to be followed with action. If you don't have that action, you're going to say to yourself, This positive thinking stuff doesn't work, which it doesn't unless you follow it with action that reinforces your agency.

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. When you see I am a, and you hear this all the time in New Age, and I'll get grief on this in advance as you get grief on your book, people say, I am an independent, strong, dynamic, beautiful, intelligent woman. I'm like, Okay, are you always independent? No. Are you always strong? No. And then all of a sudden it starts crumbling. I'm like, Okay, so what's then the other answer? And they go, Well, then I am da, da, da, da, da Ornory because I've been on a plane for 11 hours. Thank you, Swiss Air. And you're going through that process. So the idea that having going through that. But if I had these belief systems where I've been labeled properly or not properly, that I am a Penguin, whatever, that's the least label that I could have with people.

If someone has identified that- You might get letters from the Penguin Society.

I probably will. I get letters as it is. So it is what it is. If we come through and say, I identify as a Penguin. I've done that for 40 something years of my life, and I've identified in a certain pattern, be it given to me from my own insecurities or my parents or my school or my securities about myself or my self beliefs about it. And all of a sudden, that doesn't serve me anymore. What if the science showed, how do we pivot out of that? How do we start rewriting these belief systems that regrettably are limiting us or are hamphering us to get to the next level. How do we do that?

Absolutely. The first step is to recognize the power of these beliefs. I think that's where 99% of the population is right now. They don't realize that they even carry around these beliefs. Because even I that spend the past six years working on this book, I'm telling you, every day, just this morning with my wife, I could find myself slipping into these limiting beliefs. We constantly have to remind ourselves of this default state that we tend to keep doing what we've always done. We want to have a stable identity. We want to believe we understand the world as it is, that we perceive reality accurately. You don't. You don't. You see reality through this tiny, blurry keyhole of attention based on your tiny life experience that you've then processed. Even our memories are valuable. There's amazing research done by Elizabeth Loftis around how she showed adults doctored photographs of a hot air balloon ride, and she managed to implant a memory in 30% of adults who not only then believe that they had been on that balloon ride, they elaborated, they embellished the experience with how cold they were and how fun it was, and they described in vivid detail everything that happened that she completely incepted.

It never happened. Even this whole idea of my prior experiences, that's not to be confused with what people think are memories. We've got these non-conscious prior experiences that dictate our beliefs. We also have these conscious memories that, by and large, are way off base. That memory is not a tape recording. Memory is a reconstruction. Literally every time you say, Oh, that thing that that person did to me, that trauma that I had, that horrible thing, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be, you're reconstructing it every single time. Not that I'm not anti-understanding things that have happened to you in the past, but we have to be very, very careful with how that influences us in the future. I'll give you one quick story that blew my mind. I have a friend named Chris, and Chris, when I told him about the book I was writing, he told me about, Wow, that's so interesting. I used to believe that I couldn't cry. This would really hurt his relationships. Every time he'd enter a serious relationship with a girlfriend, they'd get to a point where they'd get into some emotional situation and he couldn't cry. She would oftentimes complain.

The girlfriend would complain and say, You're not emotionally available. You can't cry. He believed that he was dysfunctional. He was broken in some way. He would explain as best he could that the reason he couldn't cry was that when he was 10 years old, he attended his cousin's funeral, and it really shocked him. It was his first encounter with death. From that day, he never wanted to feel that way ever again. He decided at 10 years old that he would never cry again. He had a bad breakup with a girlfriend. He told his sister that part of the reason was that he wasn't emotionally available. All stemmed from the fact that when he was 10 years old, he went to this funeral and he couldn't cry. His sister looked at him and said, Chris, this is his older sister, said, Chris, I remember that funeral. You didn't go. You stayed home with the babysitter because mom and dad thought you were too young. It had never happened. And yet he built this entire emotional existence based on this belief of an event that never, ever What happened? So the belief was false. It wasn't true, but the cage felt really true.

The big revelation of beyond belief, of my work over the past six years, is that these beliefs should be seen as tools, not truths. We think of beliefs as true, as facts. They're not facts. No are they faith. When people say, I believe, they say it as if it's faith. It's neither those things. A fact is an objective reality. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. It doesn't care what you think. That's an objective truth. That's a fact. Faith- Now you're going to say, You know that, right? You're watching the mother. Bring them. That's fine. I don't care. I'll take them on. Better than the penguins. The penguins, those people are mean. The flat earthers I can deal with. The flat earthers, I'm not even going to say. Faith, on the other hand, as opposed to the opposite of fact, faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. God rewards the righteous. No evidence is needed. No evidence is expected. That's faith. You don't need evidence. A belief is somewhere in between. A belief is a strongly held conviction, open to revision based on evidence. So that was the big revelation for me, is that I can choose these beliefs even if they're not true.

Even if they're not true, I can still choose a belief. It doesn't matter if it's necessarily true. Now, I need evidence, of course, but most of our decisions in life, if you think about it, are not based on fact. Should I marry this person? Should I go into business with that person? Should I buy this product? Should I take this job? These aren't based on facts. They're based on beliefs. We have to be very careful about which beliefs we adopt because they can drastically affect the decisions we make.

How much of your research has shown of the beliefs that we have changed, of the memories we have changed to block it from some pain. The ABC happened, you went to the zoo, and a monkey threw poop at you, and now you blocked that out. Like, No, I never went to the zoo, or something of that nature. Because there's one we make up to protect ourselves, and there's one we rewrite our brains to defend ourselves as well, or some And that's just mine, does that as well. When you have both of those, because I think we agree that both of those exist, how do we go in and rewire this or have at least awareness of it? Because we're like, Okay, this exists. I don't know if it's real or it's not. Do we go through and say, What is the value of this? Or what are the next steps of people going, Okay, I believe that I'm a seven-headed Penguin at this case, and we're going through that process. How do we sit down and go, Okay, how does this serve me? Or what is the process of dissecting that? And do we need other people to help us through Is this a therapy thing where we talk about therapy is a gift you give yourself?

