Mindsets, Stress, and Health, A Science-Based Reframe
Summary
If stress feels like a toxin you need to eliminate, you are not alone. In this Huberman Lab Essentials conversation, Dr. Alia Crum makes a different case: our core beliefs, or mindsets, can shape not only motivation and attention, but also measurable physiology. Through vivid studies, like the “same milkshake, different label” experiment and the hotel housekeeper “exercise mindset” study, the discussion reframes stress as a paradox, sometimes harmful, sometimes helpful. The practical arc is a journey from “manage stress” to “leverage stress,” using a simple three-step approach: acknowledge, welcome, utilize.
🎯 Key Takeaways
- ✓A mindset is a core belief about a domain (like stress, food, or exercise) that shapes expectations, explanations, and goals.
- ✓Beliefs can measurably influence physiology, as seen in the milkshake study where ghrelin changed based on what people thought they drank.
- ✓Stress is framed as a paradox, it can be debilitating or enhancing, and your stress mindset may tilt the response.
- ✓A “stress-is-enhancing” mindset is not about liking stress, it is about using the stress response to support what you care about.
- ✓Public health messages can unintentionally create unhelpful mindsets, for example, exercise guidelines may make active people feel they are failing.
- ✓A practical 3-step method discussed is: acknowledge stress, welcome it as a signal of caring, then utilize the energy and focus toward the goal.
Why do some people thrive under stress while others crash?
Why can two people face the same deadline, the same health scare, or the same financial uncertainty, and yet one becomes sharper and more effective while the other spirals into insomnia, tension, and dread?
This conversation between Andrew Huberman and Dr. Alia Crum revolves around a deceptively simple answer: what you believe stress is can shape what stress becomes.
Not in a magical-thinking way. In a measurable way.
The unique perspective here is that mindsets are not just motivational slogans. They are “default settings” that can influence attention, behavior, and even physiology, including hormones and stress chemistry. That framing leads to a different goal than most stress advice. Instead of trying to eliminate stress, the discussion keeps returning to a more interesting question: How do you leverage stress to support the things you care about?
Important: Stress can be intense, chronic, and tied to trauma, poverty, illness, or unsafe environments. A mindset shift is not a substitute for safety, medical care, or mental health support. If stress is overwhelming or you are having thoughts of self-harm, seek immediate professional help.
What a “mindset” really is (and why it simplifies life)
A mindset is described as a core belief or assumption about a domain, a category of things, like stress, food, exercise, illness, or side effects. That belief then orients you toward a set of expectations (what you think will happen), explanations (how you interpret what happens), and goals (what you try to do next).
Mindsets simplify life.
That is not a flaw, it is a feature. Reality is complex, and the brain needs shortcuts. The catch is that these shortcuts can steer your choices, your emotions, and potentially your body’s priorities.
The discussion nods to the broader mindset tradition, including Carol Dweck’s work on implicit theories, for example, whether intelligence is fixed or malleable. The important bridge to Dr. Crum’s work is the idea that mindsets do not only affect effort and persistence. They may also shape physiology, which is where the conversation becomes especially distinctive.
Examples of mindsets highlighted in the conversation
The transcript moves quickly across domains to show how broad the idea is.
A key analytical point in this episode is that mindsets are shaped socially. Culture, media, family, and public health messaging can all “program” a default assumption, sometimes without us noticing.
Did you know? Negative expectations can create real symptoms. This is often discussed as the nocebo effect, the “ugly stepsister” of placebo, where negative beliefs increase the likelihood of negative outcomes, including side effects. You can read a detailed overview of placebo and nocebo mechanisms in a review from Nature Reviews Disease PrimersTrusted Source.
The milkshake study, a belief that changed a hunger hormone
This is the episode’s signature example because it is concrete, surprising, and biological.
The question behind it is simple: If you hold nutrients constant, can beliefs about food change the body’s response?
To test that, participants came in on two occasions. They were told they would be tasting two very different milkshakes designed for different metabolic needs.
In reality, it was the exact same shake both times, about 300 calories, moderate fat and sugar.
The study measured ghrelin, introduced in the conversation as the “hunger hormone.” Ghrelin tends to rise before meals and fall after eating, helping regulate hunger and satiety. More background on ghrelin’s role in appetite regulation is summarized by the National Center for Biotechnology InformationTrusted Source.
What happened was striking: when people thought they drank the indulgent shake, their ghrelin levels dropped about three times more than when they thought they drank the sensible shake.
What the research shows: In this study, labeling the same food as “indulgent” versus “sensible” changed participants’ ghrelin response, suggesting beliefs can influence satiety signaling. The original study is published in Health PsychologyTrusted Source.
The counterintuitive twist
Many people assume the “healthier mindset” is to tell yourself you are eating something virtuous and light.
The discussion argues that this is too simplistic.
