Mind Archives - Page 2 of 23

How Your Mindset Sets You Up

April 8, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

A mindset is the set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which you approach situations or people—or through which you view them. It determines how you interpret situations and respond to them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means largely unconscious. They are a type of mental shortcut; they operate based on assumptions, and they generate expectations.

You can have mindsets about yourself, other people or groups of people, places, situations, events, political organizations, types of music—actually just about anything. A mindset can have surprisingly deep and far-reaching effects.

Mindsets Are Self-Reinforcing

You’ve probably heard someone described as having a victim mentality, which is the same as having a victim mindset. If you have a victim mindset you would tend to:

feel that others are to blame for your misfortunes
believe you are powerless to alter your circumstances
have a primarily external locus of control
be disinclined to take personal responsibility
distrust other people
fail to take positive action on your own behalf

The first three attitudes and beliefs lead to the subsequent three behaviors—which, in turn, confirm the attitudes and beliefs. Like any mindset, a victim mindset causes you to view situations, events, and interpersonal relationships through a distorted filter. It leads you to believe your perception isreality. That’s one of the ways your mindset sets you up.

A Few Other Mindsets (Labels)

I’ve written about the productivity vs. creativity mindsets. Here are some others to consider.

Survivalist
Globalist
Entrepreneurial
Lifelong Learner
Achiever
Maker
Activist
Liberal
Conservative
Libertarian
Progressive
Outsider

Recognizing and Changing a Mindset

When examining a mindset, it’s important to know what it is, when it’s in effect, and how it affects your perception, interpretation, and response. But trying to understand where it came from or how it developed is a side trip that won’t get you closer to altering it. (It doesn’t matter how you came to possess the diffusion filter for your camera lens. Once you install it, it affects what you see when you look through the lens.) Instead, focus on determining your mindset’s attributes: what beliefs, attitudes, personality traits, etc. are part of it?

One of the best ways to catch your mindset in the act is to notice when your expectations of a person or a situation are not met. Instead of pausing to consider the source of your expectations, your brain is more likely to jump into action to find a suitable explanation that will allow you to comfortably fit the experience into your ongoing inner narrative. Unfortunately, even when reality conflicts with your mindset, your brain’s tendency is to interpret what happens in a way that reinforces your mindset.

After you develop an understanding of a mindset you want to change:

Clarify why you want to change it.
Determine your desired outcome.
Identify one situation to change.

Remember that it’s easier to focus on and change a behavior (what you do) than it is to focus on and change a thought, a thought pattern, or a belief. Create an intention to change your behavior in one situation and apply repetition and perseverance until the new behavior or response becomes the status quo.

It isn’t easy to recognize or change a mindset, but if you focus on the mechanics (what, when, and how), you can do it. And it’s worth the effort to open your mind, shift your perspective, and learn how to adjust your personal camera lens filters so you aren’t stuck with whatever lenses you happen to have developed over the course of your life.

Do You Want a Resilient Brain?

March 18, 2019 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The greater your cognitive reserve, the more resilient your brain will be. Brain reserve—or cognitive reserve*—helps your brain adapt and respond to changes and resist damage. It gives it the ability to improvise and find alternate ways of doing a job or performing a task.

Your cognitive reserve begins to develop in childhood and gets stronger as you move through adulthood. If you continue to learn, embrace new activities, and develop new skills and interests, you will continually build and maintain your cognitive reserve.

This is another reason to aim for challenging yourself rather than taking it easy and following the path of least resistance. You don’t know when you’re going to need your cognitive reserve, so it’s good to have as much of it as possible “in the tank.”

Protection from Damage

The concept originated in the 1980s. Researchers discovered that some people who were found at autopsy to have brain changes consistent with advanced Alzheimer’s disease had displayed no apparent symptoms of dementia before they died. These individuals had enough cognitive reserve to offset the damage to their brains to allow them to continue functioning as they always had.

Cognitive reserve can also help stave off degenerative changes associated with other brain diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or a stroke.

Even if you’re fortunate enough to never experience any of these diseases, you can still benefit from developing cognitive reserve. It can help you function better—and for longer—when you experience unexpected and stressful life events, which tend to require more effort from your brain.

You can’t prevent yourself from aging or insulate yourself from all stressful, unexpected, or life-altering events. You don’t have total control over what kinds of diseases or deficits your genes might predispose you to develop. But you can do something to moderate how much these challenges affect you, your well being, and your ability to function.

Learning, Curiosity, and Dopamine

Even if you don’t develop neurological or psychological disorders, brain circuits that rely on dopamine tend to decline in function with aging. But curiosity prepares your brain for learning by activating the reward system, enhancing memory and motivation in the process. When you’re learning something you’re deeply—as opposed to idly—curious about, you’re more likely to recall and retain what you learn about that topic. You’re also more likely to retain unrelated information you encounter at the same time.

Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it. —Matthias Gruber, UC Davis Center for Neuroscience

Curiosity, challenge, and complexity seem to define the path that leads to strong cognitive functioning and a more active and enjoyable life now—and to greater cognitive reserve whenever you may need it.

