Stop Trying to Believe Something New
“Change your beliefs.”
This rarely works. Your brain isn’t stupid. It knows when you’re trying to install a belief you don’t actually hold.
Here’s what’s actually happening…
Your brain doesn’t see reality. It predicts reality based on priors. It runs a constant mental simulation of what it expects to happen next, and it uses your senses only to fact-check that simulation. When reality conflicts with the prediction, the brain does one of two things. It updates the prior, or it manipulates the environment to match the existing prior.
This is predictive processing. It’s one of the most well-studied phenomena in psychology.
“Change your beliefs” fails because the brain knows you don’t actually believe the new thing. The trick doesn’t work on the trickster.
The real move is different. When you notice a prior you don’t want to keep feeding, you ask three questions:
- What is my current unexamined belief about this?
- What do I want to believe instead?
- What evidence from my own past, or from other people’s experience, supports that alternative?
The evidence is always there. You were filtering it out to protect the prior you already held.
You’re running this engine either way. The only choice is what evidence you feed it.
