Instant Genius - What the Nordic people can teach us about a winter mindset, with Kari Leibowitz

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

The collective misery as the nights draw in and the days feel impossibly short is palpable at this time of the year. But it doesn’t have to feel this way. Kari Leibowitz, a researcher, writer and speaker who studies how our mindset influences our health and wellbeing, joins us to explain what studying the national Nordic psychology can teach us about getting through winter (and even maybe enjoying it!). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Right now, you might have noticed that the knights are drawing in, and we're all experiencing that familiar sounds of dread as we look at the window and realise that the days are getting very short indeed. So, for today's episode, we're exploring what the Nordic continues, us about the psychology of coping with long, dark winters. And in particular, how our mindset, that's the way we frame a situation, can significantly affect how we deal with challenges. I'm joined by Carrie Lieberwitz, a researcher, writer and author who studies how our mindset can influence our health and well-being, often more than we think. And at the moment,

she's currently writing a book called How to Winter, which examines the lessons learned from a raft of studies examining how the Nordic deal with polar winters, where the sun can disappear for months at a time. Mindset is something we've covered in the magazine before, and it's absolutely fascinating how much your mindset can influence your health. But I just want to start with the idea of a winter mindset, which is kind of what the focus of your book is. What drew you to looking at winter particularly in the way we approach winter and different cultures approach winter. So I grew up hating the winter.

I'm from New Jersey, just outside of New York in the U.S. I grew up at the Jersey Shore. So, you know, summer is king there, you know, grew up by the beach and really loved summer as the best season. And I hated winter so much, actually, that I went to university in Atlanta, Georgia, in part to escape the winters. That's a good idea.

Yeah, it was great. And, you know, as part of my undergraduate studies, I became really interested in this idea of human flourishing and sort of positive psychology. So, you know, historically, psychology was really focused on what goes wrong with people mentally, how we can diagnose and treat mental illness. But sort of in the recent decades, we've started trying to understand what makes a good life, what helps people thrive, what helps people sort of function at their best. And I studied contemplative practice there. So meditation, compassion meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, which is all sort of, you know, ways of recognizing and cultivating your mindsets, these sort of contemplative strategies. And then when I finished undergrad, I was sort of looking for a new adventure. I was looking to get some more research experience. And I stumbled across the work of a man named Yor Wittorsoe. And Yoar, who became my advisor in Norway, ultimately, is one of the world's leading experts on human happiness. So Yoar studies life satisfaction. He said he's personal growth. So not just a life that sort of feels good, but a life that's full of meaning, that's sort of

psychologically rich, where we're pursuing challenges that help us learn and grow and perform at higher levels. And I was really interested in working on a project with him because I just thought his research was so powerful and important. And I wrote to Yoar, and I knew that he lived in Norway, but maybe I hadn't done enough of my homework because I asked if he might be interested in collaborating, and he wrote back and mentioned that the university, he's at the University of Tromsa, is the northernmost university in the world. And so that was when I realized just how extreme his winter was, the winter in Tromsa.

And I started learning that in Trumsa there are so far north. They're about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle that in the winter they have two months of the polar night. So this is the time where the sun sets and they get a little bit of sort of ambient light as the sun skirts below the horizon. But it never actually rises for these two months. Actually, in Trumse, they'll be in the polar night soon. So it starts at the end of November and goes till the end of January. And I just thought that that was really fascinating that this guy who's one of the world experts on human happiness lives in this place where the sun doesn't rise for two months. And I sort of thought that we could put together a study on trying to understand mental health and well-being related to the winter in tromsa.

And I was sort of coming at it with, I think, a very American perspective that this winter must be horrible, must be something really tough to endure. And Yoir sort of told me, well, we don't really see that many differences in mental health in the winter here, you know, as you might expect. And I thought, huh, like, that's interesting. What's what's going on there? And that sort of led to our ultimate collaboration in my study in Norway. And so how, I have to ask that, did you, did you emigrate, did you go live over there for a few years or, and did you experience the, the long night? Yes. So ultimately I wrote a grant proposal and I was awarded a U.S. Norway Fulbright research grant to go there for a year to sort of study this question related to winter well-being and to experience the polar night for myself. So I got to Tromsa in August. So it was still light out for almost 24 hours a day because in the summer they have the opposite of the polar night, which is the midnight sun where the sun never sets. and I was there through June. And so I was there during most of the polar night, that time where the sun wasn't rising. And I got to experience the winter in Tromsa for myself.

