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Imagine yourself in this scenario: You’re having an awful day. You dropped your phone into a puddle on the way to work and now it’s not working. Your boss told you that the big pitch you just spent two weeks working on actually isn’t needed after all. You arrive at home to find your child drawing all over that poster of your favorite artist—the one you got signed after waiting in line for hours. And then, you realize you’ve burnt dinner.
If this happened to you, you’d likely be feeling some big, negative, and uncomfortable emotions.
Most people in this situation would start to think about how they’re going to calm down. Are they going to take some deep breaths? Vent to a friend? Ignore their emotions and just move on?
What most of us don’t realize is that there is a very important, but perhaps subconscious, thought that goes through our heads before we choose which specific strategy we’re going to use to calm down:
“Can I manage this?”
Whether you’re managing a big emotion, playing a familiar sport, or learning a new skill, we all say things to ourselves about how well we will be able to meet demands that arise. For example, we might say “effort and practice will make me great at this!” Or, perhaps, “I’m bad at this and I always will be.”
It turns out that the specific messaging we give ourselves about our ability to improve upon our abilities is much more important than we may have realized, especially when it comes to our beliefs about managing our emotions.
This belief about our ability to improve through practice and effort is often referred to as our mindset towards a specific skill or domain. Some of the earliest studies of mindsets focused on students’ intelligence mindsets. At one end of the continuum were students who believed that intelligence was something that could be improved with effort and practice. These students were considered to have a “growth mindset.” At the other end of the continuum were students who believed that intelligence was a fixed characteristic that no amount of effort could change. These students were said to have a “fixed mindset.”
What made these differences in intelligence mindsets so fascinating was that they were strongly predictive of how well children actually performed academically. Children with a growth intelligence mindset showed an upward trajectory in their grades over two years.
What about emotion mindsets?
What has come out of the mindset literature over the years has been illuminating. Not only are mindsets important, but they are specific to various domains of talent or skill. And mindsets surrounding our ability to manage emotions are no exception.
Just like the children with different intelligence mindsets, we all land somewhere along a continuum of emotion mindsets: a growth emotion mindset reflects the belief that emotions can be controlled through strategy and effort, while a fixed emotion mindset reflects the belief that emotions are largely uncontrollable.
Emotion mindsets and mental health
Interestingly, our emotion mindsets show strong associations with our mental health. For example, individuals with a growth emotion mindset tend to show significantly lower levels of depression symptoms than individuals with a fixed emotion mindset. These associations appear to be quite powerful: studies have shown that an individual’s emotion mindset can actually predict their level of depressive symptoms over a year later.
The strength of the association between emotion mindsets and depressive symptoms led Dr. Tom Hollenstein and I to ask: Why does telling ourselves that we can improve upon our ability to manage our emotions put us at less risk for depression?
Making use of a smartphone app, we asked adolescents to report on their emotional experiences multiple times a day for two weeks. We then examined what participants had reported doing when they experienced a negative emotion to assess whether these emotion responses helped to explain the association between emotion mindsets and depressive symptoms. (See the full study here.)
What we found was very enlightening: when adolescents with a growth mindset experienced a negative emotion, they were more likely to think deeply about what was wrong, try to see the situation in a different light, and understand other perspectives, all in an effort to reduce their negative feelings.
On the other hand, when adolescents with a fixed emotion mindset experienced a negative emotion, they were much more likely to try to hide their feelings and simply pretend they were not upset. Six months later, adolescents with a fixed emotion mindset were much more likely to report symptoms of depression.
These findings highlight two very important aspects of emotion mindsets:
1. The stories we tell ourselves about our abilities change the way we interact with our emotions when we face challenges
Big emotions can be overwhelming. Evidence has shown that they can cloud our ability to think rationally, flood our bodies with strong and uncomfortable physical signals, and motivate us to behave in ways we might not be proud of later. While these big emotions challenge everyone at some point, when we believe that we have the power to change our emotions, we put a lot more effort into doing so.
This simple belief motivates individuals to engage more deeply with various aspects of their emotions, such as thinking more deeply about the situation and how they’re feeling. In turn, a willingness to do some heavy lifting around our emotional experiences, such as questioning what is at the core of a big emotion, taking the time to understand other possible perspectives on the situation, and finding ways to see the situation less negatively, is highly protective for our mental health. In fact, this set of thinking exercises, commonly referred to as cognitive reappraisal, represents the backbone of many gold-standard approaches to therapy and counseling (including cognitive behavioural therapy).
Conversely, when individuals with a fixed emotion mindset encounter a big emotion, they are more likely to feel that they are simply not capable of managing their feelings. In turn, they are more likely to try to disengage from the emotional experience altogether. This pattern is problematic: trying to ignore our big emotions and simply pretend we are not upset is associated with a variety of mental health problems, including depression (although this association is strongly dependent on many individual factors, such as income).
2. Our emotion mindsets are important for how we interpret failure
Someone with a growth mindset towards algebra is not always going to score highly on a test, easily complete assignments, or even quickly understand a new concept or equation. Likewise, even individuals with the most dedicated growth emotion mindsets are going to fail at managing their emotions at times.
Similar to our abilities in domains of sport or education, our overall level of skill in managing our emotions is dependent on our willingness to engage in the pursuit of honing these skills and improving upon our abilities even when things go poorly. Indeed, inherent to a growth mindset is a willingness to unpack our failings, improve next time, and simply commit to the belief that our abilities and skills can be improved upon with effort and practice.
This framing of our failures, and our motivation to dust ourselves off and try again, may be part of the mechanism that makes growth emotion mindsets so important for our mental health.
So what do we do?
Mindsets are surely not a panacea for mental health. It would be irresponsible to suggest that we could simply erase depression by encouraging individuals to adopt a growth emotion mindset. However, just as believing that effort and practice will help us improve when taking up a new sport, telling ourselves that we are capable of learning to manage our emotions may make it more likely that we engage with our emotions, show ourselves some compassion when we fail to handle a big emotion the way we wanted to, and develop the motivation to just keep trying.
