Insight Editions · No. 269
Beyond Belief
The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results
Nir Eyal with Julie Li
Nir Eyal argues that plans fail when belief fails, and treats beliefs as tools to be held firmly and revised on evidence, with practical methods for spotting limiting beliefs and replacing them with useful ones.
A study guide to Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal with Julie Li. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
Nir Eyal (author of Hooked and Indistractable), writing with Julie Li, argues that belief, not willpower or the perfect plan, is the base of sustained motivation, and that beliefs should be chosen like tools: for usefulness, kept honest by evidence. Beliefs work through three powers: they shape what we see (attention), what we feel (anticipation) and what we do (agency). Liberating beliefs are built from small actions that create evidence, never from wishing.
- The foundation (ch. 1). Thirty years of yo-yo dieting taught Eyal that plans fail when belief fails. His Motivation Triangle puts belief beneath behavior and benefit; beliefs sit between fact and faith and must survive feedback, stay revisable and require no denial. Richter's swimming rats (15 minutes versus 60 hours) suggest quitting, not capacity, sets most limits.
- Attention: the power to see (ch. 2-4). The conscious mind sees through a keyhole, so the brain assembles reality from prior beliefs. Belief can mute surgical pain (Daniel Gisler's hypnosedation), invent problems (prevalence-induced concept change, rumination), poison relationships (fixed by Byron Katie's four questions and three turnarounds) and reveal opportunities (Anne Mahlum, provoked luck), until success hardens the same filters into blind spots.
- Anticipation: the power to feel (ch. 5-7). Experience is the brain's prediction. The Experience Loop (believe, anticipate, feel, confirm) explains Liquid Death and pricey wine; pain is a danger forecast that pain reprocessing (66% pain-free) and honest placebos can retrain; belief changes biology through behavior, which is why placebo steroids worked and Counterclockwise and the housekeepers did not replicate. Positive aging beliefs track with 7.5 extra years.
- Agency: the power to do (ch. 8-10). Helplessness is the default; hope is learned through mastery experiences. Dashrath Manjhi and Blair Braverman show agency inside real constraints, built by four compounding practices (evidence, focus, story, systems). Prayer and ritual build agency without certainty through five pathways and constructive translation. Nocebos and labels work in reverse, so every diagnosis must pass a functional test, and avoidance, recovered memories and pills-only care can shrink agency.
- Good beliefs versus bad (ch. 11). Positive fantasy saps motivation (the Circle of False Promise); mental contrasting pairs goals with obstacles. David Fajgenbaum abandoned his Santa Claus theory, catalogued every barrier and found sirolimus for his own disease. Hope and action must run in parallel.
- How far to trust it. Eyal names failed replications his rivals still sell, but many supporting studies are small, correlational or survivor stories, and some citations are stretched; critical-lens boxes mark where the evidence is thin.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths | Belief underpins motivation; choose beliefs for usefulness, test them against reality |
| 2 | Why Believing Is Seeing | The brain assembles reality from belief; reality logs, illeism and timers curb rumination |
| 3 | The Secret to Better Relationships | Perception is the problem; four questions, three turnarounds, six daily practices |
| 4 | How to See Opportunities Others Miss | Belief-tuned attention provokes luck, but success-built beliefs become blind spots |
| 5 | You Already Live in a Simulation | Experience is prediction; the Experience Loop and selective skepticism |
| 6 | Sickness Is in the Body; Illness Is in the Mind | Pain is a forecast; PRT, honest placebos and six placebo-design levers |
| 7 | Living Longer, Stronger, and Smarter | Belief changes biology through behavior; aging beliefs matter |
| 8 | How to Take Control of Your Life | Helplessness is default; agency grows from evidence, focus, story and systems |
| 9 | Prayer Works, With or Without Faith | Five ritual pathways build agency; constructive translation lets doubters belong |
| 10 | Your Labels Are Your Limits | Nocebos and diagnoses can foreclose identity; treat labels as information |
| 11 | Good Beliefs, Bad Beliefs | Fantasy saps effort; mental contrasting and action turn hope into results |
Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths
Eyal opens with a confession: thirty years of yo-yo dieting in which every plan worked until he stopped believing in it. His diagnosis is that belief, not discipline or the perfect plan, drives sustained motivation, and that beliefs are best treated as working tools chosen for usefulness and tested against reality. A belief should be judged less by whether it can be proven than by whether it serves you while staying open to evidence.
The diet graveyard
Eyal grew up as the overweight kid in Central Florida who sat at the edge of the community pool in an oversized T-shirt and kept it on even in the water. His friends wore new, artfully torn mall jeans; he squeezed into his overweight father's hand-me-down jeans, cut down by half, sucking in his stomach until his ribs hurt.
Over the next three decades his bookshelf became a graveyard of diet books, each one embraced with a convert's zeal:
- 1994: low-fat. He logged fat grams in a spiral notebook and celebrated as the scale dropped.
- About three years later: vegetarian. Persuaded that meat was the enemy, he stocked the fridge with tofu and potatoes.
- Then low-carb and keto. Former staples became contraband as he preached metabolic flexibility.
- Finally intermittent fasting, which he believed was a higher state of being.
Each plan did work for a while: he lost weight, felt better and became the party bore who explained his latest revelation to anyone in range. Then, every time, he would meet an article or expert attacking the current regime ("low-fat raises hunger", "plant diets lack nutrients", "ketosis harms kidneys"). As confidence fell, so did results. Failure-justifying beliefs arrived with the pounds: exercise is hard for big people, the food-industrial complex is rigged, so nothing he ate mattered. Without conviction as a guardrail, eating became a free-for-all and his weight chart traced a roller coaster for years. The pattern was not in the calories or carbs; every success unravelled in the same way, for a reason he had not yet named.
Hope floats: Richter's swimming rats
Curt Richter wanted to know how stress affects survival, so he dropped rats into tall water-filled glass cylinders and timed how long they swam. Eyal calls the work groundbreaking but ethically dubious.
- Wild rats. Freshly trapped, fierce, always scanning for escape, stronger and naturally better swimmers. Every one drowned within 15 minutes; some sank almost at once.
- Domesticated rats. Most swam for hours and hours.
- The reversal. With a new batch of wild rats, Richter scooped each out just before it sank, held it while it caught its breath, then returned it to the water, several times over.
- Result. The conditioned wild rats swam for 60 hours or more (over two and a half days), "just as long as domestic rats or longer".
Richter could not read the animals' minds, but his notes said the wild rats seemed literally to give up, a state he named hopelessness. Never having been held or rescued, they read the cylinder as inescapable; the tame rats, raised among humans, seemed to leave room for the situation to change. Once rescued, Richter wrote, the wild rats learned their plight was not actually hopeless and became aggressive escapers again. The lesson Eyal draws is that the difference between surrender and survival was expectation, not physique: the bodies had not changed, yet a switch flipped from "why bother" to "keep going". The sixty hours were latent all along; belief unlocked them.
Eyal uses the study as an audience puzzle. Told the wild rats lasted 15 minutes, people guess 30 minutes or an hour for the rescued group, and an hour already feels bold, since it is four times the baseline. He asks readers to recall their own last limit (a sprint, an exhausting task, an overwhelming project) and imagine going four times longer. Doubtful, he says, yet the rats managed 240 times longer.
Richter's 1957 paper in Psychosomatic Medicine (on sudden death in animals and man) also involved restraint, handling and, in some trials, whisker trimming, which Eyal mentions only in an endnote; Richter judged those stressors contributory rather than essential. "Hopelessness" is Richter's inference about animal minds, not a measurement. The swim paradigm later became the forced swim test, whose value as a model of human despair is now widely disputed. Treat the study as a vivid parable, not proof that belief alone sets human limits.
My glass walls
Eyal maps the rats onto his diets. When he truly believed a plan would work, he followed it with near-religious devotion; it was the conviction that effort mattered, not the rules about fat, carbs or calories, that carried him. When doubt crept in, commitment collapsed and, like the wild rats, he sank long before his real limits.
What he had missed is that a belief can be helpful without being universal or even strictly true. His all-or-nothing mindset, which judged each diet either flawless or worthless, locked him into a loop of rigid conviction followed by total abandonment. The breakthrough came when he stopped hunting for the perfect plan and adopted the belief that consistent daily choices over time beat giant overhauls. He stopped quitting and restarting, experimented and adjusted, and watched which beliefs kept him going and which derailed him. The small changes compounded: he lost the weight, built strength and escaped the yo-yo cycle.
He then turns the question on the reader. Think of the last meaningful thing you quit: the unfinished book, the business idea you talked yourself out of, the conversation you have dodged for months. Recall the story you told yourself as you gave up: "I'm not creative enough", "it's too late to start", "people like me don't succeed at this". Repeated often enough these feel like facts but are not; Eyal suggests they are the invisible glass walls that stop people persisting far longer than they think possible.
The missing side of motivation
The common model of motivation is a straight line: want the benefit, do the behavior, collect the reward. Eyal calls it incomplete. If knowing what to do and why were enough, everyone would follow through on everything they know is good for them. A perfect, well-reasoned plan fails if you do not believe your effort will make a difference.
- Behavior. What you must do: the actions themselves.
- Benefit. Why you do it: the outcome you want.
- Belief. The base joining the two: your conviction that the actions will produce the outcome. All three are essential, but remove belief and motivation collapses.
Richter's rats show that beliefs matter and, more usefully, that beliefs can be learned. However often you have quit before, changing beliefs can make you more resilient than you expect. Eyal is careful to say quitting is not always wrong (he has left many jobs, relationships and projects), but it is the one move that guarantees failure. The biggest obstacle to change is rarely missing strategy or resources, and mistakes can be repaired; we fail because we quit, far more often and far sooner than is good for us.
Between fact and faith
Some things are certain regardless of opinion: water freezes at 0 °C, light travels at roughly 300,000 km per second. At the other pole sits faith, conviction that by definition asks for no proof. Most of life's important questions (will this business succeed, should I take this job, is this the person to marry) fall in the messy space between. Data helps, but certainty never arrives. Demanding proof before acting risks analysis paralysis; acting on pure faith and ignoring evidence risks being blindsided. Brains therefore need working models of reality, and that is where belief lives.
| Term | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Fact | Objective truth, verifiable by evidence | Water freezes at 0 °C |
| Faith | Conviction needing no objective evidence | Religious conviction |
| Belief | Firmly held opinion, open to revision on new evidence | "This business can work" |
Eyal leans on Merriam-Webster's definition (something accepted, considered true or held as an opinion) to stress that a belief can be informed by facts without requiring certainty, is provisional, and is ultimately chosen by each person. The conditioned rats had no guarantee of another rescue; they had a liberating belief that persistence might matter. Humans do the same whenever they run a first marathon, learn a skill or ask someone out without knowing the answer.
So beliefs are tools, chosen the way a carpenter picks a hammer or a saw. "I can finish this marathon" is not provably true (many runners fail), but it is far more useful than "I can't." Like a scientist's simplified model, adopting a belief for its predictive and practical value is strategy, not self-deception. The question shifts from "Is this belief true?" to "Does this belief serve me?" The best beliefs give just enough conviction to act and enough flexibility to adapt, bridging paralysed overthinking and blind faith.
- Holds up to real-world feedback. It survives contact with results.
- Remains open to revision. You can update it when the evidence changes.
- Needs no ignoring of evidence. If sustaining it requires denial, discard it.
Eyal guards the flank: "choose what serves you" must not slide into "believe whatever feels good". Telling yourself you can wish, manifest or wait for problems to fix themselves may comfort, but it is usually an excuse for inaction. The book, he says, firmly rejects magical thinking and denial: a belief that makes you happier for now while leading you away from truth, healthy action or growth is harming you. Beliefs worth keeping are valuable and reality-tested, not merely soothing.
The shortcomings of "just believe"
When Eyal finally kept the weight off, the particular eating plan mattered less than his conviction that he could change and that his actions would eventually pay off. He extends this to the novelist who finishes, the musician who finally performs and the executive who leads a team through crisis: none succeeded through secret techniques, but through beliefs that sustained effort through setbacks.
That does not make "just believe" or "think positive" the answer. Those mantras are not wrong, only incomplete: they admit beliefs matter yet offer no method for building them, treating belief as a switch you either have or lack. Eyal's version is more practical: beliefs are mental models built through experience, evidence and deliberate construction. Just as physical strength needs training, strong beliefs need strategic, consistent effort.
Belief is a trainable capacity, not a mood. The book's job is to show how to build it deliberately, the way a lifter builds muscle, rather than asking readers to summon it by will.
The Three Powers of Belief
Eyal previews the cases ahead: a man who has orthopedic surgery without anesthesia by shifting his beliefs, an entrepreneur who built a $100 million business while helping thousands of unhoused people recover, placebos that work even when patients know they are fake, and beliefs about aging that predict longevity better than standard health markers. Each illustrates one of three powers that structure the book.
- Attention: the power to SEE what you believe. The saying "seeing is believing" runs the other way too: believing is seeing. Beliefs filter perception, and attention is the gateway to noticing opportunities others miss.
- Anticipation: the power to FEEL what you believe. Beliefs act as emotional forecasts that shape energy, mood and performance; this part covers placebos and the psychology of expectation.
- Agency: the power to DO what you believe. Beliefs supply a sense of control that turns intention into sustained action under uncertainty, drawing on ancient rituals, neuroscience and mental training.
Together the three are meant to give a better response when progress stalls or doubt arrives. The enemy is limiting beliefs, internalised limits that do not actually exist and that whisper "this won't work", "I'm not cut out for this", "I'll fail again". Left unexamined, they come to feel true and shrink what seems possible. Because beliefs can change, swapping a limiting belief for a liberating one can change what you see, feel and do, and eventually who you are.
- Listen for the quitting script. Note the story you tell when giving up ("not creative enough", "too late", "people like me don't") and treat it as a limiting belief, not a fact.
- Swap, don't wish. Replace it with a liberating belief that prompts action and passes the three-part reality test.
- Train it. Build belief like strength, through small, sustained actions that generate evidence, not one heroic overhaul.
Eyal closes each chapter with a two-column swap list. Chapter 1's version:
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| Incentives (rewards, punishment) are enough to motivate | Motivation needs behavior, benefit and belief |
| I need to be certain of my beliefs | I can choose beliefs for usefulness, not certainty |
| I should defend my beliefs and never give them up | Beliefs are firmly held opinions, open to revision |
| I should wait for maximum information before acting | I can act on imperfect information and learn as I go |
| Difficulty means I'm not cut out for it | Difficulty is evidence of growth; struggle means I'm improving |
| Past failure means I'm naturally bad at it | Each attempt teaches me something and raises my odds |
| I must find the right approach before I begin | Progress comes from consistent action, not perfect plans |
Why Believing Is Seeing
The first power of belief is attention. Because the conscious mind takes in only a sliver of what the senses collect, the brain builds reality from prior beliefs, deciding what reaches awareness and what it means. We do not passively see reality, we assemble it, and what we assemble depends on what we believe. That cuts both ways: belief can mute surgical pain, or invent problems that are not there, and Eyal ends with three concrete techniques for steering the spotlight.
Surgery on a white beach
Daniel Gisler, a 56-year-old former derivatives executive, arrived at a Swiss hospital for the removal of metal screws from his ankle, a procedure that normally calls for full sedation. He refused it. Three hours later he lay on the table fully conscious, with no anesthesia or painkillers, his only aid a fellow hypnosis student he had met a few months earlier. For the nearly hour-long operation she kept telling him to "go deeper"; he pictured the wormhole from the Jodie Foster film Contact and landed on a white beach beside a deep blue sea. He registered pressure, tugging and the scrape of metal but almost no pain, and his heart rate and blood pressure never spiked. The surgeon watched in disbelief.
Eyal's point is that the case is less unusual than it looks. Gisler's surgery is one of thousands performed this way in European hospitals, especially in Belgium and France, where hypnosedation is increasingly accepted. Brain imaging shows it is not simple relaxation and has little in common with stage hypnosis: it changes how the brain processes sensory input, with measurable shifts in regions for pain perception and executive control (Vanhaudenhuyse, Laureys and Faymonville, 2014). Patients show steadier heart rate and blood pressure, more relaxed muscles (which helps the surgeon) and less postoperative inflammation.
- Thousands of procedures in European hospitals; elsewhere Eyal says tens of thousands of patients.
- Imaging changes in pain-perception and executive-control regions, not mere relaxation.
- Steadier heart rate and blood pressure, relaxed muscles, less inflammation after surgery.
- Thyroid surgery: back to work in 10 days with hypnosedation versus 36 days after general anesthesia.
He then poses the reader's question: what in your life compares with screws pulled from bone while awake, and how much of your pain is unavoidable versus a matter of where you aim your mind? He is not recommending drug-free surgery. The universal principle is that we can reshape perceived reality by directing attention through belief, and that skill helps people push through discomfort and sustain motivation.
The thyroid figure comes from a 50-case series (Badidi et al., 2021), not a randomized trial, and patients who choose hypnosis are self-selected and highly motivated. Hypnosedation in Belgium (pioneered at Liège) is real, but it is normally combined with local anesthetic and light conscious sedation, which Eyal does not mention; Gisler's fully drug-free case is the exception. Responsiveness to hypnosis also varies widely between people.
Life through a keyhole
The conscious mind handles about 50 bits per second, roughly one short sentence or a single simple instruction. The senses gather about 11 million bits per second in the same time, the equivalent of seeing every word of War and Peace flash past twice a second. That gap means we live life through a keyhole. Consciousness receives not a recording but a condensed highlight reel curated by the nonconscious, according to what beliefs flag as important, which is why two people can watch the same event and leave with different experiences.
Eyal invites a test: try attending at once to your breath, the room's sounds and the words on the page. You cannot. The brain creates an illusion of taking everything in while it actually cycles between inputs like a security system switching cameras, so smoothly you never notice. Absorption narrows the aperture further: the miles you cannot remember while driving with an audiobook, the arm that goes numb during a video. Writing this book, Eyal sometimes worked through meals for hours; the hunger was there, he simply did not experience it. This filtering is what we call attention, a spotlight the nonconscious uses to light a thin slice of input. It filters by what matters, and beliefs decide what matters.
Redirecting attention
Five years earlier, Gisler would have called hypnosis "crazy stuff"; like most people he took pain as unavoidable, an assumption about reality rather than an opinion. A friend raved about a hypnosis course, so out of curiosity Gisler watched YouTube instruction videos and tried light trances. The small surprises they produced clashed with "hypnosis can't work", forcing him to update the belief.
He then trained with a reputable local instructor. Students tested their pain tolerance with a surgical artery clamp (scissor-like steel with blunt ridged jaws), pinching folds of skin. Normally that would cause a flinch; in trance Gisler watched the teeth press in with detached curiosity, and with his eyes shut he sometimes had to open them to check the clamp was actually biting. Each successful test rewrote his beliefs about pain, and within weeks he felt ready for surgery.
Eyal corrects the popular picture of hypnosis as zombie-like suggestibility with swirling eyes: it is heightened control of attention, not surrender of it, a precise spotlight that lets signals such as pain drift to the periphery. The method worked until the end. The surgeon, operating under hypnosedation for the first time, remarked "just ten minutes remaining", an innocent cue that led Gisler to relax his focus, which he calls his biggest mistake. With the aperture open, he noticed what he had missed: the final small stitches hurt the most, and those ten minutes were hard. His lesson was to leave the trance only when the job is truly finished.
The shift was perceptual, not physical. When Gisler widened his attention, the pain came back. Pain is not imaginary, but not objective either: attention shaped by belief sets its intensity, and suffering is less inevitable than we assume.
You can't see the truth
Some beliefs, though, are wired too deep to change, and Eyal uses a visual illusion to show it.
In Edward Adelson's checker shadow illusion (MIT, 1995), squares A and B are exactly the same grey, yet A still looks darker however many times you compare them. The brain is not a camera; it builds a version of reality from prior beliefs. It "knows" checkerboards alternate light and dark and that shadows darken things, and with those scripts it automatically corrects what you perceive.
Eyal transfers this to a couple. You reach for a glass and your spouse says "All the glasses are in the sink." You hear accusation and inconsiderate timing after a long day; harsh words follow and a full argument erupts. Your partner, baffled, thinks they made a neutral, helpful remark. The same thirty-second exchange yields two incompatible memories, with neither person lying, because different beliefs about each other's intentions constructed different conversations. That is why such fights are hard to settle and marriage counsellors stay busy: an illusion can keep its hold on you even when you know it is an illusion. Limited bandwidth forces the brain to fill gaps with belief, so this is how perception works, not a defect. Eyal suggests rewording "I'll believe it when I see it" as "I'll see it when I believe it."
Seeing problems that don't exist
The mechanism runs both ways: beliefs can hide real sensations (surgical pain) and conjure ones that are not there.
Harvard psychologist David Levari and colleagues (published in Science) ran a series of experiments on shifting standards.
- Faces. Participants judged 800 faces, from very angry to neutral, flagging the threatening ones. After the first 200, threatening faces were made rarer. Instead of noticing fewer threats, people began labelling neutral faces as threatening.
- Dots. Asked to pick only blue dots on a purple-to-blue range, people began calling purplish dots "blue" as truly blue dots became scarce.
