"Don't Learn It Too Late!" - How To Get Back On Track & Design Your Dream Life | Dr. Ellen Langer
Ellen Langer, a psychologist who studies mindfulness and the mind-body connection, shares research showing how beliefs shape health. In one study, hotel chambermaids who labeled their work as exercise lost weight and lowered blood pressure. She argues stress is just excitement reframed, and that actively noticing the world improves happiness and health.
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What would you say is the most important mindset shift that we can all make if we want to live a life full of meaning and purpose and free from regret?
I think it's realizing that uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. And when we know we don't know, then we naturally tune in. And people are oblivious to the fact that Most people are not there. They're oblivious. And when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. All right. And, you know, it's interesting. I did a podcast the other day on happiness, and it was— it occurred to me, and I was surprised I hadn't said this before, but if you ask yourself, can a robot be happy? Of course, the answer is no. And yet, when you're mindless, you're no different from being a robot. So when you think you know, there's no reason to tune in. If you were going to come visit me right now, you'd come to my house and you'd pay attention. You'd see, you'd look at the paintings, you'd say, did she do that? What books am I reading? What is that? You'd be asking yourself questions and enjoying yourself without any effort. That's the important thing. So when we realize we don't know, life becomes interesting again and effortless. Now, people know they don't know, but they think they should know and they think other people do know. And so we pretend, we avoid situations rather than approach them. And what people need to realize is that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So we can't know. Now, what I often do, I've said this so many times that people will probably know the right answer but not realize how important it is. One of the things that everybody thinks they know is how much is 1 1, right? Good. And if somebody were to ask you that, you'd probably think, God, are they crazy? Or is this boring? Or why should I engage in this? But it turns out that in school we're taught absolute facts, but there are no absolute facts. I say that absolutely. Um, that 1 1 is 2 if you're using a base-10 number system. If you're using a base-2 number system, 1 1 is 10. But more interesting than that is if you add 1 watt of chewing gum plus 1 watt of chewing 1 1 is 1. You add 1 cloud 1 cloud, 1 1 is 1. Somebody sent this to me the other day. If you take 1 pizza and you add 1 pizza, you have 2 pizzas. But if you take 1 lasagna and you add 1 lasagna, 1 1 is 1. It's just a bigger lasagna. And so what is the point of all of this? The point is that when we know we don't know, we have choices. If now somebody were to say to you, how much is 1 1? You know, you could say 1. 2, 10, you have options that make the whole event more interesting. All right. And you pay attention to context. And when you're doing this, actively noticing the neurons are firing and decades of our research shows that that's literally and figuratively in line. So if you don't show up, you can't enjoy yourself. If you don't show up, You know, if you're not living, you're dying. And the change is very simple. Just know you don't know.
It makes me think of the Eastern concept, the importance of keeping a beginner's mind, right, in whatever we do. And, you know, I've been a medical doctor for, I think, 23 years now. And it's really interesting for me that I think the very best clinicians I know, they say the more patients we see, the more we realize how much we don't know.
Yeah, I think that that's crucial. In fact, you know, so a story I've also told many times, it'll take me a moment for it to become relevant to you, but I'm at this horse event and this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to go get his horse a hot dog? Well, you know, I'm a straight-A student. I'm the one everybody resented. I even studied what was under the pictures in these books growing up. So I think he's crazy. You know, horses don't eat meat. He brings back the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that made me realize that everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Science only gives us probabilities. How could you do a study that showed that horses don't eat meat? What you have are on different kinds of horses that are different degrees of hungry, a different amount of meat mixed with a different amount of grain, so on and so forth. And then you find that most of the horses don't eat meat. Not that all horses don't eat, but that's a mouthful. So our facts, mostly, you know, our medical facts in particular, are given as absolutes. And again, when you know something is absolute, you don't need to pay any attention to it. And physicians need to know that all of their learning, all of their information is essentially probability. That means it's true for some people, not for all people. And then they would proceed a little differently, which would return control of people's health back to the individual. It's a whole different way of living. And I think it'd be better for the physicians because if the physician knows he doesn't know, then he's going to pay a different kind of attention. And that mindfulness is going to be good for his or her health. And by the way, you know, especially during COVID one of the things that kept being discussed is burnout. You know, and burnout results from mindlessness. You can do the same thing over and over and over again, and at some point you can't bear being there. But when you recognize that, again, things are always changing and you can't be sure what's going to happen in any particular situation, you sit up and pay attention. So you're seeing a patient, and if you think you know everything about this patient, it's not going to be exciting for you. If you know that the patient is changing, you're changing, you're gonna notice different things, then you engage the whole situation differently. And that's good for your health, it's good for the patient's health, it's good for the relationship between you.
Yeah. What's really interesting, Ellen, is, As you were describing that whole relationship between a doctor and a patient and how we might evolve it, it's convention before you call your patient in to have reviewed their notes. Right. But the cost of that is that you have a closed mind.
Exactly. Well, let me tell you, so I had experienced a major fire that had destroyed 80% of what I owned. And one of the things that— the only thing I remember that was burned in the fire were my notes for a large class I was teaching in a couple of weeks. All right, so I did this thing. I called one of the students who had taken the course in the past, who got an A, and borrowed her notes. And then I gave the course. Now, because they weren't my notes, because I wasn't quite sure, of, you know, of anything I was going to say. I was present in a way that I hadn't been for years. And it was the best course I had ever given.
Why?
Because I had, you know, a general sense, but all the particulars had to make sense to me at that moment. And yeah, so I think that we're oftentimes just oblivious to how mindless we are. So it's not as if we can say, well, this time I'm going to pay attention because we're not realizing that we're not there. When you're not there, you don't know you're not there. But being there makes all the difference in the world.
You just mentioned the experience of you having a lot of your things lost in a fire. Now, although I'm in the UK and you're currently in Mexico, uh, we probably have a lot of mutual friends who live in Los Angeles who have recently faced fires. Now, of course, every situation is different and individual for that person, but I wonder whether you feel able to give some general advice given that you have experienced a house fire before.
Sure. Um, I will. I'll, I'll give the advice and then afterwards we can evaluate whether it's actually likely to be helpful or not. You know, of course it depends on whether you have insurance and things of this sort. But let's talk about the people who are insured. So as soon as I experienced this, the next day I called the insurance company, and the day after, the agent came, and he said, "My goodness, this was the very first time that the damage was worse than the call." Most people, "Oh my God, oh my God." And then he gets there, it's not so terrible. And that wasn't the way I was because I had already lost everything. Throwing my sanity and sense of calm After that was, was just going to cost me more rather than less. I also realized that everything I had in that house represented who I was because I hadn't gone shopping in the last few weeks rather than who I am right now. And it was an opportunity to reinvent myself in some way, in a small way. And also that when you— people who are experiencing these fires, need to appreciate that much of what has gone up in smoke, they really don't care about. You know, that we— I think in general, people acquire in some way to feel good, to feel good about themselves. You know, you might ask why these people— there's not people in the fire who've experienced the fire, but just in general, why there are so many millionaires, billionaires who are depressed. You know, and, you know, we want to achieve for what reason? We want to acquire for what reason? And much of it, I believe, is probably so that we will get the respect of other people. And if we get the respect of other people, then we'll have greater respect for ourselves. And there's a much easier way to do all of this, you know, that Most of what's lost, as I said a moment before, I don't even remember the things that I lost in that fire. But let me tell you a story that probably nobody in California has experienced, but it's meaningful to me. Right after the fire, since I didn't have my house any longer, I moved into the Charles Hotel, and I was a sight to be seen. There I am with my two little dogs and whatever. It was Christmas Eve. I went out. I came back and my room was full of gifts. Not from the management of the hotel, not from the owner of the hotel, but from the so-called little people. The people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitresses. I can't tell you. It took me years to be able to tell this story without it bringing tears to my eyes because it was just so sweet. Every Christmas, I am reminded of the basic goodness of so many people. So, you know, when you think about it, I don't remember what I lost except for those notes to that course. And I do remember the warmth that I experienced. It was actually, on whole, a positive experience. So I think that people need to understand that events themselves are neither positive nor negative. What makes them positive or negative is the way we understand these events. The more mindful we are, the more choices we have for how to understand the things we experience. You know, um, I'm curious about your view of this, um, as an important physician. My view is that stress is the major killer. I think everybody these days knows that stress isn't good for you.
Yeah, listen, I 100% agree with you that stress is the number one cause of symptoms, disease. No question at all. The, the, the longer I go on in my career, the more I think actually if I had to pick, I'd say it was stress. Yeah, it doesn't mean nutrition is not important. It doesn't mean that sleep is not important or exercise and movement. But I think when your stress response is activated chronically, as it is for so many people, we just don't realize that it impacts every single organ system in the body, including our immune system. And the other thing which I think really relates to your work is this idea for me that stress is not just external, right, which many people think it's to do with my workload, what my boss has me to do, my— the external events in my life will determine how stressed I feel. But as you just mentioned, and as I passionately believe, a huge part of stress, if not the vast majority of stress, is actually internal with how we view those external events.
You know, and so stress is psychological. And so if disease is primarily a function of, um, stress, and we can control our thoughts that will control whether or not we're stressed, it means we have enormous control over our health.
Yeah.
Far greater than most people realize. You know, I have a few one-liners I like after doing so many years of research to see if I can capture some of the major thoughts very briefly. One of these is if people just ask themselves, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Now, I'm not talking about the fire, you know, but most of the stress that we experience, I think people would realize, you know, so what? You know, it's really not such a big deal. And they'd immediately feel feel better. But also, stress requires two things. It requires a belief that something is going to happen and that when it happens, it's going to be awful. And it, you know, almost always the things we worry about don't happen. So if you simply said to yourself when you were stressed, why, what are three reasons, five if you're interested, um, you know, that this thing might not happen? So you start off, oh my God, it's going to happen, realizing maybe it won't happen. But then the more interesting part for me is to say to yourself, let's assume it does happen. How might that actually be a good thing? And so even with that fire I mentioned, the negative effects of it are totally gone. And yet every single Christmas, it brings me joy to reflect on it. Yeah. You know, so ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? We can't predict what's going to happen. But once we recognize recognize that whatever happens, we get to determine how we respond to it. So it doesn't matter what's going to happen. Yeah, you're not a victim of these happenings.
Yeah, the way I look at life, um, and I think one of the reasons why I love this new book of yours so much is because I do believe, as I mentioned, that stress is a huge part of the way that we feel and our risk of getting sick in the future, etc., etc. I also believe, as I mentioned, that a huge part of stress is the way we look at the world.
Right.
And as you said right at the start of this conversation, one of the most important mindset shifts is going from this idea that we know everything that's happening and we can predict, so we have this element of control. I go, and actually, actually, I just don't know. I actually— everything depends on the context. And as you say, with that 1 1, I I feel that these are things I didn't learn as a child. I've learned in my 40s.
Yeah, on the contrary, that the world teaches people that life is stressful, work is stressful, when you're young school is— I don't, uh, I think that's a major mistake. Work shouldn't be stressful, you know. So I talk in the book, and you might recall, um, about better than better. You know, that lots of my colleagues and lots of the world, when they're experiencing something bad, find a solution that is better, but they don't come close to the better than better way of living. You know, so that we have stress is bad. So work, let's say, is stressful. So then people are told to seek work-life balance, you know, which means this bad has to be bad. And now we need to have some fun in our lives. So we can tolerate all of these necessary bad things. And I think that that is totally mindless, that we shouldn't seek work-life balance because that says the bad has to be bad, but rather we should have work-life integration, that no matter what we're doing, there's a way of doing it that, that can be interesting, if not simply fun, no matter what. And people are taught to accept it. And then, you know, they say, okay, well, I can tolerate it rather than no, there's a better than better way of dealing with things.
