I was just recording a podcast the other day and was asked which of the eight elements of humans’ sense of meaning in their lives was the most difficult for people to implement in their lives. Naturally, I said, “Judging by the scientific measure of the number of self-help books focusing on the topic: belief. More self-help books focus on overcoming negative beliefs than anything else.” It made me think about all of the advice I’ve read over the years and how it’d be worth writing a little about what’s going on and how to address it.
First of all, let’s define our terms: what is a negative belief? Well, a belief is anything that you assume to be true. So, a positive belief is a belief in a good outcome for your life, and a negative belief is a belief in a negative outcome for your life. This includes that something bad is going to happen and, the one that self-help books focus on, that you are unable to do something (that you want to do, presumably).
So, why are negative beliefs so bad? Well, they’re not intrinsically bad. After all, the belief that if you jump off a cliff and flap your arms to fly will get you killed is a healthy negative belief—you will almost certainly die if you do that. Some think that thinking that your life is over if you fail a test is also a healthy negative belief if it gets you to study and get an A. So, they’re not intrinsically bad. However, they’re the focus of most self-help books because you might think that if you try to sing in front of an audience and make a mistake, you’ll die. (you won’t) The fact that something that might lead to a good outcome scares you and prevents you from doing it is what those books are trying to help you overcome.
Now that we’ve covered what a negative belief is, the next big question is, “What causes them?” The answer lies in evolutionary biology and psychology: our goal in life is to grow, and so we need to seek growth-enabling experiences and avoid harm-inducing ones. Freud famously stated this in The Pleasure Principle through the lens of our reward system for growing/not being harmed: seek pleasure and avoid pain. To do that, we have to explore our environment for food, water, and sex to stay alive and reproduce, and we need to explore our environment for threats like predators and falling rocks to avoid harm and death. While doing those things, we learn about the world around us and make assumptions about what is true or what will be true to make better decisions that will maximize our growth and minimize our harm. Since a belief is anything we assume to be true, we are forming beliefs about ourselves and the world so that we optimize our future behavior. If there was a lion near the stream we frequent yesterday, then we have to be more careful when we go back to that stream in case it’s still there and could attack us. So, if we believe that a place is safe and growth-enabling, we will proceed with our behavior; if we think that it is dangerous and harmful, we will not proceed with our behavior.
So, all negative beliefs protect us from harm or failure to attain our goals. If there’s a bear in a cave, we avoid the cave; if there are two ways to get to the stream and one way is faster, we take the faster way (all other things being equal). These decisions protect us and maximize our efficiency. So, if we hold a negative belief about something, we tend not to do it.
So, what causes us to form that negative belief? Two sources: direct experience ourselves and what we conclude from others or the world around us. For example, if a shark attacked you, you might not want to enter the water anymore. But you might also not want to enter the water after watching Jaws because you believe that it’s possible even though the actual occurrence is quite rare. In the latter case, the fear from watching the movie caused you to not enter the water, not your direct experience in the Ocean.
And so that’s why self-help books try to squelch your negative beliefs. When you do something risky that you probably shouldn’t and get hurt, you learn and stop doing it. But if you don’t do something to avoid pain, nothing bad will directly happen to you as a result. If you don’t try water skiing, nothing bad will happen to you, so there’s no way that feedback can change your behavior. That’s why many psychologists recommend exposure therapy to overcome a phobia: it’s only from the direct interaction with the thing that won’t hurt you that, over time, your mind and body realize that it won’t.
The problem is that we often have deeply held beliefs that we can’t pinpoint the origin of. The most famous kind in pop psychology is the idea of childhood trauma: something happened to you when you were very young that you either don’t remember or suppressed the memory of and so now you are afraid of something and don’t know why. The other famous kind is the social acceptability bias: the idea that others will judge you for your behavior. (example: there’s a new book, Let Them, with the entire premise that you should just accept that others will think some way about you so just live the way that you want) And so to get to those deeply held beliefs, you have to go beyond the simple “I think the lion might still be there because I saw it yesterday” kinds of direct causation and tap into the root cause.
The most common approach to root-cause analysis is to just keep asking, “Why?” until you get to the thing that caused everything else. For example, let’s say that you’re afraid to sing in front of a crowd. The direct cause is, “Because I might make a mistake.” But why would you be afraid of that? After all, you’re not afraid to make a mistake in practice in front of a mirror. “Because I’ll look bad. People will think I’m terrible.” So that’s an example of going from the direct cause to the root cause.
This can be done for anything. You might say that you hate the woods because of the bugs but really because your friend used to tell you ghost stories about the woods and it scared you. You might say that you think vegetables are disgusting but it turns out that you never tried them yourself and you just watched cartoons that told you that they were yucky. There are many possible sources of your beliefs, and so you have to find them if you want to dispel them.
As such, if you have found a belief that you hold that you can’t get what you want in life and you feel bad as a result, you need to start by asking, “What must I believe to be true for me to feel this way?” There are many athletes, for example, who feel bad after a career-ending injury because they think that it’s the only thing they were ever good at in life. When they identify that belief and then test it, they can break through the depression and get back on track toward living their life to the fullest post-injury.
Once you identify the belief, you have to pressure-test it to break it down. One of my favorite sayings of all-time is, “You can’t eliminate a habit; you can only replace it.” Similarly, you can’t really eliminate a belief; you can only replace it with a contrary belief. So, that’s the best way to test the belief. If you think you can’t sing in front of a crowd, you can point to how you could sing in the shower just fine and that if anyone overheard you, you’d have been singing to an audience. The world hasn’t changed at all, but your perspective on the situation has changed, which will make you more likely to proceed with your desired behavior of singing to an audience (for money, validation, or others’ enjoyment). So, the journey is that you identify a negative emotion about something you would otherwise want to do in life, which signals a negative belief that you then surface and test until it break down and you replace it with a more constructive belief.
You don’t always have to destroy the belief, however; sometimes, you can just mitigate the risk of it discouraging you. For example, there is a high risk of death in a race car. But, if you love driving race cars, you hold mitigating beliefs like how you have your car tested and you practice for thousands of hours before competing. It’s not forgetting that you might die; it’s reducing the risk or offsetting the negative beliefs with positive ones until it no longer stops you from doing what you want to do in life.
There are many more techniques to root-cause and manage your beliefs, but this post was just to start you off with the fundamentals of what a belief is, what a negative belief is, what causes it, and then how to diagnose your issue and address it. Once you get some practice with that, you’ll notice that you can manage your emotions and your behavior much more effectively. It even works in reverse: if you want something and are known for compulsive behavior, you can remember to introduce negative beliefs like, “I don’t really need to do that now because something else is more important at this moment.” These negative beliefs can be helpful in stopping you from doing things that feel good in the moment but are bad for you in the long term.
Remember, a negative belief is any belief you hold in a negative outcome or your inability to do what you want to do. They are there to protect you from pain, harm, and death. If you feel more fear than there is risk of those three things happening (or the impact isn’t as bad as you think it is), then you can always use root-causing and belief-counteracting techniques to change or mitigate your beliefs so you can move forward in your life and not hold yourself back. If there is real risk, then negative beliefs are helpful…but if they hold you back from doing what you would love to do, then it might just be worth trying to overcome them. There are many, many self-help books on breaking down your negative beliefs on love, friendships, work, money, and your skills so that you aren’t discouraged from going after your goals. Use whatever techniques work for you, and you’ll be less hesitant to work toward what will bring you fulfillment in life.