Episode 262: Mindset Makeover: Master Weight Loss, IQ, Pain Management, Stress Management, & Age Better

Hey everybody. This is Dr. John back with the latest episode of the Evolved Caveman Podcast, and this topic is near and dear to my heart. This is a talk that I've been doing for 20 years because it's so incredibly important to our success and our happiness and how we make sense of life. And this episode is all about mindset.

It's called mindset matters, strengthening the power of your mind. And this is deceptively simple and wildly powerful. And before your eyes glaze over, like you're reading revisions in the tax code, stay with me. This episode might just change how you think, laugh, love, lose weight, deal with pain, and succeed in life with a decision.

Literally. Let me start with a story from the front lines. This was probably 20 years ago. I was speaking monthly at a continuation high school, a school for young people who had been typically booted out of traditional high schools. That was a tough crowd. There were kids with ADHD, OCD, ODD, drug issues, pregnancy, addiction issues.

I remember when I would go in there, half would have at least one AirPod in their ear, and two thirds of them were probably stoned during my presentations. And I thought, okay, well. They'll be more receptive that way. And I remember during this one visit, I was walking to do the presentation and the principal kind of ran up alongside me and told me about this new student that they had.

Well, a couple minutes afterwards, I found out because I was maybe two sentences into my presentation, and this young lady stood up and said, I got a question. I'm black, I'm female, I'm 16. I don't have a family. I live in a group home. Why should I listen to anything you have to say? I thought, oh shit, how do I respond to that?

And I knew if I challenged her, she's gone. I lose her. So I said the best thing I could think of, which was, you're absolutely right, we're different. I'm white, I'm middle aged, I'm middle class. I have a family. I live in a home. And on those levels, we are different. You're right. However, I've studied emotions and mindset for over two decades.

I've got tools that can help you turn down the volume on the painful emotions and tools to dial up the volume on the positive ones. You can try out the tools. They're free. Maybe they make your life better. Three weeks later, she flipped the script. She started attending school, she joined student leadership.

She ended up graduating towards the top of her class, and she even was the speaker at commencement. Later I found out she graduated from college. Something no one ever thought she would do. All from one powerful mindset shift. She decided that she could learn, she could grow, she could improve. That's the impact of mindset.

So you might be asking, what the hell is a mindset? Well, a mindset is a choice. A choice to adopt, a set of beliefs that you know to be beneficial. A set of beliefs that science proves is good for you and serves you. And most importantly, mindsets can be learned. It's a choice and you choose to learn them.

Your mindset is not set in stone. It's a choice, a belief system, and that means it can always be changed, upgraded, and evolved, which is what this podcast is all about, our evolution. Towards greater happiness and success. Now let me back up and explain the difference between fixed and growth mindsets, because one of the basic tenets I was taught at uc, Berkeley in my PhD program was that intelligence levels are fixed.

They're static, they don't change. If you're born stupid, you die stupid. If you're born smart, you die smart, and it doesn't vary. And that was a mere 30 years ago. That was about the time that Stanford's Carol Dweck came in and blew the lid off this old school belief that intelligence is fixed In one study, simply teaching a growth mindset to seventh graders boosted their average IQ score by 30 points.

That moves the group from an average intelligence of a hundred to a superior intelligence of one 30. Just as an example. Let that sink in. That's two standard deviations from the norm that a simple change in mindset boosted IQ, something which we previously thought was undoable. That's amazing. So what's the difference?

The fixed mindset is what most of us grew up with. The idea that intelligence is etched in stone, it's unchanging. That effort is seen as something that's put in by lesser people. By people that aren't as intelligent. Failure is interpreted as a lack of intelligence, and one of the underlying beliefs of a fixed mindset is if winning means you're a winner, then when you lose, it means you're a loser, which doesn't help our self-esteem.

