Legendary Harvard Scientist On The Study That Reversed Aging | Dr. Ellen Langer

In 1979, a group of elderly men walked into a retreat center. One week later, they walked out stronger, faster, even biologically younger. And there was no medication, no intervention. The only thing that changed was the way they saw themselves. We all carry assumptions about what's possible in life, that our limits— physical, mental, emotional— are mostly fixed. But what if they're not? What if our mindsets are contributing to what's making us sick? What if many of us are living in mental prisons that were built by cultural scripts, not biology? Today's guest believes that many of our greatest limitations aren't just physical or emotional, they're perceptual. And when we stop questioning our limits, they become self-fulfilling. Her work has shown time and again that how we think is is one of the most powerful biological forces in the human body. Dr. Ellen Langer is a Harvard psychologist, the first tenured woman in Harvard's psychology department, and one of the most cited scientists in her field with over 17,000 citations to her name. For over 50 years, she's been known as the mother of mindfulness, though not the kind you're thinking of. Her definition isn't about stillness or meditation, it's about noticing, becoming awake to the present, to your assumptions, and to your agency. After decades of research, she's now getting massive traction online with hundreds of thousands of followers discovering what academia has known for years. Ellen Langer is a pioneer, and her work is shifting how we understand aging, illness, identity, and healing. At Mighty Pursuit, we help you make sense of life by looking at the whole person, Mind, body, and spirit, deeply interconnected parts of your everyday experience. Today's episode sits at the intersection of physical health, mental health, and wisdom, revealing how the way we think about aging, stress, conflict, and relationships can quietly shape the way we experience all of them. We go deep into the study that reversed markers of aging, into how stress, diagnosis, and expectation can shape our biology, sometimes more than the condition itself. And we go into all the real-world questions that follow. What about cancer, addiction, clinical depression? When is it your mindset and when is it something more? Where does biology end and belief begin? And how do we hold both without falling into toxic positivity or quiet despair? This conversation isn't about pretending everything's fine. Fine, it's about learning to see clearly so we can live wisely and build a life that actually works. Before we jump in, we want to share something that's become a real game changer for us at Mighty Pursuit, Magic Mind. If your brain ever feels overloaded, too many tabs open, hard to focus, and even harder to unwind at night, you're not alone. That's exactly where we were. Then we found Magic Mind. It's a small green shot packed with science-backed ingredients like matcha, ashwagandha, turmeric, and vitamin C, designed to support mental clarity, calm focus, and even your sleep cycle. It's not an energy spike, it's a flow state fuel. Within a week, we noticed less brain fog, more clarity, and a calmer kind of productivity that carried us through the day without the crash. If that sounds like something you could benefit from, you can check it out using the link below or scan the QR code on on the screen and make sure to use the code MIGHTY50 at checkout for 50% off your first month of subscription. The offer is only available through our link. Now let's get back to the episode. So I want to start where it all began, one of the most, uh, provocative studies that has ever been done. So 1979, a group of elderly men, they walk into a retreat, and there was some surprising results that came out of that. So can you take us into what happened and what it revealed?

Sure. Well, let me start with, this was the first test of the mind-body unity idea. Can we talk about that just briefly? Sure. Okay. So most people in today's world, they don't know that they believe in dualism. It's not a concept most people are discussing, but still everything that follows seems to suggest everybody accepts you have a mind, you have a body, as if these are separate. Now, if you have a mind and a body, then the question is, how do they talk to each other? How do you get from something immaterial, a thought, to something material called the body? And this has prevented progress of all sorts, especially with respect to our health. All right. So, and everybody's had the experience, you know, that a leaf blows in the fall across you and all of a sudden you get startled, your blood pressure impulse increase until you say, "Oh, it's just a leaf." All right. But how does it all happen? Well, I've thought about this and had many experiences. If you ask me about them, I'll tell you. But where it seemed to me to recognize these are just words. And if we put the mind and body back together as one thing, then wherever we put the mind, we're necessarily putting the body. And so we don't have to explain how you get from one to the other because it's all one. And so we've done lots of studies that are described in my new book, The Mindful Body. But the very first was the counterclockwise study, which, by the way, I can call a famous study now. Isn't that obnoxious? How can she call her own work famous? Because if you tune into, what is it, The Simpsons Go to Havana, they actually describe the study. So it's been out there.

And there was almost a movie that was made about it, right?

Well, there was going to be a movie. This was fun. In fact, the people who were making this movie were the people who called it counterclockwise. And so I borrowed it from them rather than the reverse for the title of the work. Yeah, Jennifer Aniston was supposed to play me and it was all great fun. I'd go to parties and everybody would decide who was going to play them. I said, how'd you end up in my movie? But it didn't, and she's delightful by the way. But it didn't end up getting made. Anyway, so what we did, we found a timeless retreat. It was a monastery. That we retrofitted to 20 years ago, 20 years earlier, and had these elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. All right. So they spoke about past events as if they were just happening. And all the magazines and books, TV shows that they watch were from the past, but responded to as if it was just now. So the question is, you take the mind, we put the mind back, what's going to happen? And the measures were interesting, I think, to say the least. We found that in a period of time as short as, I think, I don't remember if it was 5 days or a week, but it doesn't matter. Even if it were 3 weeks, the results were sort of amazing, but it was less than a week. Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they looked noticeably younger, all without any medical intervention. And so then fast forward, we've done many studies testing the same mind-body unity hypothesis.

Yeah, that is just so, you know, I think that after sitting with your work the past few weeks, I think that—

Why did it take you so long?

That doesn't just show the mind-body unity, but I think it highlights something about a lot of people are living in mental cages or mental prisons, essentially, that have been created by their own belief system.

Yes.

Or by maybe scripts that culture has gave them about what's possible. And I mean, I was just thinking about it. I'm like, well, if I retrofitted— I'm 35. So if I retrofitted environment when I was 15, you know, like, what would that— and I truly was like, if I immersed myself in that and when somebody in such an older age and there's these scripts that were handed about what it means to get older.

Well, see, the most important part of it, Matthew, is not the turning the clock back. It's recognizing that many of the things that we think we can't do any longer, many of the things that we see as debilitations, actually can be reversed.

Yeah.

And, you know, so, I mean, I got some— well, I don't remember that most of the comments on the study were gloriously pleasing, but this one person was arguing, "You can't turn the clock back." Well, literally, we're not turning the clock back. You know, you were still born when you were born. But the point of it is that most of our abilities, we don't know how far we can actually push things. And to assume that when you get older, it's all downhill. Is basically what I was arguing against.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the limits that we accept, I mean, you know, we're talking about aging and getting older, but then, you know, mental health, physical health, you know, a lot of these things, and we'll get into that, there's the reality of what's happening, you have a disease or whatever, or diagnosis, but the things that we accept about them, we never actually question, and so—

It's not just the things that we accept, virtually everything we're taught to accept, You know, what you're taught in school are learn these facts. And these facts are all conditional. I mean, by that, context-dependent. True sometimes, not true all the time. But we're not taught that. I was at this horse event many, many years ago. I've told this story many times, but to me it's very important. And this man says to me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog? Well, I'm a straight-A student, and it's all I could do but smirk, right? What, is he crazy? Horses are herbivorous, they don't eat meat. This is what I've been taught. I memorized all this to get all my A's in school. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it, which then made me realize everything I thought I knew could be wrong. And just think about it, how could we know horses don't eat meat? You know, how many horses are studied? How much— how hungry are they? How much meat is mixed with how much greens? All of these questions. Then at the end, if you were to do that study, you would find most of the horses under those circumstances didn't eat meat. That's a mouthful. So instead, it's simply reported as horses don't eat meat. Science doesn't give us absolutes. Science only gives us probabilities. But the probabilities are translated into absolutes. We mindlessly buy them. And live according to them and are giving up all sorts of experiences, health and happiness that otherwise would be available to us. You know, you said about how people buy into lots of these things. And the way I see it is that virtually all of us are sealed in unlived lives. Now, the thing is that almost everybody is mindless almost all the time. But when you're mindless, you're not there to know you're mindless. So you can't easily turn it around. But every absolute you bought into is limiting what you see and do. One of the favorites that I've now made so everybody knows the answer, but hopefully they understand the larger point of my asking the question. So Matthew, how much is 1 1? This is what everybody knows to be absolutely true.