- Research proposals. Asked to flag unethical studies, reviewers started marking acceptable proposals as unethical once genuinely unethical ones declined.
- Lesson. Each time, people could have updated their view of the world (fewer threats, fewer blue dots, more ethical proposals); instead they stretched the concept to match their expectation.
The same pattern helps explain why progress goes unseen. US violent crime fell 49% between 1993 and 2019, and property crime fell further, yet in nearly every survey across that period large majorities said crime was rising (Gallup). As serious crime declines, people widen what counts as violent crime; in the Harvard summary's phrase, when problems become rare, we count more things as problems.
Eyal draws the everyday consequences. If you expect cruelty you notice more cruelty; a news diet of violence and hate makes neutral situations look threatening. Much periodic dissatisfaction is the brain manufacturing problems because none are present. Since perception follows belief, we find the problems we look for and, failing that, skew the data to fit the brief: a partner believed to be critical turns innocent comments into attacks; a boss believed to undervalue you makes all feedback proof of inadequacy. The belief-driven feedback loop becomes a self-built prison.
Rumination magnifies problems
Maria, a talented engineer Eyal met while researching the book, got one critical comment from her manager about a presentation. For weeks she could think of little else: she left meetings where she had contributed good ideas remembering only her verbal stumbles, and read praise emails while fixating on the single criticism. Her belief that she was "bad at presenting" filtered out abundant contrary evidence. She then started declining chances to present, including a request to demo her team's work to the CEO, which her shocked manager saw as career-making. The avoidance confirmed the manager's doubts: at review she was passed over for a promotion she had pursued for two years, with feedback that her technical skills were exceptional but she needed "executive presence" and communication skills. She had in fact given dozens of successful presentations before that one comment.
Psychologists call Maria's state rumination: repeatedly fixing attention on negative thoughts, feelings or experiences. It shows up on brain scans. Subjects told to ruminate show more activity in the default mode network, the regions active during mind-wandering and inward focus (Cooney et al., 2010). In people prone to depression this network links tightly to the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a region tied to negative emotion (Hamilton et al., 2015), so habitual rumination strengthens the patterns that keep you stuck; over time it is associated with higher risk of clinical depression.
The trap, Eyal notes, is that rumination feels productive, like analysis. Believe "I'm unlikable" and attention spotlights every awkward moment while pleasant encounters vanish, so the belief grows. In reality you solve little and reinforce the pathways that magnify problems or invent them. Maria put it this way: she thought she was being thorough, but was training her brain to see only what confirmed her worst fears.
Rewriting rumination
Eyal heads off the objection that he is saying "stop thinking about problems and they vanish". Maria's losses were real. But while she could not change the presentation, she could change how her brain interpreted it. As with the checkerboard, she held two truths: what she felt (racing heart and sweaty palms that seemed like proof) and what she knew. Feelings are not facts. Unlike a fixed visual illusion, self-beliefs can be updated: "I had one rough presentation" describes an event, while "I'm a bad presenter" is a limiting belief about identity. The question is not whether the talk went badly but which belief serves her going forward, since the limiting one guarantees she will see only supporting evidence. Beliefs change only with deliberate strategies that pull attention off old narratives.
- Prove yourself wrong. Deliberately hunt for evidence that weakens the limiting belief. Maria kept a "reality log" for two weeks, recording every communication-related interaction, successes as well as stumbles: 17 positive, 3 neutral, only 2 genuinely negative. The evidence had always existed; her belief had filtered it. She likened the change to swapping a funhouse mirror for an ordinary one.
- Create distance (illeism). Talk or journal about yourself in the third person. Instead of "I made a fool of myself", Maria wrote "Maria got caught off guard by an unexpected question. It happens to everyone", or noted that Maria presented the quarterly road map well but was fixating on thirty seconds where she lost her thread. Research cited: self-distancing lends the perspective you would offer a friend (Grossmann et al., 2019); third-person self-talk keeps people calmer under emotional stress (Kross et al., 2014); and ERP and fMRI data show it calms impulsive reactivity without engaging extra cognitive control (Moser et al., 2017). Maria felt silly at first, but problems instantly felt more manageable.
- Question your motives. When replaying the feedback, ask: "Is thinking about this for the fifteenth time today helping me improve, or just making me feel worse?" This metacognitive check exposes rumination posing as problem-solving; Maria realised she spent hours dissecting two-minute exchanges. She set a five-minute timer: extract any lesson, write it down, then deliberately switch attention. Within a few weeks she needed the timer less. Judge a thought loop by its usefulness, not only its truth.
Unlike positive thinking or denial, these practices work by recognising and replacing the beliefs that filter attention. Change how you talk to yourself about a setback and you change what the brain ranks as important. A spotlight guided by "I must analyse why I keep failing" yields more proof of inadequacy; one guided by "gaining perspective helps solve problems" lights up both challenges and possible solutions.
The 50 bits versus 11 million bits figures are old, rough estimates popularised by Tor Nørretranders (The User Illusion, 1998), not precise measurements. The checker illusion reflects automatic low-level visual inference, a long way from conscious beliefs about oneself; Eyal uses it as metaphor. The note for the depression-risk claim actually cites a study of rumination predicting executive-functioning problems in adolescents (Connolly et al., 2014), and the Grossmann (2019) paper cited for self-distancing concerns emodiversity. Maria's numbers are a single, anonymised self-report.
Seeing beyond limits
Gisler once thought drug-free surgery impossible, yet he did it by aiming attention at his beach instead of the table. Everyone does milder versions daily: sometimes steering away from discomfort, sometimes fixating on what we fear and so creating it, as Maria did. Together with the illusion and the crime data, the cases show the First Power of Belief: once you understand attention you can reshape how you meet challenges, relationships and your self-image. The next chapter applies this to people, starting with Eyal's strained relationship with his mother and a method used to heal betrayal, family rifts and team distrust; the likeliest obstacle in close relationships, he says, is beliefs you have never questioned.
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| What I see is all there is; I see reality accurately | I see my own version of reality |
| My first impression is usually right | Perception is data, not truth; I can question it |
| "I'm not good at this" | "Sarah is struggling now but will figure it out soon" |
| Focus on what confirms my views | Seek evidence against my assumptions |
| I need to see it to believe it | Beliefs change what I can see |
| Re-analysing problems solves them | Not every thought loop is progress |
The Secret to Better Relationships
Eyal's claim is blunt: you don't have relationship problems, you have perception problems. The beliefs we hold about parents, partners and colleagues decide what we are able to see in them, and long familiarity makes us interact with a mental image instead of the person. The quality of a relationship depends far more on your beliefs than on the other person's behavior. The chapter's tool is Byron Katie's The Work: four questions plus three turnarounds, backed by six daily practices.
Wilting flowers
Living in Singapore, Eyal went to considerable trouble to find a Central Florida florist to surprise his mother on her 74th birthday. On the video call she thanked him, then added that the flowers had arrived already half-dying and he might want to call the shop, or not use it again. The 45-year-old published author felt a familiar sting of rejection: instead of appreciating the gesture she was criticising his effort; why bother, she was impossible to please. His jaw tightened, his chest constricted, his face flushed, and he answered sarcastically: "I'll be sure never to send you flowers again." The call went silent. He could almost watch himself turn back into an eye-rolling teenager; three decades of adult growth had evaporated in seconds over a kind gift.
The challenge is universal. Certain people flip an internal switch that bypasses conscious control: with parents we become children, with former classmates we slip back into old roles, with some authority figures we turn anxious and approval-seeking. This is where the First Power of Belief (what we believe sets what we see) is most visible and most costly. For decades Eyal had viewed his mother through the lens "too critical and hard to please", which converted her remarks into personal attacks. To change a relationship, he argues, start with the beliefs that shape your perception of the other person.
The pitfalls of venting
When the Zoom call ended, Eyal's wife (Julie Li, also his co-author) gently asked whether he wanted help "doing The Work" or needed time first. He was briefly speechless. He wanted no self-help "mumbo jumbo"; he wanted to vent, be validated and build the case that he was the reasonable one. Venting feels natural, like releasing pressure.
Research says otherwise: expressing anger amplifies it rather than discharging it (Eyal cites Brad Bushman, 2002, and Carol Tavris, 1988). Venting negative beliefs about someone rehearses and reinforces them, locking in toxic dynamics. Changing how you see people you have known all your life is frightening, Eyal admits, because those relationships make up the fabric of your reality.
Yet questioning what we think we know has deep roots, none requiring supernatural belief:
- Socrates, more than 2,400 years ago, questioned Athenians to expose contradictions in their assumptions rather than impose his own views.
- Buddhist teaching stresses seeing without the distortions of attachment, aversion and ignorance; the doctrine of anattā (non-self) challenges belief in a fixed self, which often drives reactive patterns.
- Twentieth-century therapy: cognitive therapy named systematic thinking errors, and REBT (Albert Ellis, 1962) taught people to dispute the "irrational beliefs" behind emotional disturbance.
- Ken Keyes Jr., Handbook to Higher Consciousness (1975), brought this to a general audience, teaching readers to spot beliefs that cause needless suffering.
The common thread: perceptions of others feel like rock-solid reality but are shaped by belief, so more flexibility gives you a wider portfolio of perspectives in any relationship.
The judgment trap
Change begins by spotting the judgment trap, an automatic, largely unconscious perceptual pattern. Eyal instantly read the flower comment as "she's criticising me instead of appreciating my gift." It felt true. Once formed, the belief steered attention to confirming evidence: her tone, past slights. He completely missed the thanks she had given at the start of the call.
Ellen Langer (Mindfulness, 1989) calls this a mindlessness that creeps into long relationships: once we think we know someone, we stop seeing them and interact with our mental image. Paradoxically, the longer we have known someone, the more certain we feel and the less accurately we see them. The Levari threatening-faces effect from Chapter 2 applies: once you look for evidence that someone is inconsiderate, you keep finding it even as the behavior declines, because the definition of "uncaring" expands. An insufficiently enthusiastic "good morning" becomes a rude insult.
The trap is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Psychologist Sandra Murray tracked couples over three weeks (Murray et al., 2003, "Once hurt, twice hurtful") and found that people who felt well regarded by partners brushed off small slights, while those who felt less appreciated read more into stressful events.
Eyal saw the loop in his own family: believing his mother critical, he noticed every perceived criticism and filtered out appreciation; he answered defensively; she felt he was being curt and reacted harshly; he took that as proof she could never be pleased. His wife, watching the same call without those filters, heard the flower remark as practical information. Same words, different perception; the issue was not who was right but what each belief allowed them to see.
Questioning beliefs: the four questions
The Work is the structured inquiry developed by author Byron Katie (Loving What Is, with Stephen Mitchell, 2002). Eyal had watched it transform his wife's relationship with her own mother, though her mother had not changed at all: she grew calmer around her parents, happier, and long-running problems in their marriage eased. Reluctantly, he took pen and paper, recalled the specific moment and wrote the belief causing the pain: "My mother is too critical and hard to please."
- 1. Is this belief true? Recall your immediate judgment. Eyal's answer: of course; if flowers sent from across the world could not please her, nothing could.
- 2. Can I be certain this belief is true? It sounds like a repeat, but it forces you to examine what actually happened and look for even a small chance of another explanation. She had thanked him, then reported the flowers' condition; he could not know her intent, and she might simply have been flagging the florist. That sliver of uncertainty was the first crack, felt as a loosening in his chest.
- 3. How do I react when I believe this? Notice the real consequences. Believing it, he felt hurt and defensive, made a cutting remark and turned a neutral exchange into conflict, a pattern that had tainted years of holiday calls, visits and occasions. It was not her comment that caused his pain but his belief about what it meant; the replaying and anger all happened in his own head.
- 4. Who would I be without this belief? Imagine the same moment without the interpretation. He might have said "that's disappointing" or "thanks for letting me know", stayed present, asked about her plans for the day and shared birthday wishes without a cloud of defensiveness.
The questions do not push you toward a forced positive verdict. They open space between automatic interpretation and what was actually said, and in that space Eyal could admit his reading hurt him more than her words had, opening the door to other views that might be equally or more true.
The turnaround
Katie's next step, the turnaround, deliberately tries out alternative framings. Each is restated and then tested by finding genuine evidence that it is true in this specific situation.
- To the Opposite: "My mother is not too critical and hard to please." It seemed obviously false, yet evidence piled up: she had thanked him, had not faulted him personally and had made a practical suggestion. If he had paid for wilted flowers, he would want to know. Perhaps she was being helpful, not critical.
- To the Other: "I am too critical and hard to please toward my mother." He had wanted more than thanks: a specific, effusive gratitude; when it did not come he dismissed the thanks she gave. He was scrutinising her words, tone and timing for any hint of criticism and imposing impossible standards on how she communicated. He was the one hard to please.
- To the Self: "I am too critical and hard to please toward myself." He had taken the comment as a verdict that he failed by choosing the wrong florist, as though a good son would somehow know which shop delivers perfect flowers. His self-criticism was primed to treat wilted petals as proof of inadequacy. This was the hardest to see and, he concluded, the most true.
The three did not produce one "correct" replacement. They widened the range of readings, giving him more freedom in how to respond next time and making him less likely to lock onto the first negative interpretation. He also noticed his body change while considering them: chest loosened, breathing deepened, shoulders dropped, which he took as a sign he was touching something true.
A portfolio of perspectives
The method's strength is that it does not swap one rigid belief for another; it builds a portfolio of perspectives, each with some truth, from which you choose the one that serves you best in the moment.
Eyal's friend Caleb was hurt not to be invited to a concert his girlfriend attended with mutual friends. His readings: "She doesn't want me there" and, deeper, "She doesn't really love me", which triggered rejection and inadequacy. After the four questions, his turnarounds were:
- "She does want me at the concert." The tickets were not hers to give; a friend had invited her.
- "I don't want me at the concert." He was actually relieved: he disliked the band and hated being around crowds of drunk people.
- "I don't really love myself." His insecurity was colouring everything; he just wanted her to want him, and the concert was never the real issue.
Eyal distinguishes this from positive thinking, which swaps "negative" for "positive" thoughts without questioning either (he returns to its pitfalls later), and from the advice to "communicate better", which locates the problem in expression rather than perception. The turnaround treats perceptions as choices. Cognitive behavioral therapy's near-equivalent is cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt thinking to changing situations instead of clinging to one reading, which research links to more resilient relationships (Kashdan and Rottenberg, 2010). Whatever the label, harmony comes not from finding the one true view of someone but from the capacity to shift perspectives toward what serves connection.
Over time, Eyal's relationship with his mother moved from mutual defensiveness to appreciation. He began to notice qualities he had filtered out for years: her practicality, subtle humor and unwavering support, even when expressed in unfamiliar ways. Above all, he stopped being seized by teenage reactions and could respond as an adult to what was happening rather than to decades of stories. She did not have to change at all.
The science of perspective shifts
Research on turning beliefs around is still emerging, but Eyal cites three strands:
- Inquiry-based stress reduction (IBSR), the formal name for Katie's method, is reported to improve well-being, self-acceptance and relationship quality and to reduce emotional exhaustion (the cited paper is Smernoff et al., 2015, a pilot clinical study).
- Cognitive reappraisal, consciously reinterpreting a situation, lowers amygdala activity and raises prefrontal activity, improving emotion regulation and, over time, relationship outcomes (Ochsner and Gross, 2005; Gross, 2002).
- Interrupting confirmation bias is the likeliest mechanism: deliberately searching for evidence against your judgment counteracts selective perception, which is why practitioners report seeing sides of people they never noticed.
Most IBSR studies are small, uncontrolled or run by researchers close to the method; the cited paper is itself a pilot. Cognitive reappraisal is far better supported, so Eyal borrows credibility from the broader field. One source he cites for the debiasing mechanism (Edwards and Smith, 1996) actually documents a disconfirmation bias, people scrutinising arguments that contradict them more harshly, which shows how hard the turnaround is rather than proving it works. Murray's study shows correlation within couples, not that changing your belief changes your partner. Eyal does concede The Work is not for acute crisis, severe mental illness or early grief. His closing suggestion that turnarounds help with betrayal or abuse needs care: "I am too critical of him" is a dangerous reframe for someone being mistreated, and boundaries and safety come first.
Practices to make it stick
The method is easy to grasp and hard to apply mid-emotion, so Eyal offers six practices.
- Start with small irritations. Practise on low-stakes annoyances: a driver who cuts you off, a barista who botches your order, a relative's habits. Eyal began with his teenage daughter's tone: charged enough to notice, not so charged he could not step back and ask whether she was really disrespectful. He calls it karmic irony that working on judgments about his daughter helped heal things with his mother; both relationships moved from dreaded tension to warmth he cherishes.
- Create a judgment journal. Write down the day's strongest judgments, pick one to turn around and find at least three genuine examples of beliefs as true or truer. A friend found that seeing "my husband never helps with the kids" or "my boss doesn't respect my time" on paper exposed the exaggeration at once.
- Install a judgment alert. Treat "always", "never", "every time", "just like them", "typical" as cues to pause. Eyal's personal alarm is the thought "That's so like her", a sign he is inside his filter.
- Seek the grain of truth. Rather than dismiss a turnaround, ask whether it has even a 2% chance of being true; a sliver opens perception. Searching honestly, Eyal recalled his mother waking for 7 a.m. video calls to connect across continents.
- Practise empathic reflection. Before voicing frustration, imagine at least three plausible explanations that involve no bad intent. When his mother commented on his parenting he considered: she is sharing what worked for her; she is concerned because she cares; she is making conversation on a topic that connects them. His response changed completely.
- Listen for defensiveness. The turnaround you most resist usually has the most to teach. Eyal's strongest resistance was to "I am too critical and hard to please"; it pointed to the truth that he was constantly criticising her in his head, sustaining a cycle of mutual criticism.
Resistance is a signpost. The reframe that provokes "that's definitely not true" is where the filter is thickest, so it deserves the most curiosity, not the quickest dismissal.
Eyal adds that the practice needs psychological readiness and discernment; its aim is release from perceptual limits that cause needless suffering, not denial of real problems that require action.
The ultimate turnaround
The method finally leads to recognising that judgments about others are judgments about ourselves. That includes, but goes beyond, classic projection (criticising in others what we dislike in ourselves): judgments expose our values, fears, unmet needs and interpretive frames. Two colleagues watch a coworker arrive late; one thinks "how disrespectful, she doesn't value our time", the other "she must be having a rough morning". Same behavior, opposite readings, each revealing the observer.
Eyal's strong reactions to his mother hit his value of appreciation, fear of disapproval and need for validation; his wife, lacking those sensitivities, does not react. Seen this way, conflict becomes an invitation to self-understanding rather than a battle: ask what your reaction reveals and which needs it activates. This does not mean dropping boundaries or preferences; it means stating them from clarity and self-responsibility rather than blame or demand. Nor does it ask anyone to excuse harm. A wider view of reality equips you to respond more effectively, not to accept mistreatment passively.
His conclusion: change what you believe about someone and you change what you can see in them; seeing differently, you act differently, which often changes how they respond. Responsibility for your beliefs and attention restores the power to improve relationships without waiting for others to change. He extends the claim from parental remarks to betrayal or abuse, where questioning untrue thoughts can widen perception beyond judgment. The next chapter turns the First Power to business: a woman who helped tens of thousands of unhoused people and then built a fitness company worth hundreds of millions.
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| They must change for this to improve | My beliefs shape my experience of it |
| They always act this way; that's how they are | I'm seeing my mental image of them |
| That comment means they don't care | I can't know their intent; I'm reading through my lens |
| If I'm hurt, someone else is at fault | My reaction reveals my values, fears, needs |
| Venting makes me feel better | Venting reinforces; questioning brings relief |
| They're trying to hurt or criticise me | It may be practical information, not an attack |
| I can't help how I react | I can pause: is this true, is it serving me? |
How to See Opportunities Others Miss
Luck isn't chance: beliefs calibrate attention, so people who believe transformation is possible literally notice opportunities others filter out. Eyal tells it through Anne Mahlum, who built a running charity for homeless men and then a fitness chain she sold for close to $100 million. The beliefs that create breakthroughs can also create blind spots, so the best builders keep upgrading them.
A wave on a Philadelphia corner
At 5:30 a.m. in Philadelphia, a jogger in her twenties ran past the same homeless men she had passed hundreds of times outside the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission. Like most city dwellers, Anne Mahlum had perfected practised indifference: eyes averted, pace steady. Then one morning a man waved, and she waved back. Next day came a sarcastic joke (did she do nothing but run all day?), and she shot back asking whether they did nothing but stand all day. That playful sparring grew into what she called an amazing rapport, and one run brought her to a halt with a question: why does she get to be the runner and they the homeless guys on the corner, and why can't everyone be runners?
Most people would have let the question fade, especially about men she admitted she previously did not care about. Mahlum saw potential. Roughly ten years later the same capacity earned her close to $100 million when she sold [solidcore], the fitness company she started in a cramped Washington, DC basement. Asked whether she had imagined such success, she answers that of course she did, since she had been driving the bus. That certainty, Eyal says, grew from a belief cultivated for years: people can transform in ways others think impossible.
