Why We Defend Limiting Beliefs

One morning in the autumn of 1954, a young psychologist in Minnesota opened his local newspaper and found what he had been waiting for buried deep in the inside pages.

The headline read: "Oak Park Housewife Claims to Receive Messages from Outer Space." Leon Festinger read the article, then read it again.

The woman's name was Dorothy Martin. She claimed superior beings from the planet Clarion communicated with her through automatic writing.

They warned her of a great cataclysm, a flood that would submerge North America. But the beings offered mercy: on December 20, 1954, at midnight, a flying saucer would descend to carry true believers to safety.

Festinger could feel his heart beating faster, not because he believed the messages were real, but because the article had just handed him a natural environment to test a radical theory he had been working on. How the human mind handles the collision between belief and reality.

In lab settings he had observed that when a person holds two irreconcilable beliefs, or when a belief clashes with undeniable evidence, they experience painful mental friction.

Instead of changing the belief to match the new evidence, the participants changed their perception of the evidence to protect the belief.

The more they had invested in the belief, the more fiercely they resisted reality.

He called it cognitive dissonance.¹

Festinger decided that he needed to be in the same room with Dorothy Martin and her followers on December 20, at midnight.

He and two colleagues infiltrated the group, posing as new converts.

Now all they had to do was wait for the day to come and observe what happened.

On the evening of December 20, the researchers gathered with Dorothy Martin and her followers in an Oak Park living room.

The group had spent weeks preparing. They had removed all metal from their bodies, left their jobs, given away their money and possessions, and endured public mockery.

They believed with unquestioning certainty that the flying saucer would arrive at midnight.

The clock ticked. Midnight came. Nothing happened.

12:30 AM passed. 1:00 AM passed. The group sat in heavy silence. Some began to weep.

The evidence was irrefutable: the prophecy had failed, and their deeply held belief had, by any measure, shattered against unyielding reality.

Then, at 4:45 in the morning, Dorothy Martin's hand began to write.

The God of Earth, she told her followers, had been so moved by the faith of this small group that he decided to spare the world. Because they had believed.

Before the prophecy failed, the group had been relatively quiet about their faith.

Now, they erupted into a frenzy of proselytizing.

They called every newspaper, issued statements, and tried desperately to convince the world.

The failed prophecy did not shatter the belief; it intensified it.

The believers could not undo their commitment, nor recover the jobs they had quit or the possessions they had given away.

The cost of admitting they were wrong was too high, so they reinterpreted the evidence to protect their identity.

In this article I want to invite you to explore limiting beliefs, often referred to in clinical psychology as "negative core beliefs."²

Beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world that not only affect our emotions, behaviors, and well-being, but create low self-worth.

What we believe will shape how we interpret situations and lead ourselves in the face of difficulties, so that is where we need to start.

Reevaluating What We Are Capable Of

Reevaluating our identity not only requires massive cognitive bandwidth,³ something that goes against what our brain evolved to do: preserve energy.

Cognitive dissonance is not a weakness of character or impoverished thinking.

It is normal human biology protecting us from the metabolic cost of uncertainty.

Now, you might be asking a fair question:

If self-awareness is so valuable for growth, why didn't evolution design our brains to be self-aware all the time?

It comes down to a fundamental biological trade-off: Survival and social functioning over constant self-awareness.

Excessive self-focus can lead to overthinking and anxiety, which hinders immediate responses to environmental challenges.

Sustained, effortful self-awareness, the sort that interrogates deceptive assumptions, that reads reality as it unfolds, and sheds limiting beliefs, is not only metabolically costly, but provides little survival advantage.

To keep us alive, nature gave us mental shortcuts, or heuristics.⁴ These are quick decision-making strategies the brain uses to solve problems by relying on past thoughts, feelings, or circumstances, not logic.

If, every time a rustle in the bushes occurred, early humans had sat down to consciously examine their assumptions, you and I would not be here today.

Nature did not design the human brain for truth or self-actualization. It designed the brain for efficiency and survival.

Self-consciousness was never meant to be our default state. It was meant to be an intentional act.

The Social Dimension

Change, even if it feels highly personal, never exists in a vacuum.

