Nir Eyal: How To Change Beliefs That Keep You Stuck… And Stop Suffering

In This Episode, Nir Eyal Uncovers:

[01:15] Motivation Is a Triangle

• How someone can succeed in one area of life and stay completely stuck in another with the same access, skills, and information.
• Why motivation is not a straight line between behavior and benefit.
• What the missing third component is that holds motivation together.
• How a belief about a boss, a process, or yourself can quietly dismantle every effort you make.
• Why beliefs change what you see, what you feel, and ultimately what you do.

Resources:

• Nir Eyal
• Beyond Belief | Nir Eyal
• Free 5-Minute Belief Change Guide

[05:20] The Flower Story: Beliefs Are Tools Not Truths

• How Nir stayed up until one in the morning ordering flowers from Singapore for his mother’s birthday in Florida.
• What his mother said when he called to ask if she received them.
• Why venting about someone actually reinforces your beliefs about them rather than releasing the pain.
• How we see people not as they are but as we are.

[08:20] Four Important Questions and the Turnaround

• What the four questions of Inquiry-Based Stress Reduction actually ask you to sit with.
• How asking whether something is absolutely true reveals that very few of our painful beliefs qualify as facts.
• What you become when you hold onto a belief that your mother is too judgmental and hard to please.
• How imagining a belief simply evaporating can make you feel lighter before you have even changed anything.
• What the turnaround reveals when you find that the opposite of your belief can also be true.
• How misattribution of emotion works.
• Why beliefs are tools, not truth.

Resources:

• Byron Katie: The Work

[19:50] The Science of Separating Pain from Suffering

• How a man underwent a 55-minute surgical procedure with scalpel cutting into flesh and metal screws removed from bone while fully awake and with no anesthesia.
• Why if the human mind can separate pain from suffering at that level, what are the rest of us really complaining about.
• How the brain processes 11 million bits of information while conscious awareness handles only 50.
• What we are actually looking at when we say we see reality.
• How pain and suffering are two completely different things.
• Why we quit is not because something is actually too hard but because a limiting belief interprets the pain as suffering.

[28:15] What Prayer Actually Does to the Brain

• How Nir stopped praying at age six when his family was scammed out of nearly everything and his parents were fighting constantly.
• What the research consistently shows about people who pray.
• What a study comparing three groups revealed: people who prayed with or without faith in the supernatural both showed significantly higher pain tolerance.
• What Nir found when he asked five religious leaders whether he could pray despite having doubts about God.
• How the rabbi’s response changed everything: he essentially asked why you would have no questions about an omniscient eternal being.
• Why we will first do, and then we will hear.
• How the practice itself is where you get the revelations, not the belief that comes first.

[38:15] How to Pray Without Perfect Faith

• How choosing a belief that the trauma of his parents being scammed caused a young Nir to create a coping strategy that served him for decades before becoming a limitation.
• Why Nir now compartmentalizes certain questions as unknowable rather than demanding they become facts.
• How he currently prays and what he prays for specifically.
• Why that kind of prayer is a recentering practice that does not depend on anything outside of you to change.
• How people who call themselves spiritual but not religious have measurably higher rates of depression and anxiety than people who participate in a faith community.
• What the priest told Nir about where miracles actually happen: in the pews, in the community, in the person sitting next to you.

[42:40] The Word “Belief” Has “Lie” Inside It

• How researching the placebo effect completely changed Nir’s view on what he had once dismissed as woo-woo.
• What the difference between sickness and illness actually is.
• How 80% of all healthcare spending goes toward treating illness, not sickness.
• Why placebo was as effective as the leading IBS medication in a Harvard study.
• The word belief contains the word lie right inside it.

[46:40] Pain Is Information + Mental Contrasting

• Why there is zero correlation between whether a spine surgeon can identify a slipped disc on an image and whether the patient experiences any pain at all.
• How pain reprocessing therapy has proven that chronic pain with no known physical cause can often be resolved by changing how the brain interprets the signals.
• Why pain is not bad, it is just information.
• How students who visualized getting an A on an exam actually got worse grades than students who did no visualization at all.
• What athletes and fighter pilots actually visualize to create the results they want.
• How Michael Phelps rehearsed exactly what he would feel and do if his goggles fell off before the race where they actually did.
• Why manifesting from a place of lack is a trap because it says you cannot stop suffering until you get the thing.

[54:05] The World as a Simulation

• How we live in a simulation because our brain can’t process all information we receive.
• How the brain is actually a prediction device, not a recording machine.
• What Maya, the Hindu philosophical concept of illusion, points to that modern neuroscience is now confirming.
• Why none of us see reality clearly.

[58:55] Three Things You Need to Know About Belief

• Why so many problems in the world come from people treating their beliefs as facts.
• How you are capable of far more than you believe right now.
• Why your beliefs shape your perception of reality, not reality itself.
• We are all working with the tools we have.
• What changed in the relationship with Nir’s daughter when he stopped expecting her to behave the way he needed her to so he could stop suffering.
• Why suffering is contagious and people are drawn to those who have learned how not to do it.

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All Resources From This Episode

• Nir Eyal
• Beyond Belief | Nir Eyal
• Free 5-Minute Belief Change Guide
• Byron Katie: The Work