Age 12 In Bismarck, her father's $50,000 gambling loss ends her parents' marriage; his later recovery seeds her belief in second acts.
Philadelphia A wave outside the shelter leads to a first run with nine men and the nonprofit Back on My Feet.
Seven years on 16 chapters, 15,000+ people served.
Washington, DC $175,000 of savings launches [solidcore]; within two years it is national.
Crisis Dozens of employees petition for her resignation; she asks the board for an independent investigation.
2023 Now executive chair, she sells [solidcore] and shares millions with employees.
The first turnaround
At 12, in Bismarck, North Dakota, Mahlum ran laps of her neighbourhood to outpace chaos at home. Her father had gambled away $50,000 the family did not have; for her mother, a frugal schoolteacher who tracked every penny, it was an unforgivable betrayal and the marriage collapsed. In a small town everyone knew, and Mahlum felt inadequate. Running began as escape and became a ritual of structure and self-definition that carried her through depression, anxiety and sadness and gave her confidence before most people were awake.
Then her father, apparently beyond redemption and kicked out of his home, slowly rebuilt: he got help and brought the gambling under control. The marriage did not survive; he did. Watching this planted Mahlum's defining conviction, a belief in second acts more than in hard work, in the idea that anyone can rebuild given structure, support and someone who refuses to abandon hope. She would not have called it a perceptual filter, but that is what it became, shaping what she noticed, remembered and counted as progress. It is why, years later, she saw the man who waved.
Back on My Feet
When she invited the shelter men for a morning run, nine showed up, mostly sceptical, some half-asleep. She had no program and no social-work degree, only the belief that running might do for them what it had done for her. Within weeks she watched them light up about who they were becoming. The stereotype of homelessness is lazy, addicted, dangerous, driftless; someone who runs three days a week at 6 a.m. reads as disciplined, focused, reliable, responsible and ambitious.
She had trained herself to look for what she believed in. Where others saw setbacks she spotted breakthroughs: a man arriving on time, another running an extra block when he could have stopped, a vulnerable story shared in the post-run huddle. The more she believed, the more evidence she noticed, and the more she noticed, the stronger the belief. The men changed their self-image too; each mile was a vote for a new identity. Her line: tell people they are capable and they start to believe it.
The circle became the nonprofit Back on My Feet: volunteers run with people experiencing homelessness three mornings a week, then offer routes into job training, financial literacy and housing support. Mahlum knew running shoes could not fix housing shortages, mental-health gaps, substance abuse or inequality; she aimed at the individuals in front of her, not homelessness as a societal problem.
It was not smooth. Some men took her car for a joyride and returned it littered with beer cans; some stole from the organisation; one had to go to jail, which she called the best place for him. None of it shook her conviction: she processed thefts and relapses as temporary setbacks, not proof of failure. Eyal insists this was not blind optimism but a deliberate choice to focus on possibilities.
- 16 city chapters.
- 15,000+ people served.
- 10,000+ job and housing placements.
- Nearly 1 million miles run.
Entrepreneurial alertness
Psychologists call the underlying mechanism belief-consistent information processing: seeking, remembering and stressing information that fits our beliefs while unconsciously filtering out the rest. Like the checker illusion, but in reverse: most people's brains filtered the shelter men out as hopeless or "not my problem", while Mahlum's father had taught her brain to flag transformation as important. So she registered the wave, heard the teasing as an invitation rather than mockery, and recognised the resilience she had seen at home.
She was not scanning for a nonprofit idea. Her beliefs produced what researchers call entrepreneurial alertness, a heightened sensitivity to patterns others miss (Eyal cites Robert Baron, 2006, on opportunity recognition as pattern recognition). Her mind was calibrated to the signs of transformation: discipline, humor under pressure, showing up despite hardship. Beliefs change what you think possible and also what you can see as possible; what you see then shapes what you do.
Making your own luck
The founding of Back on My Feet is provoked luck: small actions that create big openings which, looking back, resemble good fortune. Research suggests luck is usually not chance.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent over a decade studying why some people feel perpetually lucky and others unlucky (The Luck Factor, 2003). His finding: the "lucky" do not get more good fortune, they see more of it. In his best-known test, participants counted the photos in a newspaper. Halfway through, a huge ad announced "Stop counting. There are 43 photos in this newspaper." A second line offered $250 to anyone who told the experimenter they had seen it. Most "unlucky" people, absorbed in the assigned task, missed both; self-described lucky people were far likelier to spot the message and claim the money. They were looking wider.
Louis Pasteur's line from his 1854 Lille lecture applies: chance favours the prepared mind. Mahlum's was prepared by years of belief-building. Eyal then lists three practices.
- Push past your comfort zone. Lucky people disrupt routines. Stanford's Tina Seelig has students fill in a "risk-o-meter" mapping their comfort zones, then step deliberately outside them: a new route to work, a conversation with a stranger, a project beyond their expertise. Seelig once chatted to a stranger on a plane who was a publisher; she pitched a book, he rejected it on the spot. She kept nurturing him (inviting him to speak to her class on the future of publishing, sending him videos of student projects) and eventually sold the same proposal to one of his colleagues.
- Show appreciation. Everyone who helps you matters, and failing to thank them is a missed opportunity. Seelig reviews her calendar every evening and sends short thank-you notes. A student rejected twice from an entrepreneurship fellowship she ran wrote to thank her for what the application taught him. Moved, she invited him for coffee and advised his independent study project, which he later turned into a business.
- Set failure goals. Joël Le Bon of Johns Hopkins proposes targets for rejection: fifty noes this month, ten dream clients turning you down. Failure becomes something to collect rather than avoid, which raises the odds of success. Mahlum had already done this: thefts and relapses were data points on the way to what worked.
Le Bon's study of salespeople (summarised in HBR, 2015) found that about 60% of sales came from lucky circumstances, yet 76-88% of those "lucky" sales were the product of strategic actions that set up the luck. Mahlum's insight outside the shelter was likewise prepared: years of belief readied her to see it, years of stretching her comfort zone made her willing to act, years of reframing setbacks gave her resilience. She engineered the conditions for luck, and it was about to find her again.
Mahlum's story is told largely through her own interviews and talks, a classic survivorship narrative: we never meet the believers whose charities failed. Wiseman's luck work is engaging but mostly self-report and popular-book material with self-selected volunteers. Eyal's takeaway that "most breakthrough moments (60 to 88 percent)" are provoked merges two different figures from one sales study; the data cover sales, not breakthroughs in general.
The pink studio
While opening a Back on My Feet chapter in Los Angeles, Mahlum stepped into a bright pink fitness studio, very LA and very cute. The branding was bold, the energy electric and the workout brutal; she got her butt kicked. She was not shopping for a business, but a mind trained to scan for transformation saw small but untapped potential. She dissected the model like a forensic accountant: pricing, operational efficiency, brand positioning, scalability. Back on My Feet had shown that shared movement reshapes self-perception; here was a different audience, people willing to pay for a framework for change.
She bet nearly everything. Declining outside investment, even from a trusted mentor, she put $175,000 of her own savings into a first studio so small clients could barely move between machines. The look was deliberately raw: exposed concrete, industrial fixtures, harsh light; no amenities, no juice bar, no showers. The bracketed name, [solidcore], signalled tightness (muscles, community, bodies), and she had the two brackets tattooed on her ribs. On opening day she wrote that she would build an empire, open 100 locations and then sell, and beneath it that she knew she could do it.
Within two years [solidcore] was a phenomenon, with studios across the country, soaring revenue and Mahlum earning seven figures as a celebrated fitness visionary. The belief that saw possibility in nine men outside a shelter was now reshaping thousands of bodies. Two movements, both powered by belief, but with a price she had not anticipated.
The belief blind spot
Each success seemed to confirm that her vision was clear, her judgment sound, her approach right. The same filters that reveal possibility can hide what we would rather not see; once conviction becomes identity, feedback is hard to take, and the beliefs behind your rise start to block your growth.
Early warnings were easy to rationalise. When longtime Back on My Feet staff left, she doubled down: you can't build a movement nine to five; it is an everyday, all-the-time thing. Partly true, Eyal concedes, but unreflective belief calcifies, and clarity hardens into rigidity. At [solidcore] her intensity was on the walls, in the workouts and in the culture; early on it was rocket fuel, with sky-high standards and clear targets. But her passion often erupted in harsh critiques and public callouts, and when someone fell behind her pace she could turn impatient, even volatile. One employee said an email or call from Anne made their heart jump; another dreaded weekly leadership meetings and public blowups lasting hours. Years of telling herself her intensity was a superpower made the contrary evidence nearly impossible to absorb: belief-consistent processing again. What once inspired people was burning them out.
When dozens of [solidcore] employees signed a petition demanding her resignation, Mahlum did not retreat into defensiveness. She turned her attention inward to the wake she was leaving, invited the board to run an independent investigation of her leadership and addressed staff on a company-wide call, saying leadership carries expectations, that she knew better, and that they deserved better. The woman who built her identity on helping others transform now faced the transformation she had not expected, her own, and drew on the same belief that had powered her father's recovery, the charity and the company.
Building new beliefs
Mahlum, Eyal says, did what few visionary founders manage: she evolved. She dropped the belief that relentless drive was the only path, recognising that durable organisations need leaders who grow with them. She stepped down as CEO to executive chair and promoted her COO to chief executive. In 2023 she sold [solidcore], as she had predicted on paper about ten years earlier, and gave millions of dollars to employees, not from legal duty but because she had promised to, saying the company's success was far from hers alone.
The 2020 BuzzFeed News report that Eyal cites for staff anxiety described allegations of a toxic culture and sexual harassment at [solidcore]; Eyal mentions only intensity and public callouts. The sale figure also varies by source: the CNBC piece in his notes reports $88.4 million to Mahlum, rounded up here to "nearly $100 million". Her change of role came under employee pressure, so "she evolved" is the generous reading.
Eyal's summary is that Mahlum demonstrated the First Power three times: beliefs about transformation helped thousands of unhoused people; the same beliefs revealed a multimillion-dollar business; and when she needed to change, she saw it and stepped aside rather than insisting only she could steer. Even the strongest beliefs, left unchecked, become blind spots, which is why the most successful people review and refine their beliefs regularly.
Ask: which beliefs got me here, which still open doors, and which are quietly closing them? Where am I playing it too safe, and am I doing enough to provoke luck? When criticised, try "Could I be the problem?" before defending yourself. Your filters are already running; the choice is whether to pick them consciously or let old programming run on autopilot.
The chapter closes Part One. If attention shapes what we see now, the Second Power, anticipation, shapes what we feel about the future, and Eyal promises it can change how we feel, heal and even how long we live.
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| Some people are naturally lucky | I create luck by how I engage with the world |
| Opportunities come only to certain people | Opportunities are everywhere if I train my eye |
| People don't really change | Transformation is possible at any age with support |
| I am who I am | Identity is a belief I can choose and update |
| Questioning myself shows weakness | Self-reflection keeps me sharp and growing |
You Already Live in a Simulation
The second power of belief is anticipation: we feel what we believe, because experience is the brain's prediction about sensory input, not a direct readout of it. Eyal uses Liquid Death, ordinary water in a skull-covered can, to show how companies engineer expectations that change how a product actually tastes, lays out a four-step Experience Loop, and then turns the lesson inward: you are already designing simulations for yourself and others, so practise selective skepticism about which ones to keep.
Murder your thirst
A flaming skull on a tallboy aluminium can: not vodka, beer or an energy drink, just water. In a premium-hydration market of Evian's Alpine models and Fiji's tropical bottles, all promising transcendence through "natural minerals" and "artesian wells", Liquid Death arrived like a mohawked punk at a meditation retreat, shouting "MURDER YOUR THIRST."
The liquid is ordinary: Austrian Alpine spring water, chosen by founder Mike Cessario not for its quality but because it came from the only facility willing to can water rather than bottle it in plastic. The innovation was the packaging, a deliberate rebuke to an industry that had spent decades making water inoffensive, fusing rebellion with an environmental message: "death to plastic". Beverage experts called it brand suicide: no parent would buy a child "death" in a can and no retailer would shelve it.
- 2019 launch; the first run of 150,000 cans sold out in under eight weeks.
- Soon among the top ten bestselling bottled-water brands on Amazon.
- 2021: convenience chains sign on and sales quadruple to $45 million.
- 2024: valued at $1.4 billion, with talk of an IPO; stocked at Whole Foods, 7-Eleven, Target and Walmart.
Eyal concedes the brand may be forgotten by the time you read this; a business is more than a product. The point is what its rise reveals: if you shape what someone believes about a product, you shape how they experience it, down to taste. Cessario told The Wall Street Journal there is nothing very different about his water, and nothing very different about any product. He was engineering an insider rebellion, with water as the medium. Fans post it, wear the merch and some have tattooed the logo, for water that is indistinguishable in blind taste tests from far cheaper brands. Chapters 2 to 4 showed beliefs filtering the outside world; this part turns inward to show beliefs shaping emotion, bodily response and moment-to-moment experience. Later chapters will apply this to suffering, joy and even lifespan.
The prediction machine
Humans have always modelled the mind on their most advanced technology, and Eyal traces the sequence:
- Ancient Egypt. Watching the Nile feed irrigation channels, physicians pictured the body as channels carrying fluids. They correctly saw vessels running from the heart, but treated mental illness by "unclogging" channels with strong laxatives, a practice that lingered for millennia.
- Plato. The soul (psychē) as a chariot driven by reason and drawn by two horses, one noble and obedient (moral impulse), one wild (base desire).
- Descartes. Surrounded by elaborate clocks, he imagined the brain as pulleys and gears.
- Freud. The Industrial Revolution gave the mind as a steam engine whose emotions build pressure needing release; we still talk of "letting off steam".
- Postwar chemistry. DuPont's "better living through chemistry" era recast mental illness as "chemical imbalances", which yielded treatments of mixed efficacy but oversimplified consciousness (Eyal cites the 2022 Moncrieff umbrella review questioning the serotonin theory of depression).
- Computing. The brain as biological computer, though brains do not in fact compute like laptops.
The oldest stories may be the most accurate. Hindu philosophy's māyā treats perception as a cosmic mirage; Buddhist teaching likens everyday experience to dreams the mind creates; thinkers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam have seen the physical world as incomplete. Modern neuroscience suggests each of us lives in a personalised reality generated moment by moment. The brain is a prediction machine running on predictive processing (Andy Clark, 2013; Karl Friston, 2010), still a metaphor but a revealing one: subjective experience, from sadness and hunger to the taste of canned water, is not delivered by the senses but is the brain's best guess about what sensory input means. Neuroscientist Anil Seth calls consciousness a "controlled hallucination" shaped by belief, memory and expectation. Rather than process 11 million bits of raw input, the brain forecasts from a lifetime of beliefs and builds a simulated world.
The machinery evolved for speed: reacting viscerally to a rustle in the bushes, before logic caught up, could decide whether you were eaten. Today it is a playground for marketers. Companies design anticipated experiences that our prediction machinery then helps fulfil, which is why we pay premiums for ordinary items wrapped in compelling stories.
Wanting what others want
Sometimes we learn what we like by trying it. More often, Eyal says, we borrow desires from others: what lights people up and what they chase becomes our shortcut to value. René Girard called this the imitative (mimetic) nature of desire: we often want things simply because others do. The brain treats social signals as predictive shortcuts; if everyone covets something, it must be valuable. This likely evolved under scarcity: when the tribe suddenly prized a rare food or tool material, acting fast paid off, so desire became contagious, spreading faster than rational evaluation.
The same wiring drives sneaker drops and viral fads. In 2023 the $45 Stanley Quencher tumbler, hardly different from countless others, flooded social feeds via influencers; people who had never cared about drinkware refreshed websites at midnight for restocks and queued outside Target at dawn. The trigger was not need but the signal that "everyone wants this", which fires before conscious thought. The pattern repeats: Dutch tulip mania (1600s), the Tickle Me Elmo riots (1996), the GameStop stock frenzy (2021).
Make what people want, or make people want what you make. Successful brands start with the first and accelerate with the second. Liquid Death could have shipped another bottled water; instead it manufactured desire by designing a new experience for an old product, and every share on social media fed more imitative desire.
How to make people want what you've got
Eyal's setup: two glasses of cabernet, one introduced as a $5 table blend, one as a $45 premium vintage. The cheap one seems flat and sharp; the dear one rich and velvety, with blackberry and oak. They are the same wine. In the classic fMRI version (Hilke Plassmann and colleagues, Caltech, 2008), people not only said they enjoyed the "expensive" wine more; their pleasure-related brain regions responded more strongly, as though it really tasted better. The brain works like a Hollywood soundstage, layering richer special effects onto an experience it expects to be premium. The wine example then walks through the four steps of what Eyal calls the Experience Loop.
Step 1: Believe
Belief acts first as a frame, not an opinion: before you feel anything, the brain has decided what you are likely to feel and runs a simulation it treats as real. Expected smoothness and complexity start before the first sip. Brands exploit this everywhere: a "SALE" sign triggers belief in unusual value; a dizzying luxury price signals craftsmanship, exclusivity and prestige; "NEW!" taps beliefs about innovation. Liquid Death's can, with its rock-album look, plants one belief: this is different, and in packaged goods different is often assumed to be better. Belief is the first domino in a cascade that changes sensation.
Step 2: Anticipate
Next comes anticipation: nonconscious physiological preparation for the expected experience. It is largely invisible but leaves biological traces; in the wine study, blood flow in sensory-processing regions changed. Anticipation is not the thought "this will be good" but a reconfiguration of your sensory apparatus to show you that it is. With Liquid Death, the water became secondary to the anticipated thrill of cracking a menacing can with a dripping skull and gothic lettering. Its videos created a simulation before anyone touched the product: by the time the first units shipped, thousands had already imagined bringing it to a party and fielding "Wait, you're drinking what?" In this sense marketing is designing simulations; flop versus phenomenon often depends on the story pre-woven in the customer's mind.
Step 3: Feel
Then the actual experience: conscious interpretation of bodily sensation as a specific feeling. Primed for premium, the nervous system makes the oak and berry more pronounced, the finish longer, the mouthfeel more refined. The wine is chemically identical, but the experience is genuinely different, and people praising it are describing, not performing. Eyal gives three more examples:
- Coffee. Everyone got decaf, but those told it was caffeinated reported more alertness and did better on attention tasks (Dawkins et al., 2011); belief alone can raise heart rate and blood pressure as caffeine would.
- Golf. Golfers who thought a putter belonged to a professional player needed fewer strokes (Lee et al., 2011), which Eyal attributes to anticipatory changes in muscle tension and focus.
- Headaches. Patients reported more relief from branded pills than from chemically identical generics (Branthwaite and Cooper, BMJ, 1981).
Step 4: Confirm
Afterwards the brain seeks resolution: did the story hold? Reflection and social affirmation close the loop. Thinking "you can really taste the complexity" does more than describe; it strengthens the price-quality belief, and sharing it with others (wine lovers nodding along to reviewers' tasting notes) cements a lasting mental model that shapes the next experience. We end up feeling differently and then thinking differently.
- 1. Believe. A belief frames the experience before it starts and launches a mental simulation.
- 2. Anticipate. The body physiologically prepares for the predicted experience, retuning sensory processing.
- 3. Feel. You consciously interpret sensations through the lens of expectation, and the feeling is real.
- 4. Confirm. Reflection and social sharing reinforce the original belief, feeding the next loop.
Planting the belief directly
Some marketers skip subtlety. Lay's "Bet you can't eat just one" is a suggestion about your future behavior: told you will not stop, you anticipate wanting more, and so you do. This fits psychiatrist Scott Alexander's suggestion that addiction may be what happens when you become hyper-aware of one facet of your normal motivation system: expecting irresistibility, attention zooms onto the craving and the chips feel more compelling than they are.
In the early-to-mid 1990s Toyota and General Motors sold near-identical cars: the Toyota Corolla and the Geo Prizm, with the same engine, the same chassis and much the same design. Yet in J.D. Power owner surveys the Corolla consistently scored higher; in one initial-quality study it ranked 10th best-built car in America and the Prizm 28th. Toyota had decades of reputation for bulletproof reliability; Geo, a young GM sub-brand, had none. Prizm owners heard identical mechanical noises as worrying, felt the same shifter as clunky and judged the same interior materials cheaper.
Eyal's summary: beliefs inform anticipation, anticipation shapes feeling, we confirm the feeling, and the cycle repeats. An ordinary ad succeeds if it sells the product; a masterful campaign creates an expectation that improves the product experience itself.
Is it deception? Not necessarily. If a brand makes something mundane fun or meaningful, that is real value: water from a can whose message resonates with you is more enjoyable than water from a flimsy bottle, and the joy is real even if it is in your head. Provided the company keeps its basic promises (Liquid Death's water is pure, refreshing and not in plastic), the added pleasure is a bonus, not a scam. We half-know we are being romanced and play along because it makes life a little nicer. Successful brands are expectation engines.
The wine study (Plassmann and colleagues, 2008) scanned about 20 people. Belief-in-equipment effects such as the "pro's putter" are small-sample findings, and the related "lucky ball" golf results failed to replicate. The Corolla and Prizm were not quite identical in practice: they were often built in different plants and sold through different dealer networks, and the 1993 news report Eyal cites credits "small factors" for the gap, so owner experience could differ for reasons other than belief. The headphone claim rests on a paper about listeners' preferred frequency response, not a test of $500 versus $100 sets. The Experience Loop is a useful heuristic, not a tested model.
