The Power of Mindset

Can you leverage your mindset to achieve greater success? This is a question that researchers are trying to answer in the context of stress, sleep, exercise, food and many others. I was inspired to consider this question by a conversation between Andrew Huberman and Dr. Alia Crum on the Huberman Lab Podcast, and I wanted to summarise some of the key points, from my perspective at least.

It is maybe not so controversial to say that having a positive outlook on something, or having a "glass half full" type mindset can lead to a better experience in the face of adversity, and thus maybe to getting more out of less. But research shows that our mindset can have physiological effects on our body and actually change how our body responds in certain situations.

Most people have probably heard of the "placebo effect", which is a phenomenon in which people experience real medicinal effects from fake medicine that they were told was the real thing. It is used to test new treatments by asserting that real medicine outperforms the fake medicine. The placebo effect has been thoroughly studied as a result of this use, however an area where research is lacking is in the realm of enhancing real drugs with mindset. In theory, rather than giving an entirely fake medicine, one can give a real medicine and enhance the positive effects (and potentially mitigate the negative side effects) by instilling a positive mindset about the medication.

There's an important distinction between placebos and mindsets that Dr. Crum highlights in the podcast. Traditionally the placebo effect is understood as working because of the expectation that some particular medicine should be effective. However her research into mindsets is more focussed on the actual mechanisms within the body that can enable those positive effects to occur. For example, having a positive mindset towards a treatment and trusting the process of getting treated can lead to lowered anxiety, which in a lot of cases can have a beneficial effect on that treatment. We should not expect placebo itself to work, but rather, understand the ways in which we can use our conscious mindsets to interface with the subconscious processes that occur in the body.  

An example where they found clear physiological effects based on mindset was food. Two groups were each given the same milkshake, but one group was told it was low fat, low sugar and low calorie, and the other was told it was indulgent and high calorie. Despite the nutritional content of the milkshake being identical, those who thought it was lower in sugar, fat and calories felt less satisfied, whilst the other group experienced a steeper decline in their ghrelin levels, the hormone that tells us we're hungry. There was a clear physiological response as a result of how the groups perceived the milkshake they drank that had a real impact on their hunger levels. This would indicate that if we want to restrict our calorie intake, it is beneficial to view all the food we eat as indulgent and high calorie, even if it isn't.  

Similar studies show that after sleeping, our perception of whether or not we had a good night's sleep could effect how we approach the day. Being given a poor "sleep score" could negatively impact our ability to achieve the goals we had set out or even perform our day to day tasks. There are now many apps and tools out there that measure our sleep, and some of these will tell us about the quality of our sleep. While this can be useful if we want to improve our sleep, it is also clear that it can be harmful. We may wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day, but then get told we had a low sleep score, and all the real energy we were feeling could dissipate or become diluted. As with anything, there's a balance, and different people will benefit more or less from different approaches.

Stress is also an area that was studied, with the overall findings being that even though stress itself is not necessarily a good thing, we can leverage it for positive outcomes. If we view stress as enhancing rather than debilitating, our bodies will respond more positively on a subconscious level. For a practical approach to leveraging stress in this way, see Stanford's rethinking stress toolkit.

Now it's important to emphasise that mindset alone does not determine physical reality. Whilst mindset can have an impact, in the case of food, for example, the nutritional content of the food does still matter. Mindset does not conjure up new nutrients or make the body completely apathetic to nutrition. It's a collaboration between the mind and the body that we can enhance by focussing more on the mindset and realising the potential therein.

I think there is a lot of interesting research still to be done on this topic, but there are already a host of ways we can try to apply mindset to achieve greater success. Mindset, fortunately, does not cost anything, and is something we can start working on right away. We often look for external tools and supplements, and forget that there may be so much untapped potential lying dormant within.