Is there a process we could do it on our own? How do we start rewiring these limiting beliefs or these things, conscious or unconscious?

It comes down to first recognizing the belief itself, then asking ourselves if it's serving us, and then choosing a new belief is a third step, and then acting on that new belief as if it were true. Those are the four essential steps. Now, what is not a good idea, and this This is something we've seen a change recently in the psychology community, it turns out that just rehashing and digging back up. I remember my first research paper that I had to do for my master's program in neuroscience, which I never finished, I'll tell you, for various reasons. The very first assignment, and I'm so glad this was my first assignment, my first assignment was, is talk therapy more effective than the placebo effect? I mean, all talk therapy, all talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance of commitment therapy, the classic Freudian on the couch, Tell me about your mother and your dreams and all that. Is it any better than the placebo effect? The answer is not Really? It's a big controversy right now. Yeah, not really. There's been extensive research. It's not conclusive. Science is never conclusive. There's no such thing. One of the things that drives me crazy is when people say, science says.

There is no science says. That's not how science works. But to the best of our knowledge today, it doesn't look like it does much better than a placebo effect. That being said, that doesn't mean it's not effective. It means that the placebo effect is hella effective.

Got you.

That the placebo effect is crazy powerful. That when you think that you should get better, expectation, the power of belief, you do. The lesson here is that, again, beliefs are tools, not truths. That does it serve me to believe that I'm a victim? Maybe, sometimes, could be. Does it not serve me to think that I'm a victim? Does it empower me to believe that I have post-traumatic growth versus post-traumatic stress? Now, the problem is, and I have to have a quick disclaimer here, is that there's a lot of bad therapy out there. Just because someone hangs up a shingle and says, Hey, I offer therapy, if they don't give you an offboarding plan, this kills me. People go in to see a therapist and this therapist says, Oh, this person is a very consistent patient and all they do is sit here and talk to me, and there's no threat of severe type of illness, like schizophrenia or something that actually could require a lot of work. This is fun. This is easy. I make a lot of money, especially with children. That's why therapists love working with children because they're easy patients. A lot of bad therapists just want you to come in and vent and talk about your problems.

But without turning that into action, what are you learning? What's the offboarding plan? If you come to a doctor and say, Hey, I broke my arm, and they say, Well, this could heal within a year or 20. We don't really know. You should get a second opinion. A lot of therapy, I think, a lot of therapists, there's a lot of great therapists out there. There's a lot of therapists out there that milk the hell out of their clients because they don't turn those beliefs into something that actually creates behavioral change.

Also, there's the idea of ChatGPT or AI becoming your therapist as well. I've always told people about it. I'm like, Listen, I think therapy, it's a gift. It's a gift you give yourself. I You should check in with yourself. And to your point, is there an offboarding process? Chatgpt or AI might not be the best thing either in that situation unless you have a thing that it's back to based on. And this is we talk about AI does not mean artificial intelligence. It means always incorrect. So you have to be careful when you're playing with that ball game. So when you're doing this and you're labeling things and you're saying, Okay, this is the tool, right? This is not a truth. My beliefs are a tool. And it might be based on something that did not even happen in any way, shape, or form. And you have that awareness, can you recode new belief systems or new beliefs to get to the result you want? Because is the goal... We always talk about there's a journey. Journey is important, but there's also your goal. And if I got a plane and I sat next to you and I said, Nia, God, I'm so excited.

I wonder where we're going. You're like, I'm sorry, what was that? What? Knowing where you're going is mission critical in everything that I've ever done. Can you recode beliefs or re implement and pick different tools and use them a different way to get to rock and roll. The example I give on that is my grandfather was very, very handy and a hammer. He sat there with a, I don't know what it is. Sorry, grandpa, I know you're not on with us, but he carved in the top of a hammer a slot. I never understood why he did that until I saw him put a nail down and then tap it in. So he would hold a nail for him because he always had his hands. He found a way to change the tool, since we're calling beliefs tools in this situation, till we could influence the tool to create a better result. Is there a The way that we can do that.

Absolutely. I love the hammer analogy, by the way, because it's not like you would say, your grandpa never said, Oh, this hammer, this is the one and only true tool forevermore. No. Sometimes he used a hammer, sometimes he used a saw, sometimes he used a wrench. Whatever required the right tool, he would find the right tool for the job. There's no reason to carry around this old broken hammer for 20 years. If it doesn't work anymore, you can set it down and find a new tool. That's exactly what we can do with beliefs. The problem is, for many people, I'll tell you, for me, I had this requirement of truth. I needed it to be true. Sometimes that can actually hurt us. It certainly hurt me because there's a lot of things that I couldn't see because I was so convinced about the importance of truth, because I thought that belief meant facts, and they don't, especially in interpersonal relationships. I'll illustrate here. For my mom's 74th birthday, I was in Singapore. She was in Orlando. For her 74th birthday, I wanted to make sure that I got her some nice flowers. That's not easy to do from Singapore.