Yeah. One of the key messages in your book is this idea that if we label something a certain way, then all our behaviors are predicated on the assumption that that label was correct. Right. So one thing I'm pushing back against at the moment is this idea that behavior change is difficult, right? If we keep saying to people, it's really difficult but you can do it, we're prejudging the experience for that person and we're saying, hey, this is going to be difficult. And so they then have a reason when they can't do it to go, yeah, I knew he said it was difficult. I found it, you know, I found it difficult. It confirms the belief that you already had. But what would happen if you never believed that in the first place?
Well, what people also don't realize, they think in some way that they want to be completely successful. And so sort of an example I often use, you're a little kid and you're in the elevator and you can't reach the button and you're very excited, but you just can't do it. And a parent picks you or whoever's with you, an adult picks you up and you press the button. Then you're a little taller and you're trying to— eventually, though, you're able to hit that button. And that's when the activity is over for you. When was the last time you got in an elevator and were excited that you hit the button? Or, you know, you're playing golf and I wish I could just, you know, swing this better and get it. And so eventually you get— nobody has done this, but imagine that now you get a hole in one every single time you swing the club. There's no game there. So, you know, and there's something I think I might be the only one who— I don't know where I learned this, but I learned that it's called the Texas curse, which is, I wish you what you wish for yourself. And that the things we wish for, we shouldn't wish for. You don't want everything to be so easy. You know, I was doing this TV show 40 years ago, on my nursing home study. And I kept telling him, "Here's the way I would open it up." Nobody ever listens to me, which is true. I still think it's a good idea. Which was, you know, you ask somebody, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if somebody— all of your meals were taken care of, and you didn't have to clean the house, and essentially, there was nothing you had to do?" And then the camera should pan the nursing home. 'Cause that's the life people are living. You know, that's not what we want. You know, it's the challenge. It's the possibility for mastering something, not having mastered it. That's the essence of everything.
Yeah, I love it. And it makes me think that next time I go into a lift, I'm gonna try and see if I can recreate some sort of excitement about pressing the button.
But you can. You can do it with your eyes closed. You know, so I have this friend who, lived in this very fancy building in New York. Very, very. And in this, because the building was so exclusive, you'd go in the elevator, and there was actually an elevator operator. Why do we need elevator operators, right? In most buildings, you press the button. And I thought, my goodness, you know, what a job that every day he's just going up and down the elevator. It was wonderful because I watched how he actually did this. He, you know, I would go in and I'd say, 33rd floor. He would look at the numbers, turn around, and then turn his dial to see if he could get to the 33rd floor. You know, he made it a game. And that's the way it stayed interesting. And I think that I make virtually everything a game. And that doesn't mean I don't take things seriously, but I'm not gonna do it if it isn't fun. You know, I say to my students, because I remember years ago when people used to go to the movies rather than have these giant TVs. TVs at home. And so many people would sit there, and as they leave the movie, would complain about how awful the movie was. I couldn't imagine doing that.
You know, that I say to them, "Either make it fun, make it interesting, or leave, no matter what you're doing." The implications of your work and what you're talking about are so, so profound for people when they really understand how much our mindset influences every single aspect of our lives. And, yeah, you know, one thing I've concluded over the past few years is this idea that there's no such thing as wasting time.
It's—
it doesn't exist. You spend time and there's a consequence. You either like the consequence and want to repeat it.
I think that when you're mindless, you are wasting time.
Although you could also take the argument one step further and go, if you're spending it mindlessly and you realize that actually you were spending it mindlessly, then it wasn't a waste because then you've learned, well, wait a minute, my time is much better if I spend it mindfully as opposed to mindlessly.
Yeah, no, that's true. Except that most of the time you don't realize it.
Yeah.
You know, if I ask you how much is 1 and 1 and you say 2, you're oblivious to the fact that it could also be 1, 2, or 10, for example.
Yeah.
You know, where everything we're taught teaches us absolutes. So I had this experience, and I was in college, and I'm an anti-crastinator. I do everything early, but this time I did it last minute. And in the morning, I read over this paper that I had written, and it said, "Obviously," I don't remember what followed that, and I had no idea what I was talking about. You know, that it wasn't obvious, but most of the time, time we don't get to review, you know, that when we're mindless, it's not that we couldn't come up with a solution. It doesn't occur to us. So, for example, when I gave the first talk I gave, there was a big audience and there was a lot of distance between me and the audience. So the first thing I did was move all the chairs. Interesting, a little mindless because I could have just been closer to them, but decided to move the furniture so I would not be nervous. And if you ask— most people don't do this. They take whatever is as if that's the way it's supposed to be. But if you ask them, could you just move the chairs? Everybody would say yes. You see what I'm saying? It just doesn't occur to you most of the time. I think that people don't realize that virtually everything that is was at one point a decision. And for it to be a decision means there was uncertainty. And what that means is that if you follow the logic straight through, that virtually everything is mutable. Everything can be changed. And most people take it as it is, as if there's some larger reason for how things are, whether it's the rules of a sport, Everything can be changed. So to my mind, that if it doesn't work, change it. But you can't change it if it doesn't occur to you that it can be changed. And also, interestingly, the more different you are from the person who created the rule, the more important it is for you not to follow it. So an example to make that clearer, when I give these lectures in person, often I'll ask, is there somebody very tall out there? I don't know why, but there's always a guy who's 6'5". I invite him to the stage. I'm 5'3", so we look ridiculous together, right? I ask him to put his hand up. I put my hand next to his. His hand is 3 inches larger than mine. And then I simply raise the question, "Should we do anything physical the same way?" And the answer is clearly no. Now, if he decided how you're supposed to hold the tennis racket, the golf club, with his larger hand, and I hold it the same way, I'm never going to maximize my potential performance.
This is so, so important, and it so deeply resonates with me. It's very much how I see the world, Ellen. One of these— the key messages I think that you teach us in all of your work, but particularly in this book, is to stop living by mindless rules, right? Yeah. And— You know, you mentioned, uh, someone who was 6'5". Well, as it happens, I was wondering where you were going because I'm actually 6'7". What's interesting is you were telling that story and I was thinking about this idea about the beliefs we absorb and we take them to be truth without ever questioning them. So in my 20s, I was crippled with lower back pain, okay? And what would everyone say? Oh, you know, at that height, you know, it's just the way it is, you know. Yeah, tall people, you're gonna have back pain. Until at one point I was just like, wait a minute, who said that that's true? Why would it be that this human body that's been, uh, that's been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years is so incapable that I'm going to have back pain just because I'm tall? And just thought, nonsense, I don't buy it, I am not having a part of that. I'm completely pain-free from backache despite the fact that I'm 6'7", right? So it's simply not true. You know how much I believe in the power of small intentional routines to transform your health. And one of my absolute favorites at the moment is to take a break mid-morning and have a cup of Peak's Sun Goddess Matcha. This fantastic drink contains L-theanine, a natural compound that keeps me calm and focused, and EGCG catechins, which help kickstart lipid metabolism and curb cravings. One of the things I love the most about Peak, and what really sets them apart, is their commitment to quality. Their Sun Goddess Matcha is organic, ceremonial grade, and quadruple tested for pesticides, heavy metals, and mold. And it's been crafted by 9th degree tea masters in Japan, ensuring it's the highest quality that you can find. If you're looking for a small change that can make a really big difference, I cannot recommend Peak's Sun Goddess Matcha enough. All you have to do is go to peaklife.com/live more for your 20% off and a free starter kit. There's a reason that Peak has over 15,000 5-star reviews. Try it today and take advantage of their 30-day satisfaction guarantee. You either love it or you get your money back. Right. But my, my question is, is this the mindset you can choose to adopt? Because many people, Ellen, I think, will be listening and go, well, yeah, I've got that mindset. I believe these rules. I believe that things are really certain and I shouldn't really question them. But I guess I think you and me both share this belief that actually we can change our approach to life.
Everything. Everything. You know, but you can only change it if you realize that you're trapped in it. You know, that, um, I smashed my ankle many years ago. And smashed it, not just broke the ankle. So I have all this metal in my ankle. And I was told by the medical world that I'd never be able to walk without a limp. Now, I don't really listen. Sometimes that's a good thing. And so I forgot that I wasn't supposed to walk without a limp. And, you know, and I never had the limp. But if, let's say, I had walked, you know, believed that I had to limp, it would have to occur to me to question that for me to change it. And so if you and I are now saying, well, wait a second, why accept that you have to walk without the limp? Then what you do, even if all you, you know, for the past 10 years you've been limping, is to try to walk differently.
Yeah.
What people don't realize is the enormous amount of control we have over our psychological and physical health by recognizing change. And, you know, so that even with walking, you know, with a limp, I think most people who walk with a limp probably don't walk with a limp with every step they take. And so what's happening for the moment that they're walking and there is no limp? What's happening if you're suffering from chronic pain? You think you're in pain all the time. Nobody is anything all the time. But if you were to notice, gee, right now I'm not in pain, and then you ask yourself, well, why? And several things happen when you do that. First is you're going to see, gee, you're not in the same amount of pain all of the time. That feels better. Second, when you ask yourself, well, why now am I in less pain than I was before, to try to find the reason, you're going to engage in a mindful search for information that itself is good for your health. And I believe you're much more likely to find a solution, be able to change if you're actually looking for it. And we did this. I call this attention to symptom variability, which is really just a fancy way of saying being mindful. When you're mindful, you notice change. And so we had people attend to the symptoms of their chronic illnesses in this fashion that I just described. And we found relief for people who have multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, chronic pain, arthritis, several very real disorders.
Yeah.
So because, you know, what happens is people mistakenly think, and the medical world doesn't help them think otherwise, that when the medical world tells you you have a chronic illness, chronic illness, all that means is not that there is no solution to the problem, but that the medical world doesn't have a solution to the problem. And so you have a chronic illness, you presume without realizing it that your symptoms are going to stay the same or just get worse. But again, nothing moves in only one direction. You know, when the stock market is going up or down, it doesn't go in a straight line. Goes up, it goes down a little, and it goes up some more, and so on, or in the reverse direction. So the question, well, why? Why now is it a little better? And, um, you know, so that's been a lot of work that I am very excited about because there are no negative side effects that you get with different kinds of surgery or medication or whatever, that the person can do this attention to symptom variability in, um, coordinated with whatever medical care they're getting. And, you know, that so often you're waiting for the medical world to give you the answers that the test results have given you and so on. And this allows you to have something to do for yourself while you're waiting. And the results have been remarkable.
Yeah, this is an incredibly fascinating topic to me, this idea that someone, let's say, has got chronic pain.
Pain.