Selective skepticism
If belief shapes both what we see and what we feel, should we doubt every craving and gut feeling? Eyal proposes selective skepticism: knowing when to question a belief and when to keep it, even if it is not strictly accurate. It is not cynicism. Debunking every joy would be like peeling the paint off a beautiful painting to inspect the canvas; some harmless illusions enrich life at no cost. Consumers cannot reliably tell high-end from mid-range headphones in blind tests, whatever the ad copy says about components and acoustic science, but real life is not a blind test; if you can afford the $500 pair, you will probably enjoy the name brand more.
Ask: "Is this belief serving me, or am I serving it?" If it adds delight, motivation, focus or connection, keep it, even knowing much of the joy lives in the belief. If it drains you (maintaining a perfect social-media image, avoiding opportunities because you "can't handle change"), question it: negative anticipation is sabotaging the experience. Treat dread, resentment and prejudice as red flags.
Preconceptions can cheat us of fresh experience. Expect a meeting to be useless and you check out and get nothing, so the forecast fulfils itself. Decide a new acquaintance is unlikeable and your coldness discourages their good side, confirming the verdict. A little scepticism helps: the dull meeting may hold an insight if you listen, and the "unfriendly" person may simply be shy, opening up to a warmer approach.
- Dreaded Mondays. Ask whether Monday is as bad as you projected on Sunday night or whether you are amplifying a narrative; try reframing "Mondays are miserable" as "Mondays are a fresh start."
- Tempting purchases. Before buying the life-changing gadget, ask whether you love the thing or the story around it; even pausing can break the spell. Paco de Leon (Finance for the People) recommends a buy list: write the item down, wait two weeks, then see if you still want it.
- "It can't be done." Do not accept the verdict; find the fastest, cheapest way to test it. Before making a single can, Cessario checked whether "Murder Your Thirst" resonated with a low-budget Facebook mockup and an online commercial. It did.
You are a simulation designer
If beliefs set feelings, we can design experiences from the inside out, and we already do: every expectation you set and story you tell shapes how a moment will feel before it arrives. Leaders design the "simulation" employees walk into each morning; the culture shapes what people expect, and expectation becomes their workday. Marketers, product designers and customer-experience staff are in the simulation business, with every touchpoint a chance to build one.
The strongest tool is evocative language:
- Netflix offers not "video access subscriptions" but "See What's Next", promising boundless discovery.
- Adidas sells not athletic gear but Muhammad Ali's "Impossible Is Nothing", a manifesto of personal power.
- Airbnb lists not temporary accommodation but "Belong Anywhere", an experience of connection.
Eyal saw this with his previous book, Indistractable. Leaders who rolled out its techniques as a "productivity initiative" got compliance; those who framed them as becoming "masters of your time and attention" created anticipation of empowerment and got more excited employees and better results. The words reprogram the simulation before anyone shows up.
You also design your personal simulations. Believe you hate networking events and you arrive expecting awkwardness and leave feeling it was wasted. Set a new expectation first, such as "I'll uncover at least one interesting story tonight", and you change what you notice and feel. The most important simulation is your daily experience, which most people leave on autopilot, shaped by habit, environment and unexamined beliefs. Knowing that belief shapes experience lets you make mundane moments meaningful, find joy in boredom and opportunity in obstacles. Eyal ends by asking whether the same mechanism can change physical pain, the limits of the body and even lifespan, the subjects of the next two chapters.
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| My feelings are real, valid and objective | What I feel comes from what I believe, not only the situation |
| Feelings are automatic reactions I can't control | I can influence them by setting expectations |
| I must change my circumstances to feel better | I can change the story I bring to ordinary moments |
| Marketing is just manipulation and lies | Smart marketing creates anticipation that enhances the experience |
| Expensive means better | Beliefs often shape experience more than the product |
Sickness Is in the Body; Illness Is in the Mind
Pain is not a readout of tissue damage but the brain's prediction about danger, so expectation can raise or lower it. Eyal draws three applications: motivation is pain management, chronic pain can often be unlearned through pain reprocessing, and honest placebos work even when you know they are inert. Placebos change how you feel, not the disease itself: illness is in the mind, sickness is in the body. He ends with six research-based levers for designing your own placebo rituals.
The carousel of pain
Simon called it the "carousel of pain": it roamed his body unpredictably, so that when he prayed for his shoulder to stop hurting, the pain would leave and turn up in his foot. Tests ruled out structural causes and doctors diagnosed fibromyalgia, which he notes is an exclusion diagnosis: no machine beeps to confirm it; everything else has simply been ruled out. The label reassured him at first but came with a crushing caveat: incurable.
His decline was gradual. Years of conventional treatment brought medication that lowered his pain from 7s, 8s and 9s to 4s, 5s and 6s out of ten, and that plateau became a life sentence. He avoided anything that might worsen it (friends, dating, anything beyond his front door) and became, in his word, a hermit: avoidance on avoidance. The pain did not stop. He spent over $20,000 on specialised physiotherapy; when that failed he felt abandoned and ended up immobile in bed, where even watching TV hurt.
The turn came at a Christmas party he barely managed to attend. A woman mentioned in passing that she had recovered from fibromyalgia years earlier by changing her mind, not her body. For the first time Simon considered that the pain might not be permanent, and he learned an approach that replaced his beliefs about what pain is. Within four months he described himself as "over chronic pain".
Eyal draws the question out: the standard advice is to avoid triggers, rest and stop activity, treating pain as an enemy to be feared and sedated. What if that defensive stance amplifies the suffering, and what else about body and mind might be just as malleable?
The brain on pain
A volunteer lies in an fMRI scanner while researchers apply searing heat to his forearm, told to stay perfectly still so the images do not blur. He rates it 8 out of 10. After several rounds a technician brings a small white jar with pharmaceutical markings, calls it a powerful analgesic cream with a local pain reducer, and rubs it on. The volunteer, who knows prescription analgesics work, feels relief before the scanner restarts. Next pulse: "maybe a four"; he feels the heat but it no longer really hurts. The jar held ordinary hand lotion from the university bookstore.
In the control room, scans showed the same heat producing two brain responses. Without the lotion, pain-processing regions lit up; with it, at identical heat, those regions were quieter and the prefrontal cortex, involved in expectation and prediction, was more active, damping the pain response. Across dozens of participants in Tor Wager's study (published in Science), belief in the cream cut both reported pain and pain-region activity. Nothing changed at the skin; the brain interpreted the signal differently. Wager's phrase: the brain has its own internal pharmacy, so believing you are being treated can release natural painkillers (his later PNAS work, 2007, tracked μ-opioid activity).
This is anticipation, the Second Power, transforming physical experience, and it follows the same Experience Loop as wine and branded water:
- Believe. Volunteers had reason to think the cream would reduce pain.
- Anticipate. Their brains physiologically prepared, adjusting sensitivity before the heat arrived.
- Feel. They reported less pain and showed lower pain-region activity.
- Confirm. Their own reports of relief reinforced the belief for next time.
Motivation is pain management
We tell ourselves small comforting lies: "I'll start working out tomorrow when I have more energy", "I'll have that difficult conversation next week when the timing is better", "I'll launch the project once I feel motivated." The structure is always "once motivated, I'll act." Eyal says it is backward: motivation does not show up first; discomfort does.
We eat because food is pleasant and also because craving is uncomfortable; even without hunger, wanting delicious food is distressing (something, he notes, a former fat kid knows). Sean Mackey, chief of Stanford's Division of Pain Medicine, calls pain the great motivator. Motivation is itself a system for managing discomfort. So procrastinating on exercise, hard conversations or demanding work is not a failure to find motivation; it is avoidance of anticipated discomfort. The brain predicts the workout will hurt or the talk will be awkward, and the prediction triggers an urge to disengage.
Those predictions are often wrong. We overestimate how long unpleasant feelings will last (Gilbert and Wilson's work on "miswanting", 2000), and the more intense the expected discomfort, the less likely we are to engage. Psychologist Ethan Kross (Chatter, 2021) says anticipatory anxiety is almost always worse than the thing itself, and that worst-case mental models become barriers to action. Worse, every avoided workout strengthens the link between exercise and bad feelings, so avoidance feeds the anticipated discomfort in a self-perpetuating cycle.
The flip side is that positive anticipation makes experiences feel better:
- Neutral observation. Runners taught to take a neutral, observational stance toward burning lungs and legs performed significantly better (Giles et al., 2018, on cognitive reappraisal and perceived exertion).
- Relax and smile. Runners cued to relax and hold a light smile during hard running showed better performance and lower reported discomfort at the same exertion (Brick et al., 2018).
- Point. They were not denying sensations, only reframing them; discomfort is one more belief to reconsider.
Writing his previous book, Eyal caught his mind generating excuses: "I need more research first", "I should refine the outline", "I'll just answer these emails." He would reorganise notes, open browser tabs and dive into low-stakes tasks instead of finishing a chapter. Eventually he saw he was dodging the discomfort of concentrated effort, of wrestling complex ideas into clear paragraphs. He stopped trying to eliminate the feeling and instead reread resistance as a signal that important, meaningful work was next. Writing did not become effortless, but the struggle felt purposeful and less painful, and his output rose. He learned to manage procrastination only when he learned to manage his pain.
Predicting pain
Simon's recovery required unlearning his beliefs about where pain comes from. Most people assume pain means damage, but touch a hot stove and specialised nerve endings called nociceptors send signals that are raw data, not pain. The brain weaves in context, memory and belief to run an instant threat assessment and produce hurt. Detection happens in the periphery; the felt pain is always generated in the brain.
Hence the term neuroplastic pain: pain sustained not by injury but by the brain's own predictions. Pain psychologist Alan Gordon (The Way Out, 2021) explains that the brain learns to predict pain to protect you, but those predictions can become overprotective, warning of danger with no tissue damage. The false alarms create a pain-fear-pain cycle; in Gordon's words, responding to pain with fear confirms it is dangerous and so fear is the fuel for the pain. Anticipation amplifies symptoms; avoidance tightens the loop; every retreat reinforces the brain's mistaken belief.
Gordon lived it. After a minor back injury had had ample time to heal, his MRI came back normal, yet sitting brought sharp, disabling pain. Merely anticipating a long meeting triggered anxiety that amplified the pain when he sat; his brain had learned that sitting meant danger. Imaging supports the model: in chronic back pain, activity shifts toward regions for emotion and prediction and away from areas that process raw sensory signals (Hashmi et al., Brain, 2013). The brain moves from responding to tissue damage to responding to expected pain and the fear it brings.
Pain turnarounds
If the brain can learn to expect pain, it can learn to expect safety. A pain turnaround is the moment someone breaks the pain-fear-pain cycle and installs a pattern that leads to relief. After the party, Simon began pain reprocessing therapy (PRT), which, like the Chapter 3 turnarounds, questions automatic interpretations and retrains the brain's predictions.
- Observation. Notice sensations with curiosity rather than fear. Describe them neutrally (pressure, warmth, tingling) instead of labelling them pain, which interrupts automatic threat detection and the fear that amplifies it.
- Safety reappraisal. Gather evidence the sensation is not damage: if movement were truly harmful, pain would not vanish when stress drops or attention shifts.
- Positive affect. Use humour or lightness to challenge old predictions. One of Gordon's patients answered pain during safe movement with "Nice try, brain, I know this isn't dangerous."
In a randomized controlled trial in JAMA Psychiatry (Yoni Ashar, Gordon and colleagues), 66% of chronic back-pain patients were pain-free or nearly so after four weeks of PRT, versus 20% in the placebo group and 10% on usual care. The same three moves apply wherever anticipated discomfort blocks useful action: the speech avoided for fear of humiliation, the hard work put off for fear of strain, the skipped workout. Observe the sensation without catastrophic labels, reappraise its meaning, pair it with positive emotion, and what you anticipate, and therefore feel, changes. No formal program is required; sometimes believing that relief is possible is enough.
Illness is not sickness
Most health maintenance is done by the body's own repair systems, not drugs. Physician Wayne Jonas estimates that about 80% of what keeps populations healthy comes from restorative abilities activated by daily behavior, relationships and how meaningful we find our treatments; pharmaceuticals and surgery contribute only 15-20% yet absorb 80-90% of health spending. Modern medicine excels at acute threats such as infections and injuries but often falls short on chronic conditions like depression, migraine and persistent pain, which cost the most. Dismissing self-healing as "just a placebo" ignores one of the best tools for reducing suffering.
Placebos are not miracle cures. They act strongly on subjective experience (pain, anxiety, fatigue, mood) and little or not at all on structural disease or objective physiology. Psychologist James Alcock (Belief, 2018) supplies the key distinction: sickness (disease) is biological dysfunction; illness is the experience of bodily symptoms, which may or may not reflect disease and is shaped by beliefs, cultural readings of symptoms, biases, emotional needs and even self-delusion. You can be sick without feeling ill (early, symptomless cancer) or ill without being sick (pain with no underlying disease).
- Asthma (NEJM, 2011). Patients got an albuterol inhaler, a placebo inhaler, sham acupuncture or nothing. All three treatments made patients feel much better than no treatment, nearly equally, but only albuterol improved measured lung function.
- Brain chemistry. Expecting relief releases endorphins (natural painkillers) and dopamine (reward and relief).
- Specificity. Identical placebos described as morphine-like (for sharp pain) or aspirin-like (for inflammatory pain) produced relief that mirrored the expected drug (Benedetti and Dogue, 2015).
- Sham knee surgery. For knee osteoarthritis, incisions with no actual repair matched real arthroscopy on pain relief and function, for years (Moseley et al., NEJM, 2002).
The lesson: where pain is the main symptom, changing expectations can change what you feel even if the structural condition is unchanged. But the line matters. Promoting placebos as replacements for evidence-based treatment of disease crosses it; for conditions where subjective experience is the core problem, they can help greatly. The aim is to combine placebo effects with real medicine, not choose between them.
Honest placebos
Historically, placebos required deception, which clashed with informed consent. Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard Medical School's Program in Placebo Studies, tested whether deception was necessary.
Kaptchuk recruited 80 patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS): half got no treatment, half got pills clearly labelled placebo. They were told the pills were an inert substance, like sugar pills, shown in clinical studies to improve IBS through mind-body self-healing, and before consenting heard how placebos can work through conditioning, expectancy and responses to pill-taking rituals. They took them twice daily. After three weeks the open-label group reported significantly greater symptom improvement than controls, comparable to powerful IBS drugs in other trials. Kaptchuk said the team was stunned by the size of the effect.
Placebo pain relief also appears to be growing stronger over time: US neuropathic-pain trials show rising placebo responses (Tuttle et al., 2015), possibly because public awareness feeds expectation. That raises a paradox: if the Experience Loop begins with belief, how can a pill you know is inert work? Eyal's answer is that the brain runs on several levels. Your rational mind knows it is "just a placebo", but systems for unconscious learning and conditioning still respond to the ritual and context of treatment, just as your blood pressure rises and your eyes well up at a film you know is fiction. Noticing the pill's shape, taking it from the bottle, swallowing it: these cues trigger bodily responses, and the resulting relief closes the loop, strengthening belief in the placebo next time.
This dissolves the false choice between "real medicine" and "just placebo" and suggests we can harness placebo effects ethically, with or without self-deception. Eyal speculates that remedies people swear by (vitamin C, herbal supplements, daily tonics) may work mainly through belief, notes that Amazon sells "placebo pills" with hundreds of five-star reviews, and concludes that a safe, affordable intervention that improves your life may be all that matters.
Systematic reviews (notably Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche's Cochrane work) find placebo effects are mostly small and confined to self-reported outcomes, and much apparent "placebo response" is regression to the mean and natural recovery. Kaptchuk's trial was small and unblinded by design, so expectation and response bias are hard to separate; larger follow-up trials gave more mixed results. The PRT trial is strong but single-site, and Jonas's 80% is an estimate derived from population-health models, not a measurement. The claim that cortisone injections "intensified her fear" as a "well documented" phenomenon is asserted without support. Eyal's nod to supplements "working through belief" and to Amazon placebo pills with five-star reviews is a weak endorsement: reviews are not evidence.
Throw some ass
In 2018, Sophie Hawley-Weld, half of the Grammy-nominated electronic duo Sofi Tukker, was releasing her first album, launching a record label and touring nonstop on endless late nights. Over that year she developed debilitating chronic migraines and persistent back pain that drove her into dark rooms. Nothing worked; cortisone injections for her back only heightened her fear and worsened things. Like many chronic-pain sufferers she began avoiding anything that might hurt, and her brain learned that movement was dangerous, locking her into fear, bracing and confirmation that her body was fragile.
The breakthrough came at a choreography rehearsal. Her Brazilian dancer friends urged her to try a move she found awkward: "throwing her ass." She protested that she was uncomfortable, did not know how and did not want to, but they kept encouraging her. She braced for certain pain, and none came: a jarring gap between what her brain expected and what her body delivered. She felt playful and, above all, safe. She repeated it again and again without pain.
| Loop | Belief | Anticipate | Feel | Confirm |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Old | Movement is dangerous | Pain | Pain | Danger |
| New | Movement can be safe | Relief | Ease | Capability |
The episode inspired the celebratory track "Throw Some Ass", about the mind-body connection, with the refrain "free the mind". Sometimes the quickest way to quiet the brain's alarm is to do something joyful with your body: rhythm, coordination and fun absorbed her attention, and that absence of hypervigilance told her nervous system this is safe. Her own summary is that doing something ridiculous with your body while feeling free and happy can make pain go away. Each painless repetition chipped at the old belief and built evidence for the new, exactly what a strong placebo does, with no pill required.
Turning belief into relief
Hawley-Weld needed only an experience strong enough to replace an old belief and to confirm the new one until it stuck. Eyal says you can design your own "placebos", meaning experiences, rituals or cues that update what the brain anticipates.
- Delivery. Form matters: pills suit pain and sleep problems, creams and balms localised discomfort; larger pills beat smaller ones and capsules tend to beat tablets.
- Dose. Two placebo pills beat one, and taking them more than once a day can amplify effects (Kaptchuk, 2018). Consistent timing builds a predictive loop, so the brain prepares relief before it arrives.
- Association (conditioning). Pair relief with a learnable cue. When pain medication was paired with a distinctive-tasting drink, the drink alone later reduced pain significantly (Benedetti et al., 2003): classical conditioning.
- Design. Make it look and taste like it works. Red and orange pills read as stimulants, blue and green as sedatives (de Craen et al., BMJ, 1996); white pills seem safer but weaker; bitter liquids seem more medicinal and can work better than sweet ones (Zunhammer et al., 2022).
- Scripts. Words shape feelings. Say what it does, for example "This placebo pill will help my body activate its natural pain-relieving mechanisms." Describing a placebo as a powerful reliever that works for most people beats neutral wording.
- Social reinforcement. Effects are larger when someone else administers the treatment (Colloca and Benedetti, 2005) and when you know others have benefited.
The beauty of honest placebos is that they work even when you know. Once you see it, the effect is everywhere: the favourite mug that makes coffee taste better, a friend's hand on your shoulder easing anxiety, the steadying breath before you speak. Experience is shaped moment to moment by what you expect to feel.
Feel good now
The most powerful bodily changes often start with the narrative in your mind. Eyal offers three reframes:
- Burning lungs on a run become evidence you are growing stronger, not a signal to stop.
- Tension before a hard conversation becomes energy mobilised to connect, not anxiety to avoid.
- The strain of focus becomes the feeling of your brain building new capabilities, not suffering.
Every reframe, ritual or curious observation reshapes the neural circuits that define physical experience. Your body is something you create as well as something you have, moment by moment, through anticipation. The next chapter asks whether the same mechanism reaches ageing, healing and lifespan, and promises to separate real findings from wishful thinking.
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| All pain means physical damage | Pain is a brain signal, not always proof of injury |
| Placebo effects are fake | Placebos can work even when you know |
| How I feel always shows what's wrong | Illness and sickness don't always line up |
| Discomfort should always be avoided | Discomfort is information to observe with curiosity |
| I'm stuck with my pain | New beliefs can retrain how I experience pain |
Living Longer, Stronger, and Smarter
Can belief change objective biology, not just feelings? Eyal's answer is a careful yes: the famous mind-over-body miracles mostly fail to replicate, but anticipation reliably changes effort, attention and behavior, sometimes removes brakes on latent ability, and those routes change the body. Beliefs become biology through behavior, not by bypassing it. The biggest lever is what you believe about aging, which Becca Levy's work links to 7.5 extra years of life.
Granfluencers and dying on the Fourth
A 67-year-old holds his body rigid and horizontal off a vertical pole, a human flag. Nearby his 71-year-old teammate challenges a man fifty years younger to a push-up contest as phones go up; the young man collapses at 41, the senior stops, unhurried, at 64. These are Singapore's Team Strong Silvers, whose washboard abs and gymnastics have drawn millions of views and the label "granfluencers". What strikes Eyal is that their beliefs about aging fuel behaviors their peers dropped decades ago, and those behaviors in turn reshape what aging means.