I had to go on Google and find all these florists and look at the ratings and reviews Then I had to call them to be like, Okay, yeah, but can you really get it there? In the Florida heat, it will arrive on time and all that. I stayed up till 1 AM. I put in the order. I was so proud of myself. I went to sleep knowing, Hey, Nia, you're a good son. You did a great job. I call her the next morning for her birthday to check on, I wish her happy birthday and see if the flowers arrived. She thanks me for the flowers. She says something like, Hey, I got the flowers. Thank you so much. I wanted you to know that they arrived half dead. Don't order from them again. To which I lost it. I reverted instantly from 48-year-old, 47-year-old, whatever I am, into a 15-year-old. That I instantly reverted into this petulent teenager, and I blurted out, Well, that's the last time I buy you flowers. That went over about as well as you'd expect with my mom. Because why? I was operating Through this prior belief, the key hole of attention that I was looking through was that the belief was my mother is judgmental and too hard to please.

Because wouldn't a mother just say, Well, thank you for the flowers, and not complain mean about them? That's what a non-judgmental mother would do. And by the way, she's always like this. This is the way she is. She does shit like this all the time. She's so judgmental. And then I did the work. Now, the work comes from this woman by the name of Byron Katie, who I greatly admire her work. And she basically channeled thousands of years of this process, all the way starting from Aristotle, actually, where she gives us these four questions that I describe in the book as well. I modified them a bit, but basically, the questions start like this. Number one, so the first thing you do, you write down your belief. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Then you ask a series of questions. So this gets to your question of how do you actually change these beliefs. Number one, the first question is, is it true? Is it true? My mother is judgmental and too hard to please. Is it true? You heard the story. Obviously. What a stupid question. My mother is judgmental and too hard to please.

I just told you what happened. Now, here's a second question. Is it absolutely true? Emphasis on the word absolutely. Is there any chance Even a half a %, that that might not be true? Maybe. I guess. Okay, maybe she wasn't... She did say thank you. Maybe there's a chance that she's not too judgmental. Okay, fine. Maybe there was another interpretation. Okay, third question. The third question is, who am I when I believe this? How do I behave when I hold onto this belief? Well, when I believe my mother is judgmental too hard to please, I don't act very nice to her. I'm short with her. I say things I later regret, like I'll never buy you or anything ever again. Then the fourth question, who would I be without this belief? I know that if I didn't believe my mother was judgmental and too hard to please, that I'd be happier, I'd be more patient, I'd be more myself versus my teenage psyche. Then with those four things, you establish, one, there's a chance that your thing that you thought was the truth, clear as day, black and white, might not be true. And that when you believe that thing, it doesn't serve you, and not believing it would make you much better off.

And so now comes the most important part. Now comes the turnaround, and this is how you change your beliefs. The turnaround is when you Experiment with believing the exact opposite. My mother is not too hard to please. Could that possibly be true? My mother is not too hard to please? Sure. Yeah. She was just trying. Maybe she was just showing me care and affection, and she didn't want me to get scammed. Okay. Yeah, I guess that might be true. Another turnaround, turnaround to the self, as Byron Katie calls it. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Could that be true? I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? Well, I did have a script of exactly how I expected her to behave. I had the exact words in my mind of how I wanted to be thanked. So who was being judgmental? Who was being hard to please? I was. Now, does that matter if it's Is she judgmental? Am I judgmental? Who cares? That's where I was telling you earlier about how I struggle with fact. I was trying to prove, no, she was being, not me.

She was being judgmental. Was that serving me? Because that belief chained me, imprisoned me to require her to change for me to be happy. Impossible. Not going to happen. Rather, by collecting a portfolio of perspectives, by forcing myself through this process, through this turnaround process, to see things This from other points of view, whether they're true or not, doesn't matter. Allowed me to say, You know what? This belief imprisons me, limits me. This belief, whether it's true or not, now I can do something about it. If I choose to adopt the belief that I was being judgmental and too hard to please, I could do something about that. That's my control, versus expecting her to change. That's how we begin to change these beliefs. We do these turnarounds in various assets of our life and then prove to ourselves themselves again and again, through repetition, through ritual, that those beliefs might also be true.

It's fascinating. We would just sit down and we had this on our trip where there was a certain situation that happened with the car, and everyone was really upset with the car. Very nicely rented car, but it smelt really bad. Everybody was having this moment. I was like, Come on, what's our goal? He said, Okay, this is our goal. I said, Is this conversation and what we're doing right now effective on getting us to set goal? To what it is? And then I said, No. I said, Cool. Then how do we work as a unit, as a team, to fix that? Going in and having, is it true? Is it absolutely true? Is something you have to do on your own? Having those tools that you could do it outside of a group and do it on yourself That's exceptionally powerful. But having someone who's done the work as a whole, having that level of EQ, when you're in a moment and you're spinning out and you are your 15-year-old self again, you're like, Oh, my God, mom, because again, we are from the same tribe, I get it. Going in that environment and having that conversation, what's a shortcut that you could do to reset your mind when you're in the middle of it?

When all of a sudden it onslaughts you and you're like, Oh, my God, mom, you know what? I'm never buying you flowers again, or I'm going to go hunt down that florist and burn down their building, and you're having that moment. How do you give yourself the ability to off gas and get through it? Through aggression or depression or joy or sadness or just overwhelm or anxiety or whatever the laundry list of things that may be going on because you're a human being and you am, so I am, you just are at that moment. Are there ways that you could sit there and shortcut the system? For lack of a better term, we talk about an IT control, delete it, when you locked the system and you get that reset. Is there any way that with what you found out, as your beliefs are influencing your reality because they're not real, how do you reset from that?

