Dr. Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Psychology of Possibility

I was in a store many years ago, and I made a purchase, and I'm at the cash register, and I give the cashier my credit card. She sees it wasn't signed, she asks me to sign it. I signed it. She then runs it through the credit card machine, gives me the credit card slip to sign. I signed it. She then compares the two signatures. What was interesting to me about this was that she was completely oblivious to the fact that this didn't make a lot of sense. And then I realized that when you're mindless, you're mindless. You're not there to know you're not there. And that's why there are lots of people out there who say, "Be in the moment." That's great. But no one is ever aware that they're not in the moment. We're going to talk about how to actually Be in the moment. OK, so more formally, let me define these concepts for you. Mindlessness is when you're on automatic pilot, basically. You are relying on distinctions and categories that you drew in the past, so the past is overdetermining the present. You're trapped in a single perspective. Remember, all the while you're oblivious to this. You're insensitive to context and perspective. You have rules and routines that are guiding you, governing what you're doing, that may not make any sense any longer. And the same thing for those of you in business who think that you should have goals. You shouldn't have goals determine all that you're doing because the goal is made at time 1. Now, many years later, it might not be so smart to continue on the path you started on, and it doesn't occur to people to question that. When you're mindful— this is so simple it defies belief— all you need to do is actively notice new things. That's it. As you actively notice new things, it puts you in the present, it makes you sensitive to context and perspective. You can have rules and routines, but these are gently guiding what you're doing rather than overdetermining what you're doing. And how does it feel? When you're mindful, you're engaged in what you're doing. You're literally and figuratively enlivened by this experience of simply noticing new things. Now, what happens is when you notice new things, that reveals to you that you didn't know that thing as well as you thought you did. So then your attention naturally goes to it. All right? People think— and we teach in schools, in businesses— people believe that they should have certainties. They should know something so well that they don't have to think about it anymore. That's wrong. Since everything is always changing, since everything looks different from different perspectives, we have to be careful not to confuse the certainty, the stability of our mindsets with the underlying phenomenon. Things are changing. You want to hold them still, hold them still. But in fact, they're different. And if we can appreciate that, the inherent uncertainty in everything, everything stays interesting to us. So I was at this horse event. This was life-changing for me. Now, Gina gave me a lovely introduction. She only told you half of how wonderful I am. I was an A++ student. I memorized everything. I was the student you hated. You know, even what was under the pictures when I was younger. Now I'm at this horse event. This man asked me, can I watch his horse because he's going to get his horse a hot dog. What, are you kidding? Horses are herbivorous. They don't eat meat. I don't say this to him, but I say this to myself. He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And it was at that moment that I realized virtually everything I knew, like 1 and 1 is 2, is wrong, at least some of the time. What happens is science, whether it's physics, psychology, biology, it doesn't matter, science can only give us probabilities. But it's more fun to write about in textbooks and newspaper articles absolute facts. And so what happens, these maybes get translated into absolutes. Not some horses under some occasions don't eat meat, horses don't eat meat. Wouldn't you think that it would depend on how big the horse was, how hungry the horse was, how much meat was mixed with how much grain, and so on? And all of these hidden aspects of the research if we were doing, "Do horses eat meat?" get lost. This is going to become important when I start talking to you about the medical world. I believe that the vast amount of money and time we spend to increase people's health, to reduce depression, to teach people to be innovative, wouldn't be necessary if we weren't taught to be mindless in the first place. No matter what we're doing— giving a talk, playing golf, I don't know, what do you do in Aspen? Walking the nature trails, looking at the view— no matter what you're doing, you're doing it mindlessly or mindfully. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. Now, I'm an academic, sort of, so I have to say, most of our suffering, just among us and the other 5-10 million people I've said this to, all of our suffering. It's a very big statement. I'm saying that all of our suffering, personal, interpersonal, societal, is a function directly or indirectly of this mindlessness. And I've been doing this for a very long time, since the early '70s. That's why I'm the mother of mindfulness. I started when I was 12. So for all these many years, in these studies, we make people more mindful, and I'm going to give you examples of all of this, and then we vary the measures that we take. And here are some of the things that we found. This is only a partial list. And I'm not going to have time to talk to you about all of it, But basically, everything increases, and the bad things all decrease. In a very early study I did, we took elderly people in a nursing home, we gave them mindful choices, we went back 18 months later, and we found they lived longer. And that was the beginning of a lot of what we now take for granted in mind-body medicine. OK, so thus far. I'm sure you all agree with me that mindlessness is pervasive, that virtually all of us are mindless most of the time. We don't see what's right in front of us. We think we know, but we don't. And an acute way of understanding this mindlessness is that we're frequently in error but rarely in doubt. Okay. So I want for each of you, if nothing else happens, the next time you say to somebody clearly, No. Anytime you think you know for sure, recognize that from different perspectives, the answer will change. 1 and 1 is not always 2. OK. So no matter what we're doing, whether it's at work, at home, if we do it mindfully, it's going to work to our advantage. So it's not just that our mindfulness increases our performance, —for example, we become more competent, there's less burnout, or our health decreases pain, increases longevity—our mindfulness is actually visible. The reason I show this slide is that when I first made it, it took so long that I have to average down the amount of time. But actually, the study was about dolphins. What we did was take trainers of dolphins, and we were going to have them be either mindful or mindless, One at a time, they're going to be in the water. The dolphin will be released, and what we want to see is how fast they swim to the trainer and how long they stay as a function of whether the trainer is mindful or mindless. When the trainer is mindless, we have them just think thoughts. We want you to be thinking about all the things you know to be true about dolphins and just keep repeating them to yourself. When the trainer is mindful, They're told, "What we want you to do is think about how this dolphin is different from the other dolphins, and how this dolphin today is different from the way it was the last time you interacted with it." OK, so one is familiar-familiar, the other is let's look at novelty. And I wouldn't be telling you this if it weren't the case that the dolphins swam faster and stayed longer when the trainer was mindful. It's not just dolphins, people know. And we know they know. We have these expressions like, "The light's on, but nobody's home." And my feeling is most of us just aren't home. That, you know, so what we did was to— the first study we did with children. And, you know, a lot of people say, "Well, stay together for