The Impact of Mindset on Stress and Performance | Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | [Silence]
00:00:02.480 | How you think about stress
00:00:04.520 | impacts the stress response in profound ways.
00:00:07.800 | So this paper, "Rethinking Stress,
00:00:09.560 | The Role of Mindsets in Determining Stress"
00:00:12.080 | did a very simple set of manipulations.
00:00:15.040 | They had people in one group listen to a lecture
00:00:17.520 | that effectively was titled, quote,
00:00:19.240 | "The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided."
00:00:22.360 | And that lecture included information
00:00:24.600 | about how stress diminishes performance
00:00:27.160 | and how it can diminish health and vitality
00:00:29.840 | learning and performance, productivity,
00:00:32.320 | it increases uncertainty, et cetera, okay?
00:00:34.640 | And all of that information is true.
00:00:36.640 | A separate group listened to a lecture entitled, quote,
00:00:40.400 | "Experiencing stress improves health and vitality."
00:00:43.840 | And again, that information is true.
00:00:47.020 | Now, I realize that some of you are probably still asking,
00:00:49.000 | how can it be that stress diminishes health and performance
00:00:52.200 | and stress also enhances health and performance?
00:00:54.760 | And the answer lies in two things.
00:00:57.240 | One, the level of stress,
00:00:59.400 | and therefore the level of hormones that are released
00:01:01.880 | in response to that stress,
00:01:03.220 | the duration over which the stress response occurs.
00:01:06.320 | But the key variable here is that our cognitive understanding
00:01:10.600 | about what stress does impacts whether or not
00:01:14.200 | our physiology goes down the direction of debilitating
00:01:17.540 | or enhancing effects of stress, okay?
00:01:19.560 | So we've got a condition here
00:01:20.920 | where people are being informed very differently
00:01:23.080 | about what stress does.
00:01:24.220 | In one case, it's the stress is bad message.
00:01:26.240 | In the other case, it's the stress is good message.
00:01:28.800 | And there are many different experiments within this paper,
00:01:31.520 | but one of the more interesting ones I believe
00:01:34.240 | is where they looked at work performance,
00:01:36.480 | both in terms of performance of what they call soft tasks.
00:01:40.100 | So these are somewhat easier tasks as well as hard tasks.
00:01:43.440 | And when you look at the group that was given information
00:01:46.900 | about how stress diminishes performance in the soft tasks,
00:01:51.800 | okay, so the somewhat easy tasks,
00:01:53.600 | you don't see much change in their performance
00:01:57.140 | as you compare the before the learning
00:01:59.720 | about stress is diminishing to after the learning.
00:02:02.400 | Whereas the people who learn that stress is enhancing
00:02:05.400 | actually experience some improvement in work performance,
00:02:08.800 | even though the challenge that they're facing
00:02:10.720 | isn't that great.
00:02:11.720 | So again, what this means is that learning that stress
00:02:14.040 | can enhance performance by providing people true information
00:02:18.240 | about how stress can enhance performance,
00:02:20.320 | can increase performance even in the context of stuff
00:02:23.480 | that's not that hard, not that stressful.
00:02:25.620 | Even more interesting is that when you look at performance
00:02:27.900 | on tasks that are considered hard
00:02:29.800 | and you compare the stress is diminishing group,
00:02:31.760 | meaning the group that was taught that stress is diminishing
00:02:35.600 | and compare that to the stress is enhancing group,
00:02:37.800 | you see a really divergent response.
00:02:40.000 | The people that learn that stress diminishes performance
00:02:42.140 | did not improve at all.
00:02:43.720 | Whereas the people that learn that stress
00:02:45.200 | can enhance performance,
00:02:46.520 | enhance their performance significantly.
00:02:49.000 | Now keep in mind, all they are doing is learning
00:02:51.640 | that stress can enhance their performance
00:02:53.400 | and then they're given a task
00:02:54.920 | and they're performing better.
00:02:56.400 | So that's pretty spectacular, right?
00:02:58.960 | There's no training session that they went and did.
00:03:01.400 | They didn't practice these items
00:03:02.840 | that they were being tested on in between.
00:03:04.920 | They weren't given a bunch of drills to do
00:03:07.440 | and they didn't take a lot of time to do it.
00:03:09.160 | They just heard a tutorial
00:03:10.720 | about how stress can enhance performance.