So with a fixed mindset, when you're confronted with difficult material, which for me was high school calculus, you back off. You feel a little bit dejected, a little depressed, a little anxious, and you think, oh, I guess I'm just not smart enough. I guess I can't learn this. For me, I thought, well, this is the end of my math career, I guess this is where I maxed out, and you tend to withdraw from the material.

Now, on the other hand, a growth mindset is the belief that intelligence can change, that it's malleable, and all of us can learn to become smarter, more adaptable, and more capable. And learning requires work and effort, and our potential is limitless. So it's the idea that intelligence can change with effort.

Effort is the path to mastery. Challenges equal opportunities. When you inevitably get confronted with difficult material, you think, wow, this is really hard. Maybe I need to find some other ways to master this material. Maybe I need to find different ways to come at it. Let me try talking to a student in the class that's doing well.

Let me try talking to the teacher. Let me look for other approaches to this material online. Maybe I should get a tutor. But you never lose faith in your intellectual ability because it's a challenge. A challenge that you are up to with sufficient effort. It's not a failure. Let me give you some examples of this because I think the examples are pretty breathtaking.

So real world example number one, Josh Waitzkin. Josh is a world chess champion who turned himself into a world champion martial artist. He doesn't consider himself special as he doesn't consider himself a genius or a prodigy. He looks at himself as quite average. He also knows that he's gotta put forth maximum effort if he wants to achieve these high goals.

Now, the thing that's amazing to me about Josh is that he was first the world champion of chess, and that's, that's damn good, but that wasn't enough for him. After that, he says, I think I wanna try martial arts. He started learning Tai Chi and after many failures and much effort and some broken bones, he became world champion at Tai Chi.

Not once, but twice. Now, I've never heard of anyone doing that, going from such an intellectual pursuit as chess is to a physical pursuit like martial arts. He went from an intellectual champion to a physical champion. He went from beating everyone in chess to beating everyone on the mat. He succeeded, not because he was a genius, which he may have been, but because he deeply understands that effort leads to growth and mastery.

Real world example number two. Some years ago I got permission from a client of mine to share this story with you and to me, it's one of the more moving and impressive stories and inspirational stories that I know of. At the time, he was 24, 24 years old, and he survived a devastating accident. At the age of 12, he was struck in the head by a golf club.

Someone was practicing a golf swing while he was sitting on the curb waiting for his mom to pick him up. He got hit with the club full force in the temple. He nearly bled out in front of a country club. They rushed him to the hospital and he was put into a medically induced coma for six months. He spent a year and a half in a hospital learning how to walk, talk, and feed himself with a fork again.

I met him some seven years after that and he had recently done some extensive neuropsych evaluations by a very prominent neuropsychologist. And I got a report from this neuropsychologist that was about two inches thick. The report said his memory, reasoning and cognitive abilities were all below the fifth percentile.

That means 95 out of a hundred people had better reasoning, better cognitive ability and better memory. So he comes in after I read the report, and I knew him pretty well at this point, and I knew I could challenge him. I threw it on the ottoman in between us and I said, okay, you've seen the report.

I've seen the report. Now we have a choice to make. Either you believe that report is true and your options are severely limited, or you decide that's not true for you, that we're gonna make that untrue. We're gonna prove it that it's wrong. And so we decided to set about proving it wrong, and one of the questions he had was, can I do college level work?

Well, I didn't have the answer to that. So I said, let's set about and see if we can answer that question. He went to community college. He took three courses. It was not easy. He put in a lot of effort. We really focused on ways to sustain daily effort, building strategies for success. Hired a tutor and through our work together, he worked his ass off and he came to me at the end of the semester hanging his head.

He was really sad and I said, how are your grades going? He said, I'm not doing that good. I got two C's and a b. I was stunned. I said, my friend, do you realize that you answered the question that you had? The question was not, can you get a's? The question was, can you do college level work? And you've answered that question with a yes.

That's amazing. He defied the experts. That's the power of a growth mindset. The other thing to consider in this fixed versus growth mindset idea has to do with your use of the word failure. There's a fundamental difference between the growth and fixed mindset. Those with a fixed mindset, use the word failure.