the children's sake." That's really a bad idea. Because what? Most of the time, not always. Because the children know. So we had kids at camp. They were visited by who they thought were coaches from another camp. And they were instructed when they're interacting with the child to be mindful or mindless. When they were mindless, we said, we want the kids to like you. So pretend you're interested in what they have to say. When the coaches were mindful, We said, "We want the kids to like you. We want you to notice how the child changes verbally and nonverbally in the course of the interview." They speak to the child 10, 15 minutes, they leave, somebody else comes and takes all sorts of measures from the child. That brief time with the person who's just not there results in a significant drop in the child's self-esteem. They don't like the camp anymore, they don't like themselves. They're not helpful anymore. On all the measures we took, that interaction then showed a significant drop. Now, John Saveloka and I did this a while ago. We're going to have people sell magazines. So now we're with adults. Do they know? And we have half of the salesmen, they're told, learn the script so well that —just rolls off your tongue, so you know it backwards and forwards—and go and sell the magazine. The mindful people were told, "Here's the script, learn it, but now each time you give it, make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know." They go, they sell the magazine, somebody else comes, and they evaluate what they thought of the salesperson. The salesperson who made it new was evaluated as charismatic. For those of you in business, they also sold many more magazines. OK, so we wear our mindfulness. People find us attractive when we're there. Very simple. Why do you gravitate to some people and not the others? It's very easy to be there. Not only Is it in our person? It's in the products that we create. I started painting a while ago, when I was 50 years old. So I paint this painting, I don't know what I'm doing, but I love it. There's nothing about it that's accurate. But to me, my consciousness is left on the canvas. So we don't know if this is true or not, but that's where I'm headed in this next part here. That is it the case that when I'm there and I'm doing whatever I'm doing, that somehow it leaves its imprint on what I'm creating? So I have, I'm gonna not show you all of them. They're very large. I'm tempted, you know, we could just stop this and I could say, here's an art show, because aspirin is art, see? And they're deep, deeply psychological. So he's playing solitaire. There are two friends that he could be playing with. He's ignoring them. Now we have a Jack Russell driving the Greyhound bus full of greyhounds. Okay, so let's get back to the— well, maybe just one more. Do you know the Shar-Pei, the wrinkle dog? This is before and after surgery. So clearly I'm having fun with this. Now the question is, is it on the canvas or is it just in the eye of the beholder? So you'll see he's skinny there but muscular in the mirror. And the answer for me is both. So we do lots of studies. I'm just going to show you a very simple one. We have people draw, copy it, copy it again. We have another group draw, copy it, copy it, but this time make it new in very subtle ways. We mix them all up. We have people who have no idea what we're doing. Tell us which ones they prefer. Overwhelmingly, they prefer the mindfully created drawings. All right. Most of us mindlessly follow rules, stick with our routines because we're afraid of making a mistake. And then if we make a mistake, we're going to look stupid. Okay? Now, it's interesting because a mistake is actually a blessing. A mistake is what will put us in the present, but still we're afraid to do it. If we're in the present, we can take advantage of all sorts of opportunities. We also, when we're mindful, can avert the danger not yet arisen, but still we're afraid to engage. Probably most important in this context is that a mistake is only a view. A mistake in one context is easily a success in another. Did you know this person created this defogger to save the plants— can you hear me?— to save the plants in Florida? Sprays all the plants, and instead of what it was supposed to do, it produced this icy, snowy substance that killed the plants. Failure. Somebody else took that very same machine— you don't have this problem in Aspen, but in the East Coast— to spray the slopes of New England when Mother Nature failed to give snow. Was it a success or a failure? It was a failed defogger, it was a successful snowmaking machine. You might know about the company that produced this glue, put all of their resources into producing the glue, turned out the glue failed to adhere. You could imagine how stressed that CEO was. A glue that fails to adhere. But then they came up with a Post-it note, the very success of which depends on its failure to adhere. Was it a failure or was it a success? So we recently did some research on innovation where we took— we didn't use the glue that failed to adhere, we used lots of products that we found that were failures, and we said to one group, What would you do with this failed whatever? So let's say failed glue. And most people say, well, we'll go on to the next thing. Right? For another group, we say, what could you do with the failed glue? Now a few more people are innovative. Now for the third group, we say, what would you do with a product that adheres for a short amount of time? And now the overwhelming majority of people are able to be innovative when they bring it down to the level of property. When you say, "What are you gonna do with a failure?" It's very hard to get past that. Okay. Okay, so here, this is a fun painting of mine. I say to— —somebody dear to me—before this dog is in the painting. I say, "I want to put the dog in. Which cabinet should I remove?" She says, "Well, take out this cabinet over here because you'd never have a cabinet over a stove." I say, "When would you have a dog doing dishes?" Okay, but there's something meaningful in that because what happens When something hasn't existed, many people think it can't exist. The moment it does exist, we assimilate it so quickly, we act as if it was always there, which hurts our being innovative ourselves. More about this in a little while. Okay, so I take out the cabinet, I put the dog there. Now I'm painting. I think that I'm reaching into this color, but instead I reach and I get the— on the brush I get magenta. I start painting, all of a sudden I know it. I— oh my God! And I get a paper towel, one of my favorite painting implements, and I start rubbing it. Okay, now, there are several things going on here that I find really interesting. And for me, and this is discussed in the On Becoming an Artist book, you know, I paint, I have some experience, then I go ahead and do the studies to see if it's true for just me, or more generally true. What was happening here? It didn't make any difference what color I was using, but still I reacted like, "Oh my gosh!" And it occurred to me that that's what we do with all the decisions that we make. For something to be a decision, it means there must be uncertainty. If there's no uncertainty, there's no decision. The moment we make the decision, Oh, I'll use this color. Everything else then becomes wrong. If when you made the mistake, you reflected and realized it was just a decision, there was all this uncertainty before you made it, it wouldn't be so terrible that now you're going in a slightly different direction. Then I look up and I see, you know, I like the cabinets better this way. That's what the study that I'm going to tell you about is all about. That if when you make a mistake, you go forward and incorporate the mistake into what you're doing, you will be mindful. If you're doing it mindfully, you will probably end up with a better product. All right? So we have 3 groups, basically. We have one group that we say, "If you make a mistake, forgive yourself." That's the problem we give each other. It's human to err. Another group we don't have make a mistake. The important group, we have them, if they make a mistake, to incorporate it and go forward. Now, when everybody