Culture, upbringing, and socially accepted norms all shape our cognitive dissonance far more than we give it credit for. These are things that very few of us will willingly admit we are not fully in control of.

That would be accepting we are not the ones calling all the shots.

The Mistakes We Keep Repeating

History shows us over and over again how we keep treating assumptions as absolute truths creating unnecessary suffering.

In 1997, I cared for a patient whose behavior bewildered me.

In the 1940s, doctors drove a sharp metal instrument through the eye socket and into the brain, destroying the tissue that made a person who they were, permanently.⁵

Yes, we lobotomized our fellow human beings to make their anxiety more manageable, called it a medical procedure and gave it a Nobel prize.

In the 1920s, companies sold a wide range of radioactive-infused products like water, toothpaste, and cosmetics as vitality elixirs.⁶

When people's jaws disintegrated from radiation poisoning, the same companies invented new medical treatments to treat the symptoms of the poison they had sold.

In the 1940s doctors endorsed specific cigarette brands to calm stress.⁷

When lung cancer and heart disease exploded, we built a multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry to treat the diseases while continuing to protect the companies that sell us cancer.

In 1971, Richard Nixon, facing a reelection campaign and rising food prices, tore up the old system that paid farmers to limit production, replacing it with direct payments that rewarded them for growing as much as possible.

Corn flooded the market.

The price collapsed. Suddenly there was a mountain of cheap corn and a need to do something with it.

High fructose corn syrup was the answer.

Sweeter than sugar, cheaper than sugar, and liquid, so it poured straight into anything.

By 1984, Coca-Cola and Pepsi had both swapped cane sugar for it.

It went from 1 percent of American sweeteners in the 1970s to 42 percent by 2004.

Today it's used in most processed foods, hamburger buns, ketchup, salad dressing, bread, cereal, and infant formula.

The subsidized ultra-processed food industry is not an accident of policy; it is the engine driving disease.

Cheap corn was turned into cheap sweetener, cheap sweetener into hyper-palatable food, hyper-palatable food into millions that can't stop eating, even when they get sick.

The problem is our belief that we can drink and eat it without any repercussions.

It's easy to blame multi-billion-dollar industries, but they are only a symptom of our refusal to question our own contradictions.

The real poison is not the companies selling us our own limiting beliefs in a premium package, or that we are all buying dissonance-reduction in some form.

The waiting is the poison.

In our conviction that the fix will arrive from outside. Psychologists call it an external locus of control,⁸ and it is precisely what breeds passivity.

"The medication will change me."

The relationship will fix all my problems — "when I meet the right person."

The mood — "I'll start when I feel ready."

The audience — "once they notice, I'll do the work."

Waiting becomes the behavior that destroys us.

Not all of it is self-deception; sometimes the first step really is outside of us.

Still, the uncomfortable but constructive question most of us need to ask is: has waiting become my identity?

The Experience: Cognitive Dissonance

A young woman believes strongly in animal rights and environmental conservation, but occasionally eats factory-farmed meat, and wears makeup tested on animals.

The guilt and emotional discomfort she feels about this contradiction are the experience of cognitive dissonance.

The Reaction: Dissonance Reduction

We humans are driven to maintain psychological consistency; when the dissonance "alarm" goes off, the brain automatically looks for ways to resolve the tension.

We typically use one of three ways to cope.

The young woman could change her behavior and stop eating factory-farmed meat, stop buying make-up that is tested on animals to align her actions with her values.

She could decide that animal rights aren't that important to her and it's simply not worth buying expensive non-animal-tested makeup to align her belief with her actions.

She could do what most of us do, convince herself that "one person's diet won't change the industry," or "I only buy the meat that says 'humane' on the label" (even if she knows the label is misleading). She could reason that the harm inflicted on animals by testing makeup is an exaggeration. And by doing so, create a new thought that bridges the gap between the belief and her behavior.

The Shield of Conformity: Dissonance and the Group

While we all experience cognitive dissonance. Few of us will register it and fewer will admit it, since it protects us from the existential terror of social isolation.

From an evolutionary perspective its not hard to imagine how a radical shifts in behavior could get our ancestors exiled from the group.

Our brain will work to minimize surprise and weigh its existing beliefs to a great extent, because the predictable is cheaper.

