The Mel Robbins Podcast
#1 Mindset Expert: Simple Mindset Shifts That Transform Your Body, Energy, & Life
20 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What scientifically proven ways can I use my mind to upgrade my life?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Today, you and I are going to learn scientifically proven ways you can use your mind to upgrade your life. This is going to be so cool because you're going to learn to make workouts easier so you can get fitter faster. You're going to learn to make healthy eating easier so you can feel your best every day.
You'll even learn to overcome your worst fears. so you don't let anything hold you back. Today, the world's number one expert in mindset, Dr. Alia Crum, is here in our Boston studios. Dr. Alia Crum is a Stanford professor, and she runs the Stanford Mind and Body Lab.
She has proven in her research over and over again that your thoughts about exercise, your thoughts about stress, your thoughts about food are working against you. And she's going to go into detail that this isn't just about thoughts. Oh, this is way cooler. There are settings in your mind that you need to know about and you need to change them.
See, this isn't a conversation about positive thinking. It's mental engineering that works. If you're tired of criticizing yourself, tired of your fears and anxiety, tired of never seeing the results you deserve, Dr. Crum is going to teach you step by step, using her groundbreaking research, exactly how to change the settings in your mind so you can achieve anything you want.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited to learn about changing the settings in my mind. I'm so excited for you to learn about this research. I'm so glad you're here. It's such an honor to spend this time together. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this with you,
I just want to take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. And holy cow, did you pick an incredible episode to listen to. Our guest today is Dr. Alia Crum. She's going to show you simple mindset shifts that change your body, energy, and life. Dr. Crum is a professor at Stanford University where she runs the Stanford Mind and Body Lab.
Dr. Crum earned her BA in psychology from Harvard and her PhD in clinical psychology from Yale. She has led mindset change programs for LinkedIn, UBS, Stanford Healthcare, and the U.S. Navy. She's the recipient of the National Institute of Health's New Innovator Award.
Her work proves that your beliefs shape how your body responds biologically—wait till you hear this stuff—to stress, food, exercise, and even medicine. She's about to teach you how to use the settings in your mind to create the healthiest, strongest you. Please help me welcome Dr. Aaliyah Crum to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Dr. Aaliyah Crum in the house. Thank you and welcome. Thank you, Mel.
It's so exciting to be here.
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Chapter 2: How do my thoughts about exercise and food affect my health?
There is this power of belief, of mindset, and the people who are listening to your show are especially clued into this fact. But I'd like to go a little deeper and be a little bit more specific, right? So when we say things like, oh, just believe, or think positive, or change your mindset, what do we really mean?
I don't know. I'm hoping you're going to tell me because I think that a lot of us do feel like, okay, I just have to believe, but you're here to teach us, no, there's actually something deeper and there's something more accessible.
Yeah, I think we need to be more specific. So say you have something stressful on the horizon, like a job interview, or say you're trying to lose weight or get healthier, or say you were just diagnosed with cancer or some other health diagnosis. it really matters to know what should you believe? What is the best mindset to have? Like, how much does that matter?
And most importantly, what can we do to adopt more useful mindsets? So the goal, as I see it for our conversation today, is to help people to become more sophisticated and more skillful and understanding and applying. the power of the human mind.
Whoa, I love the idea that there is this skill that you can develop to be able to tap into the power of your mind. It goes way beyond sort of just your beliefs, but rather understanding the mechanics of how it works. Now, Dr. Crum, given that you are a world-renowned researcher on mindset, Maybe we should just start with vocabulary. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What are the 'settings in my mind' and why are they important?
What exactly is mindset? What does that mean?
Yes. So mindsets are quite literally settings of the mind.
So they're... Wait a minute.
Hold on a second.
Okay. And now I feel almost like an idiot because I've never heard anybody explain what is so obvious now that you said it. in your mind.
Exactly. Now, there are settings, there are lenses or frames of mind which orient us to a particular set of experiences. Okay. Okay, so our minds can be set in many ways. The mindsets that I'm interested in that have sort of occupied my thinking and research are the mindsets that are set by our core beliefs.
Okay.
So our core beliefs are our beliefs about the essence of what something is and why it matters.
Okay. Can you give me an example? Because already I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to follow this.