3. No, that's 2.

2. Okay. And that's what people are taught unless they've heard me speak about this. Well, it turns out 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. But who cares about number systems? You add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 1 is 1. You add 1 wad of chewing gum and 1 wad of chewing gum, 1 1 is 1. You add 1 pile of laundry to 1 pile of laundry, 1 1. Somebody sent me one the other day. If you add 1 pizza to 1 pizza, You have 2 pizzas. But if you add 1 lasagna to 1 lasagna, 1 1 is 1. It's just a bigger lasagna. So in the real world, 1 1 doesn't equal 2 as often as it does. And the point of that is everything we think we know can be wrong. When you know you don't know, you tune in. When you think you know— and not only that, if you thought, you know, you asked me or I asked you, how much is 1 1? And you say 1. For example, then I'd look at you like you're an idiot. And rather, if I understood the power of uncertainty, I'd say, "Matthew, how did you come to that?" And you'd say, "Well, you take 1 watt of chewing gum, add 1 watt of chewing gum, 1 1 1." So we're taught these absolutes. Once we have these absolutes in mind, we don't have to pay attention anymore. If you knew what I was going to say next, why bother listening to me? So the bottom line to— and the top line to all that I've studied is the power of uncertainty. We don't know. We can't know because everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Now, people know they don't know, but they think they should know. So what you do, you genuflect to the person who's acting like he knows. You're afraid to engage and so on. But he doesn't know. She doesn't know. They can't know. Again, because everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So you need to adopt a universal understanding of uncertainty. Then not knowing is a good thing because that motivates you to be inquisitive, curious, to explore the world, to see everything anew. And when you're doing that, when you're noticing new things, which is the essence of being mindful, the neurons are firing and 50 years of data, it's a long time, shows that it's literally and figuratively enlivening.

Yeah, I mean the word that you've—

I'm only letting you speak so I can have a sip.

I mean the word that you've used, you know, this word mindlessness, and so can you Define what that is and why it's dangerous.

Sure. Well, when you're being mindless, you're no better, no different from a robot. And, you know, does a robot have choices? No. Does a robot feel happy? No. You're excluding life's rich experiences. And when you're mindful— now, when people hear the word mindfulness, we probably should clear this up because many people think meditation. And meditation is great, it's just different. When you meditate, you take yourself out of the world to sit quietly for 20 minutes twice a day. When you're mindful, as we study it, and also mindfulness is a practice that you engage in to result in post-meditative mindfulness. So meditation isn't mindfulness, it's what you do to become mindful. What we do is is available to everybody instantly. And it follows very simply from knowing you don't know, and that it's okay not to know. So two ways of becoming mindful: top-down, accept the power of uncertainty, accept that you don't know, and then everything is potentially interesting. Or bottom-up, a way of convincing yourself. Notice three new— open the door to go outside and notice three new things. Three is not holy, it could be five, two, whatever. Notice 3 new things about the person you live with or work with. Notice 3 new ways of doing whatever you're doing. And each time you do this, it becomes brand new. You do this often enough and then you come to go to the top-down, realize that you don't know and not knowing is good.

So what percent of the population lives in mindlessness?

Yeah, sadly. You know, virtually all of us, almost all the time. Now, so for me, it's different from most people. I've been studying this for so long. Every time I'm mindless, I go, yes, I'm right. So it has that positive little kick to it. But yeah, I'd say virtually all of us, almost all the time, are not there. You know, we're taught not to be there. Your parents tell you, here are the rules, here are the way you do things. Schools reward you endlessly for having the answer. You get ahead in many businesses, but not to the very top, you see, because the way to get to the top is you have to come to something new, and that requires that you be mindful.

Yeah, I mean, so with all that in mind, I kind of want to take people on a journey because there's just so many ways, like so many ways that this shows up, and you outline a lot of those in your most recent book. Where quite literally it feels like we could either just A, deliberately make ourselves sick, or at the very least contribute to our own sickness. And so in that way with mental health, physical health, even relational health, it becomes this kind of like self-fulfilling prophecy.

Exactly, exactly. So I, in writing The Mindful Body, first it started as a memoir, so I have lots of I was going to say lewd, but they're not lewd. Several very personal stories in it to help make the points based on all of the research. It changed from a memoir to more like my mindfulness book, but with these personal stories. So one of these stories, this laid the groundwork for the mind-body unity theory. So I was married when I was obscenely young. Don't tell anybody. So I was— I will— you'll have to read the book to see how old I really was. But then I got married again for the general public when I was 18 and a half. We go to Paris on our honeymoon and I order mixed grill. On the mixed grill was pancreas. I asked my then husband, which of these things is the pancreas? He was more sophisticated than I, and he points to something. I'm a big eater. I eat everything else. Now the moment of truth. And I still can't figure out, Matthew, why I thought being married meant that I had to eat the pancreas. But it felt to me that that's what a sophisticated grown-up does. I start eating the pancreas and I literally get sick. He starts to laugh, which is not what you should do on honeymoon. Probably never. But why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago. So I made myself sick. Many years later now, my mother has cancer. It's also a pancreas story. I'm the only person I know who has two pancreas stories. And she had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas. Well, that's the endgame. So the medical world assumed she was going to die. They stopped exercising her limbs and treated her as if any moment she would die. And then magically, it was totally gone. So somehow I made myself sick, she made herself well, and that set the stage for 50 years of research for me to try to figure out what was going on.

Yeah, I mean, those things we would say are spontaneous remission, and you had a whole part in the book talking about That idea.

Yeah, well, we, you know, and we act as if this is a very unusual case and we really have no idea. You know, there are lots of people who don't want to go to the medical world, lots of people who can't afford medical care. You know, go out to the Ozarks and, you know, create whatever stereotypical story you have. And so there may be many people in those circumstances who have tumors They don't even know they have a tumor, and then the tumor is gone. So we don't know how widespread spontaneous remissions are, and it would be a very hard thing to study. But we do know that any information the medical world gives us is based on a probability. And when you take that probability and make it absolute, you know, that I have cancer, cancer is a killer, I'm going to die. I think you're more likely to experience all those negative circumstances than if you say to yourself, many people who have this go in this negative route, but then there are also people for whom it isn't true, and take that more positive view and beat the disease, which many people do. I remember when my mother was suffering, There was this woman neither of us knew. She came into the hospital room and she said, Sylvia, my mother's name. She said, I was told that I only had 5 years to live and I spent all of my money living the high life as well as I could. I spent almost every cent. This is now 10 years later and the cancer never came back. And, but now I don't have funds. You know, we all know people who have beaten the odds, so to speak. We don't even know what the odds really are because again, we don't know all of those people who had these spontaneous remissions.

Yeah, I mean, what really hit me was the study that— on diabetes. Yeah. With physical health. Can you share about that? That was just—

Lots and lots of studies on this mind-body unity. So with the diabetes study, these type 2 diabetes, people come into the lab and we give them all sorts of tests, measure their blood sugar level and so on. And then we put them in front of a computer and ask them to play computer games. All of this will become clear as to why in a minute. And to change the game they're playing every 15 minutes or so. So we have a clock next to the computer so that they know when the 15 minutes— when they should shift the game. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. So 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, the clock is real time. People would assume, so who cares what the broken clock is doing? But it turns out blood sugar level follows perceived time, the time the clock says. The last most recent study we did, I did this with Peter Ungl, my graduate student, was we inflict a wound. It's not a terrible wound because—

You stabbed someone?

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You know, it would have been dramatic and made the point even more clearly, but I'm not sadistic. And even if I were, hopefully somebody would stop me from doing it. So it's a minor wound, but a wound. And people again individually are in front of a clock. I'm big on clocks. And again, unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. It's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time, or real time. And again, the wound heals based on clock time, perceived time. You know, our thoughts, as you suggested before, these beliefs, these absolutes that we took in without ever questioning, affect everything. Well, I talk in the book about how fatigue is actually a mental construct. Now, people think, you know, well, the body gets tired, forgetting that the mind and the body are one. So there was a study that Frank Beach did forever ago. I love this study. He took a little boy rat and he introduced a little girl rat. And so they copulate until the little boy rat is just exhausted. However, take a little boy rat, you introduce a little girl rat, they copulate. Now immediately add a new little girl rat, that little boy rat is ready to go all over again. The human version is you're word processing all day long and you're exhausted, your fingers hurt, your back hurts, and then you go home and you play the piano. You change the context and all of our energy seems to be is stored.

What's interesting about that is, so, you know, the one that you did on sleep, you know, you were talking about perceived time. You know, on one hand, the science around sleep seems to be very solid in terms of how much sleep we actually need.

Yeah, well, no, no, wait a second. You know, just think of it. Remember that every scientific result you're given is a probability. It's not absolute. All right. You may think you need 8 hours of sleep, but everybody can't all the time. It's outrageous to think that, that somebody twice your size, half your size, somebody who ran a marathon, somebody who stayed in bed eating candy all night, that they're both going to need the same amount of sleep is almost silly. And so what we did in the sleep study People are in a sleep lab and again, we change the clocks. Very easy treatment. They wake up thinking they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they got. Biological and cognitive functions follow perceived amount of sleep.

Well, so where—

I have no idea. You're going to ask me how far can we go with it? I don't know.

No, no, no.

I'm going to ask— ask me that. It's a good question.