He then asks whether thoughts might affect when we die as well as how long we live:
- Thomas Jefferson, 83, bedridden at Monticello in summer 1826, refused medication that would cloud his mind and kept asking the date, wanting to live to 4 July, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration he wrote. Told it was the Fourth, he seemed satisfied and died around 1 p.m.
- John Adams, 90, some 500 miles north in Quincy, Massachusetts, died the same day within hours, his last words reportedly that Jefferson survives, unaware his rival was already dead.
- James Monroe died on 4 July 1831, the third president to do so.
Some medical researchers (David Phillips and colleagues, JAMA 1990 and The Lancet 1988) claim people can postpone death until symbolically meaningful occasions. If the mind could time death, what else might it control? Chapter 6 showed anticipation changing subjective experience through the brain's internal pharmacy; this chapter asks about objective biological measures such as lifespan, sorting validated findings from exaggeration. Eyal reminds readers that the most liberating beliefs are balanced with reality, not the most extreme.
Phillips's postponement findings were not borne out by later large analyses (for example Young and Hade, JAMA 2004, on cancer deaths around holidays and birthdays). Three presidents dying on one date is a striking coincidence, not evidence.
Too good to be true
Pop psychology overflows with studies promising transformation through thought alone. Eyal examines three of the most famous.
- Counterclockwise (Ellen Langer, 1979). In autumn 1979 elderly men entered a secluded New England retreat staged as 1959: Perry Como on black-and-white TV, 1950s magazines, vintage radio. For five days they were told not to reminisce but to behave as if Eisenhower were president and they were decades younger. Afterwards they reportedly had sharper memory, better dexterity and improved hearing, and some observers thought they looked younger.
- Hotel housekeepers (Alia Crum and Langer, 2007). Female housekeepers were told that their daily vacuuming, sheet-changing and window-washing met the Surgeon General's exercise recommendations. A month later they reportedly had lost weight, cut waist-to-hip ratio and lowered blood pressure, with no change in work or diet.
- Mind over milkshakes (Crum and colleagues, 2011). Volunteers drank the same vanilla shake twice, once labelled "Indulgence: 620 calories, high fat, high sugar" and once "Sensi-shake: 140 calories, no added sugar, fat-free". Believing it indulgent, their hunger hormone (ghrelin) dropped as if they had feasted.
Together they suggested mindsets turn directly into biology. Then the story frays.
The promise. Old men think themselves younger; cleaners shed pounds by seeing work as exercise; a calorie label steers a hunger hormone. Mindset alone appears to rewrite biology.
The scrutiny. Counterclockwise was never published in a peer-reviewed journal; its fame rests on popular accounts. The housekeeper result failed to replicate (Stanforth and colleagues, 2011). The milkshake effects were tiny and inconsistent, with no difference in actual hunger. Eyal's rule: the more extraordinary the claim, the shakier the evidence and replicability.
He calls these classic wishful thinking, blurring correlation and causation and treating preliminary findings as fact. Eyal deserves credit here: he confronts the very studies self-help books usually trumpet. But he does not conclude the mind is powerless. It shapes the body through deeper pathways than mindset alone.
"The lie became the reality"
Preparing for Wimbledon 2015, Serena Williams was, in coach Patrick Mouratoglou's words, not thinking like Serena: she had lost the year before and her confidence was shaken. Nerves hit hardest at the net: she hesitated, did not move up to take the ball early, and missed. With two weeks to go, Mouratoglou decided, as he later put it, to tell her something that might or might not be true. At a strategy session he said he had great news: whenever she created a short ball he relaxed, because the stats showed she would win 80% of the points at the net. Williams replied that she thought she sucked at the net; he insisted the numbers said the opposite, so on short balls he knew she would move up and win. The figure was invented. Mouratoglou says he hates lying, but a coach must say what builds confidence, and he knew she would play far better if she believed her stats were good. By his account she won 80% at the net from that day, so the lie became the reality, and she won the tournament.
Unlike the overblown mindset studies, Eyal stresses, this works through behavior: believing she would succeed at the net, Williams went there more often and more confidently, and her play genuinely improved. One anecdote, but the pattern of belief → behavior → outcome recurs in solid research.
At a Massachusetts gym, 15 young men with some lifting experience (not competitive bodybuilders) joined a trial of a supposed new "athletic steroid" for rapid muscle gain. They took the capsules for four weeks while keeping their usual routines. They improved far more than an untreated control group on the bench press, military press, squat and clean and jerk, adding 29 lb to the bench press in a month. The capsules held no active ingredient: no anabolic compounds, no hormones.
Eyal says the result has stood the test of time and been replicated. The mechanism is not mystical: believing they had pharmaceutical help, the men most likely trained harder, pushing more reps and heavier weights. The gains were real and measurable, but placebo worked by changing behavior, not by altering physiology through thought. It is the Motivation Triangle in action, with anticipation as the bridge from belief (the drug works) to behavior (more effort) to benefit (more strength). The anticipation was motivational, not magical.
Strategic deception also lifts mental performance:
- Creativity scent. Participants smelled a neutral substance; those told it was a "creativity-enhancing" aroma scored significantly higher on standard tests of out-of-the-box thinking than controls smelling the same odour (Rozenkrantz et al., 2017).
- Sham brain stimulation. People told a mild current would boost their performance during a learning task, with no stimulation delivered, showed greater accuracy and faster reaction times than controls (Turi et al., 2017).
Expecting to do better sharpens attention, lowers performance anxiety and often raises effort; the placebo works by triggering biology, not bypassing it. Mapped onto the Experience Loop, the steroid group believed they had an enhancer, anticipated gains, felt empowered to push harder and confirmed the belief when the numbers rose, a virtuous cycle. Expectations shape capability, Eyal concludes, but belief alone is not enough to unlock it.
Revealing hidden potential
A further kind of anticipation effect: beliefs sometimes remove barriers to capacities we already have.
The crocodile dream. In a Paris sleep lab, observers were startled by shouts of "Crocodile! Crocodile!" A Parkinson's patient who normally managed only a few soft words was bellowing. Sorbonne neurology professor Isabelle Arnulf reports that, dreaming of crocodiles, he lifted a heavy bedside table above his head. Awake, he could barely lift everyday objects. Eyal reads it as the body revealing locked-away potential once conscious limitations are suspended in sleep.
G-tummo. At dawn in frost-bound monasteries of Eastern Tibet, nuns and monks meditate in unheated stone chambers well below freezing, wearing only thin cotton sheets. Where others would become hypothermic, they stay warm, and their skin reportedly melts the surrounding frost. In a 2013 study (Kozhevnikov and colleagues), practitioners of forceful-breath meditation raised their core temperature into a moderate fever zone, up to 38.3 °C, which controls could not reproduce despite copying the technique. The striking part is voluntary control of supposedly automatic functions. The method combines vase breathing (holding the breath while tensing the abdominal muscles) with vivid visualisation of fire rising through the spine; anticipating warmth, they appear to ignite thermogenesis that lies dormant in most people.
Eyal links this to Harvard research identifying neurons in the hypothalamus that can directly trigger fever and other sickness responses (Osterhout et al., Nature, 2022). Fever, he notes, is not caused by infection itself; the brain raises temperature deliberately to make the body hostile to pathogens. Anyone who has had a fever has this power without knowing how to use it; the meditators seem to activate it without illness, which he calls extraordinary control of natural systems through belief, not a supernatural feat.
Placebo sleep. Researchers wired participants to monitors and then gave false feedback from fake EEG readings: some heard their REM sleep was above average, others below. Despite no real difference in sleep, the "good sleepers" did better on addition and word-association tests (Draganich and Erdal, 2014). The gain showed on objective tests, not only self-reported alertness.
Rigged clocks. In a 2009 study, cyclists pedalled to exhaustion watching a clock secretly set to run fast or slow; with a slow clock (so they thought less time had passed) they lasted significantly longer (Morton, 2009). In a 2012 study, cyclists falsely told they were riding slower than they were sustained faster speeds with no rise in perceived exertion (Stone et al., 2012).
The common thread: when psychological constraints are removed or altered, anticipation can expose capabilities people did not know they had.
Strength during dreams in Parkinson's reflects REM-sleep motor pathways that bypass the damaged basal ganglia, not a belief being lifted. The Harvard fever neurons were identified in mice (2022), so linking them to monks is speculation. Eyal claims the placebo-steroid finding has been replicated but cites Ross and Olson (1981), a theoretical review, not a replication; later small trials point the same way but the evidence is thin. The sleep and clock studies are small samples. The "skin melts frost" image traces to monastery lore; the lab work (Benson, 1982; Kozhevnikov, 2013) measured finger, toe and core temperature rises, the latter tied to the forceful-breathing technique itself.
The biology of belief
Back to the Strong Silvers: are they outliers, or evidence of how beliefs shape aging? Yale's Becca Levy has studied exactly this.
- 660 people aged 50+, followed for nearly 23 years (Levy et al., 2002).
- Those with positive views of aging lived 7.5 years longer on average, after controlling for health, socioeconomic status and other factors.
- For comparison, Eyal cites lower blood pressure or cholesterol: about 4 years; healthy weight, not smoking and regular exercise: 1-3 years each.
- Positive believers had healthier biomarkers, including lower inflammation markers and stress hormones.
- Negative age stereotypes absorbed in young adulthood predicted heart attacks and strokes up to 38 years later (Levy et al., 2009).
These differences, Eyal insists, are not magical; they run through concrete behavioral and psychological pathways. The negative spiral: beliefs like "I might fall" or "I'm too old for this" lead to avoiding physical challenges; avoidance causes deconditioning; deconditioning makes activity harder and more painful, reinforcing avoidance; socially it brings isolation, raising stress and depression risk; chronic stress then drives inflammation and disrupts hormones, accelerating biological aging. The Strong Silvers run the opposite spiral: belief in continued adaptation → harder training (behavior) → real strength (biology) → fewer injury worries (psychology) → more training and community involvement (social behavior) → lower inflammation and stress hormones (biology), which validates the starting belief.
Interventions show the positive cycle directly: older adults exposed to positive messages about aging immediately do better on physical tests such as walking speed (Levy et al., 2014), because freed from limiting expectations they try harder and move differently.
- Cognitive functioning. Positive age beliefs go with better memory and slower cognitive decline.
- Cardiovascular health. Smaller blood-pressure and heart-rate spikes during stressful tasks.
- Recovery from disability. Fuller, faster recovery of function after disabling health events.
- Preventive behaviors. More exercise, better nutrition and better medication adherence.
The stories we tell about aging therefore matter more than we think. A culture that equates age with decline, helplessness and irrelevance sees those messages show up physically. "I'm too old for this" may sound like realism but is a terrible way to live; "My body can thrive at any age" may be optimistically biased, but it is an excellent tool because it drives behaviors with measurable benefits. Aging is inevitable; how the body experiences time is substantially shaped by the beliefs that drive our actions.
Levy's 7.5 years is observational: people already declining may well view aging negatively because they are declining (reverse causation), and no set of controls removes that fully. The comparison with blood pressure and smoking pulls figures from different studies and populations, so it is rhetorical, not a head-to-head test. The behavioral pathway Eyal describes is plausible; the size of the effect is not settled.
The reality of our beliefs
Beliefs shape biology through concrete physiological and behavioral pathways. Unlike genes or past exposures, beliefs stay malleable for life, so cultivating ones that promote improvement lets us influence bodily experience. Age beliefs may matter most, gaining power as years pass. Eyal poses three questions: will you anticipate continued vigour or inevitable decline; read physical changes as signals to evolve or reasons to withdraw; see yourself as an active contributor to your health or a diminished bystander? The Strong Silvers' feats are not miracles but the result of expecting capability to persist, training consistently on that expectation and letting biology respond. Bodies respond to beliefs, which turns aging from something that happens to us into something approached with informed agency, neither naive optimism nor resigned fatalism.
Eyal's practical takeaways:
- Audit your body stories. Notice what you tell yourself your body can and cannot do; those stories shape physical reality over time.
- Pick right-sized challenges. Choose challenges suited to your current level while believing you can keep adapting.
- Build belief from evidence. Start small, log improvements, let success widen your sense of the possible.
- Choose for usefulness. Ask "Does this belief keep me going?"
| Limiting belief | Liberating belief |
|---|---|
| Getting older means inevitable decline | My body can keep adapting at any stage of life |
| My current performance reflects my potential | My body likely has capabilities I haven't accessed |
| Avoiding challenges protects me | Appropriate challenges build strength and reveal capacity |
| I'm too old, young or weak to try that | Age and ability are starting points, not limits |
| Feeling sluggish is just how I am | Feelings often reflect expectations and can change |
How to Take Control of Your Life (Even When It's Impossible)
The third power of belief is agency, the power to do what you believe. Eyal builds it on the revised science of learned helplessness: helplessness is the brain's default; what we must learn is hope. Agency grows from evidence of small wins, and it pays to believe you have control even when objective analysis says you don't, provided you respect the constraints that are real.
The question every musher faces
What frightens a sled-dog driver most is not wolves or thin ice but the snap of a tether: the team breaks loose and runs off with supplies, shelter and the means of survival. Blair Braverman, who ran Alaska's Iditarod, told an interviewer that the dogs do not wait for you; they are happier running on without you. Eyal uses the image to frame the chapter's question. Chaos will appear on any trail; the only open matter is how you respond when it does, and whether you are an actor in your life or a passenger carried by outside forces.
The book has so far covered attention (beliefs shape what we see) and anticipation (beliefs shape what we feel). Agency, the ability to act rather than be acted upon, is where inner conviction turns into outward action, and Eyal promises that the newest neuroscience makes it more counterintuitive than psychologists long assumed.
The dogs that wouldn't quit
In the late 1960s, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier (with J. Bruce Overmier) strapped dogs into small hammock harnesses and gave them mild electric shocks under one of two conditions:
- Escapable. Pressing a panel with the nose stopped the shock.
- Inescapable. The panel did nothing; the shocks ended on their own schedule.
The next day each dog went into a shuttle box, where it could escape shock on one side by jumping a low barrier. The researchers expected the earlier conditioning to speed learning. The escapable group did learn fast, but the inescapable dogs did not even try: they lay down and whimpered, as if they had concluded nothing they did would matter. Seligman and Maier named this learned helplessness: after enough uncontrollable bad events, an animal or person learns that action is useless and carries that lesson into new settings, giving up even when escape becomes possible. The idea reshaped thinking about depression, trauma and resilience and generated thousands of studies.
One detail in the data bothered the researchers for decades: a few dogs never gave up, however many uncontrollable shocks they received. Some fifty years later Maier explained them, and in doing so reversed the original theory. When the brain meets an uncontrollable situation, its first, automatic response is to freeze and go passive. When the animal detects that it may have a chance, a second region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), registers that possibility and actively inhibits the passive response. Helplessness, on this account, is not learned at all; it is the default.
Eyal ties this back to Curt Richter's swimming rats from Chapter 1: rats that were rescued once and put back in the water swam for days, while unrescued rats sank within minutes. The dogs that would not quit probably had earlier experiences in which escape worked, giving them a learned response strong enough to override instinctive passivity. Each successful exercise of control strengthens these pathways and activates what Seligman calls the "hope circuit"; over time the result is something like a new operating system that treats problems as challenges to engage rather than threats to avoid.
Eyal credits the reversal to modern brain imaging. The work summarised in "Learned Helplessness at Fifty" (Maier and Seligman, Psychological Review, 2016) came mainly from invasive studies in rats (the dorsal raphe nucleus and vmPFC), not human scans. The conclusion stands, but the evidence is animal neuroscience extrapolated to people, and Eyal's link between the few resilient dogs and prior escape experience is his inference, not a finding of the original studies.
Mastery experiences
Psychologists call these control-building episodes mastery experiences, and they can be engineered. In a Northwestern University study (Hauner and colleagues, 2012), people with severe arachnophobia spent a single two-hour session moving progressively closer to a live tarantula. By the end every participant could touch or hold it, which they had considered impossible, and brain scans showed changes in regions governing fear processing and emotion regulation after this one brief intervention.
Similar results appear for public-speaking anxiety and post-traumatic stress. This is why exposure therapy ranks among the most effective anxiety treatments: it does not try to delete anxiety but builds evidence that you can function while anxious. It also explains why positive thinking alone so often fails: telling yourself you have control is not enough, because the brain needs direct evidence that change is possible.
Procrastinating on a project, delaying a financial decision or hesitating over a career move is the ancient default doing its job: falling back on fear and passivity when outcomes are uncertain. The remedy is targeted moments of control, small wins that prove to the brain your actions matter.
Fighting chaos
When Braverman first stood on a sled's runners, ten years before her Iditarod, she dreamed of "one clean run" in which nothing went wrong. Every tangled line, weather shift or disobedient dog felt like proof of her inadequacy. Eyal says most of us treat an overflowing task list, a wobbling project or a complicated relationship the same way: as an indictment of our ability rather than a normal part of life.
Over the years her beliefs changed. She stopped seeing problems, even dangerous ones, as disasters and began treating them as ordinary features of wilderness travel: chaos became the terrain, not the enemy. At The Steps, three near-vertical drops feared even by veterans, where one error could send sled, dogs and musher hundreds of feet onto a frozen river, her body still flooded with signals to stop. But training had built more than skill; it had built belief in her own agency. She no longer wished for an easy run; she trusted her ability to handle whatever came.
Life is that which fights chaos
In 1944 the physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked, in What Is Life?, what physically separates living things from dead matter. His answer: life wages a constant battle against entropy, the drift of the universe toward disorder. Mountains erode, stars burn out, even black holes evaporate, yet living things build islands of order: a seed pushing toward light, bees turning scattered nectar into hexagonal comb, coral polyps forming reef cities, and trillions of your own cells regulating temperature, repairing damage and converting molecules into energy. Death ends life's 3.8-billion-year fight, and the body returns to dust.
Eyal's reframe follows: disorder is not a sign you are failing at life but proof you are immersed in it. Eliminating mess is impossible; the goal is a productive relationship with disorder. Like attention and anticipation beliefs, agency beliefs need not be absolutely true: Braverman had no certainty she would finish alive, only beliefs that made her more effective.
Low agency. Obstacles are immovable barriers that signal "Stop", like the dogs that lay down. The guiding question is "How can I avoid difficulty?"
High agency. Obstacles are navigation points that signal "Adapt". High-agency people do not expect fewer problems; they trust their response and ask "How will I handle difficulty when it inevitably appears?"
The man who moved a mountain
Dashrath Manjhi belonged to the Musahar caste, among India's poorest and most marginalised, landless labourers traditionally reduced to catching rats to eat. A year before he began, his pregnant wife Falguni Devi was badly injured in a fall on a mountain path. The nearest doctor was under a mile away across the ridge, but the road around it ran roughly 40 miles, and she could not be saved. Standing over her body, he decided the mountain had to go.
On a hot morning in 1960 this man, barely five feet tall, walked to the rock with a hammer and a rough iron chisel. Villagers wondered if grief had broken him. He worked before dawn and again each evening after field labour, on quartzite, one of the hardest stones there is, through scorching summers that burned his hands and monsoons that made the face slick.
- Slow evidence. For years progress was invisible; after five years there was a shallow depression, after ten a visible groove.
- Costs and refusals. He sold his goats for better tools and worked through injuries; appeals to the government produced collapsed schemes and broken promises.
- Ridicule, then help. Villagers called him the village idiot and his family begged him to stop; gradually the same villagers began bringing food, water and tools.
- Result. By 1982, after 22 years, he had cut a passage about 360 ft long, 30 ft wide and 25 ft deep, shrinking the 40-mile detour to about 9 miles, so children reached schools, farmers markets and the sick hospitals.
Psychologists call the trait he displayed locus of control (a concept from Julian Rotter, 1966). People with an external locus believe power over their lives lies with fate, luck or others; those with an internal locus see themselves as agents who shape outcomes. Manjhi could not revive his wife, compel the state or change his caste, but he could break rock, and did, decade after decade.
Agency works
Eyal argues that Manjhi's real legacy is proof that individual agency can beat seemingly insurmountable barriers, and that research shows the same stance pays across almost every domain.
- Mental health. Lower depression and anxiety, faster recovery from trauma, more life satisfaction and purpose, across cultures and even after controlling for actual circumstances. Holocaust survivors who kept a sense of inner control in the camps (often through small mental or interpersonal acts) showed markedly fewer PTSD symptoms decades later than those with an external orientation.
- Physical health. Less chronic illness, faster recovery from disease and injury, stronger immune function in lab tests. In the 1970 British Cohort Study, about 7,500 children with a strong internal locus at age 10 were significantly less likely to report poor health as adults.
- Relationships. More satisfying, resilient partnerships; people address conflict directly instead of waiting for the partner or circumstances to change, and keep supportive ties through big transitions, a loop in which agency strengthens ties and ties sustain agency.
- Career. Higher income, faster advancement, more job satisfaction. A 22-year longitudinal study found adolescent locus of control predicted adult income alongside IQ, parental socioeconomic status and academic achievement; entrepreneurship studies link it to business growth and more sustainable ventures.
- Education. Teaching students that intelligence can be developed (an agency belief) improved performance, most among economically disadvantaged students.
