Assertion Supported
Eyal: 'Spiritual but not religious' people have higher depression risk
“Turns out those people are much more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do affiliate with some kind of religious community.”
Insight
Eyal: Beliefs should be treated as functional tools rather than truths
“Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me.”
Assertion Supported
Eyal: Trader underwent 55-minute surgery with zero anesthesia via hypnosedation
“He goes into the operating room, and the doctors, for 55 minutes, cut into flesh and bone, pull out metal screws from his body with zero local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, All through the power of his mind.”
Insight
Eyal: All time, money, and weight management is fundamentally pain management
“If all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means, therefore, That time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all about managing discomfort.”
Insight
Eyal: Traditional news organizations share social media's attention-monetization business model
“How exactly do you think the New York Times makes money? Or Fox News or CNN? They're all in the same business. They're monetizing your attention.”
Assertion Partly supported
Eyal: Positive aging mindsets extend life by 7.5 years
“There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. Now, to put that in perspective, Cody, seven and a half years longer, that is more than the effect of exercise,…”
Insight
Eyal: Internal locus of control always outperforms victimhood
“What's fascinating is that even if you objectively have all the reasons to claim victimhood, It still serves you more to have an internal locus of control. You still will go farther and be happier, have less depression, less anxiety, all the good things come f…”
Insight
Eyal: Non-physical chronic pain lasting over six months is neuroplastic
“Chronic pain, you know, pain that doesn't have a physical cause that lasts for more than six months. So we're talking fibromyalgia, we're talking insomnia, we're talking chronic back pain, all these things. Turns out they are what we call neuroplastic pain.”
Insight
Eyal: Resting and immobilizing is bad advice for non-physical chronic pain
“The standard advice is if you have some kind of pain, ice it, heat it, don't move, immobilize, rest, right? Don't stress it. Turns out that's not always the best advice. Now, if there is an actual physiological cause, different story, but if it's chronic pain …”
Assertion Supported
Eyal: Evidence disproves ego depletion unless people believe willpower is limited
“Well, it turns out it's not true. That when we try and replicate those studies, and this happens in the social science, this is how science works. Science doesn't say anything. Science is the process of doing repeated experiments and seeing if they replicate, …”
Assertion Supported
Eyal: Seligman and Maier reversed their theory on learned helplessness
“Those authors, Seligman and Meyer, declared that they had gotten the study a hundred percent backwards. That the study results were a 180 degrees the opposite of what they thought. That we don't learn helplessness, that's our default.”
Assertion Supported
Nir Eyal: Rescued rats in 1950s experiment swam for 60 hours
“The rats didn't swim four times longer. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 240 times more persistent.”
Insight
Nir Eyal: Successful people accumulate more total failures than unsuccessful people
“Successful people are the biggest losers. Meaning in terms of number of failures, it's the successful people. Why? Because they persist.”
Insight
Eyal: The human brain constructs visual reality from past conditioning
“You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain based on priors, based on what's happened in the past. Your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works. So it's predicting a future that doesn't really exist.”
Insight
Eyal: Emotions are physiological responses while feelings are psychological interpretations
“Because people, people don't understand that there's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. Those are two separate things. An emotion is a physiological response. A feeling is an interpretation of that physiological response. So feelings are psychologi…”
Assertion Partly supported
Eyal: Religiously unaffiliated 'nones' are America's largest religious group
“It turns out the biggest religious community in America today, the largest religious group are nuns, not the Catholic nuns, not N-U-N, N-O-N-E, people who don't affiliate with any religion”
Assertion Partly supported
Eyal: Prayer significantly increases physical pain tolerance in experiments
“It turns out that the people who learned how to pray and the people who prayed out of a faith tradition had a much higher pain tolerance than the people who didn't pray at all.”
Insight
Eyal: Telling yourself 'no' backfires due to psychological reactance
“Telling yourself no doesn't work. It releases what's called psychological reactance.”
Assertion Supported
Eyal: 90% of phone checks stem from internal triggers, not notifications
“Studies have found 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of some kind of ping, ding, or ring? 90% of the time, it's because of an internal trigger.”
Assertion Supported
Eyal: Recalling a memory actively revises it in the brain
“Every time you think of a memory, you are actually revising it in your brain.”
Assertion Contradicted
Eyal: Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated false memories can be successfully implanted
“Elizabeth Loftus has these amazing studies where she implants memories of people going on a hot air balloon ride that never happened, and they'll describe the wind in their hair and the color of the balloon completely made up.”
Insight
Eyal: Limiting beliefs produce direct physiological effects on the body
“Whatever the limiting belief that we keep telling ourselves again and again and again, it has a physiological effect on us, just like Mr. A did.”
Insight
Eyal: Focusing on discomfort amplifies fear and creates a pain loop
“When I'm constantly thinking about what's wrong, what's causing me pain, I turn up the fear dial, and the more fear I feel, the more pain I feel, and it becomes this vicious cycle.”
Nir Eyal