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?