first comes in, we ask them some questions that I'll be clear in a moment. We say, "What did you have for breakfast?" OK, they answer this. Now they're in the different groups, and we're going to have everybody— it depends on the study, sometimes they're drawing, sometimes they're writing essays, building things. We say to them, "We want you to—" "Write an essay about mourning." Halfway through, we give them a questionnaire, and the questionnaire says, "We know how hard it is to think about mourning." Now, mourning is spelled M-O-U-R-N. Grief. So they made a mistake. We primed cock-a-doodle-doo, so everybody is thinking, "Morning!" And they're all writing about, "The sun is shining, and Aspen looks beautiful, and the flowers are in bloom." only to see that they were supposed to be writing about grief. Now, it's— you go back to what they're doing, and the question is, those who go forward and incorporate this mistake into what they're doing, what will they produce? And it turns out that what they produced were evaluated as better than even those people who didn't make a mistake. We don't need to be so afraid of making mistakes. Our mindfulness is visible in the things we produce. It's even audible in the music we make. So many of you here probably are aware that symphony musicians, it's considered a reasonably high-status position, but many of them are bored to death. They're playing the same pieces over and over and over again, but they're loath to give it up. So we take some of these musicians, and we teach them to play this piece— they're all going to play the same piece— but to play it mindfully. And what they're told is, "Make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know." Now, they're playing classical music, not jazz, so indeed it's going to be subtle. We have the mindless group that's told, "Remember a performance you were pleased with," and just play it the same way. We record the pieces, we play it for people who have no idea about the study, and we just ask them how much they like the recording and which one they prefer and so on. People overwhelmingly prefer the mindfully played piece, 89% of them. Moreover, when we ask the musicians, they prefer without question playing it mindfully. Now, when I was writing this paper up, there was a hidden finding relevant to leadership that I hadn't realized. What we have when we have a leader is the assumption that nobody knows what to do and everybody's got to be told for the performance, whatever it is, to be successful. Here, everybody is told, "Do your own thing." And in doing their own thing, they're all in the same moment, and it turns out that you get superior group performance by encouraging the group to be mindful. So I think that the major purpose of the leader should be to encourage people's mindfulness. So, is mindfulness visible? Is it attractive? I think so. I think it's the essence of charisma. Now, women have a special problem with leadership, that if you're a strong woman, sometimes you're seen as a bitch. Am I allowed to say that? And if you're a very caring, woman-like, nurturing, you're seen as weak. So what's a woman to do? So we have women be male-like or female-like, mindful or mindless, and it turns out it doesn't matter how you are, male or female-like, as long as you're mindful, people find you attractive, they find you trustworthy, they see you as charismatic. Now I want to turn to health. Okay. And I want to talk to you about this psychology of possibility. First, let's ask, why are we so sure we can't improve vision beyond 20/20, think ourselves thin, reverse virtually all brain damage? Possibility, I think, opens up when we recognize the important difference between uncontrollable and indeterminate. There is no science that can prove uncontrollability. All we can show in any experiment is that we tried this and it didn't work. That doesn't mean— it never means that something else wouldn't have worked. It's very important, just think about it. You can't find your keys. If you're sure that they can't be in the basement, you're not going to look in the basement. If you say, you know, "It's not likely that they're in the basement," then you may go down there, and they may be there. You don't try what you think you can't do. But we can never know that we can't do it. All right? That's important because I'm going to challenge again most of the things we think that we can't do and say that once we recognize that the things we thought we couldn't control, that the best we can say is we don't know, then we may be willing to consider some new ideas. So first, I want to talk to you just briefly about some medical vocabulary. When I started writing this book, I was looking for a definition of chronic. So many people have chronic illnesses. What is chronic? Does it mean you have to have the disease, the symptoms, 24/7? 3 times a week for 2 hours each time? What does it mean? There's no definition. It's very important. The reason it's very important is because what's happening when you don't have the symptoms? And by not asking that question, we give up an enormous amount of control over our health. So let's just say, for example, let's take— we can do it with any of them— Let's take asthma. Let's say when you're with Gina, you need the inhaler. When you're with me, you don't need the inhaler. If you were paying attention to the variability in the symptoms— when are they more, when are they less, when are they even not there— then you ask the question, why? And then you would find that— I should have done it in reverse, Gina, forgive me. Then you find— well, stop seeing Gina. You wouldn't want to do that. Or make the interactions with Gina more than they are with me, more like they are with me. I don't know if I'm being clear about this. Whatever some people who are depressed think they're depressed all the time. No one is depressed equally all the time. It's ridiculous. But what happens is that when you're not depressed, you're not thinking about being depressed. And then when you are depressed, you're back where you were before, so you think you're depressed all the time. So if you just kept track of it, you'd immediately feel better to see, "Yeah, I thought I was depressed all the time. I'm not depressed all the time." But then you do the simple search for, "Why now am I not depressed?" and try to replicate that experience for you. We have a culture that has made everything into a disease. How many of you are dyslexic? Okay, now for people who are dyslexic, to walk around with that— if I gave you a page to read that had 250 words on it, probably you'd miss one word, maybe two. So, the mathematicians who got the adding the 500,000 right, somebody tell me what percentage is 2 over 250? We know he's getting at least 96% of what he's reading correct. Doesn't it seem odd to define yourself by what you're missing? Now, if you said, "Why am I getting these words wrong and not these other words?" then you can start to possibly fix the problem. But we don't do that. We get— the doctor gives us a diagnosis, we assume we have it all the time, And in that assumption, we give up all of the control that we could otherwise exercise. So we have people who are arthritic, we teach them this attention to variability, dyslexia, asthma, many diseases, some MS that we're just starting now, and we find great improvement. And I think it's going to speak to all diseases. Did you understand? You don't have the symptoms all the time. When do you have them? When don't you have them? Why? Well, when you're searching for those answers, you're being mindful, which is good for your health, even if you don't come up with the answers. OK? Now, another thing I noticed is the use of the word "remission." I was at my friend Eva's house. She had just come back from Mass General, a important hospital in Boston. She had a very bad case of cancer. I said, "Eva, what did they tell you?" She said they said her cancer was in remission. And at that moment, I thought, "Interesting. If I took the exact same test, presumably, they'd tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it that I don't have it, but she has it in remission?" It's very different. When you have a cold, and the cold goes away, Do you