Now that Lent is upon us, it is worthwhile to reflect on how we can offer our struggles to God, both involuntary struggles (i.e., sickness and suffering in our families), as well as voluntary struggles that we take on for spiritual reasons (i.e. fasting and other ascetic disciplines).
One of the things I find curious—and hopeful—is how voluntary hardship is now becoming trendy via some of the world’s most popular podcasts. From intermittent fasting to ice baths, hardship is all the rage. This new interest in the positive benefits of suffering is supported by a growing wealth of research from different universities showing that when we expose ourselves to challenge, our lives become more resilient, strong, and even happy.
I wrote about that last year in a post on parenting, and I’ve returned to the subject in the latest issue of Salvo Magazine. The editors at Salvo have made the piece available for non-subscribers. Titled, “Redeeming Struggle: Leveraging Hardship For Growth,” the article explores one curious aspect of the current research, which is that the difference between struggle that makes us stronger vs. struggle that makes us weaker often comes down to mindset. From the article,
In her work with elementary school children, Stanford research psychologist Carol Dweck found that some children have what she calls a “growth mindset” whereas other children have a “fixed mindset.” Those with a fixed mindset perceived assignments as a test of how smart they are. These students gravitated towards easier tasks to avoid appearing stupid. But those with a growth mindset regarded schoolwork as a means to help them become smarter and to further develop their capabilities. When someone with a growth mindset is unable to do something well, he sees it as a spur to more practice rather than as a reflection on his innate ability. As Dweck explained in an interview with James Morehead: “In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”
How a person thinks about struggle is important whether it involves learning a musical instrument, a foreign language, or a new skill. If we think that struggle indicates weakness and low ability, we will be less inclined to do what it takes to master material and to persevere through difficulty to reach our goals. We may even give up prematurely, concluding we just don’t have what it takes to succeed. But if we see struggle as an invitation to stretch ourselves and expand, then we will be able to leverage hardship for growth.
Dweck’s work has mainly been focused on education, but it shouldn’t be hard to see how these principles can transfer to other domains in life. Consider exercise. When we go to the gym, we don’t typically view the weight machines as a test for how strong we are but as a way for us to grow and become stronger.
Why is it that when we are worn out doing household chores, we often consider this a negative sort of tiredness, yet we will pay money to go to the gym to experience equivalent, if not greater, degrees of fatigue? The difference, of course, is how we frame these activities. The whole context of a gym (with the idea that it is good for us and strengthening) helps to contextualize it positively, whereas culture tends to attach negative connotations to menial tasks like housework.
But what if the same mindset we have at the gym could be leveraged in other work contexts, including those with stereotypically negative connotations? That is a question that Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer set out to explore. Langer studied hotel maids who spend the majority of their days in constant motion, including lugging heavy equipment around hotel hallways. Surprisingly, more than two thirds of the maids reported that they didn’t get any exercise, despite the fact that their entire workday involved movement. Langer then divided the 84 maids into two groups and began educating one group about how much exercise they were getting each day. NPR’s Alix Spiegel explains what happened next: “With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general’s definition of an active lifestyle. The other group was given no information at all. One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio—and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.… Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset. This experiment suggested that by simply reframing their work as exercise, these hotel maids started leveraging the benefits of exercise, not unlike going to the gym. In other words, what we think about our struggles—whether we frame them in a positive or a negative way—can determine how those struggles impact us.”
That’s all I’ll share from the article here, but you can read the whole thing on the Salvo website.
This echoes some of the findings I came across when researching for my 2017 article “Great Lent and Cultural Anthropology.” Researchers found that the habits and conceptual frameworks of East Asians reflected a positive orientation toward struggle, while North Americans tended to have a negative orientation toward struggle. Of course, there is a whole story of how these cultural assumptions seeped into American evangelicalism, resulting in faulty interpretations of scripture that problematized struggle through misunderstanding the nature of a “victorious Christian life.” I have told that story, at least in part, in my Touchstone feature, “The Cross of Least Resistance.”