Why Your Brain Thinks You're Failing When You're Actually Winning

The neuroscience behind growth mindset and how to rewire your internal critic

What if the voice in your head telling you you're failing is actually the biggest obstacle to your success? Sometimes the difference between getting stuck and breaking through isn't about trying harder—it's about changing how your brain interprets what's happening to you.

One of my patients had the not-so-healthy habit of drinking a pint of vodka every night (the equivalent of 8 shots of hard liquor). She would come home from a stressful day at work and start drinking as a way to wind down as she started cooking dinner. She had come to me for help when after several years, she realized it was really harming her health, both physically and mentally. I gave her some basic instructions on how to map out her habit loop, and then to zoom in on the results of her drinking.

Over the course of a month or so of seeing pretty clearly that alcohol wasn't her friend, she was able to cut down to only four drinks a night. A month after that, she pieced days of sobriety together, stretching these such that she could go nearly a week without a single drink. When she told me about her progress at her next clinic visit, she wasn't happy about it: she saw this as a failure. Why couldn't she stop drinking altogether? On top of this, she was beating herself up over "failing."

Was she accidentally sabotaging her own success?

The Invisible Glasses We Wear Every Day

Carol Dweck is a Stanford researcher who coined the terms "fixed" and "growth mindset." Dweck describes fixed mindset as when you believe your basic intelligence and abilities are unchangeable: you've got what you've got, and have to utilize them the best you can. Growth mindset on the other hand, is a belief that your abilities can be developed and improved over time.

Dweck has been studying mindset for over four decades. According to one definition, a mindset is a set of assumptions, methods, or notations held by one or more people or groups of people. The way I like to think about mindset is that it’s a person's world view. Our mindset or world view can be so habitual that it colors how we interpret events, influence choices we make and how we learn. It can even contribute to what is called mental inertia or group think when individuals with similar world views come together and start feeding off of each other. Think mob mentality here. In other words, mindset is kind of important.

How do we develop a particular mindset? Here's a hint, it has to do with reinforcement or reward-based learning. [See my previous articles on reinforcement learning for more on this]

Let's use a simple example, say chocolate. If you get stressed (trigger), and you eat chocolate (behavior), and you feel a little better (reward), your brain learns something: if you are stressed, you should eat chocolate to feel better.

Congrats! You just bought yourself a pair of chocolate-colored worldview glasses.

Your Brain's Weird Way of Helping You See the World

I think of this experiential education as learning to see the world a certain way, bite by bite: We put on chocolate colored glasses, and walk around so that the next time we are stressed our brains say, hey eat some chocolate, you'll feel better. That's where sayings like, "she wears rose colored glasses," and "he wears dark colored glasses" come from. These are euphemisms for people who always see the world a certain way: rosy suggests that we're always seeing the world from a glass is half full, and dark is the glass is half empty world view or mindset. And yes, you can learn to wear the chocolate, or worry, or any other type of mindset glasses. The more you wear them, the more you forget that they are on your face --they become a part of your identity.

So the concept is pretty simple: you learn to see the world the certain way based on your previous experiences. Each time you do something that reinforces your learning, the lenses of your world view glasses get a bit thicker.

Dweck has mostly studied mindset in education and school settings, but her work is pretty relevant for, well, just about everything we do, because mindset colors how we see the world. She is famous for describing the two types of opposing mindsets that I've mentioned already: fixed and growth.

According to Dweck, individuals can be placed on a continuum according to their implicit views of where ability comes from. If you believe your success is based only on innate ability, basically what you were born with, you would fit into the category of a fixed mindset. On the other hand, if you believe that progress is based on hard work, learning and training you are said to have a growth mindset.

What mindset do you identify with most?

When Your Body Tells You Which Mindset You're In

You might not even be aware of your habitual mindset, whether you are more on the fixed or growth end of the spectrum, but you only need to look as far as your behavior to get a sense of what it might be. This often becomes very clear when you look at your reaction to failure for example. Fixed-mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement on their basic abilities; it's a reminder of their inherent limitations. On the other hand, growth mindset individuals don't mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved and learning comes from failure. [More on this in next week’s article about the F**king Growth Opportunity]

This makes sense because if you have a world view that you were born with your particular intellectual capacities for example, every time you fail, it's a reminder of how limited you are. "Oh, I can't do any better, this is as good as it gets for me." On the other hand, if you are more on the growth mindset spectrum, you can see failure as a learning opportunity instead of as a failure.

Let's use an example of walking down the sidewalk. If you are in a fixed mindset and trip on something, you might beat yourself up for being a clumsy person. In the same situation, if you are in a growth mindset, you might say to yourself, "hmmm I tripped, what can I learn from this?" In a growth mindset, you can even question the notion of failure itself a bit. What does it mean to fail? If you learn, does that count as a failure?