00:03:12.880 | And that I believe is remarkable
00:03:15.240 | because what it says is that our cognitive appraisal
00:03:18.040 | about stress, which we all are going to experience in life,
00:03:21.240 | right, elevated heart rate, narrowing of visual focus,
00:03:24.640 | shifting of blood away from the periphery.
00:03:26.560 | All of these things are characteristic features
00:03:28.440 | of the stress response that we learn,
00:03:30.920 | especially in this day and age,
00:03:32.000 | 'cause it's talked about a lot in popular culture,
00:03:34.440 | that, oh, you know, all of these mechanisms
00:03:36.520 | were put into us in order for us to get away
00:03:38.920 | from the saber-toothed tiger
00:03:40.240 | or the lion that's trying to eat us.
00:03:42.600 | Let's be fair.
00:03:43.520 | The stress response is there for a lot of reasons,
00:03:46.280 | not just because of saber-toothed tigers and lions.
00:03:48.560 | I mean, that's kind of a story that we make up.
00:03:50.960 | The stress response is inherent, not just to us,
00:03:53.380 | but to other species as a way to mobilize us
00:03:56.160 | either away from things or toward things, right?
00:03:58.440 | We need to have somewhat of a stress response
00:04:00.160 | in order to engage in adaptive challenge.
00:04:03.520 | Yes, it's true that hundreds and thousands of years ago,
00:04:06.100 | those adaptive challenges probably involved hunting,
00:04:08.240 | but they probably involved social challenges as well.
00:04:10.780 | Do you think it was easy for cavemen and women
00:04:13.540 | to engage socially and kind of settle out
00:04:15.920 | their romantic interactions, et cetera?
00:04:17.880 | Do you think it was easy for them to raise children?
00:04:19.680 | No, of course not.
00:04:20.720 | The stress response is there for a variety of reasons,
00:04:23.060 | not just to get away from predators.
00:04:25.100 | The really exciting thing that's been discovered
00:04:27.760 | in the course of Ali Crum's work
00:04:29.760 | and other work in the last couple of decades
00:04:31.800 | is that the stress response is neither good nor bad.
00:04:35.500 | The stress response depends on whether or not
00:04:38.360 | you believe the sensations that you're experiencing,
00:04:40.840 | elevated heart rate, narrowing of visual focus, et cetera,
00:04:43.480 | are serving to enhance your performance
00:04:45.520 | or diminish your performance.
00:04:47.080 | And this study really points to the fact
00:04:48.840 | that just learning that it can enhance performance,
00:04:52.120 | can enhance performance.
00:04:54.060 | Now, I know a number of you are probably saying,
00:04:55.620 | "Wait, but stress doesn't feel good," right?
00:04:58.020 | And oftentimes we experience stress under conditions
00:05:00.780 | where we're trying to learn or get good at something
00:05:02.780 | or listen better or do something,
00:05:04.260 | and it actually is diminishing performance.
00:05:06.340 | And I think it's important to acknowledge that.
00:05:08.820 | This study and studies like it are not saying
00:05:11.300 | that stress becomes pleasant as a sensation in the body,
00:05:14.700 | nor is it saying that it always leads
00:05:16.820 | to improved performance.
00:05:18.320 | I don't want you to think that's the take-home message.
00:05:20.120 | Sometimes it does, it can,
00:05:21.980 | as was demonstrated in this research paper.
00:05:24.740 | But oftentimes, as we know,
00:05:26.540 | stress diminishes our performance.
00:05:28.280 | It takes us away from the landmarks we want to hit.
00:05:31.700 | It takes us away from the grades we want to get.
00:05:33.540 | It takes us away from, quote unquote,
00:05:35.140 | showing up how we want to, right?
00:05:36.980 | No one wants to have the blotchy skin and the sweating
00:05:39.260 | and the quaking of voice when we're trying
00:05:40.740 | to do public speaking and things of that sort.
00:05:42.940 | No one wants any of that.
00:05:44.760 | What's important to understand is that learning that stress
00:05:48.200 | is a way of mobilizing resources in the body
00:05:50.700 | does two things.
00:05:51.540 | First of all, it allows us to dampen
00:05:55.280 | or adjust the stress response in real time.
00:05:58.460 | And it allows us to understand that that stress response
00:06:01.420 | heightens our level of focus in a way that allows us
00:06:04.440 | to pay attention to the things that are going wrong
00:06:07.700 | in a way that allows us to make correction
00:06:10.100 | to those errors in the future.