And so what did you find, we'll get to, I suppose, the more scientific question of kind of what were the learnings. But just on a personal level, I wonder, as someone coming, as a sun worshipper, arriving in Tromsa, did you find it difficult to adapt? You know, it was funny because every person I told in the U.S. about my project that I was moving to this place in the Arctic, they would say things to me like, I could never do that.

I would be so depressed. I hate the winter. People would ask me, people would say, are you going there to study why they're not depressed in the winter? And do you think you're going to get depressed yourself during the winter? And, you know, I think this is one of the things that to me is so important about really spending time in a culture that you're trying to study and trying to understand because I went there sort of with that mindset that the winter was going to be something to endure.

And then when I got to Tromsa and I started talking to people about my study and I started telling them, you know, that it was my first winter there. People were sort of offering their lay theories of why people thrived during the polar night. But most people were just talking about the things they liked about the polar night, the things that they were looking forward to, the things they were excited about. They talked about the polar night as a really special time of year, really magical for sort of the soft colors. I had a friend there who the literal translation in Norwegian for the polar night is the dark time. And she instead insisted on calling it the blue time to emphasize that it's not a time of total darkness. Instead, it's a time of really beautiful

soft light and soft colors. So they talked about sort of the beauty of the polar night. They talked about skiing and all sort of the opportunities for recreation in the polar night. They talked about coziness. So you might be familiar with the Danish word, uh, huga. The Norwegian word is kushlig, but this idea of coziness that's really prominent and really important in Scandinavian culture. And so people just had a different perspective, a different attitude than what?

what I was expecting in this way that was making me more excited for the polar night and sort of easing some of my fears and concerns and dread and making me see that, wow, there was going to be a lot of special stuff to experience during that time of year. So was that personal realization that sort of arriving in this strange, cold, dark place? I've landed in Trump, so it's kind of an intimidating place to land, especially in the middle of, I don't know when he went, but I was there in the middle of winter and I was like, this is, this is a serious place for serious people. Did your personal realization, did that then lead to where you started focusing your research?

Was it that you seeing this mindset, was that, did you think, oh, there must be something to this? Yeah, I really started to see that the way people were talking about winter was different than the way I was talking about winter. And, you know, don't get me wrong, there were parts of the winter and also being in Tromsa that were hard. You know, I was 24. I had moved to a new country where I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language. As you said, I mean, Tromsa is, it's very beautiful, but it does kind of have a wild feel to it. And I don't know if it's because I sort of know mentally where it is on the map, but you sort of feel like you're at the edge of the earth. And I just felt, you know, very far away from my old life. And, you know, a lot of that was really difficult for me.

But also, I started seeing that there were opportunities in that and that there were opportunities to enjoy the winter that I might not have realized in the culture that I grew up in. And that did ultimately inspire our research because as I was talking to people, I was realizing that they had this more positive view of winter, and I was trying to figure out how we could capture that in our research study, how we could measure that. And really the only existing measures for looking at seasonal well-being, winter well-being, especially in the psychological literature at that time, was to look at seasonal effective disorder. So I could measure whether or not someone had winter depression, but there weren't any scales or measures out there that psychologists were using

to measure if people liked the winter, if people had positive feelings about the winter. And so I started realizing that we needed a new different way to capture people's relationships to winter that allowed for more of this positive aspect because there wasn't really anything like that. And if I used only these existing measures, I was going to sort of miss what I was hearing from my friends and colleagues in Tromsa about how they viewed the winter. So would you be able to elaborate on the kind of measures that you designed to kind of capture this? And then what you started learning once you were able to, you know, get data on these scales and what kind of things did you discover? Yeah. So we were trying, Yowar and I were trying to

