Beyond Belief: The Science-backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results - Hardcover

Eyal, Nir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593852036 ISBN 13: 9780593852033

Verlag: Portfolio, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

What if the only thing standing between you and the seemingly impossible…was belief?

Most of your limits aren’t physical. They’re psychological. In Beyond Belief, bestselling author Nir Eyal (Indistractable, Hooked) reveals how the hidden assumptions you carry shape what you see, how you feel, and what you do—and how to replace them with beliefs that unlock your true potential.

Grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and unforgettable case studies, Eyal introduces the Three Powers of Belief: Attention, Anticipation, and Agency. Mastering these powers transforms how you see challenges, feel about the future, and act when it matters most.
You’ll learn how to:

• Spot hidden opportunities and solutions others overlook.

• Reclaim your mood, energy, and confidence by reshaping your beliefs.

• Stay calm, decisive, and in control when life feels uncertain.

• Break free from beliefs that sabotage your health, relationships, and career.

• Push further, last longer, and achieve beyond your limits.

If you’ve ever quit too soon, stalled in your career, or sabotaged your own goals, this book gives you the science and the system to go further than you thought possible.

Surgeries without anesthesia. Placebos that heal. Resilience multiplied 240 times longer. Beyond Belief reveals the science behind these breakthroughs and shows why your limits aren’t fixed—they’re learned. And with the right beliefs, you can achieve breakthrough results.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and human potential. He previously taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of the international bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which have sold over 1 million copies in more than 30 languages. Indistractable received critical acclaim, winning the Outstanding Works of Literature Award and being named among the best business and personal development books of the year by Amazon, Audible, and The Globe and Mail. His third book, Beyond Belief, reveals how to identify and replace the hidden beliefs that define our limits. As an active angel investor, Nir has backed multi-billion-dollar companies that implement his methodologies, including Canva, Kahoot!, and others. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, his writing has been featured in The New York Times and Harvard Business Review, and he is a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

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Chapter 1

Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths

How the beliefs you choose shape the life you live.

For much of my life, I was the kid who never took off his shirt at the community pool. While other teenagers splashed and played in the Central Florida summer heat, I'd sit on the edge, feet dangling in the water, wearing an oversized T-shirt to hide my belly rolls. On the rare occasions I mustered up the courage to get in, I still kept it on. Taking it off wasn't an option. Better to let the soaked garment cling to my boy breasts.

My friends wore jeans fresh from the mall, perfectly fitted and brand new but torn in all the right places. I wore hand-me-downs that needed to be shortened by half. I have painful memories of struggling into my overweight dad's old jeans, sucking in my gut until my ribs ached. No matter how I twisted or tugged, I couldn't hide the flesh spilling over the waistband.

Over the next thirty years, my bookshelf became a graveyard of diet books. In 1994, I meticulously logged fat grams in a worn spiral notebook, celebrating as the numbers on the scale dropped. Three years later, that notebook gathered dust while I filled my fridge with tofu and potatoes, convinced by passionate vegetarians that meat was the enemy. Then the pendulum swung. Foods I previously ate became contraband as I embraced low-carb, and then keto, preaching the gospel of metabolic flexibility. Eventually, I discovered intermittent fasting, which I believed was a new, higher state of being. Each new plan felt like the answer.

And in a way, each one was. I'd lose weight, feel better, and think I'd finally found the answer. I was the guy at parties who couldn't stop preaching about my latest diet revelation to anyone who would listen. Whether it was the evils of fat, the miracles of plant-based eating, or the magic of ketosis, I believed I'd found the "truth" of weight loss.

But every time, without fail, something awful would happen. I'd read an article or hear an expert explaining why my current diet was wrong. "Low-fat diets increase hunger." "Plant-based diets lack essential nutrients." "Ketosis damages your kidneys."

As my confidence faltered, so did my results. A new set of failure-justifying beliefs crept in along with the pounds. "It's hard for a bigger person to exercise," I'd tell friends. "The food-industrial complex is conspiring to keep us overweight. It doesn't matter what I eat." Without the guardrails of conviction, food choices became a free-for-all. I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. The pounds crept back on. Month after month, year after year, my weight graph traced the peaks and plunges of a roller coaster: rising, falling, and rising again.

