Change your mindset, change the game | Dr. Alia Crum | TEDxTraverseCity

Transcriber: Queenie Lee Reviewer: Peter van de Ven So today I'm going to talk about how our

mindset

matters in virtually every facet of our lives. But I want to start by telling a story about a group of researchers in Italy. Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti and his colleagues studied a group of patients undergoing thoracic surgery. What you should know about thoracic surgery is that it is a very invasive procedure. Patients are anesthetized while surgeons make large incisions in the muscles of the sides and back to access the heart and lungs. Now, about an hour after the anesthesia wears off, the pain starts to appear.

Fortunately, patients receive strong doses of morphine sulfate, a powerful pain reliever. This is a routine treatment for thoracic surgery, but Dr. Benedetti and his colleagues made some subtle adjustments: Half of the patients received their morphine dose from a doctor at their bedside; The other half were given exactly the same dose of morphine, but they were given it intravenously via a pre-programmed pump. You would think that both groups of patients would experience the same relief, but this was not the case. The group that received morphine from the doctor reported significant reductions in their pain levels. The other group, the group that received exactly the same amount of morphine but was unaware of it, did not appear to experience the same benefit.

So Dr. Benedetti and his colleagues didn't stop there. They used the same procedure to test the effectiveness of other treatments: treatments for anxiety, treatments for Parkinson's disease, treatments for hypertension. What they found was remarkable and consistent. When patients knew about the treatment and expected to receive benefit, the treatment was very effective. But when they weren't, that same medication, that same pill, and that same procedure were mitigated and, in some cases, not even effective at all. So I read about these studies when I was a student at Harvard University and, at the time, I was deeply immersed in the literature on the placebo effect.

And the more he read, the more he began to think about the true nature of placebos. So what really is the placebo effect? Well, most people dismiss the placebo effect as just a magical response to some fake pill or some fake procedure, but that's not what the placebo effect is. The placebo effect is not about the fake pill, nor the sugar pill, nor the fake procedure. What the placebo effect really is is a powerful, solid and consistent demonstration of the capacity of our way of thinking; in this case, the expectation of healing, of recruiting healing properties into the body.

So what is a

mindset

? A mindset is literally a setting of the mind, it is a lens or a state of mind through which we view the world, simplifying the infinite number of potential interpretations at any given moment. Now, the ability to simplify our world through our way of thinking is a natural part of being human. But what I want to suggest to you today is that these mindsets are not inconsequential and, on the contrary, they play a fundamental role in determining our health and well-being. While at Harvard, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Ellen Langer.

She is a psychology professor and when she heard that I was also a division one athlete, she laughed at me. She said, "You know, exercise is just a placebo, right?" (laughs) Now, I was a little offended because at the time I was spending up to four hours a day training my body to be in optimal shape. But it did make me think about mindsets and how they might matter outside of medical laws. Was I getting stronger and fitter because of the time and energy I was putting into my training? Or was I getting fitter and stronger because I thought I would?

What about the other end? What if people did an extraordinary amount of exercise but were not aware of it? Wouldn't they receive the same benefit? We decided to try this, and to test it we found a really unique group of women: a group of 84 housekeepers who work at seven different hotels in the U.S. These women are on their feet all day. They use a variety of muscles and burn an extraordinary amount of calories, simply doing their job. But what's interesting is that these women don't seem to see their work from this perspective. We ask them;

We said, "Do you exercise regularly?" And two-thirds said "No." (Laughs) So we said, "Okay. Okay, so on a scale of zero to ten, how much exercise do you do?" And a third of them said, "Zero. I don't exercise at all." So we asked ourselves what would happen if we could

change

their way of thinking. So we took these women and divided them into two groups. We measure them based on a variety of things, including their weight, their blood pressure, their body fat, and their satisfaction with their job. And then we took half of them and gave them a simple 15-minute presentation.

We gave them this sign and said, "Your job is good exercise. It meets the Surgeon General's requirements, which are simply to accumulate about 30 minutes of moderate physical activity. You should expect to receive those benefits. 15 minutes. We came back four weeks later and We measured them again. Not surprisingly, the groups that did not receive this information did not

change

, but those that did receive it looked different, had a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure, and reported lower body fat. that they liked their job better (Laughs). So what does this tell us? To me, it was fascinating that just as a result of a simple 15-minute presentation, the entire

game

changed, producing a cascade of emotions both in their. health and well-being, presumably without even changing their behavior.

Now some of you might be thinking, "How do they know they didn't change their behavior, because that must have been what produced the effects? We know that they no longer worked, and the room managers themselves assured us that they did not join the sports club on the street below. But of course we can't know for sure if they weren't putting a little more effort into making their beds. So this question really tormented me. Is there a direct and immediate connection between our way of thinking and our body? So to test this, I worked with my Yale colleagues Kelly Brownell, Will Corbin, and Peter Salovey, and we did it by making a bunch of smoothies.