understand winter well-being and trying to capture some of what allows people to thrive in Tromsa during the winter. And that was when we came across this idea of mindset. So it was actually in a conversation with Alia Crum, who later became my PhD mentor at Stanford University, where I was talking to her about this project. And I was talking to her about this different way that people in Tromsa feud the winter. And, you know, she is one of the big pioneers of mindset. And she said to me, maybe it's their mindset. And that sort of really made it click for me. And so Yoir and I came up with a scale that was meant to capture sort of a range of

positive and negative mindsets that people might have and the ways that people might respond to the winter and tromso as a result of their mindset. So we would ask people questions in what we called the wintertime mindset scale, things like, I find the wintertime. months dark and depressing or in the winter, I often don't feel like doing anything at all. That would be sort of reflective of a negative wintertime mindset if people agree with that. But then we would also ask people things like there are many things to enjoy about the winter, or I find the winter months fascinating, or winter brings many wonderful seasonal changes,

this more sort of positive aspect of winter. And so we gave this wintertime mindset scale along with a host of, well-being measures that are commonly used in psychology research. So we used a satisfaction with life scale. We measured people's positive and negative emotions. We measured people's psychological flourishing. We measured people's personal growth. So how willing they are to tackle new challenges that can lead them to grow and change. And we administered this survey in January just at the end of the polar night at three latitudes in Norway. So we gave it to people living in southern Norway near Oslo, in northern Norway, where I was living near Tromsa, and then in

way northern Norway on Svalbard, which is an Arctic Island halfway between Northern Norway and the North Pole. And so you look to these groups, and I'm desperate now, what did you find in terms of how their attitudes affected those other measures that you looked at? What was the kind of relationship there? First, we found that having a positive wintertime mindset was positively associated with every measure of well-being we looked at. So people who had more positive wintertime mindsets were also more likely to be highly satisfied with their lives. They're more likely to experience more positive emotions. They're more likely to pursue the challenges that lead to personal growth.

And they're more likely to be flourishing psychologically. Now, this was a correlational study, right? So all we can say is that these things go together. It's possible, right, that people who are more satisfied with their lives or experience more positive emotions have a more positive view of winter as a result. Or it's possible that having this positive mindset about winter leads to these gains and well-being. And we know from research on other mindsets and other domains that when you can change people's mindsets, improvements in well-being often follow. We also found another result that I thought was really interesting, which was we found that as you went farther north in Norway, people had a significantly more positive wintertime mindset. So people in Svalbard had the most positive wintertime mindset, then people in Tromsa, then people in Oslo.

And I think that's really interesting because, you know, Oslo is on the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. So it's still very far north, and it still experiences sort of a long, cold, dark winter. But Tromso is significantly darker, and yet they tend to have a more positive wintertime mindset, which might say something to me about sort of the need to embrace winter. If you live somewhere where the winter is so extreme, you sort of have no choice but to lean into the season. They're also all maddens far, aren't they? Yeah, so Svalbard's a really interesting place. I mean, so there's only about 2,000 people who live in the main town of Longerbien, and it's so remote and so extreme that actually if you leave that main town, you're required by law to carry a gun with you in case you encounter a hungry polar bear. So, yeah, people living in Svalbard are very extreme and hardcore and probably a more self-selecting group that you, you know, you wouldn't move there unless you love.

loved the winter. But Tromso is more of a normal city. People are born and raised there. People move there for jobs, things like that. So the fact that they have a more positive winter mindset than people in Oslo, I think, you know, still tells us something. So people listen to this, might wonder, before we get, because I do want to ask you for some advice on how to prepare for the winter, particularly as we have. head into November and December and January. But I think people from the UK might be thinking, oh, yeah, well, you know, in Trompso, it's beautiful,

there's this beautiful snowy landscape, come to England where it's grey skies, ruddy rain, and, you know, high winds, and it kind of can blow the morale away from you. Do you think these lessons or these findings are still, transferable to somewhere a bit more climate that gets a sort of different kind of winter. Definitely. I mean, I hear this a lot from people in the UK. People in the UK say things like, you know, well, it's easy to love the winter when you have snow, you know. And but people who live

