Harvard Psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer on Overcoming Stress and Aging with Mindfulness | Ep #287

It's very sweet that people say to each other, be in the moment. But you see, you can't be in the moment when you're mindless. And we're mindless almost all of the time, sadly. When you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. The way to be in the moment is to actively notice new things. So you actively notice new things when you know you don't know.

Hello everybody, and welcome to the show. Dotsy and I are I'm so excited to introduce you to our guest today. It's gonna be a really wonderful conversation. As you all know, good health is essential for a fulfilling life. That's why you listen to the podcast. But is there a component to achieving optimal health that we've been missing? How does our perception shape our wellbeing? Well, these are the questions we're gonna discuss today. And we welcome professor and pioneering researcher, Dr. Ellen Langer, to help us deal with these questions. She is the first female tenured professor of psychology at Harvard University and is also known as the mother of mindfulness. Dr. Langer's research over the last 5 decades has revolutionized our understanding of the mind-body connection, aging, decision-making, and our illusion of control. She is the bestselling author of books such as Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, and Counterclockwise. Her latest work, The Mindful Body, unveils how our mindset affects our physical health. This book shows us the possibilities of greater health, happiness, charisma, and so much more through the power of mindfulness. So Dr. Langer, a very warm welcome to the Switch4Good Podcast.

Thank you.

So this book started out as a memoir. So there are a lot of personal stories in there about your journey as a researcher.

Because it was a memoir and because of basically who I am and how I don't take myself too seriously, although I take my work seriously, the stories in there are used to illustrate the points that we're going to talk about today. But some of them are wild. I mean, If people— I had an encounter with Hells Angels. I was secretly married when I was very young. How young, you'll have to read the book to find out unless you ask me, you know. So, um, yeah, uh, it was interesting to me to see how long I have been actually thinking about the same issues, you know, that when I start to tell the different stories. So let me give you an example. When I got married. Well, I'll reveal the fact I was married at, oh, 19 years old. Long time ago.

And why was it secret?

Well, yeah, that's a good question. Do I even remember why I was secretly married? Oh no, no, that wasn't the secret. No, the secret was that I was secretly married at 16 and then got married again for the general public general public, my family and friends at 19. But the relevant story—

To the same person.

Yes. You know, it is kind of bizarre to think about it. And I was just a 16-year-old like other 16-year-olds. You know, it wasn't— I wasn't married in any way other than having a certificate. So if my parents walked in on us when we were necking, you know, we'd pull out the certificate that was hidden in a book called Here Is Africa. It's interesting to me what things remain decades later. At any rate, we went to Paris for our honeymoon. And remember, now I'm 19 going on 40, you know, so I'm feeling very sophisticated. And because I'm a married woman, I feel that I have to do things that I wouldn't have done a week before I was a married woman. So we're in this restaurant. I order a mixed grill. One of the items on the mixed grill was pancreas. Okay, so I feel that I have to be able to eat this. Now, now this makes no sense to me. I mean, you know, at 77 years old, I wouldn't eat the pancreas. I don't know why I thought at 19, being all grown up, I had to eat it. But at any rate, so the mixed grill comes to the table. I asked my then husband, which of these items is the pancreas? He points to something. I eat everything else. I'm a big eater, enthusiastic. Now comes a moment of truth. Can I eat the pancreas? Well, again, I felt I had to eat it because after all, I was a married woman. I start eating it and I literally get sick. He then starts laughing, which is a very strange response to my being sick. And I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. All right. So that was probably my earliest remembered experience of how my mind was creating illness. And most important, how eventually we'll see how it can create health.

And that's a big part of your book, The Mind-Body Unity. Can you tell us some of your research that backs up your— this theory and your personal experience?

