- The Huberman Lab Podcast discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life
- Growth mindset is the main topic, emphasizing the ability to embrace challenge and optimize performance
- It involves distancing identity from performance and attaching it to effort and the process of learning
- The podcast also covers the stress-enhancing mindset and its synergy with growth mindset
- The episode explores the classic work of Carol Dweck and newer research on growth mindset
- Neuroplasticity is mentioned as the ability of the brain to change and improve throughout life
- The definition of mindset is provided as a mental frame that organizes and encodes information
- The episode is separate from the host's teaching and research roles at Stanford and is sponsored by 8Sleep and Roka

- Our mindset is shaped by the stories we attach to our sense of identity
- Feedback tied to intelligence or effort can significantly impact a person's motivation and performance
- Children who receive intelligence-based feedback tend to avoid challenges, while those who receive effort-based feedback seek out more challenging tasks
- This highlights the importance of being mindful of the feedback we give to children and the impact it has on their behavior and performance

- Study shows that praising intelligence can decrease performance, while praising effort can increase performance
- Children who receive intelligence praise tend to pick easier challenges and misrepresent their performance
- Effort praise leads to taking on harder challenges and accurately representing performance
- The belief that intelligence is fixed can lead to undermining future performance
- The study has implications for the growth mindset and understanding of intelligence
- Shifting the narrative from being good or bad at something can enhance learning and performance

- Shift your narrative from performance labels to effort-related narratives
- Effort-based praise improves performance
- Effort is something we can control and should be praised before and after performance
- Effort is the only thing we can truly control in our lives

- Effort and attention are the only things we can truly control in life
- Research on growth mindset and intelligence praise
- Study using ERPs to measure brain activity in response to feedback
- People with growth mindset appraise errors and direct attention to understanding them
- This mindset leads to higher performance and value of effort

- Growth mindset is tied to elevated performance and is about focusing on effort and errors
- Shifting from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset response is important for overcoming challenges
- Understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of growth mindset is crucial for improving performance
- InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that can help with understanding and improving health
- Growth mindset is about connecting motivation to specific thoughts and thought processes
- Embracing a stress is enhancing mindset can help access growth mindset and improve performance

- The paper discusses the impact of mindsets on the stress response
- People react differently to stress based on their beliefs about it
- Learning about the negative effects of stress leads to a decrease in performance
- Learning about the positive effects of stress leads to an increase in performance
- The study showed that cognitive understanding of stress impacts its effects on physiology
- Embracing a stress-enhancing mindset can lead to improved performance and physiological responses
- The duration and level of stress hormones released are influenced by mindset
- Stress can be beneficial unless it interferes with sleep

- The Huberman Lab Podcast discusses science and tools for everyday life, focusing on growth mindset and stress-enhancing mindset
- It covers the work of Carol Dweck and newer research on growth mindset, neuroplasticity, and the impact of mindset on performance
- The podcast emphasizes the importance of effort-based praise, shifting from fixed mindset to growth mindset, and understanding the impact of stress on performance
- It also discusses the physiological effects of stress and the importance of mindset in managing stress for improved performance and physiological responses

- The amount of peripheral blood flow is a key measure of how the body responds to stress
- Being taught that stress can enhance performance can actually increase the total amount of blood the heart can pump with each beat
- Learning about growth mindset and stress-enhancing mindset can improve performance and buffer against stress
- Research by Dr. David Yeager has shown that students who are taught about growth mindset and stress-enhancing mindset perform better in stressful situations
- The research includes six experiments, including one using the Trier social stress test, and has been published in the journal Nature

- The study shows that learning about growth mindset and stress enhancing mindset can shift students' physiology and psychology, leading to improved performance under stress.
- The intervention was a 30-minute tutorial that focused on the brain's capacity to change and the positive effects of stress on performance.
- The tutorial emphasized the importance of adopting a growth mindset and providing feedback focused on effort rather than labels.
- The results showed a 40% improvement in self-regard, a 14% improvement in passing challenging courses, and an increase in taking on future challenges after the intervention.

