Introduction
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 568 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the psychology of why People Buy.
Melina Palmer: In today’s episode, I’m joined by Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and now Beyond Belief. Ready?
Melina Palmer: Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly.
Announcer: Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
The Hidden Power of Belief
Melina Palmer: Hello.
Melina Palmer: Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast.
Melina Palmer: What if the biggest limits you face in your work, your habits, your relationship aren’t coming from the outside?
Melina Palmer: What if the real constraint is what you believe? Today’s guest is Nir Eyal, a friend of the show and someone I deeply admire for his ability to bring clarity to complex ideas.
Melina Palmer: His books, Hooked and Indistractable, have shaped how thousands of businesses think about behavior and design.
Melina Palmer: And he was one of the very first guests here on the show. Such an amazing person.
Melina Palmer: And now I’m so excited that he is back with a bold new lens on something many of us overlook: belief.
Melina Palmer: In this episode we talk about how beliefs form, why they stick, and what it takes to change them—and why they matter so much more than many of us believe. I adore Nir and his work and I’m so excited for you to hear this one.
Melina Palmer: Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch and more.
Melina Palmer: It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/568. Now let’s jump right in.
Melina Palmer: Nir Eyal, welcome back to the Brainy Business Podcast.
Nir Eyal: Oh, so great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yay.
Melina Palmer: I know I mentioned—I’ve been, so audience world…
Melina Palmer: I’ve been talking like pinging Nir for a few years now saying there has to be another book and whenever it’s ready, like you have an open invitation.
Melina Palmer: And so I’m so delighted that we’ve got a new book and a new topic.
Melina Palmer: Can you share a little bit about your background and kind of what you’ve done before for those who don’t know you yet and you know, what you’ve been up to for these past several years working on the new book?
Nir Eyal: Yes, I have been feverishly working on my new book, Beyond Belief. And Beyond Belief is really an exploration of how our hidden assumptions dictate what we see, feel, and do.
Nir Eyal: And so I spent the past five years digging into what I call these three powers of belief: the power of attention, the power of anticipation, and the power of agency.
Nir Eyal: And let me tell you, this book has done more to shape the way I view the world.
Nir Eyal: I thought I kind of understood a thing or two having written two previous books. One on how to build habit-forming products, the second one, Indistractable, about how to break these bad habits we have with distraction.
Nir Eyal: So I’ve been pretty deep into this stuff. But wow, the research that I went down for this book really changed my life like no other.
Nir Eyal: I do so many things different in my day-to-day life and so different in terms of how I advise my business clients, in terms of how we should lead, how we should build products, how we should live our day-to-day lives.
Nir Eyal: This has really been a revelation for me.
Melina Palmer: Oh, my goodness. Similarly, as I was going through the book, I was like, whoa, I didn’t know that. That’s so cool, right? Like so many things that were…
Nir Eyal: That’s a huge comment because I know you read a lot of books in this field. What was the most—if you don’t mind me asking you—what was the most memorable? Like, “Oh, I hadn’t heard that before” or “Wow, I didn’t see that.”
Hypnosedation and the Keyhole of Attention
Melina Palmer: So one that has really stood out is this—and I will say the thing and then you can talk about it, right? But that people are having surgeries without anesthesia and are just using hypnosis and the power of belief, which is crazy bananas.
Melina Palmer: And I feel like I could never—like, I would never trust myself to do that under any circumstance.
Melina Palmer: And then even as it talks, the story that you have in the book I think is a great one. So that can come in and then, then wait, wait, wait…
Nir Eyal: Before you say the second one, I think people are literally going to turn off the podcast if they think that’s what the podcast is going to be about. That is not what the podcast is about.
Nir Eyal: I want those people real quick because the reason I talk about that story—and I put it really right up front because it’s so shocking, it’s so unbelievable and true—is because the book is, you know, I’m my target audience.
Nir Eyal: When I was thinking like, “Okay, who’s the demographic for my audience?” My audience for this book are what I call “productive skeptics.”
Nir Eyal: They are people who want to be better at work, they want to be better at life. They know that there’s more that they can do to grow and be better. But they’re very skeptical.
Nir Eyal: And so, you know, I have a science background. Every book I write has 30 pages of peer-reviewed studies in the back. I look at those studies. I used to kind of accept studies. Now I really look at the studies after the replication crisis we’ve had in the social sciences.
