I want to believe.
You don’t see the world as it is.
I don’t see the world as it is.
We filter the world through our biases, past experiences and the beliefs we currently (and stubbornly) hold on to.
And if you’re anything like me, you probably have a healthy mix of beliefs that serve you well but you also have some that hurt you. And even if you don’t know it, they hurt you in a very concrete way.
Our beliefs are the secret puppet masters pulling our strings in a world of infinite interpretations.
But any master can be fired.
And today, finally, after sitting on this for I have even no idea how long for, I want to talk about this.
Because examining your beliefs is precisely the kind of dangerous exercise that can, in the best case, cause an avalanche of good in your life.
That’s how deep beliefs go
A bit ago I stumbled upon a study online, on how 88% of kids in some American college feel like they cannot express their true beliefs. Or, they have to lie in order to please their professors. To mirror the professors’ beliefs on topics that have nothing to do with their courses.
This is disgusting.
I can’t imagine having to walk on eggshells every single day. Then combine this with the already crumbling mental health on campuses, and… well you get the point. It’s madness.
But let’s rewind.
What is a Belief?
Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?
No, it’s a thought!
You’re going to find a lot of definitions in different disciplines and by different thinkers and philosophers, but this is mine.
Belief is simply anything you accept as truth without further thinking necessary.
You simply accept something as true. That’s a belief. Note how it has nothing to do with actual truth. As long as you accept it as true, that’s your belief.
Frogs are green. Iced coffee is good. Earth is round. Water is wet. Sun is hot. Sleeping is fun (my kids would disagree heavily with this one.)
Note how beliefs have nothing to do with objective truth. They are just things you accept automatically.
This means beliefs differ between people. Like the beliefs of those professors and the students I mentioned up there a few paragraphs ago.
And in any normal situation, all of this is fine!
If anything, challenging your friends’ beliefs is just a fun conversation starter.
But what most never do is challenge their own beliefs. And that’s where I want to go today.
Some beliefs are harmless, some beliefs “just are”, and some beliefs are harmful. Harmful beliefs lead to harmful actions or, at the very least, harmful thinking.
Beliefs constitute a major part in the lens you see the world through.
Beliefs as your Lens
We see the world through our own subjective lens.
That’s how we consume the information we’re being bombarded with. The real, the propaganda, all of it!
And indeed, belief-consistent information processing as discussed in one of my favourite papers (kind of a smart way to say confirmation bias) dictates how we take in the information.
We cherrypick information. We only see what our lenses allows through. And we omit what it filters.
Beliefs adjust that lens. Big time. Like, big as mountain. Bigly. You get what I mean.
Context-switch to academia.
If you believe that your opportunities in academia are all but zero, the rest of your brain follows lead. You’ll find plenty of the evidence to support that.
Scarcity is your lens now.
If you believe that academia is a playground with infinite opportunity, the rest of your brain follows lead. You’ll find plenty of evidence to support that.
Abundance is your lens now.
Isn’t that crazy? Your brain simply wants to save energy, so why would it bother itself with counter-evidence to your belief? That’d just cause friction. Friction eats energy.
So if your beliefs shape your attention. And your attention surfaces everything in the world. In that way, your beliefs shape your actions, as you can act only on things you notice in the first place.
And the outcomes feed back to your original belief. Surely “it” must be true! You just found evidence for it! And even the actions support it!
Devilish loop, if you start with harmful beliefs.
A pretty cool one, if you start with good beliefs.
Beliefs have a major role in your life. Which then means you can manipulate your reality in a very tangible way by changing your beliefs.
And changing your beliefs is much more possible than you have perhaps believed.
Changing Beliefs
I’m quite ashamed when I look back at some of the beliefs that I held 10 years ago. And I’m not even talking about personal life, but academia.
“I can never do/get X because Y” was running an infinite loop in my head.
It’s so crazy. I remember at some point even thinking only foreigners can “make it” in Finland, as we do tend to prioritise people coming from outside Finland especially in the early academic careers.
Can you believe how blind I was? That’s just one example. I have held absurd beliefs about papers, research areas, even people.
All of which have been proven wrong over time, but I could have just prove them wrong myself without wasting years of time and opportunity.
Personal life wise, I don’t believe in everything experts say, even when it comes to dire medical matters. I cross-reference everything and find alternative explanations and solutions.
Because the single belief “the experts are always right” was very close to destroying my health entirely.
These are no laughing matters. Consequences are real.
Beliefs are serious. So take manipulating them with the attention they deserve.
See, Examine and Change your Beliefs
Examining your beliefs makes you a critical thinker. And you’ll never change a belief without tearing it to pieces to examine first.
But you can’t do any of that if you don’t first see it.
Step 1: Catch the Belief
Ever played Pokemon Go?
You catch things. It’s cute. You can think of your world a bit like that. Just play this game in your mind: catch the things that make you think and do things.
Catch your beliefs.
Most people never learn to see their beliefs because beliefs…well, they really don’t feel like beliefs!
You just accept them.
So then. Your first job is to install a belief-catching apparatus.
Set a broad area. What area of your life are we going to focus on?
Let’s take academic life. Obviously.
The moment you find yourself think or say something like
“I’m just not good with a calendar,” or
“I’m always late for meetings”, or
“Academia means working overtime” …
STOP!
