Dr. Alia Crum

But what we've shown in our research is that people who have a stress-enhancing mindset have more positive affect, not necessarily less negative affect.

And it potentially changes physiology.

We have a few studies that show that people who are, you know, inspired to adopt more enhancing mindsets have more moderate cortisol response and they have higher levels of DHEA levels in response to stress.

The way I think about mindset is that mindsets are kind of a portal between conscious and subconscious processes.

They operate as a default setting of the mind, right?

So if sort of programmed in there, you have stress equals bad.

That's been programmed in through our upbringing, through public health messages, and through media and other things.

And it kind of sits there as an assumption in the brain.

And the brain is then...

figuring out how should it respond to this situation.

And if the assumption, the default, the programming is stress is bad, that's going to, through our subconscious, trigger all the things that's like, okay, well, I need to like, you know, rev up the things that protect me versus rev up the things that help me grow.

Just talking about this, right, for your listeners, they're now invited to...

bring their stress mindsets up to the consciousness and say, what is my stress mindset?

How am I thinking about stress?

Can I reprogram that?

Can I start to think about it as more enhancing?

That takes a little bit of a conscious work potentially, but then once you do that, it can, that can kind of operate in the background, influencing how your body responds and you don't have to say, okay, I'm stressed.

I better tell my

you know, anabolic hormones.

That doesn't work that way.