Andrew Huberman details the powerful concepts of growth and "stress is enhancing" mindset, providing scientific backing and practical tools for improving performance and learning.
1. Understanding Growth Mindset:
- Definition: Growth mindset is the belief that our abilities are not fixed but are malleable and can be improved through effort. It involves embracing challenge and optimising one's response to it. This concept is deeply tied to neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience throughout one's entire lifespan, especially through deliberate, focused learning.
- Distancing Identity from Performance: A crucial, counter-intuitive aspect of growth mindset is separating your identity from your performance. Praising someone for being "smart," "talented," or "a great athlete" can actually undermine future performance, especially for those who already perform well, because their identity becomes integrated with their results.
- Shifting Focus to Effort: Instead of attaching identity to performance, attach it to effort, the enjoyment of learning, and the process of getting better. This means shifting internal and external narratives from "intelligence praise" (labels like "smart," "talented") to "effort praise" (verbs like "you tried really hard," "you persisted").
2. The Impact of Praise and Feedback (Carol Dweck's Research):
- Intelligence Praise Undermines Performance: Studies show that children who received "intelligence feedback" (e.g., "you're so smart") were later more likely to choose easier problems (performance goals) to maintain their "smart" label. Their performance on subsequent tasks significantly decreased, and they were less persistent, taking on fewer challenges overall. Strikingly, children given intelligence praise were also more likely to lie about their performance to appear better than they actually did. This detrimental effect occurs whether the praise is given before or after a task.
- Effort Praise Enhances Performance: Conversely, children who received "effort feedback" (e.g., "you tried really hard," "you persisted") tended to choose harder problems that offered more learning opportunities. Their performance significantly improved, and they took on many more challenges, demonstrating increased persistence. This positive effect also occurs whether the praise is given before or after a task.
- Action Point: Focus on Verbs, Not Labels: Whether giving feedback to others (children, students) or to yourself, emphasise the effort, persistence, and strategies used, rather than innate talent or intelligence. This is especially critical when performance is good, to prevent undermining future efforts when challenges arise.
3. The Mechanism Behind Growth Mindset's Effectiveness:
- Cognitive Appraisal of Errors: The key difference lies in how individuals with fixed vs. growth mindsets respond to errors.
- Those with a fixed mindset tend to have a larger emotional response (measured in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex) when told they are wrong, focusing on the feeling of disappointment or shame.
- Those with a growth mindset tend to direct their attentional and cognitive resources toward understanding what the error was and why it occurred, shifting brain activity towards areas associated with cognitive appraisal (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex).
- Action Point: Debug Your Errors: When you make a mistake or don't perform as expected, consciously shift your attention away from the emotional discomfort and towards a cognitive analysis of what went wrong and how to correct it. This deliberate focusing of attention and effort is "growth mindset in action". It's okay to feel upset initially, but then pivot to analytical thinking.
4. Embracing the "Stress Is Enhancing" Mindset:
- Mindset Shapes Response: Research by Dr. Alia Crum and others demonstrates that how we think about stress profoundly impacts our physiological and performance responses.
- If taught that stress is diminishing, people experience negative consequences like reduced performance and health.
- If taught that stress is enhancing, people experience performance enhancement when confronted with stress, even in challenging tasks.
- True Information, Different Framing: This is not a placebo effect or lying; both perspectives (stress can diminish or enhance) hold true depending on the context and, critically, on one's belief about stress.
- Physiological Shifts: Believing stress is enhancing can lead to a shorter duration of cortisol release, increased stroke volume (more blood pumped with each heart beat), enhanced peripheral blood flow, and improved cognition under stress. It can even be "anabolic," supporting the release of beneficial hormones like androgens and estrogens, rather than suppressing them.
- Action Point: Reframe Stress Signals: When experiencing physical symptoms of stress (elevated heart rate, sweating, quaking), reframe them cognitively as your body mobilising resources to give you an advantage. Understand that these sensations are signs that your body is preparing you to focus attention and perform.
5. The Synergy of Growth Mindset and Stress Is Enhancing Mindset (David Yeager's Work):
- Combined Power: Large-scale studies show that educating students about both growth mindset and stress-is-enhancing mindset leads to significantly better outcomes than either mindset alone.
- Real-World Benefits: This combined intervention has been shown to:
- Reduce anticipatory stress.
- Shift physiology (e.g., enhanced peripheral blood flow, beneficial hormone changes).
- Enable individuals to perceive stress as an opportunity for challenge and lean into it.
- Lead to better performance on challenging tasks and in academic courses.
- Result in a 40% improvement in self-regard and a 14% improvement in passing challenging courses.
- Encourage individuals to take on additional hard challenges in the future.
- Brief, Potent Interventions: These powerful effects can be achieved with brief, one-time informational tutorials (e.g., a 30-minute video) that explain the science of neuroplasticity and reframe struggle and frustration as signs of progress and expansion of limits.
6. Concrete Tools for Implementation:
- Adopt Both Mindsets (Teacher & Student): The ideal scenario is when both instructors and learners embrace growth mindset and stress-is-enhancing mindset, viewing abilities as malleable and stress as a resource.
- Praise Verbs, Not Labels: Consciously choose to give feedback (to yourself and others) that focuses on effort, persistence, and problem-solving strategies, especially when performance is good. Avoid identity-based labels like "smart" or "talented".
- Analytically Examine Errors: When mistakes occur, focus your cognitive attention on what led to the error and how to correct it, rather than dwelling on emotional responses. Seek help from others to gain additional perspectives on why you performed well or poorly.
- Be Your Own Teacher: If you lack a mentor or teacher, write a letter to a hypothetical future person trying to learn the same skill. In this letter, explain growth mindset, stress-is-enhancing mindset, and how to adopt them. This exercise has been shown to improve your own performance.
- Reframe "Mind as a Muscle": Understand that, unlike physical muscles that often show immediate "pump" or perceived growth during exercise, learning with your mind often involves feeling strain, frustration, and a temporary sense of being "back on your heels." Recognise these uncomfortable feelings as the direct signals that the neurochemical and neural circuit conditions for learning are being invoked, leading to actual growth. The mind grows through the struggle, not in spite of it.