Yeah. So one One of the things that really changed my life in the process of writing this book is that I did something completely out of character, that if you would have asked me before I wrote this book, that this would be the result, I would say, Absolutely not. I started praying. Now, I don't believe in the supernatural. I haven't prayed since I was six years old. I used to pray because when my parents first came to America, they got scammed within a year or two of living in America. As new immigrants, they barely spoke the language. They got scammed of their entire life savings, and they were on the verge of and they used to fight all the time. That's when I started praying. Then when I grew up, I stopped talking to God or what I thought was God because who the heck was listening? Nobody was listening, so I stopped praying. Then I came across the power of placebos and tangentially, the power of prayer. There's an incredible literature around the power of these rituals, even if they're secular. Having, it turns out, as part of the book project, I went to speak to five religious leaders.

It sounds like a joke, right? A rabbi, a priest, an imam, a swami, and a monk walking to a bar. I talked to these five religious leaders, and I asked them all the same question, Can you pray even when you have doubts about God? And they all gave me their answers. Now, the reason I mentioned this story is because the imam gave me a very interesting answer, is that in Islam, and I'm not a Muslim, but I learned something from each one of these religions, he talked about how the power of prayer is forced repetition of these mantras, these prayers that center you. So that in Islam, you have to pray five times a day. Why do they do that? Because at five times a day, you're constantly reminding yourself of principles you want to remember. For me, I adopted that. Now, I didn't adopt it in the way he does, but I adopted that principle in a secular manner. For me, I have certain mantras that whenever my blood is I try and remember. Last night, actually, I had a little tift with my daughter. That's not going to escape. We're going to have disagreements.

But I tell you what, within 20 minutes, we solved it. Whereas I think a few years ago, It would have been maybe a multi-day affair. In this case, we got through it very, very quickly. I think the thing I constantly remind myself after doing this research is this mantra that I repeat to myself. Well, actually, let me ask question first that led me to the mantra. The question I asked myself was, how do you measure love? How do you measure love? When someone says, I love you very much, what does the very part mean? Why do I love this person more than that person? What is that more, that measurement of love? My assessment was that my answer, and this is my mantra, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. That's what I personally repeat myself I love you. Whenever I feel my- Walk me through it.

Yeah, absolutely. Walk me through it. Okay, yeah, definitely walk me through it.

What does it mean, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt?

What do you mean?

There's a thing called the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error says that we judge others by a different metric than we judge ourselves. When someone cuts you off in traffic, that jerk, what an asshole. We don't think, Oh, they might be rushing to the hospital because they have a sick parent. When we cut someone off in traffic, it's because, You don't understand. I'm in a big rush. We'll make up excuses and we'll say why we need to be understood when we make a mistake, when other people make a mistake, we judge them differently. Now, that change is based on how much we love somebody. When my daughter was first born, kids are a lot of work. They cry all the time. They poop, they pee, they throw up. They're a lot of work. They don't give you anything. They certainly don't buy you flowers like I did for my mom. They don't give you anything. And yet when my daughter was born... Yeah, exactly. But I remember the day my daughter was born and I held her in my I loved her more than anything in the world. That was because with babies, we give them all the benefit of the doubt.

We know that when they cry, they don't cry to annoy us. Is it annoying? Yes, but that's not their intent. They cry because that's the only tool they have. The lesson for me was that we're all big babies. We just got older. We are all operating under the tools that we have. When my mom acted the way she acted, or my daughter does things as she grows up, or my wife does something, or that guy in traffic, we're all just operating with the tools we have because love is measured by the benefit of doubt. How much I love somebody is determined by how much benefit of the doubt I give them. It could be a stranger, certainly with someone I love. I can love someone as a human being, my fellow mankind. But certainly with my family, the people we tend to, when I observe different friends, it's interesting, they tend to be worst to the people that they're closest to. That's the people who we tend to be mean to more than when a stranger, oh, you have to act respectable. But when it's somebody who's in your family, you can say horrible things to them.

It should be like that. That we should recognize that love is measured by the benefit of the doubt, which means we have to give them grace. To answer your original question of how do you center yourself, how do you get back to that place where you're yourself, that's that regular mantra that I constantly repeat to myself, Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt.

It's interesting because the different filters we use. George Carlin said, who's no longer with us, he said it really well, Anybody driving faster than me is an asshole. Anybody who's driving slower than me is an idiot.

Fundamental attribution there, right there. There it is.

We use it all the time. Then I like how you said how we give benefits of the doubt to strangers, but we don't give it to our loved ones. I also think there's a possibility, I'd love to hear your feedback, that we fail to do that for ourselves sometimes. Give ourselves a benefit in the on both.

More than anybody. So true.

There are times where we'll get so bad at a waiter who takes an extra three minutes to get us our food. Oh, my God, it's just a sandwich. Why didn't you bring me to that? We're just internally just like, exploding. But we let ourselves off the hook when we're 4 to 10 minutes late getting out of the door. Having the grace on both sides and understanding we are perfectly imperfect in our beings and who we are and how we show When we have these belief systems, and there's a difference between people who are radically successful and there's people who have a difference who are not radically successful. Have you found this belief structure? Because as we know, there are patterns that get you hooked to things, and there's patterns that get you unhooked to things. Those patterns and how you can weaponize and say, Hey, you know what? I could sit there and I can play this game or TikTok or whatever it is all day long, or I could redesign that and I could recode that into healthy habits versus what we have deemed as unhealthy habits based on Those are the main hits.

There's ways to recode that. If you haven't read Nier's book, go read his other books. The new one that's coming out when you come into this, have you found success for individuals who are ultra-successful for be it health, wealth, relationships, their belief systems, versus the ones who are not. We know that if you believe the Earth is flat and that a 6'3 orange baby is a good human being, you're going to result in X, Y, Z. Versus if you believe A, B, C, you're going to end up over here. Are There are core beliefs that you have found that are just, these are things that are core for success.