In this experiment, the “sensible” framing left people feeling, at least physiologically, less satisfied. The interpretation offered is not “eat junk food,” it is that feeling deprived might keep the body and mind oriented toward scarcity. In contrast, feeling like you had “enough” may support satiety cues.
That is a very specific, non-generic takeaway: sometimes the most helpful mindset around eating is not “I am being good,” but “I am getting enough, this is satisfying.”
Pro Tip: If you are trying to eat in a way that supports your health, experiment with language that emphasizes satisfaction, not punishment, for example, “This meal is nourishing and filling,” rather than “I am restricting.” If you have a history of disordered eating, consider doing this with a qualified clinician.
Exercise mindsets, the hotel housekeeper study
The second major study in the conversation flips a different assumption: that health benefits come only from formal workouts.
A group of hotel housekeepers were active all day, on their feet, pushing carts, lifting, moving. Yet when asked how much exercise they thought they got, about a third said zero, and the average response was low.
So the intervention was not a workout plan.
It was information, framed as a mindset shift: half of the group was told, truthfully, that their work met or exceeded physical activity guidelines and should confer health benefits.
Four weeks later, despite not intentionally changing their behavior, the group that received the “your work counts as exercise” message showed improvements in measures like weight, body fat, and systolic blood pressure (around a 10 point decrease on average, as discussed).
This study is widely cited as an example of how beliefs about activity may influence health outcomes. You can find the original paper in Psychological ScienceTrusted Source.
Why this matters for how we talk about exercise
The discussion makes a sharp critique of some public health messaging.
Guidelines are often presented as a threshold: if you do not hit it, you are failing. The episode argues this can backfire by creating a mindset of insufficiency, even in people who are already active.
This does not mean guidelines are useless. It means the psychological meaning attached to them matters.
If you want to use this idea without denying reality, a balanced approach might be:
Stress as a paradox, not purely poison or power
Stress is usually defined by its harms.
That is one of the most important reframes in the conversation: stress itself is not identical to its negative outcomes.
Dr. Crum’s definition in the transcript is essentially that stress is a neutral, “yet to be determined” response tied to experiencing or anticipating adversity in goal-related efforts.
That last clause matters: we stress about what we care about.
This is where the episode’s tone becomes exploratory. Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of stress?” it invites the question, “What does this stress reveal about my values, priorities, and goals?”
The conversation also highlights that the stress literature is not one-note. There is evidence that stress can sometimes:
For post-traumatic growth, a widely cited overview is available through the American Psychological AssociationTrusted Source.
The critical nuance is repeated: this is not an argument that stress is always good. It is an argument that stress is complex and that a person’s mindset may influence which side of the paradox becomes more likely.
How a stress mindset may shift your body’s stress chemistry
The conversation proposes a “portal” idea: mindsets sit between conscious and subconscious processes.
You cannot directly command your adrenal glands or pituitary to secrete a particular hormone on demand. But you can influence how the brain interprets what is happening, and that interpretation may cascade into different physiological priorities.
One pathway discussed is motivation and behavior.
If you assume stress is harmful, you may respond by either:
If you assume stress can be enhancing, the motivational question changes to: “How do I use this energy and focus to meet the moment?”
Another pathway is affect. The transcript suggests people with a more stress-is-enhancing mindset tend to show more positive affect, not necessarily less negative affect. That distinction is practical. You do not need to force yourself to feel happy about difficult things. You may be able to feel anxious and still feel purposeful.
A third pathway is physiology. The discussion mentions studies in which adopting a more enhancing stress mindset is associated with a more moderate cortisol response and higher DHEA in response to stress.
Cortisol is a key stress hormone involved in energy regulation and many body systems. DHEA is a steroid hormone sometimes discussed as part of an adaptive stress response. For a general overview of cortisol biology, see the Endocrine SocietyTrusted Source.
A related point raised is that acute stress can sometimes increase anabolic hormones in certain contexts, such as adrenaline-linked responses, which complicates the simplistic “stress always lowers testosterone” narrative.
None of this should be taken as advice to seek out extreme stress.
It is better understood as: the stress response evolved to help you respond to challenges, and your interpretation of stress may influence whether the response is experienced as mobilizing or damaging.
From “manage stress” to “leverage stress,” a 3-step approach
Most stress advice starts with coping, calming, or reducing.
This episode suggests a different starting point: leverage.
Below is the three-step approach described in the transcript, presented as a practical tool you can experiment with.
How to practice a “stress-is-enhancing” mindset
Acknowledge you are stressed. Name it plainly. This is not weakness, it is data. If you skip this step, you are more likely to act out the stress through irritability, avoidance, or rumination.
Welcome the stress as a signal. The key logic is that stress points to something you care about, a goal, a value, a relationship, a responsibility. Welcoming does not mean enjoying. It means allowing the sensation to exist without immediately treating it as toxic.
Utilize the stress response to pursue what you care about. Stress brings energy, focus, and urgency. The task is to channel that into a specific next action that serves the goal, rather than spending all your effort trying to eliminate the feeling.