Yeah, for sure. Well, first of all, when you have a notion of dualism, a mind and a body, the main problem is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body. And without figuring that out, research had been sort of stalled for centuries. And then I started to think about it and I realized, well, mind, body, these are just words. And that if we put the mind and the body back together and see it as a single unit, then wherever we're putting the mind, we're necessarily putting the body. If you think about that and you realize of all the things you can think about, the amount of control you have over your health becomes enormous. So the first test of this was in a famous study. I can call it famous because if you tune in to The Simpsons Go to Havana, they actually talk about the study. But it was a counterclockwise study. So we took old men to a timeless retreat that we retrofitted to 20 years earlier and had them live there as if they were their younger selves. So they would be talking about past events as if they were just unfolding. So in a period of time as short as a week, what we found was that their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger, all because of the change in their mindset. The next study we did, if many of your listeners are women, they'll find this particularly interesting. I think we did with chambermaids. Right now we're going to look at chambermaids and exercise. Chambermaids are exercising all day long, right? So we ask them first, how much exercise are you getting? They say, I'm not getting any exercise because they think exercise is what you do after work, because that's what the surgeon general says, who sits at a desk all day long. And after work, they're just too tired. Now think of this. If exercise is good for your health, And these women are exercising all day long. They should be healthier than socioeconomic equivalent others. Turns out that they're not. All right. So what we do is we— and I'll explain why in a moment. So we divide them in two groups. Very simple study. And we teach one of the groups that their work is exercise. Making the bed is like working at this machine at the gym, doing the windows, this other machine, and so on. So now we have two different groups. One doesn't realize their work is exercise. One believes their work is exercise. We make sure the groups are not working any differently. One group isn't working harder than the other. They're not eating any differently. All that's really varying, as far as we could tell, is the belief that what I'm doing is exercise. As a result of that change in mindset, the work is exercise, they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index. and their blood pressure came down. So it's sort of remarkable. Now, a way to understand that study is the nocebo effect. All right. Most people know what a placebo is. You take this pill that's nothing, but that you think it's something, and then you get better. Right. And by the way, the placebo is the strongest evidence for this mind-body unity. Because nothing's happening. It's just your belief and you get better. And nocebo is in some way an inside-out reverse of this. You're taking medicine or doing something that's supposed to have a positive effect, but you don't believe it does, and therefore it doesn't. So in an early study somebody else did, they gave people who were vomiting a lot Ipecac. Now, Ipecac is supposed to stop you from— make you vomit, right? You give Ipecac to somebody who's just unintentionally ingested poison or something. Okay. So these people who are vomiting are given Ipecac and they're told that the Ipecac prevents vomiting, which is the opposite of what Ipecac does, and they stop vomiting. Okay. So we have people exercising, but the exercise doesn't have the effect that we all wanted to have unless you believe that it would have that effect. Another study in the series— we have many of them— we take people who have type 2 diabetes. We give them lots of tests in the lab before we start, and then we sit them down in front of a computer. The reason for all of this will become clear in a moment. Next to the computer is a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's real time. Their task is to change the game they're playing every 15 minutes or so. And that ensures that they look at this clock. What happens is blood sugar level varies not as a function of real time, but rather perceived time. What that clock says. We have so many of these studies. I'll just give you one more, but the book is full of these. It's very exciting when you think of extrapolate from these studies to all the ways we can control our health. We inflict a wound. It's a small wound 'cause we're not sadists, but it's a wound nonetheless. Again, we have the clock that's rigged. So you have a wound, you're in front of a clock, it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time, or real time. The wound heals based on clock time, not real time. All right. So when you go to a doctor and let's say you broke your arm, I don't know how long it would take to heal. Let's, for argument's sake, let's say 3 months. I don't know how— a month. Okay. And you ask the doctor, how long is it going to take for my arm to heal? And he tells you a month. If you called me, I'd tell you you can do it in half that time, right? That, you know, many of our beliefs typically become self-fulfilling prophecies. And so we have to change our beliefs, realizing that we can be far more than we realize. Fatigue is something that Dossie mentioned before we went on air about. The people who are listening who often suffer from fatigue. Now, fatigue is largely a psychological construct. Most people don't realize this. They believe the body is just going to wear down. You know, when you're tired, you're tired. There's nothing you can do about it. Maybe have an energy bar, which, by the way, I find very funny. We used to call them candy bars. You weren't supposed to have them. You call it an energy bar, you can have it. But at any rate, and, you know, so we have a lot of studies on fatigue. Fatigued. The simplest is, again, a clock. People are in the sleep lab, they wake up, the clock has been rigged. So for a third of the people, when they wake up, they see the clock, that's the amount of sleep they actually got. For a third of the people, they got 2 hours fewer. For a third of the people, they got 2 hours more sleep. Psychological.

But they don't know.

Right, exactly. Psychological and physiological responses Follow clock time. Now, so let me tell you something that I did in my class around the time of the marathon, which was fun. I asked my students, "How far is it humanly possible to run?" Now, these are Harvard kids. They know marathon is 26 miles, so it's gotta be a little more than that. So somebody says 28, somebody 30, 30, it becomes like an auction. Somebody then typically says 50 miles. Everybody groans, who can run 50 miles? Then I turn on YouTube, a video of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico. And these people can run 200 miles without stopping. The reason I point this out is because it's my belief that that difference between 50, which most of us don't think we could run, ever run, and 200 is enormous, but I don't think comes close to the difference between what we think we can do for our health and what we actually can do, primarily just by changing our minds.

There was a study you did with jumping jacks that I thought people could relate to. Can you share that?

You probably remember it better than I do. You have to remember that I have been doing this research for 45 years. Okay, so the jumping jacks. What did we do? We told half of them—

I can tell you if you like. You asked one group of participants to do 100 jumping jacks, and most of them stopped at about 70 and said they were exhausted, two-thirds of the way through.

So if you were to do 100 jumping jacks and tell me when you're tired, most people get tired, say they're tired around 70. So we take another group and we have them do 200 jumping jacks. And now we ask them to tell us when they're tired. They get tired at 140. So it seems that we have a sense that two-thirds, between a half and two-thirds of the way through whatever the activity is, when we're going to become fatigued. Now, one of the fun things about fatigue is that it's very much context-dependent. So imagine you're word processing all day long at work and your neck, your back killing you, and then you go home and you play the piano, which basically essentially the same physical movements, but it's in a different context. You don't see it that way. A fun study that somebody else did many years ago, Frank Beach, he took a little boy rat and he introduced a little girl rat. And they copulate. And then, as you know, the little boy rat just gets too tired. He needs to rest. But as soon as you— if instead of giving him that time to rest, you immediately introduce a new little girl rat, he's ready to go. So for me, the example would be I go through a full meal. If I were to have a taste of an appetizer again, I'd probably go through the meal again. Satiation, fatigue are largely psychological constructs. Is that, is that clear? Okay. If it were wired in, if it were the case that you're going to get tired no matter what, then it wouldn't matter how many jumping jacks I asked you to do. Do 50, do 100, 200, 300, 400. Everybody would get tired around the same time. But you get tired depending on the entire task and two-thirds of the way through that.

And how you perceive that task.

