Building Confidence Through Mindfulness with Harvard Psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer

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Everything that is was at one point a decision made by other people to meet their needs that may or may not meet your needs, especially for women, girls, because much of what is was decided by men. Now, the more different you are from the person who created the rule, the more important it is for you to do it your own way.

Hi, hello, welcome to Mary's Cup of Tea, the self-love podcast for women, though all self-lovers are welcome here. I'm Mary. I write and speak about self-love, and I'm best known for my book, The Gift of Self-Love, and I also host retreats for women. And this is the podcast that that will inspire you to love yourself. Don't freak out, but we have a Harvard professor joining us on Mary's Cup of Tea today to talk about how mindfulness is the key to confidence. Dr. Ellen Langer earned her PhD at Yale University and then joined the faculty at Harvard in 1977. She studied social and clinical psychology and is now considered the mother of mindfulness. She's written 5 books on the topic, starting with her bestseller Mindfulness and her newest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, which is linked for you in the show notes description. The Langer Lab conducts research on health, happiness, decision-making, education, business, and culture, all through the lens of mindfulness. Dr. Ellen shares with us her refreshingly practical, quick and easy way to approach mindfulness. You'll also hear her thoughts on why stress is optional, how to stop overthinking, and how to let go of binary black and white thinking to open up more room for happiness and freedom and confidence. You'll learn how move through life more mindfully, confidently make decisions. This is something I was particularly interested in hearing her perspective on. Be more comfortable with uncertainty and take away the idea that self-confidence doesn't come from knowing, it comes from noticing. Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Ellen Langer to the Mary's Cup of Tea Self-Love Podcast. Hi, Dr. Ellen. Welcome to Mary's Cup of Tea.

Thank you for having me, Mary.

Let me ask you, what's your proverbial cup of tea or coffee lately, something small that you've been enjoying?

That's interesting. Yeah, I have grandkids that are 10 years old and they're incredibly smart.

It's unbelievable.

And so lately we've been playing bridge. They're better than I am. That's not saying very much, but so I've become a bridge fanatic for the summer.

Do they know that their grandmother is the mother of mindfulness?

I don't think so. The other day, one of them said to me, "Grandma Ellen, are you famous?" And I said, "I don't know.

It depends on, you know, the circles we're talking about." My view with all of that, right now, the world is set up vertically, you know, where I sit somewhere near the top, so do you.

And I want to make it horizontal and show that everybody is worth an equal amount.

It just depends on who's deciding what the rule stick is.

Totally.

I think you've mentioned many times that this kind of relates to a scarcity mindset that the collective operates from.

Yeah. And the thing that people need to understand is that life is almost never a zero-sum. If you win, that doesn't mean I have to lose. We can both win. And so we want to create the world and live in a world where everybody can feel good about themselves. And, and that's part of why I wrote this book. The amount of depression out there in the world is staggering. And it's not just young people of your age, but straight through in every age. And it's very saddening for me, and it doesn't have to be that way. It's interesting to me that people think the way to be happy is to have power, status, money. And if, you know, the idea, I guess, is that if you had power, status, or money, people would respect you. And if they respect you, then you can respect yourself. And lots of what I write about is how to skip all of that and just emerge with self-respect. And then life is grand.

Do you feel like overall your lived experience has shown that life is grand? Because you seem to be very optimistic. Is that nature or nurture?

Oh, no, I think it's nurture.

I was very lucky.

I was brought up by parents who were enormously supportive and in a household that was just very nice and loving. I mark the edge of the optimism continuum.

Hidden in there is a deep appreciation that the things we experience are neither good nor bad. They're nothing until we do something with it in our heads. We frame them. So right now, not only are people unhappy, but they're overwhelmed with stress. Stress, you know, doesn't come from events. It comes from the view you take of an event. So if you take a mindless negative view, of course you're not going to feel good.

If you consider multiple views, then all of a sudden you realize it's who knows rather than, you know, this terrible thing is going to happen to you.