- Feedback that focuses on effort, persistence, and problem solving is more beneficial than labeling someone as talented or brilliant
- Analyzing errors should focus on the verbs leading to those errors, rather than putting negative labels on them
- Seeking help from others to understand errors and improve performance is key
- Writing a letter to oneself about growth mindset and stress can enhance performance mindset can improve performance
- The mind is not like a muscle in the sense that you don't feel immediate growth when learning, but the process of strain and agitation actually creates the conditions for learning
- Cultivating a growth mindset and stress can enhance performance mindset takes time, but can be achieved with the understanding that mindsets are powerful and can be cultivated.

- The video discusses the concept of growth mindset and how to cultivate it
- It also talks about stress-enhancing performance mindset and how to cultivate it
- Viewers are encouraged to subscribe to the YouTube channel and podcast on Spotify and Apple
- The podcast has sponsors and supplements that are discussed in previous episodes
- The host can be followed on social media and there is a monthly newsletter available for free
- The video ends with a thank you for joining the discussion and for the interest in science

- Peripheral blood flow is a key measure of the body's response to stress
- Teaching that stress can enhance performance increases the heart's pumping capacity
- Learning about growth and stress-enhancing mindsets improves performance and buffers against stress
- Dr. David Yeager's research shows that students taught about these mindsets perform better in stressful situations
- The 30-minute tutorial on growth mindset and stress-enhancing mindset led to improved performance and physiological shifts
- Feedback on effort and problem solving is more beneficial than labeling
- Seeking help and writing a letter to oneself can improve performance mindset
- Cultivating these mindsets takes time but can be achieved
- The video discusses these concepts and encourages subscribing to the YouTube channel and podcast
- The podcast has sponsors and supplements, and the host can be followed on social media
- The video ends with a thank you for joining the discussion and interest in science.

In this episode, I discuss how to build and apply a growth mindset — the practice of self-rewarding and focusing on learning and skill development through effort — to improve learning and performance. I also discuss how our internal narratives drive our ability to make progress. I contrast the growth mindset vs. the fixed mindset and describe how the type of feedback or praise we receive shapes our mindsets, and the huge advantage of rewarding and celebrating “verbs” (actions) rather than adjectives (performance labels). I also discuss data showing how stress can enhance performance and explain why the growth mindset works synergistically with the “stress-is-enhancing mindset,” and how to combine them. Whether you are a student, coach, therapist, parent, teacher or simply someone seeking to improve at something, this episode provides numerous science-supported tools for how to adopt a performance enhancing mindset.
For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com.
Thank you to our sponsors
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) Growth Mindset
(00:02:55) Sponsors: Eight Sleep & ROKA
(00:05:17) Mindset & Narrative
(00:12:58) Intelligence Feedback vs. Effort Feedback, Identity Labels
(00:20:10) Intelligence vs. Effort Praise: Performance, Persistence & Self-Representation
(00:26:45) Fixed Intelligence vs. Growth Mindset
(00:28:53) Tool: Intelligence (Performance) vs. Effort Narrative, Labels
(00:32:30) Tool: Failure & Identity; Effort & Verbs
(00:34:36) Sponsor: AG1
(00:35:41) Tool: Timing, Intelligence vs. Effort Praise & Performance
(00:40:080 Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset: Failure & Performance
(00:50:28) Tool: Shift from Fixed Mindset
(00:54:23) Sponsor: InsideTracker
(00:55:30) Stress-is-Enhancing Mindset
(01:05:53) How Stress Can Enhance Performance 
(01:13:21) Growth Mindset + Stress-is-Enhancing Mindset & Performance
(01:20:36) Reframing Stress
(01:25:45) Tool 1: Student & Teacher Mindset
(01:28:17) Tool 2: Effort Praise/Feedback: Verbs not Labels
(01:31:24) Tool 3: Errors & Seeking Help
(01:32:58) Tool 4: Self-Teaching & Growth Mindset
(01:34:35) Tool 5: Reframe “Mind is Like a Muscle” Analogy
(01:39:20) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter
Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac
Disclaimer

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Growth mindset is 1 of the most interesting and powerful concepts in all of psychology.

