How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset

Dweck and Mueller’s research showed that children praised for being “smart” or “talented” later chose easier problems, performed worse on subsequent tasks, took on fewer challenges, and were more likely to lie about their scores. Children praised for effort (e.g., “you worked really hard,” “you persisted”) chose harder problems, solved more problems overall, and their performance improved significantly. This applies to adults as well: tying feedback to controllable behaviors (effort, persistence, strategy) strengthens learning, resilience, and honesty.

When you internalize labels like “I’m smart” or “I’m a natural at this,” any failure threatens your core identity, which pushes you to avoid hard tasks and protect your image. If instead you see yourself as “someone who works hard,” “someone who persists and analyzes errors,” failure becomes information, not identity damage. That shift makes you more willing to engage with difficulty, seek feedback, and keep improving even after setbacks.

Alia Crum’s work shows that brief tutorials about stress—either emphasizing its harms or its enhancing properties—directly change how people respond to stress. When people learn that stress can improve focus, mobilize energy, and support learning, they show healthier cardiovascular responses (better stroke volume and peripheral blood flow), more adaptive cortisol patterns, and improved performance on hard tasks. The sensations of stress don’t vanish, but their meaning—and impact—changes.

EEG (ERP) studies show that people with a fixed mindset exhibit stronger error signals in emotion-related regions of the anterior cingulate cortex when they’re told they’re wrong, indicating more “ouch, that hurts my ego.” People with a growth mindset show more activation in cognitive parts of the anterior cingulate, reflecting “what went wrong and how do I fix it?” You can train this by deliberately redirecting attention, after errors, away from shame and toward analyzing causes, strategies, and next steps.

David Yeager’s large-scale school studies (thousands of students) show that a single 30-minute intervention teaching both growth mindset and a stress-is-enhancing mindset led to reduced anticipatory stress, healthier physiological stress responses, better course pass rates—especially in challenging classes—and greater willingness to take on future hard tasks. Teaching only one mindset helped; teaching both produced synergistic improvements in performance and well-being.

Huberman highlights tools such as: (1) always praising specific effort and strategies, not identity; (2) after failure, writing out the verbs that led to the outcome (what you did/didn’t do) instead of labeling yourself; (3) seeking help and feedback to understand errors; (4) reframing stress sensations (“this is my body mobilizing resources to help me focus and learn”); and (5) writing a short letter to a hypothetical student explaining growth mindset and stress-as-enhancing, which research shows strengthens your own mindsets.

The popular phrase “the mind is like a muscle” is partly misleading. With muscles, you get an immediate “pump” that hints at future growth; with learning, you mostly feel confusion, frustration, and stress at the moment progress is actually being made. The neuroplastic changes that encode learning occur during and after that strain—especially with proper sleep. Recognizing that feeling lost or challenged is the *necessary* trigger for brain change helps you stay engaged instead of interpreting discomfort as a sign you’re incapable.