Every diet worked . . . until it didn't. Every approach succeeded . . . until I abandoned it. There was a pattern here, something deeper than calories and carbs. Each success unraveled the same way, pointing to a cause I couldn't name. I kept looking in diet books for answers, unaware that the real explanation lay elsewhere entirely.

Hope Floats

In the 1950s, biologist Curt Richter conducted a groundbreaking, though ethically dubious, study. In the initial version of the experiment, Richter placed rats into tall glass cylinders that were half-filled with water. The animals paddled in frantic circles, searching for an escape that wasn't there. Richter watched in silence, stopwatch in hand, recording the moment each struggle came to an end.

The average rat gave up and slipped under the water's surface in about fifteen minutes. Richter observed that the rats didn't appear to drown from physical exhaustion; instead, they seemed to surrender, as if they had concluded their struggle was pointless.

To gather additional evidence, Richter compared wild rats with domesticated ones. Intuition would suggest that wild rats, being stronger swimmers with greater natural survival instincts, would last longer in the cylinders. But strikingly, he observed the opposite. The wild rats often gave up within minutes, simply sinking despite their physical ability, while the domesticated rats swam for much longer.

This finding challenges our conventional wisdom about resilience. We often assume that "tougher" individuals-the ones with more strength or grit-naturally persist longer. But Richter's experiment suggested something different.

He theorized that domesticated rats, having been handled by humans throughout their lives, might interpret their predicament differently than wild rats that had never experienced human intervention. When trapped in the cylinder, the wild rats appeared to surrender to despair immediately. In his notes, Richter described them as exhibiting "hopelessness," literally appearing to "give up" without a fight.

Although he could not know their thoughts, Richter suspected that the rats' survival, at least in part, depended on their mental state. To test his hunch, Richter's curiosity led him to a variation of the experiment that would yield his most remarkable discovery.

Richter placed a new group of domesticated rats into the cylinders and observed them until their exhaustion set in. Just as each animal's strength was about to give out, he plunged his hand into the water and scooped up the exhausted creature. Richter cradled them briefly as water dripped from their matted fur. He dried them off and allowed them to catch their breath. Then, after this momentary reprieve . . . plunk! Back into the jar they went.

Now, I'd like to ask you to guess how much longer these rescued rats kept swimming.

I've often posed that question to audiences when discussing Richter's study. Most people expect the answer to be surprising. Many guess that the rescued rats swam for thirty minutes, or perhaps even an hour. One hour? That's four times the original swim time and quite an ambitious guess!

Think of your own limits, the last time you pushed yourself to the edge. Maybe it was sprinting until you thought your lungs gave out, focusing on a complex task until you were utterly exhausted, or tackling an overwhelming project. With that in mind, can you imagine anything that could make you go four times longer than your limit? Doubtful.

But here's the astonishing thing: The rats that Richter previously rescued paddled for an average of sixty hours. Not sixty minutes, sixty hours! One experience of rescue drastically changed their threshold for giving up, increasing it from fifteen minutes to more than two days of swimming. Those rescued rats were 240 times more persistent!

The rescued rats had learned a vital lesson: Persistence could lead to salvation. This story was now encoded in their memories, and it helped them find the strength they never knew they had. "In this way," writes Richter, "the rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless; thereafter they again become aggressive, try to escape, and show no signs of giving up."

This profound difference wasn't due to physical changes. These were the same rats with the same bodies. The transformation happened entirely in their minds.

My Glass Walls

Richter's rats revealed something I'd been missing in my decades of dieting. It wasn't about finding the perfect plan. It was about belief.

When I truly believed in a diet-when I was convinced it would work-I followed through with near-religious devotion. Whether I was counting fat grams, carbs, or calories, it wasn't the diet rules that carried me forward, but my conviction that my effort mattered. But the moment doubt crept in, when I stopped believing, the commitment collapsed. Like Richter's rats, I let myself sink long before my actual limits.

What I didn't see then was that a belief can be helpful without being universal or even strictly true. My all-or-nothing mindset, the idea that a diet was either entirely flawless or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593852036
• ISBN 13: 9780593852033
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
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