This reminds me of a story my mom used to tell me growing up. It's called the Parable of a Chinese Farmer, and it really illustrates how important it is to break out of black and white thinking. It goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate.

They said, "We're so sorry to hear your horse has run away.

This is most unfortunate." The farmer said, "Maybe." The next day, the horse came back bringing 7 wild horses with it, and in the evening, all the neighbors returned and said, "Oh, isn't that lucky? What a great turn of events! You now have 8 horses." The farmer again said, "Maybe." The following day, his son tried to break one of the wild horses, and while riding it, he was thrown off and broke his leg. Everyone then said, "Oh dear, that's too bad," and the farmer responded, "Maybe." The next day, the conscription officers came around to draft people into the army, and they rejected the farmer's son because he had a broken leg. Again, all the neighbors came around and said, "Isn't that great?" And the farmer again replied, Maybe. This is a story my mom has told me time and time again, and I love that Dr. Ellen is bringing up how there are so many blessings in disguise. And I know in a sucky moment it is really hard to think that way, but the more neutral we can stay about events, whether they seem negative or positive in the moment, the more possibility, I suppose, we open up for ourselves to then see it from a different vantage point and kind of have this mindset of maybe. The less we judge, the more open-minded and thus probably happier we can become. Just wanted to add that in there.

And so what I suggest for people who are stressed, which is almost everybody, almost all the time, scary.

Next time you're stressed, first of all, one-liner that everybody should put on their refrigerator is ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? And almost never is it a tragedy.

Oh my God, I hit the car.

I forgot a project.

I missed a date.

Those are the things that most of us drive ourselves crazy with.

So then you breathe a sigh of relief once you realize you're overreacting in some sense.

But the other thing is to recognize that stress requires two things. One is a belief that something's going to happen, and two, that when it happens, it's going to be terrible. It turns out, and this is a little complicated, people don't really understand this, but that prediction is an illusion.

You can predict large numbers, you know, what large numbers of people are likely to do.

You can't predict for the individual. We think we know what's going to happen. We think we know most of what the day entails. But in fact, it's only unpredictable things that happen. And so there's a way of living where you recognize it just gets better and better until at some point, you know, you sort of look back and say, Why was I so stressed all the time? All you can do is the best you can do at that moment. Anyway, so the larger point is that we're more resilient than we believe. And the largest point is that we can control stress by recognizing events don't cause it, which doesn't mean on occasion, you know, somebody dies, but there's no way we can prevent that. All we can do is essentially be present, which takes us to a discussion of mindfulness, which you want to talk about?

Of course, mother of mindfulness.

Okay. All right. Because when people hear the word mindful and mindfulness, they tend to think of meditation. And meditation, while good, is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you undergo 20 minutes twice a day in the hope of becoming mindful. Mindfulness, as we study it—

and I did some of the research on meditation.

This is not disparaging it, just what we do is different. Mindfulness results simply from an awareness that you don't know.

So if you were going to come visit me now, I'm in Dartmouth, Mass., beautiful location.

Is this an invitation?

No.

Okay.

I tried.

Of course. Of course. If you want to come, you're welcome.

No, but the point is that if you came to the house, you've never been here before, you wouldn't have to practice anything. You'd walk in and everything would be new. And you'd say, oh, did she do those paintings? What books is she reading? What's that strange— oh, look at how adorable her dog is. You know, you would notice. What's interesting is after decades— I mean, I've been doing this for like 50 years, a long, long time— we find that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. We're not there. Now, the thing is that when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. So you think you're present, but we're not. So the only way to be happy is to be mindful. So when you're actively noticing new things, the neurons are firing. And our research shows that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. That's when you're experiencing engagement, fun. You can't have fun mindlessly. You become charismatic, your memory improves, you become more competent at virtually everything you're doing, more attractive, your relationships, everything. Because 50 years is a long time to be doing these studies. And it's remarkable. I mean, we started some of this research with people on the other end of the age continuum, elderly people.

