Giulio Bonasera
For me, the past year has been what might euphemistically be described as “challenging”. Not long after leaving a steady job for the freedom and financial insecurity of freelance life, it was made clear to me that my 25-year relationship with my wife would be ending in divorce, with all the upheaval that involves. My dad, meanwhile, has Alzheimer’s, so I’ve been travelling up and down the country to help my mum with his care.
To be clear,I’maware many people face far worse.I’moversharing on this occasionto explain why, having become aware ofresearch showingthat our mindsets have a huge influence on how we navigate life’s twists and turns, I decided I needed to shift my own.
The question was how. What could I do, in practical terms, to shift my perspective on divorce from “catastrophe” – something that left me feeling deeply sad and anxious about the future – to “opportunity for growth”? And how could I address the sense that the situation was ageing me prematurely, affecting my health now and potentially my longevity? In search of answers, I turned to the psychologists at the forefront of mindset research.
I wasn’t expecting miracles. At 44, I figured my mindsets would be deeply ingrained. And yet I was pleased to discover not only that researchers are investigating concrete mindset-shift strategies, but also that – for me, at least – one in particular proved remarkably effective. “It’s not magic,” says , a psychologist at Stanford University in California. “We know it works and we’re working to get a more sophisticated understanding of why, when and how.”
Master your mindset
At first glance, the term “mindset” soundsvague.For psychologists,however,it hasa precise definition: a set of beliefs and expectations about how some aspect of the world works and what that means for us. “The way we think about it is asa belief about yourself or your environment that shapes your interpretations and actions,”saysa psychologistat the University of TexasatAustin. “It’syour own intuitive, usually unspoken, theory about how things work– a theorythat shapes what you look for, how you make sense of things and how you act.”
What’smore,there isextensive evidencethatmindsets affect many aspects of our lives. The classic example is that people with a growth mindset – the belief that intelligence and abilities can improve with effort – are more likely to persevere after failure and more willing to take on novel challenges than people with a fixed mindset, who view abilities as innate and unchangeable. Similarly, people who view stress as enhancing, rather than detrimental, tend to perform better under pressure and display more adaptive physiological responses to stressful situations. It’s the same story for everything from diet and exercise to sleep.
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“The evidence is overwhelming,”says at Harvard University, who pioneered work on ageing mindsets in the 1980s. Nor should it be surprising, she argues: our minds and bodies are intimately connected, so it makes sense that how we think about something will change how we feel and even respond physiologically. Crucially, experiments also show that mindsets aren’t set in stone. “In general, mindsets can be completely changed,” says Yeager, who studies growth mindsets. “We see that in our data every year.”
Even so,“the most compelling evidence is experiential”,Crum tells me, pointing out that the only way each of us can really know if mindset-change can help is to try it for ourselves. Which brings us back to my situation.
When I share my plan, Crum has a question of her own: which mindset? “Generally, it’s important to isolate the mindset you want to change”, she says, because people have separate beliefs and expectations about each aspect of life, and the way to change them varies. “Being specific helps you to avoid the thing that people often get wrong about mindsets, which is that it is just broadly positive thinking,” says Crum.
For me, the answer was obvious.Igenuinelydidn’tseethedivorce coming and thefallouthas been stressful.My tendency to ruminate has gone into overdrive, affecting my sleep and my focus, which affectsmy income, further compoundingthe anxiety.Clearly, mystress mindset was to be myfirstfocus –and I was speaking to the right person, because Crumisakeyfigurehere.
Reframing how you think about stress can bolster your ability to handle life’s challenges Maskot/Alamy
Her work centres on the idea that stress isn’t what you think it is. The problem, says Crum, is that “our cultural assumption is that stress is negative”. That is largely down to what we hear about the harm it can do. But the truth is that stress is neutral, says Crum. It is just the body’s response to a demand, and in many cases the familiar physiological sensations are helpful: the release of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, for instance, prime us to confront a challenge. Psychologically, too, slow-burn stress from life events like job loss and divorce can bring long-term gains.
The point is that the work Crum and her colleagues have done shows that changing your stress mindset – from seeing stress as debilitating to viewing it as enhancing – can substantially affect which way it goes.
To take just one example, in a randomised-controlled trial involving nearly 400 people conducted two years into the covid-19 pandemic, and published in 2025, Crum and her colleagues assigned one group to a mindset intervention. This entailed watching videos and completing written exercises about the power of mindsets generally and about how people often benefit from living through catastrophic experiences. The other group watched videos about the chronology of the pandemic.