So they see their doctor, they're diagnosed with some form of chronic pain, so they then label themselves, I have chronic pain. Okay, not I'm currently suffering with pain, not something else, but I have chronic pain. So they put on that label, the coat, and they walk around in the world, right? So what's really interesting is that people then don't really notice when they're not in pain, when they don't. Yeah. So I would notice for many years, like, let's say with a, with with, with sort of these chronic health conditions that conventionally the medical profession have struggled with for years and ended up making patients feel bad about. Okay, so whether it be irritable bowel syndrome or chronic fatigue syndrome, just to take two examples, right? So what I realized a few years ago is if I didn't do what's called an MSQ, a medical symptom questionnaire, that we were going to have a problem because the problem would be is that a patient would come in and let's say that you recommended a series of things for them to focus on. And if they came back in 2 months and they were 50% better, they wouldn't notice the 50% better. The focus would be on the 50% that was still bad. So what an MSQ does, a medical symptom questionnaire does, is I was able to say, hey, listen, 2 months ago. I know, I know you're saying that things are still not good, but wait a minute, let me just show you. 2 months ago, your MSQ score was 72, right? Now your MSQ score is only 18. Isn't that remarkable? And you could see the whole mindset start— oh yeah, that's a good point, doctor, actually. I didn't— oh yeah, that's gone, that's gone, that's gone, that's gone. So what I'm trying to get to, Ellen, is I have thought for many years, and I think your research totally backs this up, this idea that awareness is the most important factor in any change.
Yes, yes. That what happens is people don't realize that, and people engage in hypothesis confirmation. No matter what question you ask yourself, if you ask yourself, how am I wonderful? You'll seek all the information about how you're wonderful. But if you ask yourself, how am I miserable? You'll seek the info, you know, whatever question you ask yourself, you're going to be able to validate.
Hence the benefits of gratitude, right?
Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, I usually use this example with stress. There are some people who think they're stressed all the time. Nobody is anything all the time. So if I call you periodically and I say, you know, how stressed are you right now? Is it more or less than the last time we spoke? And why. And we keep doing this. That, let's say you find out, you know, you're not stressed, you are maximally stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. All right. Well, so then the answer is easy. Don't talk to me. But, you know, by recognizing that things are changing and asking why, otherwise, whatever you're expecting, you're going to see and you're oblivious to the absence thereof. You know, that if I think I'm stressed all the time, I just don't notice when I'm not stressed. If I think I'm in pain all the time, or the example you had just given, we really have to just ask ourselves the other question. You know, don't ask yourself, when am I in pain? Ask yourself, when am I not in pain? When am I not stressed? When am I not a miserable person?
I wonder if any of your work speaks to this little exercise that I've, I've done with patients for many years, right? This idea that, um, often let's say people are trying to, um, change their diets. They want to, they want to reduce how much sugar they're having, for example. And one thing that's really common is that people can manage it often in the day, but at 9 PM in front of the sofa with the television on in the evening, they can have a craving for ice cream or sugar, right? And I have this little exercise called the 3 Fs: feel, feed, and find. And the first F is feel. Basically, I say, so okay, you're on the sofa at 9 PM, you, you've got the craving to have the ice cream. Now, if you can, before you open the freezer and the spoon somehow ends up in your mouth with ice cream on it, can you take a pause and ask yourself, what am I really feeling? Is this physical hunger or is this emotional hunger? Am I a bit stressed, a bit lonely, a bit whatever it might be? And then, you know, we go through a sequence of those 3 Fs to help people. But I would always say, and I, and I maintain that the most important of the Fs is the first F, because once you understand why you're going to that behavior, your relationship with that behavior immediately has changed. Whether you can change it straight away or not, the awareness that actually, oh, that's why I'm consuming sugar, starts to change things, right? And, and I wonder how that plays into this research where, where you've done with people with MS or chronic pain, when they realize, oh, wait a minute, I'm not always in pain, right? Do you see a similarity there?
Sure, sure. But I think something else is going on with the ice cream, which is, um, It's very important for people to feel control over their lives and moment-to-moment control. And so when you want the ice cream and you say to yourself, you're not allowed to have it, I said, well, who's telling me I'm not allowed to have it? I'm in charge. And then you go and you reach for the ice cream as if, again, the amount you're going to consume is fixed. See, so when you started talking, I thought, you want ice cream? Have some ice cream. Doesn't mean you have to eat, you know, a pint of it. And when we say to ourselves we can't, then we object.
Yeah, I agree. And just to clarify, when I go through the exercise, I actually say, "Go ahead and have it afterwards if you want, but at least understand why." Because that thing of control is interesting, isn't it? That whole idea of perceived control. I think some people struggle with their sugar intake because they feel out of control. "I don't know what— I keep reading books on sugar, yet somehow I keep ending up with the ice cream spoon in my mouth." which makes them feel out of control. But if at least you understand, "Oh, every time I have a row with my partner, I want to have ice cream," I think that gives you a sense of control.
But also that, you know, you can have a serving spoon, you can have a tablespoon, or you can have a teaspoon. And if you make the choice, let me see, which of these am I going to use now to have the ice cream? As soon as— so you feel in control again. And then when you use the teaspoon and just ask yourself, is that enough? Oftentimes you'll find it is. I mean, you know, that if you gave me a giant, you know, sandwich, not just a sandwich, two pieces of bread, but whatever you put in front of me, I will eat the whole thing. And— but I'd be satisfied with a tiny little piece.
Well, that's the whole thing about mindful eating, isn't it? About having that piece of chocolate, but taking 5 minutes to have it, where you taste every bit, you keep it on your tongue.
Well, you know something? Let me tell you, a student of mine did this research where we take inexpensive chocolate or Godiva chocolate, and it's wrapped in the inexpensive wrapper or the Godiva wrapper. So you have 4 conditions. You have the fancy chocolate that you know is— that's wrapped in the fancy chocolate. You have the cheap chocolate wrapped in the fancy chocolate, the fancy chocolate wrapped in the cheap wrapper, and the cheap chocolate cheap chocolate. And what we find, not surprisingly, people are going to like what they think is the Godiva chocolate more than what they think is the cheap chocolate. What was interesting was that they took longer eating it when they thought it was the Godiva chocolate.
Wow.
And it's that savoring that I think, you know, when you think you're not supposed to do something, then you just, you know, you want to shovel it all in before you can tell yourself you shouldn't be eating it all, rather than just let yourself enjoy it. And there's something else that's relevant here. You know, it's so funny that with all of the very big findings I've had over, you know, decades of my career, people living longer and so on, the one thought that I came to that to me was more important than any of this, it's the very simple idea that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "Today, I'm gonna be aggressive, obnoxious, inconsistent." You know? So when people are behaving this way, why is it? And so, um, it turns out that, um, for every behavior description that's negative, there's an equally strong but oppositely valenced alternative. For every negative, there's a positive. So, "I can't stand that I am so gullible." And you wouldn't believe, I really am. Well, the reason I'm gullible is because I'm trusting. And once I realize that, I'm willing to be gullible. All right. You're inconsistent. That's because you value being flexible. You're boring. That's because you value being stable and so on. Now, when you recognize that what you're doing makes sense, then even the idea that I want the ice cream right now, is a reasonable thing, you know, rather than presume there's some— what's wrong with me? I have no control. Yeah, we have this such a strong notion that there are these good things and these bad things and that people feel bad about themselves when they engage in all of those negative behaviors and so on, without realizing that there must be some reasonable, sensible, acceptable explanation. So if I said to you, You're anxious and you do X, and now you're not anxious anymore. Is X a good thing? Is it rational? You say yes. And then if we substitute what that X is, eating too much ice cream or whatever it might be. So you don't have to come down hard on yourself because when you feel bad about yourself, then you're going to do more eating of the ice cream than everything else. Else, but to recognize it's reasonable. It bought me something. It was a smart thing to do. Maybe now I can choose to do something that's even smarter.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. All behaviors serve a role. Too often we try and change the behavior without understanding the role it plays in our life.
Exactly.
I've heard you apply that attention to variability concept to relationships, right? Because relationships are a place where we often limit ourselves with labels and words. You know, my wife always does this, my husband always does this. So perhaps you could explain how this applies to relationships.
Well, you know, in the way you just said, um, you know, that, uh, I think that you're stubborn, for example. Well, so there are two ways to apply both of what I said. Um, I can see that there's another way of understanding what stubborn means, that here you have a strong belief belief in something, you know, that you're a person with— what is the word I'm looking for? Let it go. I'm having a senior moment, but right before this, it was a junior moment, so I can be forgiven. So then I, with you doing very little, assume now, because I've called you stubborn so many times, I think you're being stubborn. And I no longer look for all the moments that you're not stubborn. And if I paid attention to the times you weren't stubborn, the times you were stubborn would play differently for me. You know, I think there must be some reason, since I know you're not always stubborn, why you're stubborn now. And what people don't realize in relationships, it might sound simplistic, but I think it's potentially meaningful. Relationships are like dances. You know, that if you dance, it's hard to get somebody else to do something different. But if you behave differently, if you were dancing, the dance would be different. So, you know, you don't have to throw up your hands in frustration quite as often as we do. I mean, so many things. So the first is when the person is irritating you, recognize how that behavior makes sense from the other person's perspective, or else they wouldn't do it. So my being gullible irritates you, but once you realize it's because I'm trusting, it's kind of nice.
Yeah.
Your being inconsistent drives me crazy, but once I realize realize that's because you're flexible. I love you again.
Ellen, this is so important, this concept, right? Because it's important on an individual level, but if we think across society at the moment, there seems to be a lot of division, right? Right. This mindset completely changes that. If you understand that, hey, listen, everyone's doing the best that they can, everyone's behavior makes sense if you understand them and their childhood and their parents and their life experiences. Then suddenly everything becomes a bit more compassionate. We start to understand people.
People tend to suffer from naive realism, which essentially is you see something a particular way and you're oblivious to the fact that it can be understood differently. And so then you get irritated at the other person. Well, how could you do that? You know, because your understanding of it is single-minded.
Yeah, which is what— which is why, Ellen, the first thing you said to me when I asked you the question, what's the most important mindset shift we can make? That's it. It plays out here, right? This idea that actually you don't know everything, right? You just don't know everything. If you know that you don't know, it's like, oh, well, I wonder why that person is engaging in that behavior and believes what they believe about the world.
Exactly. We can be noticing different things. So of course, then we're going to respond differently. We can notice the same thing differently. So in this instance, you can see me as gullible or trusting. Those will lead to very big differences. Or we can see the same thing the same way, but value them differently. And so when somebody is responding differently from you, rather than the naive realism, which is they're doing this to irritate you, which which typically people are not doing what they're doing for any reason about you. It's usually just about them. But then everything becomes also much more interesting. You know, there's also the 3 levels that I talk about in the book. I'm gonna talk about The New Yorker. I love The New Yorker. It's just a way of telling the story. Level 1, people who don't read The New Yorker. Level 2, 2, people who read The New Yorker. Level 3, people who don't read The New Yorker anymore. They could read it again, but that makes it too complicated. The point is, level 1 and level 3 are doing the same thing, but they're very, very different. And every time you're castigating somebody, you're presuming it's a level 1 when it may actually be a level 3. Another example, let's say somebody You see somebody drop their cane and level 1 person doesn't give a damn and walks away. The level 2 person runs over to help. Okay, wow. That's what we want everyone to do. The level 3 person doesn't help, but they're not helping because they want to wait and see what's going to happen because they believe the person will be better if they can figure out how to help themselves. So 1 and 3 are both mocking, but they're different. And, you know, if we recognize that the same behavior can have such different meaning, and we presume each time it's a level 3, even if it was only a level 1, we ourselves grow and become less judgmental. All of this, these 3 levels, and the behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, lead us to be less judgmental, and we're less judgmental of other people. We also become more less judgmental of ourselves, our relationships improve. As our relationships are improving, we tend to be more mindful, more willing to be out there in the world. Our health improves.
