Why your Mindset is Key to Navigating an Uncertain World

A better understanding of how our minds and bodies work together to make sense of the world unlocks breakthroughs in managing ourselves and leading others.

In these newsletters, I’ll be exploring how the components of our mindset: feel, think and see work and what these insights offer to build mindsets for our future.??I’m kicking off with exciting developments in the field of interoception and how this helps us navigate uncertainty.

Given the events of the last three years, it’s not hard to make a subjective case that we’re living in an ‘age of uncertainty.’ But are we really? That much-used trope has kicked off almost every business book in the past 30 years in some shape or form. But, uncertainty is a nebulous concept because of its highly subjective nature. Uncertain executives will hesitate in making investment decisions, uncertain consumers from making major purchases and uncertain policymakers from placing bets on the future. Our perception of uncertainty is as important as the reality of unquantifiable outcomes in any decision-making.?

However, where uncertainty can be quantified in relation to economic and political events, it appears we are in a more uncertain world. Researchers Hite Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri working as part of an International Monetary Fund project, have created the?World Uncertainty Index?to capture uncertainty related to these events,??such as Brexit, drawing on data from 143 countries over the past 60 years.

This index focuses on the frequency of uncertainty reporting in major economic intelligence analysis worldwide. A key finding is that in the past decade, uncertainty has spiked dramatically, even in the context of events such as the assassination of US President Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the 1970s oil crisis.

Our brains don’t like uncertainty; they are designed to minimise it, particularly when we see our mental capacity in limited terms as a computer bound by finite limits.???However, the exponential growth in understanding self-awareness driven by experimental neuroscience combined with clever psychological tests shows us that we have a vast range of interior resources at our disposal that we can unlock to create mindsets to navigate the new uncertain environments we’re creating.

It starts by rethinking our understanding of what mindset is. Whilst the term has become increasingly popular, when we ask people for their definitions, answers are somewhat fuzzy.??Today, we use the term to describe everything from the dictionary definition of assumptions, beliefs and attitudes to personality, social affiliation, ideas or political ideology.?

Having asked thousands of people what they mean, when we dig deeper beyond their initial descriptions, we get to an understanding that is remarkably close to what science is showing us. Our mindset is the most fundamental way we make sense of the world. This sense-making isn’t purely rational or analytical. It’s the interplay between thought, perception and feeling. Our mind and body constantly triangulate between assumptions, beliefs, language, the frames we hold up to the world, and the physical sensations and emotions we experience to produce moments of knowing doubt, or certainty.??

Progress in the rapidly emerging field of interoception suggests that soon it will be seen as having a similar degree of importance as emotional intelligence in how we lead and manage our lives. Interoception is the perception of sensations?inside?our body. These are pooled at the heart and channelled through the vagus nerve to the brain, which uses them to construct affect – the term psychologists use to describe the sum total of our physical feelings, which we often confuse as emotion. When this flow is working well, it improves our judgement, resilience, and relationships.?

Interoception mostly operates outside our conscious awareness, but if our metabolism is significantly out of balance, affect will drive us to feel pain, nausea, inflammation, temperature changes, hunger, thirst, a pounding heart rate, or muscle tension.?

One of the first to make sense of how interoception works was the neurobiologist, Antonio Damasio. He proposed[i]?that emotional events start with physical changes in the body that we’re initially unaware of, called?somatic markers (responses from the body). This is important because it shows that our physical feelings are the first step in our ability to understand what’s happening in the world, not our emotions or thoughts.?

When you see the fuming face of a driver you’ve unintentionally cut up, your heart pounds, your muscles tighten, and your skin sweats?before?you are aware of emotions such as fear, anger, or embarrassment.??

That your body knows before your brain what is happening in the world is at the heart of why individuals with better interoceptive sensitivity make better decisions, can avoid unconscious bias, and have greater physical resilience. Better interoception gives the brain more information, faster.??Whilst all of us get intuitive feelings – a sense of right or wrong, danger or opportunity - with better interoception we can access it faster and seem to be able to rely on it more.

Damasio found that the decision-making of patients who had brain damage that interfered with their ability to feel physical and emotional responses were severely impaired. He showed these patients images that would normally elicit powerful emotional responses in neurotypical people, such as children crying or serious injuries, and they felt no emotional reaction. They?knew?they should feel something, but because their somatic markers weren’t activated, they didn’t experience the typical emotional responses of fear, disgust, or anxiety.

This highlights the crucial causative link between physical feelings and emotion and the importance of interoceptive sensitivity on decision-making. These patients found even simple choices about what to eat or wear at times impossible. The neurologist Robert Burton describes certainty, not as a rational process but a feeling – the ‘brain creates the involuntary sensation of knowing.[ii]’ Without this feeling of knowing, it’s near impossible to decide.

The?neuroscientist, Sarah Garfinkel[iii], brings this to life: ‘If we see a snake, our hearts won’t beat faster because we are scared. Seeing the snake will increase our heartbeat and when that’s registered in the brain, that’s what leads to the feeling of fear.”?