The pattern, in Eyal's words, is that an internal locus predicts better outcomes even when objective analysis suggests you lack control, which overturns the idea that action is worthwhile only in favourable conditions. Agency beliefs work as a lens on experience: two people facing the same discrimination, illness or hardship fare differently depending on whether they dwell exclusively on external forces or keep agency beliefs while acknowledging those forces. The circumstances are identical; where attention and energy go is not. On schools, he adds that systemic reform still matters, but agency beliefs can spark change inside imperfect systems.
The limit: naive omnipotence
Pushed too far, agency becomes naive omnipotence, the belief that sheer effort can bend any circumstance. People who ignore real constraints end up frustrated, burned out and disillusioned. Research drawing on Japan, China and other regions (a meta-analysis across 18 cultural regions) suggests that people who pair personal initiative with acknowledgment of external forces, such as family and community, are more resilient than those who insist on total self-determination.
See the constraints clearly, then act relentlessly where your actions matter most. Manjhi faced the same daily choice, surrender or strike again, and chose the hammer. Braverman could not control weather, trail or her dogs' instincts, but she could control preparation, decisions, focus and interpretation.
- Direction of cause. Locus-of-control findings are overwhelmingly correlational; health, wealth and stable childhoods also foster a sense of control, so causation runs both ways.
- Growth mindset. The national study Eyal cites (Yeager and colleagues, Nature, 2019) found small average effects, about a tenth of a grade point among lower-achieving students: real, cheap to produce, far from transformative.
- Sources. The "22-year" income study and several health claims rest on single cohorts; the Holocaust finding comes from a book, not a trial. Manjhi's distances and dates vary between accounts.
Building your agency
Twenty hours into an Iditarod storm, Braverman sat alone in a shelter cabin, dangerously low on dog food; running out would end her race, and her old default would have been to quit. She radioed a race judge, who said a small group of mushers was ahead and might spare supplies. She drove three hours through whiteout chasing that faint hope, and a musher named Victoria met her with 30 lb of dog food, more than enough. She called it a crazy second chance; the next lights she saw were Nome, the finish line (her first Iditarod, 2019).
The lesson: agency is not having every answer yourself. It is believing you can find a solution and staying committed until you do, which often means drawing on other people. Eyal draws four research-backed practices from her path from novice to finisher.
- 1. Start with evidence. Seek optimal challenges, tasks just beyond your comfort zone; each success is proof your actions shape outcomes. Even a ten-minute daily walk, when hard exercise feels overwhelming, trains the belief that effort matters. Eyal's speaking career began with audiences of a few dozen, not a TED stage; each talk supplied evidence for a bigger one.
- 2. Focus where it counts. Sort life into what you control, what you influence and what is beyond reach. In studies of ICU nurses, the most resilient did not try to control every variable: they stepped in when needed, collaborated, deferred to specialists and accepted outcomes they could not change, an adaptability researchers call control flexibility.
- 3. Shape the story you tell yourself. A setback's weight depends on whether you explain it as permanent or temporary, global or specific, personal or circumstantial. Resilient people tell narratives that highlight their capacity to act, which reinforces identity and action alike.
- 4. Build systems that carry you. Routines make consistent action the default and reduce reliance on willpower; Braverman's strict feeding and resting schedules carried her through exhaustion and storms. Habit research shows external structure keeps progress going when confidence or energy is low. Design systems in calm moments so they hold in chaotic ones.
Anthony Ray Hinton spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row, much of it in solitary, for crimes he did not commit. He later said his jailers stole his 30s, 40s and 50s, but he could not afford to hand them his soul. Humour was one tool (joking with guards, teasing other inmates, reminding everyone he was still human); the deeper anchor was the story he chose: that even in dehumanising conditions he kept agency over his identity. It carried him through confinement to exoneration in 2015 and into advocacy work.
The choice is yours
Daily alarming headlines push the brain toward its passive default, which is why so many people say they feel helpless, overwhelmed or stuck. Eyal's answer is not less chaos but more agency: not a more predictable world but a greater capacity to handle an unpredictable one, as Braverman did at The Steps. The promise of the third power is not that challenges vanish or that you control everything, but that you meet challenges effectively and direct energy where it matters. The chapter closes on a choice: wait for perfect conditions, or build the agency to handle whatever the trail brings.
| From limiting belief | To liberating belief |
|---|---|
| I tend to focus on what is wrong with the situation | I can focus relentlessly on what I can control |
| Feeling helpless means I am helpless | Helplessness is my brain's default; agency must be learned |
| I need ideal conditions before taking action | I can handle uncertainty and act despite chaos |
| If I can't control everything, why try anything? | I can influence outcomes within my sphere of control |
| Past challenges or failures predict future outcomes | Each setback teaches me how to respond more effectively |
Prayer Works, With or Without Faith
Eyal, a self-described rationalist, argues that prayer and ritual deliver measurable psychological benefits whether or not you are certain God exists, because they work through universal mechanisms of mind and community. He puts one question to five religious leaders in Singapore and distils five universal pathways by which ritual builds agency. You don't need certainty to pray; you need the willingness to practise. For the community that keeps ritual alive, he proposes constructive translation rather than inventing secular substitutes.
A boy on the driveway
When Eyal was six, his parents were scammed out of nearly all their money, and their fights escalated into screaming matches he says he can still hear forty years on. His escape was a ritual: before anyone woke, he went out to the concrete driveway, lay on his back under the fading stars and talked to God. The answering voice was not audible but felt distinct from his own thoughts, calmer and wiser, and it told him he would be okay, his family would come through, and he was not alone.
As he built a rational, evidence-based worldview, prayer began to feel strange: if nobody provably listened, was he not just talking to himself? It came to look like magical thinking and faded, he says, like an old Polaroid left in the sun. Yet he sensed something valuable had been lost, and decades later research brought him back. The chapter asks what science says about prayer, whether its benefits survive without certainty about God, and how and for what to pray.
Power from prayer
Eyal expected platitudes and found instead that prayer leaves measurable traces on brain and body.
- Columbia University. People who valued spirituality had thicker cerebral cortices in the regions that thin in depression; over long follow-up (Eyal says two decades), spirituality was linked to a 75% lower risk of depression, nearly 90% lower for those most at risk.
- Physiology. Prayer is associated with calmer physiology and lower cortisol reactivity; across dozens of studies religious practice correlates with less anxiety, substance abuse and overall mortality. Eyal grants social support may contribute but says controlled studies suggest independent benefits.
- Brain structure. Regular practitioners show more grey matter in regions for emotion regulation, self-control and compassion, which in daily life means more patience and endurance.
- Spiritual but not religious. 22% of Americans and 11% of Western Europeans now use the label, and in the US the shift has helped close thousands of churches a year. This group reports more anxiety, phobias and depression, with nearly triple the depression risk of people with no religious identity.
In a lab chilled by buckets of near-freezing water, 84 college students (Wachholtz and Pargament, 2005) each had to hold a hand in the water until the pain was unbearable. For the two weeks before, each had practised daily one of three methods: physical relaxation; secular meditation on neutral phrases such as "I am content" or "I am joyful"; or spiritual meditation on phrases such as "God is peace", "God is joy", "God is love", with skeptics allowed to swap in "Mother Earth", "the universe" or "my higher self". On test day everyone did 20 minutes of their technique, then plunged in. The spiritual group held on nearly twice as long, though all groups rated the pain equally intense; they also felt calmer, less anxious and happier. The substitute terms worked too.
The lesson Eyal takes: prayer's power does not rest on certainty or dogma. He returns to Chapter 1's three categories:
- Fact. An objective truth verifiable by evidence (Everest is the highest mountain above sea level).
- Faith. A conviction that needs no objective evidence (God rewards those who follow His laws).
- Belief. A firmly held opinion, open to revision on new evidence (most of what this book discusses).
Many people, as he once did, assume they must pick between fact and faith, which traps them in a false dichotomy: accept dogma with total certainty or abstain entirely. Engaging deeply with a meaningful idea, whether you call it God, love, nature or a higher self, taps reservoirs of resilience ordinary thought does not reach; it does not erase pain but adds inner resources. Those who have dropped prayer because they could not square faith claims with reason lose a psychologically protective practice, and the spiritual-but-not-religious may sit in a philosophical no-man's land, wanting transcendence without the practices to reach it.
Eyal concedes prayer can backfire when it becomes avoidance (asking for rescue instead of taking responsibility) or is driven by fear of divine punishment, but says the overall pattern from decades of research is improved well-being regardless of faith. Prayer and ritual can be bridges that let us engage mystery without demanding certainty; believers can use science to deepen practice, and nonbelievers can still draw on its mechanisms.
- Correlation. Nearly all of this evidence is correlational: attendance tracks social support, healthier habits and better baseline health (the very ill stop attending), so "independent benefits" are hard to isolate.
- Small or mismatched studies. The Columbia findings come from one high-risk family cohort (the cited paper is a ten-year study, not twenty); the grey-matter source Eyal cites (Lazar, 2005) studied meditators, not people who pray; the ice-water result is a single study of 84 students; the spiritual-but-not-religious figures come from a cross-sectional English household survey.
- What he omits. The largest test of intercessory prayer (the STEP trial, 2006) found being prayed for did nothing for heart-surgery patients, and those told they were prayed for had slightly more complications. The benefits flow to the person doing the praying.
The purpose of prayer
Anthropologists find prayer in every known human society, and it predates writing, pottery, farming and the wheel. Facing failed harvests, unexplained disease or disaster, people used ritual (candles, recitations, ceremonies) to respond rather than merely endure, turning passive suffering into something actionable.
Eyal long saw prayer as rumination spoken to no one. Cognitive scientist Eleanor Schille-Hudson describes it instead as a structured form of thinking with four steps:
- 1. Articulate the challenge clearly.
- 2. Formulate possible approaches.
- 3. Commit to action.
- 4. Reflect on outcomes.
Unlike rumination's circular worry, this is collaborative problem-solving: you focus on what you can control and delegate the rest to a higher power, and people who pray come away feeling more empowered and optimistic about change.
The free thinker
Raised in the US, Eyal knew only three options: believer, atheist or agnostic. A Singapore residency form offered a fourth: free thinker. As he understood it, a free thinker can be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish or none of these; what defines them is how they reach convictions, by testing ideas against reason, evidence and experience, keeping what helps and setting aside what does not. Approached this way, prayer need not involve declarations of certainty, and could instead cultivate the third power of belief, agency.
Singapore made the experiment easy: a Catholic church, synagogue, mosque, Buddhist temple and Hindu mandir can stand on one street. Eyal visited a leader of each and asked the same question, "How do I pray to God if I'm not sure He's real?" He was not hunting for the true religion, and admits five conversations cannot capture five traditions; he wanted wisdom for people living between knowing and not-knowing.
1. Action before understanding (Jewish)
Rabbi Mordechai received Eyal through a door in the kosher grocery attached to the synagogue, in a room walled with leather-bound Hebrew volumes and cracked paperbacks. Asked whether one can pray without certainty, the grey-bearded Orthodox rabbi answered with a casual "Yeah. Sure." Humans are minute specks, he said, praying to a God who is by definition above intellect and transcendent, so nobody can be certain about something so unknowable.
- Na'aseh v'nishma. At Mount Sinai the Israelites said "We will do, and we will hear": practice first, understanding follows. A person's psyche, he said, is shaped by what he does, not only by what he thinks.
- Start to do. Some people try to change by talking it out on a therapist's couch; if you want to change yourself, he said, start doing.
- The Sabbath. Disconnecting weekly (no phones, no work, no rushing) creates an "oasis in time" whose rhythm reveals truths about time, rest and connection. Many non-Jews he knows now keep one, perhaps on a Tuesday.
- Counterbalancing traits. Because we rarely notice when we are selfish, gossipy or unkind, ritual forces you to confront a specific trait and counterbalance it; the doing becomes the path to change.
- Modeh ani. It is easy to feel ungrateful, so a Jew begins each day by saying "Modeh ani" (thank you): gratitude for being alive, every morning.
2. Submission to repetition (Muslim)
The rabbi sent Eyal to his friend Imam Habib Hassan Alattas at the Masjid Ba'alwie. The imam's son Hasan showed him into chambers lined with photos of dignitaries, from neighbouring presidents to King Charles, and the imam's first words were an invitation to lunch: they had ordered kosher food for him. Eyal does not keep kosher but was moved; he set aside his fork and ate with his right hand.
The question itself puzzled the imam: doubt, he implied, comes from lack of guidance in childhood; it is all from the parents. So Eyal asked about prayer's purpose instead.
- Simple by design. Islam prays five times a day (morning, midday, late afternoon, evening, night), matching natural breaks the way meals do (breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, supper); pray on time if you can, later if you cannot. It is always the same verses, with no demand for eloquence. A hadith (al-Bukhari) holds that religion is easy and whoever overburdens himself in it is overwhelmed.
- A moral reset. Prayer means being conscious that God watches what you do; if someone angers you, prayer is the time to calm down and leave matters in God's hands. It interrupts emotional momentum: you face the world, then you pray, and it pulls you back and protects the heart.
- The evidence. In a pilot study (Bormann, 2005), veterans taught to silently repeat a sacred word or phrase of their own choosing through the day, in stressful moments or queues, reported lower stress and better quality of life after five weeks, with no special setting or time commitment.
Eyal notes how modern secular life either resists ritual or inflates it into retreats and ceremonies too big to sustain; the imam's case is the opposite, power through simplicity and repeatability. A secular prayer's first principle would be the same: a few short phrases, a familiar gesture, a pause to check impulses and recall who you want to be. We do not forget what matters all at once but gradually through each day, so a short, familiar, non-negotiable practice builds remembering into the rhythm of forgetting. The imam gave him a small journal for reflections; Eyal resolved that he might not pray five times a day but could sit still for a few minutes and repeat one idea he did not want to forget.
3. Looking within (Hindu)
Swami Samachittananda, in monastic robes, received him in a sparse office holding a photograph of Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century mystic who taught the unity of all religions. Prayer, the swami said, is for something subjective, the experience within you; tapping his chest, he said God is not somewhere outside but is consciousness itself, the kingdom of heaven within.
He illustrated with lunch: he once remarked that a dish needed salt, and a fellow monk asked why he was complaining about the cook when the salt sat right there on the table. In his mind it had been a problem, yet the answer was in front of him; hence his lesson that problems exist because we think they are problems.
- Perception, not fact. Many "problems" are perceptions, a theme from earlier chapters. Asceticism (fasting, sacrifice, discomfort) tests what we think we cannot live without and reveals how much suffering is optional.
- No wish-granting genie. Money, health and relationships are transient; God is consciousness, reflected in every conscious being, not a granter of requests.
- What to pray for. Only truth: not how the world might change but how it already is. Happiness, sadness, wealth and health pass; consciousness remains.
Eyal's secular borrowing: prayer starts not by asking for external change but by looking inward, seeing circumstances more clearly, holding what endures, and learning to live fully in the present.
4. Answering prayers through community (Christian)
Father Adrian Danker of the Church of the Sacred Heart wore a polo shirt with a school logo and looked more like a high-school coach than a priest. To him doubt is a blessing because it invites reflection and deeper understanding. Prayer is a two-way conversation of listening and speaking, and it should get people "off their butts", moving from contemplation to action: people bring conflicts, griefs and hopes, and leave with new perspectives, renewed commitments and sometimes the courage to reconcile.
- Unanswered petitions. Each week parishioners submit petitions (a job for a daughter, healing, love), and many go unanswered as asked, yet people keep coming. In returning they find others who listen, support and offer solutions, so prayers are often answered through the community.
- Collective effervescence. Shared ritual produces the electric sense of connection that Émile Durkheim named collective effervescence.
- Wired for connection. Nervous systems function better around supportive others; prolonged isolation raises inflammation and stress responses and weakens immunity. We do not merely enjoy community; we require it, and secular people can meet that need through ritual gatherings too.
- Hope versus expectation. Praying with expectation demands specific results; praying with hope trusts that something good will come even if it is not what you asked for, a lesson in adaptability. The miracle, Eyal concluded, is people carrying one another's burdens.
5. Transcending suffering (Buddhist)
At Singapore's Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, amid chanting, crimson walls and incense, Eyal met Venerable You Guang, whom he addressed as Shifu (teacher). He had expected Buddhism, mindfulness-friendly in American wellness culture, to be the most secular-compatible. Shifu accepted practice without full faith but stressed that something would be missing without the whole narrative.
- The karma disagreement. Shifu affirmed karma and reincarnation, even explaining a child's terminal illness by past-life actions: unfair locally, fair at a macro level. Eyal could not accept suffering children as cosmic retribution. Shifu, sensing this, reframed karma as empowering: mindful action can reshape destiny.
- The palace guard. Before becoming a monk, Shifu served in the honour guard at the Istana, Singapore's presidential palace, standing motionless in heat for five-hour shifts. He coped by chanting the Great Compassion mantra, which kept his mind grounded through the discomfort.
- Chosen hardship. Buddhists perform prostrations, full-body bows repeated hundreds or thousands of times; Muslims fast dawn to sunset through Ramadan while working; Jews go 25 hours without food or water on Yom Kippur. Accepting difficulty inside a meaningful frame shows people they can endure more than they imagined. Buddhist prayer does not remove suffering but reframes it as a path to strength.
Universal patterns
Back in Singapore's heat, Eyal felt empowered: beneath their differences, the practices rest on shared features of human cognition. He heard echoes of each pathway in every holy space he visited.
| Pathway | Tradition | What it teaches | Secular version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Action before understanding | Jewish | Ritual shapes you before you grasp its meaning | Start the practice; meaning follows |
| Submission to repetition | Muslim | Short, familiar rituals reset emotion and recall what matters | A few phrases, a gesture, a pause, daily |
| Looking within | Hindu | The deepest prayer seeks truth and clarity, not external change | Ask for clarity, not outcomes |
| Answering through community | Christian | Prayer's power often comes through one another | Join a group that shows up weekly |
| Transcending suffering | Buddhist | Ritualised difficulty turns pain into resilience | Chosen hardship in a meaningful frame |
The Wizard of Michigan
If ritual works through psychology rather than theology, it should work outside sacred spaces, and Eyal's test case is an atheist in a wizard robe.
Garrison Benson managed a movie theater in Michigan and absorbed constant tirades over spilled popcorn, sticky floors and soda. Drained, he put on a wizard robe, walked into the winter woods on his rural property, set his name badge on a tree stump and circled it nine times, imagining the forces of the land and his home rising from the ground to charge the badge with emotional safety. Back at work, when a parent yelled about a child's spilled soda, he tapped the badge and pictured the anger dissolving. The tap cued him that this was not about him personally, and dealing with it in the moment spared him brooding and replaying the exchange later, a technique psychologists call mental distancing.
On his podcast Placebo Magick, Benson, as the wizard Durmak, teaches how to cast spells, brew potions and "hack the human brain" while openly acknowledging magick isn't real: ritual as an honest placebo. Without knowing it he used the religious pathways: he acted before understanding how it worked, repeated a simple gesture that reset his emotions, looked inward at his own response instead of demanding customers change, and used structure to transcend daily discomfort.
Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas (Ritual, 2022) explains that ritual's predictability imposes order on daily chaos and gives a sense of control over the uncontrollable. Research suggests secular rituals reduce anxiety and improve performance as well as religious ones, provided they share the structure: repetition, formality and symbolic meaning. Ritual, Eyal concludes, works because it anchors us in action.
The community problem
Rituals also bind groups, which raises a dilemma: how do you get ritual, prayer and community without pretending to a certainty you lack? Purely secular alternatives have struggled:
- Sunday Assembly. Founded in London in 2013 as an "atheist church" (by comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans), it grew to 70 chapters worldwide; about half closed within a decade.
- Ethical Culture. Despite a 150-year history and humanist ideals, it keeps only about 20 active societies in the US.
- European Humanist Federation. Once over 60 member groups; formally dissolved in 2022.
Individual beliefs can be held flexibly for personal benefit, but communities need something more binding. A practice done only for self-improvement is easy to skip on bad days; without the weight of obligation (in religion often reinforced by fear of divine punishment), convenience beats collective commitment. Religious communities last not because members share identical beliefs but because they feel accountable to something greater than themselves, a sustainability problem they solved over centuries.
Rather than build secular communities from scratch, Eyal proposes joining existing ones and translating their language privately, just as the ice-water skeptics kept the benefit by saying "Mother Earth" for "God". The swami and Shifu both said statues of Shiva, Ganesh and fortune deities stand for ideas and attributes, not literal beings. So God's love can be heard as universal compassion, divine will as natural or moral order, a prayer for guidance as seeking wisdom from your highest self.
The approach rests on a social contract of mutual respect: congregations do not interrogate each member's faith (no one asks whether the Pope wrestles with doubt), and translators respect others' literal readings. The aim is not to convert anyone but to belong honestly; the truest free thinker, Eyal suggests, finds freedom within community rather than standing apart.
Constructive translation works best where congregations tolerate quiet nonbelief; many traditions treat creed and practice as inseparable, and members may feel misled if they learned a newcomer privately rejects the theology. Eyal's own sample was five clergy in unusually pluralist Singapore, and two of them (the imam and Shifu) pushed back on practice without faith, a tension the chapter notes but does not resolve. Schille-Hudson's four-step model comes from an essay, not a controlled study.