say to yourself your cold is in remission? Now, you could, because when you get another cold, that's going to be like the last cold in some ways. That's why you call them both colds. But each cold is also different. It's the same thing with cancer, that each cancer is similar, so you could see them as the same and then think the cancer was in remission. Or you can note that there are ways they're different. Excuse me, in which case, seeing yourself as cured is much more appealing. When you see yourself as in remission, you're waiting for the cancer to come back. Stress has been grossly, grossly underestimated, I believe, in its effect on us and our diseases. In fact, I think it's probably more important than anything else in the whole disease process. We don't have time for that now. I can make all sorts of statements that I don't have to back up because we don't have time. Okay, so what we do is we take women who had a bout with breast cancer, and we see, do they see their breast cancer as in remission or cured? We go back a year and a half later, We give them all sorts of psychological and physical tests, and those who saw their cancer as cured fared much better across all of the measures, basically because they weren't spending their time worrying about their cancer. OK. Now, remember when I told you about those hidden decisions about the horse? You know, how much meat mixed with how much grain, how heavy is the horse? We need to know these things. In order to be able to assess whether the horse is going to eat the hot dog or not. It's the same thing in all of our medical studies, that there are hidden decisions. How much do we have to add of this or that in order to get the effects that we get? And those decisions that are hidden for us make it easier for us to declare with these medical studies that the outcome is absolute, that becomes You know, that if you eat sugar and you're a diabetic, you know, X, Y, and Z is going to happen. Well, it turns out if you don't eat any sugar, you're probably going to end up with neuropathy. But that aside. All right. What I'm trying to tell you is that what we do is we're taught to maintain this illusion of stability. We want to know. And when we want to know and when we think we know, we don't pay any attention anymore, because you don't have to pay attention because you know. And that's our biggest problem. This noticing new things reveals to us that we don't know. For virtually all chronic illnesses, there are moments of little or no symptoms. When there are no symptoms, does the person still have the disease? What causes the symptoms to go into spontaneous remission? How do placebos— just think of that, placebos. 27% of the people with virtually any disease will be cured with placebos. You have to have some doctor give you a pill that's inert. The pill is not doing a damn thing. That's why it's a placebo. For you to get better. Who's making you better? We're making ourselves better. And what I'm trying to do is to make that control more direct. Biological theories can't explain placebos, they can't explain spontaneous remissions, But I have an explanation that I think can explain it. Before I have to appeal to dead white men, before I tell you what this theory is, Schopenhauer has said, "All research passes through 3 phases. First, it's ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. Third, it's accepted as if it's self-evident. We knew it all along." Einstein said, "If an idea isn't absurd at first, then there's no hope for it." OK, so here's my idea, and here are some studies that we have conducted to test it. Mind and body. Now, I'm sure you've all heard of the mind-body problem. For those of you who don't know how to articulate it, the mind-body problem is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to some— to your microphone, to something material, to the body. And that has held up research for a very long time. I want to argue that at least for heuristic purposes, let's just do this and assume it's true, that mind and body are just words. They're just concepts. And if you put the mind and body back together, Then wherever the mind is, so too is the body. It's just that we don't need mediators. If Ellen is over here, Ellen is over here. My mind, my body, my elbows, all of me is over here. OK? So we did a series of studies where what we were going to do is put the mind in a healthy place and take our measurements from the body. So the first one has become called the counterclockwise study. I did this study many years ago. What we did was we took, this time, men who were in their 80s, and that was when 80 was 80, not the new 60. These men were old. Right. They were old. I mean, I remember sitting in my office, they would come to show up for the study, with their adult daughters usually, and I'm saying to myself, "What am I getting myself into?" Because I'm going to take them away for a week, and I don't know if they're going to live through the day. That's what— honestly, that's what it was like. And what I was going to do was have two groups of these men. One group was going to go to this timeless retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier. They were going to live for the week as if it really was that earlier time. They would be speaking about events from the past, but they would be speaking about them in the present tense. They were told to correct each other if anybody started to talk about it as if it was the past. So for them, in all ways, it was 1959. We had designed the study in 1979. I wrote it up first in '81. The comparison group was a group that was going to be reminiscing. They were going to be at the same retreat, watching the same movies, talking about the same topics, but for them, now was now, and they were talking about the past. Then was then. Now, interesting, the first group I took to the retreat— and by the way, let me tell you that this was pre-Google. I know some of you can't imagine what that was like. To find out what was going on in 1979, you want to find out, go on your iPhone. And by the way, everybody can turn your iPhones off— on, rather. Usually people— it doesn't matter. You can go on your iPhones or whatever, Android, whatever you have, Google events of 1959, and in seconds, you're going to get a list of things. That wasn't the case then. So it was, it was really a very major thing. So I have these men in this van, we're going to the retreat, we have music from the past playing. We get close to the retreat and all of a sudden— this was a sexist time— all of a sudden I realized that my postdocs, male, and male doctoral students were not with me. I was alone. With these 8 men. That was fine, but that meant I was with 8 big suitcases. That wasn't fine. Unplanned, as soon as we get to the retreat, I make an announcement. I say to them, "You're in charge of your own suitcases. I don't care if you move it an inch at a time or if you unpack it here and take out a shirt at a time." This was so grossly different from the way they were overloved and cared for that the effects I'm going to talk about even occurred for them. All right, so what we did also was to take photographs of everybody. And we had lots of measures at the start of this. And so for those of you who want to know what it was like in 1959, Ellen Langer. So this was the present for these people. The reminiscing group, the comparison group, also, because they were pushed in a way they're not usually pushed, showed improvements in hearing. Tell me when the last time you heard— heard— that somebody's hearing improved, young or old. Their memory improved, their strength improved. But over and above that, for the experimental group, their vision improved, their arthritis diminished, their posture improved, and they were seen, rated by people again who knew nothing about the study, as looking noticeably younger. Now, they didn't look 20 years younger, but they did look younger. And what was interesting was— some of us— I wrote about this again, I wrote about it years ago after we first did it. But then I was young, and, you know, you have to worry about your career and things of this sort, so I didn't tell it full out because I thought I'd be laughed at. So in the "Counterclockwise" book, you