Stress Response, Growth Mindset, and Nonviolent Communication

Some of what I’ve been reading lately:

• 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman.
• The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal.
• The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal.
• Self Theories by Carol Dweck.
• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.
• The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles.

Many of these books are more “pulpy” that I’d prefer — I can’t strongly recommend them, because they’re intended for a popular audience and so have a lot of “filler” in the form of stories and such to help get across the “meat” of the material. In particular, the first three. These are in the genre of “scientific self help”; they are trying to convey psychological studies to a wider audience. Read them in the right way, though, and they can serve as a good annotated bibliography.

I covered some of what I learned from those books in Scott Alexander doesn’t like growth mindset… yet. & What Does Long-Term Thinking Feel Like from the Inside. However, I’d like to point towards a sort of “common core” of concepts I see here. I would like to do a more thorough and well-researched version of this, but I’m not there yet; so this is more like “here are some ideas I’m having which look like they are sorta backed up by research which I need to look into more”.

System 1, System2, and Stress Response

I’m guessing most of the readers of this will already know about the system 1 / system 2 distinction popularized by Thinking, Fast and Slow and others. “System 1” refers to fast, heuristic, intuitive thinking; “system 2” refers to slow, deliberative reasoning. This isn’t a perfect model of the brain by any means, but it identifies some important things that are going on. The “hollywood rationality” stereotype identifies rationality with system-2 thinking, but in fact system 1 and system 2 are both there for a reason, and are good at different sorts of things. For one thing, system 1 tends to be a lot better in areas where we have a lot of experience, but can perform very poorly compared to system 2 in domains outside of our experience. So, it’s helpful to understand these things and get system 1 and system 2 working together well. So, what determines which system will be dominant at a given time?

The Willpower Instinct and The Upside of Stress both point to complexities in the way the interaction between system 1 and system 2 are mediated. The amount and type of stress we experience can make the difference between fast, impulsive, instinctual decision-making and slow, deliberate, reflective decision-making. This is why stress-eating is a thing, for example. But it’s not just that stress causes fast thinking to dominate over slow. The stress response is complicated.

The picture I’m getting from the two McGonigal books is: there are many kinds of stress response, two of which are particularly important to mediating system 1 vs system 2. The “threat response” is what we typically think of when we think of stress: it is associated with high heart rate, increased impulsivity, increased inflammation (which helps wounds to heal quickly, but is bad for our health in the long term), increased blood pressure, and fight-flight-or-freeze behavior. The “challenge response” is associated with increased heart-rate variability, increased willpower (meaning increased ability to override impulsive responses), and intense focus. In contrast to the threat response, it is actually good for your heart (indicating decreased risk of heart failure).

When the fast, impulsive decision-making of system 1 is a problem, then, it seems it’s a mis-fire of threat vs challenge response. What tips the balance between these responses?

The difference between the threat response and the challenge response can be something as simple as telling yourself “I’m excited!” rather than “I’m terrified!” when you feel the jitters before public speaking. This was the setup of one of many studies which she cites on the theme of “thinking stress is good for you makes it good for you”. She suggests that threat response vs challenge is determined largely by whether we think we’re up to the challenge; and we can tip the scales in our favor by viewing the stress itself as a resource rather than a problem.

She also suggests than viewing the stress as a problem causes people to avoid stressful things. This likely means we’re not dealing with the problems that are leading to stress. This idea seems related to ugh fields.

This whole thing seems somewhat similar to Nate’s Replacing Guilt series [ETA info-hazard warning: for some people, reading Nate’s writing on motivation destroys their motivation], but with a somewhat less unified approach, more scientific-study based, some neuroscientific justification, and more of a focus on activating the parts of your mind that you want to run rather than getting everything to cooperate together well as Nate emphasizes.

For me, the idea of seeing the stress response as potentially helpful was a big shift. I value my state of mind, and don’t accept many disruptions to it. I’ve spent a lot of time telling myself “it’s not worth the stress” (especially when it comes to homework assignments). The idea that simply seeing things differently could make the stress response into a valuable resource makes a lot of my common motivational patterns look like alien pseudo-logic. I procrastinate, making more stress for myself, not less, because I think stress is bad and so avoid stressful things. So, you can see why viewing stress as a form of excitement, and an ally in getting things done, would turn the tables.

Growth Mindset & Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation

I’ve already written quite a bit about my reaction to Self Theories, and I have quite a bit more to say about it if I get around to writing another post. For the idea I’m trying to get across here, though, I’ll just note a few critical ideas from the book:

• Self-esteem is not as important as it’s cracked up to be. Rather, self-esteem is important if you are focused on getting approval. Children who cope well with failure are not the ones with high self-esteem; children with high self-esteem have further to fall in the face of failure. Children whose goals are more focused on learning don’t just have good coping mechanisms for handling the hit to their self-esteem; they barely seem to notice any self-worth implications of failure, as they focus on the problem and try to figure it out.
• The way adults give feedback shapes the goals of the children. Attribute-oriented praise, such as praising intelligence, puts students in a more esteem-oriented mindset. Process feedback, such as praising effort and giving remarks on the specific good and bad things the child did and how to do better next time, puts students in a more learning-oriented mindset (aka “growth mindset”).