Can I ask you then, what in your experience is the main problem that people run into in their relationships?
Well, they're mindless. You know, it's the one problem you run into in all of life. It's thinking you know, and so you don't pay any attention. But in relationships per se, you know, it's interesting because I say in my relationship, you know, something goes awry, I might say, "Are you saying I don't love you?" You know, bring it back to basics. And of course, the person is not saying that, and it immediately plays out differently. But recognizing that uncertainty, even in the relationship, is the rule. And we don't know why we did what we did. We don't know why he or she did what they did. And finding out is a way of becoming closer rather than presuming that we know. And, you know, when you say somebody does something all the time, and that seems to give you justification for being annoyed by it, you still ask, "Well, why? Why do they do it all the time?" Even if they did, which nobody ever does, you know, and remembering that everybody's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it. We're brought up, you know, I talk about this in the book some, and it starts in school. You know, I think schools make us mindless. And everybody is evaluated. And, you know, you have your place on that normal distribution. You're either spectacular, most people are in the middle, or you're awful. And you just accept it without realizing who chose the criteria. You know, who decided this is the only way to do it? It's like everybody, you know, here's a rail and you keep banging against it, and you don't know, you just have to move over a tiny bit for it to all play out smoothly. It's sad to me. And, you know, I had this experience. This is another one of those small moments that played so large in my life. We were having a large delivery, lots of furniture coming. Coming to be stored in the basement. The reasons don't matter. And I look at the size of the truck, and I look, I know the space, and there's no way that's going to fit there. There's just no way. And the person who was going to put it all away was somebody who thought he essentially, I hope he doesn't hear this, but I think he thinks of himself as a loser. He's uneducated. There's, you know, he's just not one of these straight-A student types or wealthy whatever. So here I am, the genius. Here he is, anything but. I believe it can't happen. He puts it all away, not just getting it all in the space, but where you can reach anything there. It was remarkable to me that all of a sudden I thought, this is just not fair. Why am I praised so? And he thinks so, doesn't have the same opportunity to think well of himself. And then, And then I realized everybody knows something that everybody else doesn't know. Everybody can do something. And my goal, you know, I don't know, don't think I'll ever achieve it, but would be to take the vertical where you and I sit near the top. That's great. And then you have the losers on the bottom and make it horizontal where we recognize that everybody has something to offer.
Yeah, I love that.
An example that I, you know, came to was I was giving this lecture in South Africa and they put me up in this very fancy hotel. And I had a few hours, and I'm sitting downstairs by the swimming pool and just relaxing. And I notice there's a massive amount of real estate there that the hotel owns that's totally unused. And I thought that, you know, the cabana boy, the lowly cabana boy, whose job is just to fold the chairs and put out the chairs, is the only one aware of this. You know, but who would ever think to ask him ask him. Yeah, you know, um, because we think those that know know everything, those that don't know nothing. And rather, you know, imagine you're in school now, you're a little kid, and the teacher says, okay, how much is 1 1? And you sit up and you say, 1. What is the teacher gonna do? Yeah, he's just gonna look at you like you're an idiot. Uh, he's going to, by doing that explicitly or implicitly, lead everybody else to have no respect for you.
You're going to internalize grow up in that way and conform for the rest of your life.
Exactly. When all the teacher needed to say was, well, how did you come to that? And you'd say, well, if I take one wad of chewing gum and one wad of chewing gum, I put it together, 1 1 is 1. You know, so by everybody thinking they know, and you know, whether it's physicians, you know, from the top to the bottom, it doesn't matter where, you think you know, you pay no attention to other people, um, you hurt yourself in the process, and you can't because there's always more to know. Again, everything is always changing.
Yeah. Ellen, this is, I mean, right up my street. Super fascinating, particularly because you are a professor at Harvard, right?
Yes.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, the conditioning we would have is that a Harvard professor knows, right? So, I was actually in Boston a week ago, ago, okay? And I met up with some friends of mine who are Harvard professors. Now, A, I'd love to know your perspective on how your, um, studies over the years and how our mindset influences our physiology, frankly, how that has been viewed at such a prestigious academic institution, okay? But I also would like to know about this idea of Um, I'd like to explore this idea of hierarchy, okay? And so one of these Harvard professors I was with last week, um, was saying to me, I can't stand anecdotes, okay? Anecdotes just really irritate me. Anecdotes are not science, okay? And I've not been able to stop thinking about it since then because— and I'll tell you why—
because the anecdotes lead to the science, right? You have to have the experience to get the idea.
The anecdotes lead to the science, but also— and it goes back to what you said before about science actually is only probability. It's not reality, it's probability. It tells you what is likely to happen. Okay, it's our— science is our way of trying to explain reality. Science in and of itself is not the reality, right? And so during my career as a doctor, I've realized that the anecdote has always been of more interest to me than the science. Why? Because my job as a doctor is to help the individual patient in front of me. Therefore, I very early on in my career figured out it's fine if a research study says A, B, and C, but if D is helping my patient get better, well, for that patient D is much more relevant, right? So, um, this whole thing of hierarchy, which I'm dead against, right? I think I actually genuinely do believe that we should see everyone as an equal and actually we can learn something from everyone. But in the UK, and I think in the US at the moment, there's this movement to go, there's a problem with information out there, we need more people talking about evidence-based nutrition. I saw a post on Instagram about this yesterday. And I'm, again, I'm not saying they're wrong, right? Who am I to say what's wrong or right? But I'm questioning it, going, well, hold on a minute, whose evidence and in what context? And how do we know that that evidence is relevant for that individual? So, Professor Langer, what is your perspective on what I've just outlined?
I agree completely. The implication of what you're saying is, you know, again, as I keep saying, we don't really know. And my research tends to be different from, I think, the field at large, because I think most people are trying to say what is. And in my work, I'm trying to develop what could be. You know, so if I were able to train one dog to say, "Hey, Professor Langer, do you want to go have an ice cream?" That would be enough. It wouldn't matter that I couldn't get all the dogs. To say this, to talk about possibility. I had the experience of very close to me would take Dexedrine for some reason, and it would put her to sleep. Now, Dexedrine is an arouser, right? You know, so when you have these anecdotes and you see, yeah, well, there are deviations from whatever the rule is, that leads you to pay a different kind of attention What people— uh, science is talking about large numbers, and you can predict sort of— I, I could argue with people about that, and I'll concede for the moment, although I don't really want to, that, you know, if you have a large enough sample, you can make some statement. But you can't predict the individual case, and nobody who does science would think you can predict the individual case. But in reality, all we really care about is the— you You can tell me 70, 90% of the people who have this surgery do brilliantly. I'm happy for them. But how is it going to affect me personally? And we can't know. And that not knowing leads everybody to behave differently. The physician, the individual, the husband, the wife, and use all the different examples we've spoken of. Once we know we don't know, that necessarily leads us to a different relationship with the other person. You know, to recognize that everybody doesn't respond the same way. And so you need to, you know, if you're eating something that is supposed to be wonderful for you, but it turns out your biochemistry is such it's not good for you, it's gonna take you much longer to recognize the negative effects it's having on you if you buy into the absolute notion of any scientific finding. You know, if I eat something that's supposed to be good for me, I pay attention to, is it good for me? You know, and I'd be more likely to notice that my feet turn blue.
Well, those two words, I think, are the most two important words, right? Paying attention, right? I contend that there are some general food principles to follow when it comes to talking about a so-called healthy diet. But ultimately, we need to start paying attention to how we feel when we're following all these different diets to find out, to start to understand, actually, I think I feel better when I'm eating like this. And I think we can go one step further, right, and go, if your belief, right, so this, um, you know, our behaviors follow our beliefs. So if your belief is that there's an expert out there who knows better than I what's right for me. Actually, that's one of the reasons I think so many people are confused these days and going around in circles and going, I don't know who to trust anymore. That diet didn't work for me, that diet didn't work for me. But it's all based on the assumption that someone else knows what's best for you. But what if that wasn't the case? What if you were the only person who actually could say what was right for you? For over 6 months now, I have been regularly consuming Ketone IQ a clean shot of high-performance energy. Ketone IQ contains exogenous ketones, basically ketones that we consume as opposed to ones that our bodies make, which basically means all of us can experience their benefits without needing to go on a ketogenic diet. There is mounting research on their ability to improve athletic performance, focus, metabolic health, mental clarity, and recovery. And I myself take it before I work out, before each conversation on this podcast when I need some extra focus, and more recently on my national UK theater tour where I took it immediately before going on stage. I've been really impressed not only with its taste but also how it makes me feel and perform. Ketone IQ is also consumed by many professional athletes elite and Tour de France cycling teams. And as a special offer for my podcast listeners, you can save 30% off your subscription order, plus you'll get a free gift with your second shipment— fun stuff like a six-pack, Ketone IQ merch, and more. All you have to do is go to ketone.com/live-more or click on the link in the description box life?
You know, it's funny because I, I sometimes pay attention to or ask the question, how did I come to some of the strange thoughts that I have? Uh, when I was very young, that's when curls were not in. Okay, so, and my hair is curly, and so when it rained, oh my goodness, I didn't want to go to school because my hair would frizz. And so I'd get my hair cut. And so here's the expert, not a doctor, but still, he's been cutting hair for forever, and he's cutting my hair, and And he told me that something would happen that I knew wouldn't because my hair didn't respond the way, you know, he was speaking to. And I let him do what he did. And of course, then my hair curled when it shouldn't have curled, 'cause curls then weren't in. Anyway, little examples like this. You know, if you pay attention to all the misinformation without castigating anybody, without losing respect, you know, people can be generally correct them their expertise. But then you sort of naturally become a little— I don't say cautious because you're not cautious. You're just more mindful.
Yes.
And accepting what people are saying. You know, right now it's like you get in a car and so most of us have no idea how the car operates. And so we're not tuned in to the subtleties. You know, if you were a mechanic, you'd notice that something sounds a little wrong and you'd be able to fix it sooner than that, since we're not taught to pay attention to our bodies. And there's some people who, you know, all of a sudden they wake up and they've gained 10 pounds. You don't gain 10 pounds overnight. You know that if you had noticed the smaller changes, it's much easier to take off 2 pounds than 10 pounds.
So how do we start noticing that if everything around us is training us now more and more to be mindless? How do we start becoming more mindful?
Well, the first way probably is to recognize that we don't know. I'm gonna keep getting back to that.
It's quite freeing.
Well, it isn't, but it isn't in a way that where you think, you know, you're supposed to notice everything about yourself, every move, every, you know, and that's not, you know, when I say to people, people, we should be mindful all the time. People get crazy. Oh my God, it sounds overwhelming. And I'm not saying we should be mindful of everything all the time, because that would be overwhelming. But we should mindlessly accept nothing. So we should always be either mindful or actively noticing or potentially mindful. Now, people think mindlessness serves a purpose. I don't think I think, you know, we even have— I'm doing some work now, a new book on habits, where people think they should develop good habits. No, habits are mindless. A good habit is better than a bad habit, but it's still better to be present rather than— because once you're doing something habitually, you know, you're no longer paying attention to the context, whether right now it's a good thing, for example, to be doing whatever it is.
