Your powerful, changeable mindset
You see life through your own unique lens. This is your mindset — 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’s outcomes. By understanding, adapting and shifting your mindset, you can improve your health, decrease your stress and become more resilient to life’s challenges.
Mindsets help you to simplify.
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.
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.
Having a fixed or growth mindset affects your worldview.
You may have heard of “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. These terms were coined by Stanford researcher and professor Carol Dweck, Ph.D. to describe belief systems about your ability to change, grow and develop over time. If you believe your qualities are essentially unchangeable or “fixed,” 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.
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. Because failure is less threatening, you are more willing to embrace life’s challenges, take feedback as a learning opportunity and continue to learn and grow throughout life. With 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.
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’ll see your perceived weakness as a challenge that can be motivating — and even fun — to overcome.
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. To further investigate this phenomenon, a 2011 study was conducted to test physiological satiation in relationship to mindset around certain foods. The study revealed that participants’ satiety aligned with their mindset around the food they were consuming more than the food’s nutritional content.
Another example of how mindset affects physiology was shown in a 2012 study on the association between stress perception, health and mortality. Kelly 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 they believed stress to be harmful. Those who experienced high stress levels but did not see it as harmful were no more likely to die. McGonigal encourages developing more positive mindsets around stress, and to perceive your body’s physiological responses to stress — like a pounding heart and racing mind — as your body’s natural response to rise to the challenge and overcome it, as opposed to a signal that something is wrong.
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-where they come from, how valid they are, and how they impact your quality of life.
You can change your mindset.
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 — or mindsets — at any point in life.
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.
Please question 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.
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