Growth Mindset and Mental Wellbeing: What a Two-Year Study of 454 Adults Found

A Different Question Than the Usual One

Almost every argument about growth mindset is an argument about achievement. Does believing your abilities can change make you a better student, a better athlete, a better professional? That debate is genuinely contested. A 2025 structured review in the journal Review of Education found that when you look only at the highest-quality studies, the effect of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement is close to zero, while other large analyses find small benefits for specific groups. The honest summary is that the achievement question is still being fought over.

But achievement was never the only claim. The deeper idea behind a growth mindset is about how you interpret difficulty. If you believe your attributes are changeable, a setback reads as a state you can move through. If you believe they are fixed, the same setback reads as a verdict. That difference should matter most not in a classroom, but in the middle of a genuinely hard period of life.

A study published in PLOS Mental Health tested exactly that, and it did it over two years of one of the most disruptive periods in living memory.

What the Researchers Did

The study followed 454 adults, ages 19 to 89, from ethnically diverse backgrounds in Southern California. They were surveyed at three timepoints between June 2020 and September 2022, spanning the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic and the long, uneven recovery after it.

At each timepoint, the researchers measured three things alongside growth mindset: depression, wellbeing, and adjustment, meaning how well people adapted their daily routines to the circumstances, for example using technology to keep socializing when meeting in person was not an option.

This design matters. A huge share of mindset research is a single survey at a single moment, which makes it impossible to say anything about how beliefs relate to outcomes over time. Following the same people across two years, through a real crisis rather than a lab task, is a much stronger test of whether the belief tracks anything real.

What They Found

Adults with a stronger growth mindset showed lower levels of depression, higher levels of wellbeing, and better adjustment of their daily routines. Those associations held after accounting for sociodemographic factors like age, income, and education, so this was not simply richer or younger people reporting both sunnier beliefs and sunnier moods.

The researchers then ran a second study focused specifically on older adults, 174 of them, a group hit especially hard by pandemic isolation. The findings largely replicated. Older adults with a higher growth mindset showed decreased depression and increased wellbeing over time, and they were more likely to have adjusted their daily tasks to fit the new reality rather than letting routines collapse.

That adjustment finding is the most practically interesting piece. The mindset was not just associated with feeling better. It was associated with doing something differently, with actively rebuilding daily life around the constraint instead of waiting for the constraint to go away.

What This Study Does Not Prove

This site takes evidence seriously, so the caveats belong in the middle of the article, not buried at the end.

This was an observational study, not an experiment. Nobody was taught a growth mindset and compared against a control group. That means it cannot prove the mindset caused the better outcomes. It is possible that people who were less depressed found it easier to hold a growth mindset, rather than the other way around, or that some third factor drives both. Longitudinal data helps narrow the possibilities, but it does not settle causation.

The sample was also drawn from one region, and the participants who stick with a two-year study are not a perfect mirror of everyone else.

What the study does establish is a consistent, replicated association between believing your attributes can change and faring better through a prolonged crisis, measured properly, over real time, in adults across the full span of adulthood. Given that most mindset evidence comes from students being graded, evidence from adults being tested by life is worth attention.

Why the Wellbeing Finding Makes Sense

There is a plausible mechanism, and it does not require anything mystical. Depression feeds on the belief that your situation is permanent and that you are the kind of person who cannot change it. A growth mindset is, almost by definition, the opposite belief. It does not deny that things are bad. It denies that bad is a fixed address.

That maps onto what the adjustment data showed. If you believe you can learn your way into a new situation, you try things. You set up the video calls, you rebuild the routine, you treat the setback as a stage rather than an ending. Each small successful adjustment then becomes its own evidence that you can adapt, which supports mood in turn. Psychologists call this a virtuous cycle, and it is consistent with the finding that mindset, adjustment, and wellbeing moved together.

It also fits the broader pattern in the research we have covered before: growth mindset effects show up most reliably where context and stakes align with the belief, not as a universal booster shot. A crisis that demands adaptation is close to the ideal context for a belief about adaptability.

How to Use This Without Overclaiming

The practical takeaway is not that adopting a growth mindset will inoculate you against depression. Nobody has shown that, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. If you are struggling with your mental health, real support from a professional matters more than any belief about your own malleability.

The reasonable takeaway is narrower and still useful. During a hard period, the specific belief worth practicing is not "everything will be fine." It is "my routines and skills can change to fit this." The study's older adults did not outperform because they were optimists. They adjusted their daily tasks. The belief earned its keep by producing behavior.

So when circumstances break your routine, treat the rebuilding itself as the practice. Pick one daily task the disruption has damaged and redesign it for the new constraint, however imperfectly. That is the observable, doable version of what the high-mindset participants in this study actually did. Leaders face a version of this same problem at team scale, and The Leader's Table has a good piece on helping teams through change fatigue that pairs well with this one.

The achievement debate will keep running. But on the evidence so far, the more defensible case for a growth mindset may never have been about grades at all. It is about what you do in the months when life stops cooperating.