How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset | Andrew Huberman

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. Today, we're discussing growth mindset. 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. 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.

That's right. 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 stresses enhancing mindset, you and anyone it's been shown can vastly improve your performance in essentially anything. So today's discussion will 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 stress-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. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need, but nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar.

Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells.

Drinking element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve 1 packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of element.

They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman lab to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman Lab to claim a free sample pack.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and NSDR non-sleep deep rest protocols. I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the Waking Up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much.