in colder places say, well, it's easy to love winter when it, you know, never gets below minus five, you know. And so everybody sort of thinks the grass is greener. But I do think, you know, it's interesting because winter has multiple components that I think people struggle with. So one might be the cold and it's undoubtedly colder in northern Norway than it is sort of in the UK. But another is the dark. And in some ways, it can be darker in the UK, even compared to Tromsa, you know, I mean, they have the polar night. So you're getting less actual time where the sun has risen. But when you have the snow, the light reflects. And so it's feel. feels brighter than I think in the UK, you can have what feel like these endless months of gray

drizzle. And so I think looking at tromsa and looking at these more extreme places to say, how are they embracing the winter? How are they coping with the winter? How are they embracing the darkness and taking those lessons to other places around the globe? I think is really important and really possible. And I think that, that's what I really like about studying sort of extremes of human environment and behavior is because those extremes often make it more obvious what kinds of things we can do, even if we live in a place that's less extreme. And I think when you live in a place like Tromsa, you can't ignore the fact that the sun's

not rising for two months. You can't just try to put a coat on and get on with it. You have to adapt with the seasons. And I think the disadvantage for people elsewhere, especially maybe in somewhere like the UK, is that it's different enough that you feel it, but not so different that everybody is adapting their behavior. And so people try to just ignore it and then sort of wonder why they're unhappy this time of year or why it doesn't feel good. And I think, you know, because we have to find a way to actually adapt, change our behavior and lean into the season and recognize that it is different in the winter. Okay, so I think definitely in the UK we'd love to complain that we've definitely got it got it worse, but I think I can see the benefit as a lot of us do head into that moment,

which I feel like it's about now where you look outside every so often and think, oh no, it's already dark again. So what advice would you give? What would be your sort of main, like these are the things you absolutely must do, if you want to try and have a better time over the winter months, if you're one of those people who struggle with the long nights and the cold and the rain and the wind. Yeah.

Well, I try not to offer must-does. I try to offer a winter mindset smorgasbord so that people can sort of pick and choose what things appeal to them because I think there's not, you know, a one-size-fits-all strategy. So I think the things that I observed in Tromsa that I've, that I've incorporated into my own life that I've used with my students that I'm putting in my book now that I think really help people. One is to really find the opportunities in winter and make it special, right? So part of this is embracing and adapting to the change in the seasons, right?

So that feeling of looking outside and being like, oh, shoot, it's already dark out. Nobody likes that feeling, right? I don't like that feeling. But if you have prepared for it mentally and you have something to look forward to when it gets dark out, then I think that can be a really powerful way to shift that feeling. So a sunset ritual at this time of year is something I really love. So making a cup of tea, pausing when the sun goes down, dimming my lights, lighting some candles so that I can do my work from 4 p.m. on in sort of this soft, cozy lighting. I think is really nice. And that's something that, you know, I can't do that when it's light out until 8 p.m. I can't do my evening workout with the lights off only by candlelights when it's light out till 8 p.m. I can't eat dinner by candlelight when it's light out until 8 p.m. So really trying to lean into the season and say, what are things that are better to do in the dark, that are more

special to do in the dark and try to sort of take advantage of those things? So finding those opportunities, making it special. And I think we do a lot of this sort of leading up to the holiday season anyway, right? We love the coziness of the season. We love the Christmas lights. All of those things are special because it's the darkest time of year, because that light feels so good when it's dark outside. Another thing that I observed people in Norway doing is getting outside no matter the weather. And I think this can be especially hard when you live somewhere that is sort of damp and gray and cold. But Norwegians have this saying, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. And I'm currently living in Amsterdam and the Dutch have a saying,

you're not made of sugar. You won't melt in the rain. And so this idea that, you know, the bad weather is not a good reason to stay indoors, that you can put on your waterproof food, You can put on your raincoat. You can get an umbrella and you can go for a walk in the rain. And I think this is helpful for a lot of reasons. One is that we know that being outside in the fresh air is good for our minds and our bodies. Two, is that moving our bodies, we know, is really good and provides sort of a lot of endorphins and a lot of feel good hormones in our brain and our body.