Trying to reduce cognitive dissonance is a normal defensive mechanism that helps us adapt to environments and make decisions that enhance our chances of survival.

When our personal moral compass conflicts with the group's actions, the dissonance will, as Festinger noted, feel agonizing.

To resolve it, we will often change our own perception rather than stand our ground. This is why good people can get swept up in toxic corporate cultures, cults, and cruel behavior.

The dissonance of "I am a good person" vs. "My group is doing something bad" is defended by reasoning:"What the group is doing must be good (or necessary)."

"If everyone else is doing it, it must not be that bad."

"Or, I'm just a small part of this; I don't have the power to stop it."

The Friction of Personal Growth

Healthy self-improvement and personal growth are in many ways an intentional disruption of our limiting beliefs.

Whether we decide to stop drinking alcohol, start setting boundaries, or pursue a new goal or relationship, it will set us apart from the group.

Breaking the socially accepted norms with those around us can trigger massive cognitive dissonance on both sides:

"We love our friend, or family, but when their habits threaten our personal growth." We are confronted with a choice: reverting to our old ways to keep the peace, or endure the pain of not living authentically.

We share a habit with a friend, or a colleague: complaining, or gossiping while doing nothing.

The moment we shift focus and concentrate on our own personal growth, we trigger their dissonance. Their brain says: "We are the same. But they are succeeding and I am not. Therefore, either I am failing, or their success is fake, or they are stupid."

To resolve their own discomfort, others might mock our new diet, undermine our ambitions, or distance themselves from us, and we will do the same.

Growth forces all of us to confront stagnation, and our brain will do almost anything to reduce that tension.

Are You Clinging, Grasping, or Fueling?

In Buddhist psychology, there is a concept for what happened in that 1954 living room called Upādāna, meaning clinging, or grasping.⁹

"I am not smart enough to succeed," or "If I set boundaries, people will abandon me" are mental constructs.

We humans suffer because we treat these temporary, self-constructed concepts as permanent, absolute truths.

We feel safe in the certainty of a belief, even if the belief is harmful because it provides a predictable map of the world.

So, we cling, we grasp and fuel those beliefs out of fear.

For most of my life I believed that I was a failure, then one day I succeeded at something significant.

I was acting in a new way that contradicted the self-image I had believed my entire life.

Letting go of my old beliefs felt like a death because it is a death.

The death of my old identity.

I did not hold onto limiting beliefs because I was stubborn.

I held onto them because they provided short-term relief.

In psychology, this is called a secondary gain.¹⁰

Even if a belief makes us miserable, it usually provides some hidden form of psychological, or emotional protection.

The Death: Letting Go

When letting go and accepting we are capable, we lose the safety of low expectations.

Suddenly, our emotional stagnation is our own choice, no longer something we can blame on others or circumstances. We now have to carry the responsibility of our own potential.

The paradoxical nature of growth is that the "safety" of self-doubt is a cage.

When we believe we are incapable, we are protected from the risk of failure and the pressure of performance.

Low expectations act as a buffer, allowing us to remain in a state of stagnation while maintaining a story that we are victims of circumstance or lack of talent.

Accepting our own capability removes that buffer.

It transforms our internal landscape from one of limitation to one of agency.

While this is empowering, it is also terrifying because it eliminates the excuse of "I can't." Once we acknowledge that we can, the only thing standing between us and our potential is our own courage.

"Responsibility of potential" is the shift from an external locus of control to an internal one.

It means that while we may not be responsible for the challenges life throws at us, we are entirely responsible for how we respond to them.

The discomfort of this responsibility is the price of admission for a life of meaning and growth.

The Knowing-Doing Gap

For the past ten years I have been obsessed with two questions in particular:

"How do I bridge the gap between a limiting self and an empowered self?"

And, "How does a man capable of taking responsibility for his own personal growth and making positive changes in life lead himself?"

If we only knew what to do and how to do it, we could change.

It sounds reasonable. It's not.

We know that smoking kills us, still we don't quit.

We know that exercise is good for us, still we don't do it.

We know that junk food destroys our health, still we keep eating it.

We know that short-form content on social media is ruining our attention, still we keep scrolling.

We know that poor sleep hygiene makes us unmotivated and unpleasant to be around, still we stay up late, making it harder to wind down and get a good night's sleep.