Permission to practise
The six-year-old on the driveway did not ask whether God was real; he needed someone to talk to, and the practice itself consoled him. That, Eyal says, is the third power of belief: acting on beliefs even when unsure of their ultimate truth. In prayer and ritual we practise our values rather than only think about them, reinforcing neural pathways, emotional habits and resilience.
His own ritual takes ten minutes each morning: eyes closed, attention on the breath, gratitude for being alive, a request for strength to meet the day. The effects were subtle but clear: less anxiety at work, more patience at home, sharper notice of beauty in ordinary moments. Divine help, neurochemistry or expectation, he no longer minds which; as a free thinker he treats prayer as a practical tool, and he prays because it makes his life better. To readers who lack faith but find pure skepticism empty, he grants permission to pray anyway.
- Keep it simple. Choose a ritual short enough to do daily; elaborate retreats do not last.
- Pray as problem-solving. Name the challenge, list approaches, commit, reflect, and separate what you control from what you must accept.
- Anchor it to rhythms. Attach it to mornings or daily transitions for steady emotional regulation.
- Translate, then join. Use constructive translation to take part in a community that already shows up every week.
- Judge by effects. Measure a practice by its effect on well-being and relationships, not by theological proof.
| From limiting belief | To liberating belief |
|---|---|
| I should avoid ritual because I can't prove the theology | I can use prayer as structured problem-solving |
| I must wait for perfect philosophical alignment before joining a community | Constructive translation lets me take part while interpreting the language personally |
| My willpower alone should solve my problems | Ritual and community often answer prayers through human connection |
| Real practice means elaborate rituals (which can't be sustained) | I can start with simple, repeatable rituals |
| Prayer is for asking for things to change | Prayer asks for strength, clarity and wisdom to meet challenges |
| Practices should be judged by fit with my intellectual beliefs | I can judge practices by their effect on well-being and relationships |
Your Labels Are Your Limits
This chapter turns the placebo story inside out. Nocebos, negative expectations, produce real symptoms, spread through groups and social media, and hide inside the labels we accept: diagnoses, trauma stories, "I'm not a morning person". Eyal does not reject diagnosis or medication; he applies a functional test to every label and every treatment. Ask whether a belief expands or contracts your capacity to act; a diagnosis is information, not identity.
The overdose that wasn't
A 26-year-old man, "Mr. A" in a published case report (Reeves and colleagues, 2007), was enrolled in a clinical trial of a new antidepressant and had received a bottle of pills the day before. After an upsetting argument with his girlfriend he impulsively swallowed all 29 remaining capsules, had a neighbour drive him to hospital, announced he had taken all his pills and collapsed. He looked like a genuine overdose: blood pressure 80/40, pulse 110, pale skin, cold sweat, trembling, drifting in and out of consciousness. Staff gave nearly six litres of IV fluid in an hour while they hunted for the drug; blood tests showed no common toxins. Then a physician from the trial arrived and revealed that Mr. A had been randomised to the placebo group: every capsule was inert. Once told, he visibly relaxed, and within fifteen minutes his mind cleared, his blood pressure normalised and his pulse settled to 80.
Mr. A's collapse and his recovery had the same cause: belief. His brain accepted the overdose as real and drove powerful physiological responses; when the belief changed, they dissolved.
Trapped by our beliefs
The term is the nocebo effect: where placebos harness positive expectation to heal, nocebos turn negative expectation into suffering.
- Expectation becomes symptom. Tell patients a harmless pill may cause nausea and many feel queasy; warn of pain and they feel more; tell them they were exposed to an allergen and they start sneezing. Nocebo reactions can take almost any form: headaches, rashes, fatigue, dizziness, chest pain.
- It is physiological. Hope releases endorphins and dopamine; fear and hopelessness unleash responses that weaken immunity and strain the heart. Merely believing you ingested a toxin can release cortisol and histamine, causing inflammation and heightened pain.
- The chemotherapy case. In a gastric-cancer trial (British Stomach Cancer Group, 1983), patients given harmless saline while believing it might be toxic chemotherapy vomited and even lost hair.
Psychologists Robert Kleck and Angelo Strenta (1980) applied fake facial scars to participants and let them see themselves in a mirror. During a supposed "touch-up", researchers secretly removed the scars while telling participants they were still there. In conversations afterwards, people convinced they were disfigured reported that partners seemed uncomfortable, avoided eye contact and stared at the scar, describing vivid discrimination, all in response to a scar that was not there. Belief acted as a reality filter and shrank their sense of social agency.
Eyal says we build the same traps with everyday labels: "I'm not a morning person", "I'm bad with names", "I just can't focus". Accepting them, we hit snooze, stop trying to learn names, stop looking for better ways to manage attention, until the limits harden into reality. Underneath sits one surrender: "I'm not capable."
Negative beliefs are contagious
Limiting beliefs spread outward. When people we identify with show distress, our brains mirror their signals; we expect what is happening to them to happen to us, and our bodies comply.
1965 Eighty-five schoolgirls in Blackburn, England, collapse in a fainting epidemic (reported in the BMJ as an outbreak of overbreathing).
1990s-2000s Men in West Africa report koro, the terror that their genitals are retracting into the body.
2006 Hundreds of students across Portugal develop rashes, dizziness and breathing trouble; investigators rule out allergies, chemicals and viruses, then notice the teen soap Strawberries with Sugar had just aired an episode about a fictional deadly disease striking students.
2016 More than 80 students at a school in Peru suffer fainting, seizures and hallucinations.
2022 A Kansas City, Kansas police officer collapses on body-camera footage after supposed fentanyl contact; colleagues give Narcan and he later says he knew he was dying. Brief skin contact with fentanyl cannot cause such a reaction, yet similar reports multiplied after the video spread.
Social media takes this further: algorithms push convincing descriptions of psychological symptoms and diagnoses to millions in seconds, and viral content spurs self-diagnosis, with viewers adopting labels and then entire symptom patterns, a digital nocebo. What spreads, in Eyal's phrase for the fentanyl case, is a conviction, not a chemical.
The identity trap
Proper diagnoses guide treatment and clarify problems. But diagnoses accepted uncritically, or self-diagnoses, can install limiting beliefs about who you are and what you can do; labels such as burnout, ADHD and "trauma response" can work as nocebos. The danger is not the label itself but letting it become the main lens through which you read your experience and potential.
Eyal's friend Thomas (a pseudonym), intelligent, sociable and curious, had a successful career at a demanding tech company by his mid-thirties. After several stressful quarters he took time off to "get his head right"; his employer covered sessions with a mental health specialist, and within weeks he had several diagnoses, including generalized anxiety disorder. Over coffee he seemed lighter: the sleepless worry before presentations and the pounding heart before meetings were not weakness but a condition, like finally seeing the villain in a horror film. Over the following months, though, his conversations shrank from books and projects to diagnoses, symptoms, medications and therapy, and he began backing out of social events, citing anxiety. Over years he went from a capable person managing anxiety to a fundamentally anxious person, and the shift intensified his symptoms and drained his agency.
Eyal grants that Thomas's first reaction made sense: a diagnosis can give structure, validation and coping strategies. He closes the story with Richard Bach (Illusions, 1977): argue for your limitations and they become yours.
How a diagnosis becomes destiny
Mental health care can unintentionally push people to overidentify with diagnoses, blurring a temporary condition into a permanent identity. Psychologists call this identity foreclosure (a term from James Marcia, 1966): committing to an identity before exploring alternatives, and so surrendering agency.
- "Not a math person." A student who adopts the label early may avoid maths altogether, even if the dislike came from one poorly taught class, and so never tries other ways of learning.
- "A depressed person." Someone stops seeing themselves as a person experiencing symptoms, decides action is pointless, and the narrowed life confirms the identity: a diagnosis meant to guide healing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Labels lower hope. In a 2024 study by Nick Haslam and colleagues, calling someone a case of generalized anxiety disorder or major depression made people more pessimistic about recovery than describing the same symptoms ("feels anxious", "has trouble concentrating").
- ADHD. Children often fold the diagnosis into their self-concept; a student who thinks "I have ADHD, so I can't focus well" tends to try less and disengage faster.
- Anxiety. Newly diagnosed adults may start treating ordinary nerves as pathology ("There goes my anxiety again. I'm going to spiral!"), raising helplessness. In both cases the diagnosis does not create the condition but creates a narrative that limits what people think they can handle.
- Back pain. "Degenerative disc disease" makes patients picture a crumbling spine and avoid helpful activity; calling the same findings "age-related changes" gets them moving.
- Concept creep. Haslam's term for the steady widening of diagnostic categories: grandparents' "nerves" become an anxiety disorder, ordinary sadness becomes clinical depression. Awareness and lower stigma help many, but everyday struggles get pathologised.
- Quips. Francesca Happé (King's College London): count autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and every other developmental difference and few typical people remain. Allen Frances (Duke): medicine is advancing so fast that soon none of us will be well.
Diagnoses can be echoed back by others. Support groups and forums give validation and belonging, and the message that your pain is real and you are not alone is invaluable; but when talk revolves only around diagnoses, and recovery narratives are scarce, members learn they will always be defined by illness or trauma.
None of this means discarding diagnoses, which relieve suffering and give language for real struggle. The test is functional: does this label help you act, seek support and grow, or does it sap initiative and shrink your sense of self? Used well, a label is a map, not a destiny.
Hence addiction researchers avoid calling people "addicts": the word casts a person as broken, while "struggling with impulse control" makes the problem something they face, not something they are. In the same way, "I currently find it difficult to concentrate" frames a struggle as surmountable, where "I have ADHD" can sound permanent. Eyal insists the difference is living under constraint versus acting with power, not semantics.
- Wrong affiliation. Nick Haslam is a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, not Harvard as Eyal says.
- What the study measured. The 2024 label study (Altmann, Haslam and colleagues) had people rate vignettes of marginal cases; it shows perceptions, not real patients' recovery, and does not test the affected person's "own ability to change".
- "Most Britons." The claim that most Britons now see themselves as neurodivergent comes from a newspaper headline (Sunday Times, 2025); Happé's quoted remark is about how broad the categories have become.
- One-way examples. For many adults diagnosed late with ADHD or autism, a label reduces self-blame and unlocks treatment that works. The fair reading is Eyal's own functional test, not a presumption against diagnosis.
When "safety" hurts
Well-meant therapeutic habits can narrow possibility too. To avoid retraumatising vulnerable people, some therapists favour trigger warnings, safe spaces and constant validation; like medical language, these can signal that people cannot cope.
- Trigger warnings. A professor may warn students before upsetting material so trauma survivors can prepare or opt out. Research (Bellet, Jones and McNally, 2018) suggests warnings rarely reduce distress and can raise anxiety by reinforcing vulnerability: a psychological nocebo.
- Avoidance in the clinic. A therapist who encourages clients to avoid discomfort lowers their tolerance; the client feels safer for now, but each escape tells the brain "that was unmanageable; we were right to run", and their world contracts.
Recalling Chapter 8, helplessness is the default and agency has to be built, so overprotection trains the opposite of resilience. Breaking the cycle means gently challenging fears in ways that widen the person's world: agency grows from proving, again and again, that we can survive discomfort.
Flawed memories can become limiting beliefs
Trauma-focused therapy starts from a sound premise, that hard experiences shape us, but too much excavation can trap patients in a damage-centred lens whose unspoken message is that your pain defines you. Without equal attention to strengths and skills, therapy can reinforce helplessness. Research on event centrality finds that people who make trauma central to their identity have worse long-term outcomes than those who acknowledge it without making it the core of the self.
Memory complicates things further: remembering is reconstruction, not recording. Each recall rewrites the memory with current emotions, beliefs, needs and outside input. That does not mean traumatic events did not happen, but our relationship to them is less fixed than we think, and people can carry whole self-narratives built on events that never occurred.
- Chris. For decades he believed he could not cry because of a childhood trauma, attending the funeral of a beloved cousin who had died by suicide; he stayed stoic even in deep emotion. Years later his mother and sister told him he had never attended the funeral. The inability to cry rested on a false, self-reinforcing belief.
- Lost in the mall. In Elizabeth Loftus's study (with Pickrell, 1995), roughly 25% of participants came to believe, and vividly recall, having been lost in a shopping mall as children, though it never happened; later work showed even doctored photographs can implant childhood memories.
- Recovered memories. In the 1980s and 1990s many patients "recovered" repressed memories of childhood abuse in therapy; many were later shown to be implanted by suggestion, and lives and families were wrecked and innocent people imprisoned. Some therapists still hunt for repressed memories, a Freudian idea, despite a scientific consensus that there is no credible evidence repressed memories exist.
Eyal's question: are the stories we tell about our past serving us or keeping us stuck? Some memories carry wisdom and self-protection; others become tales that rehearse helplessness. Healing comes less from endless digging than from loosening our grip on old stories enough to make room for new ones and act in the present.
Pills don't teach skills
In the US, medication is still widely the first-line response to common distress, even for children and young adults whose brains are developing. A pill promises a quick fix, but expecting rapid relief from a pill alone can stunt resilience and increase dependence on outside solutions.
- Gordon Marino's crutch. The St. Olaf College philosophy professor found Ritalin first helped him focus, then became a dependency: during an upheaval in his life, needing a pill-shaped crutch undermined his faith in himself.
- Biochemical, not behavioural. Medication can relieve symptoms but, even when it works exactly as intended, it does not teach cognitive frameworks, emotion-regulation techniques or practical habits.
- Skills transfer. Skill-building therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy hand ownership back to the person; what helps with anxiety may also help with procrastination or workplace conflict, and skills outlast the pill.
- Where medication is essential. For severe depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia medication can be lifesaving, though the best outcomes still come from combining it with therapy, skills training and agency-building life changes.
- The productive struggle. Skills take more effort because they require facing emotions rather than numbing them. Eyal cites the line often credited to Viktor Frankl: between stimulus and response lies a space, and in it our power to choose.
- The long run. Eyal's summary of the research: in depression, medication may work faster but therapy wins in the long run, and studies of anxiety and ADHD show the same pattern.
For depression, cognitive therapy and antidepressants show similar acute effects (DeRubeis and colleagues, 2005), and therapy's edge is mainly lower relapse after treatment stops. For ADHD the opposite holds in the best-known trial (MTA, 1999): medication beat behavioural therapy on core symptoms at 14 months, though the gap faded in later follow-ups. The "Frankl" quote has no known source in his writings; Eyal's note cites Stephen Covey.
Reclaiming our agency
The way forward is to take ownership of the beliefs and labels we live by. Diagnoses and prescriptions can be essential, but a prognosis is at best an educated guess: a starting point for healing, not a verdict on potential. Writer Matt Haig, who lives with depression, ADHD and autism, warns that it can be dangerous to set ourselves in stone, reasoning that because we have x, y or z we will keep acting this way; sometimes, he says, you have to insist you can be better, and by embracing that possibility you change.
Mr. A's body collapsed from belief and recovered when the belief changed. Eyal asks readers to examine each label with the same question: "Does this belief expand or contract my capacity to act effectively?" Choosing labels carefully changes how we see the world and what becomes possible in it.
- Describe, don't define. Say "I'm challenged by anxiety at times", not "I am an anxious person".
- Treat diagnoses as starting points. Use them to get help, then build skills alongside any treatment.
- Guard against prophecy. Others' opinions and self-diagnoses can act as nocebo suggestions.
- Face discomfort gradually. Build agency through graded exposure, not constant avoidance of triggers.
- Run the test. Ask whether each belief and label expands or contracts your capacity to act.
| From limiting belief | To liberating belief |
|---|---|
| My diagnosis defines who I am and what I'm capable of | My diagnosis is information from my experiences, not my identity |
| If someone tells me I can't change, I should accept it | Prognoses are educated guesses, not verdicts |
| I need to avoid anything that might trigger or upset me | I can handle discomfort and grow stronger by facing challenges gradually |
| My painful memories are fixed truths that control my present | My relationship with the past is flexible; I can reframe stories that no longer serve me |
| Taking medication means I'm broken and need fixing | I can use medication while building my own skills |
| I should focus on understanding why I'm damaged | I can acknowledge struggles while building on my strengths |
Good Beliefs, Bad Beliefs
The final chapter separates beliefs that build agency from look-alikes that replace effort: manifesting, positive fantasy and the comfortable assumption that experts already have the answers. Eyal's case is David Fajgenbaum, a dying medical student who stopped waiting for rescue and found his own treatment on a pharmacy shelf. Beliefs work when they direct attention, expectation and action toward real obstacles; they fail when they substitute for effort.
The moles nobody would explain
At 25, Fajgenbaum looked like American success: a former Division I quarterback at Georgetown, a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania on full scholarship, dating his college sweetheart. In July 2010, during a summer break between rotations, he went within a couple of weeks from winning bench-press contests to exhaustion; within days he was blind in one eye from a retinal haemorrhage, swollen with 70 lb of excess fluid and kept alive by daily blood transfusions as his liver, kidneys and bone marrow failed. After eleven weeks of testing came the diagnosis: HHV-8-negative idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease. The nurse who told him had never heard of it but cheerfully said at least it was not lymphoma. Alone, he searched online and found a 1996 study: average survival one year after diagnosis, and only one in eight lived past two. He wept.
Throughout, he kept asking every doctor and nurse about small red moles, like clusters of blood vessels, pushing through his skin; everyone dismissed them as trivial beside organ failure, but he could not let them go. Eyal links him to Richter's rats: belief stretched minutes into hours in the water, and Fajgenbaum's belief gave him similar endurance. He had no mystical gift; what separated him from despair was how he used belief: attention to overlooked signals, anticipation of possibilities, disciplined action. Beliefs did not heal him; they pointed him to the right questions and the next step. The warning built into the chapter: beliefs untethered from effort and evidence trap people in passivity.
The negative side of positive thinking
Millions now embrace ideas promising control over uncertainty through mental power alone, sold as "positive thinking" and "manifesting" and spread, often with good intentions, through social media and self-help: vibrate at the frequency of abundance, attract your desires by thought. Joe Dispenza claims visualisation can reshape physical reality: the more coherent and energised the heart, the more you can draw your future to you with its magnetic field, once you reach the right brain state and fall in love with that future. Dressed in quantum buzzwords and misused neuroscience, the pitch says: align thoughts with desires, keep unwavering faith, and the universe delivers your order.
1800s Phineas Quimby's "mind cure" movement rebels against fatalistic religious doctrines.
1952 Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking tells readers to stamp a picture of themselves succeeding indelibly on the mind.
2006 Rhonda Byrne's The Secret says thoughts alone can bring wealth, health and love, and that the law of attraction is as reliable as gravity.
2009 Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided warns that "positive vibes only" exacts "a terrible price in self-blame" when illness or hardship does not yield.
Research shows positive thinking alone often fails to last and can backfire. Reality eventually delivers its blunt verdict, wishing isn't doing: when positive thinking substitutes for effort, it blocks the steps that would help.
When visualising backfires
Gabriele Oettingen, a social psychologist at New York University, has shown over decades that positive fantasies can reduce motivation when indulged the wrong way. Imagining the rewards without the effort fools the mind into feeling the goal is already reached, which relaxes us and drains the energy needed to act.
- The blood-pressure study. Participants hooked to monitors imagined either vivid ideal outcomes of cherished hopes (a dream job, perfect romance, ideal fitness) or more neutral, realistic versions. Within minutes the idealisers' blood pressure dropped significantly: the body behaved as if the mission were accomplished.
- Across domains. From academic tests to weight loss to career advancement, mentally rehearsing victory led to fewer real victories; in Oettingen's words, the more positively people fantasise about success, the less well they do.
- Mood. The high wears off and a crash follows. Her team found that for people struggling with depression, positive fantasies correlated with more depressive symptoms later.
The Circle of False Promise
Eyal names the resulting loop the Circle of False Promise: an uplifting fantasy; discovery that the real path needs far more effort; disappointment at the gap; scaled-back effort or abandonment; feeling more helpless and inadequate than before; and, because life feels worse, a fresh escape into fantasy. Each unfulfilled fantasy becomes evidence of personal failure, and each failed attempt at manifesting reinforces belief in helplessness.
The industry's answer when it fails is that the fault is yours: you were not aligned, you have resistance to clear, your vibration was too low. That is a cruel trap: the more you struggle, the more self-work you are sold, while you build no skills, experience or effective action, an endless self-improvement loop that feels like progress but produces none.
Religion has a version too. "Let go and let God" can become spiritual bypassing, a way to dodge responsibility for what you can control. Eyal stresses this does not cancel the power of prayer from Chapter 9; it marks the line between practices that build agency and those that erode it. Waiting for intervention while avoiding effort is another surrender; as the saying goes, God helps those who help themselves.
The line is blurred because the same words (belief, visualisation, positive thinking, mindset) and techniques (meditation, prayer, affirmations, goal-setting) appear in peer-reviewed programmes and in manipulative marketing. A manifestation course starts with a true finding (imagining activates brain regions used in real experience), adds a true application (athletes use mental rehearsal), then makes an unwarranted leap: thought can attract external circumstances. Rehearsal does not make the hoop wider or defenders weaker; it prepares actions the athlete will actually perform. Placebos shift perceived symptoms, but no affirmation cures cancer or knits a broken bone: the mechanisms are specific, limited and biological, not magical.