About probabilities, though. So I feel like probabilities are obviously useful.

I'm not suggesting they're not. What I'm saying is that— but I, on another occasion, might suggest that they're not. Probabilities are in your head, not in events. It's either going to rain or it's not going to rain. It doesn't probably rain, but that's a whole other show that we'll do. But I'm saying is when probabilities— probabilities are sometimes maybes, it would seem. And when those probabilities are understood as absolutes, it is, there's often a problem. You say most old people can't whatever. And so then you assume, you say now so many elders are— I hate that word being older myself now, but it doesn't matter.

Elders? Yeah.

I don't— okay. Anyway, that Every time you forget something, oh my God, am I becoming demented? And that can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know that if I think I'm losing it, well, first I'd stop lecturing because what if it happens when I'm addressing a large number of people? I withdraw a little. I might even stop reading because I start to think I'm not going to remember what I've read anyway. So I have to keep reading the same page over and over again. And slowly it takes its toll. I teach this health class at Harvard and I teach it on Tuesday and Thursday. And on Thursday, before I give lecture on aging, I ask people, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday? Of course they don't remember. And I say, young people are not infrequently forgetful either, but they don't worry about it so much.

Yeah, I mean, so—

And just think for a moment, it just occurs to me how awful it would be if you remembered everything. You know, forgetting is a skill. Because if I remember, you know, you're talking about relationships, if I remember every miserable thing you did, it's going to be very hard for me to, you know, greet you with open arms.

Do you feel like labeling then, I mean, the label year olds? Like, what do you think of these labels then?

Well, you know, labels serve some purpose just as diagnoses, but to take them too seriously again causes problems. I personally, you know, I'm 78 years old. I don't have any sense of myself as 78. In fact, not that long ago, somebody dear to me saw me helping an old woman, and she said to me, "Honey, you're probably 10 years older than she is," which I didn't realize. So my desire, perception of my abilities is not influenced by my age. Now, certainly, you know, there are age differences, and I talk about one study that we did. This was an archival study, you know, where The hypothesis was that people who work in uniforms will age better because they're not given the age-related cues that dress provides. So, for example, if I went into Neiman Marcus and I went to buy a miniskirt— do they still sell miniskirts? Whatever— that presumably they wouldn't let me walk out with it. Because it's age inappropriate. All right. So there are reminders that tell you you're no longer 15, 30, 50, and so on. But, you know, so it turns out that those people who wear uniforms their whole life do indeed age better.

Do you feel like if older people are surrounded by old people things, how much would that accelerate their decline? I mean, this is kind of the inverse of the counterclockwise, but Oh yes, so we have data.

People whose spouses, excuse me, are much older than they are. So what happens is, you know, if let's say you're 40, or let's make you old, let's say you're 50 and your spouse is 70. Now you're together for a long time, so you're going to be pulled into the older person's world usually because they're more sophisticated, more knowledgeable, wealthier, and what have you. So now your life is surrounded by all these old people. The data suggests that you will age more quickly. He typically, on the other hand, because he is experiencing your youthfulness, lives longer.

We were talking about this offline, but do you feel like we're meant to retire?

You know, I think that Life is short. I'm not the first to have said that. And that what you want to do is not be sealed in an unlived life. You want to be out there experiencing yourself, being mindful, enjoying yourself virtually all of the time. So if you're doing something, you know, your work, even if you go to a movie, I never understood this. You know, you're going to sit there for 2 hours, let's say, and there are people who are hating the whole thing and then they leave and all they do is criticize the movie. To me, find a way to enjoy it or leave. So if your work, if your relationship, if anything is not working, don't accept it. You either make it work so that you're enjoying it or get out of it. So it's the same thing with, you know, should you retire or not? It depends if you're having a wonderful time and you're adding something to the world. Or to your own personal world, why should you retire? But if you're hating it, yeah. And, you know, if you— it depends on what your alternatives are after you leave the work or relationship.

Well, if you're just sitting there and doing nothing all day long.

But why should that be an option? You know, why should one put oneself in the position? You know, remember the Birdman of Alcatraz? So here we have somebody who's incarcerated. And you would think now, not just that you're not working and you're taking out of the community your life as you knew it, but you're now in this small little cell. And then these pigeons arrived in that tiny little window, and he took a liking to the pigeons and came to learn about pigeons. And then his life became meaningful. You know, you don't need grand things, grand schemes of things. It may sound too Hallmark, not to put down Hallmark, but to say that life only consists of moments. And if you make the moment meaningful, your life is meaningful. So that if you retire, make things meaningful. If you stay at work, keep things meaningful.

Well, I guess what I'm getting at is I think that there seems to be constructs that we walk into that would then facilitate a process of mindfulness. And I think when I—

Oh, without question. I mean, you know, almost everything you do, there's somebody's rulebook about how to do it, for example. And, you know, my favorite example of this, and I do this when I'm lecturing, I'll ask, is there anybody 6'5"? And I don't know why, but I attract tall people. So there's always some guy and I say, please come. Stage. He comes to the stage and there we are, me at 5'3", him at 6'5". We look silly together. And then I just raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? It's ridiculous, right? I asked him to put his hand up. His hand is 3 inches larger than mine. It's the same with anything. And so the rule should be, the more dissimilar you are from the person who wrote the rule, the way to do it, the routine, the more important it is for you not to follow that.

Well, as it pertains to older people, you know—

Yes, older people are following rules that worked for them when they were younger. And, you know, so that let's say you're playing tennis, which game I enjoy. All right. So, you know, when you're 18 years old, you're running around all over the place. And when you're 60 years old, you've probably slowed down a bit, but you should be wiser. You don't need to run. You know, if the person is standing like this, you know where they're likely to hit it because you've seen them do it before. And so, you know, you use the wisdom. There's no reason to think that there's one right way of doing anything.

Do you think mindlessness can become, like, institutionalized? Like—

It is institutionalized.

Well, like nursing homes, for example.

Nursing homes, schools. Everything. You know, they have— this is the way. And that if you just mindlessly do whatever you're asked to do, you're never going to be as good as the person who wrote those rules in the first place, because the rules are written to meet the needs of the rule writer.

Well, I think a lot of older people go into nursing homes and it's basically just this place where you die. Like, and so it's like, I'm— and so you go in there and it's like, how does somebody go from somewhat vibrant at 80, and then all of a sudden a year later they're just like so mentally declined. And it feels like it accelerates this process, and I wonder if mindlessness is one of the core drivers of that.

Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. You know, what is it? Tennyson, "Walls do not a prison make." You can go into that nursing home and change it. You know, help the 3 people that you're interacting with. Rather than give in to the expectations for yourself.

Yeah. I mean, this applies to so many things. Stress was another area that—

Stress. Yeah. You know, okay, so everything I say to you, I have data for, except this one. But this follows. First of all—

Well, there was data in your book for stress.

Oh, I have a lot of data on stress, but not the statement I'm going to make right now, which I think that stress is the biggest killer. The biggest killer. So I'm suggesting that if, you know, I was going to do this research many years ago before COVID with people in China, but we never got to do it. A massive, very difficult study where we take people who, excuse me, just been diagnosed with cancer, all different kinds of cancer. And then, you know, nobody, when told they have cancer, is going to be gleeful, right? So we'll give them 3 weeks, arbitrary, obviously, to adjust to it. Then we measure the level of stress every 3, 4 weeks. My belief, no data, my belief though, is that over time, that stress will dictate the course of the disease over and above genetics, certainly nutrition, and even treatment. Now, And nobody, years ago, the medical world didn't think stress mattered. Now, you'd be hard-pressed to find somebody who doesn't believe that stress matters. And I imagine that if you ask, you say somebody has tuberculosis, pick whatever disease, somebody has COVID, doesn't matter. And now you have somebody who has COVID who's stressed, somebody has COVID who's totally relaxed, how long will the symptoms of COVID last? I think most people would guess that the person who is at peace— well, everybody in some way knows that stress is now bad. Okay. Stress is psychological. Event— I know I pointed to myself, all of a sudden I represent stress. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of events. If you take a single-minded negative view, of course you're going to be stressed. So I have several one-liners that people might find useful. One is the next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost always just an inconvenience. You know, I banged the car, I burnt the dinner. I missed the appointment, so what? And so then you immediately come back inside yourself and feel better. And of course, you have no worry before it's time. Worrying isn't helping. And what happens is if you're not worried about whatever event, looming event, you're going to be stronger. And so then should you need resources, you're going to have more available to you than if you're frightened. You know, for all the time leading up to it. It was interesting. So I mentioned tennis before, and I did this thing. I've been doing this for maybe 30 or so years where you're playing with somebody and they hit a terrible shot and, you know, then they're driving themselves, how could I be so stupid? I'm incompetent. I can't play. You know, whatever things we tell ourselves. And I take the person aside and say, "Hum. Just hum. Next time you screw up, just hum." Because when you're humming, it seems to me mutually exclusive with this negative self-talk as a way of just getting past it. I think almost all of the upset we experience is a function of this negative self-talk. Talk, which is all much less likely the more mindful you are. So if it is the case that stress is the major killer and stress is psychological, then that again makes clear how much control we have over our health and well-being.