Yeah. Something that we probably should start with, if I didn't want to so quickly tell you my pancreas story, is what I mean by being mindful. Right? Because mindfulness that I've been studying for 45 years has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is fine. It's just different. And by the way, meditation isn't mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you undergo to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness as we study it— and I did lots of early research on meditation— but mindfulness as we study it is not a practice. It's an immediate response that follows from the realization that Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. So if you take, you know, you look at somebody you live with or somebody you think you know well and just notice 3 new things about them, all of a sudden you're going to notice things that you didn't know before. Walk out your door and look around now with the intention of seeing 3, 5 new things. And each time you do this with things you think you know, you come to see, gee, you didn't know it as well as you thought you did. When you finally realize that, then you start off recognizing that you don't know. That's what puts you in the present. It's very sweet that people say to each other, be in the moment. But you see, you can't be in the moment when you're mindless. And we're mindless almost all of the time, sadly. When you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. The way to be in the moment is to actively notice new things. So you actively notice new things when you know you don't know. If the two of you were going to visit me tomorrow at my home in Dartmouth, Mass., you wouldn't have to practice being mindful. You have no idea what it's going to be like. You know, she'd walk in the door and say, "Oh, look at those books she's—" Did she do those paintings? Everything would be new and potentially interesting. Now, this act of noticing, it turns out, is energy begetting, not consuming. All right. So what happens as you're actively noticing, the neurons are firing. And our research makes clear to me that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So in early studies, we would take elderly people I hate using that term now that I'm so old, but nevertheless, we take older people and we teach them to be mindful and we find that they live longer. So the effects are very dramatic. Now, everything that we've learned in our lives has taught us essentially to be mindless. I think the biggest perpetrators are parents. And schools, they tell you facts as if these facts are always true. So I was at a horse event. I've told this story so many times, but it never ceases to amaze me, my own mindlessness. And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog? Well, you know, I don't know if your audience realizes I am Harvard, Yale, all the way. I'm the person you hated in school who knew all the answers. Nobody knows better than I do that horses don't eat meat, period. So, but I say to him, sure, I'm happy to watch your horse. And I'm thinking to myself, he's crazy, right? He goes, gets the hot dog, brings it back, and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I think I know could be wrong. All right. Now, when you know you don't know, what do you do? You sit up and you pay attention. That makes everything new and everything potentially exciting. Unless you mistakenly believe that other people know. Because if you know and I know that I don't know, then I either ignore you, you know, stay away from you, or I genuflect to you, or whatever. I'm telling you, nobody knows. Nobody can know because everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Now, if you want to examine the importance of that in the health sphere. Whenever you're given any health information, any information, it's always a probability, not, not an absolute fact. Okay. So when you're told you have cancer, you should never be told you have cancer. When you're told you have anything, they cannot know. For sure. It's very important because as soon as you think that you know something absolutely, you do what follows from that absolute. Right.

Well, we do have limitations because we think cancer is a deadly disease and we know the percentages of where we might die. But doesn't it also help to know that we have cancer so we know how to approach it?

Oh, no. I'm not suggesting that diagnoses serve no purpose. What I'm suggesting is when you're given the diagnosis that you recognize that this is a probability. It says most of the people who we've examined who have these symptoms follow this particular course of action. All right. And we're going to call that cancer, for example. Okay. So you can never predict the individual case. This is very important. And, you know, I get calls all day long from people who— sometimes people who I don't even know who've been given these dread diagnoses. And I typically tell them the story about my mother. I'm probably— Alexandra, you can tell me if this is right or not— the only person you know who has two pancreas stories. I'm going to tell you the second one now. So my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the endgame, right? Then magically it was totally gone. And the medical world couldn't explain it, right? That spontaneous remissions occur, they probably occur far more often than the medical world is aware of or can be. I mean, I know that if I were in a hospital and I'm told I'm going to die soon, I'd want to go home to die in my own house and bed. And I don't know why, but that seems to be something common for people. Now, if whatever I had was gone, I don't think it would occur to me to call the medical world and tell them they were wrong. You know, haha, I'm not dead. I mean, just, you know, so we have all of these spontaneous healings that we don't know about. There are people who never go to— I mean, you have tumors, they come, they go. Uh, the medical world doesn't know how frequently that is, so we just can't know how likely it is. But the point is that it does happen, and that the information you have is about norms, other people, you know, a group of people, not everybody who follows whatever the particular path is. So there's reason for you to, in most cases, to take care of yourself, to not give in, let's say, to the diagnosis. You know, when people are given a dread diagnosis, they tend to think the symptoms are going to stay the same or they're going to get worse. Nothing stays the same. And so, you know, the stock market, if it goes up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up, it goes down a little, it goes up, goes down a little, and so on. When you're looking at your own symptoms and expecting that they're only going to stay the same or get worse, you don't notice those minor fluctuations, the times that they're actually better. Because if you did notice that, then you can say, well, why? Why now is it better than before? All right. And take advantage of that information. And we developed this into what I call attention to symptom variability technique or treatment. That all— it sounds fancy. It just means being mindful because being mindful is noticing change. So here you're going to notice the change of your symptoms. Let me give you an example. It can be with stress as well. It doesn't matter. Anything you're holding still. So Datsy is terribly stressed. She thinks she's stressed all the time. No one is stressed all the time. But when she's not stressed, she's not thinking about the stress. So she's stressed, then she's doing something else, then she's stressed again, and it seems as if it was steady state. Now, if I'm helping Datsy and I say, okay, Datsy, I'm going to call you a few times a day, random times over the course of a week. And then I ask you, so how are you now? Are you more stressed than before? Less stressed? It's rarely going to be exactly the same. She's a little less. And then I say, why? And then you search for the reasons why. That search is mindful, which itself is going to be good for your health. All right. So if you imagine I'm not sure if I'm being clear enough, so one of the two of you tell me. But let's say with Dossie, she finds, you know, she is maximally stressed when she's talking to Ellen Langer. All right, the cure is simple. Don't talk to me. Okay? That when you have an explanation for why it's a little better or a little worse, there's action you can take. All right, so with chronic illnesses, there, as soon as, if you do this attention to variability, the first thing is, Wow, the medical world has led you to believe there's nothing you can do for yourself. Now there is something so you feel better. Number 2, as soon as you see at some point the symptom is a little better, you say, wow, I'm not maximally stressed and pain or whatever it is all the time. 3, when I ask you why now is it better than before, that search is mindful. And that's going to itself be good for your health. And finally, if you're looking for a solution, you're more likely to find one, I believe. Now, we've done this with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, chronic pain, arthritis, big disorders, right? And in each case, we get the symptoms diminishing as a result of it. Now, I wanted to find a way, since placebos are so effective, find a way that we can take care of ourselves. But you can't give yourself a placebo because you know that you're giving yourself something that is nothing. So it's not likely to work. So this was my alternative. So you can do this yourself. Everybody has a smartwatch, a smartphone, whatever, smart device, and you set it to ring in an hour and it rings. Then you ask yourself, well, is my symptom better or worse than before? And why? And then set it to ring, you know, 2 hours and 10 minutes later and ask the same question. And you keep doing this and you get more and more information. And the doing of it— what's nice about this, to be contrasted with some of the things that sadly happen in the medical world, there are no negative side effects. Now, I'm not suggesting that you do this instead of going to the doctor, but, you know, while you're waiting or even after you've seen the doctor and ways of taking care of yourself. But you're not going to do this if you believe that there's no way for you to get better. That's why I keep stressing that the medical information that you're using is just a probability. That means many of the people who we've— who have been looked at in this particular way behave in this way. Not anybody by a long shot. Okay. All right. Now, have I lost you? Amazed you? Where are you?

