The Best Mindset for Minimizing Stress

It's tough to navigate stress. Part of the problem comes from how not many of us have developed effective ways for dealing with it. In general, social scientists agree that avoidance of stress is not a very effective coping strategy. A lot of (most?) life's stressors are unavoidable and cannot be avoided, but most people can still find ways to relax during difficult times. Although we have to cope with these changes, the best way to deal with them is to prepare in advance. People can get better at how they interpret the stress they experience, but we can't learn to be immune to it.

Being a teen in today's world is stressful. More teens are at the stage where they need to start focusing on their career and raising a family. However, unlike when they were in school, there is less pressure for them which makes it a relaxing rite of passage. They also experience stress from social & peer pressures and gaining an identity. Academic demands can also be stressful too because you're still trying to figure out what subjects.

A team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, University of Rochester, and Google's Empathy lab sought to determine the best way for helping teens address their stress (Yeager et al., 2022). Because stress is often inescapable, the researchers wanted to focus on strategies that helped adolescents shift their perspective and meet stress head-on.

They examined two key possibilities:

Growth Mindset: The idea that our intelligence and skills are not permanent and can be developed to aid us better in our lives. When there is a lot of stress in your life, consider that "stressful situations" cause people to feel a mix of emotions. The way you think about them and the perspective you take is what helps reduce or control your stress levels in the moment. It's also important to identify whether or not a normal hard challenge makes up for the stress in other areas of your life .

Stress-Can-Be-Enhancing Mindset: This point has been made in some studies that experiencing difficulties and stress can provide one with valuable knowledge and skills to use in their career. While stress can make teens feel more anxious, it can also help them perform better. There's evidence to suggest that a significant number of the emotions adolescents experience are important for building and strengthening relationships. This affords them a greater capacity to choose whether they're willing to prioritize certain tasks or not. In other words, think of stress as an asset rather than a burden.

Here's the innovative part: The researchers studied both the synergistic mindset together to provide insights into the attitudes that each skill set has towards creativity. Growth mindset helps teens see that stressful situations don't always have to result in doom, while stress enhancement tries to help them see the potential benefits of challenging experiences. This has been proven. Mindsets can work together to achieve a greater outcome than what each does individually.

Across six randomized double-blind controlled studies, over 4,000 participants took self-administered online training modules that lasted 30 minutes. The researchers studied the "dose" of pizza...which doesn't require much time or effort from teens.

Their results indicated that learning about a synergistic mindset "can protect vulnerable adolescents against unhealthy threat-type responses to normal social-evaluative stress and the negative mental health outcomes associated with such stress responses." More specifically, teens who learned a synergistic mindset reported less stress, had lower cardiovascular reactivity, lower daily cortisol levels, lower anxiety, improved academic success, and enhanced well-being. Importantly, it was the combination of both mindsets working together that yielded the benefits.

Stress is a difficult but unavoidable aspect of life. Instead of looking at stress as an entirely negative experience, seeing it as a way to develop your skills and resiliency, as well as an asset that can help you achieve your goals, is a useful coping strategy.