You see life through your own unique lens. This is your mindset \u2013 the assumptions and expectations you hold about yourself, your life and the situations around you. Research shows that mindsets play a significant role in determining life\u2019s outcomes. By understanding, adapting and shifting your mindset, you can improve your health, decrease your stress and become more resilient to life\u2019s challenges.<\/p>\n
To learn more about mindsets and how to change them, BeWell spoke to Dr. Jacob Towery, adjunct clinical instructor in the department of psychiatry at Stanford University.<\/p>\n
Mindsets help you to simplify.<\/b><\/p>\n
Mindsets are a set of assumptions that help you distill complex worldviews into digestible information and then set expectations based on this input. For example, you may believe that becoming sick with cancer would be catastrophic or that going on a diet would be challenging and depriving. These belief systems help you set expectations, plan for the worst and guide decisions based on these assumptions.<\/p>\n
While mindsets can be helpful for distilling information and managing expectations, they can also be maladaptive, lead to interpersonal problems and feelings of guilt, inadequacy, sadness and anxiety. Dr. Towery observes that it is common to hold onto mindsets that were adaptive at one point in life but have since become maladaptive. For example, it might have been helpful to believe that others cannot be trusted if you were betrayed at a young age, but this belief may lead to interpersonal issues at a later stage of life.<\/p>\n
Dr. Towery assures, \u201cthe good news is mindsets are highly changeable, and if you are willing to learn the technology of changing your mindset and defeating your distorted thoughts, you can have significantly more happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having a fixed or growth mindset affects your worldview.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
You may have heard of \u201cfixed\u201d and \u201cgrowth\u201d mindsets. These terms were coined by Stanford researcher and professor Carol Dweck, Ph.D.\u00a0 to describe belief systems about your ability to change, grow and develop over time. If you believe your qualities are essentially unchangeable or \u201cfixed,\u201d you may be less open to mistakes because setbacks are seen as inherent, and impinging on future success. For example, if you have a fixed mindset and have trouble connecting with others at an event, you may see this as evidence that you will never be able to socially connect, leading to social anxiety and avoidance.<\/p>\n
With a growth mindset, you know that you can change over time, and therefore you are more open to reflect, learn and grow from challenges.\u00a0Because failure is less threatening, you are more willing to embrace life\u2019s challenges, take feedback as a learning opportunity and continue to learn and grow throughout life.\u00a0With a growth mindset, you are also less likely to personalize setbacks. For example, in the scenario above, you might reflect that the cause of your social difficulty had more to do with the environment at the event than a personal inability to socialize.<\/p>\n
With a fixed mindset, it can be hard to find motivation to work through perceived weaknesses, because the ability to change may seem as hopeless as changing your eye color. In contrast, with a growth mindset, you\u2019ll see your perceived weakness as a challenge that can be motivating \u2014 and even fun \u2014 to overcome.<\/p>\n
As Dweck writes in \u201cMindset,\u201d \u201c\u2026as you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another \u2014 how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Towery gives a personal example, \u201cIn my own life, I was dissatisfied with my singing abilities and decided to take singing lessons for nine months. While you won\u2019t be hearing me on the radio any time soon, my singing is remarkably less terrible than it used to be before the lessons.\u201d He describes that it was fun to learn that singing is a skill that can be cultivated rather than something innate and immutable.<\/p>\n
Mindsets can impact your reality.<\/b><\/p>\n
Mindsets can impact your outcomes by determining the way you think, feel and even physiologically respond to some situations. A 2007 study revealed that increased awareness of physical activity resulted in health benefits like weight loss and decreased blood pressure.\u00a0<\/b>To further investigate this phenomenon, a 2011 study was conducted to test\u00a0physiological satiation in relationship to mindset around certain foods.\u00a0The study revealed that participants\u2019 satiety aligned with their mindset around the food they were consuming more than the food\u2019s nutritional content.<\/p>\n
Another example of how mindset affects physiology was shown in a 2012 study on the association between stress perception, health and mortality.\u00a0Kelly McGonigal references the study in her 2013 TED talk, explaining that participants who experienced high levels of stress had an increased risk of death, but only if\u00a0 they believed stress to be harmful. Those who experienced high stress levels but did not\u00a0see it as harmful were no more likely to die. McGonigal encourages developing more positive mindsets around stress, and to perceive your body\u2019s physiological responses to stress \u2013 like a pounding heart and racing mind \u2013 as your body\u2019s natural response to rise to the challenge and overcome it, as opposed to a signal that something is wrong.<\/p>\n
Dr. Towery points out the impact of mindset on the effect of medications. \u201cThere is a powerful phenomenon in medicine known as the placebo effect, in which if someone believes they are going to derive benefits from taking a particular medication, they often do. In fact, regardless of the disease or condition, about 30-40% of people can have significant improvement in their symptoms even when taking a placebo (sugar) pill, if they believe that the pill is going to be helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEqually fascinating,\u201d Towery observes, \u201cis the \u2018nocebo-effect,\u2019 a psychological response based on a person\u2019s expectations around side effects. When a physician emphasizes the potential side effects of a medicine, and the patient believes they will develop those symptoms, even if given a sugar pill, these patients can develop the adverse side effects, just based on what their mind expects.\u201d<\/p>\n
Science is just beginning to validate the power of the mind-body relationship. Mindset matters, so it is important to pay attention to your belief systems\u2014where they come from, how valid they are, and how they impact your quality of life.<\/p>\n
You can change your mindset.<\/b><\/p>\n
Although your mindset about topics like appearance and success are largely influenced by outside factors, the brain is neuroplastic, meaning neural networks can continue to grow, change and reorganize throughout the lifespan. By challenging yourself with new experiences and perspectives, you can form new neural connections\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or mindsets\u00a0\u2014\u00a0at any point in life.<\/p>\n
Even a fixed mindset is not set in stone. You can change your mindset by learning and consciously choosing to believe that your characteristics are not predetermined and that you can continue to grow over time.<\/p>\n
According to Towery, \u201cThe exciting news about mindsets is that they are absolutely changeable. The entire field of cognitive therapy is based on the idea that thoughts determine feelings and that you can learn powerful techniques to modify distorted thoughts and self-defeating beliefs.\u00a0 For those that want to learn how, I recommend reading the book \u201cFeeling Great\u201d by David Burns, MD and doing all of the writing sections.\u00a0 A competent cognitive therapist can also teach you how to change your mindset, even in a small number of sessions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Towery says that the most rewarding part of his work is helping people transform distorted beliefs like \u201cI\u2019m a failure\u201d to more realistic thoughts like \u201cI didn\u2019t perform well, but I can better prepare next time and it will probably go much better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Towery encourages questioning self-defeating thoughts and creating new narratives that are more self-serving. If you develop a growth mindset, setbacks can become learning opportunities and there is always another chance to improve and feel better.<\/p>\n
By Standford Report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You see life through your own unique lens. This is your mindset \u2013 the assumptions and expectations you hold about yourself, your life and the situations around you. Research shows that mindsets play a significant role in determining life\u2019s outcomes. By understanding, adapting and shifting your mindset, you can improve your health, decrease your stress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[311],"tags":[537,522,574,321,551,528,457,540,519,524],"class_list":["post-4666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-insights","tag-confidence","tag-emotional-intelligence","tag-growth-mindset","tag-mental-health","tag-mindset","tag-resilience","tag-self","tag-self-awareness","tag-stress","tag-stress-management","enable-dropcap","disable-2-columns"],"yoast_head":"\n