Three months later, the people in – a biomarker of systemic inflammation – than they did at the start of the study.“We were able to show that people can reframe stressful events not just in realtime, but also by deliberately reflecting the past through the lens of opportunity, which can fundamentally alter how it influences our health and vitality in the future,” says Crum.
All of which was encouraging. Reflecting on my own mindset regarding divorce, I realised it had been entirely negative. For me, divorce feels like a huge loss, first of all, but also a failure – and one with distressing consequences, not least for our two children. All this coloured my immediate response. And yet when I thought about it, months after the initial shock, with a deeper understanding of the power of mindsets, I could see that it didn’t have to be that way.
The problem wasthatitwasn’tclearhowexactlyIcouldchangemy stress mindsetregardingthedivorce.EverythingI’dread overlooked the question of what we should do,practically speaking,to reset our beliefs and expectations.In thepast few years,however,researchers havebeentesting differentmindset-shiftinterventions.“I take the question of how, and how best, to change mindsets very seriously,” says Crum.“What good is knowing the power of mindset if you don’t also have the ability to change them?”
Thinking about thinking
Broadly, there are two different kinds of approach. The first is persuasive: to convince participants that one mindset is right or true. It works. Indeed, Yeager has found that it is even more effective if you ask participants to explain the benefits of the target mindset to others. “If we just teach somebody the better mindset and have them use it to help others, they tend to adopt it,” he says.
But Crum suspected that persuading people that one mindset is more right or true than another may not be the best approach. Trying to convince someone that they should think of some aspect of their life in a particular way inevitably oversimplifies its true nature, which is usually complex and ambiguous. “You see the videos [in the interventions] and you’re like, OK, stress is enhancing, I’m going to crush my work,” she says. “But then you read something, or something happens, and suddenly you think, it’s not true. So you’re opening yourself up for disconfirmation.”
Hence Crum and others have recently been investigating a different strategy. Here, the idea is to give people balanced information about the nature of stress, along with the power of mindsets, with a view to empowering them to choose a more adaptive stress mindset even in the face of conflicting information and events.
“The goal is to adopt a particular mindset not necessarily because it’s more true, but because it’s more useful,” says Crum. “To do that, you first have to understand that the belief that stress is debilitating isn’t some unmediated reflection of an objective truth. It’s a belief. And then you need to understand that those beliefs have consequences, so you start to understand their self-fulfilling effects.” That’s why it’s called the metacognitive approach: you are encouraging people to think about how they are thinking.
Sometimes, a shift in perspective can offer a whole new perspective Khairil Azhar Junos/Alamy
Sure enough, it seems to work better than persuasion, at least when it comes to stress. When Crum and her colleagues compared the with persuasion, they found that it leads to more pronounced mindset shifts and that those changes were more robust. “All of our intervention studies now are metacognitive,” says Crum.
I was sold, and Crum helpfully pointed me to an she and her colleagues had devised. It consists of short videos and written exercises on the nature of stress and the power of mindsets, followed by a focus on Crum’s three-step implementation process – to acknowledge the stress, welcome it and utilise it. It took me a couple of hours to complete.
I was taken aback by how often I found myself reaching for the three steps over the following weeks – and even more so by the extent to which it changed the way I felt and behaved. Just before bed, first thing in the morning and in moments where I could feel anxiety welling up, I asked myself the following questions: What’s the source of my stress? Why am I stressed about this? And how can I best repurpose it? Honestly, I felt energised and resilient every time. Even when the latest bit of divorce admin arrived, which typically sends me into an emotional tailspin, I felt better able to cope. Repeat the steps, reframe the stress.
My experience is anecdotal, of course. But it aligns with another body of research on emotional regulation. , also at Stanford University, argues that emotions unfold in stages: we encounter a situation, attend to certain aspects of it, interpret what it means and finally generate a full emotional response. Building on that model, Gross and his colleagues have shown that if we intervene at the interpretation stage with a process he calls “cognitive reappraisal”, we can alter the meaning of a situation before the emotional response is consolidated.
Cognitive reappraisal involves changing how you interpret a situation to alter the emotional response. Gross and others have demonstrated that it is effective across all manner of contexts, with habitual use leading to less negative emotion, better well-being, stronger relationships and greater life satisfaction. An found “compelling evidence showing that cognitive reappraisal skills operate as a protective strategy against stress and adversity and, therefore, enhance personal resilience”.
