Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal and Julie Li — Why Your Beliefs Are Tools, Not Truths

Most of us carry around beliefs we've never examined. I'm not a morning person. I'm bad with numbers. People like me don't do that. I'm too old to start now. They feel like facts, so we rarely question them, and they quietly decide what we try and what we don't. Beyond Belief argues that many of these statements aren't facts at all. They're beliefs, and beliefs are tools. Some help us. Some hold us back. And, like any tool, they can be examined, kept or put down. Nir Eyal is best known for Hooked, his 2014 book about how habit-forming products are built, and Indistractable, his 2019 book about managing distraction. Beyond Belief, written with his wife and long-time collaborator Julie Li, was published by Portfolio on 10 March 2026, and its publisher describes it as an instant New York Times bestseller. Like his earlier books, it mixes psychology research with practical exercises and personal stories. What Eyal adds to a crowded field Books about mindset, self-belief and reframing are not new, so the obvious question is what this one contributes. The answer lies in its stance. Most mindset books ask you to believe in yourself. Eyal asks you to treat beliefs the way a product designer treats a prototype: as working assumptions to test, keep if they're useful and discard if they're not. That's recognisably the thinking behind Hooked, turned inwards. Instead of designing products that shape users' behaviour, he asks readers to examine the beliefs that are already shaping their own. That approach also creates the book's most interesting tension. If beliefs are chosen partly for usefulness, where does useful end and self-deception begin? Eyal's answer is that a good belief still has to fit the evidence. "I'll never be good at this" can be tested against what actually happens when you practise. "I can do anything" can't survive contact with reality for long. The book is at its best when it keeps those two standards, useful and true, side by side. A simple way to read it: an accurate belief matches the evidence, a useful belief helps you act, and a harmful belief limits you without good reason. The beliefs worth keeping are the ones that are both accurate and useful. The book is organised around what Eyal calls three powers of belief, and they work as a chain. Attention decides what you notice, anticipation decides what you expect to happen, and agency decides whether you act. A limiting belief can break the chain at any of those links. Attention: believing is seeing Beliefs act as filters. They decide what we notice and what we miss. Eyal draws on the psychologist Richard Wiseman's research on luck. In one of Wiseman's best-known experiments, people were asked to count the photographs in a newspaper. Inside was a large message telling them they could stop counting because there were 43 photographs. People who described themselves as unlucky tended to miss it, while self-described lucky people were more likely to spot it. Wiseman's conclusion was that "luck" partly reflects how open and relaxed people's attention is. The same filtering affects relationships. Once we've decided that a colleague is selfish or a relative is difficult, we tend to notice only the evidence that confirms it. Eyal suggests keeping a record of these judgements, deliberately looking for evidence that contradicts them and asking whether the belief is actually useful. One of the book's most memorable stories comes from India. Dashrath Manjhi, a labourer from Bihar, spent around two decades cutting a path through a hill with hand tools after his wife was unable to get timely medical help because the nearest town was so far away. Eyal uses the story to show how a belief about what is possible can change what a person is willing to attempt. It's worth reading this story carefully, though. Manjhi's determination was extraordinary, but the reason he had to cut through a hill by hand was that nobody had built a road for his village. His story shows what belief can do in the face of a structural barrier. It doesn't show that structural barriers are really just beliefs. Anticipation: expectations shape experience The second power is about the future. What we expect to happen changes how we experience what actually happens. Eyal draws on research into placebo effects, including work by Ted Kaptchuk, and on studies showing that expectations can affect how we experience taste, pain and physical effort. He spends time on ageing in particular. A 2002 study led by the psychologist Becca Levy, which followed 660 older adults, found that those with more positive views of ageing lived, on average, around seven and a half years longer than those with less positive views. This was an observational finding. It shows a link, not proof that thinking positively will add years to anyone's life, and people with positive views of ageing may also stay more active, more social and more engaged with their health. Eyal also includes a chapter on prayer. Although he says he hadn't prayed since childhood, he interviewed leaders from several religious traditions and argues that prayer and ritual can work as a form of structured reflection, calming the mind and clarifying priorities, whether or not a person believes. This is the authors' interpretation rather than a settled finding. Research on prayer and ritual mostly shows associations with lower stress rather than clear cause and effect, so the chapter is better read as a suggestion to try than as a proven technique. Agency: believing your effort matters The third power is the belief that what you do makes a difference. Eyal draws on the classic research on learned helplessness by Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, which showed how repeated experiences of having no control can lead to giving up, even when escape becomes possible. Maier and Seligman have since revised their original explanation, concluding that passivity is closer to a default response to prolonged stress and that what people learn is the sense of control. The practical lesson is much the same: agency can be built. The antidote is building a sense of agency in small, concrete ways: focusing on what you can control, collecting small wins and treating setbacks as information rather than verdicts. His most striking example is David Fajgenbaum, a doctor diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening form of Castleman disease, who went on to research his own condition and helped identify an existing drug that put him into remission. It's a powerful story of agency, but it's also a story of medical training, scientific research and years of collaboration. Belief made him keep going. Science made the difference. Labels and the danger of fixed identities One chapter looks at how the labels we give ourselves can become limits. A diagnosis, a job title or a single piece of criticism can harden into an identity. Labels are useful as descriptions, Eyal argues, but harmful when they become the whole story. He also warns that optimism on its own can backfire. Drawing on Gabriele Oettingen's work on mental contrasting, he suggests pairing a positive goal with an honest look at the obstacles in the way. Practical tools The exercises are the book's strongest feature. Readers are encouraged to record their strongest judgements and challenge one at a time, to look actively for evidence that contradicts a limiting belief, and to run the quickest, cheapest test they can to see whether an assumption actually holds. If you believe you're "not a runner", for example, the test isn't to sign up for a marathon. It's to run for ten minutes three times this week and see what happens. Other suggestions include talking to yourself in the third person to create distance from strong reactions, and reframing discomfort as a sign of effort rather than a signal to stop. Where the book needs care The evidence is stronger in some places than others. Placebo effects and learned helplessness are well established. Some popular mind-body findings have not held up as well. Early claims that adopting "power poses" changes hormone levels, for instance, failed to replicate when other researchers repeated the experiment. The book acknowledges some of these uncertainties, but the subtitle's promise of "breakthrough results" sets expectations higher than the research can always support. Like many books built on inspiring examples, it also leans on success stories. For every person who overcame a limiting belief, there are others for whom changing a belief wasn't enough, because the obstacles were real: money, health, discrimination, caring responsibilities. Readers shouldn't conclude they're failing just because a new mindset didn't solve a practical problem. And beliefs can't replace medical treatment. Reframing pain or illness is not a substitute for proper care, and the health stories in the book work best as examples of agency alongside medicine, not instead of it. So is it worth reading? Yes, if you suspect that some of your limits are self-imposed. Beyond Belief's real contribution isn't telling you to believe more. It's giving you a method for checking which of your beliefs deserve to be kept. Its three powers of belief are easy to remember, and its exercises are simple enough to use straight away. Approach it with the same healthy scepticism the book encourages. Some limits are in your head. Others are in your circumstances. The skill this book helps you build is telling the difference. Read it to question the stories you've been telling yourself. Then test them against reality, one small experiment at a time.