I'm interested to go back to perceptions a bit because I think there's a lot there. And I was thinking about it when you were telling the story of your class and running distances and people were saying, you know, oh, maybe 28 miles, maybe 50. And then we looked at the South American runners and they're running 200. Miles, 250 miles, and that was years ago. And it made me think of the 4-minute barrier, right, that Roger Bannister broke in '54. And it had been 60 years people talking about it, but at first of thinking that's never possible, and then even people talking about it might be impossible, but nobody did it. And then people just started doing it in droves very quickly after he broke it. It had been 60 years.

Dossie is an Olympian herself. She won a silver medal in the London Games. So she, she knows how to push limits and get rid of the self-doubt.

But the point that Daxi is raising is really important, that whenever we buy into a limit, we're being mindless. We can't know, you know. And, you know, so let's say, Daxi, you can tell me how many push-ups a person can do. What's the most? Okay, whatever it is, let's say 100 pushups. I don't know. I can't do 3. All right. So, so there's no, there's no reason to believe there's no data that can be gathered to say you can't do 1 more or 5 more. The point is that science can never tell you you can't. All science can show you is what you've tried didn't work if it didn't work. So that's very different. And I make a big deal out of this in a lot of the stuff that I write. Very important to appreciate the difference between uncontrollable and indeterminate. When you believe something is uncontrollable, which you would do if you say, here's a limit, it means I can't get past that. If you want to, you just don't do it because after all, You know, it's uncontrollable. When you understand that it's indeterminate, which just means we just don't know, then, hey, I'm going to try it, you know, and if I can, great. And if I can't, so be it. It's a very different way of organizing ourselves. So there's a, you know, even if we go back to the idea of chronic illness where people think there's nothing they can do about it, I've given you the major thing, attention to symptom variability. But there are so many other things. You know, when you're given a dread diagnosis, most people become depressed, withdrawn, you know, turn, you know, tune out the world at large and essentially are increasing their mindlessness, which is bad for their health, you know, so that if with whatever diagnosis you keep yourself active and engaged in the world in whatever ways you can, that's going to be good for your health. And this is one that I think both of you will enjoy, especially you, Dotsy. Not from my lab, but there is evidence that imagined exercise is as good as real exercise. So if I am lifting weights, okay, whatever will happen to my biceps will happen. If I'm imagining myself lifting weights, you get essentially the same improvement so that when we're sitting with some chronic illness, We can engage, so be mindful, we can engage in imagined exercise. We should be still feeling in charge of our lives. And I tell you, it's very interesting. I don't understand, and I've never been in the position where somebody is telling me, you know, you have a month to live or something like that. If you told me that, I can't imagine I would waste a minute feeling sorry for myself, complaining. Or maybe you do that, you know, quickly. But then I've got a lot of living to do, and I would start doing it as soon as possible. And we have a world now that seems to me obsessed with adding more years to their lives. And I think people have it wrong. I think that what you want to do is add more life to your years by being mindful. And when you do that, interestingly, you're probably going to add more health and lives to, uh, years to your life.

It was coming, coming off of, uh, the, the 4-minute mile and, and the perception of what somebody is capable of, a human is capable of. And, but you talk about perceptions of aging, and we, you know, I would tend to say, oh, it's not a perception, I'm 51, like, that is how old I am. But how does changing our perceptions of aging actually influence our biological age?

Well, you know, in directly and indirectly. So indirectly, that if, if you realize that these numbers don't mean what they used to mean, you know, people used to die around 40, then, you know, people were dying at 60. I have two people close to me who are celebrating their 100th birthday. In the next 2 months, you know, and the expectation is that kids born today may live to 120. Who knows? You know, if you think of it the way we were talking about with the push-ups, that if somebody can live to 120, wouldn't you think somebody else can come along and live to 120 and a half? I mean, we're all very different. And if 100— and so again, we don't know how long we can live. But I think that if you see yourself as old, then again, you behave differently. You know, you say, well, this is something for young people. And, you know, so— and you start to talk yourself into being old so you don't engage the same activities. Also, you make different attributions. For things that happen. So lots of people of my age, I'm 77, you forget something and, oh my God, am I starting to get dementia? And if you think that now, every time you don't remember, you get into a conversation with yourself, you become stressed, you know, again, you start to withdraw from things. I teach Harvard students. These are young people. And periodically I'll just say, okay, what did I say? And the last thing I said and the last lecture? Nobody remembers. So if the 20-year-old is remembering, the 20-year-old doesn't say they're not getting dementia. Right, exactly. And that what happens is when you have the expectation that you're going to forget as you get older, then you overlook other explanations. So for me, when I was a young up-and-coming, you'd introduce me to people and I would remember their names because, you know, It was important, I thought, to my future success. At this point, I really don't care. So you introduced me to 3 of your closest friends. I'm going to nod and be pleasant. I know that if there's going to be any interesting over-time interaction, I'll have plenty of time to learn their names. So now when you start asking me about Susie and I don't remember which one was Susie, I know that it has nothing to do with memory. Many people don't. They think, oh, I should know Susie's name. I met Susie. What's wrong with me? I must be coming senile, demented, right? Suffering from dementia. People need to understand that if you don't learn something in the first place, then when you don't know it in the second place, it's not that you've forgotten it. All right. So, and it's also the people do that with their aches and pains. You know, if you have arthritis, for example, and you're gardening, you assume that the aches and pains are all a function of the arthritis, probably the position you are in. We overlook other explanations that would help keep us healthier.

