Can't Sleep #7: Growth Mindset and Human Development

6:27 AM

We all- generation Z especially- fall victim to a specific state of being some like to call overthinking. Some can’t sleep because they’re thinking about their future. Others can’t stop thinking about that embarrassing thing they did last week. Some fall into depression overthinking things they’ve done or things that have been done to them years and ages ago. 

I am all of these people. 

That’s not to say that I’m deeply scarred and heavily bruised- there are definitely people in worse situations than I ever was in- but I fall into these pits of overthought quite often. It used to be much more often than normal, if you consider it normal to blame your genetic makeup for spontaneous blurting out “I love you”’s to complete strangers or ripping your clothes off while drunk at a party... anyway... I’ve just recently found a change in my mind space, and surprisingly enough, this is the conclusion I’ve reached:

We are all born with a growth mindset.

Let me explain.

Presumably, in the chain of evolutionary events that led humans to become... well... humans... we were faced with obstacles of everyday, pre-evolutionary life: eating the wrong berry and spending an evening crouching behind bushes, deciding that the best place for a new wooden tool is right beside an open fire, falling asleep next to a river infested with alligators... all mistakes and problems- if, of course didn’t end up fatal- we had to learn from in order to survive. The process of cause and effect has been in existence forever, but our brains aren’t predisposed to it. It still takes a toddler to poke at a candle to learn that fire plus finger equals pain. But it’s the toddler that didn’t stick his hand in the flame again that survived in pre-evolutionary times...
Am I making sense? I hope so.

We, as humans, learn best from cause and effect. All of science is cause and effect, and science is everything (or at least the comparable explanation OF everything). We are analytical, inquisitive and driven to learn - whether it’s about scholarly works, how to be more successful in a certain realm, or even about the whereabouts of our significant others. We are machines fueled by taking in information and making sense of it.

The growth mindset is explained in these terms: an understanding that intelligence can be developed, therefore spiking one’s desire to learn and strive toward success. I believe that this definition of the growth mindset has a lot in common with evolution, specifically Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s not a coincidence that the most successful people in today’s society are also equipped with a strong growth mindset.

When one is a child, they are constantly learning. The world is so new, that everything must be explained. As one develops, learning happens through experience, stories and warnings, whether they take shape in threats from parents or fairytales, gossip or civilian laws, the news or simply a song lyric. Through these, we learn social norms, vital lessons and other important things that makes us who we are. We are equipped with some degree of a growth mindset since birth because since birth, we cannot help but learn things. But most of us lose it when our brains slow in development, which is where we reach another point in this argument:
Humans are predisposed with a physiological liking for stability, balance- in short, homeostasis. But life (and AP Psych) has taught me that homeostasis is also important in human psychology. We as humans generally consider stress to be a bad thing, therefore we do everything to avoid or get rid of it. We like happy endings in stories, where everything is resolved and nothing is open ended, which is why you won’t find many happy philosophy students but you’ll find plenty of content (and often dull, but that’s another essay) mathematics scholars. This is what makes thinking so frustrating to most people, so most don’t do it. 

In the growth mindset, the most important thing is analysis. That is, being able to look back on one’s actions and either remembering what they did right and what they did wrong: in short, learning from one’s failures in order to prolong/ repeat one’s successes. If you’re a person with a strong growth mindset that wishes to implement its power in their day to day life, this can be tricky. This is why:

Analytical brains work almost solely on cause and effect: I do X, Y happens. Usually, there is a cause to an effect...

Did you catch the “usually”?

I say usually because there are always other factors that are at work OTHER than X. You can compliment a woman on her weight loss, and she can burst into tears. That doesn’t mean your compliment was the cause of her crying, the effect (turns out she’s battling anorexia, but who knew?). The analytical approach isn’t always the best way to assess one’s failures in day to day life, which is why applying the grown mindset to it is probably not a great idea. 

But children, teenagers and younger people in general often find themselves awake at night, tossing and turning, being kept awake by the memories of these kinds of scenarios where THEY were the producers of these potential causes for failures. They take apart every second of that moment where they could’ve possibly done something different, whether it was swallowing a certain phrase, standing in a certain way, using a different tone of voice than they did in that moment. They tweak at the memories, imagining different (better) outcomes to their tweaked actions.

This is almost identical to the inner workings of the growth mindset: it is the analysis of cause and effect and learning from one’s mistakes. Most, if not all, people who are faced with this see it as an excruciatingly painful experience that disrupts the homeostasis in the most uncomfortable way: the brain is making a problem out of something it cannot change, a memory or an issue that has already passed.

This explanation can also aid in uncovering the mystery of when most people lose the growth mindset and lose interest in improving themselves: it happens in late youth. It’s not a coincidence that people start abusing drugs, doing poorly in school, or develop (depressive and anxiety specifically) mental disorders in their teens or in their 20’s. And while a lot of it has to do with genetics, hormones and natural maturation, a lot of it is psychologically developmental: when one experiences the stress that comes with constant analysis, introspection and internal evaluation, one is bound to look for anything that will return them into the homeostatic state.