Without a doubt. One of those things is that people who are successful entrepreneurs have a different way to see the world. They literally, not just figuratively, they actually see the world differently. They see the $100 bills that are on the ground that other people don't see. If you think about starting a business is nuts. Basically, what you're doing when you start a business, you're saying everybody else is an idiot because they don't see this opportunity that I see. Because if they did, they would do the business. But clearly, everybody else is an idiot, I'm smart, and I think I'm going to succeed. You have to see that opportunity. They say about Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson put this in his biography of Steve Jobs. He said that people said about Jobs that he had a reality distortion field around him, that he would will things to exist. That's actually the big lesson of beyond belief, is that people who believe in a reality that is different from what exists are the ones who make reality as they see it. That's the change makers. That's the super successful people, that they can see this different reality. One of those traits has to do with making your own luck.

That people think that there are lucky people and unlucky people. Oh, look, that guy, all this great stuff happens to him. What a lucky guy. Turns out that statistically, lucky things don't happen to some people more than others. That over the course of a lifetime, pretty much everything averages out. It's just that lucky people take advantage of those opportunities differently. I'll illustrate the point. There was a study done where they took people who they asked, Do you think you are a lucky person or do you think you are an unlucky person? They asked these two groups of people to take a pamphlet and circle all the E's in the pamphlet. A very boring task, a mind-numming task. Just circle all the E's. If you did that, you got some monetary prize at the end. Now, the unlucky people did the task very diligently. The lucky people were the ones who noticed that inside this pamphlet, both groups got the same exact pamphlet that they had to circle. Inside the pamphlet, there was a little ad that said, The experiment is over. If you're reading this, collect your reward. The lucky people, the ones who were self-identified lucky, saw that at a much higher rate than the people who self-identified as unlucky.

They literally saw opportunities that the unlucky people didn't see. That's a fundamental difference. That these entrepreneurs are ones that see opportunities that other people just don't see. Another attribute of more successful people has to do with the locus of control. That there's a difference between what's called an external locus of control and an internal locus. Have you heard this? You probably heard a similar concept before, no? This is a very, very powerful idea. The idea is that people tend to see the world in to tend to see the world one or two ways. An external locus of control, a person who has an external locus of control, that thinks that things happen to them. My life is a product of society and my parents and my past trauma and all the things. That's an external locus of control. The things that happened to me happened to me because of external circumstances. Then there are people who have what's called an internal locus of control. They believe that things happen to them because of what they do. Now, by the way, here's what we know. People with an internal locus of control do better in every conceivable metric.

They make more money, they have more friends, they contribute more to society, they live longer, they're healthy. All the good things happen to people with internal locus of control. What's super interesting, that's surprising or interesting, what's really surprising is that even when people have objective reasons to be pissed off, they're low on the socioeconomic totem pole, they are past victims, terrible things have happened to them. Even when that's true, having that belief, again, beliefs are tools, not truth, having the belief that you have an internal locus of control still makes you more successful. That, to me, is It's the same thing. That even when you have all the justification to say that life screwed me, you still benefit from thinking, I have agency, I have an internal loax of control.

There's a Latin expression that I will absolutely destroy. For those of you who speak Latin, I apologize. But it's, Itum aut facium, Which is I either find a way or make a way. And this idea of I'm going to figure it out. And sure, there's the life's happening to me versus life is happening for me and all of that. But every successful entrepreneur I know, every billionaire that I know, there is this steadfast outdo to them, outfast to them. I'm going to figure it out. It doesn't matter how I get there. And when you look at someone's like, Hey, we had this huge debate earlier on in one of the calls I was on this morning. One of my employees says, What's the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur? And I said, Well, entrepreneurs, employees will sacrifice ABC for security. Entrepreneurs will sacrifice security for ABCDE, whatever that is. She says, Well, I can't. I could never get rid of my security. I need to know that I have a paycheck coming. I'm like, That's why you work for me, and that's why you're not an entrepreneur. She was, Well, I want to be an entrepreneur.

I said, Well, I want to be better than Michael Jordan, but I'm 6'2, 204, and I can't dunk. There's certain realities. This is what you got, kid. What you're telling me in your book is that belief system outside of some physical things. I'm not going to beat Michael Phelps in the pool unless I'm in a speed boat or a jet ski. It is what it is. There's certain limiting physical things that I can't do because I'm not 7 feet tall. It is. I think what you're telling us in your book that's come out is you can rewire these beliefs that if you have a internal locus control versus an external locus control, you can rewire that. So if I know that people who live longer lives are people who are fundamentally racist. In other words, if it's white, they don't stick in your mouth. So no sugar, no carbs, stuff like that. Don't stick white shit in your face. That's a nice friend to say it. Eat organic stuff. So if I know that, but I'm coded that I adore sugary sweets and bad for me food and fried food, and I know that. I just fundamentally know.

I know the research is there. I know I should do intermittent fasting with a Mediterranean-based diet. I should eat more protein. I get But I'm stuck with this belief system that we already know now will change my behavior, just like in success, just like in business, just like in everything else. If we know that it's, I need to do this, and I know I need to do this, and I have this belief that's in my way, Again, is it that same process? Do we sit there and we walk it through? What is the truth? What is really true? Is that what we do to recode that? Or how do we get people to pivot?

We examine the source of the suffering. The source of the suffering is always the judgment. That's always the source of the suffering. The sugar example about how much I can't lose weight because I have a sweet tooth. That's a belief. That's a belief. You've taken on that lens, and of course, you will prove it as true all the time. That's for sure. But the belief that the discomfort is bad. There's some unbelievable research that I talk about in the book around not only the placebo effect, but around hypnosedation. Have you ever heard of hypnosedation? It's unbelievable. I thought it was complete woo- woo nonsense. I've seen the tapes, I've seen the video, and I interviewed this guy Daniel Gisler, who was this derivatives traitor, and he was very buttoned up, not the opposite of anything woo- woo. This guy, he had a freak accident. He broke his tibia and his fibia, and he had to have these metal screws put into his leg, and then a few years later, he has to have them removed. He decides to take a course on hypnosedation. He saw some YouTube videos, and that led him to this course.