Those are all beliefs. That’s your old programming, which you have installed at some point in your life. And you’re now just repeating the words, further installing the belief deeper in your brain, where it’s always just harder and harder to dig out.
But dig it out, you must.
Stop yourself. Pause. Catch the thought.
You don’t even need to the thought down.
For me, this process works better without writing it down. Because writing is a lot of work… and the belief train is FAST! Who has time to write down 200 thoughts per day?
So, just stop to think for a bit and notice if it repeats over the coming days.
From a science perspective, this is something called metacognitive awareness: your prefrontal cortex observing instead of processing automatically.
But you can call it whatever you want. As long as you’re aware of it.
The point is to take distance from your automatic processing, and this opens the door to everything great that follows in Step 2.
Step 2: Go Full Scientist on the Evidence
This is easy for you because you are already a scientist.
This is also terrifying.
Because you’re going to challenge yourself. And your brain does not want to be challenged. It wants to conserve energy.
The good news is that you don’t need to argue, confront all kinds of idi…I mean people who disagree with you (like in social media), or go to war with thoughts.
Just be a scientist.
Ask yourself two questions:
- When did I first decide this is true?
Because at some point in your life you decided.
Maybe this was 10 years ago when something happened, or maybe this was when you were a kid, or maybe it was when one project failed.
But that was then.
Now is now.
And somewhere along the ride, your brain made a generalisation to protect you and your identity, and to simply conserve energy because you don’t need to think about this anymore.
You may have been running an erratic piece of software all these years. Maybe. We don’t know yet. Which is why we ask the second question.
- What evidence exists that this belief is NOT true?
Now we’re getting to the hard part.
Your brain will resist this question. It’s going to feel like you’re lying to yourself or trying to trick yourself.
You’re going to concretely feel resistance. That’s the belief fighting back. Your lens cracking a little bit.
Push through it.
Find EVEN ONE piece of contradicting evidence. Then find another. You’re not trying to flip the belief in one session. Give it time. All this does is shows your nervous system that the verdict is not quite as final as you previously believed.
And just to make this more practical: let’s say this is a genuinely harmful belief you’re catching. And you can pretty easily tell the degree of harm by simply looking at the downstream effects: how the belief affects your mood or concrete actions in everyday life.
Wouldn’t it be quite worth it to… at least find the truth about that belief? Sure! There’s a chance that it’s real. But just as well it might be complete rubbish!
This is what cognitive restructuring is in CBT. You’re not just thinking differently, but you’re sorting out new neural pathways.
Every time you discover a piece of counter-evidence, you strengthen an alternative network. You are rewiring yourself.
Step 3: Installing a Replacement
Waking up from a simulation is tough. It can and it will disorient you.
If you suddenly realise you’ve been quite concretely living in a lie…what’s there to trust? What to fill the vacuum with, when you now understand your “truths” were not true?
Sometimes the simplest solutions work best.
Simply fill that vacuum with whatever beliefs that serve you.
Forget the truth.
It’s impossible to find the truth, given how truth is so subjective to begin with.
And install your own better belief to replace the old truth that was revealed a harmful lie.
A couple of things here that can go wrong. If you try to just tell yourself something your brain instantly rejects, it’s just not going to stick. Yeah, you’re that smart. So it has to be something that’s at least a directional trust.
Think of… maybe not “academia is the planet’s best job and there’s nothing that even comes close” but something in the — DIRECTION — of what serves you:
“I’m the kind of person who can make academia work for me, easily and happily!“
Directional. Not absolute.
Not “academia is easy and money grows in trees” but “with patience and good friends I can get grants to fund my cool future.“
Feel the difference?
One is a scream your entire nervous system will reject. The other one you can persuade yourself to believe.
You can over time confirm these new beliefs with past AND future evidence.
And with evidence, it’ll stick.
And then you just keep working. Every time you act in alignment with the new belief and encode a positive outcome, you are giving your predictive processing system new materials to work with.
You are updating your internal OS, to see the world differently.
Step 4: Repeat, Repeat and Repeat
This is the step nobody wants to hear about.
Because it’s not glamorous. It’s “boring.”
There’s no breakthrough here. Just repetition.
Your old beliefs have YEARS of reinforcement. Thousands of confirmations. Neural pathways that go deep.
You are not going to overwrite that in a weekend seminar or a journaling session (although they’re a great start).
Beliefs are not just fairy dust. They’re wired biologically. Myelin inside your brains builds with repetition. Neural connections are built with use.
The fun part is, you are doing physical work on the most complex structure in the known universe.
My routine is clear these days. Every single day after going to the daycare, I do my morning walk with brain games. Embodied cognition. Look it up. Helps build the beliefs. Exercise does.
So. Write about them. Speak about them. Tell them out loud. Online. Anywhere. Remember, every action is a vote toward what you want to become.
Eventually your Reticular Activating System starts working FOR you.
Your attention network, your lens (which we talked about in the intro series) now tuned to the new belief, start finding evidence you would have walked past a year ago.
Opportunities that were always there but invisible become suddenly obvious.
Not because the world changed.
Because YOUR FILTER changed.
Isn’t that just crazy?