know, I reveal that these men were playing football at the end of this—touch football, but still, these are men who— a few of them dropped their canes. This has been recently replicated by the BBC with actors from England, The Netherlands and in South Korea, one of the actresses— and they happened to have been actresses, but when they were at the retreat, they were just being people. This woman, Liz Smith, who spent the 2 years before she was at the retreat in a wheelchair, by the end of this was able to balance herself on one leg. The effects were real. It wasn't magic. We can all do it, but it doesn't occur to us to do it because we have a chronic this, Or we're told the best we can do is that. And nobody can know those things. Why should we all accept them? OK, so now— yeah, and some of this is on our new website, the Langer Mindfulness Institute, if you want to learn more about that. Because now we're actually running these retreats for people of all ages. Chambermaid study. Now, this is a very recent study. Okay, so chambermaids. As you all know, these are people who are exercising all day long. We asked these chambermaids, "How much exercise do you get?" They say they don't get very much exercise. Well, that itself is bizarre. And that's because what exercise is, is defined by the Surgeon General, who sits in an office like many of us all day long, so it's what you do after work. Now, if these women are doing exercise, and exercise is so good for you, then they should be healthier than socioeconomic equivalent others. Turns out they're not. OK, let's just put all that aside. Now we take these chambermaids, very simply we divide them into two groups, and we tell half of them that their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym, and so on. So the only difference between the groups is that one group is now taught that their work is exercise. Just so you understand what I'm saying, this woman here, if this is what she does the entire time she's at the gym, but she doesn't realize it, she will benefit from having spent the day at the gym. Our minds are that powerful. Okay. That was just to make sure you're paying attention. Okay, so what do we find? So from this very simple treatment, what we do is we ask people, we find out initially how much they're eating, how much exercise, how much everything that we can think of. Then we come back, I don't remember now if it was 6 weeks a month, but we come back at a later date and we ask people, is she working harder than she did before? Is she eating more? And we go through as many measures, no differences. The only difference at that point was one group believes their work is exercise. Those who believe their work was exercise now lost weight. There was a decrease in body mass index. A decrease in waist-to-hip ratio, and a decrease in blood pressure from the change in their mindset. Okay, so then we do another study. Everybody here has been tested with the Snelling eye chart, I assume. There's something about this that's really bizarre— many things. But one, we go into a doctor's office, which for many people is stressful. In the doctor's office, he shows us letters— or she shows us letters that make no sense. They then give us a number, and we take that as a measure of how we see. I don't know about you, but when I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign much sooner than when I'm not. And if I owe you money, I probably can see it sooner. All right. You can see things in color, but more important, to go back to the attention to variability, You don't see the same way all day long. After you eat a heavy meal, you probably see less well. After you've exercised, I don't know if you see better or worse, but I would bet that it's different. Things change. But in this culture, all we want to do is hold things still. And again, control over our health comes from letting things more naturally vary. But the important thing about this chart was I realized that because the letters get progressively smaller, implicitly, this chart is telling me soon I won't be able to see. So what do we do? We reverse the chart. So now the chart is telling me soon I will be able to see. And what happens is people can see things they couldn't see before. Now, most of us believe about two-thirds of the way down the chart is when we're going to have trouble seeing. So we start the chart a third of the way down. So now two-thirds of the way down are much smaller letters. And prior to that, people again can see what they couldn't see before. We have some new research that's pretty dramatic. I'm going to tell you about it, but I can't say it with any certainty. I'll say it with certainty, but you shouldn't take it with certainty. Because one, the diabetes study we haven't even completed, and the cold study we're trying to replicate. But the cold study is really extreme. Now, I don't know if you know anything about the history of medicine, but medical people used to believe that psychology really didn't matter at all. That what you needed to get sick was a pathogen. If you didn't have the introduction of some bacteria, whatever it is, virus, you're not going to get ill. Okay, and then they started to think that, well, maybe psychology matters some. If you understand what I'm saying, this is the whole ballgame, maybe psychology. Very extreme. That gives us really much more control than we could have imagined. We take people who agree to be in a study and agree to give themselves a cold. They're all healthy. They come into the study. They're watching a video of people coughing and sneezing. We have tissues, Vaseline, cough drops, chicken soup, all the things that remind us of colds. And, you know, without the introduction of a pathogen, they're able to give themselves a cold. Now, we have to replicate that, so if you tell anybody about it, whisper it. OK. But diabetes is another one of these mind-body studies where we have people who are diabetics who are doing some tasks where, for a third of them, the clock is running twice as fast as it's actually running. For a third of them, the clock is running half as fast as it typically runs. So let's, for example, to make this clear, if you usually get hungry at 12 o'clock and the clock says 12 but it's really 11, you're going to be hungry. I'm hungry all day long, so I don't know if that works, but all right. So, and we have a third group for whom the time is as it is. And the question is, does one's blood sugar level follow real or perceived time? And you should know, obviously, at this point, obviously, that the belief is that it will follow perceived time, which means that the diabetic may have far more control than they realize. We just finished a sleep study. People wake up, they think they slept more than they slept, they think they slept less than they slept, They think they slept as much as they slept. Then they're given biological and psychological tests, and it seems again that perceptions trump, quote, "reality." Okay, so let me conclude this part here and say that the magic lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to social and cultural cues. We need to challenge the idea that the limits we assume are real must exist for us at all. With only subtle shifts in our thinking, our language, and in our expectations, we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap creativity, health, optimism, and vitality from our lives. Improved vision, younger appearance, weight loss, increased longevity, competence, and increased creativity are just 6 of the many experimental results that are a consequence of these subtle changes. So, let me conclude by saying if we increase our mindfulness, we're going to increase our effectiveness, our health, and our overall well-being. Basically, if we treat ourselves as we are, we're going to remain that way. If we treat ourselves as we can be, then I think that's what we can become. Thank you. All right, now challenge me. Does anybody want to ask me a question? Yes. It's called Science and Health. Do you know what that is? I haven't read that book, no. Christian Scientist, and this is what this is all about. But when I was told my cat had diabetes, I think, how does my cat think that he has diabetes and create