There’s always another episode, movie, or video.

In fact, there are so many that we log about 8–9 hours of entertainment screen use alone

The equivalent of more than 100 full 24-hour days spent on screens — roughly 40% of waking life.¹¹

Our entire education system is built on the premise that the more we know the better we will do in life.

The core problem is not that we don't know what to do, a lack of information or knowledge.

The problem is that we rarely address the underlying problem: emotional regulation,¹² and therefore pursue the wrong type of knowledge.

I have never won an emotional battle with theoretical knowledge.

The gap isn't in what I know.

It's in my ability to understand my own emotional landscape.

I can recite the right answer all day long and still watch myself do the wrong things.

When I stopped watching the news and listening to the radio, at first I didn't give it much thought.

In my mind I was removing information.

In reality I removed a door. The outrage that entered my consciousness before I had a chance to decide whether I wanted it, or not.

That's not willpower.

I know willpower.

I have white-knuckled myself through many things in my life.

It's exhausting and most of the time I have relapsed back into old destructive behaviors.

Most of us go through life struggling to keep the door shut by using willpower alone.

Willpower is a guard you pay every hour.

The aim isn’t to become perfectly disciplined; it’s to make the life you want easier to inhabit.

The question needs to shift from “How do I keep resisting this?” to “What keeps opening this door, and can I redesign my personal space so it doesn’t have to be a daily fight?”

A door never built, or removed, is a cost you never pay again.

A life lived intentionally is designed to be low-maintenance so we don't have to rely on discipline to change.

Are You Willing to Be Changed?

It is said that it's human to jump to conclusions. I think that is only a small part of the puzzle.

It's a symptom of the collective human resistance to the fact that all things are in a constant state of change and nothing, absolutely nothing, lasts forever.

When I say I want to change my life, what I usually mean is I want my circumstances to change while the benefits of the destructive behavior remain exactly the same.

I want the gains without the emotional discomfort.

Jumping to a conclusion, whether it's "this diet doesn't work," "my mother is a jerk," or "I'm not cut out for this," is the ego slamming the door in anger.

Refusing change puts me on auto-defense.

If I am not willing to be changed, I will automatically rationalize to defend my reactions and behaviors.

I will use logic, blame, and self-serving conclusions, not to find truth, but to build a bunker around my limiting beliefs.

Most energy is spent distracting ourselves from how we feel about the problem, instead of addressing it head-on.

The hardest part of change is that we don't see that we are often seeking confirmation, not change: Therein lies our biggest challenge: understanding what we are up against before trying to change.

Are we really trying to discover what’s true to change what we do, or are we trying to preserve a familiar story about ourselves and the world?

We are all Dorothy Martin in some sense, trying to manipulate circumstances to confirm our limiting beliefs, defending them without consciously deciding to do so.

That makes our life task less about “How do I change?” and more about asking “What am I protecting by not changing, and what evidence would I allow to change my current story?”

Not as another intellectual exercise, but as a way to notice when the search for insight is a search for reassurance, not change.

The Coordinates

I want to leave you with some triggers to look out for and 3 coordinates for transitioning from unconscious to a more conscious living.

First, cognitive dissonance is not the enemy, but a starting point to notice limiting beliefs instead of running from them. To motivate meaningful changes in our attitudes and behaviors.¹³

Second, the most common triggers I see in myself and others, in no particular order, are:

Chronic Procrastination: is often linked to underlying issues such as anxiety, depression, or low self-esteem. Waiting for the right moment, the right way, the right skills, or knowledge, anything to avoid focusing on what I know I should be doing.

Never Starting (also called “paralysis by analysis”): Endlessly researching, planning, or preparing for the "perfect time."

Avoid risking looking incompetent comes at a high price.

Decreased productivity with all its missed opportunities, which leads to self-doubt and diminished confidence, strained relationships, stress and anxiety.

Giving Up: Quitting at the first roadblock to reinforce limiting beliefs and avoid the discomfort of personal growth. This is an important one to look out for, as it creates a cycle of failure.

Perfectionism: Setting impossibly high standards to justify why I don't start, or finish a project.

Blaming Others and Circumstances: To silence the emotional discomfort of taking responsibility and doing the hard work of changing what matters.

