Courses

When you eat vegetables, is it a chore or an indulgence? When you take a new medication, do you think about how it will help you heal, or do you worry about side effects? Do you avoid or embrace stress? Your answers to questions like these can reveal how mindsets—thoughts, beliefs, and expectations, conscious or otherwise—shape your life. Drawing from cutting-edge research in psychology, medicine, and behavioral economics, this course will illustrate how powerfully—and sometimes surprisingly—mindsets impact our motivation, performance, health, and well-being. We will see how cultivating the mindset that healthy foods are delicious improves health without dieting. We will learn about how stress can improve work performance—if we adopt the right stress mindset. And we will see how the mindsets that form in the doctor’s office influence how our bodies respond to sickness. Along the way, we will take the latest research and apply it to our lives as we see how adopting more useful mindsets is not only possible—it’s necessary for us to thrive. We will combine scientific research with experiential exercises to understand and shape our mindsets. Students will leave this course with a scientific understanding of the power of mindsets as well as practical strategies for adopting useful mindsets.