And three, because I think a lot of the negative wintertime mindset comes from seeing winter as a limiting time of year, when you're really focused on all of the things that you can't do, that you like to do other times of year. And so showing yourself that you can get outside, even in the winter weather, is actually a really powerful way to see that winter is not limiting. And if you're listening to this and you're like, heck no, like, that doesn't sound fun, my challenge for you is to just try it one time. Just say you're going to go 15, 20, minutes, bundle up and go for a walk. And I've done this with many students. I've done this in my workshops. I've done this with my family on Christmas Day where I force people or I assign my students

to go for a winter walk and reflect on it. And it almost always is people saying, I didn't want to do it. I thought it was going to be miserable. It looked horrible out. And then I got outside and I was like, maybe a little cold for the first few minutes. And then I started moving and I warmed up. And I was like, you know, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. And walking in the rain when you're dry, when the city is all or the town or the country or wherever you live is all sort of misty and romantic and soft can actually be so enjoyable and so peaceful. But I think we don't do it enough to recognize that it can be. So just give it a try. You can report back. You can let me know how it goes. So I think getting outside is also something that's really, really helpful for people.

It's fascinating to me because as you were saying that a lot of this stuff also, I suppose, rings a little bit true with a lot of traditions, which I think the Nordic kind of embrace as well, in terms of candles, light, the festival of light that Christmas becomes the Christmas Day walk. I don't know how much of an embedded tradition that is, but going for a walk and Christmas Day is the tradition in my family, lest we kind of are joint set after Christmas dinner. But I just, I guess

someone listening who might be cynical of this stuff might wonder how much of this sort of idea about mindset, oh, you just need to change the framing of the situation. How effective is that really? So I just want to ask, you know, it's quite a new area of psychology, really. And you mentioned Alia, whose work we've covered

before. But what do we know about how powerful an effect changing your mindset can have on you psychologically and even physiologically? Biologically. Yeah. So the research is just showing more and more how much our minds affect our bodies and how much our mindsets and our expectations impact the effects of drugs, treatments, exercise, the food that we eat. And, you know, all of these kinds of things. And that this framing is really powerful. So I'll just give you one study example, although I could give you 20, but I'll spare you. One study that I was part of at Stanford that I really loved, we had kids going through

treatment for life-threatening food allergies. So they were doing oral immunotherapy where they had to eat a little bit of their allergen and sort of increase the doses that they were eating over time until their bodies build up desensitization to, in our study, it was peanuts. And in one group of our patients, we told them the side effects that you might experience, sort of hives, itchy mouth, upset stomach. They're just something that happens during treatment, and you can try to minimize them, but there's not that much we can do about them.

And in the other group, we told them, these side effects are actually a sign that the treatment is working and that your body is getting stronger and building up desensitization. So again, it's just a relatively simple reframe of the meaning of an unpleasant part of treatment. And what we found is that kids in that condition who were exposed to this mindset that side effects were positive signals that the treatment was working, they and their parents were less worried when they had side effects. They were less likely to contact the patient.

care team with questions about side effects. They were less likely to skip their doses at the largest dose sizes. And they were less likely to have symptoms at the largest dose sizes. And they also showed a greater change in a biomarker of allergic tolerance that we looked at in their blood called peanut IGG4. So this is just one study. You know, there's many, many showing. but I think this idea that how we think about things influences our biology, our physiology, and also our behavior is just being shown more and more and more. And, you know, expectations matter because they influence our motivation, right? If you tell yourself going outside for a walk is going to be completely miserable,

of course you're not going to be motivated to do it. But if you tell yourself going outside for a walk is going to be peaceful, calm and refreshing and make me feel good, then you're going to be motivated to do it. And then as a result, you're more likely to do it. And then you're more likely to have health benefits down the line. I'll just give you one more example. Becca Levy, who's at Harvard, I believe, does some really great work on mindsets about aging. And people who have the mindset that aging is full of opportunities tend to live longer than people who have the mindset that aging is an inevitable decline, even when you control for important sort of health factors and health behaviors.