Growth mindset is essentially a way of embracing challenge and thinking about your bodily and brain's response to challenge in a way that allows you to optimize your performance.

Growth mindset consists of many things, which we will discuss today.

And of course, we will discuss how to implement growth mindset.

But some of the key features of growth mindset are developing an ability to distance your identity from the challenge you happen to be embracing.

Now that might come as a bit of a surprise to many of you.

For instance, we grow up hearing, we hope from time to time that we are smart, that we are talented, that we are a good athlete, that we are a good artist.

You know, we like to think that we are good at something or perhaps many things, but it turns out that the kind of praise or feedback that we receive that attaches our identity to performance can actually undermine our performance.

And believe it or not, this is especially problematic for people that perform well in their endeavors.

If you are somebody who performs well in school or athletics or music, and you are told that you are very smart, that you're an excellent student, that you're an excellent athlete, or that you're an excellent musician, you have much to lose if you at any moment do not perform well.

And that's because your identity has been integrated with your performance.

Somewhat counterintuitively, growth mindset is the process of distancing your identity from performance and rather attaching your identity and your efforts and your sense of motivation to effort itself and to the process of enjoying learning and getting better at learning anything.

So today we are going to discuss what growth mindset is and what it isn't, because it's often discussed in terms that frankly are not accurate to the science.

We will also talk about another mindset, which is the stress is enhancing mindset, that it turns out can act synergistically with growth mindset, such that when you combine growth mindset with the stress enhancing mindset, you and anyone, it's been shown, can vastly improve your performance in essentially anything.

So today's discussion, we'll of course explore the classic work of Carol Dweck, who was really the founder of the growth mindset field, as well as some of the newer research from people like David Yeager, Ali Crum and others, who have explored how growth mindset and stresses enhancing mindsets can be applied both in and out of the classroom in children and adults, and really in people of all backgrounds.

By the end of today's episode, you will have a rich understanding of the science, as well as many tools that you can apply in everyday life, in essentially any endeavor.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring 0 cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Growth mindset, as the name suggests, is the idea that we can get better at things.

That is that our abilities are not fixed, but rather that our abilities are malleable.

And at the core of growth mindset is the idea that our brains can change and indeed they can.

We refer to that ability as neuroplasticity or the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience.

Now, I've done several episodes about neuroplasticity.

So that's a topic unto itself, but suffice to say that neuroplasticity, brain change, can occur throughout the entire lifespan.

It is far more robust early in life, from birth until about age 25.

Neuroplasticity is sort of the default process.

Our brain is being shaped by our everyday experiences.

But certainly from age 25 and onward, and certainly well into people's 90s, even it's been shown, the brain can change if we want it to.

It can change for the worse, of course, through injury or disease, things of that sort, but it also can change for the better through deliberate focused bouts of learning.

We can learn new languages, we can learn art, we can learn music, we can get smarter, we can get better at essentially anything if we devote our attentional resources to learning those things.

So really any discussion about growth mindset has as a subtext, a discussion about neuroplasticity.

Although today we aren't going to focus so much on neuroplasticity, meaning we aren't going to focus so much on the neural circuit and neurochemical changes that underlie neuroplasticity because I've covered those on previous episodes.

We'll talk about them a little bit today, but we are mainly going to talk about the data, the studies from the field of psychology, applying growth mindset in and out of the classroom in children and adults.

And we are going to talk about tools, everyday tools that you can use to enhance growth mindset for yourself and perhaps for those around you if you care to teach growth mindset, which as you'll learn later, turns out to be an excellent way to reinforce your own growth mindset.

And we're going to talk about how to apply those tools in a bunch of different domains, musical, athletic, intellectual, and on and on.

No discussion of growth mindset would be complete without mentioning that Growth Mindset is the brainchild of my colleague, Carol Dweck in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

Today, you'll learn how she discovered growth mindset and you will learn how others have taken that discovery and expanded upon it and especially its application in and out of the classroom.

