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A mindset is the set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which you approach situations or through which you view them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means somewhat unconscious.

You can have mindsets about yourself, another person, a group of people, a place, a time of year, a type of music, a political organization—actually just about anything. A mindset is not just an opinion. It is more complex than that.

And it can have surprisingly far-reaching effects.

Dueling Mindsets

Some mindsets have more profound effects on our lives than others. In her 2007 book Mindset, Carl Dweck describes two general mindsets—the fixed mindset and the growth mindset—that can lead to quite different experiences and outcomes.

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.

Dweck’s work on mindsets has been applied to the field of education, where children’s mindsets are often formed. Children praised for their talents and abilities (fixed mindset) tend to avoid taking on challenges they think are beyond their abilities. Children praised for their effort and persistence (growth mindset) tend to take on additional challenges in order to learn from them.

Be Good vs. Get Better

Following in Dweck’s footsteps, Heidi Grant Halvorson describes these two mindsets as Be Good and Get Better. People who have a Be Good mindset are focused on proving themselves, demonstrating their skills, and comparing themselves to others. If they think they aren’t already good at something, they tend to either not want to try to do it or to give up if they don’t experience quick success.

People who have a Get Better mindset are focused on improving, rather than proving, themselves; developing, rather than demonstrating, their skills; and comparing their current performance to their own past performance rather than to others’ performance. They aren’t afraid to try something new because even if they’re no good at it now, they can always get better.

The Be Good mindset may be good when it comes to performance, but it doesn’t have much else to recommend it. People with a Get Better mindset generally handle challenges better, get less upset when things go wrong, don’t give up as easily, are more comfortable with the new and the unknown, and get more interest and enjoyment out of what they do. People with a Get Better mindset use whatever happens to them—the good, the bad, and the ugly—as well as their own missteps and miscalculations, to help them get better.

This type of mindset isn’t a black-or-white kind of thing. You can have a Be Good mindset about some things and a Get Better mindset about others. It’s worth cultivating a Get Better mindset in as many areas as possible. But, as Halvorson says, it’s important to have a Get Better mindset about changing to a Get Better mindset.

Some new research indicates that as we age we don’t have a harder time learning new things because we can’t absorb the information but because we can’t forget “the old stuff.” There are two proteins in the brain that play a role in synaptic connections: NR2A and NR2B. NR2B weakens synaptic connections, essentially creating “space” for new ones to be formed. NR2A inhibits the process. Before puberty, our brains produce more NR2B than NR2A; adult brains produce more NR2A and less NR2B. When it comes to learning, it’s just as important for our brains to be able to weaken synaptic connections as it is for them to be able to strengthen new ones. A year or two ago, I remember reading about a study suggesting that one of the purposes of sleep was to “prune” some of the brain’s synaptic connections. Recently, SF Gate ran an article linking brain deterioration and sleep woes, although with a different slant:

After comparing the brains and memory skills of young study participants and older subjects, researchers found that age-related brain deterioration contributes to poor sleep and, in turn, recollection problems.

The article goes on to say that poor sleep then contributes to brain deterioration, creating a downward spiral. It doesn’t say anything about NR2A and NR2B but attributes the brain deterioration that results from poor sleep to a reduction in the amount of long-wave sleep. Whatever the mechanism, sleep seems to be pretty important to our ability to learn, especially as we get older.

Processing Regret

Mental (psychological) health and brain health are not identical, but they go hand-in-hand in many cases, to some extent because of the brain’s plasticity. Forgive and forget is an old adage that may now be scientifically validated. One of the things we may have difficulty forgetting are thoughts and feelings of regret over events from the past, either losses or missed opportunities—which represent a different kind of loss. How our brains “process regret” (read article) is a factor in our mental health. When our brains actively mitigate our experience of loss, we are much less likely to experience ongoing regret over them. Learning to let go turns out to be good advice. Another way to visualize it is breaking the synaptic connections of regret.

Reset Your Mindset

Dueling Mindsets

Be Good vs. Get Better

Breaking those Synaptic Connections

Processing Regret

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