I've failed. I'm a failure. We need to pull that word out of our vocabulary and replace it with challenge or learning opportunity. Because one of the things you learn with a growth mindset is when you've hit a challenge, it's just part of the learning process, and you just wanna keep going because you know you're gonna find another way around.

This challenge. When met with this challenge, a fixed mindset person will blame themselves. They interpret failure as a lack of ability. They become somewhere between depressed and anxious, and they end up disengaging from the material. I hit calculus and I was like, oh my God, like I'm not getting this. I must be stupid.

I pulled back from the material. I remember I barely got a B minus outta the class, and I thought it was a failure at that time because I had a fixed mindset. I blamed myself. I blamed the teacher. I blamed the material. If you have a growth mindset on the other hand and you encounter challenge, you don't think of it as failure.

So you don't blame anybody. You understand it as this is just part of the learning process. So you look for lessons in the challenges, you persist and you look for other ways around the challenge and you remain hopeful. So what we found in research is that the key to success is not just these traits of perseverance, resiliency, grit, and effort.

It's actually the growth mindset which underlies these other success fueling traits. It's the granddaddy. Mindsets. So once you get the growth mindset down, the other traits seem to follow suit. So beyond intelligence, let me share some more areas in which mindset has been shown to make all the difference in critically important areas of your life, including pain, stress, aging, and weight loss.

A few years ago, Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti did a study with patients who were recovering from thoracic surgery around pain management and the placebo effect. Now thoracic surgery is a really invasive surgery. It's very painful. When you get outta surgery, you get morphine to help with the pain. So in this experiment, what they did is split the patients who were recovering into two groups.

One group got a shot of morphine into the iv. The doctor would come into the room, say, Hey, how you doing? I'm gonna give you some morphine. Now give them the shot and say, there you go. The other group got the morphine from a pre-programmed pump, exactly the same amount of morphine at exactly the same time.

There was no difference in the amount of morphine or the timing of when it was administered. The only difference was in the patient's awareness that they were receiving the meds and in their expectation that they would gain some relief from their pain. The results. Those who saw the doctor inject the morphine into the IV, reported 34% more relief from their pain.

That's 34% improvement in pain relief simply from a mindset difference. That's just from expectation. I'm going to feel better. So he didn't stop there. He looked deeper into when patients were aware of the treatment and expected a benefit, what else might happen? Anxiety sufferers received 20% more benefit when they were aware of the treatment and expected a benefit.

Those with Parkinson's had an 11% greater decrease in symptoms. Those with high blood pressure got 8% more decrease in their blood pressure. And what we're talking about here is the placebo effect, and you've heard about the placebo effect is like a sugar pill, but the expectation of benefits creates a real life impact.

The brain is a factory of creating neurochemicals that can help or hinder your healing and your expectations. Your mindset turns it on to help you heal. Placebo isn't trickery. It's a mirror reflecting the power of belief. Your brain is incredibly powerful. Do not underestimate, underestimated. It's powerful.

When you believe you can't do something. It's powerful when you believe you can. Thinking makes it so to a large extent, and yes, there is a dark twin. The nocebo effect, if you don't believe something's going to help you, it's probably not gonna help you. Your mind literally can block the benefit. I had a client some years ago, very depressed, and I shared the idea of the nocebo effect with him, and he had an aha.

He was like, oh my God, that's why Advil has never worked for me. He just didn't believe it would do anything. And the funny thing was he had a effect in pretty much every area of his life. He just didn't believe anything could help him, so therefore it wouldn't help him. But therefore, also, he wouldn't try, he wouldn't put forth effort in any of the exercises or tools that I was teaching and nothing would help him.

He was like, no, that won't work for me. No, that would work for other people. Nope, I've tried it. He's so attached to his own story of suffering that he refuses to believe anything can help him, and so nothing does. So let me ask you, where in your life are you believing change is not possible? And how badly might this be limiting you?