this illness for himself? Well, okay, that's an interesting question. No, that's an interesting question. Now, um, what I am saying is that we may be able to cure these various ailments, which is a separate question from what brings it about in the first place. Certainly, if I were to— forgive me for this— but shoot you in the arm, you're going to bleed, right? Start. It's not going to feel good. But the question is the healing. Can you affect that healing? And I believe yes. But don't be carried away only by the physical implications of all the things that I'm saying. Because there's a psychological part, the whole first part of what I was saying, that's just as important. But actually, a thought comes to mind. I was doing this consulting in this nursing home many years ago. And I said to these people, "What is it you would like to be able to do that you can't do?" And this one woman said, You know, her arms are paralyzed. She said it's embarrassing for her for someone to have to blow her nose. So I said, "OK, let's see what we can do." So I said, "Raise your arm to here." She couldn't do it. I lowered it to here. By the way, do you know Zeno's paradox with respect to distance? Zeno, who I believe was a cynic, said, If you always go half the distance— so I'm going to come to you, the end of the stage. You always go half the distance, you're never going to get there. You get closer and closer, but you get smaller and smaller, right? You'd be an eighth of the way, a sixteenth of the way, 32nds of the way. You're never going to get there. The Langer's reverse of Zeno's paradox is there's always a distance from where you are to where you want to get to. That you can do it. You're having trouble dieting? Eat one cookie less. You can't eat one cookie less? Eat half a cookie less. You can't eat half? Eat a quarter of a cookie less. You can't eat a quarter of a cookie? There's always a crumb. There's always something you can do that's in the direction of what you want to achieve. At any rate, so we do this. Can you move it to here? No. I keep lowering it by half. And at some point, there's a tiny bit of movement, and then we start again. And at the end of this, she was able to blow her nose. Now, it says, "Oh my God," and people can easily say, "Well, she was misdiagnosed." And I address that in the book, and I say, "Well, how many of us are misdiagnosed?" So even if it's only for those of us who are misdiagnosed— and what does it take to make a diagnosis? What you have to remember, you have to, is that everything you read, everything you know, was a construction by people. When you get a biopsy and they send the tissue down to the cytologist, the tissues don't have written on them, the cells don't have cancer, not cancer, cancer, cancer, not cancer. Somebody has to decide which of these are cancer cells. So if you have somebody who decides, "Mm, this isn't quite a cancer cell," you might not have cancer. Somebody else reading that, you may have cancer. It's a very important difference. Let's take an IQ test. I don't know what the numbers are now, but in the past, if you got a 69— what do we call people? Challenge. What do you call them? No, you don't call them morons. Okay, so somebody gets a 69, and they used to be called mentally retarded. I don't think they were ever called morons. Now, so let's say this half of the room gets a 69 on the IQ test. This half of the room gets a 70. You don't need to know anything about statistics. No one is going to argue that there's a meaningful difference between 69 and 70. However, once they're labeled, they become entirely different populations. And that's what happens with those who are labeled cancer, not cancer, dyslexia, no dyslexia, and so on. And we take these labels as more meaningful than they probably are. When I say the world is a social construction, When you're frustrated, you go into a room and— excuse me— the chair doesn't fit. You don't feel comfortable in it. Most people don't change the chair. But if you recognize that the chair was built by Sam, whoever Sam is, and you say, "Well, Sam had someone else in mind," and then it would occur to you. Let me give you an example. Let's say, so there's this woman, she is 90 or 87 years old. She lives alone, she goes shopping, comes home, puts her groceries down, reaches for her key, opens the door, goes in her house. One day she goes shopping, puts the groceries down, she can't bend down to pick it up. What happens? Then she's rushed— rushed— she's sent to a nursing home. Or some kind of assisted living because you can't live alone anymore. But that's only a function of the way we've been taught to think about these things. You live with me, I'm going to get you a little piece of wood. It can be a fancy piece of wood, it can be a piece of plywood. And I put it right outside your door, on the side of your door. And you come home with your groceries, and you put that bag on the shelf, you reach into your pocket, You open the door, and now you can live alone for several more years, or however long. All because of a little shelf. All because we didn't expect everything to go downhill. When you're 20 years old and your wrist hurts, you don't expect your wrist to hurt, so you do anti-wrist-hurting things, whatever that is. When you're 70 years old and your wrist starts to hurt, Many people think, well, what do you expect? You start to fall apart. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. Yes. You see, it doesn't even matter if you ask me a question. I just go on. I forgot that we were in question answering mode. Well, you go next. Yeah. How do you remind yourself to be in a state of— Yes. OK. And also— What is a state of mindfulness? I mean, yeah, okay, I got it. Yeah, all right. No, it's a very important question. You know that, you know, I say when people say, "Be in the present," it's pablum. Because when you're not there, you don't know you're not there. So, you know, stop and smell the roses. Well, you walk past 5 dozen roses and it didn't occur to you. So how can it occur to you? The simplest thing is to adopt an understanding of the inherent uncertainty in everything. Because it's only because you think you know— you're married for 15 years, no surprises. You're doing the same job for 20 years, no surprises. And people are bored. You know, I don't have children, but I've never heard any of my friends who have children, when the kids were 20 years old, say, "Ah, You're 20 years old. You bore the life out of me. It doesn't happen. Why doesn't it happen? Because we expect our children to change. So we look for changes. So if you think you don't know for sure, will this horse eat the hot dog or not? You're there. And the way to be there, or just, you know, if you travel. When we travel, we expect to see new things. Right? But there are new things happening all around us. And so, in expecting novelty, we're naturally there. I was at Masada many years ago, and I liked rocks. And I do everything with such enthusiasm. And I picked up a rock. Everybody started picking up rocks. And I hear this woman behind me talking to her family. And she says to them, "Do you know how old this rock is?" As if we have young rocks at home. Okay, everything is new. And if you can understand that everything is new, you will naturally pay attention. But you don't want to pay attention to it with the goal of understanding it so well that it becomes mindless again. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Now, not knowing— so I've given you a tremendous amount of power if you can just accept that no one knows. Because the next time you're talking to one of these people that's intimidating, that acts as if they know, you just keep poking because they don't know. They can't know. Now, when to not know, there are two kinds of not knowing. That if you make a personal attribution for not knowing, "I don't know, you're acting like you know, maybe you do know," then I fake it, I pretend, I'm inauthentic, I keep to myself, I do all sorts of things that are not particularly healthy. You don't want to do that, you want to make a universal attribution for not knowing. "I don't know, you don't know, you don't know, nobody knows." And then not knowing is easier. And if you're teaching and you ask a question and the student gives an answer, you don't obnoxiously, which so many of us were taught to do, say, "Wrong, you're an F student." What you would naturally do is say, "How did you come to that answer?" "Well, if I add 1 watt of chewing gum to 1 watt of chewing gum, I get 1." And everybody learns it. We have been so indoctrinated into a world of better and worse, where everybody wants to always see who's on top, that we misjudge each other all the time and cause a tremendous amount of unhappiness. The amount of money that's spent in this country on antidepressants is staggering. And I think that it wouldn't be if we had more respect for each other. Well, how do you respect each other? What you do is you realize the thing you're calling by some name looks different when called by another name. You may not like me because I'm impulsive. From my perspective, I'm being spontaneous. I might not like you because you're so rigid. From your perspective, you're being dependable, someone you can count on. And you, I can't stand because you're so gullible. But that's because you're trusting. Now, I did an experiment many years ago where I took about 300 of these descriptions, and I asked people, "Circle those things about yourself that you're trying to change, but you're having difficulty changing." So for me, I'd circle "impulsive." Then you turn the sheet of paper over, and in a mixed-up order is the positive version of each of these. What things about yourself do you really value? Spontaneity. That's why it's so hard changing people, because they're not doing what we're accusing them of doing from their perspective. Now, if I said to you, "Do you want me to be—" You know, you want me to be less impulsive. I say, "Now you have to say, 'Do you want me to be less spontaneous?'" Chances are you won't. Right? And marriages change, relationships change. OK, yes. I just wondered what percentage of the medical community— What percentage is beginning to change with everything that you're talking about? Yeah. Hippocrates, a lady went, as you know, Mass General, cancer, you're finished. Then she went down to Sloan-Kettering. She ended up at Hippocrates. And she's eating wheatgrass. No opportunity. What percentage of the medical profession in the last 20 years or 30 years is changing? Yeah, I don't know. I know that early on when I gave a talk on the counterclockwise work, when there's a way of reading it so it seems very anti-medical. And even though I begin the book by saying, look, if I were sick, I'd go to see a doctor also. But that's where it ends, what you would do and what I would do, speaking to most people. So I'm giving this lecture to a lot of people, and I'm not aware that a good third of the audience are physicians. When I become aware of it, it's too late. And I never say things I don't believe, but I might be a little less forceful about some of it. Anyway, it turned out that they were more receptive than other audiences because they know they don't know, and it's a burden to act like you know. And so things are changing. You know, I think that the change to my belief isn't coming fast enough. But I think that it wasn't that long ago that the belief was that you needed a pathogen to become ill. Medical world is aware of placebos. Placebos were always a bad name, a bad thing, because the medical, you know, drug company is giving money to test the efficacy of a drug. If the drug can't outperform the placebo, then you can't bring the drug to market, rather than saying, "My God, look at how powerful this sugar pill is." And people are starting to become aware of that. Percentages, I don't know. Mindfulness is often associated with a meditation that sort of brings you there. Concentrate on your breathing, which has never made me mindful of anything other than the fact that it changes my breathing. Yeah, okay. So, you know, that's a very important question that what is the relationship between what I'm saying and meditation? Well, for those of you who don't know, that meditation is undertaken in order to arrive at post-meditative mindfulness. This is happening immediately. Now, I did some early research on meditation, and meditation can be wonderful. However, I know a lot of people who can't sit still for 5 minutes once a day, who are not going to be able to sit still for 20 minutes twice a day to meditate. It's an alternative. They can both get you to the same place. This is more active. That there are— You know, the idea with meditation is you sit there, and it's wonderful, really, that what will happen is when thoughts come, you just let them go. And that's very important because over a long period of time, you come to realize that they're just thoughts. See, what I want you to do is you take that thought and you undress it, and you attack it this way, and you attack it that way. And by doing that, the thought also has no control over you. So you start off believing when you're stressed. So stress— events do not cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of events. So you open up that view, you can diminish the stress. So, for example, you believe this thing is definitely going to happen, and when it happens, it's going to be awful. So you want to attack both parts of that. How do we know something is definitely going to happen? You know, give me 5 reasons why it might not happen. And it's not that hard to come up with the reasons once you ask the question. So now you go from "It's definitely going to happen" to "Maybe it will, maybe it won't." It's immediately less stressful. Now, if it happens, like the glue that failed to adhere, how is it actually a good thing? You know, you have a lot of people stressed about losing their jobs, and the people in this audience aren't going to go hungry. If they should lose their job for a short time. You shouldn't be working at a job where you don't feel valued. Life is short. You shouldn't be in a relationship where you're worried you're going to lose the relationship. You shouldn't even go to the movies and hate the movie. That's 2 hours of your life. You either make it work or you leave. No, I'm very serious about that, to realize that you can do that. You know, so that then you become less stressed. We go from, "Oh my God, it's going to happen and it's going to be awful," to maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't, but if it happens, these good things will follow from it. Try it. It's actually reasonably effective. I say to my decision-making seminar students, I say, "OK, I've been teaching a version of this course for like 40 years. I've never missed a day. What is it like—" and I teach it on Wednesday. Let's say. I say, what is the likelihood I'm going to be here next week? Now these are Harvard students, bizarre. We go around the room, they say 98, 97. How are they doing this calculation? What they're saying is it will happen, but they don't have the guts to say that, so it's 98, 96. Now I say— so they're all sure it's going to happen. That's how we predict what's going to happen is what happened in the past. But things are only the same until they're not. Now I say, "OK, let's go around the room and everybody give me a good reason why I might not be here next week." And they have no difficulty coming up with reasons. "Well, you figure you've always been here, you deserve not to be able to." "Your dog needs to go to the vet." "A friend needs to—" And they generate all sorts of reasons. And then I say to them, "What is the likelihood that I'm going to be here next week?" And it goes from 100%, basically, to 50%. They don't know. You know, we think we know things because looking back, it's very easy to make everything make sense. Going forward is a whole different story. Going forward, we can't know. Stress relies on a belief that this thing is going to happen. So the first thing to do is to show yourself that we don't know it's going to happen, it's not going to happen. If it happens, it's not going to be so bad. The relationship ends, it's an opportunity for you to breathe again, for you to seek out a relationship that better meets your needs, and so on. All right, was there another question? Yes. You're in charge? I'm in charge. One and a half more.