Now, this might seem like magic, but when we think about it in this context, I think we can see how it makes sense. If you think that there's nothing you can do to stop the decline of aging, why are you going to go to the doctor to get your checkups to make sure you're in good health? Why are you going to bother exercising and moving your body and working on your flexibility? because it's all downhill anyway. Why are you going to bother doing anything that's going to be good for your health?

Because there's no point. Whereas if you see that aging is full of opportunity, there's all these things you want to do as you get older, you're much more motivated to take care of your health. You're more motivated to exercise. You're more motivated to eat healthy foods. And that actually contributes to longevity. And so these mindsets aren't magic.

It's not like, oh, I think that winder will be wonderful. And now all of my problems will be gone. and I don't feel the cold, it's that I think that winter will be wonderful and I'm more motivated to make it wonderful. I'm more likely to notice the ways that winter is wonderful rather than the ways that winter is dreadful. And I'm more likely to do things that I enjoy during the winter and that reinforces this mindset. And so mindsets can be the sort of powerful catalyst for our motivation and our behavior that can then lead to improvements in well-being that then sort of reinforce this mindset. And so I think the issue is that most people underestimate the importance

of their mindset and these things. I mean, if you can do all of this stuff and enjoy winter and, you know, make it special and make it cozy and make it fun and get outside when the weather's bad while having the mindset that winter is terrible, then great. You don't need the mindset. But I think most of us can't do that. I think for most of us, the mindset is the foundation to all of this other stuff. Thank you. I think that's a perfect place to end. I have one more question, but I might end it there anyway, but just lastly, before I let you go, do you feel that if I can get over winter, so I can change my winter mindset, just a little bit and have a better time of winter, that that also might be a generalizable skill that that might, you know,

tackling or, I mean, I don't know if there's any evidence or if it's more of just a thing of personal anecdotes, but did you believe that it's a generalizable skill to have a better winter mindset might give you a better mindset for all those other challenges that you just talked about? I think so. So I think that, you know, practicing, growing are sort of mind mindset muscles and noticing when our mindset is helping or hurting us in terms of living the way we want, feeling the way we want, achieving the things we want to achieve is a skill that you can learn. And one of the things I really like about winter mindsets is I think they're at the right intersection of challenging but accessible, right? A lot of us struggle with winter,

but it's not changing your mindset about your cancer diagnosis, which there is research. from the Stanford Mind and Body Lab about a mindset intervention that sort of improved well-being for patients going through cancer diagnosis led by my colleague Sean Zion, but we don't have time for that right now. That's the next episode. Next episode, yeah. Yeah, but the point is, you know, changing your mindset about something that is really traumatic or really difficult, right? Like a serious health diagnosis, like losing your job, like, you know, a divorce, something that is really traumatic in life, that's really hard. And I think practicing,

changing your mindset about something like winter is practice in A, showing yourself that it's possible to change your mindset and cultivate a more useful mindset. And B, seeing the feedback loops, seeing how you feel, right? Just try on this mindset for a week. Try living a week with the mindset that winter is wonderful and see if you experience winter any differently that way. I feel like it is sort of, yeah, it's lower stakes in a way, you know? I think it's a little bit friendlier, but it's still, I think, has a surprisingly big impact in our sort of day-to-day, how we're feeling and well-being. And once you see that you can do that in relation to winter, you start to recognize, A, how powerful our mindsets are. And B,

you start to sort of have the confidence that, yeah, I can work on my mindset, that that is something within my control that I can cultivate sort of intentionally and deliberately. And so I think that for me, wintertime mindsets are powerful because, yes, we could all use a little bit more well-being in winter, but also because, you know, we can think of winter as a metaphor, right? We can think of it as any challenging season in our lives. And once you've practiced changing your mindset about a literal winter, then you might be that much better equipped when it's time to use your mindset

to help you through another difficult season of life. That was Carrie Lieberwitz there, talking about how your mindset can influence your health and well-being. If you'd like to find out more about how to get through the long, dark winter months, keep your eyes peeled for Carrie's book. How to Winter, harnessing your mindset to embrace all season.

seasons of life. I believe it will be out next year and published by Pan Macmillan and I think we'll definitely have her back on the podcast when the book's out and indeed in the magazine to keep your eyes pill for that. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find this online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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