Ellen Langer 'Counterclockwise: the power of possibility' at Happiness & Its Causes 2012

And now, what a treat we have for you. Professor Ellen Langer. Now, she is the pioneering researcher, the pioneering researcher into successful living. She hailed from the psychology department of Harvard University, USA. She's a best-selling author of Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, On Becoming an Artist, and Counterclockwise. And not only that, But a major motion picture is about to be made about her. When I received this note, I thought, surely this can't be true, but I'm told it is. A major motion picture about our very next speaker, and the person who will be playing her is Jennifer Aniston. Intriguing. We must hear more. Would you please welcome to the stage Professor Ellen Langer.

The similarity is overwhelming, isn't it? Now don't laugh, that's not meant to be funny. OK. So today I'm going to talk to you about possibility, possibility with respect to health, possibility with respect to our general well-being. To do this successfully, what you need to do is play along with me, and in doing so, I think I can persuade you of the cost of this concept of mindlessness, And then, without leaving you feeling overwhelmingly sad, what we'll do is talk about how to reverse it. Okay, so, this is true for at least people of 40 years and older. When you're driving the car on ice, and the car starts to skid, what do you do? When I ask this of people, what they say is you gently pump the brakes to get control of the car. That made sense at time 1. And what happens is that we learn something, life changes, but we hold it still. Well, it turns out that now there are anti-lock brakes. In order to safely drive on ice, if the car skids, what you need to do is very forcefully step on the brake. So even though we learned how to drive to be safe, we keep doing the same thing over and over again. Circumstances change, And in fact, we're setting ourselves up, or in this case, for accidents. I went into this store several years ago, and I went to make a purchase. I gave the cashier my credit card. She noticed that the credit card wasn't signed. I just recognized that you were here, I'm sorry. She recognized— and you're here too, look at that! All right. So who should I talk to? I'll talk to you and you can watch from the— no. She noticed that it wasn't signed, she asked me to sign it, so I signed it. She then ran the credit card through that little credit card machine, came up with a slip of paper, asked me to sign it. I signed that as well. She then compared the two signatures. Now, what was interesting about this is there was no sense that she was giving to me that she had any idea how peculiar this was, that given I had just signed both of them in her presence, it would be odd if they didn't match. But that's very important because when we're mindless, we're not there to know that we're not there. And that's why I do some of these little things in venues like this to show you that you're not there, because you don't have the feeling of not being there. And I'm telling you, we're not there. Virtually all of us, almost all the time. You can't be happy if you're not there. And as you'll see, being healthier than you imagined you could be is also a lot easier if you're mindful. No matter what you're doing— giving a talk, listening to a talk, playing the piano, playing golf, it doesn't matter— whatever you're doing, you're doing it either mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. Now, I'm an academic, as you heard, so I have to put in writing most, just among the few of us, all. It's a very big statement, but I think virtually all of our suffering, physical, psychological, if one wants to distinguish between those two, is the direct or indirect consequence of our mindlessness. And I've been studying this for over 35 years. I started when I was 10. And what we do in study after study is we increase mindfulness, and then we take our measures, and it seems almost not to matter what we stick in here, we get enormous changes. Just to mention some of them: we become happier, our relationships are better, our self-esteem is enhanced, our prejudices are decreased, our competence in all sorts of spheres is increased, we get an increase in memory and attention and learning and creativity. An increase in charisma, leadership, decrease in burnout, decrease in accidents, an increase in productivity. And then with respect to health, just some of them, you get a decrease in stress, alcoholism, attention deficit disorder, an increase in vision, hearing, weight loss. It doesn't matter what we do, that this simple thing that I'm going to show you leads to enormous benefits to our health and well-being. Mindfulness, as I study it, is so simple it almost defies belief. Notice new things. That's all you need to do. If you notice new things, that puts you in the present. Remember, everybody tells you, "Be in the present," but when you're not in the present, you're not there to know you're not there. This is the way to be there. It's the essence of engagement. As you notice new things, you become engaged. And it turns out that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. You can have rules and routines, but they should guide what you do rather than govern what you do. So this phenomenologically is