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Now, I'm, you know, it, I don't know, you know, to say something and to believe something and do something are very different things. And I think that if the affirmation is something that you're taking seriously, which means that you're going out in the world and you're being different in a positive way than you would have without the affirmation, well, you know, then it's essentially the same. I don't know, you know, what is the expression? You know, talk the talk or walk the walk. So if they're talking the talk of the affirmation, they also walking the walk. But sure, everything positive, you know, there's, there's nothing out there that in and of itself is good or bad. It all depends on the way we frame it. And so if, you know, doing positive affirmations now makes you feel you're going to be a happier, better person, you're going to stand taller, you know, your posture is going to be better, that's going to be good for your health. You're gonna be out there in the world. You know, if I feel good about myself, then I'm happy to speak to the two of you. And if those affirmations lead me to that place, then you can see how my life is going to be much richer. But there are many ways of getting to these places.

Sometimes they say, I mean, I've read that affirmations can become mindless. So what I think I'm hearing you say, as long as they're mindful and fully, but we get so used to going, I am a wonderful person this morning.

That, you know, I think that it's important not to say I'm an awful person, but I don't think it's good to say I'm a wonderful person. I'm a person, I think, should cover it. And so, you know, when you recognize, as I was trying to say before, that things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad— right now most people believe this is a good thing, I've got to kill myself to get it. This is a bad thing. I have to kill my, you know, kill other people to avoid it and so on. When you recognize that it's not events that cause our feelings, that cause stress, for example, it's the view we take of the event. Then the more mindful you are, the more potential views you have. So, you know, a few other things for people in stress. I believe that actually stress is the major cause of illness, you know, that if people have a diagnosis and those people say dread diagnosis, whatever it is, and half of the people with that are stressed and the other half aren't, it's the stress that's going to determine the course of the disease. And stress is psychological. Stress is a result of the view you take of an event. You change the view because you're mindful now. The event changes. So, you know, you might ask your audience to ask themselves next time they're stressed, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost always just an inconvenience. Oh my God, I burnt the dinner. I forgot the report. I missed— I got to smash the car. Very rarely are— and as soon as you do that, you know, then you breathe. You say, yeah, all right, so what? And that's one of the beauties that comes with age. Because you've done so many of these things before and have seen, yeah, you know, it hasn't had the tragic outcome. In fact, if you think back over the things that were stressful for you, almost all of them probably didn't happen. The thing you're worried about, the oh my God, those things, and if it did happen, Dotsy, because you're remembering one that happened, clearly you're here today So you got through it. So there's no reason to be quite so crazed about it. And, you know, so I would say to people, because stress requires two things. It requires a belief that something's going to happen and that when that thing happens, it's going to be awful. Now, you can't predict. People have an illusion that they can predict. So if you said to yourself, what are three reasons that this thing won't happen? Them. So now you immediately feel better because, oh my God, it's going to happen. Well, maybe it will, maybe it won't. Now, the more interesting part is let's assume it does happen. What are 3 reasons for— 2, it doesn't matter— that that's actually an advantage? So you're afraid your husband is going to leave you. Okay, think of 3 reasons why he probably won't. Okay, now let's make believe he does leave you. Well, the first thing to recognize is a relationship requires two people. If one of them isn't there, you're not in a good relationship and you're better off without it. Right. You know, if he leaves, you can now eat muffins in bed or whatever it is that, you know, we all make compromises in our relationships. But the point is that as soon as we recognize the advantages to this thing that feels scary, again, we can just relax. For me, I just really don't worry about anything. You know, we're speaking now and it's fun for me. If my internet goes out, okay, you know, then I'll, I'll go have a drink because it's almost drink time. I don't really drink, but I'll do something fun. But the point is, The point is that these things that we worry about—

It's how we look at the situation.

Yeah. Yeah.

And my best friend always says, it's happening for us, not to us.

That's beautiful. Yeah. No, I, you know, I report something in the book where I talk about one day I came back from a friend's house for dinner and the fire department was outside. My house had gone up in smoke. Smoke. That— so I lost, um, 80% of what I owned. So that was scary, and that would seem on the tragic side. Um, and, you know, then, um, I had to— because I didn't have the house, I moved into the Charles Hotel, uh, for the next many months. And, um, you know, I was a sight to be seen because I'm friendly and whatever, and I had my two dogs with me, and so most people knew me. It was Christmas Eve. It was around Christmas that all this happened. Christmas Eve, I went out with friends and I came back to the hotel room and it was full of gifts, not from the owner of the hotel, not from the management, but from the so-called little people, the people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitresses. It was— it took years for me to be able to tell the story without it bringing tears to my eyes. Now, I don't remember virtually anything that I lost in the fire. But, you know, every Christmas I am reminded about how good people can be and may be. So net sum, I think that it was actually a good thing. You know, that events, when they happen, you can either make them good or you can make them bad. They're in and of themselves nothing. And you do this a little while and then it becomes sort of just the way, you know, when you know that you can see how this thing is positive and you see how it could be negative, but you know when it's positive, you feel good. Why would you turn around and see it as negative? Now, I remember, Dossie, you wanted to ask me about burnout.