Okay, this is really interesting. So can— might one argue, Ellen, that the reason we sometimes want to automate things is because we're not having to use up cognitive resource for it. A habit is something, isn't it, that we are doing without any conscious thoughts, right? So by definition—
Yeah. You're headed someplace as if we only have 10 units, so we don't want to use up those units on these minor things so we have it for more important. But the more, the more, the more mindful you are, the more energy you have, the more capacity you have.
So this is like brushing your teeth. You can brush your teeth whilst also thinking about tomorrow's to-do list and thinking about the emails you didn't do, or you can brush your teeth while paying attention to the bristles.
You should be there. Yeah. So let's say, you know, the example I have, you know, uses, let's say you're a kid and you're thinking about a test you have to take and you reach for the box of cereal and you pour it into the bowl and you're not there because you're thinking about about whatever you're thinking about other than the breakfast. You're not going to notice the shell of the nut in that bowl that then cracks your tooth. You know, that when you recognize that if everything, if nothing is perfect, that means we want to be there to recognize the imperfection. And this event comes to mind. So friends of mine were leading this safari whatever, and they're in India. And so they have these tourists and there's a tiger and one of them takes out a piece of rope, like a cord, and gives one of the tourists a cord and takes the other end and gives another tourist the cord and says, don't go, you know, stay on this side of the cord, as if the tiger is going to pay any attention to that. I mean, that's the way we're trained to assume that in the States, not in all countries. But if, you know, if the food is available, then somebody has made sure it's safe for us. We do everything based on the assumption that some other group of people who know more have said that this is okay. I'm in Mexico, as you said, and there's a place I drive where there's no traffic light, there's no stop sign, and there are also no accidents, as far as I can tell. Because everybody is there paying attention because there's nothing else telling you. You know, there's nobody telling you that this is the way to do it. So you do it that way and you don't have to see, you know, on how things could go wrong. And so it's not just to be there there to avert the danger not yet arisen. You want to be there because that's the only place where you're growing, where you're exciting, where, you know, your life becomes meaningful in the smallest detail. If you're going to brush your teeth, show up for it. Now, if you're taught to brush your teeth so that you do it in some automatic way, so it's boring— boredom is when you're doing it the same way over and over again and you feel compelled to be there, but you're not noticing anything new.
Are you mindful all the time?
Um, well, it's interesting, you know, that for me, when I find myself not being mindful, I go, yes, I'm right, that this mindlessness is all over the place. So no, I'm probably more mindful than most people. Um, I've been studying this for 50 years. Um, but sure, there are times that I'm not mindful. Every time, you know, I get a little frustrated with something you know, in that relationship. How could you do that? You know, the sorts of things that we were talking about before. No, but I snapped back very quickly.
Yeah. You know, the last few days I've been reading your new book, and it's changed how I go for walks or how I've been driving around. So I've been taking this idea of, well, can you notice new things every time? So, you know, the same drive that I do all the time, time, oh wow, I didn't see that tree or that fence looking like that, right? Or on the walk around my block that I went on this morning, I started to actively look for new things that I'd never seen before. And they're all there. I mean, they would have been there the entire time, but I never—
But it's not just that you're noticing them. The act of noticing them feels good. Yeah.
Okay.
It's energizing. And that's the piece that people don't understand, because when I say you should be mindful all the time, they think, oh, that would be exhausting. Exhausting. But no, it's energizing.
Well, that, that brings up the concepts of fatigue that you write about as well, right? And what fatigue really is.
Yeah. Um, I don't know if we can prevent all fatigue, but certainly we suffer fatigue at times we don't need to. That if we were mindfully doing what we're doing, as I said, it would be energizing rather than and that, you know, what purpose does fatigue serve? I was thinking about this because for me, you know, if you watch me giving talks even now, that, you know, for most people, they start out here and then they get tired. I don't know. I just go in the opposite direction. I get more and more excited. And so then how could it come to an end? You know, it couldn't come— I mean, you know, this will be over as soon as you tell me it's over. But I can do this all day.
Yeah, me too.
You know, and so for society to function, you need to have closure. You need to have times when it's over. And I think somehow we came up with what I call the two-thirds effect. You know, you begin an activity and built into it is this overlay in some sense. Two-thirds of the way through, you're going to start getting tired, and that's going to allow you eventually to exit the activity. So The first test of this was so simple. They just asked people to do 100 jumping jacks and tell us when they're tired. Turns out they get tired at around 70. That's one group. We have another group, they're gonna do 200 jumping jacks. Tell us when they're tired. They get tired at 140.
Yeah.
I mean—
Same sort of fitness levels of the groups?
Exactly, exactly. You know, so there was a study that Frank Beach did on in the '50s that I thought was really fun. He takes a little boy rat and introduces a little girl rat, and they'll copulate. And then the little boy rat, as you can identify with, can't take anymore, right? He has to go through a refractory period to rest. However, if immediately after they copulate, you introduce a new little girl rat, you change the context, he's ready to go again. And that, you know, so our fatigue is tied to the context. And you change the context and all of a sudden you have renewed energy. So it's sort of as if, you know, I'm word processing all day long. I'm just so tired. I can't take it. And then I go home and I play the piano. Okay. Same activity, but in a new context.
Yeah, you— we see this in athletics a lot, don't we? That, um, you know, I've seen it before. My, my movement coach Helen Langer Langer has told me about this. I've seen this with lots of runners, this idea that, you know, you know, people get tired at the same times on their runs. They can do a marathon fine, let's say, some runners, but still in a half marathon, which is less distance, they'll still get tired before the end, right? And I think Professor Tim Noakes wrote about this many years ago, the central governor hypothesis, I believe, where it's the brain that actually generates fatigue. It doesn't mean that you're done. And I think we all know that feeling, don't we, where we're, as you say, we're bored at, you know, in the evening, we think we're knackered, work, whatever, the emails were boring us or whatever, but we could go to bed and feel tired. But if your best friend just suddenly turned up at your you'd probably have all the energy in the world to chat to them for 3 hours, right? So what actually happened to your fatigue there?
Yeah, so we did a study, um, and, um, sleep. And I'll tell you, after I tell you what we found, uh, we should talk a little bit about how hard it was to actually run this study. Um, but so we have people there in a sleep lab, um, they wake up and the clock tells them that they they got a certain amount of sleep, or the clock is rigged and it tells them they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, or 2 hours fewer. And biological and cognitive functions seem to follow perceived amount of sleep.
Yeah.
Now, the science about the science is really fun for— not fun. It was so hard for me to do this study. Such a simple study. Move a little clock, you know, an inch, however long it is on the clock. And, you know, I didn't want to I didn't want to take the time and the resources to set up my own sleep lab for— and I just wanted to test this one idea. So I call the medical world, people who have sleep labs, and they won't do it. And I said, it's so easy. They said they don't think it'll work. I said, so if it won't work, it won't interrupt whatever study you're doing just to change the clock. And it was interesting because nobody that I had spoken to early on in the medical world thought it would would work. Everybody in the psychology world thought, of course it'll work. You know, no doubt on either side, which was kind of fun. Then eventually I found people who were willing to do it, and obviously it worked or I wouldn't be talking about it. You're talking about anecdotes that sometimes you can make the point with an anecdote. You can't even get the study done because there's so much disbelief surrounding the possibility.
Yeah. This idea that our perception and our thoughts affect our reality and our physiology is—
it's the whole ballgame.
It's the whole ballgame. And your entire career, that message is interwoven everywhere. We haven't even covered a small fraction of the studies or the exciting studies that you write about. In The Mindful Body, um, that there are just so many. And that, that sleep study you just quoted, I actually referenced and wrote about in my brand new book, actually. So I'm familiar with it. I think it's, I think it's absolutely brilliant. But this idea that, um, we don't know, okay, it has lost more than that.
We don't know. It's that we don't know that we don't know. That's the bigger problem, because then when we think we know, then we disparage other people, different ideas, uh, we limit ourselves in so many ways.
Yeah, and it makes me think of the two words, sort of, uh, fixed view of the world or a more fluid and flexible view of the world. And I think this plays into your rather provocative section on decision-making, right?
Yeah.
Um, I wonder if you could talk about decision-making a little bit, because I think it, it's so fascinating the way you look at it.
Thank you. Um, well, it's interesting because because people have trouble making decisions. And they think they should do what decision theorists tell them to do. And I think this is an instance where the experts are wrong and the people are right and should just know that what they're doing is fine. Essentially, let me give you the bottom line first, which is rather than waste your time— the big words, waste your time— trying to make the right decision, what we need to do is almost randomly choose and make the decision wrong. Make the decision right. What does that mean? When you're making a decision, you make a decision to take action. As soon as you take that action, there's no way to assess what the other alternative decisions would have been. So you can never know. Now, and we have lots of people who suffer decision regret, which is kind of funny because the presumption is that, you know, so you do something, it doesn't work for you, you regret it. You say, "Oh, I should have done this other thing," as if the other thing would have been better. The other thing could have been the same, worse, you know, or better. But more important than that, the consequence of the decision is totally a function of the view you take of it. So interestingly, all of my decisions are good. You know, it's amazing. I just don't make bad decisions. Now, how could that be? Because whatever happens is the right thing. Now, the way people think they should make a decision is to do some kind of cost-benefit analysis. That's nice if you live in the world where there really are good things and bad things. When you recognize that the things themselves are neither good nor bad, that means every cost is a benefit, every benefit is a cost. You add them up, they're not going to tell you what to do. Now, even beyond that, you have people telling you, gather information. This sounds good, but it's ridiculous. Let me tell you, if there were only 10 pieces of information that could possibly be considered to make your decision, certainly having 8 pieces of that information is more helpful than having 2 pieces of information. But the amount of information you could collect is almost endless. And if you think for, you know, let's say there are a million pieces of information. The difference between 5 and 15 is meaningless, right? Put it 5 over a million versus 50 over a million, and, you know, you're talking about a tiny bit of information. There's no natural endpoint to the information you could collect. Now, you're collecting the information and you say, okay, now I have enough. The next piece you could have collected could have changed at all. You know, should I buy the house? So, all right, I like the ceilings, there are enough closets, it's near the schools, you know, everything is wonderful, I'm going to buy the house. And then you find out they're going to put, um, a highway right in front of the house that the government has just decided on. You didn't know about it, so then it's a bad decision. But actually, is it a bad decision? Well, maybe it's a good decision because then they'll pay you to get rid of the house so they can enlarge the— yeah. So, so the, the point is that there's no natural endpoint. You can just keep gathering information. There's no natural endpoint to the information to make the decision. There's no natural endpoint to an assessment of the, uh, advantages or disadvantages to any of those alternatives. Um, and each alternative is simultaneously good or bad depending on how you view it. So you can't do a cost-benefit analysis. So what is the person to do. It doesn't matter. Now, it's one thing if you're deciding should you get M&M's versus a Mounds bar. People will say, "Okay, yeah, why should I waste all this time?" I'm suggesting— and this kind of gets people crazed— that if you're deciding should you get married, should you take the job, it's exactly the same thing. You cannot know. Should you take the job? Let's say, well, you'd have to have an option of taking the job, seeing how it feels, taking a different job, seeing how it feels. But you can't even do that because once you've taken the job, you're already a different person. So when you start that second alternative, you can't adequately assess.