That word cuts very differently now that I'm as old as I am, but nevertheless, I still use it.

And we taught them to be mindful in this way, and they lived longer. So we're talking very big consequences from very small changes.

You followed them through their lives and they ended up—

No, we took people who started off old.

Taught them how to be mindful.

And then we went back a year later, and of the people who had died, they were all in the low mindful, mindless group.

Wow, that's a big finding.

The beauty of it is that it's so easy. So there are two ways to become mindful: top-down, which means here's sort of a theory that's going to drive how you are, or bottom-up. Okay, so let's do the top-down first. Once you appreciate the ubiquity of uncertainty. Nobody knows. Everybody thinks they know, but nobody can know anything for sure, because everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. You have choices. See, when you're mindless, you have no choice. And now, because you have choices, you pay some attention to the context to see what choice, which one do I want to choose? Okay, knowing that they're all fine. So when we're mindless, we don't have any choices. We're not able to take advantages of things right in front of us or avert dangers that otherwise we could. Once you know that you don't know, you sit up and you notice, as you did when you came into my house. You knew you didn't know anything, so you looked. Everything was fun and interesting. Bottom up, take things you think you know or people you think you know, and notice 3 new things about them. 5 new things.

There's nothing holy about 3. Well, maybe there is something holy about 3, but not in this instance.

Anyway, um, so walk outside and notice 3 new things. When you're at school or you're at work, notice 3 new things. Do what you're doing in 3 new ways. And all of a sudden, you come to see that those things you thought you knew You didn't know as well as you thought you did. And eventually, that leads you to appreciate the power of uncertainty, right? So not knowing is good. Now, women in particular have trouble not knowing because they're so sure that it means that they're stupid, or, you know, we're supposed to know. Men, when they find that they don't know, they often pretend.

Women often do also.

But here, there's no need for any pretending because no one knows.

When somebody is feeling stuck, stressed, you talk about a lot, or in my particular case, it's a perfect combination of all of it. And I describe it as feeling lost, which comes with the struggling to make decisions, driving myself crazy over, like you said, every, every little thing that I know in my head logically it doesn't really matter, but there is this kind of black and white thinking that comes with it. And underneath that, trying to control the outcome, which you eloquently mentioned, is like trying to control other people's reactions to then like externally bring back in some sort of value and worth and sense of assurance for myself. So there's this one clip that you had, which was what led to me inviting you on this show, where you talked about making the right decision. Can you please speak on that?

I'll start with— there's so much that you said that I can comment on, but decision-making, I think, is, um, the biggest problem for people, uh, that they think there's a right decision, uh, they get very stressed, uh, not knowing what that decision is, and then things fall apart in the way you described. Let me give the people, your listeners, the bottom line in case The big discussion loses people because I don't know how to make it this because I'm taking apart what everybody believes about decision-making. So there are so many pieces to it. I don't know where to start. Let's start at the bottom. Rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, simply make the decision right. If you make the decision right, then you've made the right decision. So I took my graduate students and I said, okay, I want you to spend the week Don't make any decision. Flip a coin, roll dice, start out with a view that whatever the first alternative is that you're going to, you know, you're going to take it.

And then we'll discuss it next week.

And they come back and they all had a stress-free week.

When you think, I don't know what to do with my life, it's less because you literally don't know and more because you're afraid to choose. You're afraid because choosing one path requires passing on another. There's like a certain level of, of grief that is built into that process of making one decision. You are also shutting down the opposite one. You're afraid because choosing one path requires passing on another. So many books to read, so many people to meet, so many places to see, so many versions of yourself to be. But what if I don't choose the quote right one. There is no right one. There's only yours for now. This book, it's yours to read for now. This person in front of you, they're yours to love for now. The situation you're in, it's yours to learn from for now. The person you are, she's yours to be for now.