Again, this puts a new perspective on things which makes the previous view seem like alien pseudo-logic to me. Kids with these two different mindsets take opposite actions when presented with the same stimuli. The learning-oriented kids will choose harder problems and harder classes, while the esteem-oriented (“fixed mindset”) kids will choose easier ones. Kids who are stuck thinking in terms of approval and self-esteem would see the learning-oriented students who don’t bat an eye in the face of failure, and infer that those kids must have a huge self-esteem. Growth-mindset kids see fixed-mindset kids shooting themselves in the feet. The fixed-mindset kids basically want to look smart (get good grades, get approval from parents and teachers and peers…), but they end up being very short-sighted in the pursuit of that goal; they deprive themselves of learning opportunities because they fear failure.

This seems to me like a special case of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motives are self-generated, such as enjoying good conversation, running to feel good, playing video games for fun, and so on. Extrinsic motivations are things imposed by the environment, such as working to get money (to get all the things money can buy), doing assignments to get good grades (to get the things good grades can eventually buy), and so on.

It’s not a perfect distinction, and I’m hoping to find a better one that cuts a cleaner line around the phenomena, but the generalization seems to get me a lot. Carol Dweck focuses on learning goals vs esteem-related goals such as good grades (which she called “performance goals”), but my generalization to intrinsic vs extrinsic lets me speculatively apply the ideas more broadly.

The Moral Economy offers some evidence for this generalization. In one study it cites, people entering into West Point academy are asked about the reasons they are joining. The reasons are assessed for intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation (or as he terms them, “intrinsic vs instrumental”).The cadets were followed for a decade after graduation to measure their success. In this study as well as many others cited in the book, there was a “crowding out” effect: extrinsic and intrinsic motives did not get along. Success was most closely associated with high intrinsic drive. High extrinsic drives were better than low of both, but high of both was barely better than high extrinsic drives alone.

This kind of “crowding out” fits well with the ideas of growth mindset, and also with the ideas about different stress responses mentioned earlier. It seems quite plausible to me that extrinsic vs intrinsic motives are another important factor determining whether a stress response has characteristics of a threat response or a challenge response.

A complicating wrinkle to the story: The Moral Economy shows that crowding-out occurs, but not consistently. Sometimes other effects occur, including “crowding in”, where extrinsic and intrinsic drives reinforce each other. So, it’s complicated.

Nonviolent Communication

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is a way to communicate during a conflict or express your feelings or desires in ways which avoid conflicts that might otherwise occur. It emphasises communicating in ways that are more likely to be successful, in cases where many people have a tendency to communicate in ways that make enemies. It’s not too far off to say that it’s a philosophy which applies principles of de-escalation to everyday life. Again, I won’t try to review the entire technique, but here are some important points which strike a chord with the themes here:

• Like Self Theories, NVC discourages praise of a person which focuses on properties of the person such as “You’re great!” or “You’re a genius!”, and instead encourages saying what you appreciated about specific actions. I find myself resonating strongly with this idea; I don’t usually appreciate being broadly praised, and prefer more concrete and informative feedback.
• Like Nate’s Replacing Guilt series which I mentioned earlier, NVC emphasises only doing things because you want to, not because you “have to” or “should”.
• Use of non-judgemental language. Judgemental language puts the other person on the defensive, and is easier to slip in than you may realize. “You make me feel ___” is judgemental, blaming the other person for your feelings; NVC encourages people to “own their emotions” and express them more factually, as in “When you ___, I feel ___” (and also explicitly communicate to the person that you don’t blame them for your emotions, you just want to let them know how you feel).
• Using reward and punishment to get others to do what you want is seen as counter-productive. People have a basic drive to help each other, if they see the humanness of each other’s needs and feel mutual empathy and care. Threatening retribution if you don’t get what you want dissolves this motivation. Rewarding people is almost as bad, as it implies that your approval is conditional on their behavior. You want others to help you out of a desire to help you, not anything else.

Again, we can get some support for this from the idea of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation and the crowding-out effect. I also see a tie with the kind of nonjudgemental awareness taught by mindfulness meditation and by Eugine Gendlin’s focusing technique. Generally speaking, NVC is “goal-oriented communication”: expressing yourself in ways which are more likely to get what you want. But there’s a bit more to it than that — it also has to do with respecting other people’s autonomy in a particular way that seems important.

Now, I don’t think NVC is perfect. My biggest complaint is probably the way focusing on language (formulae for what language to use and what to avoid) provides the foundation of the technique, which I think leads some NVC advocates into counter-productive “language policing” (which is really against the whole philosophy, but an easy mistake to make given how it’s taught). But I’m interested in the worldview behind the language, and I think it provides something valuable which clicks with the other stuff I’ve been reading. To quote How to Win Friends and Influence People (which also has some commonality with NVC):

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

[…]

No! No! No! I am not suggesting flattery! Far from it. I’m talking about a new way of life. Let me repeat. I am talking about a new way of life.

I’m not looking for the language formulas which come with NVC. I’m looking for a new way of life.

I don’t think NVC is perfect; nor do I think growth mindset is perfect; nor the theories of stress response laid out by Kelly McGonigal; and certainly not the theory of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation that ties them all together for me. However, the way all of these things (together with Nate’s series on guilt, and other things) re-shape my thinking (so that old confusions look like alien pseudo-logic) makes me think something deeper is there, waiting to be articulated properly.