The Yale ‘Mind Over Milkshakes’ Study, and Automatic Belief Change

Do you have a belief that is limiting you?

Below you’ll find three examples of limiting beliefs quickly transforming, from my one-on-one Automatic Change work: one about ageing, one about performance, and one about eight years of panic attacks.

You’ll see, verbatim, what the clients said and how long it took.

First, a remarkable experiment that shows just how deep the impact of a belief can be.

Alia Crum is the principal investigator of the Stanford University Mind and Body Lab.

Her research investigates how our subjective mindset can alter our objective reality, and the behavioural, psychological and physiological mechanisms involved.

Here is one of her experiments, conducted while she was at Yale, which holds a potentially life-changing lesson for you and me.¹

The same 46 participants drank the same 380-calorie milkshake twice, a week apart.

Each time, a fake nutritional label led them to believe they were drinking either:

1. A high-fat, 620-calorie ‘indulgent’ shake, or…
2. A fat-free, 140-calorie ‘sensible’ shake.

Here is the label for the ‘indulgent’ shake:

And here is the label for the ‘sensible’ shake:

Again, everyone drank the same 380-calorie milkshake both times. Only the label was different, and participants were asked to view and rate it, to ensure that they read it.

After consuming the milkshake, Crum and her colleagues took blood samples to measure levels of the so-called ‘hunger hormone’, ghrelin.²

To simplify a complex hormone: ghrelin typically rises before eating and falls after food is consumed.³

The results?

1. When participants thought they were drinking a 620-calorie ‘indulgent’ shake, they experienced a dramatic drop in ghrelin levels.
2. When participants thought they were drinking a 140-calorie ‘sensible’ shake, they didn’t.

In other words, their ghrelin responses differed according to what they believed they had consumed, even though the actual nutritional content was the same. Their bodies responded to what their brains had predicted.

Beliefs are not just ‘all in our minds’. Our mind and body are not separate. They are part of a single, unified whole system. And this is why what you believe about a milkshake can influence levels of a ‘hunger hormone’.⁴

Beliefs are not all-powerful, though. Placebo effects are supported by a very large body of research, and they show a clear continuum: certain things are highly influenced by belief and expectation, others far less so. And this is one study, with 46 participants, from one laboratory.

But our beliefs reach into nearly every aspect of our lives. Our mental and emotional responses tend to be shaped less by the situation we’re in than by what our brain predicts it means for us.

What this study doesn’t tell us is how to change a long-term limiting belief, and how effortlessly it can happen.

Automatic Belief Change

Across more than a century of research into automatic processes, from Pavlov’s conditioning work to modern dual-process theories popularised by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, psychologists have distinguished two metaphorical ‘systems’, or modes of processing:

1. The Effortful System: slow, deliberate, conscious. Logic, analysis, insight, willpower.
2. The Automatic System: fast, effortless, unconscious. It produces your reactions, feelings and habits before your conscious mind gets a say.

The problem?

Despite these insights, mainstream change methods vastly underutilise the Automatic System, reinforcing the belief that change must be slow, difficult, fragile, and dependent on willpower.

Books, advice, seeking insight, challenging your thoughts, and talking with AI all target the Effortful System.

But the reactions, feelings and habits we want to change are produced by the Automatic System.⁵

I believe this is one of several reasons why average therapy outcomes have not improved in over 50 years.

Fortunately, we can change the Automatic System directly, and without any deception.⁶

Three Real Examples

Beliefs can change precisely, quickly, and effortlessly, as these examples show.

Everything below comes from recordings and written follow-ups from my one-on-one sessions. Every quote is verbatim. Names are not used, and some descriptive details have been changed or left out to protect privacy.*

There are two things I want you to notice, because both stand in stark contrast to traditional approaches.

First, when the conditions are right, limiting beliefs transform on their own. Effortlessly, naturally, and often instantly. The old way of seeing things simply stops making sense.

Second, more useful beliefs arise from within the person.

I don’t have to supply them, which is more important than it might sound. It means I’m not imposing my world view. And it means the new belief fits in a way that works for every part of the person’s life.

That’s what makes the change automatic. A belief you have to continually reinforce often suggests that some ‘part’ of you is still in conflict with it. When there’s inner congruence, change can be effortless.

1. One-sentence belief change

A client had come to me with a lot of fear and sadness. Underneath it was a belief:

Client: I have these feelings that with age I lose my worth.

Me: With age, you lose your worth?

Client: Yes.

Me: How long have you had this belief for?

Client: I don’t know. I think it’s maybe been a few years.

Me: So, given that with age you lose your worth, how soon will that belief start to age, so that it loses its worth?

(Client laughs.)

Me: How do you feel now, as you’re thinking about it in this way?

Client: It feels kind of funny. It feels like a, it’s a very silly thing to say. (laughing)

Notice what I didn’t do.

I didn’t try to convince her to let the belief go. I didn’t tell her what to believe about ageing. I never asked her what she would rather believe instead.

No evidence was weighed. No thought record was filled in. Nothing was challenged, disputed, or argued with.

I accepted her belief entirely, then invited it to apply to itself.

Then we moved on to other things.

Forty-nine minutes later, after working on other elements of her challenge, I came back to check whether that belief had stayed shifted.

Me: What happens as you think about that belief, that as you age you lose your worth?

Client: It feels just like words that don’t really have any meaning. Like they’re just a random string of words that have been spoken into the air.

Six weeks later, in a long email about how different her life was, she confirmed the changes had lasted and wrote:

‘I think it’s really important for people with problems like those I previously experienced to know that help is out there.’

There’s nothing exotic about what happened here, except the precision.

Most of us have had someone say something in passing that permanently changed how we saw a situation. A single remark, often not even meant seriously, and afterwards you simply couldn’t see it the old way again.