Okay, so now let's go back. People think they're supposed to gather information. And that's fine, except nobody tells us because nobody knows how much information are we supposed to gather?

When do we stop gathering this information?

Okay, so that can't be right. But more important, if you think you should do a cost-benefit analysis, and we go back a few sentences where I already told you things in and of themselves are not good or bad. So that means every cost is a benefit. Every benefit has a cost. You add them up, it's going to come to zero. So if I said to you, here's your decision, Mary, do you want to meet my friend Joe? He's very impulsive.

Why would you want to meet him?

But if I said to you, Mary, do you want to meet my friend Joe? He's very spontaneous. You'd love to meet him. But spontaneous and impulsive are two views of the same thing. Do you want to meet my friend Ellen? She's very gullible. Why would I want to meet her? Do you want to meet my friend Ellen Langer? She's extremely trusting. Well, that sounds nice. So no matter what you're thinking about, it can be seen as good, bad, neither, both, what have you. So you can't make a decision by gathering goods and bads and seeing are there more good things or bad things, because each and everything is simultaneously good and bad. I also told you that you can't predict. We can predict overall Serena is going to win most games. She's not going to win every game. You know, we can say that she's going to hit a spectacular drop shot. She's not going to each time she tries a drop shot. It's not going to be spectacular, right? We can't predict if this is the one that's going to be different from her typical performance. Okay. So while you can predict for the group, generally, you can't predict the individual case. And we make decisions to take action. Once you take the action, you no longer are able to assess what the other alternative would have been. So let's say you're applying to school and you're, you know, real smart and you get into both Harvard and Yale. Oh, should I go to Harvard? Should I go to Yale? And then you decide you're going to go to Yale for a semester. You go to Yale and you hate it for some unknown reason. Now, you cannot— you will never be a first semester freshman again. So if you now go to Harvard, you don't know what it would have been like having that experience. So we can never assess the so-called road not taken. That's why regrets are so mindless. Regrets are mindless for several reasons. The first is that people, silly, assume that if they're not happy with something, the unchosen alternative would have been good, could have been worse, could have been the same. And actually, it's neither better, worse, or the same. It all depends on how we frame it. If one is mindful, they respect why they're doing what— and they know why they're doing what they're doing. Why they're choosing what they're choosing.

So when we know why we're doing what we're doing, we're less victimized by other people telling us how we are. Okay, so now this is really interesting to me because, you know, you've read The Mindful Body.

I have lots of, oh, really big findings—

how to be healthy, how to reverse chronic illness. I mean, how to live longer.

On how to be happier. Despite the fact that I have all of that research that I've done, the one thing that I came to over these 50 years that I think has been more important to me than anything else is the very simple idea that what we do makes sense, or else we wouldn't do it. No one wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be obnoxious, aggressive, stubborn, or whatever we call people. So when we see people and we cast aspersions and we're judgmental, we're always evaluating them from our perspective, not their perspective. When we judge ourselves harshly, we're doing the same thing.

We're judging ourselves from the after perspective, oblivious to why we did it in the first place. Okay, so We did this simple study years ago.

We gave people— I don't remember, it was 200, 250, whatever it was— behavior descriptions. And we asked them, check off those things that you keep trying to change about yourself, but you fail. So for me, I'd check gullible, impulsive.

I'm not going to share what else.

Okay. Then you turn the page over and in a mixed-up order, are the positive versions of each of these. Now we ask people, check off the things you really value about yourself. And so to me, I check off being trusting and being spontaneous. As long as I value being trusting, I'm going to be gullible.

As long as I value being spontaneous, sometimes I'm going to be seen as impulsive.

It's a remarkable way to feel good about yourself. All you need to do is know why you did what you did. And then it all makes sense. So each and every negative behavior has this alternative positive way of looking at it that's equally strong. And then you become nonjudgmental. Your relationships improve. Your relationship to yourself improves. You're more willing to be out there in the world. To try new things, to notice the neurons are firing and life just becomes better.

