Redeeming Struggle

Leveraging Hardship for Growth

These days it seems that struggle has fallen on hard times. Increasingly, the opportunity to struggle through hardship is not perceived as a source of dignity and pride but as an indication that something must be wrong. In school, the media, and children’s television, the continual refrain is to follow whatever makes you happy.

Parents going along with this zeitgeist would rather have a child who is happy and successful than one who is sturdy and capable. Yet as parents project the expectation of happiness onto their offspring, the children then feel great pressure to be happy. Over time this solidifies the assumption that a difficult life necessarily signals abnormality or dysfunction. Thus, when the children are not happy or do encounter difficulty, it’s easy for them to lapse into depression and assume that something must be wrong with them.

Many contemporary movies reinforce the message that hardship and struggle should be eschewed at all costs. One thinks of the 2010 hit Eat Pray Love, which promotes a life of utter selfishness as truly therapeutic and self-fulfilling. Even country music, once a genre that glorified struggle and hardship, now often celebrates a frictionless life. Instead of singing about that heartbreak feeling that comes from suffering, much of contemporary country music is about the happy feeling someone gets from partying.

In the face of these opposing perspectives—one that says struggle is good, the other that says struggle is bad—contemporary social science offers some intriguing insight.

Being Mindful of Mindset

The latest research shows that it’s a little more complicated than simply concluding that struggle is either healthy or unhealthy, good or bad. Rather, what is more important is the mindset we bring to it—what we think about struggle.

As part of his series of lectures on Genesis, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson explained a fascinating finding about challenge and struggle. Two groups of people experienced a stressor but used vastly different psychophysiological systems to deal with it. One group voluntarily embraced the stressor as a challenge and used the system associated with challenge and adventure. The other group had the stressor imposed involuntarily and used the system associated with defensiveness and withdrawal. Both groups in the study faced the same struggle, but the struggle was only productive in the group that approached it as a challenge and an opportunity for growth. This suggests that the simple act of interpreting stressors as a challenge, as something that can be leveraged for good, can lead an individual to thrive and become more courageous.

Since most of us face hardships of varying kinds, we can leverage these findings for our benefit. By approaching unavoidable suffering as a challenge, an opportunity for growth, or a spiritual adventure, we can actually change the psychophysiological system we use for dealing with the ups and downs of life, resulting in greater resiliency and growth. In this way, we can reframe obstacles as opportunities and grow stronger as a result.

Mindset: Growth vs. Fixed

The work of Stanford research psychologist Carol Dweck can help us engage in this type of reframing. In her work with elementary school children, 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.

The Power of Framing

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.

Dr. John Gottman found something similar in his work with married couples. If a couple approaches conflict as the enemy and thus assumes that low conflict is indicative of a healthy marriage, they often foreclose on opportunities for growth and thus put the relationship in jeopardy. By reframing conflict as an opportunity to grow closer together, a couple can leverage uncomfortable conversations for healthy conflict resolution and deeper intimacy.

What if we applied this same growth mindset to all the struggles in our life and the lives of our children? What if we viewed all difficulties—from dealing with a teenager’s rebellion to learning a new skill for work—as an opportunity to learn, grow, expand, and thrive?

Now to be clear, not all struggles can be reframed in this way. For some types of hardship—for example, when we are exposed to abuse, danger, or potential injury—the best course of action is to do whatever it takes to flee. Not all struggle is created equal. Yet a lot of the normal struggles we face in everyday life may be an opportunity for growth. As the stoics understood many centuries ago, all it takes is a different mindset.

An Anthropological Perspective

Psychology and educational theory are not the only social science domains to underscore the importance of struggle. We can also learn from anthropology and cross-cultural studies. A few years ago I spent some time dabbling in cultural anthropology and was intrigued to learn that while Anglo-American cultures generally fostered a negative idea towards struggle, this was not the case in many East Asian societies. Cultures that have been strongly influenced by Confucianism have tended to emphasize human adaptability, and thus put more emphasis on changing oneself through struggle, including working through frustration, confusion, and failure to achieve an optimal outcome.

Research published in a 1990 issue of Educational Researcher found that, when confronted with a child’s poor achievement, Japanese mothers were more likely to put it down to “lack of effort,” whereas American mothers were more likely to put it down to “lack of ability.” American mothers were also more likely to blame conditions outside the students’ control, such as the school environment and other external factors.

In fact, many of the same behaviors that Americans regard as failing (struggling for a long time over the same problem, for example), the Japanese think of as learning. As I explained in a 2017 article in Touchstone, titled “The Cross of Least Resistance”:

To many Asians, the students who show they can persevere through repeated setbacks are the ones who are preparing themselves for great things later in life.

Wider research in cross-cultural psychology shows that these contrasting orientations towards educational struggle are rooted in the different ways Asians and Westerners perceive the development of character, intelligence, and skill. Most East Asians believe that these qualities result from what one researcher called “dull and determined effort” over long periods of time. But a majority of Westerners (particularly in the English-speaking nations) tend to view character, intelligence, and skill as resulting from innate ability or sudden flashes of insight. Accordingly, Americans are prone to take the lack of prompt success in some endeavor as a sign that the person just doesn’t have what it takes, instead of as a reason to engage in further struggle.

When Effort Becomes the Reward

More recently Dr. Andrew Huberman has done some intriguing work on the advantages of struggle, including the benefits that accrue from voluntarily putting ourselves in difficult situations, such as cold-water immersion and intermittent fasting. A Stanford colleague of Carol Dweck, Huberman explains that the holy grail of motivation and drive is learning to see effort and friction as reward.

Dr. Huberman’s wildly successful podcast, Huberman Lab, repeatedly shows that by retraining ourselves to perceive strain as good, we can increase our baseline dopamine and live more rewarding lives as a result.

These popular forms of secular asceticism are rediscovering what the Church has always taught: that we become more human not by resisting struggle, but by leaning into it. By pressing forward and persevering, even through suffering, we can leverage the struggles as an opportunity for growth.