Ellen Langer RETURNS: Lead a Stress-Free and Mindful Life | Align Podcast #510

Welcome back to the Lion Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander. This is a place that we bring together the world's leading experts in all things health and wellness to help you optimize your mind, body, and movement. Today's conversation is all about the mind-body relationship. It is with one of the most, uh, well-recognized psychologists on the planet, Dr. Ellen Langer. She is American professor of psychology at Harvard University. In 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. She is brilliant. She is the author of Counterclockwise. She is the author of The Mindful Body, which we talked about today. This conversation is a mind freak of sorts. It gets into the way our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, our language, all of that forms our physiology and our lifespan and our cardiovascular function and our strength and our connective tissue and our nervous system. Really amazing stuff. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. I invite you over to the Align Podcast YouTube channel. If you subscribe to the channel this month, the month of this release, September, uh, you will be entering for a chance to win a rebounder from Bellicon. That is the best rebounding company in the game. I think I can confidently say that. I think they're considered that just generally across the board. I have one at my house, I'm a big fan, and subscribers will be entering for a chance to win one. We'll announce at the end of the month, send you out a rebounder, and, uh, it's a good time. I bounce on that mofo every single day. I genuinely do. Thanks for subscribing here. Thanks for reviews. Thanks for joining you. Let's get to it with the good Dr. Ellen Langer. Ellen Langer, thanks so much for making time to come back. You— I have a lot of admiration and respect for you. I've had for years now, like, like quite a few years actually. You don't realize that, but I'm following your stuff for a long time. But now in getting to know you a little bit through just our last conversation and observing you, I think the thing that I'm the most enamored with is you have what seems to be this, like, timeless beauty and youth to you. I don't know how— what your linear age is. I'm not going to ask what it is. 77. I was born July 7th. 7/7/87. I'm 37. 7 is like, that's my number. Any time 7 happens, I'm like, haha, this is a thing.

So I guess I'm older than you are.

You're a little bit, yeah, a little bit, but, but, but your spirit seems like at least as like comparable or even younger. How does one do that? And what happens to a person if they lose that childlike perspective on the world from a physiological structural perspective?

Well, it's interesting. A friend of mine wrote a song and I play it before I give a lecture in my health class on aging. And it's, You're never too old to be young. And what you want to do is continue playing. I was more fortunate than most people, I think. I was brought up by parents who were extraordinarily supportive and loving. And so I've been positive all my life and virtually stress-free. And I'll tell you, you know, most of the things we'll talk about, I have 45 years' worth of data to back it up. This I don't, but I still feel reasonably confident that stress is the major killer. You know, I show a slide in that same class of presidents right before they were elected and once they took office, and they got old very fast. And, you know, I believe from the stress. And what people need to understand is that stress is psychological. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of the event. So the more mindful we are, the more potential views we have, the easier it is to mitigate against stress. And lots of people teach— and I was big in this back in, I guess, the '70s— how to reframe things, you know, so you're suffering with something and then you go to a therapist or a good friend or you come to it yourself. You say, oh, you can look at it this other way. Well, when you do that long enough, you don't need to reframe. The stressful thing doesn't strike you as stressful in the first place, just as opportunities. So a one-liner that your listeners might enjoy is next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? And most of the time, the things that we're worried about, you know, they're not big deals. Like I burnt the bread, I forgot the project, I bumped the car, you know. So what? Yeah. And so it gives you a chance to pause and to think things through. And also, most of the things we worry about never happen. So another thing people can do is just think about the last few times they were stressed. Did whatever they worry about happen? If you see the last 3 times it didn't happen, that makes you a little more confident that this too won't happen. Or if it did happen, somehow you got through it, or else we wouldn't be dealing with whatever the newer stress is.

Yeah. Yeah. I have that in relation to, I used to be into like mountaineering and climbing and stuff like that. And that would be something that if someone would get kind of like banged up or something of the sort, that would be the first place that my mind would go. Like, is this an actual injury or is this just an owie? Because this is just an owie, it's completely different.

That's right.

And I think throughout our days in our lives, we have a lot of owies.

A lot of owies.

We have a lot of owies that we construe as actual life-threatening injuries.

But I had an experience that I wrote about in The Mindful Body where, you know, my thought was when I tell people my beliefs and present data for many of the things I hope to talk about, they might say, well, what do you know from your privileged position at Harvard and so on? So, you know, I detail it because the book started off as a memoir. So I detail some of the experiences I've had. One was I was coming home from a friend's house for dinner. It was It was in December, very cold. I get to my house and all my neighbors are outside because my house had just burnt down and I lost 80% of what I owned. So that seems more like an owie.

Could be perceived as an injury.

Yeah. Okay. But so the next day the insurance person came over and he said, this sounds like I'm bragging, but I see myself really just as sharing. He said this is the first time in his 25 years at the job where the damage was worse than the cold. Most people, oh my God, oh my God, and yes, they're not so terrible here, you know, it was pretty terrible. But, um, and my feeling was, you know, I already lost whatever I lost, why throw my sanity away as well? But so I moved into the Charles Hotel with my two little dogs, and I was a sight, as you might imagine. Um, and so everybody in the hotel knew me. Now it's Christmas Eve, I go out, I come back, and it was remarkable out The room was full of gifts, not from the owners or the people who ran the hotel, the management, but from the so-called little people, the people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitresses. It took me years to be able to tell that story without it bringing tears to my eyes. And every Christmas I am reminded of the basic goodness of most people. And, you know, so that's all I remember about the fire, you know, rather than anything that I lost. Now, clearly, when the fire— when I first got there, I go, oh my God, who cares? You know, I'm not stressed. I'm human. Some might argue against that. And but even for the big things, there's another way of dealing with it. And all of my research says that that other way, that more mindful way is life-giving. So it results, you know, and when you're mindful, that means you're actively noticing things. And as you're doing that, the neurons are firing. And all of this research shows that that's literally and figuratively enlightening.

So your book, The Mindful Body, which I'm a big fan of, and just the concept in general I've been a big fan of for a long time, how do you differentiate the mind and the body? My guess is your answer is, I don't. So if you were steelmanning a differentiation between the mind and the body, where does the separation— where's the linchpin between the mind and the body?

We don't have to go there.

We don't steelman it.

These are just words. And that everybody has had an experience where you're walking down the street and you fall and a leaf blows in your face and you get startled and your blood pressure increases and so on. Until you realize it was just a leaf, or you see somebody regurgitating on the side of the road and you start to become ill yourself. That, you know, it was clear that nothing was happening to us, yet our thoughts led us to be sick. I had an experience when I was even younger than you are that set the stage for this mind-body unity theory that I pursued for 45 years. So I was married when I was obscenely young. Don't tell anybody.

So how young?

I'm— well, I got— well, I'll have to read the book to know the real story, but for these purposes, um, I was, I was 19 going on 35.

I was thinking, I was thinking 19. I was gonna guess 19. We're a tune, Ellen.

Okay, that's wonderful. So we went to Paris on our honeymoon, and now for reasons I still don't understand, I felt I had to be all grown up because now I was a married woman. We go into this restaurant and I ordered a mixed grill. On the mixed grill was pancreas. I asked my then-husband which of these was the pancreas. He was more sophisticated than I, worldly, and he pointed to it. I ate everything else. Now the moment of truth. And why did I think being married meant I had to eat the pancreas? But that's what I believed. I start eating it and I literally get sick. He starts laughing. Inappropriate, right? I said, "Why are you laughing?" He said, "Because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago." All right, so I had made myself sick. I have another pancreas story. My mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the endgame. And then magically it was totally gone. So she made herself well, I made myself sick, all without any medical intervention. Now, so how can we do this? And if we say we have a mind and a body, which Descartes gave us forever ago, then we have the problem of how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And no one's been able to bridge that gap. I decided mind-body— again, these are just words— let's put them back together, make it one unit. If it's one thing, look at the control we have. Wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And I've done a host of studies where we put the mind in strange places, taking measurements from the body. And so I am, after all of these years, am persuaded that at least for heuristic purposes, if not literally, but I believe literally, that we should see it as a single unit. So the first test we did of the mind-body unity is I retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So we're putting the mind in a younger place. So they spoke about past events as if they were just unfolding. Everything was to say it was 20 years earlier. As a result, the dog is very cute.

I know. I'm probably going to have to tell her to leave the room in a second. She's trying to play. She's excited. Her name is Lucy. She's a Malinois German Shepherd.

All right, back to the research. All right. No problem. All right. So they live in this retreat as if they're their younger selves without any medical intervention. In just a week, these are men in their 80s, for example, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger. Yeah. Startling. So that was the first of many. The next one is kind of fun also. Well, they're all fun, but let me just tell you just a few of them. If people are interested, they can read the book, The Mindful Body. So the next one, we take chambermaids. Now, everybody knows chambermaids are busy all day long cleaning hotel and motel rooms, right? So we asked them, first of all, how much exercise are they getting? And bizarrely, they don't think they're getting any exercise because they think, according to the Surgeon General, who sits at a desk all day, that exercise is what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired. Okay, so now we have chambermaids who don't realize they're getting any exercise but are getting plenty. They're not any healthier than people of similar socioeconomic status who are not exercising all day long. That's kind of interesting. Now, very simple. We have them in two groups. One group, we train them and teach them their work is exercise. Making the bed is like working at this machine at the gym. Dusting the windows is like working at this other machine. And so on. So we have two groups now, one that knows their work is exercise, one that doesn't. We take many, many measures before and after, and the groups are not eating any differently. One group isn't working any harder than the other. Nevertheless, in this short period of time, the group that changed their mind, that now sees their work as exercise, lost weight. There was a change in body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and their blood pressure Now, something about this that I don't typically point out is this is a study on the nocebo effect. Everybody knows what a placebo is. You take nothing, a pill, a sugar pill, you think it's something and you get better. And clearly it's not the pill because the pill is nothing, right? You're doing it yourself. And I think placebos are our strongest medicine. All right. Yeah. In this case here, you're actually doing something. But you don't realize it's something and it wipes out the effect. That's what the nocebo effect is. All right. And so what does that mean? So let's say you go to the doctor and the medicine you are prescribed isn't working for you. What is the doctor likely to do? Probably going to increase the dosage, but that's not going to make any difference either. What you need to do is participate in your own health care, because if you don't believe it's going to work, chances are it's not going to work. People who are given— this isn't from our lab— they were given ipecac. Ipecac is what you give people who've accidentally or even on purpose ingested poison. You want to make them vomit. All right, now people who have problems because all they are doing is vomiting are given ipecac. Remember, the medicine is supposed to make you vomit, but they're told it'll stop them. From vomiting. And in fact, it stops them from vomiting. Minds are so much more powerful than any of us believe. But let me give you just one more. I'll give you the most recent mind-body unity study. So we inflict a wound, a minor wound, but a wound nonetheless. People individually are in front of a clock. For a third of them, unbeknownst to them, for a third of them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of them, it's going half as fast as real time. For a third of them, it's real time. The question we're asking is, does that wound heal based on how much time you think has passed or how much time has actually passed? Clock time or real time? Turns out it was clock time. Perceived time affected wound healing. Again, we have people wake up in a sleep lab the clock. I like doing things with clocks for some reason. You know, you get started on these, you just keep using it. And we change the time. So one group wakes up thinking that they had 2 hours more sleep than they had, another group 2 hours less than they had, and another group the amount of sleep they had. Cognitive and biological functioning seems to follow perceived amount of sleep. Lots of studies.

How So that's— there's all these absolutely astonishing, incredible trends to observe. What would the explanation—

these are significant findings. I mean, that trend— I know you don't know the experimental lingo, but when— sorry, so these significant findings, but no reason why you should know it, but when it's almost significant, it's called a trend.

Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

These studies, the data are all significant.

Okay, I retract, I retract. But we're observing these amazing patterns. If we were to make an attempt to go under the hood of one's physiology or psychology or spirit, dare I say, what is happening? What's our best shot at applying language to what's actually going on underneath the hood of that?

All right. Surely something's going on under the hood. If I raise my arm, everything under the hood is different from if I don't raise it. Yeah. The difference in what I'm saying from what people typically believe is I'm saying whatever is happening is happening simultaneously.

Sure.

All right. Rather than, you know, this is leading to this and leading to this and so on. And you don't have to look under the hood. You can look under the hood. But with the hood closed, we can get great mileage. You know, I ask my students— you look very— and you said you're a mountain climber, so you're very athletic. So I ask my students—

Why'd you roll your eyes when you said that?

No, I didn't.

Oh, you're very athletic.

Yeah, right. Well, yes, good for you. You're glottal. Right. You know what Mark Twain said?

What did he say?

Every time he gets the urge to exercise, he just—

Oh, yeah. He just pauses for a moment. And suddenly it passed. It's like leptin and ghrelin. If you hypnotize yourself into believing you're not hungry, you actually will reduce your levels of ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, which is back to the mindful body stuff.

Yeah. So what was I going to tell you?

I don't know. I'm lost.

Okay. So I said, when I ask my health class, these are Harvard students, I say, how far is it humanly possible to run? So they're very smart. They know a marathon is 26 miles. They know I wouldn't be asking them if it were 27. So they start guessing. Someone says 30. Someone says 35. When somebody finally says 50, everybody groans, which is outrageous. Then I turn on a YouTube of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico. These people can go over 200 miles without stopping. The difference between 50 and 200 represents, in part, what I'm saying exists between what we think we can do and what we can actually do. Well, you know, we, we only stand in our own way in preventing our health and our happiness.

Why do we— it's a similar thing with the actual potential strength that we allow ourselves to access. It's like 30-some percent of what we actually allow ourselves to recruit. But then if there's some emergency situation where I have no other out, suddenly I can pick up the car, do these superhuman feats because our body wants to protect ourselves. How do we start to safely push our overprotective mother or father of a nervous system to allow us to actually access our potential? I want to take a moment and share about an important issue that I think people probably are not thinking about all that much. If you've recently engaged in any sort of restricted diet or have taken medications to lose weight fast, it would be wise to be careful. There's a big chance that you create a nutrient deficiency that not only could harm your overall health as it could jeopardize your weight loss goals as well. Did you know that over 75% of Americans are already deficient in magnesium? Magnesium is a crucial mineral that is involved in over 600 biological reactions and offers amazing benefits for sleep, stress management, and hormone balance, all of which are key supporters for keeping your weight on healthy levels. And if you're still taking medications, you may be dealing with uncomfortable side effects like lack of sleep, digestive issues, or irritability that can also compromise your willingness to a long-term commitment to your goals. With or without medications, it is critical to set healthy habits to help you maintain your weight over time. Making sure you have all the magnesium you need to optimally function is one of them. Don't let magnesium deficiency derail your goals. Try Magnesium Breakthrough today and give your body the support it needs to thrive. Unlike other supplements, Magnesium Breakthrough by Bioptimizers contains all 7 forms of magnesium that your body can actually absorb, ensuring you get the full spectrum of benefits. This approach will support you to achieve your goals and maintain your weight while securing your overall health. For an exclusive offer, go to bioptimizers.com/align and use promo code ALIGN10 for 10% off of your order. That's bioptimizers.com/align. B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R.

Well, I think that, um, what people need to understand is that science doesn't allow us, um, to show that something is impossible. There's no science that says you can't. All science can show us is that what you tried didn't work, which means perhaps something else will work. And this is kind of fun. People think they want all sorts of things that if they got them— it used to be a thing when I was about your age, people talked about, I don't know why they called it this, the Texas curse. The Texas curse was, I wish you what you wish for yourself, because you think those things will make you happy and they don't. So people think they want all sorts of competence, they want to be perfect at everything. And it turns out that you can either perform perfectly mindlessly or imperfectly mindfully. So an example I'm fond of using: you're a little boy, Aaron, and you're in the elevator and you're trying to press the button and you can't reach it. And your mother, father, uncle, aunt, whoever picks you up, and now you can press the button. And the next time you get in the elevator, you're struggling again. And this is great fun for you. And then finally you're tall enough and you press that button. Yay! After that, you tell me, when was the last time you were excited about pressing a button in an elevator? All right. So it's the mastering that is actually important to us rather than having mastered. You play golf, you wish you got a hole-in-one every time you swung the club. If you did, there'd be no game there. And if you're hell-bent on winning, then play whatever your favorite thing is against a 5-year-old and you'll always win. So we don't want the things that we often think that we want. Some of that struggle is what the name of life is all about.

So what do you think about— I don't know how you're going to feel about this question, but what do you think about the concept of manifestation and bridging beyond? So the mind-body relationship, clearly there is no bridge. There just is. There's some more like unicity within that. Does that extend out beyond the body? Like my body to your body, my body to my community, my body to the planet?

And why not? So familiar with manifestations. So I mean, I'm just going to take the literal meaning of the word, but why, why don't you ask me more specifically? And my answer will surprise you. Oh, let me— I mean, everybody knows what you're talking about except me, so let me just say, okay, you—

so something I've heard you mention that you cut out of the book was that was because it was like too woo, um, of like more scientific talk. It would be like Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, how, you know, your dog is able to tell that you're coming home at a certain time. Or yeah, you, you mentioned a trip where you going to, um, some country and you're like, maybe Harvard could pay for it. Then Harvard, some randomly in the next day calls you. What do you, from a scientist's perspective, what the heck is happening there?

Yeah. Okay. So people, to make sense out of what Aaron just said, people are gonna have to read the book, which I think—

get The Mindful Body. It's in there.

But, um, yeah, I think that, um, uh, science as it will appear 50 years from now will look very different. From what it looks like now. So now several of the things that seem to be woo-woo will be better understood. But we did this experiment, and I haven't replicated this yet, so I don't want to make a big deal out of it, but it was kind of interesting. If you, you know, when we did this, God, 30 years ago, I would give people an index card, and on the index card it would say something like, Mary had a little lamb. So I just asked, read it. And you would read, Mary had a little lamb. I said, I'll pay you to be accurate. Mary had a little lamb. How many words are on the card? Mary had a little— 5. They just didn't see it. Now, colleagues of mine, Simon and Chabris, did this much more elegant, but the exact meaningfully the same study where they had people watching a basketball game. And in the middle of the game, somebody dressed in a gorilla suit walked on the court and people didn't see it. It's hard to imagine that, but we see what we expect to see, the more rigid or strong our expectation. Okay, so people don't see it. Now, we did a study where what we did, you'd be the participant and I'm going to give you the card to read. However, the experimenter is going to be either mindful or mindless. So when you're mindful, you're present, you're actively noticing, right? When you're mindless, you're more like a robot. When you were in the presence of the mindful experimenter, you saw the double word. So somehow our mindfulness is contagious. Now we can explain part of the contagion differently, you know, that you gravitate to people who are charismatic, That's the meaning of being charismatic. And charisma is just being mindful. When you're there, people know it. When you're not there, people say things like, "The light's on, but nobody's home." And what people don't realize, and I have decades of research, is that most of us are not there most of the time. The problem is when you're mindless, you're not aware that you're mindless, but it's pervasive, right? And so, you know, you know that you find certain people appealing. Because they're there, right? They're being mindful. You feel safer with them because when you're mindful, you're seen as more authentic. And, you know, if you're safer with them, you're going to approach them more, you're going to like them more, all sorts of things that can be confused with mindful contagion. It is contagious in this other way, in other words, that if I'm mindful and I let you know verbally, nonverbally, energetically, whatever, that you're safe with me, that's going to allow you to be more mindful.

Yeah, I love that. I'm going to take this dog out of the room because she's excited and she has no chill right now. So I'm going to walk her outside really quick.

Hold on. Okay.

All right, come on outside. She has no chill.

Yeah. Well, my dog is just sitting here at, at my feet bragging that she has whatever chill you're talking about. Yeah.

Well, not a lot of chill. So for people, I mean, like, I think it's, it's amazing how this is the concept of the mind is, can so saliently be applied to improving our health. And I think it's something that most people in Western culture, many people are, I think, hoping for a pill to come or hoping for a savior to arrive. And meanwhile, they're sitting— what is that quote? It's like, "We're fishing for minnows while we're sitting atop of a whale." Yeah. So why are we doing that? How did that happen?

Well, a lot of the book is about this. This sort of thing. So people, when— if you find that you have— are diagnosed with a chronic illness, most people see that as a life sentence. They think it means you have no control over whatever the disease is. And all it means is that the medical world hasn't developed that treatment pill or what have you. But there are always things you can do. Now, another mind-body study which speaks to this, not from our lab, you'll love this, is about imagined exercise.

Oh, sure.

So in these studies, they have people— so, you know, you can be lifting weights or whatever for real, or imagining yourself doing it, and it turns out that the results are virtually identical. So if you were bedridden with some— or not bedridden, but you have some chronic illness, um, you— and you can't get out and about to do the exercise to climb the mountains you're climbing, um, you know, that you can always do this imagined exercise. The other more important thing— so one of the earliest studies I did when I was studying, started to study mindfulness, is we take elderly people and we just teach them to be mindful. Being mindful just means noticing new things. Now there are two ways of getting there, Aaron. One is bottom-up. So if you take things you think you know and you notice new things about them, that naturally makes you more interested in your attention naturally goes to them. The other is top-down, which is to recognize we don't really know anything, that everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, so you can't know. Now, when I'm trying to persuade people of this, I often take what I think people are most certain of, so certain that they think me foolish for asking: How much is 1 1?

The typical answer would be, would be 2, but I know we're going a different direction than that.

Okay, right, right, because I asked the question if for no other reason. Yeah. All right, so now 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 written as 10. Now it becomes interesting. If you take 1 pile of laundry and you add 1 pile of laundry, 1 1 is 1. You take one wad of chewing gum and add one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. You take one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. Somebody sent me one the other day. So if you take one pizza and you put another pizza on top of it, you have two pizzas. However, if you take one lasagna and you put another lasagna on it, one plus one is one. You just have a bigger lasagna. So in the real world, one plus one doesn't equal two. As or more often as it does. Now, why do we care about this? Well, now if somebody asks you, "How much is 1 1?" all of a sudden you have choices. See, when you're mindless, you don't have any choice. You just blurt out 2 and, you know, it becomes a non-event. You now know you can say 1, 2, 10, and possibly other things as well. All right? And so mindfulness gives us choices. Mindfulness, when you add to that that events are not causing our emotions, it's the views we take of them. The more mindful, the more potential views one has. Anyways, I was telling you about the study where we take older people, we give them experience a short period of time just noticing new things, and they live longer. And we have 3 separate experiments showing that. So you're living longer when you're being mindful, the neurons are firing, people are seeing you as more appealing. It even affects the products we produce. Everything is just better. You know, I've been studying this for so long that there's been a lot of opportunity to make people mindful in this active noticing way and seeing its effect. And its effect is broad, deep, almost no matter what you're doing. You're doing it either mindfully or mindlessly. And there are strong, strong benefits to doing them mindfully. And it's the essence of what you do. You can't be having fun unless you're being mindful. So it's not only good for you, it's fun and it's energy begetting, not consuming. So you ask me, how do I stay young? Just by, you know, being alert, noticing, enjoying, knowing that I don't know. And that's the other way to become mindful, if one can do it, is to recognize that uncertainty is the rule. It's not the exception, right? Since everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, you can't know. So if you approach situations knowing you don't know, you naturally find them engaging. As you're finding them engaging, you become aware of opportunities to which other people are blind. And people are finding you appealing all at the same time. It's a win-win-win. There's no downside to being mindful.

Are you familiar with the guy Swami Rama? He's like a Hindu fellow that can change the temperature of his hand by 9 degrees just through his power of the mind. Power of Perspective, like meditation and guide temperature change. You know, are you familiar with that?

Yeah, yeah.

Or like, or like the—

Powers. These powers are available to all of us. The problem is, I— one of the problems is that as soon as there are people who can do something exceptional, uh, people create an exceptional category. So, you know, all of us can improve our memory enormously. So you have people who have spectacular memory. So they're called super memory, super tasters, super agers. And as soon as you do that, it suggests that whatever they're doing isn't available to all of us. And I believe if anyone can do it, everyone can do it. Not with equal ease, but still, it's possible.

Yeah. Yeah. And they can— there's, I think, monks from similar traditions, they can reduce their metabolism by 60%, which puts them into like less than the state of a coma. Like you're just not supposed to be there. Like you can like practically start, stop their heart. They can make a, be out in the middle of a cold icy place and put a wet blanket on their backs and dry it. So like they have the potential to do that. And with the experiments of the, you know, the different exercise, strengthening their thumb or free throws or all the things that you're mentioning, it's like we can go in and create this neuroplasticity and myelinate these pathways and kind of grease these grooves for us to manifest ourselves in a different way.

Right. I wonder We need to ask ourselves what leads us to believe we can't.

Yeah.

And when you see that, it's just somebody said you can't.

This is like Peter Pan. This is Peter Pan stuff. That's what we're entering into. It's like you need to, like, you need to find your happy place. You need to find, like, you need to truly believe that you can fly in order to be able to fly. And you don't want to believe that you can fly.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know that I want to go to flying, but I'm just saying as a story, I mean, like, that would be the idea of being able to hear yourself. From cancer or something of the sort would be comparable metaphor.

Yeah. Well, you know, we go back to my mother who I told you the cancer had metastasized and gotten to her pancreas. The medical world wrote her off and then magically it was gone. And I think spontaneous remissions are probably far more common than people assume.

Yeah, we don't want to believe it.

What?

We don't want to believe it.

Well, which is strange. Of course we want to believe it. We're afraid to believe it. We're afraid.

Why are we afraid to believe it, Ellen Langer?

Because, you know, what if I believe it and it's not true?

We don't want to be let down.

I think that we need to organize ourselves very differently. You know, a lot of people call me, excuse me, when they're given these dread diagnoses and what have you. And I say, you know, they want to know what they should do. I can't tell you what to do. All I could tell you is that if I were told I had 6 months to live and the medical world never should never say that they can't know. And remind me to get back to that because I can support that and I think I'll persuade people. But so a person says they only have 6 months to live. I say, I don't know about you, but if I were told I only had 6 months, I wouldn't waste it being depressed. First thing I do is I go have a hot fudge sundae. And then, you know, I get out there and really start to live. And there's other data, again, not from my lab, that when people have a stroke, you know, a heart attack and live through it, other dread, you know, scary sorts of things, for many people, that's when they first come alive. And, you know, I'm trying to get people, rather than worry about their life after death, to give themselves some life before death.

Ellen Langer has been a past guest on here a couple of times. And one of the quotes that she has popularized is— I looked it up because I forget it usually— "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." And it's kind of a similar thing. There's like some aspect of ourselves that has a fear of actually our potential. And I wouldn't—

yeah, I mean, that's— I'd have to talk to her to understand more fully what she means by that. But on the face of it, I'm not sure I agree. But let's move on.

Oh good. Why do you— why do you disagree?

Well, I, you know, I don't think, um, if people were afraid of being powerful, I think that the fear would actually be that, uh, if they accepted it, it would wear— it would wear off. In which case they would have experienced something wonderful and then go back to not having that power.

But, um, you know, like we're afraid to actually like catch the cat. We'd rather keep the carrot.

Yeah.

We'd rather keep chasing it.

Yeah.

Or, you know, keep the game alive.

Yeah.

And I don't know, for a person, so I, I think a big part of this would be, and I'm kind of going into realms that I feel like you probably I wanna like kind of deter away from, but, but for a person, so, so much of this would come down to self-belief. Like if let's say you could convince somebody in placebo or nocebo someone into the belief that, oh, all of the stuff that you're doing while you're doing the housemaid stuff, you're actually exercising, you're burning calories, you're burning, you know, you're, you're gaining muscle and suddenly you turn that on. So we can, you can do that by tricking someone, which is kind of like a form of like shamanism in a way, or, or doctoring in a way. It's kind of a lot of what we're doing. Whether they realize it or not. For a person that just wants to shaman themselves or doctor themselves into an orientation where they actually have the belief to be able to access these things that Swami Rama can do or all the different things, but they're in that place of disbelief, I guess just listening to this conversation might be a good starting point. But, would meditation be a suggestion or some way to access? Yeah.

Now, I did some very early research on meditation and it's wonderful, but it's different from what I'm talking about. Meditation is a practice that you engage in 20 minutes twice a day, presumably to lead to post-meditative mindfulness. It's not itself mindful. Mindfulness, as I study it, is more immediate. And all it is is actively noticing. And you don't actively notice when you think you know. So our schools, our books, magazines, you know, are constantly telling us absolutes. And when you know something absolutely, like one and one is two, um, you don't pay attention to it. I was at a horse event many years ago that actually changed my life. This man asked me— people have to know, I'm a straight-A student, the person you probably resented, you know, sitting there knowing all the answers.

No, you're the person I would copy your test.

Okay, great.

All right, I appreciate you.

This man asked me, um, if I'd watch his horse for him. Because he's going to get his horse a hot dog. Well, here's why I told you how smart I am. I know nobody knows better— as well, but not better— horses don't eat meat. So I think he's crazy, right? But sure, I'll watch your horse. He goes, he comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized— to me, that was exciting because that meant everything I think I know could be wrong. All sorts of things are possible. And I started to think about that and realize that Science doesn't give us absolutes. The best an experiment gives us is a probability that if you do this, you're likely to get that. That's translated not that horses under these circumstances typically don't eat meat. That's translated as horses don't eat meat. Not 1 in 1 could be 2. 1 in 1 is 2. So lots of us are straight-A students, think we know, and lots of what we know is simply wrong. So when you're asking, so what should people do? Persuade yourself that you don't know if you can, which means, you know, walk outside, notice 5 new things. Hey, I've been living here for 30 years. I never saw that, you know, whatever. And then see how good it feels. And whenever you're having fun, it's because you're being mindful. And so you don't have to feel bad about not knowing. Right? Because right now, when you don't know and you think you should know, then you pretend or you feel inadequate. But nobody knows. Nobody can know because everything is always changing. And all those facts that we have are, again, just probabilities. And so when you want to— when somebody says you can't, how do you know I can't? You know, "Who Said So" was an alternative title for this book way back when. And, you know, so I have this— imagine you're walking down the street and you want to cut across this lawn, but there's a big sign that says "Keep off the grass." So what are you likely to do is keep off the grass, unless you're from New York. Okay. Now, what if the sign said, "Ellen says keep off the grass." All of a sudden it feels different, right? Maybe Ellen doesn't even live there anymore. Maybe I can negotiate with her. The hard fact becomes malleable. And that's what we need to do, is realize that everything that is was put there by people. People who are similar or dissimilar from us. People whose views may not be in sync with ours at all. And yet we're doing whatever it is based on what they said. So to make— you'll enjoy this— to make this a little more concrete, when I'm giving these talks in public, I often ask, is there somebody very tall out there? There's always a guy for some reason who's like 6'5", and I invite him to the stage. So here he is, and I'm 5'3", so we look silly together, right? And then I asked him to put his hand up. I put my hand over it. His hand's like 4 inches bigger than my hand. And then I just raised, should we do anything the same way? And of course not. So the more dissimilar you are from the person who wrote the rules, the more important it is for you to not mindlessly follow the rules and to make it your own. And then life becomes much more exciting. You know, when you— even a simple thing I tell my students that let's say you're constantly dropping a mug, whatever it is. So rather than be frustrated, realize somebody created that mug thinking that the design was good. The design isn't good for you, so create a different mug. You know, that the dishes are very high up in the kitchen. You know, I can't reach them, but you take the world as it's given. So why put the dishes up there? And you could have easily mechanically have created something where the shelves would come down, you know, to make it, to make it easier. What we do, in other words, is we take what is as if that's the way it's supposed to be. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, Elaine Noble, created the first gay pride parade in Boston. So she has the parade goes, argue and say from here and it goes around here and up over here. Okay. And I asked my students, why does the parade take that route? Again, they say maximum viewing, maximum safety, maximum everything. In other words, whatever is, we give all sorts of good reasons why it has to be that way. The fact of the matter is she was down here and she had to deliver a present to a person that was up there. You see what I'm saying? You know, so if you knew that, then you'd feel it would be easier for you to change the route. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like Wayf, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and Free People. Plus, free shipping and returns and freestyling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app.

And how does language form our physiology?

Well, you know, our language is a manifestation of these, you know, these beliefs, and it's these beliefs that are freezing our possibilities, most of which we don't even recognize. So I spend a lot of time— my ear is very sensitive to words. And so I remember this is almost irrelevant, but I had this friend and she said, you know, is it okay with you? I just want to go. I'm going to take my shower. And I said to her, no, take my shower. So, you know, I would say I'm going to take a shower. She's saying, I'm going to take my share. There's a reason for that. And I have a view of the world as plentiful. She doesn't. So if you listen to, you know, some of the things we just mindlessly accept. So let me ask you, is forgiveness good or bad? Most people say it's good.

It's a weird thing, but I would say good.

Yeah. Everybody says forgiveness is good. Is blame good or bad? It's bad. But you can't forgive unless you first blame. Wait a second. So our forgivers are our blamers. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. It depends on how we frame them. So what do we have? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame, then forgive. Hardly divine. So a lot of— I spend some time in the book talking about things where you go from bad to seemingly good, blame to forgive, but there's a better than better way almost always. And this is something that was very important. You know, you have to imagine, and I've been doing this for so long and I have remarkable findings, all sorts of diseases, where we can cure non-medically. I'll talk to you about that. Still, the thing that was most exciting to me was when I realized this one simple thing, which was behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else he or she wouldn't do it. No one wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be awkward, conforming, and obnoxious. So when we see people, what is it that they're intending? Okay, so let me make this clear to you. So, um, you might want to change me because I'm very, very gullible. I really am gullible. And you show me, oh, look at this, you were taken by not one but two psychopaths. Oh my God, help me, Ellen, become less gullible. I will make an attempt, but I'm always going to fail. Because from my perspective going forward, I'm not being gullible, I'm being trusting. All right. So the positive version of it is trusting. The negative is gullible. You, I might think, are very inconsistent. And I can show you, even in this short time we're together, how inconsistent you've been. So you don't want to be inconsistent. So you're going to try to change, but you're also going to fail. Because going forward, what your intention is, is to be flexible and you value being flexible. All right. So what am I saying? Well, let me give you— you know, we did this study forever ago. We gave people 200 or so of these behavior descriptions: inconsistent, gullible, impulsive, many of them, right? And we say, circle those things that you keep trying to change about yourself and you keep failing. So I'd circle impulsive, gullible, and others that I won't share. Then you turn the page over and in a random order are the positive versions of each of these. And now the question to participants is circle those things you really value about yourself. That I'm trusting and spontaneous. And as long as I value being spontaneous, I'm going to appear at times impulsive. As long as I value being trusting, I'm going to at times be seen as gullible. And then, you know, I don't want to change. And I think if we had a longer relationship with it, you probably wouldn't want me to change. But the point is, if If you do still want me to change, you have to get me to stop valuing being trusting and being spontaneous because that's what I'm doing going forward.

Yeah. That's like, that's like that, that which we resist persists or however you'd say that. So if we place ourselves, I think a lot of people, maybe myself in certain ways, knowingly or unknowingly, we're like addicted to shame. Within ourselves, you know, related to like, I'm a bad boy, or, you know, or bad girl.

You should know why you did what— you know, if you were in a relationship with me, an intimate relationship, that would be awkward for a thousand reasons, but just for argument's sake, I don't want you to ever forgive me. I, you know, I don't want to ever be forgiven because I'm a nice person going forward. I mean no harm, but sometimes things happen. And what I want you to do is understand me. And when you understand why somebody did what they did, that obviates the need for forgiveness. So in so much of what I see with people, there's bad. So in this case, it'd be blame. Yeah, better to forgive, because if you blame, you surely should get to forgive. But even better is to understand why they did what they did. And so many things, there's a better than better way. An example in the health area. I went to see my friend Eva, who had a terrible case of an unusual cancer. And I said, so how are you? And she had just gotten back from the hospital and she said she's thrilled because her cancer is in remission. And I thought about that. Presumably, if I took the very same tests, they would tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it I don't have it, but she has it in remission? So active cancer remission is much better, but better still is to see yourself as cured. And so we did some work where we take people who have cancer, had cancer, and we divide them up into those who see themselves as cured and those who see themselves as in remission. And those who are cured fare far better on physical and all sorts of psychological measures. You know, that If it's not there, it's not there. If you're going to worry about it being there, you know, and the medical world has this 5-year rule, which I've never understood. There's really nothing behind it. You have to be cancer-free for 5 years before they'll give you the bill of health. But that's 5 years for many people of being stressed. I already told you that that itself is not good for your health. Now, you don't have it. If cancer comes again, in some ways it's the same cancer, but just in as many ways it's a brand new cancer.

Cancer.

So remission can always be seen as cured. And then you get on with living, you know, which again, with lots of those chronic illnesses, what we do then is become so depressed and we turn the world off, when in fact it's a time we should increase our mindfulness, because that itself starts the neurons firing and it's literally good for us.

Do you have a belief in God?

What difference does that make?

I'm just curious. I was thinking because I was going to ask about like the Southern Baptist churches and people, you know, going by snakes and all that stuff. They would call that God. That would be called like an intervention and like the power of the Holy Spirit.

Yeah, call it whatever you want. You know that I would say I'm agnostic. I don't see any scientific evidence. But if a belief is calming and it's not hurting you in some other way, That's fine. Yeah. If a belief that something is going to help you prevents you from helping yourself, well then—

If you had to put language or definition around the concept of God, like how would you, how would you do that? Or do you, is that another question you don't like?

Yeah, no, it's not. It's a wonderful question, just not for me.

Come on.

Really?

Take a shot.

For some people, it just means a power greater than yourself. And I think that there are many powers greater than I am, so I don't have to appeal to a God. But as I said, that, you know, it's almost like— oh, I can talk to you about ritual because a lot of religion is like rituals. And so we had had this thing when I was growing up My sister was married, I was married, and we would all meet with my parents every Friday for dinner. And then I would hear my sister talking to someone, she was resenting it. I hear my mother, she and I brought us all together. I said, why are we doing this if nobody likes it? So we stopped doing it. And then what happened is we all missed it. And so then we, you know, resumed. We had the ritual, but now it was a mindful ritual. We knew why we were doing it. There. That's not answering your question. I know I'm trying to divert it somewhat, but why do you have resistance around going outside of science? No, I don't have any resistance going outside of science. I just want to be really clear what my expertise is and, you know, and what I know and what I don't know. Um, and I mean, you know, we can have talks about, uh, the new physics, um, and which I think the old physics will change quite a bit But I'm not a physicist and I'd rather not go there. But energy is involved in, you know, in some way. There's some way that my mindfulness is affecting not just my body, but my body is affecting everything around it. Remember, you know, when I say— when I talk about mind-body unity, if you really see it all as one, that means everything. That's manifested anywhere is manifested everywhere. So again, I'm about your age. I don't even know how old you are, but you look—

37.

Okay, so I was about your age. I think I was older. And I was in Kansas City or someplace, and a friend said, you want to go see an iridologist, an eye person? Sure, I'm game for anything. So we go to see this iridologist. She looks in my eyes, and then she said to me, you have a gallbladder problem. Problem. Right, okay, so we're done with that. I come back to the real world. Anyway, I had to go about a problem. Now, and now with this mind-body unity, it doesn't surprise me as it used to. Everything— we just don't have the technology that's strong enough to detect, you know, so a tear of sadness biochemically is different from a tear of joy. When you look at it, both look just like a drop of water. Yeah. Eventually technology will be able to differentiate, and then, you know, I can know by the movement of your eyes, by perhaps a follicle of your hair, what your physical and possible psychological health is.

Something— another question that I know you're going to hate, so it's great that we're finishing the podcast up and all your least favorite directions to go, I'd imagine. So you'll probably end up maybe, hopefully you'll, you'll, you'll understand me at some point in the future and not forgive me. What are your thoughts on a lot of that really amazing research around using things like, like, like psychoactive substances to create some more malleability in the mind and perspective? So MDMA therapy or psilocybin therapy, things alike to kind of, because many people are bound very tight and they're a train and they're going one direction and they can listen to this podcast and say, cool, that's great, but it's not actually going to sink in and create any change. It's just intellectual knowledge. There's no wisdom in it. They're not able to actually create the change. And sometimes it takes a while.

No, I mean, I think that it's the wisdom of the ages in some sense that I'm saying that we make our thoughts become self-fulfilling prophecies. So we want to be careful of what we think and recognize that anything truly, virtually anything is possible. And that all of the facts that we have that limit us, we need to recognize were just probabilities. That some horses don't eat meat, that 1 and 1 is sometimes 2. And if you, if you think about all the things you're sure of and say, why are you sure of it? And let that be something to motivate you to get outside of your your own boundaries, all sorts of wonderful things could happen.

But do you have any— because you grew up in like '70s and such— do you have any perspective?

I don't have— no, I mean, I think everything is potentially interesting. Um, I think that surely there's some, some of those drugs that could lead you to be more mindful. Um, the question for me would be, once you see whatever you see with those drugs, are you willing to see it without the drugs?

Yeah, that's the integration.

Yeah, yeah.

Without that, then probably not going to be too impactful.

Yeah, but I mean, if people— it, you know, if people's motivation to take the drugs is because they're miserable, there are other ways of not being miserable. And, um, and what I'm saying is not mutually exclusive with any of these other things that might work. You know, it's not mutually exclusive with meditation. You can meditate and still be mindful in the way that we study it.

Yeah. Cool. Well, is there anything to leave us with before, before taking off? Obviously all of this and more is in The Mindful Body. I think that's something that would be supportive or helpful is like the best entry ramp into creating some more empowerment within oneself outside of just getting the book. And going deeper into that, is there like what would be like one great entry point into accessing one's power to create change within themselves?

Well, there are several of them. I mean, not the least of which is next time you take yourself to task or insult somebody else, next time you find yourself being judgmental, ask yourself what the positive version of that might be. And so then you don't feel bad about yourself and you're not rejecting all these other people. The important thing about mindfulness as we study it is it's so simple and it's immediately available to everybody. If you came to visit me in my home right now in Cambridge, you've never been here, you don't have to practice anything, you don't have to learn anything, you would walk in the door and you would notice things. You'd say, "Oh, did she do that painting? What is that over there?" You know, you'd take in information. When we travel, we pay a lot of money to see new things. But everything at home is brand new if we just opened up our minds and looked. So, you know, at the least, next time you're unhappy, you want to go through, you know, a series of questions. Or when you're stressed, you know, in fact, why don't I tell people this, that stress relies on two things. One is a belief that something's going to happen, and two, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. So next time you're stressed, just ask yourself, what are 3, 4, if you're really smart, 5 reasons it might not happen? So you went from mindlessly thinking it's going to happen to now, maybe it won't happen, and you feel better. Now let's assume it does happen. How is that actually an advantage? And, you know, so for me, when my house went up in smoke, it made me realize I didn't need most of those things anyway. Even my notes for my lecture class that I was going to be giving soon after went up in smoke. Turned out to be the best class I had ever given because I couldn't rely on things I had learned in the past. And as I said, every Christmas, my interest and appreciation of people is renewed. You know, that when you say— I was talking, doing a podcast And I was trying to explain to people that things in and of themselves are not good nor bad. It depends on how we frame them, right? And I said, so for example, if my internet goes out right now, for me that'd be fine. I'd go have lunch. And the funniest thing, Aaron, is the internet then went out. Yeah, I, you know, I didn't will it to go out, but it did go out. And I did, I went and I had lunch and it was fine because most things just don't matter. So we go back to that other one-liner: next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? In addition to that, next time you think you can't, ask yourself, how do you know you can't? And there's always a step small enough towards where you want to get that you can do it. And remember that once you can fully do it, like pressing that button on the elevator, it becomes a non-event. So don't run from the this so-called struggle and enjoy it. And that one can lead a stress-free life. And that's different from what most people tell you. And but it's the life that I've led and all my life felt an obligation to share it with people because, you know, and you have lots of things out there. I'm surely not the only person who said this. This. I mean, my major contribution might be that the behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else they wouldn't do it in the psychological realm. And all the health effects that doctors are giving you information, that's a probability. That means it's sometimes true for some people, and it doesn't mean it has to be true for you. But you can make it true, you know, by not doing the things that you otherwise would do, letting the system turn off. You know, if you're not growing, you're dying. And growing just by being mindful and noticing couldn't be— could— it's the essence of fun and engagement. Amazing.

Thank you so much, Ellen. I appreciate you. Folks can grab The Mindful Body if they want to go deeper into your stuff. And is there anything else, directions people should ought to go?

They can go to my website Ellenlanger.me, I think it is.

All right, cool. Sweet. Well, I appreciate you so much. I've been, like I've said, I've been following your stuff for a long time, so it's an honor and privilege to get to share conversation with you. Thank you all for tuning in. That's it. That's all. I'll see you next week. Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I want to invite you for a chance to win a rebounder from Belicon. They are the best rebounders in the game. Rebounding is good for lymphatic drainage. It's good for your nervous system. It just makes you giggly. It's a good time. All you gotta do for a chance to win a rebounder from Belicon is subscribe to the Align Podcast YouTube channel. We'll be announcing a winner at the end of the month from one of y'all subscribers in September, and it will be to continue doing these giveaways each month. So just generally subscribe and you'll enter for a chance to win something. Uh, thank you for listening. Thank you for doing you. Thank you for reviews. I appreciate them. I read them. I appreciate you guys. I'll see you next week.