Yeah, I mean, I think about somebody who has to work 60 to 70 hours a week and then on top of that they're like, Oh my God, I love working.

But wait a second, though. You know, there was an old Disney film. I show a little clip of this in my health class. Whistle While You Work. It's very sweet, but there's a lot of wisdom that's out there that we ignore. You know, we have the notion that work has to be stressful. My work isn't stressful. Now you say, okay, what do I know being a full professor at Harvard and so on? But There's a way to approach whatever you do to make it more fun. You know, was it Tom Sawyer who fools his friends? I'm not sure I've got it absolutely right. It's a long time ago. But into painting the fence for him, right? And ha, wasn't he smart? But they're enjoying themselves. And so you get everybody to do things for you, then what are you going to do with yourself? The only way you feel good about yourself is to is to be having these challenges, these experiences. Otherwise, you might as well be in that nursing home that you experienced.

Your student who now is at Stanford, Aliya Crum, she's done a number of— and you guys, did you guys collaborate on a set with the stress? Sure.

Well, it was when she was at Harvard, we did the second study in the Mind-Body Unity series. A fun study also where we took chambermaids. And the first thing is to ask the chambermaids, how much exercise do you get? Interestingly, since these women are cleaning hotel, motel rooms all day long, they say they're not getting exercise. And that's because they see exercise as the Surgeon General does, is what you do after work, because he sits at a desk all day long. And after work, they're just too tired. So, so simple. We divide them into two groups and we randomly teach half of them that their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym and so on. So you have two groups now. One that believes their work is exercise, one that doesn't realize that. We make sure neither group is working harder than the other. They're not eating any differently. We've taken many, many measures before we start this. We find those people now who've changed their minds and see their work as exercise lost weight, there was a change in body mass index, waist-hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down just by changing their minds.

I mean, I think, you know, all this stuff is— it's fascinating and compelling. I think it does raise a million questions in people's minds though.

I mean, so if you would take physical health, for example, Physical health, mental health, it's all health.

Yeah, so let's, you know, we've established how labels can be limiting, but you know, let's say you actually do have cancer running rampant in your body and you don't get a diagnosis or label it, that would be problematic, no?

Maybe yes, maybe no, I don't know. It depends on what happens once you label it. If you label it and you're told you have stage 4 cancer, and in your mind that means you're going to die any minute, I'm not sure it's an advantage. If you label it and that means there's a treatment you can undergo, then sure, you're better off labeling it. A treatment that's likely to be effective.

But if someone— if someone— okay, someone says stage 4 and that's based on probabilities, would it be delusional to live as if— even from a grief standpoint, even for time you have left with your family, to live delusional of like, this isn't going to happen. And so—

No, I don't know that you want to say it isn't going to happen because we don't know that any more than we know it is going to happen.

Certainty.

All I know is that if I found out I had a month to live, I hope that I wouldn't waste my time complaining and being depressed about it. I'd try to fully live. None of us know how long we're going to live. You can get hit by a car tomorrow. And in New York, that's probably not a— You know, so what you want to do is if you're alive, you want to be alive. Does that seem strange?

Yeah, I mean, it's so— these things have become so intertwined of like, label and then it means this. Or I mean, even I think about depression or addiction.

Well, again, what you have to remember, whatever the label, the label represents a probability, not an absolute. That means there are some people who have the same symptoms, so to speak, don't follow the predicted course of events. And why not try to be one of those people?

To beat the odds.

Yeah, well, yeah, and the odds, you know. Again, that's the discussion we'll have the next time I come on.

Yeah, so then if someone is actually clinically depressed or someone is actually addicted, they have markers of addiction, they deeply struggle with alcohol or drinking, how might you help them modify their mindset about these things?

Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, some of this is radical and probably won't go over well, but nevertheless, I'm here to say what I believe. First of all, if I said to you that here's Joe, Joe is extremely anxious, stressed, unhappy, and then he does X and then he feels better. Sounds like X is a very rational thing to do, right? But now when we say X is, you know, alcohol, then all of a sudden it becomes bad. So the first thing is to, in my mind, is rather than saying you're worthless because you do this thing, to make people realize that their behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't have done it, and that that means they're strong and smart rather than pathetic. And but there are other things that they can do to achieve the same end without the negative side effects. That's one. Number two is, and we do this with— we've done lots of studies with chronic illnesses and we can say chronic conditions, doesn't matter, chronic personality things, addictions, or as we typically understand chronic illnesses. When somebody has a chronic condition, a chronic illness, they typically believe that their symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. They believe that chronic means there's nothing that can be done about it. All chronic means in the medical sense is the medical world can't do anything about it for you. That doesn't mean there's nothing that can be done. Okay. Now, when you have symptoms, when you have anything, Nothing goes in only one direction. The stock market doesn't go up like this, a straight line. It goes up and it goes down a little, goes up. All right, you have pain, you think you're in pain all the time. Nobody is in pain all the time to equal measure. But you don't pay attention to that. But therein, that attention provides the cure for you. To recognize that, gee, It's changing. Right now I'm not in as much pain, for example, as I was a moment before. Why might that be? So what we do is we take people with various diseases and we call them throughout the day and simply ask them, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called? And why? Now, the why is the crucial thing, because the why then engages them on a mindful search for why it is that I feel a little better right now, which itself, you know, I've been doing this for a very long time. The early research, we make people more mindful, they live longer. The neurons are firing. It's literally and figuratively enlivening. So they become— they're doing good things for themselves regardless of whether they can figure out why. So what happens here? The first, when you have a chronic illness, you feel helpless. So now with this treatment that we call attention to symptom variability, all of a sudden you're doing something for yourself. It doesn't conflict with anything medical. This can be in synchrony with any medical treatment you're taking or while you're waiting to find out, is that tumor malignant, you know, for example, or benign? All right. So you feel better. You see it's changing. You're asking why is it better or worse right now? It's engaging. And then I believe you're more likely to find a solution if you're actually looking for one. So we did this with real disorders— chronic pain, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson's— and in each case, get very positive results. And I developed this basically because I was looking for a way for you to give yourself a placebo. So placebos, this is our strongest medicine, but placebos have a bad word. You know, we, when we did the Counterclockwise study, we, the BBC replicated the major condition for a BBC production. And I remember Sylvia Sims, who miraculously was better on so many dimensions. She said, "I just can't understand how it happened." And so I started telling her about placebo. She said, "No, my pain was real." So people have been taught placebos are nothing rather than taught that placebos are ultra-powerful. Placebos are our minds over our illnesses. And I think that's because the pharmaceutical companies— just sort of imagine, I'm making this up, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me. In order to bring a drug to market where you're going to make billions of dollars, you have to do a test where you have a placebo versus the drug. The drug has to outperform the placebo in order for you to declare it effective. So that placebo is a bad guy, right? Because if that placebo is good, then that drug isn't going to outperform, in which case I'm going to be denied all that money. But for the rest of us, placebos are almost magic. And how do placebos work? Well, essentially it's due to the mind-body unity. You take this substance that's essentially a nothing and you think it's something, and then magically it exerts its power. The chambermaid study that Ali and I did was actually a test of the nocebo effect. And the word nocebo is less familiar to people, but a placebo, you take a nothing, think it's something, and it works like the something. And nocebo is really the opposite of that. You take a something, but you think it's nothing, and it takes away its effectiveness.

I agree. I mean, I could see the power in so much of what you're saying. I think people will have a great difficulty. A lot of this is perception, but some people might push back and say, it's not that simple in the sense that you wake up, you're flooded with limited negative emotions, and then that experience is almost automatic or like very emotional. It's not rational or cognitive type of thing that's happening. So they feel like they're powerless to themselves.

Yeah, not only that, but I think there's an implicit belief, if I have a big upset, there has to be a big cause. So, and to say that your mind is controlling it doesn't seem big enough to justify all the pain you're experiencing. You know, next time you're not sure, go thread a needle. You're in great pain. Go thread a needle. Now, for most of us, especially as you get older and your vision isn't quite what it was before, you become totally attentive. And during that time when you thread the needle, if I were to ask you, are you in pain? You're not in anything because your attention is devoted to threading the needle. And, you know, just to see that our attention is determining much of our experience.

This is why they prescribe mindfulness for certain mental health treatments?

I think, you know, no matter what you're doing, no matter what— speaking at a podcast, playing golf, reading a book, eating— you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. So for everything, you know, the— there is no reason in my mind to ever be mindless. That means you're not there. And if you're gonna do it, show up for it.