And realize also that these mindsets are context specific. You might have a fixed mindset in math, but a growth mindset In English, you might have a fixed mindset at home in terms of your relationship, but you might have a growth mindset in terms of your ability to learn skills at work. So go through your day and look for where you might have a fixed mindset and where you might have a growth mindset.

Alright, the next area is stress. And stress is what you say it is. Most people think chronic stress is bad, and this idea has been fed to us through the media for years. But in truth, there's two sides to stress and research can back up both of them. There's the idea that stress is good, and the idea that stress is bad.

Stress is enhancing, stress is destructive. There's more and more research showing that stress can have positive effects on our abilities. For instance, before this podcast, I was a little nervous. I reinterpret these bodily symptoms as this is my body readying me for a challenge. I'm getting amped. It's giving me energy, I'm getting alert.

I'm ready to focus. And that serves us. It serves me. So the question was in some of these other studies, to what extent do our beliefs about stress affect how we respond to stress on a physical and psychological level? Was the focus of a study done at Yale that looked at 300 people at a company going through layoffs.

They split the 300 employees into two groups. One group saw a three minute presentation on stress as debilitating. Now stop for a moment and think about that. This is merely a three minute presentation. This is about as short an intervention as I've seen. One group saw the stress is debilitating presentation.

The other group saw a different presentation that explained how stress is enhancing. In other words, that it helps your performance. So they got the two groups, got one of three minute messages. Stress is debilitating or stress is helpful. Stress either deteriorates your focus, decision making, drive and performance.

Or stress enhances these same areas. What they found is pretty remarkable. The employees who watched the stress as enhancing video had fewer physical aches and pains, less insomnia, less muscle tension, and a higher level of engagement and performance at work. That's incredible for a three minute intervention in the social sciences, you just don't see results like that.

So the conclusion is that stress isn't inherently bad. It's more about how you perceive it. You can look at it as stress equals energy. And what's your belief about how that energy shapes your outcome, your performance? If you think stress is bad for you, guess what it is. If you think stress is empowering, energizing helps you perform better in high stake situations, it serves you.

I mean, the clearest example I can give you is. The starting pitcher in the World Series, whoever that is has a lot of stress on him, and elite athletes have to find ways to befriend stress and make it work for them so that it enhances their performance and doesn't detract from what they wanna do. The next area is one that's near and dear to my heart as I'm, you know, 58 and kind of heading towards my sixth decade.

But it's about aging. The question is, is aging inevitable or do we have some hand in controlling it? So Ellen Langer, who's a Hall of Fame psychology researcher, did a seminal study a while back where she looked at a group of men in their eighties. She split these men into two groups. One group she told to just reminisce about the 1950s.

The other group she took for a week and put them into a college dorm, which she had decorated as if it were the 1950s. There was nothing in these dorms that was created after 1959, and she instructed this group of men to talk about news events only in the 1950s. Listen to radio broadcasts only from the fifties.

Don't talk about anything past 1959. Speak as if you are in your fifties, 30 years younger, and what you found was amazing. And this is only one week that they did this in intervention for and by acting as if they were in their late fifties, they actually changed significantly how they performed on benchmark tests.

So while both groups showed improvement in hearing memory and grip strength, the experimental group showed all the above, plus greater flexibility, less arthritis, a 63% increase in intelligence, better posture, and better vision. Which is crazy because I don't know of anything that affects vision except apparently your mindset.

They were also rated as better looking and as looking younger by independent raters. So if the mind can have this much of an impact on the body, hell, what other potential is there? Alright, one more. Wanna lose weight? Your mindset matters. So this is the epic weight loss mindset study performed by Alia Crum who's now at Stanford.

So some years ago, Alia was a D 1 athlete in college. She might've been in graduate school when her mentor Ellen Langer Said to her, you know, exercise is a placebo, which means we get the benefits of exercise because we believe we should get benefits from exercise. And this frustrated Alia who felt that the benefits of the exercise were a direct result of her working out four hours a day.