Nir Eyal: So I’m very, very picky about the science that I will put in my books. And this, when I first heard about hypnosedation, I said “No, come on, there’s a trick, right?” It’s definitely some kind of mumbo-jumbo woo-woo stuff.
Nir Eyal: And it’s real. Thousands of people have gone under surgery. And I talked to many people who did it, but the person in the book, I literally saw the video of his surgery.
Nir Eyal: I talked with his doctors, I talked with the person who trained him on how to do the hypnotherapy. And I didn’t put it in the book because I want people to get hypnosedation. I ain’t doing hypnosedation. There’s no way. Probably not. Maybe someday, but no, at this very moment I wouldn’t do it.
Nir Eyal: But the reason I put that in the book is because I wanted to show folks that if the mind can do that… Daniel Gisler gets screws removed from his bone. He had an accident in his 50s. He tripped and he fractured a bone in his ankle.
Nir Eyal: He had to get these screws put in; that was done with anesthesia. Then about five years later, he learns about hypnosedation. He gets interested in it, he gets trained in it himself.
Nir Eyal: And they cut into his skin without general anesthesia, without local anesthetic, nothing. And they take out these screws. It’s about an hour operation, 100% without anesthesia.
Nir Eyal: And so what I wanted to really show was this concept of how we live life through a keyhole—this power of attention that we have.
Nir Eyal: The brain takes in about 11 million bits of information per second, but we only process about 50 bits per second. So that contrast—50 versus 11 million bits of information—shows us that there is this “keyhole of attention” that we live our life through, that we only see an itty-bitty amount of reality.
Nir Eyal: I mean, right now, for example, if I asked you to pay attention to my voice and also listen to the hum of the air conditioning in the room and also take in all the things that are around you in your peripheral vision, and also pay attention to your breath—you can’t do it.
Nir Eyal: It’s impossible. You can cycle through those things, kind of like a security system cycles through views of a video camera, but you can’t pay attention to all those things at the same time.
Nir Eyal: And so what he was able to do, and what thousands of people have done through hypnosedation, is to focus their attention so tightly on one source of information that they’re actually concocting in their head.
Nir Eyal: He talks about in the book how he does this so that they can tune out the other sensory inputs, this principally being pain.
Nir Eyal: And so what I wanted to show from that was that we can do this in all kinds of areas of our life, right? In Indistractable, I learned about how time management is pain management.
Nir Eyal: When we procrastinate, it’s really an impulse control issue. When I scroll my phone versus working on a big project or doing whatever, it’s because I am escaping discomfort.
Nir Eyal: Well, if Daniel Gisler can have metal removed from his bones without anesthesia and manage pain that way—wow. What else is possible, right? What possible pain can we be suffering through in our lives, emotionally, physically, financially? Stress, whatever it might be. There’s no way that compares to surgery without anesthesia.
Nir Eyal: So that’s why I told that story. That’s not what the entire book is about, but it was pretty shocking to me, at least. But thank you for mentioning that.
The Impact of Focus and Expectations
Melina Palmer: Yeah. No, and for me, with that, exactly what you’re saying, right? Where it’s like, “Okay, if I feel like I can’t do—if there’s anything that’s like, well, it’s just so hard to focus on”—to know that the way the brain can filter these things out…
Melina Palmer: And what I really think stood out to me a lot in that story as well was the moment… so you talk about how then the doctor says, “Oh, there’s about 10 minutes left” to the staff and everything, right?
Melina Palmer: And that brought him out of the hypnosedation enough to where the last stitches were like the most painful part of that procedure for him, even though that’s like the simplest thing, because his mind focused on that. And then all you can focus on is, “Oh my gosh, that’s going into my leg.”
Melina Palmer: And so that shift that he experienced… it’s not like that guy’s just super powerful (which potentially, yes, he has a powerful brain and trained for that). But to know that distraction can creep in. If you’re not really knowing what you need to be focused on, and also that that can happen and it’s okay. And then you can bring yourself back when you need to.
Nir Eyal: Yeah. By the way, folks, this is why you tune in to this podcast right here. You see what she just did? I really have to compliment you for a second because I’ve been on hundreds of podcasts, and it’s amazing to me that you really put in the time and effort to read the book. You remember the story. That means so much to me as an author. It means a lot to your audience, too. So on behalf of your audience, thank you for doing that. It’s awesome.
Melina Palmer: Thank you. Thank you.
Nir Eyal: And just to finish the point from that story, what I took away was the doctor—it was the first time he had performed hypnosedation, and Daniel had to kind of convince the doctor, “No, no, this is fine, it’s going to be okay.”