What do you make of the so-called negativity bias in the brain?

I don't think there's a negativity bias in the brain. I think some people are biased to being negative. That's what they were taught, you know. People who live on the dark side. You know, who then take people like me who live on the bright side and want to demean us in some way. And then the answer is, well, who's happier? You know, I don't know who decides what side is dark or light. All I know is that if you think there's no way, then chances are there's no way. And that even if it turns out that this thing you're approaching or trying to do is not easily done, maybe never done, The doing of it, the trying, is exciting.

Yeah, I mean, we've had so many guests on here across disciplines and—

They're all wrong.

But no, I start to see threads in what they're saying, how it relates to what other people are saying. And I think it's very interesting because even going back to that addiction thing that you were talking about, if you go through trauma treatment, if you go through the arc of healing trauma, the way that usually you become aware, I have destructive behaviors and there's some sort of trauma. And, and that— and one of the things that's important at that stage is the way you look at your own behaviors. And you were just saying, for someone with addiction, they need to be able to look at their behaviors of like— it's almost like an appreciation of like why they're doing that.

Well, okay, so, you know, two things. I've done so much research. I mean, 50 years is a long time. And the thing that I came to was that one simple statement that to me was more important than anything else I've done, which is, again, behavior makes sense from the perspective of the person who's doing it, or else they wouldn't have done it. That means my behavior, your behavior, that means every time you're being judgmental, you're being mindless. And so if we turn that around, and we find now a way to appreciate ourselves that would lead us to less drinking and so on. All of the things that we do to feel good that are separate from just feeling good about ourselves. Our relationships would improve. We set ourselves up for a very different kind of life. Okay, so let's say one of my favorite examples. So I, turns out, probably to no surprise of anybody, I'm extraordinarily gullible. And I'm sure the people who scam who are watching this are now going to, you know, but I've learned how to deal with them. All right. That, so I go to you and you're a therapist or just a dear friend. And I say, Matthew, I see what I'm doing. I mean, I was taken by two, not one, psychopaths. I mean, you know, cost me a lot of money. Help me. And you say, okay, you're going to help me not be gullible. So we both have the same goal. And now we try and we're going to always fail. Why? Because going forward, nobody says, I'm going to be gullible. Nobody wakes up in the morning, says, today I'm going to be aggressive, obnoxious, stupid. You know, so when people are being these things, what's actually going on? Well, it turns out that for each and every negative understanding of our or somebody else's behavior, there's an equally strong but oppositely balanced alternative. For each negative, there's a positive. What's the positive of being gullible? I'm trusting. You know, and there's no way— I mean, I value being trusting. And as long as I'm trusting, I'm going to be gullible. Now, you're going to like me better now that you see that I'm trusting. But if you want me to not be gullible, you have to get me to stop valuing being trusting. You drive me crazy because you're so damn inconsistent. Well, from your— and I can show you, look at all these things you've done that are inconsistent. But from your perspective, what are you being? Flexible. And you value being flexible. And the only way I'm going to get you to stop being inconsistent is to stop valuing being flexible.

Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. I was looking into something called labeling theory and the idea that as soon as we attach a label to someone, we start filtering our bias through that label.

Oh, that's so interesting. We did a study, God, back, I think it was in '74, a long time ago, before you were born, where I videotaped an interview between— it was Bob Abelson, who was my mentor at Yale, and somebody else. I don't know if the other person was actually on the camera or not. It doesn't matter. The interview was— the person who was interviewed, whether we see or not is irrelevant, was called a patient or a job applicant. We then played it for clinicians to evaluate the person on the tape. Everybody's seeing the exact same tape, but the label of that person is different. And when the person was labeled patient, he was seen as having hidden this, you know, negative that, all sorts of problems. When he was labeled job applicant, he was seen as well-adjusted. Everything can be, you know, that's what we have to understand is that the world is ambiguous and we disambiguate it as if that's the only way it could have been understood. And then we attach ourselves to that understanding. It's also the case that everybody does hypothesis-confirming data searches. You have a view. So people, you don't want to ask yourself, how am I awful? Because no matter who you are, you're going to find evidence for how you're awful. But if you ask yourself, how am I wonderful? You're also going to find evidence. So you want to ask yourself the more uplifting questions. Seek and ye shall find is another way of understanding.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of ancient proverbs about how, you know, words change worlds. And I mean, based from what you're saying right now, I think that we underestimate the truth in the fact that a simple label—

No, I don't think it's underestimating the truth. In fact, I think it's overestimating as true any particular statement as if that's the only way it could have been understood.

Well, we didn't address the diabetes— I mean, we didn't talk about the diabetes study. I want to circle back on that. No, because I think that that's just a beautiful illustration of this entire dynamic. Yeah. So can you share about that?

Well, I'm not sure where you're headed with that, but—

No, the idea that there's people that got a diagnosis of— diabetes, but diabetes are markers.

Oh, you're talking about the borderline effect.

Yes, exactly. You know, with the labels, this plays right into it.

Yeah. Yeah. So no matter what you're doing, what you're measuring, there's always a group that falls right below it or right above it. So we can say intelligence, I guess you're given an IQ test and there's got to be some cutoff point. All right. So let's say the cutoff point is 65. I don't know what it is these days. And you get a 64. Somebody else gets a 66. Nobody in their right mind would think there's a meaningful difference between those two numbers. You could have sneezed. You misread one question. What's the difference? Nevertheless, as soon as you're given that label, it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, you know, now you're labeled as mentally deficient. You take yourself to task every time you don't know something. You stop reading difficult things, entering discussions, because after all, you've self-labeled as being less than while everybody else is growing and you no longer are. Self-induced. And it's the same thing for disease. So for all diseases, There's a group that falls just above where they're going to tell you you have it and just below where they tell you they don't have it. Those two groups are again like 60— when I say 65 and 64 or 67, whatever it is, are the same statistically. But over time they'll separate and the separation is a function of their psychology.

Which is what happened with the diabetes.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that is just so indicative of how a label could— again, we're not saying that label is necessarily bad or good, but when we attach—

When a label is taken as absolute rather than one way of understanding things.

And then that starts shaping and modifying our behaviors in the way that we respond to that.

Exactly.

Yeah, no, that's so powerful.

I say this is a Rubik's Cube here. Is this here because you're going to ask me to fix—

No, I think—

Well, let me tell you a story. Yeah. I haven't told the story to anybody else. So I was my first year at Yale, graduate student, and there was a party for the first-year students. So first-year students and all the faculty. And somebody had a Rubik's Cube and somebody gave me the Rubik's Cube. And without really knowing what I was doing, I did it. And I think, talk about labels, that that might have been the key to my entire success as a graduate student. And after that, where, you know, after that, I took another Rubik's Cube when I wasn't able to solve it. But the label, you know, wow, she's whatever it is, whatever label was imposed. So I'm looking at this Rubik's Cube and I don't know whether I should refer to the time I did it, in which case feel very confident, or the time after that I wasn't able to do it and feel scared.

Well, we use it as a symbol as a company because our tagline is making sense of the human experience. And so I think this this conversation is like the Rubik's Cube is, is, is a symbol of all these twisting and turning and trying to figure out life. And I mean, it's very hard to complete one side, but I think that, you know, that, you know, what we're talking about today is kind of a symbol of that.

Well, you know, and add to that is that we don't want to be able, we shouldn't want to be able to do it perfectly. Everybody seeks perfection, which they're not going to achieve anyway. But all tasks can be done imperfectly mindfully or perfectly mindlessly. So an example I'm fond of: you're a little kid, you're in an elevator, you're trying to reach that button and you can't, and the adult you're with picks you up and you press it. Next time you're in that elevator, you're getting a little closer, but you still can't reach it. They pick you up. Eventually, You're tall enough, you press that button. When was the last time you were excited about hitting an elevator button?

Never.

Exactly. You know, so, and, or another example I overuse is golfers might think they want to get a hole-in-one. Get a hole-in-one every time you swung the club? There'd be no game there. So we have to appreciate the mastering, the the little struggle more than we do.

Now, when it comes to relational health, personal conflict, I mean, you have a lot of interesting things to say about this. So if we are seeking to be mindful instead of mindless, what does that look like in a healthy way with our relationships? Because let's just say if we were to accept mistreatment and then say, it's just a matter of perspective, now is that living under a delusion if someone's deliberately being harmful to you?