Yeah. And this plays in, Ellen, to how I have changed my own relationship with regret. Okay. So I think in the past, I very much would regret a lot and there would be guilt and shame and all kinds of things associated with previous decisions. But I, like you, believe that these mindsets are completely malleable and we can change them any time we want to once we are aware that we're choosing to take a particular mindset. And then when we go, I don't want to actually, I'm going to, you know, live my life with a brand new mindset. And it can take time to practice it. But the point I'm trying to get to is that for the last few years, I actually don't believe in regrets anymore. I think it's a pointless phenomenon. Um, I actually believe that regret is a form of perfectionism. This idea that actually there was a perfect decision. I think that, that when we're regretting something, we're effectively saying— or certainly this is my interpretation of what I think many of us are saying— is I had the potential to make the perfect decision, and the fact that I didn't means I've somehow failed. Therefore, for the rest of my life, I'm going to regret something that I did 30 years ago when I didn't know better. Or as you say, and I really like this chapter, um, well, I like all the chapters frankly, but this, this, this whole idea on, um, making decisions, so therefore it sort of makes regret a little bit pointless because it's the mindset you choose to take over anything that happens in life.
But there's a step before that, which is when you make— when you choose whatever you choose, there's some good reason for it, or else you wouldn't have chosen.
Exactly.
And if you're aware of that, then you don't— you're less likely to have any regrets. So let's say I decide, you know, today all I want to do is— I've just been traveling. I just want to relax. I want a very simple day. So I'm not going to go to that big event tonight, whatever that big event is. And then I find out that that big event would have been spectacularly important for the rest of my life. Life. Now, because I made the mindful decision to stay home, I know that what I need right now is just some peace and quiet to be by myself and so on. I'm not going to regret not having done that other thing. If I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing now and I find out the other option was a good one, of course, you know, then I would experience regret. So the bottom line, if you know why you're doing what you're doing, you're not going to regret not doing something Yeah, I love that.
So if you're paying attention in the moment to what you're doing, then the decision makes sense because you were paying attention. But if you weren't, then yes, you set the scene. Right.
It's like we were saying before that, "Oh my gosh, how could I be so gullible?" Well, that's because I'm buying somebody else's or my own after-the-fact interpretation of why I did what I did. But I did what I did going forward because I'm trying trusting.
Yeah.
And if I'm oblivious to that, then I become a victim of every negative person's interpretation of my behavior. So as I say before, in the relationship, that I never want anyone to forgive me. Never. I want to be understood because what I did made sense or else I wouldn't have done it. You see, so we have to go back to the three levels, tie everything in. It was a fun story. Asked forever ago, decades ago, to give a sermon in one of the Harvard churches. I'm Jewish. I'm barely Jewish, but, you know, I'm not very religious, but I say yes to everything. Don't tell anybody. And so now I've agreed to give this sermon, and since I don't really think about it, what am I going to talk about? And so then I think, well, forgiveness sounds religiousy. It's not religion, but I could probably get away away with it. So I do a deep dive into thinking about forgiveness, and I come up with something basically sacrilegious. Okay, if you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad, what are they going to tell you?
It's good.
It's good. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad, what are they going to tell you?
It's bad.
It's bad. But look, you can't forgive unless you first blame. Our forgivers are our Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame and then forgive. To me, hardly divine. All right. So it's certainly, if you blame, it's better to forgive than not forgive. That's the way the world is. But in my mind, there's almost always a better-than-better way, which is if you understand that obviates the necessity necessity for blame. So, 3 levels again, right? Level 1, you blame. Level 2, you forgive. Level 3, well, you know, you understand.
What you said there, I think we should all pause on for a moment. "I don't want to be forgiven. I want to be understood." That, Ellen, that's like gold. That is literally you dropping gold. I mean, I'm— I'm thinking about that in so many contexts of my life.
Well, also, just with yourself, not just for other people. You don't want to forgive yourself. People keep saying, you know, "Forgive yourself for all your faults." Oh, no. You know, I don't have any faults. I have ways of doing things that, from one perspective, have worked for me, that may, from a different perspective, seem not to be to my advantage. It's a very different way of living in this world. The world that most of us are brought up in is a world where stress is something we're just supposed to accept. There are good things and bad things. There are winners and losers. All of this is just something I so strenuously object to because all I can see is the way it hurts people.
Tell me about your experience in Australia when you were asked about your bucket list.
Yes, this is funny. So I go to Australia and I give a talk and a number of other people give individual talks. And then the surprise, we're all brought out on stage, all these big shots, like a panel, and somebody asks the first person about their bucket list and they have an answer. And I'm the last person in this row, so I have a chance to think about it. And the next person, what's their bucket list. And I'm like, what's on my bucket list? I don't have a bucket list. And then in my typical style, I said, well, if I don't have a bucket list, it's probably fine not to have a bucket list. And why is it fine not to have— you know, so then she gets to me and I say, I don't have a bucket list. That if what you're doing is fun, enjoyable, and you're doing it full fully, you don't need to be doing anything else. You know, a bucket list, you know, is the kind of thing where, you know, it's like work, you know, where I need a vacation. And if you're working the right way, you should never need a vacation. It's different wanting a vacation. But it's like a glass of— a glass, and you're going to pour water in it. And the glass is full, it's full. And it doesn't have to be full by going on a safari or whatever else might be on people's bucket lists. And I'm not I'm not speaking against travel, vacations, but you shouldn't need them. You know, as you said, you walk outside, all of a sudden you see new things. I mean, there are people, you know, when you're young and you go to Europe and you go to all of the cathedrals, if you ask any of those people, do we have any cathedrals back in the States? They wouldn't know. It's just something you do in this other location. But the more important part of it is that when the moment is full, is full, and then you don't need anything beyond that. And the fullness can be garnered from very little, very small things. We don't have to be investing large sums of money and so on. You know, if you are very stressed and you ask me to help you, many things I could do. But one, I might say to you, you know, thread a needle. Here's a needle, a thread it. And you'd be threading that needle. And then afterwards I say to you, so were you stressed when you were threading the needle? You say no. You know, you're busy threading the needle. And so what happens is when, especially when we think we have big problems, we seek big solutions. And if you take care of the moment, then the end of the day is fine. It's all we need are these moments.
The power of now, as Eckhart Tolle says. It's, um, hey guys, I really hope you're finding this useful. If you are and you want more content like it, please do check out my book Make Change That Lasts: 9 Simple Ways to Break Free from the Habits That Are Holding You Back. It's in all the usual places as a paperback, ebook, and as an audiobook which I'm narrating now. Back to the video. That, it's really fascinating. You were talking about that threading the needle It made me think that, is it possible to be stressed when you're in the moment?
No, because stress is an evaluation of a future event.
Okay. But let's imagine that you really are in danger. Okay. There is a wild predator attacking you, which activates your stress response. You're in the moment evaluating danger, trying to escape, aren't you? But you're in the moment, but you're still stressed.
No, yeah, I think it's all wrong. That's what we're taught. I may be wrong in this, but when I give an example to people and they say, aren't there times that mindlessness is good for you? And which is what the stressful situation you're suggesting. And I say, no, let's say you're in a park and you're with a little kid, a 3-year-old, and the 3-year-old wanders— this is you talking to me— the 3-year-old wanders into the street. Isn't it better better just mindlessly pulling the 3-year-old out of danger. And I thought, well, first, if you're mindful, the child wouldn't have ended up in the street in the first place. Second, that, you know, you can pull the child to the right or to the left, you know, to get them out of the car's way. And you have to have some sense of which way the car is moving, you know, and you can only do that if you're present. You know, the car turning this way, turning that way, going straight, How shall I pull this child into a safe location? So I think that if you're face to face, which none of us ever are, I mean, these examples are kind of silly. You're face to face with that tiger, you know, and because you're face to face with the tiger, the medical literature and psychological literature, you know, you have a fight or flight, then the adrenaline starts pouring, you know, to help you become safe. Safe, I don't see why, if I were face to face with a tiger or any other dangerous situation, why it wouldn't be— why I wouldn't be thinking more clearly the less stressed I was.
Yeah, I definitely agree that the more you can train yourself to not see situations as stressful and threatening, the calmer you are, the better.
And that can be exciting.
Yeah.
You're going out on your first date. Who remembers what that was like? But, you know, the person is coming. You can see yourself as anxious or you can see yourself as excited. Biochemically, it's the same. Physiologically, it's the same response. But that label makes such a big difference. If I see myself as excited and I open the door and there you are, I'm going to, you know, be much more appealing than I'm scared.
Ellen, I've realized we've got to this point in our conversation and we've, we've not dealt with some of your greatest hits yet. Okay, so, um, okay, now I— for many people, for people who are listening who perhaps are not familiar with your work, some of your studies— the Counterclockwise study, the Chambermaid study, the Nursing Home study— are legendary. In fact, a lot of listeners I'm sure will have heard about them without necessarily knowing that you were the creator and the author of these studies. So could you just go through some of these, uh, top-line studies to explain some of your work to my audience, please?
Okay, well, so I got into all this in the first place with a nursing home study, um, where we took people in nursing homes and we either gave gave them tender loving care, is the comparison group, or we gave them choices to make and a plant to take care of. And we went back 18 months later and twice as many people in the group that we gave these active choices to were still alive. All right. So then the first thing that came to me is, well, wait a second, how is it that making a choice translates translates into longevity. And that led me to the mindfulness work. But the mindfulness work here, you know, how is it your thoughts have all these powerful physical effects on you? And I started to think that, well, we have this idea. It was clear to me that it had this effect on us. This was before people were talking about mind-body connection. We had a mind and a body, and the big question was, well, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And these are just words. Somebody decided to talk about a mind and a body. You know, we could have talked about mind, body, and elbows, and we would've had a different conception of people. So I argued, let's put the two together, even if it's just for useful purposes, heuristic purposes. Although now I think it's literal. True. Put the mind and body back together, then wherever you're putting one, you're necessarily putting the other. Wherever you're putting the mind, you're putting the body. And the question is how you get from one to the other goes away. Now, I've been talking about this. We did the— I published the counter-clockwise study in 1981, a long time ago. Takes so long for things to change. And people finally start talking about mind-body connection. That's What's wrong? You have the same problems. How are they connected? See it as one thing. So the first study that we did, and the BBC did a replication of this that only people in the United Kingdom could see, called The Young Ones. But to go back to the study itself, what we did was to take a retreat and retrofit it to 20 years earlier and had elderly men Old men lived there as if they were their younger selves. So they discussed past events as if they were just unfolding, for example. In a period of time as short as 1 week, we found their vision improved. When have you ever heard an old person's vision improving without medical intervention? Their hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they looked noticeably younger. That was the first test of mind-body unity. The second test, which was a few decades later, was we take these chambermaids— this is work I did with Ali Crum— and very simply first ask them how much exercise are they getting. These are women who are exercising all day long, right, cleaning the hotel and motel. Still, they thought they're not getting any exercise because exercise, they believed, according to the Surgeon General who sits at a desk all day, is what you're doing after work. And after work, they were just too tired. Okay. Very simple study. Divide them into two groups. And we're going to teach one group that their work is exercise. So we're changing their minds. They're taught working on this machine at the gym is like making a bed and so on. We teach them they are getting lots of exercise. So you have two groups now, one who doesn't think they get any exercise, one that at once. They're not eating any differently from each other. They're not working any harder. Nevertheless, simply changing their minds to see their work as exercise resulted in a loss of weight, a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down.
Yeah.