Viewed in that light, it’s easy to see why the reinterpretation embodied in Crum’s stress-mindset intervention is effective. It operates first at the higher level of beliefs and expectations, but also in the moment, offering a robust, practical strategy for reinterpreting the situation. And it has made a tangible difference for me. Obviously, it’s hard to know what is simply the result of the passage of time and what is down to the mindset shift, but I have been more emotionally stable, for starters, and more focused and productive at work.
Iwasn’tdone yet, though.The more I thought about my own mindsets, the more I came to see that mythrowaway remarksabout howallof this wasageing me prematurelywereindicativeofanageing mindset thatisalmost certainlynot good for my health and longevity.
Again, the research here is convincing. at Yale Universityhas published dozens of studies showing thatour beliefs and expectations about ageing–the extent to which we think decline is inevitable as we get older–predict how wefare in the coming decades.
“We’ve looked at the ways positive age beliefs are associated with behaviour, with people more likely to exercise and take prescribed medications,andwith better cognitive performance and physical healthmeasured in various ways,”says Levy.“When we’ve looked at longevity, we’veevenfound that people who’ve taken in more positive age beliefs have a survival advantage.”
In onelongitudinal study,for instance,Levy and her colleagues found that, on average, people with a moreoptimistictake on ageing than those who were more pessimistic, even having controlled for factors such as socioeconomic statusandbaselinehealth.
In a ,Levy andhercolleaguestrackedmore than 11,000older adults in the USover 12 years. Theyfoundfirstlythatcognitive and physical performance improved fornearly halfof participants, giving lie to the idea that decline is inevitable.Buthaving asked participants at the outset to rate the extent to which they agreed with statements such as “As you get older, you are less useful”and “I am as happy now aswhen I was younger”, the researchersalsofound“that those who’d takenonmore positive age beliefs are significantly more likely to show trajectories of improvement”,says Levy.
Shifting negative beliefs
Thesefindings are explained byLevy’s“stereotype embodiment theory”, whichproposeswe internalisebeliefsabout ageingthrough our livesandthattheyeventuallybecome self-relevant,shaping behaviour and physiology.Thishas,in turn,informed intervention strategies.“We’ve found that most people are able to shift their negative ageing beliefs toward more positive views,” says Levy.Indeed, in her 2022bookBreaking the Age Code, sheoutlines practical things we can do.
Levy suggests starting by becoming aware of the stereotypes we have internalised, such as by noting the first words that come to mind when we think about older people. The next thing is to question where those beliefs come from, and finally to challenge them with alternative explanations – you forgot your keys not because you are getting older, say, but because you were distracted. “We suggest people keep a diary for a week of all the age belief messages they come across and then, for all the negative ones, think about alternative narratives,” says Levy.
The beliefs you hold about ageing appear to have a dramatic effect on how you feel as you get older David Litschel/Alamy
Obviously, it is too early to say if any of this will help me live healthier for longer. But “it’s never too early to start strengthening your positive age beliefs”, says Levy, pointing to inwhich shefollowed people from their late teens until their 60s and foundacorrelation betweenearlynegativeageing beliefs andpoorcardiovascular healthin old age.
Sowhat didI learn, in the final reckoning,by trying to shift my mindsets?The first thing is that it iseminently doable. You might even argue that wedon’tneed psychologists to tell us we can feel differently aboutstress or ageing,and that doing so can change how we respond.Typically, though,wedon’t. We tend not to give our mindsets a second thought because thatis their nature– default setsof beliefs and expectations.
This iswhy Langerprefers tospeak about“mindlessness”.“I think virtually all of us, almost all of the time, are mindless,” she says.“A mindset is just what you think you know about something.And once you thinkyouknow something, alternativesdon’toccur to you.”Itis also whyLanger’sadviceisunapologeticallybroad-ranging:“The way to deal with this mindlessness, for any of these views, is to look for contradictory evidence.How do you know? How might it not be true, or how else might the situationyou’rein be understood and interpreted?”
In that sense, Langer argues that awareness isthe key.What I wouldadd,based on my own experience, isthatawarenessmust becombinedwith practical stepsthathelp turna new way of thinking intoahabit.I still use Crum’s three-step process when faced with a stressful situation, for instance, and it still works to make me feel more resilient.SoI do feel better equipped to deal with whatever life throws at me.
It is also worth noting, however, that none of this is to deny that some of the things that life dishes out are difficult, upsetting or overwhelming. The point is rather that outcomes are rarely fixed and the way we interpret events can shape how they unfold.
Inmy case,I’mcontentto be mindful thatIdon’tknow howlife after divorcewill pan out, andthatIhave a clear understanding of what I can do, in Langer’s phrase, “to exploit the power of uncertainty”.
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