How You Can Influence Your Mindset to Live a More Examined Life
Your mindset determines the way you perceive events around you and how you process them. The Stoics would posit that it is not events that upset us, but our interpretation of those events. What happens around us is neutral. Our interpretation of such occurrences is what drives our reaction. That is a mindset. To be precise, as dr. Alia Crum from the Mind & Body Lab puts it in this conversation, “mindset is a portal between conscious and subconscious processes.”
You don’t have one mindset. You have as many mindsets as there are feelings/circumstances that can arise in life. You navigate those events through heuristics (mental shortcuts) that help you cut through all the noise to interpret the issue at hand with satisfaction. Those mindsets determine how you experience, feel, think, and act during your life. While mindsets are a by-product of your personality traits, cultural context, and childhood experience, they are not considered fixed. Mindsets are malleable and can be worked upon throughout our life. Such belief is a mindset in and of itself. If you believe you can improve your heuristics about the world, you are more likely to actually make such a belief true.
Feelings are not good or bad by themselves; it is how we interpret them through our mindsets that make them “good” or “bad”. And this concept has been significantly reinforced by the Milkshake study (Crum, Corbin, Brownell, Salovey, 2011). This study has demonstrated that mindsets also have a physiological effect on our bodies (not just psychological and behavioral). Two groups were given the same exact milkshake. Participants in group 1 were told that their milkshake was high-calorie (”indulgent”). Participants in group 2 were instructed that their milkshake was low-calorie and healthy (”sensible”). Results showed that participants in group 1 significantly decreased their level of ghrelin (”hunger hormone”) despite there being no actual difference in the milkshake.
Such findings, if scaled and validated in the future, can change the trajectory of how we think about weight loss and how we can shape our messages around healthy food. At the moment, the general public opinion about healthy food is that it tastes bad and is not filling. The perception is that there is a trade-off between healthy and tasty. What if we change that? What if healthy food can also be abundant and tasty while keeping its priceless health benefits?
““The total effect of anything is the combined product of what you are doing and what you think about what you are doing.””
Health and fitness are not the only domains heavily impacted by mindsets. So is the entire “negative emotions” realm. Take stress, for example. The way we process stress and act on it is determined by our mindset. Psychological stress is similar to physical stress. When you train at the gym, you are stressing your muscles. But once you are done with your session, you do not keep tensing your muscles. You let go and continue with life. The same mindset can be applied to stress in life. The way you label stress does make a difference in how you experience it.
You can think of stress as debilitating—which is how we, as a society, tend to perceive stress—or you can resolve to believe that stress can be a portal for growth, building your resilience (the capacity to be psychologically strong in any situation and recover from descents), and opening up opportunities. Your mindset on stress will determine your feelings about—and possibly also your physiological reaction to—stress. Stress is neutral. The way we frame and interpret stress is a by-product of our own minds and social forces.
As dr. Crum points out in her conversation with dr. Huberman, stress happens when you care about something. You are stressed because you care. You are stressed because you perceive there is a negative situation affecting one of your goal-related efforts. The moment stress arises, there is a choice we can make. We can choose to leverage stress to our advantage because we know that stress can be a powerful means of enhanced attention, focus, and effort.
Dr. Crum posits that there are three fundamental steps we can follow to reframe stress and leverage it to our advantage:
Acknowledge that you are stressed. Witnessing your feelings objectively and noticing them arise is a great mindfulness practice to get in touch with your stream of consciousness.
Welcome it (because it means you care about the thing you stress about)
Utilize the stress response to achieve the thing you care about. Now that you are aware you are stressed, you know you can do something about it. Stress can be a catalyst for growth and opportunities. Lean into it and use it like you would use the most important lever in your life.
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Dr. Alia Crum: Science of Mindsets for Health & Performance | Huberman Lab
Boles, D., DeSousa, M., Turnwald, B., Horii, R., Duarte, T., & Zahrt, O. et al. (2021). Can Exercising and Eating Healthy Be Fun and Indulgent Instead of Boring and Depriving? Targeting Mindsets About the Process of Engaging in Healthy Behaviors. Frontiers In Psychology, 12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.745950
Crum, A., Corbin, W., Brownell, K., & Salovey, P. (2011). Mind over milkshakes: Mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response. Health Psychology, 30(4), 424-429. doi: 10.1037/a0023467
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