Is your mindset serving you?
Part 1 Mindset and stress.
Dr Alia Crum at Harvard University has been working on understanding further how our mindset of many different aspects of life can change our physiological response to them and therefore our overall health. As a trained clinical psychologist, now researcher, Dr Crum has the understanding of how the mind works and has chosen mindset as a focus for her work. I find this research particularly interesting as it shows evidence of how our conscious thoughts can influence some of the autonomic functions in the body.
Mindset, Crum defines, as a core belief, an assumption that we have about many aspects of life, such as food, exercise, stress, to name a few.
Take stress for example.
The mindset we have about stress:
Orients our thinking
Changes what we expect to happen to us because of the stress
Changes our motivation for what we engage with when we are stressed
Our mindset impacts our motivation.
We can adopt different mindsets
Those assumptions that we jump to help us to simplify our complex reality. They matter because they then impact how we behave.
So where do these mindsets come from?
Dr Crum has established there are 4 aspects to how these are created.
Our upbringing. How our parents talk about this issues
Culture and media. Including movies, podcasts and social media
Influential others
Conscious choice
Dr Crum carried out a study to investigate the mindset about stress, asking the question, Does orienting people toward different mindsets change how they respond to stress?
One group were shown a film that presented anecdotes and information that enforced the general perception that stress is harmful and the other group were shown films that showed stress as enhancing and improving performance.
Those that watched the ‘stress as enhancing films’ were changing their mindset about stress which led to physiological benefits such as fewer back aches, less insomnia and resulted in better performance at work, than those that watched the film reinforcing that stress is bad for you.
This study showed how the mindset about stress can be adapted and therefore how a person responds to stress physically as well as mentally.
What is the most adaptive way to think about stress?
Let’s clarify what we mean by stress. Stress is the other side of the coin of what we care about. As humans we stress about something because we care about it, we don’t stress about things we don’t care about.
So if that is true how can we better respond to the inevitable stresses we are going to experience? Through understanding its leveraging power. We don’t have to train up our stress response, we all have it.
Most of us stress about the stress, or disassociate as a coping mechanism, which can lead to depression or substance abuse as a way of escaping the stress. So much of substance abuse takes over peoples lives, because of increased stability to find the solution to stress, which then becomes the problem.
Stress can allow for personal growth
Dr Crum has developed a 3 step approach to adopt stress as an enhancing mindset.
Acknowledge the stress, own it, be mindful of it
Welcome it - because inherently within that stress is something you care about. Use it as an opportunity to reconnect to what it is that you care about.
Utilise the stress response to achieve the thing that you care about, rather than focusing efforts on trying to get rid of the stress
Dr Crum goes on to describe our mindset as “a kind of a portal between conscious and subconscious processes. They operate as a default setting of the mind”.
If we are programmed in our consciousness that stress always has a negative impact then this sits as an assumption in the brain and through our subconscious we move toward behaviours that protect us rather than things that help us to grow.
By this same method we can access this conscious programming to start by asking ‘What is my stress mindset? If I have a mindset that stress is debilitating, start to ask myself is this harmful or helpful? Then I can go about seeking ways to adopt a more useful mindset.
Dr Crum goes on to describe mindset as a piece of the puzzle, we have access to it and can change it, look at life and mindsets and see, what is serving us? Then we can find more adaptive and powerful mindsets and live by those.
I am very interested in Dr Crum’s work. As a Hypnotherapist I work with clients to access their subconscious via hypnosis. Therefore I can help people to adapt their mindset whilst in a trance state, helping them reframe how they view life, which then leads to a change in desired behaviour.
On a personal level, I have seen how the mindset I chose to have about getting Long Covid impacted directly on my behaviour toward it. I continue to view the experience as challenging at times and often struggle, but I also see it as an opportunity to learn about my behaviour and how my body responds to certain behaviours.
Dr Crum has also done some interesting studies into how our mindset around how we view food as healthy or indulgent can impact the physiological response to the food as well as studies into how we view exercise and how this leads to changes in our body.
I will be writing further journals, part 2 and 3 on food and exercise.
You can listen to more of Dr Crum’s work at Huberman Lab podcast, episode 56.