I have found these triggers to be a powerful way to reveal my blind spots.

A trigger acts like a flare: it shows where something important is happening before I have time to explain it away.

The intensity of the trigger will often point to a threatened need, an unreasonable expectation, a boundary crossed, or an outdated belief.

The shift in thinking from "this reaction is wrong" to "there’s something worth understanding here" is where real change starts.

A useful pause is: What happened? What did I feel? What did I immediately make it mean? What did I want to do next?

The space between the trigger and the response reveals the pattern. And the goal isn’t to eliminate every trigger; it’s to learn what it’s telling us without letting it dictate what happens next.

Triggers are a signal for self-reflection, a practice in greater self-awareness, and can, if we are open to it, help us explore and understand our personal values, exposing options for constructive changes.

The first coordinate, a place to become more aware of the dissonance instead of running from it, asking:

"Where in my life is there a conflict between the life I say I want to live and the life I am living?"

"What belief is being challenged over and over again that I keep defending?"

The second coordinate is catching the exact language, known in psychology as cognitive distortions,¹⁴ that most limiting beliefs hide behind.

The psychologist Albert Ellis famously coined the term "musterbation."

"I must" or "I should" creates immense pressure and guilt on us and those we claim to love when reality inevitably fails to meet its rigid rules.

"I never," "I always": Also known as all-or-nothing thinking or over-generalization.

Always, never, everyone, or nobody is the best way to bend a temporary setback into a permanent psychological disability.

Once cognitive dissonance is out in the open, the final and third coordinate, is to call out any defensive language by cross-examining it like a lawyer.

"Is that really true?

Where is the evidence that making a mistake or asking for help is so bad?

Is it really a lack of time or simply a matter of priority?

Without dismantling the defensive language, the limiting belief survives, and that is not a life, but a prison.

The end goal is not to remove limiting beliefs, that is not possible.

The end goal is to understand why we cling to limiting beliefs, to see that we are rarely trying to solve any real problems, but mostly managing our existential terror and uncertainty.

The source of most of what we call "my problems" is an attempt to escape the unbearable reality that we are finite, fragile creatures, ultimately alone inside our head.

I find it both terrifying and beautiful that cognitive dissonance is something we human beings will never solve.

Terrifying, because we keep ignoring how much harm our limiting beliefs cause.

Beautiful, because we keep finding the courage and the vulnerability to question limiting beliefs.

While I might sound pessimistic in my view on humanity, I don't believe we as human beings are failing: we are doing exactly what a complex, social, mortal, meaning-seeking animal would do.

We are, no matter how crazy our behavior looks, trying our best to survive, maintain, and seek belonging where we can in an inhumane environment.

Behind our limiting beliefs lives a desire to feel we matter, that we are worthy of love, even if the way we go about it is sometimes misguided.

Whether we think we can change or not, we are right.

Change is seeing through our own limiting beliefs; it's sight, just like our eyes adjust to see in low-light conditions.

Nothing shifts until we adjust our emotional sight, so we can see the beliefs as mental constructs, not facts.

Change begins not when the world suddenly becomes clearer, but when we develop the skills to see that when a limiting belief dies, we are left standing in "emotional darkness" without the excuse that once sheltered us.

When we recognize "I can't" as learned helplessness, rather than an unquestionable truth, we are staring right into the terrifying responsibility of "I need to try."

The "darkness" we all feel in the face of change isn't the absence of ability; it is the presence of unknown possibilities.

Like dark adaptation, the shift will take patience.

We must not force ourselves to see everything at once; but give our attention time to adjust by accepting that losing a limiting belief is both a burden and a superpower.

That losing the belief costs us its protection, the safety of low expectations, the certainty, the excuse. That's the emotional burden.

Releasing a belief will often feel like grief and freedom at once.

A belief may have narrowed our world, but it may also have offered protection: fewer risks, fewer disappointments, and reassuring explanations for why things couldn't change.

Letting it go often involves mourning what it gave us, even as we reclaim the energy it cost to keep believing it.

The burden and the superpower aren’t separate outcomes; they’re two sides of the transition.

We don't get to choose which feeling appears first; all we can do is make room for both and choose which one we want to focus on.