Nir Eyal: Но the doctor didn’t realize that that was a big no-no; that you’re not supposed to have any cue to the patient that the surgery will end soon until it’s really, really, really done.
Nir Eyal: Because that’s when Daniel started taking himself out of that hypnotic state. He widened the aperture of his attention. His attention went from just his little focus of his dreamland—he puts himself on a beach in his mind—and he opened that aperture to involve what was happening in the operating room.
Nir Eyal: That’s when he started feeling the pain. Not the wrenching of metal from bone, but the tiny stitches at the very end. And so he learned from that to not release himself from that meditative, hypnotic state until the very, very, very end.
Nir Eyal: But what an incredible demonstration. I mean, if our brain… by the way, this is not one person; tens of thousands of people do this. This is not standard practice, but it’s not all that unusual. In France, Belgium, many parts of Europe, they do this hypnosedation.
Nir Eyal: It’s becoming more and more popular because it turns out people heal way faster. Their vitals are more stable, they don’t need the kind of full general anesthetic that other patients do, and they recover much, much quicker.
Nir Eyal: So it’s becoming much more popular. But what a lesson for us in terms of how we can focus our attention on one thing and then zoom in and out as we need to, to block out the uncomfortable sensations that aren’t serving us.
Reframing Beliefs as Tools
Melina Palmer: Yeah, it’s like the light and shadow side of any concept. Focusing illusion can be really bad if all you’re thinking about is, “Oh, my boss must be staring at… is there a stain on my shirt? They must not like me.”
Melina Palmer: But I like to talk to people about how you can use that for good. So if you are training yourself to say, “No, my boss thinks I have good ideas,” and you’re trying to pick up on those signals, you can focus on those positive things where you want to change behavior.
Melina Palmer: If you do go into it saying, “I’m a terrible public speaker” or “My boss hates me,” those beliefs are potentially not serving you very well. So change them, focus on something else, and it can work really well.
Nir Eyal: That’s a great point. There’s actually another study that I mentioned in the book, which is a pretty famous one: the “scar study.” They put a scar on participants and they said, “We want to test people’s reaction to facial disfigurement. How does the public treat people with a scar?”
Nir Eyal: So they put the scar on people’s faces, and then they say, “You’re going to go into a room, and we want you to observe very carefully. Pay attention to how you’re treated.”
Nir Eyal: But before you go, “Wait, wait, wait. We want to do a quick touch-up on your makeup.” And in that process, they actually took the scar off without the participant knowing that the scar had been removed.
Nir Eyal: This is in a chapter where I talk about how we invent problems that don’t exist. Because what turned out to happen is when they thought they had a huge scar that secretly had been removed, they started seeing problems and behaviors that didn’t exist.
Nir Eyal: They reported that people were rude, people weren’t treating them equally, people were staring at the scar, they were acting weird, they were being discriminated against.
Nir Eyal: Turns out they didn’t have a scar. But they were hyper-fixating and they weren’t lying. They were not making it up because to them, their reality—based on their beliefs—was picking up details in that keyhole of attention. They were focusing on the mannerisms of the person, the tiny intonations of voice.
Nir Eyal: And in their mind they were very clearly seeing that they were being treated differently because of the scar that, of course, didn’t exist.
Melina Palmer: Yep. Yeah, definitely. And it’s just one of those things that when we focus, we’re going to feel it. Sometimes you have a self-fulfilling prophecy in there. Sometimes it’s just in your own illusion that you believe to be there—not illusion in a negative way, but the lens your brain is putting over stuff.
Melina Palmer: I loved a couple things from Indistractable that I say to people all the time, being that you can’t call something a distraction until you know what it’s distracting you from.
Nir Eyal: Right.
Melina Palmer: And then also, the opposite of distraction is traction. I told you then like, “Oh my gosh, I never thought about that,” and you said, “Well, it took me five years.”
Nir Eyal: You make it all worth it. Thank you.
The Difference Between Fact, Faith, and Belief
Melina Palmer: One of those little nuggets in this one too is that beliefs… the difference between it being a tool and a truth. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Nir Eyal: Yes. This is really the big takeaway of the book for me. Beliefs are tools, not truths.
Nir Eyal: Boy oh boy, especially with everything that’s happening in the news, so many of our problems today come from the fact that people don’t realize this because they conflate beliefs with facts.
