Alia Crum on How Mindset Shapes Stress and Hunger

Pour someone a milkshake, tell them it has 620 calories, and their body starts acting like they just ate a big meal, even though the shake is actually 350 calories (12:02). Tell someone else the same shake has 140 calories, and their body barely reacts. Same cup, same ingredients, same spoon. Different story attached to it, different biology inside the person drinking it. This is the finding that made Stanford psychologist Alia Crum's career, and it runs through her conversation with cognitive scientist and Columbia professor Scott Barry Kaufman about how belief gets under the skin.

Crum studies mindsets, which she defines as the lenses through which information is perceived, organized, and interpreted (00:50). That sounds like a soft claim until she backs it with a hormone. The hormone is ghrelin, sometimes called the hunger hormone, which rises before a meal to push the brain toward food and slows metabolism in case food doesn't arrive, then normally drops once a person eats (10:05). In Crum's 2011 Mind Over Milkshakes study at Yale New Haven Hospital, participants drank the identical shake but were told it was either a 620 calorie indulgent treat or a 140 calorie sensible one (12:02). The people who believed they were indulging showed a ghrelin drop three times larger than the people who believed they were being sensible (12:37).

"When people thought they were consuming an indulgent shake, their body responded as if they had had more food." (Alia Crum, 12:37)

The surprise wasn't that belief mattered. Placebo research had already shown that. The surprise was the direction. Crum expected the healthy mindset to help. Instead, believing one is eating sparingly seems to tell the body it is still short on food, which keeps ghrelin high and metabolism slow (13:40). A restraint mindset can work against the very diet it's meant to serve.

"The mindset of sensibility or restraint or scarcity actually counteracts the hard work that you might be doing actually reducing your caloric intake." (Alia Crum, 14:11)

This wasn't Crum's first pass at the idea that belief can rewrite a body's response. Years earlier, as an undergraduate working with Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, she studied hotel housekeepers who were getting plenty of exercise on the job without knowing it. Once researchers told the housekeepers that their work already exceeded the U.S. Surgeon General's exercise guidelines, the women showed measurable drops in weight, body fat, and blood pressure, without changing what they actually did all day (08:03). The labor stayed the same. Only the story about the labor changed.

The Body Believes What the Mind Decides

Crum's next target was stress. A 2013 paper she wrote with Yale's Peter Salovey and researcher Shawn Achor introduced the Stress Mindset Measure, a short questionnaire asking whether a person believes stress enhances performance, learning, and health, or drains them (18:24). Most people, across many countries and translations, score below the midpoint, meaning they see stress as something to avoid (19:25). The one group Crum has found that consistently scores on the enhancing side is Navy SEALs, the U.S. Navy's special operations force, who volunteer for extreme stress because they trust they can handle it (20:18).

That belief seems to change body chemistry. People who see stress as enhancing show a moderate, adaptive cortisol response instead of a spike or a shutdown (24:54). Cortisol, the stress hormone, gets blamed for a lot, but Crum points out it is also tied to attention and engagement, so the goal isn't to suppress it, it's to keep it in a useful middle range (25:39). People who believe stress is debilitating tend to swing to one of two extremes: they either freak out or check out, and both show up as unhelpful hormone patterns (24:54).

"The body's stress response was not designed to kill us. Like, it was not designed to hold us back. It was designed to help us rise to the occasion to meet the demands we're faced with." (Alia Crum, 21:35)

Crum draws a line here that a lot of pop psychology blurs. Believing stress is enhancing doesn't mean chasing more of it, and it doesn't mean the stressful event itself is good. Borrowing a concept associated with psychologist Peter Salovey's circle, she distinguishes clean discomfort, the raw stress or fear itself, from dirty discomfort, the layer of judgment piled on top, the guilt or panic about feeling stressed at all (26:33). The aim isn't to erase the first layer. It's to stop manufacturing the second one.

"Stress is the experience or anticipation of encountering challenges in your goal-related efforts." (Alia Crum, 27:52)

That definition matters because it explains why stress can't and shouldn't be eliminated: it only shows up around things a person actually cares about. No one gets stressed about a stranger's failing grade. The useful move isn't avoidance, it's choosing, deliberately, to treat the stress response as an ally. Crum calls this a metacognitive or meta-mindset approach: instead of telling people the enhancing mindset is simply the true one, her interventions show the full paradox, that stress can wound or strengthen, and let people choose the enhancing frame because it's useful, not because it's forced on them (32:49).

The same design shows up in Crum's work with cancer patients. People diagnosed with cancer tend to hold one of three mindsets: the diagnosis as catastrophe, as something manageable, or as an opportunity for growth (36:39). Strikingly, which mindset a person holds has almost no relationship with how severe their cancer actually is (38:21). Someone with stage four disease may see opportunity, while someone with an early, treatable case may feel their life is over. Crum's team built a documentary-style digital intervention, roughly an hour of survivors describing how shifting their mindset changed their experience, and found it improved patients' health-related quality of life, meaning day-to-day functioning, mood, and symptom management (35:44). Accepting the diagnosis has to come first, and from there a person might choose to fight hard or, as Kaufman notes of one widely covered case, choose to stop fighting and spend remaining time differently. Crum treats both as legitimate outcomes of an honest mindset (41:21).

Genes Are Not Verdicts

The most unsettling study in the conversation involves genes rather than beliefs about the world. In a 2019 study, Crum's lab looked at CREB1, a gene linked to how efficiently the body uses oxygen during exercise; people carrying a particular version, or allele, of the gene were thought to tire faster and be more prone to weight gain (43:26). Researchers tested people's actual VO2 max, a measure of exercise capacity, then handed each participant a report on their genetic result a week later, before a second identical test. The catch: the report didn't always match reality. Some people with the protective gene were told they had the risk version, and vice versa (48:37). What predicted the second test's outcome wasn't the actual gene. It was what people were told. Those told they carried the risk allele converted oxygen to carbon dioxide less efficiently, regardless of true genotype (47:10), and also reported feeling hotter, more pain, and less motivation (47:40).

Crum connects this to genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, the large genetic surveys used to estimate risk for traits like intelligence or disease. Those studies currently explain only about 2 to 15% of the variance in outcomes such as intelligence or achievement (50:10), a modest number that a consumer genetics report can make feel like fate. Crum's CREB1 result suggests the report itself, not just the gene, can become part of the outcome. She and Kaufman both note the parallel to the Pygmalion effect, the classic finding that a teacher's expectation of a student can shape that student's performance regardless of the student's actual ability; a genetic label, they suggest, may work the same way on the body (51:43).

Crum ends on a wider claim, developed with University of Pennsylvania researcher Jer Clifton and published this year in The American Psychologist, that people also carry primal world beliefs, basic assumptions about whether the world itself is safe or dangerous, abundant or scarce (53:12). Where Carol Dweck's growth mindset concerns beliefs about intelligence, and Crum's own work concerns beliefs about stress, food, illness, and genes, Clifton's research asks what people believe about the one situation they never leave, the world itself. The claim reframes personality less as a fixed trait and more as a belief about a permanent situation (58:23), which returns the conversation to where it started. A mindset is not a fact about the world. It's a lens a person picks up, often without noticing, and Crum's career has been spent showing, hormone by hormone, cell by cell, that the lens changes what it sees.