It depends on how harmful, you know, what they're actually doing. I mean, you can, you know, imagine you're with a 3-year-old who keeps, you know, "Nyan nyan," saying mean things to you. It's probably not going to get under your skin, right? It's an annoyance. It's not, "Oh my God." So, and interestingly, I believe that bullies, in fact, are no different from that little kid. And that, you know, if you have children and you have a little boy who is a bully, the mother might say to the little boy, "It's not nice to pick on kids who are weaker than you." But I think that that enhances, reinforces bullying. He says, "If I do this, I'm strong." In fact, the kid should be told Only the weak bully, and then there's nothing in it for the person to bully. And so, you know, you're a very accomplished woman and the CEO now takes you to task for something and you feel belittled because he's not doing it in a particularly nice way. If you remembered that people who have it together just don't treat people that way. And so you should feel sorry for him. Then all of a sudden the power difference changes. First he's being here, being mean, and you're feeling less than. To recognize people aren't mean when they're fully adult as a way of dealing with that.

Now let's just say someone is in a relationship, they both have the value, we're gonna say faithful to each other. One person goes out, lies, cheats, then covers it up, and then it comes to light that they were cheating. So how would you apply mindfulness into that situation?

Um, okay, well, first of all, lying is itself interesting that, uh, the child, um, is often punished by the mother or father for lying. For not telling the truth, so they learn to lie. If you're involved with somebody and they know that you're going to understand why they do what they're doing, there must have been some reason that in fact was a function of the relationship, then you don't need to lie. If you knew I wasn't gonna punish you for lying, He'd be more likely to tell me the truth. Right?

Yeah, I agree.

Okay. So both parties are complicit in some way. Now, if somebody has had 20 relationships and parents who taught them to lie, it's not as easy as saying, you can tell me the truth and then people will change. But even that understanding that everything people do, everything a person does makes sense to them or else they wouldn't do it. Gets us out of the good guy, bad guy understanding.

Well, that will produce compassion.

What?

That would produce compassion.

No. Yeah.

I mean, empathy. Empathy.

No, I don't even think it's a matter of compassion. I think it's because compassion to me always feels like there's somebody is one down. You know, so I have to feel kindly towards this poor You know, this poor person. And here we're just saying that everybody's behavior makes some sense or else they wouldn't do it. And to appreciate that would lead us not to diminish them in our minds and, you know, in the first place. So there's something I wrote in the book. There's a lot of language. That I love. I don't get to talk about enough in The Mindful Body. Because part of the book, I talk about better than better. Now, very often we have, here's a problem and somebody solves it. I say, oh yeah, that's good. But there's an even better way. Okay. And so some of the language demonstrates that. This is cute. You'll like this. Many, many years ago, I was asked to give a sermon at one of the Harvard churches. I'm Jewish, and I'm not religious. But I say yes to everything. So I say yes. Now I had to figure out what am I going to talk about because I don't really know anything about religion. Forgiveness. It's not religion, but it sounds religion-y. I could get away with it. So I start thinking about forgiveness. And I come up with something that was actually sacrilegious, which is, if you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you?

It's bad. I mean, it's good. It's good.

If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to tell you? Blame is bad, right? But you know, you can't forgive unless you first blame. Well, that's interesting right there, that our forgivers are our blamers. Do you blame people for good things or bad things? Well, you blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame and then forgive. Seems to me hardly divine. And there's a better than better way, which is to understand that that behavior made sense or else they wouldn't have done it. I don't want anyone to ever forgive me. I'd rather they understand.

How do you pair it with Maybe I need to get out of this relationship.

I'm not suggesting that anything is simple. You know, any of these changes are simple. What I'm suggesting is that it's worthwhile making these changes to live a full life. We shouldn't deny our emotions, but we also have to understand that emotions are choices. And most of us don't. And most of us, or people too frequently think, you made me angry. You're making me miserable. The only person who's making me angry or miserable is me. And when I recognize that and then I change my understanding of the whole situation, you know, I can stay or I can leave. There's no right answer. You know, you don't know if you leave the relationship, are you going to be happier or less happy? But all I know is that people, most people, sadly, are miserable. You know, the number of people on antidepressants is scary. And so with that, it's, oh, I'm single. If only I were married, I'd be happy. Oh, I'm married. If only I were single, I'd be happy. Oh, I'm not working. If only I were working, and so on. And I don't think that's— those things are the things that make us happy. We make ourselves happy. We make ourselves miserable. You know, I spend a lot of time in Mexico. It's a lovely place where we are. And these Mexicans, they're phenomenal. Phenomenal. They're all happy. You know, every day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. And I spend a little time there, then I come back to Cambridge. Cambridge is a wonderful place in the United States, right? And I say good morning, good afternoon, and people look at me like I'm crazy. Now, these people who are doing all of this, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, are making almost no money. You know, yet somehow they seem by and large to be happy. So, you know, people think, it's interesting in this culture, people think you need to have a lot of money, you need to have power. People step on each other, fight with each other in order to achieve that with the end result of wanting self-respect. And you don't need any of that to have self-respect. You don't need the money, you don't need the power. You know, you want the power so that other people will respect you, so then that can translate into you respecting yourself. And I'm telling you that all you need to understand is that what you're doing makes sense, or else you wouldn't do it. and that self respect returns even if you're being bullied.

You said that emotions are choices. Yes. Okay. Do you think the initial emotion is a choice?

Yes. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no. It depends on Whether we're talking about from the actor or observer's perspective. Okay. You know, so most of us act like we have no choice over anything, but there are always choices available From somebody else looking in. And so if you recognize that you do have choices, then you feel differently about how you behave in this world and what you experience.

So I think this is really interesting. So if someone—

This is the only thing, huh, that you think is really—

No, I think the whole conversation is interesting. But I think if someone is in bed and they're depressed and they're like, I can't get out of bed, they would probably be like, that's my emotion. Those are my emotions. My emotions are literally keeping me in bed. But then I guess it would be a mindset thing or a mindful thing of like, let me get out of bed and go into exercise. But I think the disconnect there is they feel like they literally can't do that.

The problem is not being in bed or out of bed. The problem is taking yourself to task for being in bed, rather than saying, "The hell with everything. I'm just going to spend the day happily in bed." You know, rather than, "I'm going to spend the day in bed thinking that there's something wrong with me for making this choice." So you're not even—

you're not judging yourself?

No. There has to be some reason you're doing it. Let yourself do it. Rather than fight it, because you're going to do it anyway. And you're just going to think poorly of yourself. I tell a story. I don't know if it was in this book or not. I hope my friend— well, I won't mention her name. So this was many years ago. A friend of mine, there was a bird watching thing at the cemetery nearby. It was Garden Cemetery. It's beautiful. And so I called her. It's not my thing, but I thought it was her thing. Do you want to go to it? And she said, oh, I'd love to go, but I can't because I have to finish writing this grant to make some money for her husband who had big medical issues. I said, okay. We got off the phone. I knew she was going to go, but she didn't know. Eventually she calls me back. She says she's having too much trouble with the grant. She can't do it, so we might as well go on the bird walk. Bird walk. And I explained to her afterwards, Eva, if you had enough respect for yourself, all you needed to do was to say, you know, I really want to go on that bird walk, so I'm going to do that and I'll write this grant later. Then what would have happened, you would have done just what you did, go on the bird walk, but afterwards you wouldn't feel incompetent, making it that much harder to do the writing. We almost always, virtually always do what we want to do. Take responsibility for it. And who decided we shouldn't do it? Who decided what the right way to be, what to wear, what to eat? You know, all of these things that we've been handed. I mean, you know, it was only a few years ago that you couldn't wear white before the summer. So on June 20th, you were breaking some law. You know, these are just every decision about what is, or every is was just a decision made by a group of people at an earlier time that met their needs. Another name that I almost called the mindful body was, who says so? And there's part of me who thinks we should all go back to, was it 3 years old or however old we were, where You know, who says so? To recognize that everything is mutable. Everything. And that means that if something doesn't work, change it. But we tend not to. You know, so, I mean, example, this may seem silly, but, you know, so I said I'm 5'3". The cabinet, it's just too high for me. Well, who put it up there? And who decided that the fact that it's up there means I have to put the dishes up there. So we all just march in tune. And, you know, then somebody at 6 feet has no problem, is not breaking dishes, and I'm breaking dishes and I'm called clumsy rather than I didn't design the world for me. I'm living in a world that was designed by others to meet other people's needs. And sometimes that's fine. You know, when you do that, then you just have to make the right attribution. Everything, everything is big. Everything that is was just a decision that other people made at an earlier time. And the more different you are from them, the more important it is for you to realize that. So my favorite example, go back to tennis. So when you play tennis, there are 3 serves, 2 serves rather. So for me, I serve the ball, I kill it, doesn't go in. Then because I'm playing doubles, I have a wuss follow-up serve. It's gonna always go in and always able to be returned. If I ruled the world, Matthew, there'd be 3 serves. The first one, I kill it, doesn't go in. Now I've learned from that. I throw it up for the second serve and I kill it and my serve is gonna get better and better. And I still have my follow-up third serve. Now no one in their right mind would think the gods handed down from the heavens the rules for playing tennis. So every time you're not as good as others, it may just be that the differences between you and the people who created it are creating that less than competent performance or not facilitating it.