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Chapter 4: How can I change my mindset to make healthy habits easier?
So do you believe that your intelligence is fixed, set in stone? Or do you believe it's malleable? It can grow, it can improve, it can change. The work that we do in our lab is looking at mindsets about things related to our health. So take stress. Do you believe that stress is going to kill you or is it going to make you stronger? What's your belief about healthy food?
Do you believe healthy foods are the disgusting and depriving option? Or do you believe healthy foods are actually indulgent and delicious? What about cancer? Do you believe that cancer is an unmitigated catastrophe? Or might cancer be manageable? Might it even be an opportunity to make positive changes in your lives? So these mindsets, Mel, they're not true or false. They're not right or wrong.
They're oversimplified, highly evaluative judgments about the nature of these things. But they matter in shaping our lives. In fact, they create our realities. And they create our realities not through some kind of magic, but by design. So our mindsets change what we pay attention to. If you believe the world is dangerous, you're going to see more danger in the world.
Our mindsets change how we feel and expect to feel emotionally. Our mindsets change what we're motivated to do and how we actually engage and behave in the world. And what our work has shown is that our mindsets also change our bodies. They change how our bodies physiologically prepare and respond to different things.
I think that last thing is super fascinating, and it's going to help us understand why the settings in our mind, which we can change, matter so much. And I would love to have you explain your famous milkshake study. If there was ever a scientific study that I wanted to be a subject in, I think it would be a study called the milkshake study.
But could you explain what this study is, how you conducted it, and more importantly, What did you find in the famous milkshake study? And what does it tell us about what's possible regarding the settings of your mind and the power that it has over your health?
Yes. Great. So the milkshake study was very simple, actually. We brought people into the metabolic research lab. This was done at Yale University. And we had them come in two time points and we had them drink a 350 calorie milkshake. Okay. What flavor? It was vanilla. Okay. Just a simple vanilla milkshake. And meanwhile, while they were drinking this milkshake, we had them hooked up to an IV.
And the reason we had them hooked up to an IV is we were measuring their blood. Okay. And in particular, we were interested in this hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin. Ghrelin.
Okay, ghrelin.
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Chapter 5: What does the milkshake study reveal about mindset and biology?
You're with your mom. Great place to go to celebrate or hang out with somebody. Yes, so I'm with my mom. We had a great meal.
It was the end of the meal. The plates were cleaned and cleared, and I was faced with this obvious but existential question. Are you going to have dessert? Yeah. Am I going to order the cheesecake? Okay, so you're with me here. So anybody here who's struggled with their weight or diet knows that this is a stressful question. And it's stressful because it's really a catch-22.
You're like faced with two bad options. So on the one hand, you could let yourself go and have the cheesecake, right? But if you're watching your weight, you're eating it with this sneaky sense of guilt and shame as you eat. Or you could, you know, be virtuous and restrain. But if you're like me, that would leave you leaving the whole experience like somewhat unsatisfied.
Like it is the cheesecake factory after all. So here I was agonizing over that decision when the thought occurred to me, you know, what if our beliefs, what if my beliefs about this cheesecake could change my body's response to it?
And I thought, I hoped, I was like, maybe, like the placebo effect, if I just believed this cheesecake was good for me, that my body would respond as if it was good for me, right? So that's where the idea for the milkshake study was born. Oh. Yeah. So fast forward, we did the study. Hold on, did you order the cheesecake?
Yeah.
You know, I didn't order the cheesecake. And the reason I didn't order the cheesecake was that at the time I had been obsessively counting calories. I had been struggling with my weight. I had disordered eating. I had gone through a period of bulimia. I was recovered at that time, but it was still sort of a like, I was well over the 2000 calories that I had allotted myself.
I was like, I will not have this cheesecake, but it was not a very pleasant state to be in. So I hoped like, okay, maybe I can just make, maybe I can find a way to literally have my cake and eat it too. Like if I just believed good things about it. So I kind of went into that study with this wishful thinking.
And fast forward to what we found, which as you know, is that our beliefs did matter, right? What we believed about the cheesecake, in this case, what people believed about the milkshake changed their body's physical response, right? Now, that alone was radical, as we've discussed, because it took that calories in, calories out equation and flipped it on its head.
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