Is Your Mindset Serving You?
I tend to steer clear of talking about parenting topics like sleep because I know so many people who manage baby/toddler/kid sleep differently (co-sleeping/sleep training/gentle sleep training/etc.) and the thread that seems to run through each of these sleep arrangement choices is a conviction that there is a “right” way to sleep a child, and then this tends to align with other “right” ways to parent.
What I’m pretty sure of after a few years of doing what feels right for me and my family with the kids’ sleep is that conviction (what we’re convinced of) is built on belief (what we believe to be correct and true) and belief is shaped by so many factors—our behaviors, what our parents did, what our culture says we should do, what influential people in our life or online tell us is ok, what we receive support to do as parents, what our instincts guide us toward naturally, and the information we look to that reinforces our beliefs.
The question I’m left with is not what type of sleep arrangement or parenting practice is best for my family (I’ve already built my own convictions and beliefs about this) but what are beliefs and why do we have them?
This question led me to a 2015 paper that provided these four overlapping functions of beliefs:
Beliefs at their core create a consistent and coherent representation of our world and our place within it. They are survival mechanisms that form the basis of all of our actions.
Beliefs give us an explanatory framework for interpreting and understanding incoming information from the world around us and help us reconcile and resolve inconsistencies into a cohesive narrative with a sense of meaning and purpose. This is, at its evolutionary core, an adaptive mechanism.
Beliefs shape our experience of the world through top-down processing. Meaning patterns, expectations, and pre-existing beliefs influence and prefigure our perception of the world. Our brains reconstruct experiences using both pre-existing information and beliefs along with incoming sensations.
Beliefs help us navigate social relationships and interactions and provide a common understanding and social context for that understanding.
Beliefs are essential because they maintain a kind of cognitive balance that makes the world feel familiar, safe and stable. They help our brains save time and energy as they quickly sort and sift through information, fill in gaps, and fit old and new information into an existing framework instead of rebuilding that framework from scratch with each new experience.
Beliefs are a survival technique. For parents navigating endless contradictory recommendations about raising children, beliefs form like an anchor that hold us to the reality we most align with so that we can make sense of both ourselves as parents and our children as, well, children. It’s a huge responsibility to not only keep kids fed and safe, but also guide them in life. Beliefs are the templates that underlie the choices we make on behalf of our children.
Beliefs are efficient for our brains. Restructuring, disproving, reevaluating, and changing belief systems is energy intensive. It disrupts cognitive homeostasis and our self-concept and self-representation. We need time and space to look at our own beliefs from a distance and ponder them with curiosity, which is hard to do when time and space are so limited. Challenging? Definitely. Important? Certainly.
Our brains work hard to protect certain, immovable beliefs while others are held less tightly. It helps to examine beliefs with curiosity, like a scientist, because doing so allows us to understand that beliefs shape our reality and we have the capacity to change our beliefs, thereby changing our perceptive reality.
Another type of belief, which we apply to different situations in our life—parenting and behaviors like eating and physical activity for example, is our mindsets. Mindsets, according to a 2021 study, are a “specific type of construal or belief, defined here as one’s core assumptions about the nature of things or categories that activate a specific set of attributions, expectations, and goals.”
In the study, participants in the “appeal-focused condition” group received information that physical activity is a source of pleasure, fun and relaxation whereas the “health-focused condition” group received information that they should participate in a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week for specific health benefits.
During the follow up (seven weeks later) the appeal-focused group significantly improved their mindset about physical activity and this mindset shift ended up predicting greater engagement in physical activity 3 months later. The health-focused group, on the other hand, did not experience a change in mindset and were more likely not to complete their follow-up measures for the study (via missing exercise classes).
Similar results were found when the researchers tested appeal versus health mindsets in healthy eating groups. One group (the appeal-focused class) was told that healthy eating was tasty, visually appealing, and fostered social connection. The health-based group received information about dietary guidelines and nutritional properties of certain foods. Again, the appeal-based group experienced significantly greater changes in mindset compared to the health-based group, however both groups did experience improved mindsets about healthy foods.
I love this study because in How to Grow a Baby I wrote about how pleasure underlies my desire to choose and keep choosing to eat healthy food and move my body frequently and in diverse ways. Some people might be motivated by specific health markers, but I’ve always been motivated by taste, joy, experience and awe and this research supports that we tend to choose actions that we believe are pleasurable, fun, and indulgent.
I wrote about beliefs and mindsets in the book using the words story and narrative because what we tell ourselves about almost everything changes how we perceive it and how our physiology responds. This not only extends to healthy food and physical activity. Research finds that our mindset affects our experience of and physiological response to stress, aging, weight, and other health categories.
What I’ll leave you with is not advice, but rather a question: can you shift your mindset toward sleep, parenting, eating healthy food, physical activity, or even stress in a way that better serves you?
It’s a question I’m asking myself and I love that the answer has everything to do with curiosity and pleasure.
p.s for more on mindset, be sure to check out this podcast episode, which inspired this post.