It's reassuring to know that you did research on this because 6 years ago when I wrote my first book, I was just a baby. A small anecdote that I told was about my little sister, who at the time was maybe 8. We have a big age gap and our mom was always on her ass about cleaning her room. One time my sister very unironically, dead seriously, yelled back at our mom and been like, Mama, it's not my fault I'm so messy. It's because I'm this creative.

Yeah, right. Okay. Or, you know, another one is young kids are often accused of being distracted. Distracted is really interesting because the better way of looking at it is otherwise attracted. But if I have the power as the teacher You have the problem if you're not doing what I'm saying. So in other words, you don't find me interesting. And so you're paying attention to something else. We say you have a problem with being distracted rather than I have the problem making it interesting. So if you say, why is the person doing this? It's because they find this other thing exciting. Well, that's a good thing when kids have other interests. And, you know, then when I wrote The Mindful Body, one of the titles I had considered using, but it only describes like half of the book or whatever, was who says so? Everything.

This is a big one.

Everything that is was at one point a decision made by other people to meet their needs that may or may not meet your needs. When we respond to the world as it is, as if it's handed down from the heavens, it's very hard to deviate from it. So your sister could have said, it's a beauty. You know, it's not messy. Everything— I know where everything is. It's all right here on the floor. But it's very important, especially for women, girls, because much of what is was decided by men. Now, the more different you are from the person who created the rule, The more important it is for you to do it your own way. And so for everything we learn, no matter what we're learning about anything, we should learn it conditionally. What that means is rather, this is— we should learn it as this could be, and then you make it your own. We don't realize that everything is mutable. Everything can be changed because it was just somebody's way of doing it in the first place. And there's almost always a way of meeting our needs. The problem is realizing that the thing that's irritating, stressful, or whatever was just a decision and can be changed.

Yeah, it takes a little bit of chutzpah to think that way.

But chutzpah is interesting. I have this friend who is an art collector, but she also drinks too much. She came over the house and she saw one of my paintings.

This was very early on.

And she said, Ellen, there's something there. Then she added, because of the alcohol, now don't go thinking you're Rembrandt. So now I said to her, no, I said to myself, because I didn't think she would understand it in her state, was that, and Rembrandt isn't me, meaning that if I'm true to myself, no one can do a better Ellen Langer than I can. And I would rather do that than be the 10,432nd person who paints like Rembrandt.

It's confidence-giving when someone can illuminate something in you that maybe you didn't see. It comes second nature. Maybe you were even insecure about it, but they repackaged it in a more delightful way. And in the last anecdote about not becoming a Rembrandt, and who would want to be, it's about taking people's— feedback, I suppose, with, with a grain of salt because they're coming from their own perspective or alcoholism or, you know, jokes or whatever. And those can either land deeply and dictate—

that's good, Mary, because there, that leads to something very important. People engage in unwittingly hypothesis-confirming data searches. What that means is whatever question you ask yourself, you're going to find evidence And so if you were to ask yourself, am I an awful person? You're going to find evidence that you're an awful person.

If you ask yourself the question, you know, am I a wonderful person or how am I wonderful?

You're going to find evidence for that as well. And so the questions, the way we talk to ourselves is crucial. And thank you for, you know, for seeing that hidden in what I was saying. But and also a very important part of living for me that I think everybody should adopt is a playfulness. I make almost everything a game. So then you're engaged in it. Your life doesn't depend on the success of it. You find joy in more things than most people do.

I love that, Dr. Ellen. I think that's a beautiful place to land. Thank you so much, Dr. Ellen.

This was a pleasure. If you're enjoying our Self-Love Podcast, please take a moment to leave a comment or a review letting me know what your biggest takeaway was. As somebody who works mostly behind the scenes on this podcast, I love hearing from you, and it just keeps me connected to the purpose, which is always to spread the gift of self-love.