To start off our discussion about growth mindset, however, we need to define what a mindset is.

I think most of us think we know what a mindset is.

We think, oh, it's kind of a mental stance where we are positive or we are negative or we believe something or we don't believe something, but a mindset actually has a very specific definition.

And here I'm referring to the definition provided by Dr.

Ali Crum is also a professor of psychology at Stanford.

She runs her own laboratory working on stress-related mindsets and other mindsets.

She's actually been a guest on this podcast previously.

Highly recommend you listen to that episode if you haven't already.

Crum defines a mindset as quote, a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information.

And I think the key thing to highlight there is organizes information.

Because as you all well know, we are constantly being bombarded with information from the outside world, sensory information about what's going on with our visual system, what we're hearing, what we're seeing, what we're feeling.

We are also bombarded with internal sensations of how full or empty our gut feels.

So tons and tons of information funneling into our brain and mindsets really help us organize that information such that we pay attention to certain things and not others, and we respond to certain things and not others.

Okay, so here I'm not trying to put additional language on something simple in order to make it complex.

I'm trying to put a little bit of language.

That is that a mindset does many things, but it mainly organizes information.

I'll add to that for specific actions or inactions in a way that allows us to simplify our world, in a way that allows us to make certain choices and do away with thinking about and acting on other types of information.

The other thing about mindsets is that they include entire narratives.

And most of the time, we aren't even aware of how those narratives are operating.

Meaning we don't walk around looking at opportunities in the world, like the opportunity to get better at fitness or a sport or music or arithmetic or languages or anything for that matter, thinking, okay, what is my mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information.

And those stories are usually attached to our sense of identity.

I do not think of myself as a good musician.

I like listening to music, but I consider myself a terrible musician, right?

I've really assigned a value or I've assigned my value to music and my relationship to music, right?

We can also do it in the opposite direction, right?

I've been running a laboratory for a long time, been in science for close to 3 decades.

So if you ask me, do I feel proficient at science?

I'd say, yeah, I'm proficient at science.

I know how to do experiments, set up experiments, write research papers, write grants, et cetera.

We tend to decide if we are good or bad at things, and we tend to integrate those with our identity somewhat or a lot, depending on whether or not, you know, we're a professional or amateur, or how much we engage in an activity.

The point being that mindsets include all of these narratives and often those narratives are visible to us if we think about them, but most of the time we are moving through the world, meaning school, work, relationships, and all our endeavors without a lot of careful thought about the narratives we carry.

And the beauty of growth mindset is that it forces us to step back and ask ourselves some simple questions.

These are questions that you could ask yourself right now.

You could ask yourself, for instance, what have I been told I'm really good at?

You should also ask yourself, what have I been told I'm really good at?

You should also ask yourself, what have I been told I'm really poor at, that I'm just not good at?

What have I told myself I'm really good at?

And what have I told myself I'm really bad at?

And then a second set of questions is, what am I good at and why?

Meaning, did I apply a lot of effort to learning that thing?

And then it's also important to ask yourself, why am I not good at other things?

Is it simply because you've never applied yourself with those things?

Or is it because you tried and had an early failure?

Or perhaps you tried and tried and tried for many years and you continue to fail at that thing, or you just didn't reach a level of proficiency that made you want to pursue it further.

In asking yourselves those questions, you are asking yourself not just what you're good at and bad at and why, you should also be thinking about where the messages of being good at something or being bad at something arrived from.

Meaning from your parents, from your coaches, from your teachers?

Or was it the case that despite a lot of positive feedback, you just sort of decided you weren't good at something?

Or conversely, was it the case that despite a lot of negative feedback that you would never be good at something or that you weren't good at something that you continue to persist because there are certainly people like that.

The more negative feedback they get, the more they dig their heels in to prove themselves as capable of becoming good at something.

So I do recommend as we march forward in this conversation, you think about those questions.

