I read recently in Bill O’Hanlon’s possibilities newsletter about a study, “Mindset Matters: Exercise as a Placebo,” (2007) Psychological Science, 18, 2, run by Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from the Harvard Psychology department in which they tested whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one’s mindset.
84 female room attendant/ hotel room cleaners working in seven different hotels were measured on physiological health variables affected by exercise. Typically those housekeepers do not think of themselves as doing exercise, and yet they clean on average 15 rooms per day, spending 20 to 30 minutes cleaning each room at quite a pace (as pressured to finish the cleaning task quickly). So, the experimenters splitted them in two groups and told one group that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active and healthy lifestyle. This was documented through examples of their work and using the figures mentioned above. The other group was not told anything.
When the researchers returned to measure the results four weeks later, they found that although their actual behaviour did not change, the women who had been told they were exercising enough had lost an average of two pounds, that their blood pressure was almost 10% lower as a group and that they were significantly healthier in measures of body fat percentage, body mass index, and waist-to-hip ratio. No such changes were noted in the control group.
It’s always difficult to know whether other factors might have influenced the healthier outcomes or whether those results were mainly due to a shift in perception, nevertheless, obtaining such results in such a short timescale is amazing, and just reinforces to me how much your state of mind, your perceptions and your mindset can influence how you feel ( mentally and physically).
So with that in mind, which mindset might be beneficial for you to adopt?