Then we have many, many of these studies that are reported in the book. An example of another, we take people who have type 2 diabetes We take many measurements. We're going to have them play computer games. The reason will become clear in a moment. And there's a clock there, and they're told, "Change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so." That ensures that they'll look at the clock. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. So it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time, or real time. And the question we're asking is, will blood sugar levels level vary based on clock time, perceived time, or real time? And it turns out perceived time. And I, I don't know how I get— got this clock obsession, but we've used it in a lot of studies.
Yeah, this stuff, Ellen, is, is just so fascinating because it also, it also highlights arguably one of the biggest holes in all of medicine and the way we practice, which is we just don't take into account account, our mindset, or our thoughts, or our beliefs, right? And then there's another study, I'm pretty sure it's in your new book, about diabetics. There's a belief that giving people more information is a good thing, right? That would be the conventional belief. And I, I would often— and I think much of me subscribes belief, but—
but it doesn't— it doesn't matter that whether you give them more or less, it depends on how the information is received. So if we— if more information leads people to be more certain and more certain leads them to be more mindless, then that's how the problem—
well, maybe you could explain that through the lens of this, this diabetes, pre-diabetes study where the patients who were told that they were told they were on the borderline borderline of prediabetes, right? Could you, could you explain that study?
Sure. So, um, I call this the borderline effect. It's not just in medicine. No matter what you're doing, there's always a point where people above this borderline respond one way, people below it respond a different way, and where there's no meaningful difference above and below. So for example, let's say you're grading papers and you give one student an 89, or they take a test and they get an 89. That makes it a B. Another student gets a 90. That makes it an A. Nobody's going to think there's any meaningful difference between 89 and 90, but there's a real difference over time between a B student and an A student.
In terms of their perception of themselves, you mean?
Not just them, but the world's perception of them as well. Yeah. Right. You know, you take a typical example, you take an IQ test. And if you get 69, then you're cognitively deficient. You get 70, you're in the normal range. But again, one could have sneezed, misread the question. But once you're labeled, you've got this cognitive problem or you're normal, over time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's the point to a lot of this, that we— once we get these labels, labels, uh, we then behave according to those labels and they become true even if they weren't.
Well, this, you know, you write about the effects of our beliefs on our immune system. I think it's at Asya Rose, you talk about this idea that immune— the immune response begins in the brain and positive expectations boost antibacterial and anti-tumor activity. I mean, that was incredible, those studies. And just going back to that borderline effect for a minute, Ellen, what's that study? Am I remembering it correctly that the patients who were told that they were at risk of diabetes, they were more likely to get it?
Yes. We looked at the people who fell right below the diagnosis, compare them to those right above. So one is told they have the disease, one is told they And that label became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah. What about the relationship between our thoughts, our beliefs, our expectations, and our immune system?
Well, if we go back to what I'm saying about the mind and the body, it's one. If you recognize that it really is one thing, then every thought thought is simultaneously affecting every part of our body. Now, it's interesting because the coin of the realm for neuroscience now would be something like MRIs and fMRI, right? They're going to look at the brain and see how the brain changes under these circumstances or those circumstances. And of course, the brain is changing. However, my belief is every part of the body is changing. Every part. And it's happening more or less simultaneously. Instantaneously, that your eyes, your skin, you know, that in the book I talk about how a teardrop of happiness is biochemically different from a teardrop of sadness. I had this strange experience because I, you know, have always been up for anything, almost anything. And I'm with a friend in Kansas City, and we go to an iridologist, somebody who looks at the iris of the eye. Now, I don't believe any of these things, but I also am always, you know, who knows, right? So I go, she looks at my eye, And she tells me I have a gallbladder problem. So at the time, I thought, this is ridiculous, right? You know, what nonsense. Anyway, I came home and I did have a gallbladder problem. Then I start writing about mind-body unity and realize, yes, it's all right there. We don't have the machinery, the technology to notice the subtle differences. But if we developed it, I think we'd have support for this. So when you say the immune system, every system, system. Yeah, I go like this, uh, my brain is different, every part of my body is different.
Yeah, it's ridiculous if you have the fixed belief that actually— I've never been taught that there's a relationship between what you can see in the eye and my gallbladder, therefore this must be rubbish, right? Because what are we seeing now, right? We're seeing so many things that traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Indian medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, has been saying for years. Not everything, but many of of the things we're now going, oh wow, now we've got modern science to support the fact that, oh, different organs have different rates of genetic expression at different parts of the day. Well, these guys have been saying this for thousands of years. We've poo-pooed it in Western medicine for many years until recently where we're now, oh yeah, there's this thing called circadian biology. And right, each cell in the body has got its own circadian clock. And I'm like, yeah, but—
And I think a lot of this, a lot of this results from our teaching absolutes.
Exactly. Exactly.
That we be open to all sorts of— I mean, there are so many things, you know, I teach some of this stuff and it's mind-boggling to me that people think they need 8 hours of sleep. I mean, how big are you? How small are you? What is your life like? If you just ran a marathon and I stayed home at home in bed eating chocolate, watching movies all day. That night, would we both need 8 hours sleep? You know, um, so it's not just that there are individual differences, but within the individual, uh, you know, it's, um, people buy these facts, um, they talk about them, they teach them, they, you know, when you see something happen, I think the nature of science is you see it, you then develop a theory to explain it. So now it seems like it can be no other way.
Yeah.
And so then somebody has some other experience and the response to them is, well, you're simply wrong, crazy, whatever.
Have a beginner's mind, right? That old concept, have a beginner's mind. This whole idea of stress, our beliefs, the immune system. And there are many studies in your book talking about this, right? So if people want to dive deeper, please do check out The Mindful Body. It's such a fantastic read. It really is. But my, my question is, how much does our belief around health impact our health?
Yeah, well, you know that I agree with you that the impact is potentially enormous, um, but in many ways, you know, that if you think you're getting sick, then you do getting sick things, um, and you may stay in bed You may avoid relationships for the moment. You avoid those things that are fun and exciting. And it turns out those things you're avoiding are actually good for your health. And staying in bed is probably bad for your health. And so you're making yourself sicker. And that's one way it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, I have this thing where, again, it's an anecdote, but I'll think I'm getting something. Doesn't matter what it is. It is. And then the next day I forgot that I was getting it and I'm always better. And, you know, but when the problem of an anecdote is we're talking about a sample, a very small sample size, sample size of one. And, but I, like you, think that I'm almost invulnerable. If I get anything, it goes away very quickly. You know, there can be many explanations for that.
Of course.
But I think the explanation that Somehow my attitude and the way I live my life is a protective factor, even if ultimately found to be wrong, is still right. Because if you're going to be there again, you should be alive for it.
Yeah, this is such an interesting topic, right?
Yeah.
In my latest book, Ellen Langer, I write about the relationship between— that's there in the literature between between, uh, people who hold on to resentment and don't express their emotions and certain chronic illnesses like autoimmune disease and cancer, right? And I say very clear, these are associations, right? So they're not proving causation, but nonetheless, there's, there's a lot there in the literature. Gabor Maté has covered this in detail in his book The Myth of Normal, um, and it also correlates with what many clinicians who look for these things have seen. I spent so long on this section because I didn't want get this misinterpreted. And what I said, and this I think is relevant to what you've just said, is I say, listen, it would be easy not to say this, right? I'm not saying this to put blame on people, but if this is a potential contributory factor, then if you don't know that information, you're not inclined to do anything and change anything. Whereas my goal is to try and help people. I think, like you, like, we're, we're doing what we do, we want to help want to help people be more compassionate and less judgmental and go, actually, this information is important to know.
And, you know, interesting that even if— and I agree with you completely, I think the information is crucial and correct— but even if it turned out to be wrong, it's still right. It's right in that believing it leads you to act in a way where you're actually alive. You're feeding all the positive things about, um, your life.
Yeah, this whole, this whole area is deeply fascinating to me. Um, to finish off this conversation, and I hope we have many more, Ellen, because I've not even scratched the surface of what I wanted to talk to you about. In the section in the book on placebos, which is amazing, and this really fits in with your idea about the importance of mindfulness, you say this: I believe that some clinical trial outcomes are positive positive because they encourage people to notice symptom variability. There's totally somewhere inside of me that really connects. And I thought, yeah, it's like what we said before about awareness, right? Once you start bringing attention to something, you start to change your relationship with it. So can you explain what you meant by that powerful phrase?
Sure. What I— well, everybody knows that placebo is something inert, you believe it's going to be effective, and hence it's effective. So if I take some medication and I think it's going to, to be positive, now I'm looking for ways that it's positive. And we said, you know, seek and you shall find. We always end up doing hypothesis-confirming analysis. And so if I notice it's fine, then I'm also more likely to notice perhaps in a moment when it's not so fine. And then that naturally gives rise to the question, why was it fine in this moment and not in the other moment, which then I can start testing. And that leads to effects, positive effects across all chronic illnesses that we've looked at. So it's a way of explaining, you know, placebos. We go back to placebos. It's so funny because I think placebos, I'm sure you agree with me, are our strongest medicine. And yet placebos, if somebody finds out they have a placebo, they go, what No, no, yeah. What do you mean it was just a placebo? They think it's real. Not to realize that I think the effectiveness of all medication is largely, I believe, placebo. Now, why are placebos given such a bad name? Well, you know, I think it comes from the pharmaceutical industry, right? That in order to bring a drug to market, this drug has to outperform the placebo. If it doesn't, damn it, I, you know, couldn't make those billions of dollars without realizing that how effective this placebo actually is. Across all disorders.
Yeah.
And then there, you know, there are some people— most people are amenable to placebos, not everybody. And I think everybody should be. And, you know, if I had the time, I would pursue that. But yeah, you know, placebos. And it's interesting that when you talk to me briefly about the chambermaid study, this was actually a nocebo study. Study, which is important in its own right. Now, people know placebos— you take something that's nothing to lead to a positive response. And nocebo, you take real medication and you believe it's not effective, and it wipes out the effect.
So explain that in the context of the chambermaid study. They're not taking a medication.
No, no, no, no, because people are exercising, but they're not getting any of the benefits of exercise. Because they don't realize they're exercising.
Yeah.
So we say all of these things that are good for you, you know, many, if not all, are good for you if you believe they're good for you. That element of belief is not inconsequential in any of these circumstances. You know, so there was a study with Ipecac. So I don't remember who did this, but, you know, so Ipecac is what you take to make you vomit in case you have accidentally or on purpose ingested too much. Poison. All right. So whoever this was took Ipecac with people who are having trouble doing too much vomiting, and they're given the Ipecac and they're told it'll stop the vomiting. And you know what happens? It stops the vomiting.
People who are rubbed with poison ivy, who believe it's not poison ivy, or rubbed with another leaf that they believe is poison ivy that isn't poison ivy, you know, get the rash when they believe Yeah, I spoke with Camilla Nord, this neuroscientist from Cambridge University, and Camilla basically shares some research showing that in psychedelic trials, some of them, when you're given a placebo and you think you're taking a psychedelic but you're not, you still hallucinate. You know, in medicine, and I think with the public, we've used the term before, oh, it's just a placebo effect, right? So just—
it's got to change.
Exactly, as in underplaying the value. Um, you mentioned vision before. People think of, you know, vision static, it is what it is, right?