And ask yourself to what extent your labels, that is your identity, is attached to the things that you are good at or bad at.

And the reason I'd like you to ask yourself those questions is that next we're going to talk about some research from Dr.

Carol Dweck's laboratory that was really the seed of the entire field of growth mindset.

It relates to a specific set of experiments that really show that the specific feedback we get, meaning whether or not we get feedback that is attached to our identity, like a label, like smart or great athlete or talented, sends us down a very different path of performance in the short and long run, as compared to whether or not we receive feedback that's based on effort, meaning you tried really hard or you really seem to apply yourself under conditions where you're getting the right answer over time because you simply refuse to quit.

Those are 2 very divergent sets of feedback.

And as you'll learn in a moment, the sorts of feedback that we get, especially early in life or early in an endeavor, so this doesn't just apply to young kids, this applies to adults too, who are taking on a new skill or are trying to expand on an existing skill.

Those 2 divergent forms of feedback get integrated into our core beliefs about what we think is possible for us in a given endeavor.

And the great news is we can also modify those core beliefs simply by changing the feedback that we give ourselves.

The research paper I'd like to discuss briefly that beautifully embodies the runway that led to the discovery of growth mindset is a paper from Dr.

Carol Dweck as well as her colleague, Claudia Mueller.

And the title of the paper essentially says it all.

The title is, "'Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance.'" That should be surprising, that praise for intelligence can undermine motivation and performance.

I would have thought, and I think many people probably believe that if you tell a child or an adult that they're really good at something and you're genuine about that feedback, meaning they're performing well and you say, great, you're doing really well, you're so smart, you're so talented, that their performance would continue to improve, that it would bolster their motivation to engage in that activity, which hopefully they enjoy, but regardless, provided that it's a safe activity, it's educational, or what have you, that it would serve to encourage them, right?

The kid thinks, not only am I engaging in this activity, but I'm getting positive feedback, presumably from people that I care about or whose opinion I care about.

Wouldn't that serve to elevate performance?

So I'll just give you a few of the key takeaways from this study, the way it was done is very interesting.

They essentially gave feedback about performance that was linked up with a child's intelligence, telling kid they're smart, they're talented, that they can learn things really easily or that they're very good at learning this sort of thing.

And they called that intelligence feedback or they gave them what was called effort feedback.

The simple way to think about effort feedback is that it's more attached to verbs as opposed to labels.

So effort feedback consists of things like, you tried really hard on that problem.

It was great the way that you applied effort.

It was great the way that even when you got the wrong answer you spent 10 minutes thinking about it and then you try it again and again, or in some cases, even if they didn't get the right answer, telling them, well, even though you didn't get the right answer, it's really terrific that you continue to try, okay?

So intelligence feedback was the sort of feedback that was tied to labels of identity, things like smart, talented, et cetera.

Whereas effort feedback was tied to verbs, choices, behavioral and cognitive choices that children made in an effort to learn or get better at something.

So in this study, which included over a hundred children, they either got the intelligence type feedback or the effort type feedback, or there was a control group that didn't get either the intelligence or the effort type feedback.

And then they looked at a number of different outcomes.

So I'll just highlight a few examples of what they found.

First of all, the kids that got the intelligence-based feedback, when they were then later offered problem sets that were either challenging or were of the sort that they knew they could perform well on, they tended to select problems that they knew they could perform well on.

These were what were referred to as performance goals.

In other words, they pick problems that allowed them to continue to get the praise that they had received previously about being smart or talented.

Whereas the kids that got feedback about their strong effort, when later presented with problems that were either easy or hard, more often than not, they pick the harder problems that stood to teach them more.

It says that if you tell a kid that they're smart or talented, and that's the reason why they perform well, When they encounter challenges, they are likely to go with the least amount of challenge so that they can continue to receive that praise or feedback.

Whereas if you receive praise and feedback for your strong effort, then later you tend to pick environments, problem sets, et cetera, that allow you to exert the very effort that got you the praise in the first place.

So in both cases, these children are essentially attached to the praise, right, in some sense.

