Growth Mindset and Mental Health
Your mindset is created by the set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world around you. Your attitudes are a direct reflection of your mindset. How to behave in the world is often a direct reflection of your mindset. The good news is mindsets are not rigid. So, if you behave like a jerk, that doesn’t have to be for the rest of your life. Your mindset is a continuum, and people can be at different points on the continuum at different times of the day, week, month, or year. The better news is growth mindsets and mental health go hand-in-hand according to the latest research.
Have you ever noticed how unlucky things happen to unlucky people? And lucky things seem to always happen to lucky people. That is no coincidence. What you put out in the world comes back to you. The more you believe in and show gratitude for the lucky things in your life, the more you will receive those things.
Let’s talk about the mindset you need to be lucky, mentally healthy, or just a little bit happier in this world: a growth mindset.
The Growth Mindset and Mental Health
A “Growth” mindset encompasses the belief that ability (such as intellectual, athletic, or musical) is not fixed but can be developed with effort, effective strategies, and support from others. Having a growth mindset means that you think intelligence and talent are malleable and can be developed with time. This is the opposite of a rigid, or fixed mindset, in which you believe that your basic qualities are fixed or permanent. In other words, unlucky people will always be unlucky. And mentally ill people will always have a mental illness.
When it comes to mental health, many people believe that mental disorders are immutable to change. While that may be true for some conditions, like addiction, it most certainly is not true for many other conditions. Think of it like you would think of physical ailments. It’s true that some illnesses are curable and others are not. You can heal a broken bone, but not arthritis. However, remember that it is only the people who believed they could walk again when all the doctors said no, who actually got up and walked again.
When analyzing the growth mindset among college kids, it’s been linked to a wide range of benefits, including improved mental health, decreased stress, and improved academic achievement. It’s not that the students made less mistakes, it's that they view mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve. They don’t see failure as the end-all-be-all; they see it as an opportunity for growth. These are just a few of the benefits of utilizing a growth mindset:
Improves mood
Decreases stress
Improves academic achievement
Easier to bounce back after a failure
Improves motivation
A growth mindset isn’t just about success. The way a person responds to challenges and setbacks is often determined by their mindset. When it comes to mental health, a growth mindset can improve symptoms of mental health challenges.
What’s the Research Say?
Recent research shows just how effective a growth mindset can be for mental illness. Schleider, Abel and Weisz, conducted studies involving over 6500 students. They found that those with a fixed mindset were 58% more likely to show symptoms of anxiety, aggression, and depression than their growth mindset peers.
A longitudinal study found that students with a growth mindset were less impacted by symptoms of depression and anxiety over time. Lai, Nie and Huang explained, “The results of this study suggest that the growth mindset has long-lasting positive effects on mental health.”
Another study, led by David Yeagar, found that “mindset training improved stress-related cognition, psychological well-being… [and] anxiety symptoms.” In other words, you can train your mindset to be less rigid and still see the mental health benefits.
Improving your Mental Health with a Growth Mindset
A growth mindset can’t fix everything. If you have mental health challenges stemming from trauma, that needs to be addressed before a growth mindset can be used in the most efficient way. It’s true that those with serious mental illness or substance use disorder can’t growth mindset away their struggles. However, they may be able to improve their symptoms over time if they believe that they can improve their symptoms over time, and put in the work to do it. After all, why would you try at something if you didn’t believe you could make it better? In the famous words of Henry Ford, “whether you think you can or think you can’t—you’re right.”
I recently spoke to a mental health therapist on my podcast, Watching Mental Health, and he said that mental health is fluid. It changes over time, as do our needs and the way we address those needs. If you find yourself feeling like an unlucky person, struggling to see anything better as a possibility in your life, change your mindset and you might just change your life.
