1: How do you personally respond when adversity strikes?
Do you see adversity as a challenge you can meet, or as a threat that could overwhelm you?
Your perspective on adversity significantly impacts your life.
Good news: There’s a proven way to shift from threat to challenge. Read on to learn how.
“In a threat mindset, you focus on the potential for risk, danger, harm, or loss,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
“You feel pressured to prevent a negative outcome rather than to achieve a positive outcome.”
A threat mindset often arises when you don’t believe you can change a situation or avoid a negative outcome.
On the other hand, with “a challenge mindset, you focus on the opportunity for growth and positive outcomes,” Jane notes. “Even though you acknowledge that you may face risk, harm, or loss, you feel realistically optimistic that you can develop useful skills or strategies to achieve the best possible outcome.”
As a result, you seek resources and use your personal strengths, believing you can affect the outcome. This belief, called “self-efficacy,” helps you adopt a challenge mindset.
2: “Psychologists have been researching challenge versus threat mindsets for more than thirty years,” Jane shares, “studying how they impact people’s ability to handle stress and adversity.”
Here are some of the main differences they’ve discovered:
“When you operate under a threat mindset,” she notes, “you’re more likely to develop anxiety and depression in addition to whatever struggle you face. As a result, your ability to perform under pressure suffers.”
You are also more likely to seek out escapist and self-defeating actions, like social isolation, drug and alcohol abuse, or simply ignoring your problem while your situation gets worse and worse.
“With a challenge mindset, however, you experience less anxiety and depression, and you adapt to change more effectively,” Jane observes.
“You don’t try to escape your problem. Instead, you take advantage of important resources like social support and your own competence. You increase your skills and become better able to solve your problem.”
Which means you are more likely to achieve the best possible outcome, whatever the situation.
“The differences between a challenge mindset and a threat mindset aren’t just mental,” she notes. “They also determine how your body reacts to the stress.
“In a threat mindset, your arteries constrict, and your heart has to work much harder to pump blood throughout your body. . . Over time,” Jane writes, “if you spend months or years operating under a threat mindset, your heart may weaken from having to work so much harder.”
Which increases your likelihood of suffering a heart attack.
Also, your fight-or-flight instinct kicks in, which engages your sympathetic nervous system.
“If your sympathetic nervous system is engaged continuously for hours, days, weeks, or longer,” she notes, “your immune system can become compromised, and you may experience more illness.”
A threat mindset also increases the stress hormone cortisol and the metabolism hormone insulin.
“Increased cortisol and insulin are associated with weight gain, difficulty building muscle, and diabetes. In short,” Jane says, “a threat mindset is not just a psychological barrier—it’s also damaging to your physical health.”
By contrast, when you adopt a challenge mindset, both your mental and physical resilience can increase, she notes.
Your heart is much more efficient, which improves blood flow. And, “your nervous system finds a better balance between the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and the parasympathetic (calm-and-connect) responses,” Jane writes. “This balance helps you avoid nervous exhaustion and burnout.”
One important final point about a threat vs. a challenge mindset: “A challenge mindset doesn’t require you to think positively all the time, or to ignore your pain or losses,” she explains. “It’s more about investigating your own strengths and abilities and trying to increase them.”
Adopting a challenge mindset doesn’t mean denying the possibility of bad outcomes.
“It simply means,” she writes, “paying more attention, and devoting more effort, to the possibility of positive outcomes or personal growth.
“It means not accepting the negative as inevitable—or if a negative outcome is inevitable, not allowing it to completely define your experience.
“With a challenge mindset,” Jane explains, “you’re committed to looking for something more than the negative, something that will bring meaning and purpose to your struggle.”
Now that we understand the importance of mindset, let’s look at how to shift from a threat to a challenge mindset.
One practical approach is to play more games. When you play, you naturally use a challenge mindset, Jane explains.
In fact, “challenge-seeking” shows up again and again in frequent game players. “It’s the number-one rule of living gamefully,” she notes.
3: So how can you move from a threat to a challenge mindset?
Jane provides three concrete strategies.
Strategy #1: Begin by selecting a significant challenge or obstacle in your life right now. Then, put a check mark next to any statement that you agree with. If you disagree with a statement, skip it.