This guy went through a 50 five-minute operation where they were slicing his skin open, wrenching metal from bone without anesthesia of any kind. No general anesthesia, no local anesthesia. I didn't believe it unless I have seen the video and Tens of thousands of people have done this. How? How is that possible? It's possible because of the power of beliefs that he managed to have incredible control over this keyhole of attention and then change his interpretations of the information coming into our brain. Remember, 11 million bits of information, only 50 bits are processed through conscious control. We can choose what we then pay attention to. I really can't lose weight because I have a sweet tooth You're describing your pain. It hurts. I don't like that feeling of not getting the thing I want. I want to eat the cake, damn it. I can't resist it. Why can't I resist it? I have a sweet tooth. I made up a belief in order to justify not feeling bad. Well, I totally get it. We all do it. I used to be clinically obese. I've been there. I'm still there. I honestly have to fight that limiting belief.

Because if Daniel Gisler can go under surgery without anesthesia for 55 minutes where they're yanking metal screws from his bone without anesthesia, what does that say about... I'm not saying you should do that, but I'm saying, what does that say about the power of mind to resist all kinds of pain points? How many things in our life do we not do because it hurts? So many.

Yeah. I also think there's this idea. One of my friends, he's a billionaire, and him and I sat down and I said, Walk me through how you're not afraid of this. He was, Oh, I'm terrified. I'm like, I'm sorry, what was that? He goes, I accept that I'm going to be terrified. I'm just going to choose what I'm going to be terrified about. I'm not going to stop this being afraid. That's right. That's his human behavior. It is what it is. I know I'm going to get upset. I'm going to be joyful. I'm going to be happy. I know that I am hard-tooded as a human being because I'm nothing more than a bald pink monkey that's just who I am. He was, I'm going to be terrified. I know that. I can't stop that. I'm just going to change what I'm terrified of.

He doesn't think that that discomfort is necessarily a bad thing. I think we are so conditioned.

That discomfort is not the thing in any way shape or form.

Exactly. Well, I think that's a very counterintuitive notion because pain is there to get you to stop doing That's why we have physical pain. That's why we have emotional pain to say, Hey, pay attention. This is something you should avoid. But the people who are incredibly successful in every field are the ones who learn that pain is a signal. Pain isn't damage. I did extensive research on, exactly, on chronic pain, on how people create this chronic pain. Not that it's fake, it's real. Chronic pain is real pain. But the way it's created in us is by constantly We're constantly focusing on the fear of damage. I used to have back pain, and the traditional advice is, Okay, you got to ice it, you got to lay down, you got to heat it, you got to do this, you got to do this. You got to stop the pain, you got to stop the pain. We used to have these charts. They don't do it anymore, but they used to have these charts. Say, How bad is your pain? And so what are you doing? We're constantly paying attention to how bad is our pain. Focusing, hyper-focusing on pain, pain, pain, pain.

It pain is bad, pain is bad. Stop the pain. That's not true. That is not true because pain doesn't happen It doesn't happen here. It doesn't happen here. Pain happens here. It doesn't mean it's fake, it's real. But where else could pain be? It's completely in our heads. This billionaire entrepreneur, it doesn't surprise me, he still gets the same signals the rest of us gets. He still gets the terror. He still gets that thing, but he interprets differently. He's not judging it as bad. He's judging it as exciting, as exhilarating, as opportunity. He's seeing it differently. He's experiencing it differently through the power of beliefs, the power to change what we see, feel, and do. That's exactly right.

He changes his belief and the legal meaning behind it. I have friends of mine who are operators, especially force operators, and they always say that success is completely correlated to the amount of discomfort you can tolerate.

That's it. For how long? That's another trait, by the way, is persistence. Where we started our conversation was around motivation. That's really at the core of this. I'll tell you one of my favorite experiments that I talk about in the book. Have you ever heard about the Kurt Richter rat experiment? It's one of my faves. Kurt Richter, back in the 1950s, he takes some rats. He has wild rats. He has these domesticated lab rats, and he's doing experiments on how long rats can swim in water. He takes wild rats, he takes these lab rats, he puts them in a series of water. Then he takes them out. Okay. Please, Felicit.

Yeah.

Okay.. The first part of the experiment. Some people have heard the experiment. They know the ending about how the rats swim for a long time. But there's another part of the experiment that a lot of people don't understand is the difference between the wild rats and the domesticated rats. The wild rats were natural swimmers. They're more ferocious, they're stronger, you know higher muscle mass, they're grittier, they're more aggressive, all the tough aspects that you would think. And yet when he put these wild rats inside these cylinders, they swam far less, far shorter, less. Help me with the ground here. For less time than the domesticated rats, than the nice cushy lab rats, the nice cute white ones. They swam, the lab rats swam way longer. Why? Why would that be? Well, it turns out that even though the wild rats were grittier and stronger and meaner and tougher, they gave up faster. They gave up faster, especially when they were under stress, when they were handled by humans, when That's when they really gave up. The theory was that Richter concluded was that the lab rats, the domesticated rats, had experience with humans handling them and they knew that salvation might be possible.