Eyal's dividing line: visualisation works when it primes action; placebos work when paired with proper treatment; positive expectations help when they lead you to prepare, never when they replace effort.
The Santa Claus theory
When Fajgenbaum first fell ill he assumed teams of brilliant scientists somewhere were working around the clock on his disease. He later called this his "Santa Claus theory": the comforting belief that answers already exist and someone else will deliver them. In his book (Chasing My Cure, 2021) he explains its cost: if nearly every medical question is already answered, all you need is the right doctor, and as long as "Santa-doctors" toil on unsolved diseases, nobody else has a reason to push when those diseases strike them or their families.
The theory turned all three powers against him:
- Attention went to finding the right expert, not understanding his own condition.
- Anticipation pointed to external rescue, not discovery.
- Agency became passivity disguised as appropriate deference to authority.
Eyal sees the same reflex everywhere: waiting for politicians to fix social problems instead of acting locally, expecting teachers to educate children with little parental involvement, assuming economists will handle healthcare or poverty.
The turn came in his fourth near-death relapse, under Dr. Frits van Rhee, the world's leading Castleman expert. Fajgenbaum had pinned everything on siltuximab, an experimental drug that blocks the immune protein thought to drive the disease: his perfect expert plus perfect treatment. It failed; his organs kept shutting down. He asked van Rhee what caused the disease (no one knows), which immune cell started it (no one knows), whether other drugs were in development (not at the moment) or planned (not that I'm aware of). His realisation: the world's foremost expert can only know what the world collectively knows; if the answers have not been found, no expert can have them. A proper patient might have accepted this humbly, he wrote, but "no one knows" was not good enough for him. Santa Claus was not coming, and the collapse of that belief made room for one that saved his life.
Seeing the obstacles and solutions
He could accept the verdict and sink into the helplessness that claims many terminal patients, or decide that if answers were missing he could help find them. What he did mirrors Oettingen's mental contrasting: deliberately pairing a desired future with present obstacles. It refuses perfect futures and holds goal and barrier together, so the mind starts linking each challenge to a response and obstacles become prompts for action rather than reasons to quit.
- Students. German university students who pictured their target grades while also considering personal distractions and time constraints studied more diligently and performed better on exams.
- Adults. Middle-aged adults who paired fitness or nutrition targets with awareness of internal temptations and scheduling conflicts kept up their routines far longer; obstacles came to trigger solutions automatically, even without conscious effort.
- Attention. Instead of filtering obstacles out, it brings them into focus, giving a complete, realistic picture of the challenge.
- Anticipation. It sets expectations for difficulty as well as success, preparing mind and body for the effort required.
- Agency. It builds conviction that you can handle obstacles rather than avoid them, strengthening the pathways for effective action under pressure.
Rather than visualising perfect health, Fajgenbaum catalogued every barrier: the only experimental drug had failed; nothing else was in development; the leading expert had run out of options; relapses were growing more severe and frequent; and he was nearing the lifetime maximum dose of chemotherapy. Each barrier became a road map, pointing to a problem research, collaboration or creative thinking might solve.
Still weak from organ failure, he worked twelve-hour days through records and tissue samples spanning three and a half years of illness, read immunology textbooks for the cellular mechanisms, and searched medical databases for any clue. He found a pattern no one had seen: T-cell activation and VEGF (the protein behind blood-vessel growth) surged months before every relapse, as if the body were preparing for a fight with no visible threat, and those surges likely drove the moles doctors had dismissed. The clues had been there for years: doctors had recorded unusual vessel growth in his lymph nodes, retinas and a benign colon polyp, but the notes were scattered across specialists, time frames and contexts, and nobody connected them because nobody was looking.
His breakthrough began when he tried on the opposite of his beliefs, building a portfolio of perspectives:
| Old belief | New belief | Power |
|---|---|---|
| Stay focused on existing tests and established treatments | Look beyond standard approaches to overlooked data that reveal patterns | Attention |
| Experts have all the answers; patients wait for cures | Experts don't have every answer; expect progress from patient-practitioner partnership | Anticipation |
| A good patient follows directions | A good patient questions, researches, experiments with lifestyle changes and contributes findings | Agency |
The cure already on the shelf
A lesson from medical-school immunology supplied the last piece. One biological switch, mTOR, appeared to control both problems: overactive immune cells and the vessel growth behind the moles. Like tracing two glitches to one faulty circuit, it could explain the moles, the T-cell spikes, the organ failure and the relapse cycle; block the switch and the disease might stop. A blocker already existed: sirolimus, FDA-approved for decades to prevent organ-transplant rejection and never considered for Castleman disease.
By December 2013 a fifth relapse loomed and conventional treatment had nothing left. There was no trial, no protocol and no expert consensus, only his own data and an old drug with a good transplant safety record. The story was coherent, but coherence is not proof, and the risks were real. Doing nothing meant certain decline, so he chose to act, not from certainty (there was no time to set up a formal trial) but from a determination to act despite uncertainty, without pretending positive thinking would carry him. His reasoning: there has to be a first for everything, and an untried drug is not a drug that won't work.
The bet paid off. He married his college sweetheart in 2014 and has been in remission for over a decade, far beyond his previous longest remission of about a year. His lesson about hope and action: people treat them as alternatives, either hope and pray or act, when they must run in parallel.
- Castleman Disease Collaborative Network. Cofounded by Fajgenbaum, it brings together patients, researchers and drug companies to identify treatments systematically, on the principle that patients help discover answers rather than wait for them.
- Every Cure (2022). A second organisation he cofounded uses artificial intelligence to find new uses for existing drugs, the approach that saved him.
- 80%. Over 80% of approved drugs are generic, so no company has a profit incentive to find new uses for them.
- 66 million. Every Cure's algorithms have produced 66 million drug-disease compatibility scores, far more possibilities than human researchers could ever evaluate.
Eyal calls this belief change at the level of systems: not waiting for breakthroughs but designing conditions for them to keep coming.
- Survivorship. This is one patient; most people who research their own rare disease find no cure, and Fajgenbaum was a physician-scientist at Penn with lab access and colleagues. Sirolimus helps a subset of iMCD patients and is still being studied in trials.
- The "good patient" risk. "Question, research, contribute" can also feed do-your-own-research misinformation; the method to copy is his (data, peers, physicians, testable hypotheses), not just his defiance.
- Citations. The blood-pressure finding is usually credited to Kappes and Oettingen (2011); Eyal's note points to a different Oettingen paper. And "God helps those who help themselves" is not scriptural; Eyal's note traces it to Algernon Sidney (1698).
- What he leaves out. Oettingen's own packaged method, WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan), adds if-then implementation intentions to mental contrasting and tests better than contrasting alone; Eyal never mentions it.
When beliefs work
The most comforting ideas often help least: trust that "everything will work out" leaves you unprepared when it doesn't.
Work. They focus attention on what you can influence; acknowledge challenges while building confidence to meet them; channel hope into concrete steps; build capability over time; and rest on observable, measurable mechanisms, so you see the world more clearly.
Don't work. They promise control where none exists; invite avoidance of obstacles instead of preparation; replace effort with rehearsal, giving an illusion of progress; substitute wishful thinking for competence; and rely on forces that can't be tested, pulling you away from reality.
Fajgenbaum's beliefs helped him see what others missed, expect discovery rather than rescue, and act when waiting meant decline. Every reader, Eyal says, faces the same choice between beliefs that empower and beliefs that limit.
Rising beyond belief
Resilient people (entrepreneurs in volatile markets, clinicians amid complexity, parents in uncertain times) do not avoid chaos; they build a different relationship with it and use all three powers in service of what matters, treating beliefs as tools to adjust, refine or discard, not fixed truths. The shift from limiting to liberating beliefs comes not from affirmations, vision boards or magic rituals but from direct experience and evidence of influence. Anne Mahlum began with one morning run for nine men outside a homeless shelter; Daniel Gisler tested hypnosis on minor pains before trusting it against surgery. Neither had perfect confidence, only enough belief for a first step and enough curiosity to let results guide the next. Liberating beliefs emerge from liberating actions.
Two kinds of people, and three sets of questions
Eyal asks readers to think of the people who inspire them personally: they act with integrity unobserved, show up for those they love, take risks that matter, choose growth over comfort, and let themselves be happy. The opposite group lives in "what ifs" and "if onlys": quitting relationships, projects and themselves too soon, deciding from fear, steered by pain and resentment, knowing what to do but never committing, and blaming circumstances or others. The difference, he says, is not talent, luck or circumstance but belief: whether limiting beliefs dictate choices or get challenged and acted against.
- Attention. Where is your focus, and does it match what truly matters? What have you refused to see about yourself, your relationships or your path because shifting view is uncomfortable? Could trying on the opposite belief give you a portfolio of perspectives, one of which serves you better?
- Anticipation. What future do you expect, and who decided that path? Are you holding on to pain needlessly, or letting fear colour your worldview? What becomes possible if you expect discovery instead of disappointment?
- Agency. What has been holding you back? Does life's chaos energise or drain you? Are you acting to change yourself and help others, or waiting for the world to adjust? What one small step today would prove you have more control than you think?
He then asks readers to picture the end of their life: the people gathered around, recalling how you stayed connected, mended what was broken, saw the best in people, aged with strength and energy because you believed a long healthy life possible, and met hard moments by asking what good could still come of them. That future starts with the beliefs chosen now, and it spreads: your freedom from limiting beliefs gives others permission to question theirs, and your small acts of agency nudge someone else to take a first step.
The world will not become less chaotic, but readers have the three powers: direct attention, anticipate possibility, act despite unpredictability. Fajgenbaum saved his own life when doctors had nothing left; Richter's rats swam for days when they believed escape possible; Dashrath Manjhi cut a road through a mountain with a hammer and chisel. None had certainty; all had belief. Remarkable lives are built not on grand declarations but on a loop: action creates evidence, evidence strengthens belief, belief fuels more action, until what is possible expands.
- Contrast, don't fantasise. Picture the outcome, then the specific obstacles you are likely to meet, then your response.
- Treat beliefs as navigation tools. Update them on new evidence rather than defending them as absolute truths.
- Take the next controllable step. Don't wait for perfect conditions or external rescue.
- Pair hope with action. Hope without action is false comfort; action without hope is burnout.
| From limiting belief | To liberating belief |
|---|---|
| I should avoid obstacles and setbacks because they mean I'm failing | Obstacles provide information that helps me move toward solutions |
| Positive thinking alone will manifest my desires | Mental contrasting (goals plus obstacles) produces actionable plans |
| Someone else has the answers and will rescue me | I can be an active participant in solving my own challenges |
| Visualising success is enough to reach my goals | Small actions create evidence that builds genuine confidence |
| Prayer or manifestation will deliver results | Hope and action must work together in parallel |
Master Takeaways
Eyal's book reduces to one loop: choose a useful belief, act on it in small steps, let the results become evidence, and update. Belief that skips the action step turns into fantasy; action without belief collapses at the first setback. Judge every belief by one test: does it expand or contract your capacity to act?
- Belief is the base of motivation. Behavior and benefit collapse without conviction that effort will pay off; most failures are quitting too soon, not lack of capacity.
- Choose beliefs for usefulness, not certainty. Keep a belief if it survives real-world feedback, stays open to revision and needs no denial of evidence.
- You see what you believe. The brain filters a flood of input through prior beliefs, so changing a belief changes the pain, problems and opportunities you notice.
- Experience is prediction. Believe, anticipate, feel, confirm: expectations shape taste, pain and effort, and placebos can help even when you know they are inert.
- Helplessness is the default; hope is learned. Agency grows from mastery experiences, small wins that prove to the brain your actions count.
- Contrast, don't fantasise. Picturing success relaxes you into inaction; pairing the goal with its obstacles turns barriers into prompts for action.
- Train belief like strength. "Just believe" offers no method; beliefs are built through experience and evidence, one small sustained action at a time.
- Feelings are not facts. Counter rumination with a reality log, third-person self-talk and a five-minute timer that forces a lesson, then a switch of attention.
- Rare problems look bigger. As threats decline we stretch our definitions (prevalence-induced concept change), so feeling that things are worse is weak evidence they are.
- Question the judgment, not the person. Ask whether it is true, whether you can be certain, how you react, who you would be without it; then turn it around three ways.
- Venting rehearses anger. Expressing a grievance reinforces it; inquiry into the belief behind it brings relief, often without the other person changing at all.
- Luck is provoked. Leave your comfort zone, thank people, and set failure goals; most "lucky" breaks follow actions that set them up.
- Success beliefs become blind spots. The filters that revealed an opportunity can hide your own flaws, so audit which beliefs still open doors.
- Ask whether a belief serves you or you serve it. Keep harmless beliefs that add delight; question those that breed dread, resentment or prejudice.
- Words design simulations. How leaders and brands frame an experience in advance changes how people feel and perform in it.
- Motivation is pain management. Procrastination avoids anticipated discomfort, which we overestimate; read resistance as a signal that important work is next.
- Pain is a danger forecast. Observation, safety reappraisal and lightness (pain reprocessing) retrain chronic pain that has outlived its injury.
- Illness is not sickness. Belief moves symptoms, not tumours or lung function; placebos complement real treatment and never replace it.
- Belief changes biology through behavior. Placebo steroids worked because lifters trained harder; the celebrated "mind alone" studies mostly failed to replicate.
- Age beliefs are a health lever. Positive views of aging predict longer, healthier lives through exercise, adherence and lower stress, though the evidence is observational.
- Chaos is the terrain, not a verdict. Life is the fight against disorder; high-agency people do not expect fewer problems, they trust their response to them.
- Control what you can, accept what you can't. Sort control, influence and the untouchable; avoid both helplessness and naive omnipotence (control flexibility).
- Explain setbacks as temporary, specific, circumstantial. The story you tell about failure decides whether you try again.
- Design systems in calm moments. Routines carry you when confidence and energy run low, and they generate the evidence that feeds belief.
- Agency includes asking for help. Braverman's race was saved by radioing a judge and accepting a stranger's dog food; agency means finding solutions, not soloing.
- Prayer is structured problem-solving. Name the challenge, list approaches, commit, reflect; benefits flow to the person praying, with or without certainty.
- Keep ritual short and repeatable. We forget what matters gradually through each day, so brief, familiar practices build remembering into the rhythm of forgetting.
- Belong by translating. Join existing communities and translate their language privately; purely secular substitutes rarely last.
- Nocebos are real and contagious. Expectation of harm produces symptoms, and they spread through groups, broadcasts and social media.
- Describe, don't define. "I'm dealing with anxiety at times" leaves room to change; "I am an anxious person" forecloses it.
- Avoidance feeds fear. Graded exposure, not trigger-dodging, teaches the brain that discomfort is survivable.
- Memory is reconstruction. Stories about the past can be reframed, and some are simply wrong; loosen your grip on those that keep you stuck.
- Pills don't teach skills. Medication can be essential, but durable agency comes from transferable skills built alongside it.
- Experts know only what the world knows. When answers do not exist, active partnership beats waiting for a Santa Claus rescue.
- Hope and action run in parallel. Hope without action is false comfort; action without hope is burnout; liberating beliefs emerge from liberating actions.
Eyal deserves credit for naming failed replications (Counterclockwise, the hotel housekeepers, the milkshake) that rival books still sell, and for repeatedly saying placebos must never replace treatment. But the evidentiary standard is uneven. Many core claims rest on small samples (84 students in ice water, about 20 wine tasters, 50 thyroid patients, a pilot study of veterans), correlational cohorts (aging beliefs, religiosity, locus of control) and survivor stories told by their heroes (Mahlum, Fajgenbaum, Gisler, Simon); we rarely meet believers who did everything right and still failed. Some details are wrong or stretched: brain imaging where the learned-helplessness reversal came from rat studies, a Harvard affiliation for Melbourne's Nick Haslam, a meditation study cited for prayer, two sales figures merged into one "breakthrough" statistic. "Belief" also stretches to cover visual illusions, conditioning, religious faith and diagnostic labels, which blurs the mechanism. The critique of diagnoses, medication and trigger warnings is one-sided: Eyal concedes the exceptions but supplies few cases where a label or a pill freed someone. Read it as a well-sourced practical toolkit with an honest core (belief works through behavior), not as settled science.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Motivation Triangle | Behavior and benefit rest on belief | Plans keep collapsing despite knowing what to do |
| Fact, faith, belief | Beliefs are revisable working models between proof and faith | You wait for certainty before acting |
| Useful-belief test | Survives feedback, stays revisable, needs no denial | Choosing which belief to adopt |
| Three Powers of Belief | Beliefs shape attention, anticipation and agency | Diagnosing where a belief helps or hurts |
| Reality log, illeism, timer | Collect counter-evidence, speak in third person, time-box rumination | One criticism dominates your thinking |
| The Work | Four questions, then turnarounds to opposite, other and self | A relationship keeps triggering the same reaction |
| Six turnaround practices | Small irritations, journal, judgment alerts, 2% truth, three kind explanations, notice defensiveness | Making The Work a daily habit |
| Provoked luck | Risk-o-meter, appreciation notes, failure goals | Opportunities seem to pass you by |
| Experience Loop | Believe, anticipate, feel, confirm | Designing a product, event or your own day |
| Selective skepticism | Keep enriching beliefs, question draining ones | Deciding which expectations to challenge |
| Pain reprocessing (PRT) | Observe, reappraise safety, add lightness | Chronic pain or dread of hard tasks |
| Placebo design levers | Delivery, dose, association, design, scripts, social cues | Building an honest-placebo routine |
| Belief to behavior to biology | Expectation changes effort, which changes the body | Judging mind-body claims |
| Hope circuit | Passivity is the default; the vmPFC overrides it after mastery | Feeling stuck or helpless |
| Four agency practices | Evidence, focus, story, systems, compounding in a loop | Rebuilding control after setbacks |
| Control flexibility | Act, collaborate, defer or accept depending on leverage | Facing a situation you only partly control |
| Explanatory style | Temporary, specific, circumstantial beats permanent, global, personal | Interpreting a setback |
| Prayer as problem-solving | Articulate, formulate, commit, reflect | Turning worry into a plan |
| Five ritual pathways | Action first, repetition, looking within, community, chosen hardship | Wanting ritual's benefits without certainty |
| Constructive translation | Reinterpret a community's language privately, respect others' literal reading | Joining a tradition you doubt |
| Functional label test | Does this label expand or contract my capacity to act? | Taking on a diagnosis or self-description |
| Circle of False Promise | Fantasy, disappointment, helplessness, more fantasy | Spotting manifesting and vision-board traps |
| Mental contrasting | Hold the goal and its obstacles together | Setting goals or planning a hard project |
| Portfolio of perspectives | Try on the opposite of each belief and keep the most useful | Stuck on one reading of a problem |
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Curt Richter | Johns Hopkins psychobiologist | Swimming rats: the book's founding parable of hope |
| Daniel Gisler | Ex-derivatives executive | Ankle surgery under self-hypnosis alone |
| David Levari | Harvard psychologist | Prevalence-induced concept change |
| Byron Katie | Creator of The Work | Four questions and turnarounds for relationships |
| Anne Mahlum | Founder, Back on My Feet, [solidcore] | Belief-tuned attention, and its blind spots |
| Mike Cessario | Founder, Liquid Death | Expectations as product: the Experience Loop |
| Alan Gordon, Tor Wager | Pain researchers | Pain reprocessing; the brain's internal pharmacy |
| Ted Kaptchuk | Harvard placebo researcher | Honest placebos for IBS |
| Becca Levy | Yale epidemiologist | Positive aging beliefs and 7.5 more years |
| Maier and Seligman | Learned-helplessness researchers | Helplessness as default, hope as learned |
| Blair Braverman | Iditarod musher | Chaos as terrain; agency includes asking for help |
| Dashrath Manjhi | Indian labourer | 22 years cutting a road through a ridge |
| Singapore's five clergy | Rabbi, imam, swami, priest, Buddhist teacher | Source of the five ritual pathways |
| Gabriele Oettingen | NYU psychologist | Positive fantasy backfires; mental contrasting |
| David Fajgenbaum | Physician-scientist, Every Cure | Found his own Castleman treatment |
Connect it
- AI adoption. Teams treat AI as either magic or useless; the Experience Loop and selective skepticism argue for small, evidenced pilots that build calibrated belief instead of hype or dismissal.
- Enterprise architecture. The Santa Claus theory shows up when teams wait for a vendor or central function to fix a problem nobody owns; mental contrasting (target state plus named obstacles) is a sound way to write a roadmap, and control flexibility maps onto deciding what to own, influence or escalate.
- Banking and risk. Prevalence-induced concept change applies to fraud, compliance and credit monitoring: as true alerts become rare, reviewers stretch definitions and flag more benign cases, so thresholds need periodic recalibration.
- Every Cure's model. Using AI to score 66 million drug-disease pairs for repurposing is a concrete example of machine learning surfacing options that humans then test.
About this book
Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results by Nir Eyal with Julie Li, 2026. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions