#32: You need a mindset audit
You know 'Believe in Yourself' is an important message - why else would it be emblazoned across so many t-shirts for pre-teen girls? But do you really understand why it's so important, and just how far thinking the right thoughts about who you are and what you do can take you towards where you want to be? Your imperfect pal here just discovered the astonishing work on mindsets by the Stanford psychologist, Professor Alia Crum. Get the kettle on and let's have a chat about what it all means for you and your academic (and non-academic) struggles.
Click here for Professor Andrew Huberman's interview with Professor Alia Crum on the Huberman Lab podcast.
References:
Crum, A. J., Corbin, W. R., Brownell, K. D., Salovey, P. 2011: 'Mind over milkshakes: mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response', Health Psychology 30/4: 424-29.
Crum, A. J. and Langer, E. J. 2007: "Mindset matters: exercise and the placebo effect', Psychological Science 18/2: 165-71.
Zahrt, O. H. and Crum, A. J. 2020: 'Effects of physical activity recommendations on mindset, behavior and perceived health', Preventative Medicine Reports 17: 101027
Episode transcript:
You need to take your mindsets more seriously. Seriously.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
We want our beliefs about ourselves to be accurate, right? We don’t want to believe we’re a big deal in our research field, or our department’s star researcher, or the most interesting and entertaining person at this party if we’re not. That would be a disaster, right? Who wants to be that person with the over-inflated ego, or the person at the party who talks on and on and on, apparently oblivious to the fact that everyone they’re talking to is going crazy with boredom? That would be awful. It’s important, we think, not to believe things like this unless we’re absolutely certain that they’re true. And since it’s difficult to form accurate beliefs about ourselves - I mean, those sorts of beliefs are prone to being knocked off course by things like wishful thinking and self-deception - many of us take a precautionary approach. If we’re not 100% sure whether we worked hard enough last week, then it’s best to err on the side of caution (read: negativity) and believe that we didn’t work hard enough. And if we’re not 100% sure whether we stand a realistic chance of getting that thing we just applied for, best to be safe and believe that we probably won’t get it. Makes sense, right? Because if we believe that we’re underperforming, that will help motivate us to try harder. And if we believe that things won’t work out for us, then it’s less disappointing when we fail, and it’s a nice surprise if we succeed, which we probably won’t anyway, given our chronic underperformance. Does any of this resonate with you? I’d like to bet that it does, because this is what I hear again and again from coaching clients. They view believing positive things about themselves as somehow reckless, irresponsible, dangerous, even insane. I’m the same, by the way - although I’m not as bad now as I used to be.
This is all wrong. When we err on the side of believing negative things about ourselves, we don’t simply form an inaccurate view of ourselves. We inadvertently sabotage our chances of succeeding. In this episode, I want to convince you that there’s not a clean division between, on the one hand, who you are and what you do, and on the other hand, your beliefs and your attitudes about who you are and what you do. These things are linked. What you believe, you create. Your beliefs and attitudes about who you are and what you do help create who you are and what you do. Believing that you’re a success - or at least that you’re making good progress towards being a success - is a big part of being a success. And believing that you’re never going to make it - well, that makes things difficult for you. As Henry Ford remarked, whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.
I got to thinking about all this last week after listening to a fascinating interview on the Huberman Lab podcast with Professor Alia Crum, a psychologist who leads the Stanford Mind and Body Lab. Professor Crum studies mindsets, which she defines as those core beliefs or assumptions we have about a particular domain, that orient us towards particular expectations, explanations, and goals. So, take stress: Professor Crum explains that whether you think of stress as debilitating or enhancing - which are two possible mindsets we might have towards stress - affects what you expect to happen to you when you experience stress, it affects how you explain what happens to you when you’re under stress, and it affects the choices you make, like the extent to which you’ll go to avoid stress. We have mindsets about all sorts of things, without always being aware of this; that is, without always being aware that our view about a particular domain - stress, intelligence, exercise, or whatever - is just one of many ways to view it, any number of which can lay claim to being the ‘right one’ (hope you can hear the inverted commas there) in terms of how accurately it reflects reality.
Which mindset we have matters. You probably know this, thanks to the work of another Stanford psychologist, Professor Carol Dweck. Professor Dweck’s work on mindsets about intelligence - and in particular the benefits of adopting a growth mindset, the idea that our abilities can improve as a result of our efforts - has been really influential both inside and far outside the world of academia. My kids were talking about growth mindsets pretty much as soon as they started going to school. But what I found fascinating and empowering about Professor Crum’s research is the startling ways she has shown just how much mindsets matter. It’s empowering because it shows that what we believe about who we are and what we do is far more powerful than we tend to assume. Let me describe a couple of Professor Crum’s studies to illustrate this.
In one study, participants were asked to come and taste two new milkshake recipes. First, they were told that they were sampling a 620-calorie, fatty, sugary ‘indulgent’ shake. A week later, they came back to try what they were led to believe was a 140-calorie ‘sensible’ shake. In reality, despite what the participants were told, it was the same 380-calorie milkshake each time. The researchers measured the response of the participants’ gut peptides both times. In particular, they were interested in ghrelin, which is often called the ‘hunger hormone’: our ghrelin level rises when we need to eat, helping to motivate us to find food, and it drops off when we’ve eaten. The researchers found that the participants’ ghrelin levels dropped dramatically after enjoying the indulgent milkshake, but remained pretty flat following the sensible shake, even though both shakes were identical. To quote from the article, ‘Participants' satiety was consistent with what they believed they were consuming rather than the actual nutritional value of what they consumed’. The participants’ mindsets towards what they were consuming affected their bodies’ responses to it.
Another study measured the effect of mindsets about exercise. It involved a group of female hotel housekeepers - what we in the UK would call chambermaids. Despite their jobs involving an awful lot of hard, physical work, many of these women believed that they got no exercise. They were all measured for various health-related things, including weight, blood pressure, body fat, and so on. Half of them were informed that, due to the nature of their jobs, they were getting plenty of exercise. The other half weren’t given this information. 4 weeks later, the researchers returned and again measured the participants’ weight, blood pressure, and so on. They found that the members of the group who had been told that they were getting enough exercise showed improvements in these measurements (compared to the control group) despite not having changed their behaviour. Again, the participants’ mindsets about what they were doing affected their bodies’ physiological responses.
What does any of this have to do with you? Well, there are a few things I want to say about it. Let’s go back to that idea of having accurate beliefs about ourselves. We don’t want to be deluded about ourselves. We want to be realistic. We want to understand ourselves. But what does any of that mean? I mean, there are obviously instances in which it’s clear what makes the difference between a true belief about ourselves and a false one. My belief that I’m recording this episode in March 2022 is true, but if I believed that I was recording it in 2005, I’d just be wrong - clearly. But when it comes to the sorts of beliefs that are a bit more fraught - beliefs like ‘I’m doing enough’ and ‘I should be writing’ and ‘All I need to achieve what I want to achieve is to keep on going’ - things are murkier, because whether beliefs like that are true depends partly on whether we hold them. Believing ‘I’m doing enough’ may well make it the case that I’m doing enough. That’s what Professor Crum’s research points towards: remember that in the hotel study, those employees who adopted the belief that they were doing enough exercise came to enjoy the benefits of exercise even without changing their behaviour. All that had changed was their belief about whether they were doing enough. And in the milkshake study, the participants who formed the belief that they were eating indulgently came to enjoy the benefits that come with eating indulgently - like feeling satisfied. So I’m wondering: what similarly impressive benefits might you come to enjoy if you were to believe that you were doing enough, and that because you’re already doing enough, it’s not the case that you should be writing, and that you’re going to achieve what you want to achieve if you just keep on doing what you’re doing?
Does all this sound a bit too much like indulging in fantasy? Like, narcissistic fantasy? I thought you’d say that. The thing is, you’re already indulging in fantasy - at least, you are if you’re like my coaching clients. They’re happy to adopt beliefs about themselves that they recognise might well not be accurate - as long as they’re negative beliefs. If you’re like that, you’re fine with believing negative things like ‘Everyone else works harder than I do’ and ‘I procrastinate too much’ even if you suspect that they might not be true, because you’re under the impression that beliefs like this play an important role in motivation. Without the belief that you’re consistently underperforming, you assume, you’d kick back and lose all motivation to do anything. We might call this an ‘underperformance mindset’, and those who adopt it do so not necessarily because they genuinely believe themselves to be underperforming (although they may well believe that), but because they think they need it in order to succeed. If that’s you, then it follows that you’re on board with the general idea that, sometimes, it can be useful for us to form beliefs about ourselves regardless of whether or not they are accurate, because those beliefs play some role in motivating us and helping us succeed. I’m with you on that. What I do want to challenge is your conviction that the underperformance mindset, in particular, is the best candidate for that motivational role.