This is kind of a personal thing of what I've been working on. And yes, there is a very specific question at the end, but I recently, I'd say maybe the last couple of months, have been working on being, trying to be more in my body than my mind. And I guess kind of quieting the mind's ever chattiness. I think in a way I want to feel free from my mind. So I started listening to the voice in my head and paying attention to its repetitive thought patterns, which are many in many people's minds. But I know definitely in mine, you know, whatever it is, I'm frustrated with someone at work, there's pain in my heart from a broken friendship or a fight, or— and my mind will go over and over and over the same movie in words, um, from what they said to me, what I'd like to say back but haven't, blah blah blah. So I've been trying to listen to that voice impartially because usually I just let it run and judge it. So trying to listen to it impartially without that judgment so that I can, you know, kind of be aware of my own presence. And you said earlier that mindfulness is just noticing things. Is that what I'm doing?

It's hard for me to know in the absence of seeing you actually do it.

Yeah, no, you know everything in the subject.

You have to. Come on. As you describe it, yes. If you're noticing that, gee, I told myself the story last week and, you know, last year and so on, that's going to lead you to changing the story, you know, to see that you were mindless. But when you were talking before this, you know, this idea of what people call monkey brain or whatever, where We have to get away from our thoughts because they're getting us crazed. People need to understand that it's not the thought that's getting you crazed. It's the mindlessness surrounding the thought in some sense. You know, thoughts are just thoughts. If I say it's the worry about the thought, it's the overcontrolling the thought. Well, let me try to say this a little differently. Our thinking is the best thing that we can do for ourselves. Being mindful is the best thing we can do for ourselves. Now, people think that thinking is hard and that being mindful is hard because what is hard is the evaluation of that thinking. You know, so problem solving is fun, but the fear that you're not going to get the solution is, is what's problematic. So it's not so much you're having the thought, it's that you don't follow it through where you get a good answer to it. You know, so, oh my God, is my passport going to arrive in time? What if it doesn't arrive in time? And then you just go on and on. Or what you can do is say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to call the passport office and find out when my passport is coming. Now you don't have to be thinking about it. It any longer. You see what I'm saying? It's many people who are doing this, this kind of chatter, nervous chatter that is destructive for them, don't have to stop thinking at all because you really can't. You know, if I said to you, stop thinking about pizza, you're going to be thinking about pizza. We can't ourselves to stop. But what we should be doing is to tell ourselves to think about it, but think about it differently. So if you have the pattern that you've had the story you've told yourself now 20 times, and you see, which is, you know, very astute of you and mindful, that gee, this is the same story, the next step is to change the story. So it's not that we don't want to be Yeah, you know, we can change many things about it. You know, we can change, how do we know that it's true? How might I have misunderstood? How might this turn out to be something very advantageous? There are many questions we can ask of it, but we tend not to. And so, you know, it stays there and you want to get away from the thought and quiet your mind and be in your body, whatever that means. And I think that Remember, to me, this mind and body are one thing. So you don't want to— even if you are able to completely turn off your thoughts, that would be bad for your body. What you want to do is, you know, whatever we do, we can do it mindfully or mindlessly. When we do it mindfully, the neurons are firing. And that's, again, literally and figuratively enlivened. When you're being mindful, you light up. We have evidence that people find us more charismatic, more authentic, and trustworthy. When we're mindful, it actually leaves its imprint on the things that we produce. It's in all ways good. And, you know, so— and when you're being mindless, you're letting the past determine how you're going to be right now. You know, so that person that you're, you know, you're having that fight with and you see them the next day, for you to just assume they are just as they were the day before and you were, and you have to continue with that fight, is essentially being mindless. Because on some very real— both of you are brand new right now, and both of you— and this is the advantage of getting a little older— recognize that most of the stuff is just so silly. You know, um, that I wrote a paper, a blog, years ago. You remember you're 3 years old and you fall and you get a raspberry and scrape on your leg and you scream bloody murder. And then you're 7 years old, you're not going to do that anymore. But now, um, Johnny or Janie doesn't give you a Valentine, um, and you're devastated. And then you're 14 and now you have pimples Yeah, it keeps— there has always been something that we were, oh my gosh, about. But then you finally get to the point where you realize it's all kind of silly, you know, that I don't know, an example that made sense to me that might be silly for you is if I had spilled something, say I'm wearing a white shirt and I spilled some spaghetti sauce on it, I would walk around all day like this. Cover, which itself looks ridiculous, right? At this point now, so what is anybody going to think about me? So I have a little spaghetti sauce on my shirt. The people who I know who see me, they know they've never seen spaghetti sauce before. They know that I'm neat. The people I'm never going to see again, do I really care? And so, you know, so in so many ways, as we get older, we naturally become more mindful because our experience has shown sometimes this is good, sometimes it's bad, and we can choose how to move it one way or the other.

You— I'm going to switch a little bit, but stay on sort of the well-being track. You've done studies on alcohol and when people drink more because people— and this is relevant to our audience who cares a lot about what they eat and their exercise and maybe their drinking. Can you share some of the factors that make people sue themselves more than in other situations? Because none of us do our thing 24/7, whatever it is that we use to— a habit that we would like to get rid of. We don't do it 24/7.

There's a larger issue behind this, which is that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective. Or else the actor wouldn't do it. Now, every time we're demeaning ourselves or somebody else, we're being mindless. Remind me to get back to the alcohol example. But so let's say, Dotsy, you can't stand me because I am so gullible, which I am. And you're driving me crazy because you're so inconsistent. Now, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning, you know, today I'm going to be gullible and inconsistent. So what are they doing from their perspective? Well, it turns out, you know, as soon as we recognize that their behavior makes sense and you know that I'm gullible because I'm trusting, you can't be trusting without being gullible. Now, do you want me to change? Probably not. And your inconsistency is because you're flexible. All right. So do I want you to change? Probably not. But if we want people to change, what we need to do is persuade them to change. For me, you'd have to persuade me not to be trusting. And for you, I'd have to persuade you not to be flexible. Do you understand what I'm saying? Every single negative description has an equally strong but oppositely balanced alternative.

Human beings don't do things destructively.

We do things because we believe that it's going to help us So in the same way, you know, somebody who is drinking, um, they say, oh my God, you know, it's a terrible thing, how could I do this? You know, um, you tell them that they're hurting their liver. Nobody is drinking in order to affect their liver, right? They're drinking for some other reason. Now, if I said to you that, do you know, so you're stressed, doing X makes you feel calm, should you do X? You're going to say yes. Okay. So now I say the ex is taking a drink. All right. So now rather than put the person down, if the person can respect themselves because their behavior made sense, then they can seek alternatives to become less stressed. It's a very powerful concept because for any of us who don't feel at every moment that we're you know, worthwhile, competent, successful, nice people. It's because what we're doing is evaluating our behavior from the observer's perspective. Sometimes we're the observer. I look, ah, you're right, look at how gullible I was. I am, I am really, you know, I've been taken by two psychopaths, not just one, you know. But that, you know, if you said to me You know, the way to not be gullible is not to be— I said, no, I don't care. I'd rather be trusting. I, you know, people who are boring, they're not boring. They're consistent. They want to be consistent. It's, you know, it's very different. It's like when years ago, you both remember when women were called aggressive rather than assertive. You know, so each of these things, the same thing, only it's not. So we do what we do because it makes sense to us. And other people are doing what they're doing because it makes sense to them. And the negative evaluations tend to be mindless and to obfuscate the fact that there is a context in which their behavior actually makes sense.

Right. And that's why, I mean, Dotsy and I both have struggled with eating disorders. And that's why the important thing when it's not about what you eat, it's why you're eating. So the question is never, why are you eating all that food, for example? It's, what is go— what's eating you, really, right? What is it that you're needing that food? So in, in coaching, um, we call that a hidden commitment, so that you say you want to stop eating the food, but you really have a commitment to try and reduce your stress. And so that's why you're not—

until you address the need to reduce stress, you will never stop eating the Okay, so essentially, um, people are aware of, as I said a moment before, of when we're mindful or mindless. Most people are mindless most of the time. When we're mindful, people find us attractive. When we're mindful, people seek us out and feel calm in our presence because they don't feel evaluated, for example. So we had an experimenter who was going to be mindful or mindless people were coming in for a wine tasting experiment, and they were told they could drink as much as they want. And the experimenter, you know, was going to be mindful, which would mean noticing new things, being open and aware, or mindless, the way most people naturally are. And we were just going to look and see how much the person drank. And when the experimenter was mindful, people drank less. You know, people— we have an expression, the light's on but nobody's home. You know, when you're talking about people who— one oar in the water, whatever we say, that people who are just not there. It's very hard to realize how often we ourselves aren't there. But to go back to where we started, that Every time we think we know, we're being mindless. So I usually often start lectures to businesses or to wherever by asking a simple question. And I'll ask, how much is 1 1? Because this is the thing that everybody thinks they know. So if I asked you in the outside world and I wasn't Professor Langer asking you, you'd probably lose patience, demean me in your mind or whatever. What is she doing? Okay, but now I seriously ask you, Dotsy, how much is 1 plus 1?

I'm thinking it might be 2, but it's probably not because you wouldn't be asking if it was. Exactly.

Well, it turns out that the thing we know best is not that 1 and 1 is 2 all the time. If you were to add— this is a fun one given your conversation about food. So if you take 1 pizza and you put it on top of another pizza, you have 2 pizzas. But if you take 1 lasagna and you put it on top of another lasagna, you have 1 lasagna, which is taller. All right, 1 plus 1 is 1. You take 1 pile of laundry and you add 1 pile of laundry. What do you have? 1 pile of laundry. You take 1 cloud plus 1 cloud and you have 1 cloud. So in the real world, 1 plus 1 probably doesn't equal 2. As often as it does. As it does. Now, it's also the case most people don't realize that even when you're talking about 1 1 equaling 2, you're using a base 10 number system. If you were using a base 2 number system, 1 1 would be written as 10. Okay, so now let's say we're getting going soon and somebody approaches you, very unlikely, and says, okay, Alexandra, How much is 1 1? You're no longer going to mindlessly blurt out 2. You're going to pay some attention to the context. You're going to realize you have choices to make, right? So you organize yourself. And questions to ask. Exactly, exactly. You know, and so horses don't eat meat, 1 1 2, virtually everything we learned in school. Needs to be questioned rather than accepted as if it's always true. When you think something is always true, you don't pay any attention. So I used to think before I started painting that if it wasn't the fall, you said to me, what color are leaves? I would say green, right? Then I start painting. So I'm looking at all these— my gosh, there are hundreds and hundreds of shades of green. And the way the sun is in the sky, depending on the season, everything changes again. And so this one simple thing that I understood now becomes fascinating, many different things. And so by being more mindful, by recognizing we don't know, and again, it's okay. You don't have to feel bad about knowing, not knowing, because nobody knows. So you stand tall and the posture I suggest to my students, to everybody, is to be confident but uncertain. All right. And, and by doing that, other people will approach you, will find you attractive. You don't have to know all the answers. And everything in some sense becomes new and potentially exciting. And so things like boredom and burnout become things of the past. You burn out when you just keep giving and you have no idea, you know, you're No longer noticing new things. Just a simple noticing. Right. And it leads to, as you'll see if you read the book, that we become aware in ways we haven't gotten to talk about now, how everything is mutable. Everything. That means anything that doesn't fit can be changed. And if your audience is largely women, it's most important for women to understand this. Because almost everything that was decided had been decided by men. So I make this point if I'm lecturing, I'll see if there's a tall man in the audience. He usually is. So he's 6'5", I'm 5'3". I ask him to come up on the stage and we look ridiculous together. I ask him to put his hand out. I put my hand next to his. His hand is 3 inches larger than mine. And then I just raise it. Should we do anything physical the same way? Probably not. So if he's the one who said this is the way you hold the tennis racket, if I mindlessly hold the tennis racket exactly that way, I'm never going to be as good as I can be. So what we need to understand is that everything is not just that all of our facts are probabilities, but that even the things we choose to find facts about are decisions, that everything that is was at one point a decision. For something to be a decision, it means there is uncertainty, which means that everything that is could be different. And that when it doesn't work for us, you know, change it. And for women, it's more important because you're going to be more different from, from him than perhaps another man.

