How 7 Core Beliefs Shape Your Health, Happiness, & Success | Shawn Achor

Good Life Project

Shawn Achor explores how invisible core beliefs act as an upstream driver of human behavior, often overriding willpower and habit systems in determining life outcomes. He reveals that the placebo effect has doubled or tripled since 2000,

Key takeaways

• The placebo effect has doubled or tripled since 2000, making human beliefs more predictive of health outcomes than they were two decades ago.
• University of Virginia research shows that physical obstacles like hills appear 15% steeper when individuals believe they must climb them alone.

Main topics

• Core beliefs as upstream drivers of behavior
• The doubling placebo effect & modern mental health trends

Notable quotes

"If we want a different world, we have to change one of those core beliefs about the world."

Conclusion

Listeners gain actionable psychological tools to audit their hidden be

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) So what if no matter how much you thought you were in control of your life, there was a core set of beliefs, largely invisible to you, that were secretly running the show, determining success or failure in nearly every domain of life, from work to relationships to mental and physical health. So often we're told to fix our habits or build better systems and just try harder. But what if the real driver underneath all of that is the beliefs we hold about ourselves, about... other people, and about the world. And what if every attempt at change was forever limited by these underlying beliefs, and the only way to truly live the life you want was to make them visible and then do what's needed to rewire the ones that need rewiring? My guest today is Sean Aker. He spent 12 years at Harvard studying the science of belief, happiness, and success. His TED Talk has been watched more than 25 million times. and his new book, The Power of Beliefs, it grew out of research with the NFL, NASA, and six Marine battalions at Camp Pendleton, and also watching his own daughter fight for her life being born three months early. In this conversation, he breaks down seven core beliefs that shape how we experience life. Beliefs like whether we matter, whether we're alone, and whether our actions actually make a difference. And we talk about why the same situation can feel just completely different depending on the story we tell ourselves, how stress becomes more damaging when it feels meaningless, and why even small belief shifts can create big changes in health, happiness, and performance. If you have ever felt stuck in the same patterns, this conversation offers a fresh and practical way to look at what's really going on and what it takes to move forward. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump right in after this short break. Speaker 2 (1:56) I'm fascinated by the topic that you have been really diving into. I've been following your work for quite a long time now. The world of beliefs and behavior change is something that I have been so curious about for so long. I don't know if I've met anybody that you can bump into on the street. And if you ask them the question of, hey, is there anything about you or your life or your circumstance that you would love to be different? I have to imagine almost everybody's going to have an answer to that question. There will be something. And yet, most people think about change as, well, this is about willpower or having the right system or the plan or the habits or enough time. And you think that those, they're not completely useless, but they're also a bit of a distraction from the bigger thing. Take me into this. Sure. Speaker 1 (2:51) I think you're right. I think that oftentimes when we think we need to make a change in our life or when I'm invited to give a talk, they ask for practical takeaways, which means another habit. And every speaker at the conference is doing that. So by the end of the day, you've got 37 things you need to be doing. But my research is not that those are not important. I've been talking about the value of habits my entire career. But there's a precursor to it. The precursor, before we even decide whether or not a habit is worthwhile or whether or not change is possible, we have a belief about change, about ourselves, about whether the world is for us or against us, how much free will we have, that change not only the math about what's possible and probable. But our beliefs change the very paths we decide to take. They decide which hills we're going to climb. They decide which goals we're going to go for. It tells us when we're unhappy with parts of our life and that we believe that something should be different or that we believe that we feel alone, but that we feel like that that shouldn't be the case or we feel like we're being moral or immoral. Those stem from a belief system. beliefs about so many different types of things. We have beliefs about whether or not it's safe to get into a self-driving car. We have beliefs about whether or not we should be working or at home with our kids. We have beliefs about whether AI is great or it's going to start a market crisis or it's going to steal our kids' education. We have beliefs about a lot of different things. And the question that drove a lot of this research is, we have beliefs about everything, but not all of those beliefs really change us. What I'm interested in are, are there certain beliefs that are most predictive about what's about to happen next in the path that you take? Speaker 2 (4:40) So I want to wrap my head around this so I'm really clear on this. You're saying behaviors matter. Like if we just, we can believe anything in the world, but if we never attach behavior to it, still nothing's going to happen. But there's something upstream from behavior. And that upstream thing is belief. And if all we do is focus on the behavior, and we never focus on the belief, will anything meaningful ever change or sustain? Speaker 1 (5:07) I think it's very difficult to change our habits long