Have your education, work, and leisure activities challenged you over the years? If so, they have contributed to your cognitive reserve. If not, there’s no time like now to reverse course if you want to do as much as you can to maintain your memory and your cognitive skills for as long as you can. Engaging in a variety of activities—physical, mental, and social—with differing levels of complexity have a synergistic effect. So the more things you do in these areas, the better—for both you and your brain.

*“Brain reserve” is sometimes used to refer to physical changes in the brain such as an increase in neurons and synapses (aka the “hardware”). “Cognitive reserve” is sometimes used to refer to the brain’s capabilities and skills in regard to completing tasks, learning new things, or recall (aka the “software”). These distinctions are really two sides of the same coin, and research is currently being conducted on the relationship between them.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0

November 2, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Emotion is a natural part of intelligence, so the term emotional intelligence might be somewhat misleading, especially considering the popular view of it. Emotional intelligence 1.0 is based on two beliefs. First, that we can detect emotions accurately in other people based on their facial and bodily expressions. And second, that emotions are automatically triggered by events, but we can learn how to control them. Neither belief has held up to rigorous testing.

Emotional intelligence 2.0 is based on the brain being predictive—which means it is always assessing the situation to determine what action we should take—as well as the concept of emotional granularity: putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity. So the more precisely we can identify and recognize our emotions, the faster and more accurate our brain will be in assessing the situation to determine the most appropriate response.

For the brain, the payoff of higher emotional granularity is efficiency. For us, the payoffs include a greater ability to identify our desired outcomes, enhanced experience, and improved critical thinking and decision-making. Developing an appreciation for a variety of nuanced emotional states is preferable to trying to maintain any particular emotional state.

Nuance and Experience

Artists tend to have a more nuanced perception of colors than non-artists, as do musicians in regard to music, architects in regard to buildings, botanists in regard to plants, and sailors in regard to the sea. Their training alters their experience and with it their sense of who they are.

We can similarly train ourselves to distinguish, appreciate, and detect more nuanced emotions than we habitually identify, which can, in turn, alter what is possible for us to experience and, therefore, who we are, who we can be, and what we can do.

Your personal experience is actively constructed by your actions. You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. You are, in a very real sense, an architect of your environment as well as your experience. —Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made

Our emotional vocabulary reflects the concepts we have for emotions, and those concepts influence our experience because they help our brain “construct” our emotional states.

Research shows that increased emotional granularity doesn’t just add words to our vocabulary; it also leads to a greater ability to experience emotions without getting swamped or tossed around by them. Remarkably, high emotional granularity also leads to better health.

We don’t perceive reality so much as we interact with what’s “out there” in a particular way that creates our conscious perceptions of the world. Although they are internal, we do the same thing with emotions. There are no circuits for fear or anger or happiness or anticipation that are automatically triggered by events, forcing us to experience the resulting feeling. Emotions don’t simply happen to us. They’re conscious reflections of our engagement in and with the world—signs of life, so to speak.

Yes, things happen to us. But more importantly, they happen to us.

Note: For those who want to understand these concepts as they might relate to trauma, including PTSD, here’s a link to an article written by Michael K. Suvak and Lisa Feldman Barrett and published in 2011 in the Journal of Traumatic Stress: Considering PTSD from the Perspective of Brain Processes: a Psychological Construction Approach.

Good Stress vs. Bad Stress

October 16, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Although stress is widely viewed as something to be avoided as much as possible, not all stress is harmful. Intermittent stress can motive you and focus your attention, improve your memory and mental and physical performance, and help you adapt. It can also nudge you to change your behavior for the better.

The “father of stress” himself, Hans Selye, said that the opposite of stress is death, so even he didn’t see all stress as bad.

Negative stress is referred to as distress in order to distinguish it from positive stress or eustress. Distress isn’t motivating, and it decreases performance instead of improving it. It can lead to anxiety, feelings of powerlessness, and even depression.

Situations that generate eustress:

feel exciting rather than anxiety-producing
seem to be within our coping abilities (we have a sense of agency or control)
tend to be short-term

Situations that generate distress:

feel unpleasant rather than exciting
seem to be outside our coping abilities (we don’t have a sense of agency or control)
can be either short- or long-term

Some situations, such as illness or the death of a close friend or family member, are likely to create some distress for nearly anyone. But not everyone reacts the same way to the same situations or events. That’s why stress scales that assign a value to potential stressors miss the mark.

Eustress = Excitement

In the 1980s I volunteered to take on a responsibility for a group I belonged to that, on the face of it, was an impossible task. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into initially, and I could have just walked away when I found out. Instead I saw it as a challenge and ended up doing the “impossible” for two full years. Most people I knew then thought I was crazy for subjecting myself to the pressure.

But I didn’t experience the pressure as distress; I experienced it as eustress. I spent many entire weekends, from Friday evening until after midnight on Sunday, doing the impossible and loved every minute of it. I always went back to my regular job on Monday morning extremely short of sleep but much more refreshed, energized, and ready to go than my co-workers who had relaxed all weekend.