00:06:11.740 | So if you think back to that study, that ERP study,
00:06:14.040 | where they measured brain activity
00:06:15.260 | and they looked at people who had a fixed mindset
00:06:17.100 | versus people who had a growth mindset,
00:06:19.160 | and the people who had a growth mindset
00:06:21.080 | were paying more cognitive attention
00:06:23.080 | to what was happening during errors and after errors.
00:06:26.860 | Well, this stress is enhancing mindset is very powerful
00:06:30.460 | because what it does is it shifts one's attention
00:06:33.800 | away from kind of somatic experience of,
00:06:36.460 | oh my goodness, my heart rate is elevated,
00:06:37.820 | I'm sweating, I'm quaking, I sound terrible,
00:06:40.420 | I feel terrible, I look terrible, et cetera,
00:06:42.620 | to a mode of allocating more of our thinking
00:06:44.840 | toward analyzing why things might be going wrong.
00:06:48.000 | And something else powerful happens
00:06:49.680 | when we embrace a stress is enhancing mindset as well.
00:06:52.720 | When we embrace a stress is enhancing mindset,
00:06:55.400 | it turns out that some of the very physiological processes
00:06:58.920 | that we call quote unquote stress shift in important ways.
00:07:03.000 | Some of those include the duration over which
00:07:06.320 | the stress hormone cortisol is released.
00:07:08.480 | And in fact, I don't even really wanna call it
00:07:10.000 | a stress hormone because cortisol does
00:07:11.600 | so many other things as well, and it's not bad.
00:07:13.980 | You need cortisol, believe me, you want cortisol,
00:07:16.440 | especially released early in the day
00:07:18.040 | and in response to acute stressors.
00:07:19.840 | What you don't want is for cortisol to stay elevated
00:07:22.400 | for long, long periods of time,
00:07:24.160 | and you especially don't want it
00:07:25.840 | to interfere with your sleep, okay?
00:07:27.960 | So much so that I think at times I wonder
00:07:30.880 | whether or not our philosophy on stress should be
00:07:33.360 | that stress is fantastic for us
00:07:35.480 | except when it interferes with our sleep, right?
00:07:38.560 | And when stress becomes terrible for us
00:07:40.800 | is when it starts to be chronically elevated
00:07:43.000 | and especially when it starts to inhibit our ability
00:07:45.580 | to sleep well enough and long enough, okay?
00:07:48.500 | So the point here is that when we embrace
00:07:51.700 | a stress enhancing mindset,
00:07:54.120 | we are able to have shorter duration release of cortisol.
00:07:58.360 | We are also able to engage what's called
00:08:01.060 | increased stroke volume under conditions of stress.
00:08:03.820 | This gets a little bit technical,
00:08:05.460 | but the amount of blood that your heart can pump
00:08:07.540 | with each beat turns out to be a key metric of stress.
00:08:10.360 | When we are very stressed,
00:08:11.380 | even though we need to mobilize a lot of resources,
00:08:13.660 | somewhat paradoxically,
00:08:15.220 | our total stroke volume can actually be reduced.
00:08:18.720 | And we tend to shuttle blood and other resources
00:08:21.580 | towards the core of our body and towards major limbs
00:08:24.700 | and away from things like our brain and our periphery.
00:08:27.500 | So one of the key measures of how a stress response
00:08:30.460 | quote unquote is going
00:08:32.020 | is how much peripheral blood flow there is.
00:08:34.440 | And when we are more relaxed under conditions of stress,
00:08:37.180 | there tends to be more peripheral blood flow.
00:08:38.900 | When we are more anxious,
00:08:41.140 | more panicked under conditions of stress,
00:08:43.100 | peripheral blood flow is lower.
00:08:45.060 | And in a remarkable set of experiments,
00:08:47.980 | Ali Crum and colleagues have shown
00:08:50.100 | that when we are just taught that stress can be enhancing,
00:08:52.860 | and then we are placed into a stressful environment,
00:08:55.380 | either because we are imagining stress
00:08:57.140 | or we are experiencing real stress,
00:08:59.020 | and then our physiology is measured.
00:09:01.860 | What is observed is that the total amount of blood
00:09:06.100 | that the heart can pump with each beat
00:09:07.700 | is actually increased, peripheral blood flow increases.
00:09:10.940 | And our ability to maintain cognition,
00:09:12.860 | to think clearly under conditions of stress increases.
00:09:15.900 | And again, the only manipulation here
00:09:18.220 | is a tutorial about how stress can be enhancing,
00:09:21.020 | which is essentially what I'm telling you right now.
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