10 Self limiting beliefs

Here is a list of 10 thinking errors. It’s a tool that anyone can use for better self-talk hygiene.

1. Labeling: Fat, stupid, undisciplined, lazy, gauche—there weren’t many derogatory adjectives one hadn’t applied at one time or another.
2. Personalising: Taking personal responsibility for a bad thing when, rationally, it was outside one’s control — like choosing to go and see a film that turned out to be a bad one, and feeling apologetic towards the friend one would have dragged along to see it with.
3. Mind-reading: Believing that someone was thinking bad thoughts about us, on the basis of little or no evidence. If someone didn’t return our call, it had to be because they thought we are boring, rather than because they hadn’t picked up the message.
4. Fortune-telling: In our own mind, we’d already anticipated failure. Closely tied to…
5. Catastrophising: Imagining the worst possible outcome and expecting it to come true.
6. Black and white thinking: If something wasn’t a total success, then it was a total failure, even if, objectively, ninety percent of it had gone well.
7. Mental filtering: Focusing on the negative, rather than the positive, in any situation — like ignoring praise and concentrating on the one negative comment.
8. Disqualifying the positive: Construing positive comments negatively; mental filtering, taken to its logical conclusion.
9. Making demands: Directed at oneself, this is what is known as “masturbatory” thinking: “I must…”, “I should…”, “I ought…”. Trying to control uncontrollable people (i.e. everyone) is a guaranteed shortcut to frustration and stress.
10. Emotional reasoning: Using our emotions to evaluate a situation. For example, believing that because we feel unattractive, we, therefore, are unattractive.

These thinking errors were a list of ways one might fail to look at events rationally and objectively, and instead, to interpret things in the worst possible way.

Why does brain get influenced by beliefs?

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The brain gets influenced by beliefs because beliefs are deeply ingrained in our subconscious mind and influence our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Beliefs are formed based on past experiences, cultural and social conditioning, and personal values and attitudes. These beliefs can be positive or negative, and they can have a significant impact on our perception of the world around us.

Beliefs can also create cognitive biases, which are mental shortcuts that the brain uses to make sense of information. These biases can cause us to see things in a certain way, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. For example, confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore information that contradicts them.

Additionally, beliefs can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is when our expectations about a situation or person actually influence the outcome. This is because our beliefs can shape our behavior, which in turn can impact the behavior of others.

Here are 2 critical research studies about how the brain gets influenced by beliefs:

1. Alia Crum and Ellen Langer conducted a study where they found that people’s beliefs about aging affected their physiological and cognitive functioning. In the study, a group of hotel maids were told that their daily work of cleaning rooms was enough exercise to meet the recommended daily activity levels. Another group of maids were not given this information. After four weeks, the maids who were told that their work was exercise had a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and improved attitude towards their job compared to the group that was not given this information. The study showed that beliefs can have a powerful effect on physiological functioning.
2. In a study by Carol Dweck, students were given a difficult IQ test. After the test, half of the students were praised for their intelligence and the other half were praised for their effort. The students who were praised for their intelligence were more likely to choose an easier task to work on in the future, whereas the students who were praised for their effort were more likely to choose a more challenging task. The study showed that beliefs about intelligence and ability can influence the type of goals people set for themselves and their motivation to achieve those goals.

Overall, beliefs play a significant role in how we perceive and interact with the world, and understanding the influence of beliefs on the brain can help us to better understand ourselves and others.

Are you an achiever, an explorer, a socializer, or a killer?

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In the 1996 paper – Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs, Richard Bartle described how mindsets and goals of different players could be described in a way to analyze the dynamic of balance in a game:

• Achievers are goal-oriented and enjoy meeting milestones they set for themselves
• Explorers want to learn as much as they can about the game they’re playing—mapping it, experimenting with it
• Socializers most enjoy their interactions and conversations with others; relationship building
• Killers like to demonstrate and exercise their power over others (and make impact on others)

Bartle’s paper has some fascinating discussion of how the balance of a game might be tweaked by focusing on combinations of these player roles.

But what are you? Are you an achiever, an explorer, a socialized, or a killer?

That is, what motivates you to do anything you do. Do you do things to learn how to achieve something? To dig into the explration? To be part of a community? Or, to have more impact on the world?

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Making a change

To change a behavior it’s usually best to focus on our mindsets and environment, rather than just the behavior.

Eat more vegetables = behavior

Vegetables are bland and boring → Vegetables can be satisfying and delicious = mindset shift

Making fresh, well-prepared, veggies readily available = environment

Get more sleep = behavior

Sleep is a waste of time → Sleep is restorative and essential to learning and health = mindset shift

Avoiding caffeine in the afternoon, making the house dark before bed = environment

This approach is also useful for skills and behaviors we want to see in many areas of life.

But so many times we stop at the behavior and don’t make the necessary changes in our mindsets and environment to ensure that those behaviors last.

To really make a change, we need to understand the value of all three parts.

The behavior gives us a target. Our mindsets kickstart and fuel action. Our environment helps sustain action.

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Fake it until you make it

When you have “thoughts” to bring a change, you start seeing “new behaviours” gradually replacing your “old behaviours” that leads to a transformation.

But, many times you find it tough to build thoughts strong enough for the “change” and you find yourself still stuck in old behaviour habits. Does it mean that you really don’t want that change at some level?

If that change is important for you in some way, there is still one way to work over it.

Fake a new “behaviour” of the “changed person” that you desire to be and over time you start experiencing the thoughts that feed to the new behaviours.

Why does repetition of a behaviour (even if it is fake) fact make us more likely to believe it, and to be more certain of that belief? As with other cognitive shortcuts, the typical explanation is that it’s a way our brains save energy. Thinking is hard work—human brain uses up about 20% of an individual’s energy. The illusory truth effect comes down to processing fluency. When a thought is easier to process, it requires our brains to use less energy, which leads us to prefer it and start “living” in it.

So, all scams are not bad!