1. I’m eager to tackle this obstacle.
2. Thinking about this obstacle stresses me out.
3. I’m worried that this obstacle might reveal my weakness.
4. I can become a stronger person because of this obstacle.
5. There is someone I can turn to for help with this obstacle if I need it.
6. Tackling this obstacle seems like an exhausting prospect.
7. This obstacle is probably going to have an overall negative impact on my life, no matter what I do.
8. I get fired up when I think about tackling this obstacle.
9. This obstacle threatens my or my family’s health and happiness.
10. I’m worried that I lack the resources needed to overcome this obstacle.
11. This obstacle gives me a chance to find out what I’m really made of.
12. I feel like this obstacle represents basically a hopeless situation.
13. I get excited when I think about the possible outcomes of tackling this obstacle.
14. I don’t mind struggling with this obstacle, or sometimes failing, because the outcome is important to me.
15. I think I have or can acquire the abilities needed to successfully tackle this obstacle.
16. If I succeed, my choosing to tackle this obstacle will have a positive impact on my or my family’s health and happiness.
17. This obstacle probably requires more strength than I have to deal with it effectively.
18. If I fail to overcome this obstacle, it will have significant negative consequences for me and my life.
19. It’s beyond anyone else’s power to help me with this obstacle.
20. I’ll probably learn something by tackling this obstacle as best I can.
Add up how many of the following statements you agreed with: 1, 4, 5, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20. This is your challenge score.
Next, add up the following statements you agreed with: 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 19. This is your threat score.
Then, write down the ten expressions of a challenge mindset and put the list in a place where you will see it every day.
“Looking at this list,” Jane predicts, “will give you a daily reminder of what a challenge mindset feels like. This can be extremely helpful, especially if it doesn’t come naturally in your current situation.
What else? “You can also try reading the statements out loud like a mantra once a day,” she notes. “That won’t make them automatically true, but it will give you a chance to reflect on the possibility that they might become true. Indeed, the more you speak them, the more likely you are to make choices or changes that foster a challenge mindset.”
Strategy #2: Ask yourself, What’s the best that could happen?
“When we operate under a threat mindset,” Jane writes, “we tend to spend a lot of time pondering What’s the worst that could happen?
“And we usually come up with lots and lots of answers.”
To balance this out, you simply ask yourself the opposite question and write down as many answers as you can come up with.
“It will help you stay open to the potential for some kind of positive outcome or post-traumatic growth,” she observes.
Strategy #3: Practice saying that you’re getting superbetter at something, not from something.
“Just the way you talk about your SuperBetter journey can influence whether you adopt a threat or a challenge mindset,” Jane writes.
“Getting superbetter from something implies a threat,” she notes, “but getting superbetter at something implies the opportunity for growth.”
This is our natural language when we take on a positive life change: “I’m getting superbetter at writing a novel.” “I’m getting superbetter at world travel.” “I’m getting superbetter at triathlons.” “I’m getting superbetter at running for city council.”
For post-traumatic growth, however, it may require you to do some rethinking.
“For example,” Jane writes, “instead of getting superbetter from anxiety, you might be getting superbetter at being brave, or finding peace, or preventing panic attacks, or whatever represents to you the positive change or growth you want to experience.
“Instead of getting superbetter from insomnia, you might get better at sleeping.
“Instead of getting superbetter from a concussion, you might get superbetter at healing your brain.”
Eventually,” Jane predicts, “as you continue to get superbetter—and as you learn the other six rules of living gamefully—you’ll naturally strengthen your challenge mindset.”
Why? Because Jane writes, the other SuperBetter rules were created to help you increase your personal strengths or see opportunities for growth and positive outcomes.
- Collecting power-ups will give you more physical and emotional resources.
- Battling bad guys will allow you to develop new mental resources.
- Completing—and designing your own—quests will help you acquire new skills and abilities specific to your challenge.
- Recruiting allies will increase your social resources.
- Seeking epic wins will help you focus on opportunities for growth and positive impact.
- And adopting a secret identity and keeping score will highlight your progress and growing strength.
Her advice? “Even if you feel unprepared at this moment to bring a challenge mindset to your most pressing problems, don’t worry. Keep going. Achieving a challenge mindset is the inevitable outcome of engaging with obstacles more gamefully.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: When I face adversity, do I truly believe I can grow stronger through it—or do I assume the outcome is out of my control?
Action: Activate Jane’s three strategies to shift from a threat to a challenge mindset.
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