the experience of engagement. So you notice new things, that makes you aware, "Gee, I didn't know this as well as I thought I did," and your attention stays with it. Things are always changing, and things look different from different perspectives, so you're never going to know it fully. Right? And by noticing new things about it, you become more and more aware of the inherent uncertainty. Now, mindlessness is essentially when you're on automatic pilot. You're not there, but you're not there to know that you're not there. The past overdetermines the present. Your rules and routines govern rather than just guide what you do. And as I said before, the best way of understanding this is that we're frequently in error when we're mindless, but rarely in doubt. Now, I'm going to turn to some of the work that I describe in my latest book and takes advantage of some of these ideas. Some of these things I'm going to tell you are very extreme. This is all about possibility. The study of possibility is a study of what might be rather than a mere description of what is. So the first thing I want you to consider is why we're so sure we can't improve vision beyond 20/20, think ourselves thin, reverse virtually all brain damage. We need to free ourselves from constricting mindsets and the limits they place on our health. Possibility opens up when we recognize the important difference between uncontrollable and indeterminate. There is no science that can prove that something is uncontrollable. It cannot be proven. All it can say is that thus far it's indeterminate, which is very important because when you want to try something, if you're sure you can't do it, then what would be the sense of trying it? And trying is going to be the key here, and we'll talk about it. What you also need to understand is that all research gives us are probabilities. And what happens is that these probabilities get passed along in magazines, television, speakers, whatever, passed along as absolutes. Now what I want us to do is to learn how to question those absolutes and to say, "Well, how do we know that that's the case? How do we know that we can't?" I'm going to show you some studies that I think may surprise you. But the first thing is just to tell you where a lot of this came from for me. I was at this horse event, and this person asked me, would I watch his horse, because he wanted to get his horse a hot dog. I'm Harvard-Yale all the way through, but I'm a nice person, so just to myself I say, "What is he, crazy? Horses are herbivorous." They don't eat meat. He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And I love being wrong. And then I thought, yeah, what does it mean horses don't eat meat? How many horses were studied? How much meat was mixed with how much grain? How large were the horses? How hungry were the horses? And so on. And these are the hidden decisions that if we vary some of these parameters, we may find that lots of the things that we think can't be possibly can be. I have a lot of this in the book, just a couple of snippets now about language. So when I started this work on health for this latest go-around, I was interested in chronic illnesses. And then I thought, well, what is a chronic illness? How long do you have to have it? Do you have to have the symptoms 24/7? What if you have the symptoms every day for an hour? 3 hours a week, 1 day a month. There's no definition of this. Now, this becomes very important because the word chronic has come to mean for us that we can't control it. It's just going to be. But nothing stays the same. What that means is the symptoms that we have are changing, and noticing these changes is going to be very important for us to capture and control our health. Not only that, but many of the symptoms to the worst of diseases actually go away for part of the time. Well, how can that be? So let's take asthma, for example. Now, what most people who have asthma believe is that they have asthma, and so when you need it, you reach for the inhaler. What I'm suggesting is that we need to attend to variability, which is a code word for mindfulness. Notice when we need the inhaler. So let's say when I'm with Beth Thelen, I don't need the inhaler. But when I'm with Martin Seligman, I need the inhaler. Well, then the solution is straightforward, right? Either don't be with Marty, or make my interactions with Marty more like they are with Beth. Okay? Take another one. Let's take dyslexia, because this is very typical. If you gave a page of, let's say, 250 words to somebody who is dyslexic to read, at most they may have 5 errors. That means they're getting 98% of what they're reading correct. It seems bizarre that we should define ourselves by our diseases. Now, if you realize it's only 2%, it might occur to you to say, "Well, why these words and not the other words?" And then you start entertaining different theories, and you may solve the problem. So 3 things happen when we attend to the variability in our symptoms. One, we see, "Gee, we don't have it all the time." And when we have it, it's not always as bad as we thought, so we feel better. The second is that it may occur to us ways to solve the problem. The third, that while we're searching for these solutions, that's mindful, and all the research that I alluded to before and that we've been doing over the past "Forever," suggests that just the mindful search is good for our health. Take another one: "Remission" and "Cure." Now, a friend of mine had just come back from Mass General, one of the Harvard hospitals. She had a bad case of cancer, and I said, "Eva, how are you?" And she said, "Well, they said her cancer was in remission." And I said— at that moment, all of a sudden, it occurred to me: if I took the test and it looked the same as her tests, they would tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it that I don't have it, but she has it in remission? When I have a cold and the cold goes away, I see the cold as cured. If I get another cold, in many ways that cold is similar to the one before. In many ways it's different. I could say the cold is in remission. But by seeing it as in remission, I'm enfeebled by it. If I saw it as in remission and it came back, no matter what I do, I can't get rid of this thing. Rather than the way we are with colds, they don't scare me so much, I've beaten many of them. And we interviewed women who, in fact, saw their cancer as in remission versus cured, and to cut to the chase, those who saw it as cured over the 6-month time ended up happier and healthier on all of the measures that we took. Health is more than just the absence of our illness. And I believe it's our mindsets, this mindlessness that we accept without carefully thinking of what we're getting ourselves into, that's the cause of many of our limits. I'm going to suggest a very different view. And to get you to open your minds to it, What I'm going to do is to appeal to dead white men. Now, Schopenhauer said, "All research passes through 3 phases. First, it's ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. And third, it's accepted as self-evident." Einstein said, "If at first an idea isn't absurd, there's no hope for it." OK, so here is the idea. Very simple. We have mind, we have body. I want to suggest that this is nothing more than words. Now, the mind-body problem that has been with us preventing the kind of research that I'm going to show you has been held up by the question of how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to this material thing called a body. And that's the mind-body problem. But if you put them back together, the problem goes away. And when you put them back together, then it turns out you can explain things like placebos, spontaneous remissions, and other things of that ilk. So let me tell you about some of these studies where the bottom line is we take the mind and body, we put them together, we put the mind in strange places, and we take our measures from the body. The first is the counterclockwise study. This is a study where I was going to take old men to a timeless retreat and have them live as if the past was the present. Okay, so everything was set up as if it was 20 years ago, and what they did was to live speaking in the present tense about the past. The comparison group reminisced for that week. It tells me I only have 10 minutes, so I'm not going to go into great detail about this because the other studies are interesting as well. The BBC production— I'm going to show the finale in the workshop tomorrow— actually just replicated this study. One important thing that we did: as we're driving to the retreat, I'm in this van with these 80-year-olds, and that was when 80 was 80, not the new 60. They were old. And I realized it was a sexist time. I didn't have my male postdocs or doctoral students with me. It was just I, 8 suitcases, 8 old men. We get off the bus, and I hadn't thought about this. It didn't come from any science. It came from my own laziness. I said, "No way that I'm going to carry your suitcases. You're responsible for getting your suitcases up to your rooms. I don't care if you move it an inch at a time." Unpack it here, take out a shirt at a time. This made this event so absolutely different from the way they had been almost coddled to death that it set the stage for even this comparison group to do well. These are people who had been overloved, overcared for, believed that getting old means it's all over, one becomes incompetent quickly. And so what did we find? First, for those of you who weren't around in 1959, here's some of what it looked like. So they would have a movie at night, a discussion about these things during the day. They were in charge of everything. Both groups— now you tell me when you've heard that an 80-year-old's hearing improved, their memory improved without any special memory exercises. Their strength improved. Even beyond that, for the experimental group, their joint flexibility improved, their arthritis diminished, their dexterity improved, their cognitive abilities improved, and their vision improved, which it doesn't say here. We took photographs before and then took again at the end of the week. We showed those photographs to people who knew nothing about the study, and they were also evaluated as looking significantly younger. They didn't look 50 years old, but they did look younger. Okay, fast forward to the present. Chambermaids. We go to these chambermaids, and the first thing we say is, "How much exercise do you get?" Oddly, even though they're exercising all day long, they see themselves as not getting exercise. Okay, now, if exercise is good for you, they should be healthier than socioeconomic-equivalent others who are not exercising. Turns out they aren't any healthier. We take these chambermaids and we teach half of them, "Your work is exercise. Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym," and so on. Okay, so at the end of this, we have two groups. One group now of people who realize that what they're doing all day long, 40 hours a week, is actually exercise. I just put that in to see if you're paying attention. Okay, so just to make sure you're following this, you see this woman in pink. The argument is that even though she's not doing any exercise, but she sees herself as having spent the day at the gym, she will lose weight. Okay, it's a very extreme hypothesis. We come back a month later, and we find out, are there any changes? No changes on any of the dimensions. Are you working any harder? Is she working any harder? Are you eating any differently? No differences. The only difference is that one group believes now that their work is exercise. And what we find is they lost weight, there was a significant change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and a decrease in blood pressure. From the change in their mindset. Amazing. Vision. And remember, where we put the mind, the body is also going to be. You go into a doctor's office, and you're given an eye test. Now, the eye chart implicitly is working against us. The eye chart— you know the standard eye chart? The letters get progressively smaller. What that tells us is soon we're not going to be able to see. So what we did was reverse the eye chart. And in doing so, what happens is people are able to see what they weren't able to see before. Not only that, but most of us have the mindset, you know, about two-thirds of the way down the eye chart is when I'm going to have trouble seeing. So what we did for another group of people is we start the eye chart down a third of the way. So now two-thirds of the way down are much smaller letters, and indeed we find people can see what they couldn't see before. We have men who believe that pilots, Air Force pilots, have excellent vision. They come into the study, we give them an eye test. We have them put on uniforms, Air Force pilot uniforms, or not for the control group. We have them step into a flight simulator, and while they're in the simulator, they're supposed to read what we call the markings on another plane, which is a line from the eye chart. When they're Air Force pilots, they can see what they couldn't see when they were just themselves. When I'm in the shower and I'm being Barbra Streisand or Maria Callas, I'm on tune. When I'm Ellen— It seems to me there's no one there to check. OK. Anyway, there are hints in here as to how we can expand our own performance. We did a study where we have women, they're getting their hair done, we take photographs of them and measures before they do so, then we ask them how do they think they look, and we see whether they think they look younger or not. We then cover their hair and just take a photograph of their faces, and we ask other people how old or young they look. And it turns out that those women who were evaluated as looking younger, who thought they looked younger, also had a reduction in blood pressure. This is without medication, mind you. All right, an example. We have so many of these studies. Let me just give you one more. About uniforms to help prove the point. If I went to your fanciest store and I wanted to buy a miniskirt, presumably they would not let me out of the store. It's age-inappropriate, right? Well, that suggests to me that clothing is a marker for age. So those people who are in uniforms their entire lives are missing that age-related cue. And it turns out they have lower morbidity. Men, when you're young and you're led to believe that baldness is related to age, so now you bald prematurely, you see a person in the mirror, you think of yourself now as older than you are, all sorts of heart disease and problems are likely to follow. And there's no medical explanation for this. OK. Things are changing. What we want to do is harness the power of that uncertainty. Right now, we hold things still. We think holding things still is going to give us control. In fact, we have far more control by noticing the way things change and not to be afraid of those changes. OK, so the argument is that we're going to prosper from being mindfully virtually all of the time. If we remove our negative mindsets regarding health and presumed limits, we can create all sorts of possibilities for ourselves. And even if we're unsuccessful in solving whatever the particular problem is, that hypothesis-seeking and testing is itself good for our health. The magic lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to social and cultural cues. We only need to make subtle shifts in our thinking and our language and our expectation to change some of these ingrained behaviors that zap health, optimism and vitality from our lives. What I've shared with you are just a few of these many studies where we find improved vision, younger appearance, weight loss, increased longevity, all from simple changes, getting rid of some of that mindlessness that we too easily accepted throughout our lives. If we do this, then what will happen is we'll increase our health and well-being, and that's a promise I can make to all of you. Thank you.