The Wrong Beliefs Can Kill You
Two views on stress, the Tetris Effect, and three questions you should ask yourself daily.
Hello, good people! It has been one of those wonderful, yet amazingly busy weeks (with a clogged drain and flat tire sprinkled in just to keep life interesting). I hope you and yours are doing well and starting to get some of the beautiful spring weather we’re experiencing in Texas.
Today I’m going to re-push what I believe is the most life-changing concept that you can understand: the power of belief. As parents and educators, it is important to remember that our mindset tends to be passed on to our kids. When people talk about the power of belief they often get cheesy so I’ve made sure to stick to the facts. But the facts are powerful.
For example, in 1972 they did an experiment where they told a group of weightlifters that the six lifters who made the largest strength gains over the course of seven weeks would be given steroids for the last four weeks of the trial period. After seven weeks, they randomly chose six guys and then told them they were getting steroids for the next four weeks. But they weren’t. Those six lifters were getting placebo pills. The results shocked everyone:
Four weeks later, when the researchers conducted the final test, the athletes set all-time personal records in every exercise tested. Before the placebo pills, the lifters added an average of 5.8 lbs (2.6 kg) to their squat during the first 7 weeks of training. After they believed they were taking steroids, they added an average of 41.8 lbs (18.9 kg) in just 4 more weeks of training. That’s a 7x increase in nearly half the time.
So often we are limited by what we think is possible. That’s what I want to talk about today…
Take Your Placebos Daily
When pharmaceutical companies run trials for a new drug, they don’t just compare the results of people who use their drug against those who don’t. They also have to run trials against people who are given placebos—that is, people who believe they are getting a drug treatment, but who are actually only receiving sugar pills, or something comparably inconsequential. Drug companies don’t just have to show that their treatment is more effective than no treatment, they also have to show that their treatment is more effective than a fake treatment. And for good reason. The placebo effect is extremely well documented. Just the belief that you are receiving an effective treatment is proven to have tremendous healing effects, whether the treatment is effective or not.
The placebo effect isn’t reserved to just drug treatments. It applies to everything from cryotherapy, to cupping, to KT tape, to giving your children band-aids and ice. A large part of the success of any intervention comes from the belief that said intervention is working its magic. But this phenomenon goes even further.
Michael’s Secret Stuff
In a scene at the end of the original Space Jam, Michael Jordan gives a halftime speech to his downtrodden Looney Tunes teammates. They are being pummeled by the mighty Mon-stars. Jordan tries to motivate with a heroic call to “fight back,” but the Tune Squad is unmoved. They sit there looking helpless, disinterested, and defeated. Then, Bugs Bunny swoops in and says, “Great speech… but didn’t you forget something? Your secret stuff.” Bugs has taken a blue water bottle (filled with normal water) and written: “Michael’s Secret Stuff” on it. The implication being that Michael’s greatness comes from this magical elixir. The Tunes devour the water and run out of halftime convinced of their expanded powers.
The same idea is conveyed in countless other stories. In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the father believes Windex fixes everything and so, it does (a bit of confirmation bias here too). In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s character explains why the star pitcher should maintain his run of abstinence, saying, “If you believe you're playing well because you're getting laid or because you're not getting laid or because you wear women's underwear, then you are.”
This is the power of belief. Belief can heal. Belief can energize. Some beliefs can even lengthen your life.
The Wrong Beliefs Can Kill You
In a fantastic TED talk, psychologist Kelly McGonigal explains how her own oversimplified view of stress had led her to reinforce a destructive message about stress. She begins by highlighting a study that tracked 30,000 Americans for eight years. At the beginning of the study participants were asked two questions:
"How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"
“Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?”
Then, after eight years, they found out which participants had died. Those who claimed to have experienced a lot of stress in the previous year were 43% more likely to have died. This confirms the predominant, simple view of stress being harmful. But, as McGonigal found, people who experienced a lot of stress were only more likely to die if they believed that stress was harmful to their health.
Read that again.
Alarms should be going off. Psychologists like McGonigal had been telling everyone (based on the simple reading of the stress research) that stress was bad for your health. But it turns out stress was only bad for your health if you listened to what these psychologists had been telling you about how stress was bad for your health. If you had a lot of stress but didn’t believe that it was harmful, you’d be no more likely to die. “In fact,” McGonigal points out that such people “...had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.”