So we made this big batch of smoothies and then we invited people to come to our lab to try them and in return we would give them $75. Sounds great, right? The least appealing aspect of the arrangement was that while they drank the shakes, we hooked them up to an IV so we could take blood samples. We went out to measure ghrelin. Ghrelin is a peptide secreted in the intestine; medical experts call it the hunger hormone. So when we haven't eaten for a while, our ghrelin levels start to rise, signaling to the brain, "It's time to look for food" and slowing down our metabolism, in case we don't find that food.

Now let's say we go out, find and devour a milkshake, a burger, some fries, our ghrelin levels drop, signaling our brain, "It's time to stop eating," and speeding up our metabolism so we can burn off the food we've just finished eating. from being consumed. So the participants came in, we hooked them up to an IV, and then we gave them a shake, Sensi-Shake. This is zero percent fat, 140 calories, zero added sugar, this is guilt-free indulgence. Then they drank their shake, and in response, their ghrelin levels decreased, but only very slightly, signaling to the brain that they had consumed some food, but not a lot.

So a week later, they came back to our lab, and we hooked them back up to an IV and gave them this shake. (Laughs) 620 calories, 30 grams of fat, 56 grams of sugar: this, this is the decadence you deserve. (Laughter) And in response to this shake, their ghrelin levels dropped again, but this time at a significantly steeper rate, about three times more than the shake they had before. Now this would make sense to any metabolic nutritionist who understands that the drop in ghrelin is proportional to the amount of calories consumed. But there was a problem: In this study, although participants thought they had consumed the sensitive shake and the indulgent shake, we actually gave them the exact same shake at both times.

So what does this tell us? Just as in the case where the same amount of morphine produced more or less effect depending on our consciousness, and as in the case where the same amount of exercise produced more or less benefit depending on how it is interpreted, here Once again , our way of thinking proved to be important. In this case, it suggests that it might not just be the calories in and out, or the precise composition of fats and nutrients, but what we believe, what we expect, what we think about the foods we eat, that determines our body's response.

So in light of this, it is up to us to consider our own lives: what are our ways of thinking? And how could we begin to change them, to alter them, so that they are more beneficial? Take stress as an example. What is

your

way of thinking about stress? If you're like most people, you have the mentality that stress is bad: bad stress. Now this is not surprising considering that everywhere we look there are warnings, labels screaming at us and reminding us of the negative effects of stress. But the truth about stress is not so clear-cut, and in fact there is a strong and growing body of research showing that stress can have positive effects, improving its effects on our health, well-being and performance.

Now, I'm not here to try to persuade you that the effects of stress are increasing, but rather to point out that the truth about stress is like most things in life, and that is, it is uncertain. And therefore, begging the question: does our way of thinking about stress determine our response? So to test this question, I worked with Shawn Achor and Peter Salovey, and we worked with a group of 300 employees. This was after the 2008 financial crash, and we decided: they were stressed, they had just found out that ten percent of their workforce was going to be laid off, and they were overworked.

We decided to see if we could change his way of thinking. And we did it by having them watch simple video clips. So I'm going to show you here simultaneously, but half of the participants saw the one on the left and the other half saw the one on the right. (Video starts) versus (Video ends) So you get the point, right? So here we are... in the dark. (Laughter) So here we are: they are looking at facts, research, anecdotes, all true, but oriented towards one point of view or another. What we found was interesting: those who watched these simple three-minute video clips before the bell rang, before starting their work, over the course of the following weeks reported fewer negative health symptoms, less back pain, less tension muscle, less insomnia.

And they also reported a higher level of commitment and performance at work. So far I have presented four studies, four studies that demonstrate the power of mindset in medicine, exercise, diet, and stress. There are many other very talented scholars addressing this phenomenon as we speak. Carol Dweck's research shows us that if we can change the way we think about intelligence and talent as fixed and changing over time, we can dramatically alter our academic and professional success. Yale epidemiologist Becca Levy's research shows us that if we can change our way of thinking about aging, from seeing aging as an inevitable process of deterioration to a process of acquiring wisdom, gaining growth not only shapes the course of how we age but even prolongs longevity. .

Ted Kaptchuk and his group at the Harvard Placebo Studies Program are doing cutting-edge work to understand how we can begin to harness and ethically use the placebo effect in clinical practice. Although the context is different, the message is the same. Our way of thinking matters. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that medications don't work, or that exercise has no benefits, and that what we eat doesn't matter; it does. But the psychological and physiological effect of anything in our lives can and is influenced by our way of thinking. So is the power of mindset limitless? Probably not, but what I hope I've done for you today is inspired you to reconsider where those boundaries really are.

Because the real task before us is to begin to claim this power for ourselves, recognize the power of mindset and know that just like this (snaps fingers) in the blink of an eye, we can change the

game

of any facet of our life. life simply by changing our way of thinking. Thank you. (Applause)