And in one sense, I mean, this, this does make sense of a lot of aspects of life, but then there are aspects where I don't know if I necessarily agree. Let me give you another, um, example. Let's just say we walk to the top of this building, and you're saying the thing, not absolutes. If I were to jump off the top of the building, would I assume maybe I'll levitate in the air, or would there be—

this isn't— okay, let's go back a step. I am not, um, promoting people doing these ridiculous things. What I am making, trying to make the point that we have no idea what our limits are and we're severely limiting ourselves across the board.

Well, gravity is a limit.

Yes and no. That gravity doesn't exist in certain environments and certainly out of space.

No gravity on Earth.

Gravity. Okay. You know, so what's the point? So yes, there are certain things that probably are. Yeah. So, and how does gravity personally affect you? I'm not saying jump off the building, you'll be fine and you can fly. But I am saying that we don't know if eventually we can't learn how to fly. It's very different. But, you know, we haven't learned how to fly. You know, you have people who, who have brain damage where the assumption is that's it, the brain is damaged, isn't, you know, but then there are parts of the brain that are still working. And I think that much brain damage can be reversed. I think I did something many, many years ago where I was dealing in nursing home and I said to people, what is it you'd really like to do that you can't do any longer? And this one woman said, you know, it may seem silly, Dr. Langer, but my arms are paralyzed and I find it humiliating for someone to have to blow my nose for me. So I said, okay, let's see if we can fix that. Now remember, even if we can't, we're totally engaged in doing it. So it's got an advantage. I say, okay, lift your arm to here. And she can't do it. So I go down a half and I keep going down until a tiny, tiny difference from where she is. And that's a new starting point. And we kept doing this. And eventually, yes, she would. Now, so then what is the comment? Oh my goodness, she wasn't really paralyzed. How many people are misdiagnosed? You know, we don't know. But the idea is that I call this the reverse of Zeno. So Zeno's paradox with respect to distance is if you always go half the distance from where you are to where you want to go, you're never going to get there. Say you're half of the distance, a quarter. So now I'm an eighth of an inch. If I go half the distance, I'm a sixteenth of an inch. I'm a 32nd of an inch, a 64th. You never— I say Zeno was a cynic. Let's do Langer's reverse Zeno's paradox. There's always a distance you can go from where you are to where you want to get. And if you can't get— so you eat a whole box of cookies, eat half a box of cookies. You can't eat less, you can't eat half a box. Okay, eat a quarter. Everybody can eat a crumb less. And then you go from there, a new starting point to get to where you want to be.

Yeah, I mean, I find— again, I find that the— adopting mindfulness for all these, for many areas of life will bring extreme benefit. I mean, one of the things that stuck out about the book, I think comparison, when you talk about the social world is another area that has become increasingly difficult. People are just falling into these mindsets of comparing themselves to other people, success, and then we make these rules about what that means about us, what it means about the world around us. And then we automatically have this anxiety that we're falling behind. And I think that's like a perfect example that fits into what you're talking about.

Well, you know, so first of all, you might ask who decided in the first place that this is something we should want to do?

Yeah, 100%.

Who decided what success actually means? And, you know, third, who decided the way to do it? You know, when you change all of these things, We line up a little differently, as with my 3 SERPs.

So what is your perspective on comparison?

The right one. No, I say no, we compare ourselves to other people presuming we know what their motivation is in doing what they're doing. Okay, so let's step back a little bit. This has been very important to me. It's a better than better, another better example. So you can have people who are seemingly behaving the same way, but for very different reasons. The original way I heard this and then went from there was about The New Yorker, which I think is a marvelous magazine, truly. But it doesn't sound that way in this comparison. So level 1. Level 1, people who don't read The New Yorker. Level 2, people who read The New Yorker. Level 3, people who don't read The New Yorker anymore. So 1 and 3 are both not reading The New Yorker, but they're very— now let's bring The New Yorker back. We have level 4, people who are reading The New Yorker again. It's just to illustrate that we have people behaving. Now, since most people when they see they're in some ways level 2, they see somebody different, they assume it's a level 1 rather than a level 3. If they said, how might this be a wonderful way to be, regardless of whether it was a level 1 or 3, they'd learn something and grow from it. A more homey example, let's say Oh, somebody, a woman drops her cane. So level 1 doesn't do anything. They're selfish, whatever, unhelpful people. Level 2 rushes in and picks up the cane. Level 3 doesn't rush in, doesn't help, but is watching. Because level 3 in this case might think this person is going to be better off if she can figure out how to pick up the cane herself. Hmm. Okay. So 1 in 3 are not helped, but they're so very different. So whenever you're putting anybody down, it's usually presuming you understand why they did what they did, that there's only one way of understanding that particular behavior. And so you denigrate them rather than ask yourself, how might this actually be a good thing?

Yeah, I mean, I think that cuts right through. I mean, for example, when you compare yourself to someone who is seemingly successful or looks a particular way, we carry the assumption into that that that person is happy with whatever they're doing, or we know why.

Or that they can only do what they're doing, you know. So you get older, and I tell you, you know, I've written so many research articles and it just doesn't do a whole lot for me anymore. I can still write them. But now if I were more typical, not paying attention to why I'm doing what I'm doing, you say, oh, here's this young upstart who published 10 articles. Forget about books. I do plenty of those. 10 articles and I only publish 2. I can feel, well, I'm past my my prime, and that's what happens as you get older.

And now I need to start publishing.

Well, rather than realize it was a choice that was made. Things change as you get older. You value things differently. But without that, yeah, it's easy to presume that your motivations are the same. Not just that, but The way the outside world is facilitating or harming that performance of the same. You see somebody sitting, you know, it doesn't mean at that moment they're not capable of jogging.

You know, I think the most ridiculous, I think, results of this with the— in terms of self-sabotage, even if you look at the Olympics and Olympics with these documentaries and stuff like that, What's really interesting is people who place 2nd, 3rd, 4th end up getting very depressed because they didn't place 1. But you're 2 out of the entire world and now you're depressed.

Oh, no, you can make yourself miserable. I remember when I was young and there'd be student evaluations. I'm teaching a course of over 300 students and you go through all 300, you go through the evaluation And there are 2 that say something negative. And, you know, you're crushed by it. Yes, we do that all the time, but we do that with many disorders. So let's say you're dyslexic. I don't know if we even still use the term, but so you get a page to read and the page, let's say, has 200 words on it. And you get 2 words backwards. You got— what did I say? You got 198 words right. I mean, you should be applauded rather than worry about the thing you got wrong. And we do that all the time.

Well, why do you feel like we fixate on that though? It's like we pinpoint on the thing that went wrong. It's like, it's just boom. Like we're just looking at it.

That's a good question. I don't know, but not all of us do it and do it to the same extent. I mean, you know, I play— if I'm playing tennis, you can't pay attention to each and every ball that you hit, you know, because you're now into the next point and you don't know if the shot you made was because they, you know, sent you over a blooper or whether it was magnificent. I mean, you don't have the whole thing videotaped and whatever. And there are some people who will just pay attention to their errors. some people who just pay attention to their successes and most people to some combination thereof. And, you know, if all you do is pay attention to your errors, you're not going to feel good about yourself. It's like what I said to you before, that we engage overwhelmingly in hypothesis-confirming data searches. So you're paying attention just to your errors, you're looking for your errors. How can you feel good at the end of the day? When there were all these potential successes around. And not only that, but whether something is an error or a success is often open to interpretation.

Now, you've been at this for 50 years. Does this process— if someone's just completely mindless all the time, does the process get easier in the sense to become mindful? Yes, like you— sure, you're starting to do it.

That's a wonderful question, Matthew, because Mindfulness is energy begetting. Mindfulness is what you are or what you're doing. You're being mindful when you're at play. It's a way of being engaged. And so it takes care of itself when you just want more and more of it. People misunderstand because they often confuse mindfulness with thinking, and thinking's gotten a bad rap. Thinking is fun too. But thinking feels hard because part of that becomes, what if I don't get the answer? There's no right answer when you're being mindful. You're just noticing new things. And so people think, oh my God, it sounds exhausting. But could you be happy all the time? I am virtually all the time. And no, you just get more and more animated. It's the way you want to be. You know, you see people who feel passionate and you say, gee, I wish I had something to feel passionate about. But I go back to the Birdman of Alcatraz. Feed a pigeon, you know, that just notice new things about something and it becomes more interesting. So yeah, and I think that we said before that people see work must be stressful, work must be hard, but whether something is work or play is up to you. And that I make a game of virtually everything. And so virtually everything is fun for me. An example came to mind the other day. This was graduation a couple of years ago, and somehow my colleagues and I found ourselves on stage. That's just where they put the faculty. And we didn't know that we were going to have to be there for like 3 hours when they gave out degrees to every sub-area in the university. All right. So, you know, everybody is groaning and I say, let's not. They say the next, okay, now we'll give our degrees to East Asian studies. So I said, I bet there are 4 people. And the next person said, I bet there are only 2. I bet there are 6. And then the answer. And then we get the next one. And it became a game. When you recognize that the essence of games is just the attempt to predict what's unpredictable, essentially everything can be virtually made into a game.