The incredible thing about Alia is that she figured out a way to test this idea. If you're exercising but you're not aware, it's actually exercise. Do you not get any benefit from it? An odd question. And when I first heard that, I was like, okay, great, but how are you gonna do this experiment? And Alia found a way.

They found housekeepers in a hotel chain. They interviewed them ladies who were working 40 hours a week, changing bed linens, cleaning sinks, vacuuming. Two-thirds of whom said, I get no exercise. Zero. So they did a 10 minute intervention. They taught one group of these women in this 10 minute presentation that their work actually qualified as exercise, according to the surgeon General, and broke each task down into calorie burn.

So shared with them that you're burning 250 calories while you vacuum. You burn 200 calories, changing the bed, you burn 180 calories, cleaning a sink, and so on. So they were taught that they were actually getting eight hours of exercise a day or 40 hours a week. That was the only thing that changed.

Everything else was held constant. There was no exercise outside of work. They didn't change how they ate, so what happened? Two weeks later, these women in the experimental group reported being more satisfied with work. Their systolic blood pressure went down. They had a lower hip to waist ratio, and they lost weight.

Again. They did not join a gym. They did not change their activities. They did not change what they ate. This was purely a change from their mindset about exercise at work. So hopefully you can see with these examples that your mindset matters in a huge way. So given all this about mindsets, here are some things you can do to improve yours.

Number one, practice mindfulness. Train your attention to come back to the present Nonjudgmentally. Over and over and over. Why? It lowers stress. It improves emotional regulation. It improves your attentional control, and it literally changes your brain in as little as eight weeks. And we've gotta begin to become aware of our mindsets, of our thoughts, the ones that serve us, as well as the ones that don't.

So we can challenge the ones that aren't serving us and flip them to ones that do. Number two, curiosity. The antidote to anxiety. Ask questions. Be humble enough to say you don't know. Be fascinated. Wonder often. Number three, realize effort is more important than outcome. Train yourself to focus on effort yours and other people's.

Train yourself to focus on effort over outcome, praise, effort in yourself and others. Reward persistence. That's where growth lives. Number four, reframe stress. See it as preparation, not danger. See it as your body trying to prepare you for a challenge by giving you energy, fuel. If the fuel is too much, which it is, sometimes talk to your body, tell it, Hey, you know, you overshot the Mark A.

Little bit, little too much energy. Thank you. And then take some deep breaths where you focus on breathing out longer than you breathe in. So for instance, breathe in for four or five seconds. Breathe out. For six or seven seconds, that will activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation response, and bring your level of stress down to a manageable level.

Number five, challenge black and white thinking. Teach yourself and others to see the gray areas in life and in your thought. I failed is not the same as I am. A failure I failed is temporary. It's specific to this one instance, and I would even say I failed is too harsh. I would go at with what can I learn from this?

And number six, watch your words. And one of the best recommendations I can make is add the word yet to fixed statements. I can't do that yet. I can't bench two 50 yet. I can't listen non defensively to my spouse yet because it's all in your mind. Set. Alright, some closing thoughts. Mindsets are like operating systems for your brain.

If yours is outdated, it's time to upgrade because when you shift your mindset, you shift your results in health, love, leadership, and life. And when faced with a huge challenge, you say to yourself, oh man, I can't do that. I want you to add one word to that thought, yet I can't do that yet. This has been The Evolved Caveman.

I'm Dr. John Schinnerer. If this episode hit home for you, please share it with everyone you know. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss a single episode, and you can check out more great content@theevolvedcaveman.com. or@guidetoself.com, or you can check out the amazing couples work that Joree and I are doing at LoveIsntEnough.net.

Thank you so much for your time and attention. I greatly appreciate it. And until next time, may you be brave enough to face your own shit. Bye-bye.