term if we don't believe that this is worthwhile. So what I find fascinating is we can make all these habit changes. We can lose the five to ten pounds. We can get our kids in the right school. We can invest our money the correct way. But our beliefs shape whether or not we believe money is good or evil or leads to security. We have beliefs about how much productivity is necessary or if there's an even off switch. So what's amazing is that the same exact behavioral changes that we see in the world or environmental sets, like the kid is at the same school or people are at the same income level or they live in the same town with the same weather. But our beliefs are superimposed upon that, that guide whether or not that A minus you got in school makes you feel like you've been incredibly successful or you're a terrible failure compared to your parents. Speaker 2 (6:12) So would it be fair to say then that, so what you just described, anyone with sort of like a short enough burst of drive or willpower or support is going to be able to, you know, let's say like the change you want to make is you want to lose a couple of pounds, which is often one of the top, you know, like change pursuits that a lot of people have in the first week of a year. you can probably muscle your way into doing that. Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but a lot of people can probably muscle their way into sort of like hitting the number. But from what it sounds like you're saying, it's almost like there's this underlying belief that's kind of like a set point almost. And we're going to rubber band back to that if we don't change the belief along with the process. Is that right? Speaker 1 (6:58) Yes. So let's take the same exact world. In fact, this is one of the main themes of the book is the idea that if you have the same world, but you have different beliefs, you're going to get a different outcome. But if you have the same beliefs about yourself, if you think I'm alone or I'm worthless or I don't matter, even if you lose that five pounds, you haven't actually hit the core things that are driving your happiness and your long-term well-being. More importantly, or equally importantly, you may have created a behavioral change or an outcome change in your life. You might have gotten that good grade or lost that weight or been able to join the club that you wanted to or been able to go on the vacation you want. But if you're still going on that vacation, feeling like you're a failure or believing that the world is against you, then you're going to find that just like the world feels like it's against you at home, it's also going to feel like that in Italy. It's also going to feel like that in France. If we don't change the beliefs, then what happens is the lens through which we view our children, our work, our wealth, our weight has not changed. And as a result of that, we're going to get the same world in the future. If we want a different world, we have to change one of those core beliefs about the world. We have to change the belief that... my behavior matters, or that I'm not alone, or that I matter, or I have something to give, or I have something to be grateful for. Speaker 2 (8:30) I want to drop into some of those core beliefs. You list out seven. But before we get there, I've also heard you say something else, which I'm kind of curious about. It's this idea that it's not just beliefs are powerful. Okay, so you know, like, and as you've just shared, if we want to change something and have that change sustain. we also have to address the belief underneath it, right? I get it. That's a lot of power. But I've also heard you describe it. It's that beliefs are also, they're becoming more powerful, more predictive, and potentially more healing and destructive. Tease this out for me. Speaker 1 (9:05) So this is one of the most fascinating parts about this research, because we've known beliefs are powerful for thousands of years. We've known it throughout. the beginning of psychology up to the present. We know that our mindset matters. We know that our beliefs matter. But something incredible is happening over the past couple years. For example, as I was doing the research for the book, and one of the reasons I wrote this book is my daughter was born early, three months early, and I'd be happy to share that story. But for here, while I was doing that, I was reading about some conditions, and they use the same drug. And one of the study occurred in 2002 and one occurred in 2015. And as I was reading the study, I realized that while it's the same drug, the placebo effect was wildly different. The placebo effect, as most of the listeners know and watchers know, is that if we're going to test a new drug, we need to make sure that that drug works. So when we do... provide a new drug to people. We also have a placebo group. And in the placebo group, they receive a fake pill or a fake treatment, but the person is told it's the real drug. And the belief that this drug will heal you has a positive beneficial effect upon people in such a high degree that we have to test every new drug against this placebo effect because our beliefs that this action is going to heal us. has such a healing effect upon people's lives. We've known that since the 1950s when a Harvard anesthesiologist discovered this. But what's incredible is that since 2000 to the present, something extraordinary has occurred. What I saw in that study, I got fascinated. I went down into a rabbit hole and I started reading as many studies as I could. And what I found is from everything from cancer to heart disease, to childhood epilepsy, to 23 different forms of chronic pain, it turns out from 2000 to now, the placebo effect has doubled, if not tripled, for some reason. And what that means for us listening is that, and learning this information, is that it's not just the beliefs are powerful. For some reason, beliefs are more healing today than they were Two decades ago. Our beliefs are more predictive of what's about to happen in our lives today