Talking on the subject of mindsets towards diet and exercise, Professor Crum remarked that it’s actually damaging to believe that there’s some set of standards that you ought to be living up to - for example, eating a particular diet or exercising for a particular amount of time each week - which you then fail to live up to. Those are situations in which you’re viewing yourself as underperforming in relation to diet or exercise. You believe that you’re not getting what you need, and that you’re going to be worse off as a result, and that causes you stress and anxiety. If an underperformance mindset is damaging when it comes to diet and exercise, it would make sense that an underperformance mindset in other areas of life is a bad idea too.
In any case, you’re just wrong if you think that an underperformance mindset is motivating. One study looked at whether people are better motivated to exercise when they are prescribed higher versus lower levels of exercise. The study found that people who are prescribed lower levels of exercise, and who as a result end up believing that they are doing enough, turn out to be more (not less) motivated to exercise in the future. To quote from the abstract of the article, ‘Rather than inducing complacency, recommendations prescribing a relatively lower (vs. higher) amount of physical activity may be more effective at promoting physical activity and health by inducing adaptive mindsets.’ There’s your evidence that getting people to adopt a mindset of ‘I’m doing enough’ doesn’t result in them kicking back and doing nothing. It actually results in them doing more, not less. Your underperformance mindset is doing the opposite of what you think it’s doing. If you want to motivate yourself to do more, lower your expectations of yourself.
So, what do you do? How do you find and adopt the right mindsets? And, if you already have an unhelpful mindset in some area of your life, how do you get rid of it and replace it with a better one? I think there are a few things to say about this. Professor Crum tells us that one important thing you can do is simply be aware that you have mindsets; that you’re not perceiving the world as it really is (whatever that means), and instead you’re viewing it through some lens made up of your beliefs and attitudes. That immediately opens up the possibility of other viewpoints, other lenses, which you’re then in a position to spot and entertain. I talked about this, although without the ‘mindset’ terminology, in episode #14: Become your own biggest advocate, with Immanuel Kant. I explained there that your negative beliefs about yourself filter the way you experience the world so that you think you see evidence for them everywhere, while at the same time you overlook evidence for more positive, alternative beliefs about yourself. I offered some advice there about how we can interrupt that process and open our minds to evidence for more flattering views about ourselves - do check out that episode if it sounds like something you need.
I’m going to take a more general approach here. For a useful question to ask, to help us identify and distance ourselves from unhelpful mindsets, I’m going to paraphrase the relationship coach, Evita Lavitaloca Sawyers. She suggests that, when you’re feeling anxious about the behaviour of a person you’re in a relationship with, it can help to ask: What story am I telling myself about what this person’s actions say about me? So, for example, what story are you telling yourself about why that person hasn’t texted? I think we can open that strategy out and turn it into an all-purpose tool for questioning our mindsets. We can ask, simply: What story am I telling myself about this? Whatever ‘this’ is. Let’s take an example from a previous podcast episode: do you, as I used to, tell yourself that ‘writing’ only ever involves the activity of getting words down on the page, and that anything else - staring into space, pottering around at home, tidying your desk - is simply time-wasting nonsense, if you do it when you’re meant to be writing? If so, you have an unhelpful mindset towards writing. I talked about this in episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing. I said, in that episode, that it matters what you tell yourself about procrastination - whether it’s simply a pointless, destructive activity, or whether it’s an important part of the process of organising your ideas and coming up with good insights. When I said that, I wasn’t thinking about the sort of things Professor Crum has discovered about mindsets - but let’s think about that now. Could it be that adopting a mindset according to which writing involves a lot of fermentation in addition to the activity of getting words down - see episode #20 for more on fermenting your writing - could it be that viewing it that way not only makes writing more pleasant and less fraught, but also enables us to get more out of those staring-into-space moments when it feels like we’re doing nothing, but which are actually important parts of the creative process? Could it be that we’d be better writers if we scheduled those moments into our writing time, and viewed ourselves as investing in our research when we engage in them? I hope I might have inspired you to experiment a little with things like this, to try on a few new mindsets and find those that work best for you. You never know what potential you might unlock.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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