Dweck argues that the growth mindset will allow a person to live a less stressful and more successful life. This also makes sense, because in growth mindset, you're always learning and literally growing from your experiences. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck advises, "If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don't have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence. (p. 179-80)"

I love her phrase "enjoy effort". It's kind of hard to enjoy what is happening when we are clenching our teeth together as we try to force something to change, as we beat our heads against the wall. But what happens when we start getting curious about our experience, loving the challenge, getting intrigued by the mistakes?

Can we grow into a growth mindset?

Putting On Your Growth Mindset Glasses

You can leverage curiosity to help you move into growth mindset instead of getting stuck in fixed mindset.

To get a sense of how to do this, explore the following: What does your body feel like when you have a fixed view, or are closed to someone else's ideas or feedback about your own ideas?

You might have noticed that it literally feels closed down or contracted, like you are protecting yourself from different information getting in and thereby contaminating your world view. Interestingly, this may have evolutionary parallels: when you are being chased down and cornered by the proverbial saber-toothed tiger, your job is to close down into a tiny little ball, as small a target as possible, so that you can protect your vital organs.

What does it feel like when you are in growth mindset? You are literally (and figuratively) open to new ideas. Can you feel that in your own experience? Only in growth mindset are you open to learning.

So it doesn’t take a bunch of therapy or a semester-long course to check to see what course you are on. Starting to notice when you’re contracted vs. expanded can give you concrete and simple signposts for when you’re in fixed vs. growth mindset.

Are you open to learning a bit more?

What Happens When Life Becomes Your Teacher

What mindset are you usually (or habitually) in when you fall into an old habit loop that you've desperately been trying to change? When you judge or beat yourself up, of course you are closed down because you are being attacked (even if you are attacking yourself). Here's an example:

Back to my vodka-drinking patient. How could she move from a fixed mindset –thinking of herself as a failure and unsure that she could quit—to a growth mindset?

When my students or patients are suffering under the weight of never-ending anxiety, a stubborn habit or out of control addiction, I encourage them to see if they can envision these experiences as teachers. Teachers help us learn. When we learn something, we feel good (it is rewarding). Our best teachers do their magic and help open us to seeing the learning in hardship, even when we are struggling, and reflexively close down or turn away from the pain. At these times, I ask my patients and students to see if they can bow to these moments of hardship as teachers, which helps them open up so that they can learn from them, instead of habitually closing down with the first hint of struggle.

When my patient described how she had failed at staying sober for longer than six days at a time, she added, "well, I guess it's two steps forward, one step back."

I asked her what it felt like over the past several months to have learned so much about how her mind worked, and to have gone from drinking a pint of hard liquor a day to getting stretches of sobriety.

"It feels good," she said. (In that moment, she was opening and moving into growth mindset.)

Then I asked her about those "backsteps." Was she was able to learn something about her habits and herself, something that she might not have learned otherwise? (Especially if she was stuck in a habit loop of self-judgment and in a fixed mindset.)

I asked, "If you learned something, does that count as moving backward?"

"No, I guess not," she said, realizing that learning actually counted as (and felt like) moving forward.

We talked a bit more about all of the progress she had already made in a short period of time, and how she could bow to each "slip up" as a teacher, opening to it as a learning experience that could help move her forward. She left my office with a bit of a skip in her step, seeing how she could learn from her experiences and at the same time step out of the habit loop of beating herself up. She was almost looking forward to the challenges that lay ahead.

I love the quote: "Running away from any problem only increases the distance from the solution." (Anonymous) Two steps forward, one step backward becomes obsolete when we stop getting in our own way. All moments move us forward if we are aware and open to learning from them.

But it’s not always as simple as bowing to moments as their teachers. Not everyone responds to the "get curious about your setbacks" approach immediately. I've had patients who say, "Doc, I've been curious about my anxiety for three years. I could write a dissertation on it. Now what?" And they're right to be frustrated. Sometimes the most growth-minded thing you can do is accept that you're in a fixed mindset phase and that's okay too.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

Take a moment now to see if you can recall a recent habit loop. Map it out in your mind. Ask, "what did I get from this?" Check to see if you are closing down or judging yourself (fixed mindset), and instead imagine it as a teacher (growth mindset). Ask yourself, "what can I learn from this?" and feel into those results. Repeat.

And also notice: if this exercise makes you feel more contracted or judgmental toward yourself, that's information too. Maybe today isn't the day for reframing. Maybe today is the day for just noticing that you're human, that change is hard, and that's fine too.

Parts of this were adapted from my book Unwinding Anxiety (Avery Books. Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD).

Want to have more growth opportunities and learn more about leveraging curiosity and a growth mindset? Subscribe for practical insights on how ancient wisdom meets modern neuroscience, and why understanding how your mind actually works might be the most important thing you never learned in school.

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Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He is a professor at Brown University and co-founder of MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. If you’re curious to learn more, you can find additional resources at drjud.com.

Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES:

Dweck, C.S., Mindset: The new psychology of success. 2008: Random House Digital, Inc.