Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

And now, my conversation with Dr. Alia Crum.

Great to have you here. Great to be here. Yeah. Alia Krum. Well, great to have you here.

Great to be here.

Yeah.

Just to start off, you know, you've talked a lot and worked a lot on the science of mindsets.

Could you define for us what is a mindset and what sort of purpose does it serve?

We define mindsets as core beliefs or assumptions that we have about a domain or category

of things that orient us to a particular set of expectations, explanations, and goals.

I can distill it down for you.

So mindsets are an assumption that you make about a domain.

So take stress, for example, the nature of stress.

What's your sort of core belief about that?

Do you view stress as enhancing, good for you, or do you view it as debilitating and bad for you?

Those mindsets, those core beliefs, orient our thinking. They change what we expect

will happen to us when we're stressed, how we explain the occurrences that happen or unfold

when we're stressed, and also change our motivation for what we engage in when we're stressed,

sort of distilling down those core assumptions that really shape and

orient our thinking and action. I've heard you say before that mindset simplify life in some way

by constraining the number of things that we have to consider. And it sounds to me like we can have

mindsets about many things, as you said, many people are familiar with our colleague Carol Dweck's

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