Yeah, your earlier answer to the question of how was compelling but deeply unsatisfying.

Ah, because, well, maybe I asked too many questions.

Because I think I would like to know if you could talk a little bit more about how to, drilling down. Your earlier answer was to suggest the adoption of an attitude of doubt. That brings to mind the absent-minded professor who doubts everything but is hopelessly preoccupied. So speaking as a modern-day husband, what mental exercises can you suggest? If it's not meditation, what is it that can make you mindful?

Sure, sure. We have lots of programs where we can give you these exercises, but I'm giving you the bottom line that if you can go from your certainties to doubt— and we'll talk later about this absent-minded professor. It's wonderful. I'm allowed to forget anything. 'cause I'm a professor. It works beautifully. You're a moron if you forget something, right? That's what we figured out. I don't mean you personally, but that was your chara— or an idiot. So I don't know many professors that are really absent-minded. Okay, so once you know you don't know, then you naturally pay attention to it. If you can't tell yourself you don't know, then approach anything you think you do know and notice new things about it. So I can take two things that seem the same— here we have two fingers— that seem the same and ask you to notice the ways they're different. Well, one is on my right hand, one is on my left hand, you know, and so on. And you will notice. And then things become interesting again. So we have this idea that there are some activities that are exciting, that You know, if you're doing them, you don't need any exercises. There are other activities that are deadly dull. So let's go back to chambermaids. I teach my students, you know, "How could you spend your whole life making beds?" Well, those beds are telling you stories. Every room you go in, those sheets are telling you what went on there, how many people were participating, participating. If you're really good at it, you know how much they were enjoying it. It's all there. But for most of us, we don't look. It's just a sheet. And so what happens is the more we do this, the more engaged we become, the more the world opens up for us, and it starts to happen on its own. But even if you don't do any of those things, that all you do is that next time something upsets you, then you start asking these questions: Why does it upset me? What's good about it? How do I know that this is going to continue? You start to look at it differently, and it will change. Just remember that events are neither good nor bad. Events are nothing. We see them that way. And right now, if it's something good, we feel we have to have it. And if it's something bad, we feel we have to run away from it. So we become very reactive to the world that other people have taught us. When you're more mindful and recognize in and of itself it's neither good nor bad, you can be responsive to it. You don't have to run from it in quite the same way. Um, a half a question. A half a question. Somebody asked me so I can assert my authority. Yes. So we live in this era where technology can track everything. We have databases. I can track where I'm going with everything. But that seems like very mindless mindfulness. How can we use technology to remind us to be mindful? Yeah. It's very funny because a lot of this work on mindfulness I had begun when I was studying the importance of perceived control. And then I got a call from this place in Oregon where they had these facilities that were totally wired. Every move the person made became a data point. Everything. And I thought, "Well, why are you calling me?" Because that sounds like Big Brother when I'm as far as can be on the other end of that continuum. So we don't know how to use all of that information. Some of it is useful, you know, that you have— if you make it like a game, which people were doing in lots of the consulting we do. This is not going to answer your question, but it's a little more interesting. My answer— your question was great. OK. That lots of people talk about work-life balance. And work-life balance is a lot better than work-life imbalance. But that's not what you want to do. It should be work-life integration. And we teach this in our workshops. What does it mean, work-life integration? It means when you're working, you're still a person, you're still having relationships. You don't put that aside and behave differently while you're working. And everything can be a game. We had people evaluating cartoons as if it was a job versus it was a game. They're doing the exact same thing. Those who did it as a game wanted more and loved it. Those who did it as a joke— you know, Tom Sawyer painting the fence, except the joke was on Tom Sawyer because his friends were enjoying painting the fence. So, you know, so you should be approaching your work, everything, as if it's a game. It comes back to the question. So you have like the Nike FuelBands, and it's great fun. "What do you mean I only did 4,000 steps today?" And then you walk more. You know, but if you do, "Oh my God, I'm going to die because I didn't do enough steps today," then it's bad. Technology is neither— like anything else— is neither good nor bad. It depends on how we use it. Technology is incredible. But, you know, we have so many mindless ideas. What I'm often asked by the media, there's so much information because now you get information from so many different places. You know, that people are overwhelmed with it. And I say, there's no more information now than there ever was. There isn't. But what happens is that now people think that they have to take in that information. There's no data that if you take in more information, you're actually going to do better. So that itself, I think, is kind of interesting. That it's not in the information, it's not in the technology, It's in the way we approach whatever it is we approach. And that if we approach it to get it done, we're giving up again much of our lives. Our lives— life consists only of moments. That's all it is. And so when you're depressed, the next time you're depressed, just make it through the moment. And then one moment leads to the next moment, and then you're OK. But what happens is that we're so hell-bent on these successes that we end up with a lot of money at the end of this and a lot of antidepressants. And I think that there's another way that is really very easy, that simply amounts to recognizing you don't know, it's OK not to know, Because nobody knows. And on that note, I'm going to say good night.