They had this belief, it wasn't in their bodies, it was in their brains, that something might save me, that that human hand might scoop in from that cylinder of water and save me. Now, here's where it gets really interesting. He saw that the wild rats could only last for about 15 minutes in that cylinder. They would swim, swim, swim, 15 minutes, they'd give up. But then, Richter took those wild rats. He reached in, he scooped out the wild rat, he dried them off, let them catch their breath, and then put them back in the cylinder. He did this a few times. These rats went from swimming for 15 minutes to how much longer. I'll give the listener a minute to guess how much longer. They didn't swim for twice as long, not for 30 minutes. They didn't even swim for an hour longer, not 60 minutes, which would be amazing. I think about all the things in your life that you give up on. Imagine if I could give you some treatment that would quadruple how long you could last. That would be incredible. But they didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours.

They went from 15 minutes to 60 hours because because they knew that salvation was now possible. Correct. They had hope that something might come in and save them. To answer your question, successful people, they're not the smartest, they're not the best, they're not the strongest, they're the most persistent. Yes. That's the critical difference. They don't freaking give up because they have different beliefs that get them to keep trying and trying. You talk to anybody who's successful in business, they've failed more than people who think they're losers. You've seen it.

Yeah, absolutely. Over and over and over again. Again, we talk about, and I'm thinking about the operators that I know. People will go into it. A buddy of mine, his name is Mark Devine, SEAL Commander, and people walk up to him all the time, even when we're out there, Oh, my God, you're this person. How do I get through Hell Week? And he goes, You're not going to get through Hell Week. If your question is, how do I get through this very short process of this six-month evolution, you're going to lose. The ones that get through it are the ones who have the beliefs, to your point, of, All the one here, all these cadres, All the instructors are looking for the person who's going to help save them one day. That's their filling. They're trying to figure out, if my life's on the line, is this person someone I would be willing to make sure that I got home to my kids? And then the second thing is, is this person willing to die? My favorite example about all this is this one guy was going through training and he got to the swim portion, and he had to tie five knots underwater.

And he had already failed this multiple times. And this was his last time, and he's down there, and he's already The option is depleted, and he's tied four of the knots and he drowns. He absolutely blacks out and he droughts. There's this whole concept in seal training, make you drown proof, which basically means we've drowned you before. You know what it's like. It's okay, we'll pull you back out of the water. We'll resuscitate you. So this guy completely drowns. Pull him out of the water, they run CPR, and they bring him back. And the first thing out of his mouth is like, I didn't tie the last knot because he knew that. If he didn't tie the last knot, he was out. That was it. Those were the rules. He was, I didn't tie the knot. Did I pass? And the cadre goes, Dude, the test isn't, can you tie knots underwater? The test is, are you willing to die to complete this, to execute whatever this is? So yeah, you passed, dude. It's good. He's like, Oh, okay. And the ones who were willing to go through it, well, the ones were like, I'm just willing to die here because they knew two things.

Those two things. And I think redesigning your beliefs, it's not an easy thing to do. As we go through this, what are the things that shot you the most in your studies when you went through this process where you were like, I can't believe this is a reality? Because We know the rat story. You put them in, you take them out for five seconds, they put them back in, they swim for 60 hours. That's the thing I interrupted. But one of the other examples when you sat down and you're outside of prayer, that you're like, I wish someone could do this right now. If anyone is listening to this podcast, you're like, Whatever you're doing, just go do this. Whatever that one thing is.

Yeah. Oh, there's so many. I mean, literally, because beliefs shape your reality, they shape what you see, feel, and do. I mean, there's a section on relationships, how to repair relationships, how to have better relationships. There's a section on how to make money, how to see business opportunities, how to extend your lifespan. I'll tell you the thing that really blew my mind. That your beliefs... This is something you can do right now. Like, literally right now, I'll change your life. Studies have found that positive beliefs about aging are correlated with a lifespan increase of seven and a half years. That is more than changing your diet, than quitting smoking, than managing your cholesterol. Positive beliefs about aging. Now, it is true that correlation is not causation, but that's not the point. The point is that when you have positive beliefs about aging, what happens? A person who has a limiting beliefs about aging, how many times have you heard someone say, even at my age, I'm not that old, but I hear my friends who are younger than me even saying, I'm having a senior moment, I'm having a midlife moment. When you say stupid shit like that, you are training the brain to notice those things.

Over the years, saying it day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, your body responds accordingly. Because I can't do that. I have a 40-year-old back, a 45-year-old back, so I can't do that. If I can't do that, well, guess what? Your body starts to decay. If you start to decay, you can't go to do the things with your friends, and now your friends aren't involving you in the physical activities. Now, wouldn't you know it, 40, 50 years later, you do have a seven and a half year, shorter lifespan, all starting from these beliefs that started years and years ago, decades ago. That's something you can flip a switch right now, is to have positive beliefs about aging, that you can get better, that you can improve at any age. That's a switch you can flip right now. That's just the beginning. There's another Can I give you one more? We used to believe that the placebo effect was something that required deception. In order to show that the placebo effect work, you had to have a double-blind study That meant that the patient was blind to the placebo, that the person doing the study was blind to who was getting a placebo.

There was a lot of this deception around that. Then there was a researcher by the name of Ted Capchuck at Harvard who wanted to test this theory. He studied IBS patients. He gave IBS patients what's called an open-label placebo. He called them in. He said, Hello, Mr. And Mrs. So-and-so. I am going to give you a treatment for your IBS. Now, this treatment is a placebo. It is a completely inert substance, and here comes the important part, that has been shown to be effective for some people. Wouldn't you know it?

It worked. It was effective even though they were told it's a placebo It still worked.