Researchers are showing that individuals with greater?interoceptive sensitivity, measured by their ability to estimate their heartbeat rate, perform better in risky decision-making[iv],[v]. The researcher,?Hugo Critchley highlighted the link between interoceptive sensitivity and activation in a part of the brain crucially involved called the insular cortex. He developed an ingenuously simple measurement method, asking test subjects to assess their heart rate. The closer their assessment was to their actual heart rate, the higher the insular activation. This measure, called?interoceptive accuracy, has been applied in hundreds of studies, revealing its significance across numerous well-being and human performance areas.?

For example, a now-famous study involving Critchley and?Garfinkel[vi],?in a London trading floor,?showed that increases in a trader’s interoceptive sensitivity matched an increased ability to generate profit compared to their less sensitive peers and they enjoyed longer careers in what is undeniably an intense environment.??

Another puzzle piece is the research studies showing how interoception generates this advantage. Damasio designed an experiment to measure bodily responses to unconscious decision-making. Participants were given money and four decks of cards to play with on a computer screen.??They had to choose and bet on which decks would enable them to win more money and avoid losses. Their physiological responses were tracked using electrodes to detect tiny changes in skin conductance as the body produces sweat in response to perceived risks.??As the test progressed, the participants became consciously aware that there were ‘good decks’ where they won money and bad ones where they lost it.??Where it gets interesting is that in the early stages of the test, where they had no conscious awareness of which decks were the bad ones, as their mouse lingered over risky cards, their skin conductance spiked, showing that their bodies knew before their brains where the risk lay.?

A stronger connection between the body and brain not only gives us an advantage in decision-making in risky situations but also strengthens our resilience.??An enlightening study[vii]?conducted by Martin Paulus, combined testing cognitive ability while applying an unpleasant stressor (restricting participants' ability to breathe freely) and studying their brain activity. The subjects represented a range of physical and mental resilience from elite athletes, highly trained special forces personnel and normal healthy individuals. Brain scans showed that when stressed, those with the best interoception and highest levels of resilience had a significant spike in insular activity?before?the stressor, which quickly subsided during and after the event.??Many studies[viii]?in parallel fields, such as pain research, reveal a similar picture. In low-resilient participants, the insular activity spikes later and lasts longer,?provoking a cascade of internal body changes (increased heart rate, vasoconstriction, and sweating) interpreted by the brain as stress.

The bottom line is that individuals with good interoception don’t have to allocate mental processing resources to interpret these signals. Instead, they can employ resources for the task at hand.??And perhaps most intriguingly, stressors?improved?the cognitive ability of those with good interoception on the test, whilst those with lower interoception were fighting an internal battle, got distracted, or confused and gave up.?

How does this help us in our challenge of building mindsets for the future and navigating the quantifiable and subjective uncertainty we all experience every day? Research isshowing that the effects of interoceptive training on improving decision-making and lowering anxiety can be achieved rapidly. Studies[ix]?conducted at the?National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo, provided four, 40-minute training sessions over a week.?Participants were?asked to listen to a range of tone sounds, some of which matched their heartbeat, and they were asked to choose which was which. They were also tested for the rationality of their decision-making. The results, echoed in other comparable studies, are impressive and suggest that interoceptive training is a powerful method in building mindsets. After just one week of training, participants’ interceptive accuracy improved, and their decision-making processes ‘shifted in a more rational direction than the baseline.’

In future articles, I’ll look at how the other components of our mindset operate and can be strengthened.

To learn more, get a copy of my latest book,?Leading in a Non-Linear World.?

References:

[i]?Damasio, H., Grabowski, T., Frank, R., Galaburda, A. M., & Damasio, A. R. (1994). The return of Phineas Gage: clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient.?Science (New York, N.Y.),?264(5162), 1102–1105. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.8178168

[ii]?Burton, R., 2009.?On being certain. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.

[iii]?Nast, C., 2021.?Listening to your heart might be the key to conquering anxiety. [online] WIRED UK. Available at: <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sarah-garfinkel-interoception> [Accessed 14 August 2021].

[iv]?Dunn BD, Galton HC, Morgan R, et al. Listening to your heart. How interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision making.?Psychol Sci. 2010;21(12):1835-1844. doi:10.1177/0956797610389191

[v]?Sokol-Hessner P, Hartley CA, Hamilton JR, Phelps EA. Interoceptive ability predicts aversion to losses.?Cogn Emot. 2015;29(4):695-701. doi:10.1080/02699931.2014.925426

[vi]?Kandasamy, Narayanan & Garfinkel, Sarah & Page, Lionel & Hardy, Ben & Critchley, Hugo & Gurnell, Mark & Coates, John. (2016). Interoceptive Ability Predicts Survival on a London Trading Floor. 10.17863/CAM.6427.

[vii]?Paulus, Martin P et al. “Subjecting elite athletes to inspiratory breathing load reveals behavioral and neural signatures of optimal performers in extreme environments.”?PloS one?vol. 7,1 (2012): e29394. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029394

[viii]?Haase, L., et al.,?When the brain does not adequately feel the body: Links between low resilience and interoception.?Biol Psychol, 2016.?113: p. 37-45

[ix]?Sugawara, A., Terasawa, Y., Katsunuma, R.?et al.?Effects of interoceptive training on decision making, anxiety, and somatic symptoms.BioPsychoSocial Med?14,?7 (2020).?https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-020-00179-7