I mean, we like to think that they enjoy these activities and they're benefiting from them as well.

But in both cases, the praise really serves to reinforce a certain pattern of behavior.

But in the case of giving intelligence feedback, the kids are really just trying to reinforce being told that they're smart or talented, as opposed to reinforcing the engagement in the activity that got them the praise in the first place.

When kids are told, hey, you really tried hard and that's great, or I like how you persisted, or you're so persistent, I can really see how persistent you are in trying to get the right answer, even if you don't get the right answer, well then when you present those kids with additional challenges, they work very hard to stay in challenge.

The kids that are rewarded for effort and that continue to pick harder problems outperform the kids that are given the intelligence praise and feedback by a large margin.

This tells us that the narratives that we hear from others, of course, reinforce certain patterns of behavior.

This tells us that if you're a parent or teacher, you have to be very careful about giving feedback to a child that is attached to their identity around an endeavor, especially if they're performing well at that endeavor.

Now, of course, if a child is not performing well at something, You also don't want to tell them that they're stupid, right?

You don't want to tell them that they're deficient, right?

But that's a rare occurrence in the classroom, 1 would hope.

That's a rare occurrence on the field, 1 would hope.

But what's very common, very, very common, is that when we see children or adults performing well, we tend to give them identity labels as a way to try and reinforce whatever behavior we observe and we like.

Now, the other thing they looked at in this study besides whether or not these kids would pick hard or easier challenges down the line were the actual raw performance on cognitive problems.

And these data, I must say, are just so interesting.

They took the kids and they gave them all the same problem sets.

And all the kids across the board, whether or not they were getting intelligence praise or effort praise, or they were in the control group, were performing more or less the same way.

They were getting some of these questions right, some of these questions wrong.

Then they gave them praise after they completed those problems.

They either got intelligence praise, you're so smart, you're so talented, or they got effort praise.

You tried so hard, you really persisted, that's fantastic.

Then later they gave them another set of problems and they looked at performance.

Now remember, the first time around, all the kids got some of the questions right and some of the questions wrong.

So there's room for improvement for everybody.

The kids that were in the control group, so they didn't get any specific form of praise, they perform more or less the same way as they did before.

So if they were getting 75% of the answers right the first time, they got 75% of the answers right the second time, 25% wrong in both cases.

The kids that were in the intelligence praise group, the you're so smart, you're so talented praise group, their performance went down significantly.

Whereas the kids that were in the effort praise group, their performance increased significantly.

Okay, so this is a bi-directional effect where giving intelligence praise reduces performance and giving effort praise improves performance, which is absolutely striking and tells you everything you need to know, which is if you're a parent, you're a teacher, and of course, as we all give ourselves feedback, rewarding yourself for effort is the best way to improve performance.

Rewarding yourself based on identity labels, so smart, so talented, you're a great athlete, et cetera, all that stare in the mirror and do self-affirmation stuff can actually undermine performance.

And in fact, it does undermine performance.

It may not do it right away, but eventually it does.

The other thing this study looked at that I just have to mention is this notion of persistence.

So remember earlier, I said that the kids that got intelligence praise tended to pick easier problems down the line, whereas the kids that got effort praise tended to pick harder problems.

It turns out that the kids that got intelligence praise also tended to take on fewer problems overall.

They tended to limit the total number of challenges that they engaged in.

Whereas the kids that got the effort praise, that you worked so hard, you're so determined, that was so impressive how you just kept going, even when you got some answers wrong.

Those kids not only opted for harder challenges, they not only performed better, but they also took on many more challenges.

So these data really make clear that the effort praise is the way to go.

Now I know many people have heard this whole thing about don't reward the person, reward the effort, reward the verbs, as I'm referring to it.

But it's actually pretty rare that we hear effort rewarded in everyday settings.

And it is very common for us to overhear intelligence praise or talent praise.

You know, a kid comes home with a trophy and we tell them you're a great athlete, right?

Kid comes home with a great report card, you know, you're so smart, congratulations.

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How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset