How Products Shape Our Mindsets and Change Our Reality

When I first started using Strava (Android / iOS), my weekly running mileage skyrocketed. Nothing had changed other than my perception of how much running was “enough.” Lots of people in my feed were clocking 40 to 60 miles a week, and suddenly my 20-mile weekly average seemed negligible.

The products we use can shape our perception of reality and, as a result, change our actions and lives — all by leveraging the much-studied yet still mysterious power of mindsets.

Mindsets are lenses we use to interpret and simplify the complex world around us. We use them to organize the otherwise overwhelming amount of information we ingest on a day-to-day basis. They color our beliefs about everything: food, intelligence, sleep, you name it.

Consequently, our mindsets can shape our experience of the world, our success, and even our health outcomes. Mindsets come from what we interact with — everything from the culture we live in to the people we spend time with and the products we use.

In this article, we’ll explain what a mindset is and how it impacts our reality; then we’ll zoom in on how the products we use shape our mindsets.

How do mindsets work?

There are several interconnected pathways through which mindsets affect our reality.

1. Attention: Take stress as an example. As one group of researchers found, if you have the mindset that stress is debilitating, you’re more likely to notice and focus on your negative symptoms of stress than to pay attention to the ways stress may benefit you.
2. Feelings: Mindsets change how we feel and what we expect to feel. In the same study, participants who saw stress as detrimental had lower mood than participants with the mindset that stress is enhancing. And no wonder — if you think of stress as a negative, you likely experience more agitation and negative feelings when you think of work or other responsibilities. In turn, those negative feelings drain you and leave you feeling more stressed, reinforcing a cycle that strengthens your negative mindset.
3. Physiology: When you anticipate a sensation, your body prepares for it by activating or deactivating the relevant systems in the body. Negative…