Why is it so hard to resist those very tasty chocolates, even though you know it’s unhealthy? And why do some situations make you crave chocolate like crazy, whereas in other situations you’re not tempted at all? And is it true that that piece of chocolate tastes better in one situation than in the other? These are all relevant questions to ask yourself when deciding to adopt a healthier lifestyle. And your mindset plays a big role in answering them.
Let’s start with explaining that living a healthy lifestyle is not always easy. Not the least because we all live in a so-called obesogenic environment. But what does this mean exactly? Simply put it refers to “an environment that promotes gaining weight and one that is not conducive to weight loss” (Swinburn, et al., 1999). We are continuously triggered by countless food cues in our environment. If you walk down the street, you see several billboards of tasty foods, and if you walk by a bakery it is hard to resist all the sweet pastries that you smell and see. At the grocery store, the unhealthy food options are omnipresent. Even when you are at home, watching television, tasty unhealthy food advertisements are there to tempt you to choose to eat unhealthily. However, the way you react to these food cues differs, depending on your current mindset. For example, imagine yourself at a nice get together with your friends… You probably won’t refuse that delicious homemade brownie. At this moment you are more in a hedonic state of mind. But if you just went shopping and tried on tight jeans, you might reconsider eating that same homemade brownie. This as you are now more focused on the accompanied health concerns. So, how you act upon seeing a brownie very much depends on your current mental state.
From previous scientific research, we know that your mindset can have a great influence on your eating behaviour. More specifically, peoples mindset can be manipulated into a health mindset (e.g. focus on high caloric content and weight gain concerns) or into a hedonic mindset (e.g. focus on the rewarding value and good feeling of eating it). Having a health mindset can lead to eating less high caloric foods and to making healthier food choices as compared to a hedonic mindset. Apart from behaviour, biological mechanisms are also influenced by your mindset. The way your brain reacts to food can be strongly influenced by your current mindset. In our labstudies we have shown that the way one observes high caloric food really determines the way his/her brains process it. In these studies, we asked female overweight participants to either focus on taste or neutral aspects (i.e. colours) of visually presented food stimuli. These food stimuli were individually tailored on liking, and all food stimuli included were very strongly liked. We found that when participants focused on the taste, brain regions that are specifically related to reward were activated. This was not the case when they focused on the neutral aspects of the presented foods, like colours. This showed that even though you like the food you see, reward processing is not always leading. Interestingly, this indicates that being in a certain mindset can really influence your biological processes and that this even overrules the influence of food liking.
The finding that mindset can lead to behavioral changes and even biological response changes is good news. Mindsets and personal thoughts can be adapted via the right instructions and this is exactly in line with the goal of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT); changing the way you think, can change the way you react and act. It was also found that changing eating behaviour or biological processes is most effective when the mindset that is induced is very relevant (context) for that specific moment (time). That means that changing a mindset can help when, for example, you are about to make a choice or when you need to engage with those unhealthy foods. Therefore, to really improve and sustain a long-lasting healthier lifestyle, this health awareness should be raised multiple times a day and for a longer period of time.
How can we implement this knowledge in the Socrates project? We know that we can change eating behaviour and the accompanied brain responses, if we focus on the mindset of an individual. To improve a current lifestyle, personal thoughts or internal dialogue should be changed, which could be possible by using a VR-based CBT. Changing your mindset, starts with your own personal observation. For this reason, combining the knowledge that we have on the influence of mindsets and CBT and being able to bring this all together in an almost-real-life VR therapy environment, seems to be a very promising approach to improve a healthier lifestyle!
About the author
Dr. Sieske Franssen is a cognitive neuroscientist working as a postdoc at Clinical Psychological Science and Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University (NL). Her PhD project focused on the influence of mindset on neural responding (fMRI), physiological responding (hormones and metabolism) and behaviour (e.g. subjective craving and intake) in the context of (over)eating. After her PhD she worked as a postdoc to develop a mobile application with an individually tailored intervention using a network approach to reduce obesity in children. In the Socrates project, Sieske will contribute by designing and executing fMRI studies to examine the influence and effectiveness on neural responses of a VR-based treatment using embodiment for people who are overweight/obese. https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/sieske.franssen