It's so cool to learn about what does becoming mindful entail. When I— before this interview, I think I thought it was a lot more woo-woo, a lot more— and you kind of alluded to that in the very beginning— maybe more complex. But it's like, in leaving the audience with everyday practices that they could adopt to become more mindful, I mean, it's just— I'm really learning. It's noticing your surroundings and maybe even noticing more details in your surroundings and Right before this podcast, I took my dog on a walk who is like 7 different breeds, but it's mostly hunting dogs. So she's wildly obsessed with squirrels to the nth degree. And a lot of times, you know, we're going on a walk and, you know, she wants to stop and look at every tree and see the squirrels. And, you know, sometimes I let her, but a lot of times I'm like, no, we're gonna walk. And so today before this, I thought, I'm just gonna stop with her a couple of times. And she does it to the very first tree and I stopped and I looked up and I didn't see any squirrels. I said, "Sheesh, there's no squirrels in that tree. Come on." And she was obsessed. So, I stopped and I looked with her. And do you know there were 6 squirrels up in that tree? But we had to— she didn't see them. She just knew they were there, right? She, she— it's like animals, other animals, not human animals. They're able to notice their surroundings with so much more of themselves than just their eyes. And I thought, gosh, I wonder if I can start noticing with more of me than just here, like my dog.

Yeah. No, I think actually we'll go back to health. There was— I have this in the book. I don't recall it well enough. Broad outline. Dogs were trained or were able to pick up the scent of people who had cancer. And, and, you know, dogs can do it. Why can't we do it? You know, so somebody would say, well, they have, you know, many more sensors, whatever it's called. But there's no evidence that they need all of those, you know, right? You take a A man who can lift 30 pounds doesn't mean he couldn't also lift 200 pounds. And you have to work to decode my examples here. But the idea, I mean, it's a wonderful idea. What I used to do is be on the floor to see, well, what are they actually seeing? You know, walk around and yeah, I think The more I know people, the more I love my dogs. So I'm open to them teaching me whatever they can. But, you know, so we have mindless notions of smell. We have mindless notions of taste. Almost everything that we talk about, where we talk about as if we know, needs to be opened up. And, you know, when you're answering a question, give multiple answers rather than a single answer. So you don't, you know, lock yourself in. We have a thing in this country where we have people who do things really well and we call them super— super smellers, super tasters, super memorizers. And I think that that's a very big mistake because that suggests that the rest of us aren't able to do that. And so again, you absent yourself, like with the running. You know, that, well, I just can't. And so if you believe you can't, then you don't. And people need to understand that with whatever they want to do, it's the mastering of it, not having mastered, that matters. It's the learning how to do it. So it doesn't matter whether, you know, if you increase your ability to smell by 1%, that's 1%. That feels good, you know, you can run around another block or whatever it is that people need to understand that once you finally master something, what happens then for most of us, it becomes a non-event. So the example I'm used to using is you get in the elevator as a little kid and you try to press that button and you can't reach it. It's very exciting. Then your parents pick you up and you can hit the button. And this goes on for a while. And then finally, You're tall enough and you can hit that button, you know, going to the fourth floor and you press that button. But from then on in, it's a non-event. I mean, when was the last time you got excited about being able to press the elevator? You know, so the point is to recognize that it's the not knowing that's exciting. And that if you understand fully what I'm saying, then everything is potentially available to us in that way because we can never know because it's changing. All right. And that— and there are always multiple ways of doing whatever we're doing. And we tend to just lock ourselves in. And I think that too many people essentially are sealed in unlived lives. And which saddens me because it's so simple to break the seal. And when you do do that through an appreciation of mind-body unity, um, just being more mindful in general, um, life becomes very exciting and stress goes away. And, um, I don't know, when you recognize how easy it is and all the good things that follow from it, it's hard for me to believe that people wouldn't embrace it and do as much as they can to have to be in this space.

Well, thank you for helping us break the seal. And folks, you can get The Mindful Body anywhere. But tell us where we can find you, Dr. Langer. I'm— I'm fine. And more of your research. You can't find me.

Don't find me. You're not hiding.

I think if you just Google me, probably whatever you're interested in will come up. But I have a website. I don't know how up to date it is, but it's EllenLanger.com. And yeah, I think the website has all of my books. I think it has examples of my paintings and so on. And so that might be a place to go.

Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. We really appreciate it. And I've learned so much as someone who— Me too. —feels most comfortable in certainty. You've inspired me to feel to allow more uncertainty in my life. So thank you.

As long as you stand tall, it's fine to say, gee, I don't know. But what happens is when we don't know, we don't know because we think we're supposed to know. All right. Well, this was great fun. I thank you for having me on.