This is where the episode’s analytical “why” becomes clear: if stress is tightly linked to goal pursuit, then treating stress as an enemy can accidentally make you fight your own goals.
»MORE: Create a one-page “Stress Leverage Plan.” Write (1) what you care about, (2) what stress sensations show up, (3) what one action would use that energy well. Keep it somewhere visible for one week.
Expert Q&A box
Q: Does a “stress-is-enhancing” mindset mean I should stop trying to relax?
A: Not necessarily. Relaxation skills can be valuable, especially when stress is chronic and your body is stuck in high alert. The mindset shift here is about not panicking about stress itself, and about using stress energy when it is time to act, rather than treating every stress signal as damage.
It can help to decide which mode fits the moment: leverage stress for performance (for example, a presentation), then deliberately recover afterward with sleep, movement, or social support.
Alia Crum, PhD
A practical mindset audit you can run this week
This section is intentionally more “mostly bullets,” because the most useful part of mindset work is often noticing patterns in real life.
Start with one domain, stress, then expand if you want.
Identify your default definition of stress. Write one sentence finishing: “Stress is…” If your definition includes outcomes like “harmful,” “toxic,” or “will make me sick,” you are defining stress by its worst-case consequences. Try rewriting it in a neutral way: “Stress is my body and mind responding to challenge in something I care about.”
Notice your stress storyline, threat or challenge. When stress hits, do you interpret the situation as “I cannot handle this” or “This is hard and I can respond”? This aligns with broader research on stress appraisal, where challenge appraisals are often linked with more adaptive responses. A classic overview of stress appraisal theory is available via the APA Dictionary of PsychologyTrusted Source.
Track your two default behaviors, freak out or check out. The transcript describes these as common reactions to a stress-is-debilitating mindset. For three days, jot down which one shows up, over-control and frantic action, or avoidance and denial. Patterns matter more than perfection.
Practice “utilize” with a 10-minute action. Pick a single, concrete step that uses the stress energy, for example, outline the first slide, send the email you are avoiding, schedule the appointment, ask for help. Keep it small enough that you can do it even while stressed.
Reframe recovery as part of leveraging. Utilization is not endless grinding. If stress is mobilization, recovery is consolidation. Sleep, downshifting, and social connection are not optional extras for many people. For sleep and stress links, the National Institute of Mental HealthTrusted Source notes that stress can affect sleep and sleep can affect stress reactivity.
Apply the “enough” mindset to food and movement. The milkshake and hotel worker studies share a theme: believing “this counts” and “this is enough” may change how the body responds. That does not mean ignoring nutrition or exercise quality. It means avoiding a constant backdrop of deprivation and insufficiency.
Be cautious with illness and side-effect mindsets. Reframing can help reduce fear, but it should not prevent you from seeking medical care, reporting symptoms, or following evidence-based treatment. If you are starting a new medication, ask your clinician which side effects are common, which are urgent, and what to do if they occur.
A short closing thought: mindset work is not about forcing optimism. It is about updating the brain’s default settings so that stress becomes information and energy, not an automatic verdict of harm.
Expert Q&A box
Q: What if my stress comes from something truly bad, like caregiving, layoffs, or illness?
A: This approach does not require you to label the stressor as good. The distinction is between the event and your body’s stress response. Even in painful circumstances, the stress response can sometimes support action, connection, problem-solving, and meaning.
If stress is chronic or tied to trauma, it can be especially important to pair mindset tools with real resources, medical care, mental health support, and practical help.
Alia Crum, PhD
Key Takeaways
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a mindset in the context of stress and health?
- A mindset is a core belief or assumption about a domain, like stress, that shapes what you expect, how you interpret events, and what you do next. In this framework, mindsets can influence motivation and attention, and may also affect physiological responses.
- Does a “stress-is-enhancing” mindset mean stress is good?
- No. The point is not that stressors like illness, poverty, or layoffs are good. The idea is that the stress response itself can sometimes support focus, learning, connection, and performance, depending on how it is interpreted and used.
- What happened in the milkshake study Dr. Alia Crum describes?
- Participants drank the same milkshake twice, but it was labeled as “indulgent” one time and “sensible” the other. Their ghrelin response differed, dropping more when they believed the shake was indulgent, suggesting beliefs can influence satiety signaling.
- How can I try the 3-step stress approach in real life?
- Start by acknowledging you are stressed, then welcome it as a signal that something you care about is at stake. Next, choose one small action that uses the energy of stress to move the goal forward, rather than spending all your effort trying to eliminate the feeling.
- Can mindset shifts replace therapy or medical care for anxiety and stress?
- Mindset tools can be a helpful layer, but they are not a replacement for professional care. If stress or anxiety is persistent, severe, or affecting sleep, work, or relationships, consider discussing it with a qualified clinician.
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