Nir Eyal: Facts are not beliefs. There’s a difference. A fact is an objective truth which is true no matter if you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. It doesn’t care if you believe in it; it is an objective fact.
Nir Eyal: On the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is not fact. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. For example, the faith that God rewards people who are good. You don’t need evidence for that statement; that is purely faith.
Nir Eyal: Then there’s something in the middle that is called a belief. A belief is a strongly held conviction subject to evidence. I think we confuse beliefs and think belief is either faith or belief is a fact.
Nir Eyal: But a belief is something very, very special. That’s why the book is called Beyond Belief. It’s about going beyond just our conventional definition of beliefs in order to do something that is beyond belief.
Nir Eyal: When we use those beliefs as convictions that are subject to new evidence, we can use them as tools. That changed my life because I realized I was carrying around all these assumptions and lenses that were coloring how I see things in a way that hurt my relationships.
Nir Eyal: There’s shocking evidence that we actually don’t see people accurately. We don’t see people; we see our beliefs about people. Think about the workplace. “Oh, Jake. What a jerk, man. He’s always saying weird things and he’s late.”
Nir Eyal: What we begin to do is not see Jake clearly. Jake’s spouse doesn’t see Jake that way. We see our beliefs about Jake. And so that really can hurt us. We don’t give people a clean slate. We can stay stuck because we don’t realize what we’re doing with these beliefs.
Nir Eyal: Using them as tools in interpersonal relationships was a big revelation for me. We can choose these beliefs as tools, not truths.
Applying “The Work” to Interpersonal Relationships
Melina Palmer: You mentioned the piece with your mom, which I of course loved. It was really useful and interesting. You had a series of statements and questions that you walked through. Can you talk about that section?
Nir Eyal: Yeah. So I’ll set up the story a little bit. I was living in Singapore, where I am today. I grew up in central Florida. It was my mom’s birthday and I had spent a lot of time and effort trying to make sure she would get beautiful flowers on time. I stayed up late here in Singapore so I could call the florist in the United States.
Nir Eyal: Anyway, I ordered her some flowers and I call her for her birthday. I say, “Hey, mom, did you get the flowers?” She said, “Yes, I got the flowers, honey. You should really call them and tell them the flowers are not so great, they’re a little dead.”
Nir Eyal: Every time I tell the story, I kind of get goosebumps and I immediately time-warp into 15-year-old me. The thing that I blurted out was, “Well, then I won’t get you flowers anymore! Forget it!” Not the right thing to say.
Nir Eyal: But in the moment, that’s how I felt because in my mind, my belief was “My mom is too hard to please.” And so that belief took over what I saw. She said one thing, but I heard something completely different. I felt awful and angry.
Nir Eyal: My wife was right next to me on the call. After the call, she said, “Wow, that was interesting. Do you need to do ‘The Work’?”
Nir Eyal: “The Work” is the work of Byron Katie, who’s a counselor. She developed a methodology for questioning your beliefs. The idea is to take that belief, “My mother is too hard to please,” and run it through a series of questions.
Nir Eyal: Question one: Is it true? The answer is easy. “Of course it’s true! Didn’t you hear what I just told you?”
Nir Eyal: Question two: Is it really true? Is there even a 1% chance that it’s not true? Is there any other possible interpretation? And, you know, I didn’t want to admit it, but… “Yeah, okay, maybe she’s not too hard to please. Maybe the flowers really weren’t that great. Maybe she wasn’t judging me.”
Nir Eyal: Question three is: Who would you be without that belief?
Nir Eyal: Essentially, what you’re prompted to do is to assemble what I call a “portfolio of perspectives.” Most things in life don’t sit in the realm of fact or faith; they sit in this belief category—a conviction based on evidence.
Nir Eyal: If I can change that conviction based on what I’m able to now see clearly, I can develop that portfolio. We do what’s called a “turnaround.” This again comes from Byron Katie. We want to see the belief from different vantage points. Not trying to change our mind, but having a “deck of cards” to choose from.
Nir Eyal: For example, a turnaround to the self: “I am too hard to please.” That hit home. Why did I have to be the perfect son that delivered perfect flowers? Why do I have this standard that if my mom says anything judgmental, I need her to say thanks in exactly the way I would like? Maybe I’m the one that’s hard to please.
Nir Eyal: My relationship with my family, particularly my mom, has never been better. My relationship with my wife—we’ve been married now for 25 years—is better than ever. My relationship with my 17-year-old daughter—we are good buddies. Now I can pluck not the instinctual reaction, but rather the wise perspective that serves me.