In fact, Ted told me that even after this IBS study, several of the patients in the study came back to him and called him and said, Hey, Dr. Katchuk, can I get some more of those placebo pills? It gets better. If you go on to Amazon right now, search for placebo pills, you will find placebo pills for sale that are called placebo pills. They work. Now, they don't heal, but they absolutely will They change the perception of your symptoms. Insomnia, ADHD, depression, anxiety, all of these things have been shown to be highly responsive to placebo. A lot of the things that I used to make fun of… My wife This family is Chinese, and so they're into traditional Chinese medicine, the herbs and the Feng shui and a bunch. I used to make fun of that stuff all the time. I don't make fun of that stuff anymore. Because, again, I release myself from this noose of everything having to be true all the time. Correct. But rather, if it works, who cares if it's placebo? As long as it's not costing you a ton of money, as long as it's not hurting you in some way because it's some poisonous substance, do it.

Does the vitamin C actually cure your cold? No. But it actually definitely will change your perception of those symptoms. That's, again, something you can do right away. You can start taking placebo pills and it probably will work.

I love that we're now selling placebo pills.

At least though, it's honest. You know what pisses me off? It's at least one being honest. I don't know what you're selling on your show, but I hear a lot of podcasters that are selling. Awesome. Thank God, because if I'm called to do one of these podcasts where they're selling these stupid fucking green drinks and all this bullshit, and they act like that's going to make you healthy. Meanwhile, you're not going to the gym, you're eating like crap, you're drinking every night. The AG1 is not going to do shit for you, okay? Nothing. But other than the placebo effect. Now we're getting there. Yeah, that's okay. I'll take them. I'm going to say the phrase.

Nita and I have not seen any changes for ourselves for agencies. It's a great placebo or whatever it is.

It's a great placebo. It's a fun to you. Exactly. I don't have any problem with With the honesty around it. I think that's what we need. That makes me comfortable with saying, You know what? Do the ritual, do the prayers, do the potions. As long as it's not harming you, it will have... Here's another thing that blew my mind. Did you know that placebo effect is actually getting stronger? No. That drug companies, check this out, drug companies are having an increasing problem because when you want to prove that a medication is efficacious, you have to show that it's more effective than a placebo. It's not good enough if a new drug is effective. It has to be better than a placebo. But pharmaceutical companies are having a big problem because the placebo effect is getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Why? Because more people are expecting placebos to work because they hear they're effective.

That would be a nice thing because whenever you see the ads on TV, you're like, take this pill, it'll cure your headache. Side effects, anal leakage, your head will explode, you'll die, your dog will catch on fire. I'm like, Oh my God.

It's all the same example. Okay, so this brings up a very interesting question. I I think that we should not tell... When I go to the doctor and I have to get some medication or something, I tell him, Don't tell me the side effects. Do not tell me the side effects because of the opposite of the placebo effect is the nocebo effect. I'll tell you another amazing study. Patient A barges into a hospital, has a pill bottle in his hands, spills it to the floor, collapses. The words out of his mouth says, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. Pats out. They put him on a girney. They measure his blood pressure. It's dangerously low. His heartbeat is rock bottom. This guy has clearly overdosed on something. They don't know what. They pick up the pill bottle. It says, Call this number. They call the number. They say, yes, this medication was part of a pill trial that this guy took all these pills. That's part of a pill trial. They say, well, what was it? What was in this pill? He said, that was a placebo. They tell the patient that he took an inert substance.

Fifteen minutes later, he's completely revived. His heart rate is normal. His blood pressure is normal. Everything's back to normal. This is called the nocebo effect. This is actually even more dangerous. This is what I'm really worried about in society. Placebo effect would be nice. I think we are prescribing nocebos on a massive scale, and we need to be very careful about that because it's what we talked about in the very beginning about your great question around identity. Your labels are your limits. So If we tell people that you have XYZ diagnosis and we medicalize otherwise normal human behavior, that can have a very serious nocibo effect because we will conform to those beliefs as well.

We'll force other people to do this. I know someone I deeply care for, self-diagnosed. I'm going to use a pronoun, self-diagnosed for ADHD.

Yeah, that's the worst. That's the worst of all worlds, self-diagnosis. There's so much bullshit about this self-diagnosis going around. At least you can say, Okay, get a proper diagnosis. Even though today, I've never actually met anyone who's gone for an ADHD diagnosis who doesn't get one. Everybody gets one.

It's like when I watch a commercial on TV or read at WebMD, I'm like, Oh, my God, I read there.

You've got all those things. I might have uterus cancer.

I don't have an uterus, but okay. This individual went through and hunted down therapists until this person found a therapist that said, You're right, you do have ADHD. Here's the pill. I was like, Oh, my Gosh, it's heartbreaking. There's so much value here and here. I could talk about this for days and days and days. I know you just released a book. Where could people get it? Where can people get a hold of this? How do they get a hold of you to jump on the conversation and have these? Because I'm blessed because I get to talk to you. We get to have conversations when it's not recorded, which are far more blunt than these are. Where could people jump on? How do they track you down? What's the best way to get a hold of you?

Absolutely. My website is neeranfar. Com. It's my first name, n-I-R-andfar. Com. The book is called Beyond Belief, and that's available wherever books are sold. There's a special bonus. We have a 30-day Belief Transformation Journal. It's 120 pages. It's absolutely free. If you buy the book, anywhere you buy the book, you come and give us your little order number at neerandfar. Com, and you can get that beyond Belief Belief Transformation Journal absolutely free.

I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. This is a lot of fun.

That's a wrap on another episode of The Proven podcast. Your success isn't about willpower, it's about design. Stop blaming distraction. Start building discipline into your systems. While others scroll, you could be compounding focus. Remember, if your habits aren't intentional, your results were were were were were were were were.