No wonder all those former presidents are living late into their nineties. Stress doesn’t kill people. Believing stress is bad kills people. And, yet, most the experts are still telling us that stress is bad for our health.
How often do we make people more brittle, powerless, and unhealthy by implanting negative self-fulfilling prophecies? Parents convince themselves that they need to feed their kids “kids foods” because they won’t like actual food. In schools, we identify SPED students, label them, modify their assignments and meet with them every year, all the while reinforcing the belief that their learning disability limits and defines their intellectual abilities. We tell students that they are fragile to emotional slights, that every obstacle is traumatic, and that people’s disadvantages usually define them. Under the guise of empathy, we ingrain fatalism.
The Tetris Effect
Your beliefs will often determine your reality. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor identifies a psychological principle known as the Tetris Effect named after a study which found that people who played hours of Tetris each day reported that they began to see the physical world as if it were a game of Tetris. Whether staring at their pantry or the skyscrapers of a city, they couldn’t stop themselves from flipping objects around in their head and fitting them together in new ways (I’m sure this made them great at packing luggage into the trunk of a car). More significantly, this shows how our minds can be primed to filter the world through any lens we reinforce. And there are no neutral or insignificant forces here. Our language, the media we consume, and our daily habits all conspire to create the filters we view the world through.
Try this:
Look around you and identify everything that is brown…
…
Now close your eyes and tell me everything you saw…
… that was blue.
You missed most of that didn’t you?
Your mind finds what it sets out to find. So be careful what you focus on. You can train your mind to interrupt unproductive patterns and reinforce very different narratives. Train it to find what will amplify your capacity, your empowerment, and your fulfillment.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy, perhaps the most effective known therapy for combatting depression and a host of mental disorders, works by identifying dysfunctional belief patterns (negative tetris effects) and re-programming them. Some of the most prominent distortions it sets out to short-circuit:
Mental Filtering Toward the Negative (the world conspires against me…)
Emotional Reasoning (the belief that every negative emotion must be true)
Mind Reading (assuming other people’s bad intentions…)
Black and White Thinking (a situation is good or bad; people are good or evil)
Catastrophizing (projecting the most devastating domino effect from every event…)
Over-generalization (one bad date = I’m a bad dater and will never find love)
Fallacy of Fairness (“People who go through life assessing whether something is ‘fair’ or not will often end up feeling resentful, angry, and unhappy because of it.”)
All of these are mental narratives that many people have programmed their minds to interpret their experiences through—the opposite of rose-colored glasses. CBT works by teaching people to spot these distorted patterns, write them down, and then work out better interpretations to replace them.
Creating Rose Colored Glasses
There are so many little habits in my life that I hold dear. Exercise, cold-plunges, mindfulness, etc. But I’m becoming more and more convinced that a frequent gratitude practice/prayer is probably the most mentally transformative thing you can do. Gratitude works by training the mind to notice opportunities and frame events in a positive way.
But a word of caution first. You can’t go into gratitude training by seeking to create any specific feeling. Fighting, fleeing, and seeking feelings is a sure way to induce anxiety and frustration. Why am I not feeling those strong emotions of gratitude like I did yesterday.
Instead, make gratitude a practice of showing up and seeking to identify specific things you could be grateful for, with no expectation of any feeling. Set specific times to show up each day and reinforce the sort of thinking you want to ingrain by going through a battery of questions. Here are mine:
Over the past 24 hours, what have I benefited from?
What moments could I be grateful for?
Today is a day of my life that I can never get back. Who do I want to be? What impact do I want to make? How do I want to make people feel?
I give myself a couple minutes to focus on each question. Often, the first thirty seconds are the slowest and then things just fall out. By the end I’m usually surprised at how many awesome things happened in my life that I almost forgot about.
You can turn this into a daily journal practice or fit it in a couple times a day by turning it into a pre-meal prayer where the first two questions are “Thank you God for…” and the last are, “Please help me to…”
Regardless of how you do it, just commit to making gratitude a habit. It will do great things for you, if only you believe it will.
Thank you for reading today and sharing with any kindred sprits!
A final note: it is helpful to have artifacts and heuristics for your family to reinforce the ideas that matter most. If you, like me, consider this message to be one of the most important ideas you can convey to your kids, I recommend getting a few of these for the family.
Carry the Fire!
Shane Trotter