That’s a natural human example of Automatic Change.

My work is knowing how to create it on purpose, when and where needed.

It’s also a good demonstration of why there is no one-size-fits-all protocol. The sentence I said to her might have shifted nothing for someone else with what looked like exactly the same belief. The exact words, the timing, the tempo, her state at that moment, the structure of her particular belief: all of it has to fit one person, which is precisely why I believe that the best results usually come from a solution tailored for each individual.

2. Spontaneous belief change

A professional performer had felt since childhood that she was ‘different to people, and weird’, and had never been comfortable in her skin in front of an audience.

She had tried ‘perhaps ten psychologists’, a performance psychologist, medications, books, meditation, and a range of other strategies. Little had shifted.

‘I’ve always been able to understand things cognitively, long before I can actually create any change.’

Many people will recognise this. Intellectual insight rarely changes an automatic pattern by itself.

Sixty-nine minutes into a session directed at her performance as an artist, coming out of a deeper process, she described a belief that had arisen on its own:

‘It’s just the realisation that if you are the same as everyone else, then you have no value to them as an artist.’

I could have said something similar to her directly at the beginning of the session. She would have understood it cognitively, the way she had understood everything else for years, but it probably wouldn’t have changed anything.

Instead, this important belief change came from her.

As Milton Erickson put it:

Change will lead to insight more often than insight will lead to change.

This is a good demonstration of Erickson’s point. The realisation arose after the shift had already started. It didn’t start the change.

After her next performance, she wrote to me:

‘We got at something sizeable in our last session because I have never felt close to that good before, during or after a professional performance.’

A month later:

‘I can feel my diaphragm moving for the first time, not just my belly or ribs moving in response.’

This is quite a comment coming from someone who had trained her breathing professionally for years. And yet nothing in our session had been specifically about her breathing, a good example of what I call pushing a snowball down the hill.

Six months later:

‘I still feel comfortable performing in a way I never have.’

And after a later high-profile performance, the feedback she was given was that she was one of only two people on the stage who looked like they were having more fun than they were terrified.

Two years later, when we discussed working together again:

‘Our past work together has still stuck and was hugely helpful.’

Nothing needed to be reinforced to maintain this change. I didn’t give her any techniques to practise, or anything she had to remember before walking on stage.

As always with Automatic Change, the goal is simple: for the way you want to be to become as effortless and automatic as the problem once was.

3. Between-sessions belief change

Sometimes the easiest way to change a belief is out in the world, in the exact conditions where the unwanted response happens.

This is where Precision Experiences, as I call them, can be so valuable.

A client came to me after suffering eight years of panic attacks. His life had shrunk, he described being ‘paralysed’, and constantly feared having a heart attack. Remote places, far away from medical help, were the most frightening of all.

‘It’s really hard for me to go in remote places. Even looking at the map, the idea of going in a remote place where there might be no phone reception where I cannot call an emergency, you know, if something happens to me. Which is ridiculous from one angle, but that’s it.’

As he put it:

‘I used to be courageous. Now I’m not.’

Between sessions I gave him a Precision Experience that took a few minutes each day until our next session.

Two weeks later, when we next talked, he mentioned in passing that he’d slept in a forest.

I asked him what he meant.

‘Without even a tent. I was just in my sleeping bag, under a tree looking at the stars. And I remember that my body wanted to get into panic, but somehow there was something else. I just loved being there. The energy of the place. And the tree and everything. And I slept so well.’

As he said, demonstrating the automatic nature of the change:

‘Somehow something in me kinda switched. I’m not sure exactly where, when, or what, but I can feel the switch, of course.’

I never told him to sleep in a forest, a remote place if ever there was one. And he never stated a new belief explicitly. He simply chose to do something he longed to do, but had not been able to.

In my experience, this is typical when a significant belief changes. You don’t have to force yourself to be different. You automatically are.

What this means for you

Many of our most significant beliefs are acquired automatically, through experience, as we live life.

If you have come to believe something inaccurate and limiting, the right experience can effortlessly replace it with something more accurate and more useful.

If you’ve spent years struggling unsuccessfully to think your way out of a limiting belief, it says nothing about whether you can change.

It just tells you about the approaches you’ve tried.

Perhaps it’s time to try something different.

Footnotes for the Scientifically Curious

1. Crum, A. J., Corbin, W. R., Brownell, K. D., & Salovey, P. (2011). Mind over milkshakes: Mindsets, not just nutrients, determine ghrelin response. Health Psychology, 30(4), 424–429. ↩︎
2. Blood was drawn three times: at baseline, after reading the label, and after drinking. ↩︎
3. Ghrelin is one of several signals involved in appetite regulation, and its relationship to how hungry we consciously feel is far from one-to-one. In this study, participants did not report significantly different hunger between the two conditions. The difference showed up in their hormonal response. The authors note that this may reflect how hunger was measured, since ratings were taken ten minutes before each ghrelin sample rather than at the same moment, and on a visual analogue scale. ↩︎
4. Ghrelin is not only a hunger signal. Its receptors are found well beyond the gut, and it has been implicated in cardiac function, immune regulation, bone metabolism, mood, cognition and sleep. ↩︎
5. Amongst mainstream approaches, behavioural and exposure-based approaches are the biggest exception. They work with automatic learning directly. ↩︎
6. Open-label placebo studies show that deception is not necessary for some placebo effects: people benefit even when told plainly they are receiving a placebo. The current evidence finds these effects mainly on self-reported outcomes, which is exactly the domain this post is concerned with. ↩︎

* Quotes are exactly as spoken or written, with some hesitations removed for readability. Where a personal detail might identify someone, it has been changed, generalised or removed for privacy.