A Mindset of Indulgence Can Improve Your Metabolic Health

Last time, we discussed how letting go of our sense of self can significantly impact our lives by reducing mental suffering, improving productivity, and helping us experience the benefits of awe. This week, we’ll explore another question together:

Can our mindsets make us healthier?

Our beliefs can indeed exert surprising physiological effects. A recent randomized clinical trial discovered that educating children about the side effects of allergy immunotherapy greatly improved patient compliance and parental anxiety during treatment for peanut allergies.

Oral immunotherapy is an emerging treatment for allergies in which patients are given gradually larger doses of an allergen in order to promote immune tolerance. The appearance of mild reactions to treatment like a scratchy throat or congestion can sometimes concern children and parents alike since these symptoms closely resemble those of a more severe allergic reaction like anaphylaxis.

The anxiety can be so great that families may skip doses or stop treatment completely. In the study, telling children that side effects may be beneficial and even help overcome allergy in the long term allowed kids to successfully complete treatment and experience fewer side effects when exposed to actual peanuts.

Why might a positive mindset change our response to something like allergens? Let’s dive a little deeper to find out.

Mindsets 101

Our mindsets affect our perceptions of reality and are influenced by our upbringing, cultural values, and environments. Marketing, advertising, and health influencers shape our attitudes towards foods, exercise plans, and lifestyle practices.

Many of our mindsets are simply the result of mimetic desire, meaning we imitate what others want. We desire what is socially desirable. Mimetic desire describes how social influences like parents, peers, teachers, media, and society impact nearly all our decisions from our career aspirations to the partners we choose.

Dr. Alia Crum, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, studies how mindsets affect health and physical performance. She defines mindsets as core beliefs or assumptions about a domain. Whether we think stress is enhancing or debilitating influences the outcomes that follow. Whether we believe the nature of intelligence is fixed or malleable affects motivation and the ability to persist during academic challenges.

Mindset vs. Placebo

While the origins of the placebo effect may have been based on insufficient evidence, science suggests that the way we feel about something does in fact impact the way it affects us. We often forget that the total effect of a medical treatment is a combination of the chemical properties of that drug plus the placebo effect, which consists of social context, beliefs or mindsets, and our body’s natural physiological ability to heal.

Mindset and Food Metabolism

Do our beliefs change our bodies’ physiological response to food?

Dr. Crum conducted a well-known study, sometimes called the “milkshake study,” in which she administered identical vanilla milkshakes to the same group of people separated by a week. Participants were initially told they were drinking a calorie-rich, indulgent milkshake full of fat and sugar. The second time, volunteers were told they were drinking a healthy, sensible, nutritious meal shake.

Levels of a gut hormone called ghrelin were measured before and after drinking each set of milkshakes. Sometimes called the “hunger hormone,” ghrelin signals to the hypothalamus in the brain that it’s time to seek out food. After a large meal, ghrelin levels drop, telling your body that you’ve eaten enough.

Scientists originally thought that ghrelin levels fluctuated in response to nutrient intake alone. Eat a cheeseburger, and ghrelin levels drop substantially. Eat a salad? Not so much. But Crum discovered something else entirely in her milkshake study.

She found that telling people that they were drinking something indulgent caused their ghrelin levels to drop threefold more than when they thought they were drinking a low-calorie shake. In other words, simply believing that they were consuming something filling caused their bodies to respond a