The Three Powers: Attention, Anticipation, and Agency
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. You can just see how this can come into job interviews or when you’re pitching a new client. You can find the way that a belief can be a tool.
Nir Eyal: That’s exactly it. I used to have terrible stage fright. Telling myself the belief that I’m not good on stage was a choice. Now I have evidence that I am good, but I still have to choose a different perspective when I feel nervous. If I think getting nervous is bad, I don’t perform as well.
Nir Eyal: Or sleep! Last night I did not sleep well. I got up at 1:00 AM and didn’t fall back asleep until 5:00 AM. My old perspective was, “Man, I didn’t get enough sleep. That’s bad. Look at the facts.”
Nir Eyal: But I can choose to believe that I’m not affected by one night of poor sleep. I can choose the perspective that serves me. You adopt these beliefs that affect your performance pretty dramatically.
Melina Palmer: We talked about attention and hypnosedation. Can you share a little about anticipation and agency?
Nir Eyal: Yeah. So, Attention is about how beliefs change what you literally see in the present moment. People on a diet see food as larger; people afraid of heights see distances as farther.
Nir Eyal: Anticipation is about what is to come. This part of the book focuses in large part on business. One of my favorite things to learn was how powerful the placebo effect is in marketing.
Nir Eyal: I’ve turned around my perception of marketing. I used to think marketing was advertising—getting the word out. Not at all. Advertising gets the word out; marketing shapes the anticipation of the product experience.
Nir Eyal: There’s a study where they give people the same wine but tell them one is $5 and one is $45. People rate the $45 bottle as much tastier. What’s surprising is that inside FMRI machines, their brains literally had greater blood flow in regions associated with pleasure when they thought the wine was $45. They weren’t lying; they literally experienced it differently.
Nir Eyal: I talk about Liquid Death. It’s just water. But people tattoo the logo on their bodies! They swear the water is better. If we can make people pay premium prices for water by branding it differently, what else can we change? This isn’t trickery; this is what people are paying for—the anticipation and the preconceived notions.
Agency and Fighting Entropy
Melina Palmer: How do we change beliefs when people already think something else about us, like the GM versus Toyota example?
Nir Eyal: It comes down to setting new expectations. Apple is a wonderful example. Apple has never done anything new—they weren’t first with the MP3 player, the laptop, or the tablet. What they did was reset expectations. They sent signals associated with the brand to reset what people expect.
Nir Eyal: Liquid Death did the same. People think it’s just “heavy metal water,” but it’s actually about “death to plastic.” It gave people a way to blend edginess with virtue signaling.
Nir Eyal: Great brands have a “mythology,” which is a belief. Every product needs a bigger reason for existing than just money. You succeed by building things people want, or by making them want what you’re building. Successful companies like Liquid Death do both.
Melina Palmer: And the third power, Agency?
Nir Eyal: Agency is the power to do what we believe. In a time of uncertainty—AI, markets, geopolitics—agency is at risk.
Nir Eyal: The number one reason people fail is because they quit. Quitting when you could have persisted is sad. We want to reshape our beliefs around an internal locus of control.
Nir Eyal: Understand what you can change versus what you can’t. Interestingly, we often want an external locus of control for others (giving them grace for being late) but an internal one for ourselves. Even when society is stacked against you, those with an internal locus of control still do better.
Nir Eyal: Don’t live life thinking, “I’ll be happy after I retire” or “after the kids move out.” Chaos is the point. The philosopher Schrodinger said the definition of life is “that which fights entropy.”
Nir Eyal: To be alive is to fight chaos. That sparked me to be more agentic. Realizing that fighting that chaos is what it means to be alive.
Conclusion
Melina Palmer: I love that. You have to get Beyond Belief. It’s a million amazing examples. For everyone who is now so excited to get their copy, what is the best path?
Nir Eyal: I blog at nirandfar.com (https://www.google.com/search?q=N-I-R-and-far.com). The book is Beyond Belief, and it’s available wherever books are sold.
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Nir Eyal for joining me. One thing that’s sticking with me is that beliefs aren’t facts; they feel true because our brains are wired that way. But just like habits, beliefs can be built, shaped, and strategically used to our advantage.
Melina Palmer: If you choose to believe something else and focus on attention, anticipation, and agency, anything becomes possible.
Melina Palmer: Come share a belief you’re ready to change with me on social media. You’ll find me as @thebrainybiz and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