Going back to “regular life” was one of the things that contributed to my experience of the weekend stress as positive: it was short-term. I didn’t live every day of my life like that. Another contributing fact was my belief—at least after the first instance—that I could succeed in producing the desired outcome. (So dopamine also played a role in pushing me to all those finish lines.)

Chronic or excessive stress can have harmful effects on the body, the brain, and interpersonal relationships. But not only do we respond differently to life events and situations than others might respond, we don’t always respond the same way every time. So we can’t just compile a list of things to avoid, and avoiding things isn’t the best life strategy, anyway.

Immunity Against Stress

It’s better to increase the ability to handle challenges than to hide out in the hope of never having to face them. Developing a reliable sense of personal agency—the feeling that you can take action to influence your well-being and the outcome of events—is one of the best defenses against distress. And you can’t develop a reliable sense of personal agency unless you are active and engaged in the world—intentionally and purposefully, that is.

In order to be intentional and purposeful, you have to know what you want. When you don’t know what you want, life often amounts to a lot of busywork, reactivity, and fending off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Knowing what you want focuses your attention and your efforts on what’s important, so you’re less likely to get caught up in the everyday stressors that can add up to a big mess of distress.

There are various things you can do to protect against or cope with stressors, such as eating a healthy diet, getting enough sleep and exercise, and taking time to relax. But being clear about what you want (having direction) and developing a reliable sense of personal agency (knowing how much control you have or don’t have in a given situation) can actually help you develop immunity against the harmful, derailing effects of stress. It can even turn potential distress into eustress!

Stressed? Try to Avoid Future Life Crises*

October 3, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Stress is not a useful term for scientists because it is such a highly subjective phenomenon that it defies definition. —American Institute of Stress

In 1936, Hans Selye, the so-called “father of stress,” defined it as the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change.

It didn’t take long before Selye’s definition expanded to include any unpleasant situation a person was exposed to, their physiological reaction to the unpleasant situation, and the long-term consequences of these reactions (such as an ulcer or a heart attack).

In a 1951 issue of the British Medical Journal, one physician commented that “stress in addition to being itself was also the cause of itself and the result of itself.” Selye himself said that “everyone knows what stress is, but nobody really knows.” And that is pretty much where things are at today.

What Is Stress?

The Global Organization for Stress provides six different definitions of it:

Worry and Anxiety: the worry experienced by a person in particular circumstances or the state of anxiety caused by this. (the Kernerman English learner’s Dictionary)

Bodily or Mental Tension: a physical, chemical or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation…and a state resulting from a stress is one of bodily or mental tension resulting from factors that tend to alter an existent equilibrium. (the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

Strain and Overwork: strain felt by somebody: mental, emotional, or physical strain caused, e.g. by anxiety or overwork. It may cause such symptoms as raised blood pressure or depression. (the Encarta World English Dictionary)

Mental or Emotional Disruption: a mentally or emotionally disruptive or upsetting condition occurring in response to adverse external influences and capable of affecting physical health, usually characterized by increased heart rate, a rise in blood pressure, muscular tension, irritability and depression. (the American heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Threat to Well-Being: stress is a term that refers to the sum of the physical, mental and emotional strains or tensions on a person. Feelings of stress in humans result from interactions between persons and their environment that are perceived as straining or exceeding their adaptive capacities and threatening their well-being. The element of perception indicates that human stress responses reflect differences in personality as well as differences in physical strength or health. (the Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders)

Emotional or Physical Threats: stress is a biological term which refers to the consequences of the failure of a human or animal to respond appropriately to emotional or physical threats to the organism, whether actual or imagined; the autonomic response to environmental stimulus [that] includes a state of alarm and adrenaline production, short-term resistance as a coping mechanism, and exhaustion. (Wikipedia)

Getting Closer…

And a seventh definition from Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biological Sciences and Neurology at Stanford University and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:

If you are a normal mammal, a stressor is a challenge to homeostatic balance—a real physical challenge in the world—and the stress-response is the adaptation your body mobilizes to reestablish homeostasis.

Only Sapolsky’s definition of stress connects back to Selye’s: the stress response is your body’s reaction to change and its attempt to return to or preserve homeostasis—the physiological equivalent of the psychological status quo.

Although “everybody knows what stress is, but nobody really knows,” we think we know enough to be able to measure it.

The most commonly used measure of stress (the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale) doesn’t distinguish between negative stress (distress) or positive stress (eustress). It lumps all stressors together, assigns them a value, and provides you with a numerical score that is supposed to indicate how likely you are to become ill. As I am finding myself saying more and more these days, yikes!

More on stress next time, specifically the difference between negative and positive stress, how we experience stressors, stress and change, and how knowing what you want and developing a reliable sense of personal agency may be your two best defenses against the potential ravages (which are very real) of your body’s stress response.

As you consider all the different definitions of stress, think about how you would define it.

*Non-ironic advice from a stress-reduction website.