But no, just thinking about it, how mindless it is that you go to the doctor, you're shown this, uh, Snelling eye chart with letters out of context in black and white, and then you're given a number to tell you how well you see. You know, I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I see that restaurant sign much further away than if I'm not hungry. I see things in color different from black and white. I see things that are meaningful differently from things that are meaningless. And more important is that for me personally, my vision, I believe, is better from 11:00 to 1:00 than it is earlier or later in the day. Things vary. Your vision varies. Now, if you know if you knew that you started to have trouble seeing around 4:00 in the afternoon, rather than get eyeglasses that you're gonna wear constantly, you had an energy bar. And the energy bars, this gets me crazy also. It's a candy bar. We call it an energy bar, and then it has very positive effects. You know, I was laughing. You know, back— you take a cake and you put it in a muffin tin, so now you have muffins. And if you ask people, is this muffin healthier than the same amount of cake? And the muffin is healthier because, you know, changing the name is very important. Okay. Be that as it may. Yeah. So our vision varies. Now, what happens is that you're given this number, you then get eyeglasses and you train your body not to be able to see. To my mind, it would It'd be like, you know, it's fine if you're having trouble going to the bathroom, take a laxative. But if you take a laxative every day, you're teaching your body to rely on the laxative. And I think that's the mistake.
Yeah, the stuff about eyes and vision is super fascinating. Okay, I think I read it in your book this morning, this whole concept of how you look at that Snellen chart determines its outcome as well.
Yes. Well, so for me, I know I'm busy, bizarre. When I, you know, before I did that study, I'm, uh, being— my eyes are being examined. I'm looking at the charts. I said, wait a second, you know, you're creating in me the expectation that soon I'm not going to be able to see because these letters keep getting smaller.
So you start with something you can do and then you go, oh, we're about to catch you where you can't see.
Exactly. So what we did is a study where we reversed it. It starts with small letters, gets larger larger, creating the expectation that soon you would be able to see, and people can see what they couldn't see before. Now, most of the time when you're doing the Snelling eye chart, it's around two-thirds of the way down that you start to have trouble, most people. So what we did was we started the eye chart a third of the way, smaller letters. So now two-thirds of the way are much smaller letters, and again, you can see what you couldn't see.
Can I just pause you there? Two-thirds 2/3, right? 2/3 comes up in the Snellen chart. 2/3 came in, in the fatigue study as well. I know what is going on with the human brain.
I don't understand. I had this thing for 2/3. I'm for cocks, it seems.
No, but I, I— this stuff about vision, this literally played out for me a couple of months ago, right? So, um, I, I'd been thinking about eye, you know, glasses and contact lenses, thinking, okay, this is quite a novel concept when comes to, you know, the human experience, to have these things on my eyes so that I can see. And if you think about this in an evolutionary context, of course people didn't have contact lenses, um, and glasses. And there's many reasons for that— the need for distant vision out in the plains, whatever it might be. Okay, there's many reasons for that. But I got my— I've been looking into how one can reverse myopia naturally, and it looks so— there's quite a lot of people who are doing this. I'm, you know, I may bring someone on the podcast at some point to talk about this, but I'm currently looking at it and I'm fascinated by it. And one of the things they talk about is that your vision is different at different parts of the day. If you're tired, your vision isn't as good. If it's dark—
so many years ago when we wrote this, but sad to me is it takes so long. Yeah, one would think since all of this work is in the service of improving our health, our well-being, making us happier, you know, and so on, that once people hear about it, it would just go like wildfire, right? You know, I mean, people still today are just learning about, let's say, the counterclockwise study. You know, it was how many years ago? 40 years ago.
Yeah, that's how slow it is. But, but Ellen, I literally had my eyes checked at 5 PM, and I was a bit jet-lagged. I think I'd just come back from America, and they wanted to put my power up with my glasses. And I said, hey, wait a minute. I said, listen, um, would you mind if I come back in 2 weeks and I'll book a morning appointment? And I paid for another appointment, and totally different. I didn't need it, but my power could go down. And I was like, how many people are on a prescription that is given based upon the time of day?
And that is mind-boggling.
Yeah, it's mind-boggling.
Yeah, you know, so I had this— I used to wear a contact lens in lens in one eye, one eye for distance, one eye for reading. And I get home from school, and in the evening, I'm trying to take the lens out. I'm killing myself. I have to get the stupid thing. I couldn't get it out. Then eventually, I realized I never put it in. And my vision was fine all day. And that gave rise to another set of studies.
The power of our beliefs.
But starting with the N. Make that.
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Before we finish, I want to bring up something you said before that surprised me in the context of your work. Okay, so there was a moment where you lost your train of thought and you said, "Excuse me, I'm having a senior moment," right?
I was joking.
Yeah, I know you were joking.
But now, the reason I said that was only because the other day, um, I thought I was so clever when I had said to somebody, "I'm having a junior moment." No, the reason I'm bringing it up to illustrate a really important point from your work, which is the importance of our perceptions.
And there's a beautiful section in the book where you, you write, you know, here I've underlined it. It's interesting to ask how much of the presumed memory loss attributed to the old is a result of this difference in perspective, right? And, you know, that's almost not just perspective.
Now, I think that much of the time life changes as you get older, your values change. So when I was young, um, as an up-and-coming whatever, and you introduced me to some of your friends, I'd make sure I knew I don't know their names. At this point in my life, frankly, I don't care. So you introduce me to your friend's names, and I'm not gonna know them. Now, later, when we discover that I don't know your friend's name, the mistake people often make is to see that they've forgotten. I didn't forget because I didn't learn it in the first place. And also, you know, what people, I think, need to pay attention to is, imagine how awful life would be if we remembered everything. I think. Yeah, it'd be hard to get— you know, forgetting is, is an advantage.
Yeah.
Um, and, um, most of what we need to remember, we'll remember.
Yes. And what I was getting to with, um, highlighting the fact that you called it a senior moment, right, is this whole idea that I've also had mind blanks when I'm doing this podcast before, right? But because I'm at a different age to I'm not gonna call it a senior moment, right?
Okay, so it's cute, but let me tell you what, before I lecture in my health class about aging, I ask them a question. I say, okay, what was the last— these are Harvard students, this is the best of the best, right? Um, I say, what was the last thing I said on Thursday? So the class meets Tuesday and Thursday. So this is Tuesday. What was the last thing I said on Thursday? Nobody And I go, "Ah, you know, you all better check to see whether you're suffering from dementia." You know, that young people are not infrequently forgetful. The difference is they're fine with that. They don't see it as the beginning of some impending terrible diagnosis.
Yeah. And I think it's so important that this idea that if our expectation starts to impact our physiology, we've got to be very careful. Careful about what we think as we get older. We have to change this perception that old people are frail and they can't do much and they need help, right? We need to change that. And there's, again, there's quite a provocative section, um, in that section in your book where you talk about this idea that someone of your age— and I, I certainly won't ask you how old you are—
I'm 77. Yeah, 77.
Okay, so someone of your age wouldn't typically be seen in miniskirts or have miniskirts marketed to them. Right. And I really liked the way you put that because it basically— the cultural norm is a 77-year-old lady probably shouldn't be in a miniskirt. It's not appropriate for a woman of that age. But maybe it is. Maybe if you don't subscribe to that and you go, no, I'm going to dress like I was in my 20s or 30s, well, maybe that's going to actually keep you younger.
Yes. Yeah. The, the point of that particular of my research was to show that there are age-related cues all around us that, unbeknownst to us, are determining our longevity, our health, and so on. So there, what we did was compare people whose jobs require that they be in uniform. So if you're in a uniform and you're 25 and you're wearing the same basic uniform, different version of it, but for the next 40 years, you're missing an age-related cue. And those people do better.
Yeah.
Because they don't have that age-related cue.
And we see, you know, here, and I'm sure it's the same in the US, we have, you know, near residential homes, there are signs on the roads with an elderly couple, you know, hunched over with a walking stick saying, "Be careful." And again, that's an age-related cue that on the face of it is there for a reason, so people can pay attention and be considerate. Right? But there's also a negative consequence of that, or a potentially negative consequence.
Although there's one thing that older people do, which is, for all other groups, there's an in-group bias. Everybody prefers their own to people who are different, except the elderly. I hate that word now that I'm so old, but, uh, so let me give I'll give you an example. When my father was alive, I'm picking him up at the airport. He is now, at that point, I think he was 88. And I said, Dad, how was the flight? And he said, it was okay, but there were too many old people on the plane, distancing himself from the group. And, you know, which is a good thing in this context because we have the view of old as only representing illness. Decrement, which is sad because, you know, you live your life the right way, it just keeps getting better and better. And, you know, it's a shame for people to dread their future. And they're not dreading old age, they're dreading pain. In fact, I think most of the fear of death has nothing to do with death. It has to do with disease and all sorts of things that, you know, one can live a very long life without illness.
Now that you are 77, how do you think about death?
I don't, you know, I don't tend to think about death. I'm too busy living.
Are you scared of death?
No, no. You know, my picture of death is, you know, going to sleep. Remember, you know, I've been studying old age since I was very very young. And I see all these— I mean, I know lots of people now, not lots, but several people now who are over 100, and they don't seem to be afraid of death. I ended my Counterclockwise book with a story where I'm talking to one of his older friends. She was 90-something, and she said, "You know, Ellen, I'm not afraid of dying, but living is sure fun." And I think that represents my own Ellen, it's been such a joy talking to you.
I've been looking at your work and your research for years. I think it's completely game-changing. I really hope the practical implications of your work get realized much quicker than they should have already been, right? So, you know, the cancer clotting study, as you say, was done several decades ago. We're still not implementing that into practice. This. Um, right at the end of this conversation, Ellen, what's the takeaway for someone? For someone who's heard everything you've had to say, for someone who's going to go out and buy your book, and they're thinking, okay, this is really fascinating, I don't want to live by mindless rules, uh, I've got to start to know that I don't know, but how can I practically start doing that in my life today, what would you say to them?
Well, you know, we go back to where we started with this, that, uh, realize the power and uncertainty. And people are afraid of not knowing because they think they're supposed to know. So let me be here to tell everybody, nobody knows. And when you make, um, a universal attribution for not knowing, it's not that I don't know, nobody you can know, then you sit up and you pay attention. If you're in that state, you'll see that it's energy beginning. It's what you're doing when you're having your best time. And the way to do that is just accept uncertainty. Ask yourself for anything you think you know, how it could be otherwise. Anytime you're asked a question, give several explanations for it or just start noticing. And you notice new things about the things you thought you knew. You come to see you didn't know them as well as you thought you did. And your attention naturally those there. But the larger reason is that right now so many people are sealed in unlived lives and stressed, negative, unhappy, making themselves sick and oblivious to it. And I think that just recognizing that there's another way of being that's readily available to all of us should be worth trying it. You know, there's— by Increasing your mindfulness, as I studied, has nothing to do with meditation, just this active noticing, leads you to be happier, healthier. The neurons are firing. Other people see you as more alive, as charismatic, as authentic. The things that we do bear the imprint of our mindfulness. It's only good. There are very few things you can say about that. And it doesn't cost anything.
And for those of us, Ellen, who are parents and want to try—
Teach conditionally that what you want to do is not bring your children up in the world you were brought up in, the 1 1 2. You bring them up into the world of it could be possibly, you know, from one perspective, maybe it seems like to keep things interesting. For that.
Yeah. Ellen, love your work, love your book. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
This was great fun. Thank you for having me.
If you enjoyed that conversation, then I think you are really going to enjoy this one.
If I were to choose to live my life over again, I wouldn't live it in this way. Yeah. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. When you're driven to work too hard, you actually ignore what matters. And where does that come from? Again, that comes from childhood trauma.
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