than it was just even 10 or 20 years ago, which is incredible because we live in a world in which we have AI and MRIs and SSRIs and all these technological advancements and medical advancements. And it sounds like our beliefs are going to dwindle in power. And yet, actually what we're finding... in the midst of all of these new drugs, in the midst of all this technological revolution, it turns out our human beliefs are more predictive today than they were even 20 years ago about what's about to happen in your life, not only in terms of your health, but in terms of your investments, in terms of your children's levels of happiness and their education, in terms of... the loneliness we feel or anxiety or depression. And if we're able to harness that power, then we can use it in a positive way. But unfortunately, what we're finding is that if beliefs are more powerful, that means that the negative beliefs are more powerful as well, which is what we've seen happen over the past two decades, where we've seen what I call in the book, the rise of the four horsemen of the modern world, the burnout, anxiety, loneliness, and depression that everyone talks about. But what we found is that all four of those have doubled over the past decade for every age group, including eight-year-olds. And that's not the saddest part. The saddest part is that we've given up hope. We've given up the belief that that's going to change. Like we thought things would get better after the pandemic, but it turns out after the pandemic, things either stabilized at the lower level or got worse for some of those characteristics. And what that means is that we continually are going down this decline, where as a species, we're feeling not only less happy, but we're feeling increased levels of burnout, anxiety, loneliness, and depression. And that's because of these core negative beliefs that are driving us, the beliefs that I'm alone, or that I don't matter, or that my behavior doesn't matter in a world in which there's so much going on. Speaker 2 (13:39) I need to ask the obvious question here. I don't know if there's an answer or if you have the answer or seen the answer in research. If our beliefs have become... that much more determinative of our outcomes, both positive and negative over the last 25 years or so, what's driving that? Where's that shift coming from? Do you have any sense? Speaker 1 (14:03) It's a fantastic question. And I try to answer it and unpack it in the book, but we're still learning. But I will say that before getting into psychology, I studied at the Divinity School. I was fascinated about how our beliefs about the world have shaped why we wake up in the morning and shape why we give and why we forgive and why we do altruistic actions. And these beliefs have motivated literally billions of people's lives across the globe for almost all of humanity. And those are the same questions I'm getting to ask in psychology. But when I look at history and religion and psychology, I see the same answers starting to come out that throughout all of human history. Our core beliefs about the world came from four sources. It came from our village. Speaker 2 (14:55) It Speaker 1 (14:55) came from an occupation, and that could be in the home or outside of the home. That could be the political, like the government, and the religious group that we were a part of. Those were the four main sources of our core beliefs. And that was true all the way up until about the past 30 years when you're looking at sociology. And then we started to become untethered from all four. People no longer stay in the same village. They scatter across the world for education and for work. And even when we're in the same village, American male adults, for example, they just found in a Gallup study that they found that they have 60 % lower face-to-face contact than they had two decades ago. So they're in the same village, but the village is gone. And we don't stay with the same jobs. We move around, we have a gig economy where only 14 % of people claim that they want to have the same job next year that they have this year, which is a historic low, worse than at any point, even in the bottom of the pandemic. The trust in the government in the United States, as a particular example, is actually the lowest in recorded history over the past 70 years. And so we no longer have that belief that the government is there to be able to solve that or that it represents us. And finally, in 2000, 5 % of people claimed in the United States that they did not believe in a God. That's jumped up to 24 % in a two-decade period of time. That is a seismic shift in the beliefs that a collective society has. And so as we become untethered, I believe what's happened is we still have these desires for belief. We still have these desires for connection and for a village, but we can't find it. So we cling on to whatever we can. We get lonely. So we follow influencers who are maybe just as angry and as lonely and depressed as the rest of us. Or people get lonely, so they cling on to OnlyFans subscriptions. Or they scroll through social media hoping for hits of dopamine and connection, but really feeling like, we're missing out. And as a result of that, we've grabbed onto these quasi-communities that we thought were serving the purposes that we were getting in the past, but are actually leaving us with all those scars. And those scars are those negative core value beliefs. And the beliefs are that my behavior doesn't matter. I'm alone. I don't matter. My work is not meaningful. I have nothing to give. I'm missing out. And there's nothing greater than me. But the antidote to those changes is the flip side of those beliefs. The getting people to believe that my behavior matters, that I'm not alone, that I matter, completely shift not only the formula in the present and our experience of the present, but it changes what happens next. For a specific example, if you take the same child with ADHD, same loving parents, same school, same condition, but you change one thing for