The Effects of Stress Mindset Interventions on University Students' Health and Functioning

In modern society, the overwhelming cultural narrative proclaims that stress is detrimental to health and should be limited and avoided at all costs. However, recent research has demonstrated that it is one’s stress mindset, rather than their stress level, that determines the psychological and physiological outcomes. Mindsets are lenses that simplify and order the world, and have been proven to influence daily behavioral and physiological responses to create cascading effects. Recent research has demonstrated that one’s mindset about stress is the demining factor in health, performance, and productivity in response to stressful conditions, and that these mindsets can be manipulated via intervention training programs. Given the increasingly high stress levels of university students and the common mindset that stress is debilitating to health and performance, university students are excellent candidates for mindset interventions. The present study examines the feasibility and impact of a mindset intervention for university students and tracks their academic and psychological functioning over the course of the year. Additionally, this study examines the effect of mindset interventions on students’ willingness to grow from stressful experiences. Results indicates that stress mindset intervention training has a significant effect on students’ mindsets about their stress, and that these effects last over time. However, results fail to indicate that a stress mindset intervention significantly impacts students’ willingness to grow from potentially stressful experiences. STRESS MINDSET INTERVENTIONS 3 The Effects of Stress Mindset Interventions on University Students’ Health and Functioning In modern society, the overwhelming cultural narrative proclaims that stress is a negative force, and should be reduced and avoided at all costs. Though stress a normal part of life, high levels of stress and chronic stress are villainized (Bethune, 2014). This has created panic about stress, spawning an entire self-help industry aimed at reducing and avoiding all stressors. This panic may be warranted: chronic stress has been linked to the six leading causes of death (Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013), absenteeism from work and decreased productivity (Aktinson, 2004; Schneiderman, Ironson, & Siegel, 2005), as well as cognitive impairment, depression, mental illness, increased aggression, and relational conflict (Crum et al., 2013). In 1998, 30,000 American adults were asked how much stress they experienced in the past year, and results revealed a high level of stress increased their risk of dying by 43% (Keller 2011). However, this study also measured these adults’ perceptions of their stress, and found this increased risk of death only applied to those who believed stress was harming their health. Those who reported high levels of stress and didn’t believe it harmed their health were no more likely to die than those with low levels of stress. In fact, those who had high stress levels but who did not believe this stress negatively impacted their health had the lowest risk of death out of anyone in the study (Keller, 2011). This study revealed an important inconsistency: stress can be debilitating for some people, harming their health, performance, and productivity, and it can be enhancing in these same domains for others. Further research has confirmed this finding: it is not the amount of stress but the perspective on this stress that determines the health outcomes. Stress can be generally defined as “the experience of anticipating or encountering adversity in one’s goal related efforts” (Crum et al. 2013). The physiological arousal of the stress response is an evolutionary response to threats that prepares the body to act (McGonigal, 2015). STRESS MINDSET INTERVENTIONS 4 While these physiological responses can produce the previously mentioned negative health effects related to stress (e.g. death, aggression), they can also produce an increased performance during times of high stress. The best performers in each field – surgeons, athletes, musicians, and others – are not physiologically calm under pressure, but rather exhibit these stress response symptoms that allow them to perform at this high level (Pfiefer, 2012). This is because the stress response is evolutionarily designed to promote high performance, whether that be our ancestors escaping a predator or modern athletes scoring a game-winning goal. While the stress response can be detrimental to health, it can also promote activity, vitality, and success. This is known as the stress paradox: stress can be debilitating for some, causing disease, and enhancing for others, promoting health and performance. Recent research has indicated these physiological effects depend on one’s mindset about their stress. A mindset is a sort of lens through which to process information, which orients an individual towards a particular way of processing experiences and guides one towards corresponding behaviors (Crum et al., 2013, adapted from Dweck 2008). These can be small scale and situation specific (a belief like “I get enough exercise through my current job as a landscaper”) or large scale and ubiquitous (beliefs like “Money won’t buy happiness” or “People are inherently good”). Research has shown mindsets regarding ideas like aging and learning have significant effects on health and functioning outcomes (Levy, Zonderman, Slade & Ferrucci, 2009; Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007). Mindsets are pervasive and guide corresponding actions. Though they may be simple, mindsets are not inconsequential, but rather have cascading results with immense effects on psychological and physiological functioning. The importance of mindsets has influenced a plethora of research into how we can manipulation mindsets to benefit individuals. One line of research suggests mindsets may be STRESS MINDSET INTERVENTIONS 5 altered via brief interventions challenging the previously held beliefs by presenting research and/or counterexamples from one’s own life. Rather than directly manipulating the individual’s held mindset (i.e. telling participants that stress is good for them), participants can be walked towards an effortful and purposeful change of mindset by presenting them with research and information on mindsets, the physiology of the stress response, and through strategies to help them reframe their own stress mindset. This type of intervention places the power in the hands of the participant, who, after receiving the factually accurate research, can work towards changing their previously held beliefs. Mindset interventions like these are remarkably effective, and the change in mindset persists even after the intervention itself has been forgotten (Walton & Cohen, 2011). The message of the intervention – the new mindset – is internalized, and takes hold and flourishes even without conscious activity or memory of the intervention, leading to more positive outcomes for the individual. The entire concepts of a “mindset” is a relatively new idea; however, much of the theory behind mindsets draws from cognitive psychology. According to this school of thought, humans function primarily as creators and seekers of meaning and as such, we tend to impose organizational patterns on internal and external events. We then draw conclusions about ourselves and the world by combining encountered information with these patterns to organize and classify events (Berlin, 2002, 3). We create schemas, or memory processes, that organize sensory and semantic cues into meaningful themes or patterns of experience (Berlin, 2002, 4). Different people develop and impose different schemas on similar events. We develop schemas through storing recurring patterns in our memories, and continuously drawing on them in new situations so that they become increasingly accessible and eventually operate at a nearly automatic level. The more these patterns are called upon, the more general they become, and STRESS MINDSET INTERVENTIONS 6 soon just a few bits of information are enough to automatically call to mind an entire set of feelings, thoughts, and actions associated with a particular schema, thus creating a mindset. While mindsets are automatic, they can be changed. Changing one’s mindset takes effort because it is not routine to intentionally create an alternative mental pattern. While it can be difficult to attempt this sort of conscious control, as compared to following automatic impulses, consciously modifying schemas is a method towards changing one’s cognitive-emotional experience. One way to change a mindset is through interventions designed to lead to effortful creations of new thought patterns that will eventually become as internalized and automatic as the previously held belief. The reason that an individual may want to change their stress mindset is because there are two dominant mindsets regarding stress. An individual can either believe stress is enhancing in their life and creates positive health benefits, or stress is debilitating in their life and is detrimental to their health. People tend to act in ways consistent with their belief and thus experience the corresponding health benefits or detriments. Research supports this dichotomy, and one study demonstrated the immense differences between these two mindsets in participants from a high stress workplace, a global financial firm during the height of the 2008 recession (Crum, Corbin, Brownell, & Salovey, 2011). In the study, participants watched three videos detailing either the beneficial effects of stress or the detrimental effects of stress. Compared to control participants who watched no videos and those who watched the videos on the debilitating effects of stress, just three weeks later subjects who watched the videos on the benefits of stress were less anxious, less depressed, had fewer health problems, and exhibited better focus, engagement, collaboration, and productiv