That's so interesting. I mean, because in that example, so many people I mean, the default literally is, "Oh my God, I'm going to sit here for 3 hours now." And it's just like, I mean, even I feel that sometimes when I go on the subway. "Oh my God, the train's coming in 10 minutes. I'm going to have to stand here for 10 minutes." Yeah.

But just notice things. Make it a game. You know, how many people are wearing sneakers? You know, so the other day I was at the airport and I put on sneakers and I thought, "Well, I don't know. Am I unusual? Is it just older people?" So I paid attention to sneakers and it was great. It was my turn to come up, show him my ID to get on the plane, and I wasn't done counting.

Yeah. I mean, this is venturing into neuroscience a little bit, but I would think that the process of brain plasticity is at work over time if you have certain pathways that are locked and gridlocked into mindlessness and then You practice this over a period of time of years in a one-grid, and then it literally in your brain circuits becomes an easier process.

And when I'm talking about mind-body unity, I'm not saying there's nothing going on, as my colleagues would say, under the hood. All I'm saying is that it's one process and it's not this is causing that. It's simultaneously, it's all changing. I go like this, my brain, everything about me is different.

Yeah. Um, I mean, there's a lot of fascinating research around the mind-gut connection as well.

Sure.

And, you know, these— this comorbidity of, uh, you know, mental illnesses and then the gut. And so it's like, that's a physical, like a literal, a physical vagus nerve representation of the mind-body connection. And I just feel like this idea of the mind-body connection is just popping up as a fact.

Well, you know, then again, as you said, I've been doing this since 1979. Yeah. I was in Kansas City for reasons I don't remember. And person I was with said, let's go to an iridologist. I'm up for anything. And so an iridologist, somebody who's going to look in your eyes and tell you about yourself. And so she looks in my eyes and she says, you have a problem with your gallbladder. And of course, this is ridiculous, like astrology. Anyway, I went home and the next week I discovered that I had a problem with my gallbladder, which until I started studying mind-body unity seemed to me kind of crazy. But yes, everything is manifested everywhere. If we had the tools that were strong enough to look at it, you know, that the color of your skin is going to change whether you're mindful or mindless. But we don't have tools that are strong enough to pick this up now. Eventually we probably will.

You know, if we just zoomed out and thought about the possibilities of how this could radically change the world, I mean, you had a whole part in your book about a mindful utopia.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that?

Well, you know, right now we have a world, as I said before, where there are many, many people who are depressed. Sick, getting older, afraid of being older. I mean, it's not— if you randomly chose any 4 people, doesn't have to be in New York, go to Kansas City, that they're— my guess is that they're not going to be happy, healthy campers. And all of that needn't be. You know, so in a mindful utopia, we have people who end up respecting themselves because they know their behavior made sense or else they wouldn't do it. They also respect other people. You can learn from other people rather than feel you need to degrade them. So relationships improve. You have a happier world. And we have people understanding, you know, you talked about addiction, that many of the people who have addictions are people who have been taught that they're less than. In this mindful utopia, nobody is less than. I had this experience, it's going to sound maybe silly, but it was so important to me. We were having this major delivery. I was keeping stuff in the very large basement. So this giant truck shows up. I know the basement. I said, there's no way, and I'm supposed to be a genius, right? There's no way that all of that furniture is going to fit in that space. The person I was talking to who was going to put the furniture away was somebody who thinks nothing of himself, who's uneducated, who's missing many of us, you know, just, you know, who sees himself as a loser, has been taught to see himself as a loser. He put every piece of furniture away. And not only was it all in the space, but everything was accessible. And I thought at that moment, This is not right. Why am I applauded as a genius, as if I can do everything, and he's diminished at every turn? And, you know, then I wrote this little thing for my grandkids that everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something, everybody can do something else. A little song that is really meaningful to me. And where basically I want to take the vertical where I sit somewhere, you know, on top, not the very top, but, you know, pretty high up and make it horizontal, recognizing everybody doesn't know something. Everyone knows something else. Everybody can do something. Everyone— we almost came to that, I thought, in COVID, when all of a sudden the person who's delivering the toilet paper was applauded, you know, but we didn't get there. We buy into Somebody's definition of what excellence is, the proper way, the only way to do things. And with all of that, there's always somebody who's allowing this fiction to exist, who's sitting on top, afraid it's going to all fall apart, rather than, you know, so I'm with my grandkids. They were 5 at the time, and one of them starts to whistle. I say, "Theo, you're such a good whistler." At that moment, his twin brother says to me, "Grandma, when Theo was learning how to whistle, I was learning something else." And I thought, that's the way the world needs to be. But in the world I was brought up in at their age is I'm inferior because I can't whistle, rather than respect that and learn something else. Everything, you know, that The world is not zero-sum. And that's what this mindful utopia would teach people. Zero-sum is that one winner, one loser. Winners and losers, you add them up, it becomes zero. That for the things we seek, in my view of the world, there's no reason why we can't all have them. Because what we all want is self-respect, to have some peace of mind, to have relationships that are rewarding. And all of that is available equally to all of us.

I think that example with your grandkids is interesting because if we were to pretend someone sitting in front of you who's in their 20s or 30s who is constantly comparing themselves online, feeling behind, not good enough, like they're not there yet or doing what somebody else is doing, how would you directly speak to that person if they were sitting in front of you?

In a larger sense, I don't think there's anybody better than I am. But the important thing is I don't think I'm better than anybody else. And so to deeply feel that means that when someone can do something you can't do, it's an opportunity to learn something new. And the fact that you couldn't do it— everybody is doing whatever they're doing at one point in their lives couldn't do it. You know, I did this little demonstration forever ago. That a student would come in and I'd say I'd use some arcane expression and they'd walk out thinking I know every word in the English language versus I'd have a dictionary open and then I'd use some arcane expression and they would realize that, yes, there was some point I didn't know the word and now I learned it. And, you know, a learning that's available virtually to everybody and understanding again that you don't want perfection because as soon as you have perfection, you know, you're pressing that elevator button and it's a non-event. So it's the mastering, not having mastered, that's meaningful.

What about somebody who feels anxious about being single and they've internalized the idea that they're behind, there's something that's wrong with them and time is running out?

Well, you know, my answer to most of these things is, who says so? You know, you look at people, look at people who are married, are they happy? You know, go into any restaurant and sit down and have a sandwich or a full meal, and you see couples together who aren't even talking to each other. What is it you're envying? What is it that they're doing that you yourself can't do? And, you know, again, as simple as it sounds, life only consists of moments. And most people, if they realize that, realize it's not hard to make a moment meaningful. So you don't need the anxiety, you don't need the competition, you don't need the comparison, the unflattering comparison. You say that, gee, I can't, whatever. You know that we have expressions, it's lonely at the top, or you have, in the past when I was young, you know, the girl who is simply gorgeous, who everybody assumes is going out, invited to all the parties, and, you know, who, since everybody's assuming everybody else is asking her out, is sitting at home. We don't know what other people are experiencing. All we know is that whatever we're experiencing is a function of what we tell ourselves. And the more mindful we are, the more stories we can create for ourselves. Not fictions, ways of understanding things. And that, you know, I was living in San Francisco and I was young and I— there was this procedure, it was to buy a rubber suit. If you put your whole body in this rubber suit, you'd lose weight, which you probably would, you know, because you'd perspire and it'd be a water loss. So this person measured every inch of my body. Okay, writes it down in a column. And then the next column writes what it's going to be. And as soon as the person wrote the next, I felt good. Now, why would I feel good when I haven't changed? In the 10-minute time period, but it was because of what's possible. And what people need to understand is that there's no way of assessing possibility, but to live in a world where you presume whatever is, is going to either stay the same or get worse is very sad to me personally.

I think it's interesting if we go back to the beginning of the counterclockwise study, You are basically the same age now as those people who did, who were participants. And so what about the people that are around your age range or are worried about getting older who have now, I mean, you're here.

Oh, I talk to them all the time.

I mean, you have incredible amount of endurance, which is amazing. I mean, that you're doing this. Most people, I feel like probably in their 70s is like, well, That's not possible for me. I can't do that. And so if you talk to them all the time, what are the things that you're saying?

Well, I think that's changing. I think that there are so many baby boomers, you know, in the distant past, the image of old was decrepit and there weren't many positive images around for people to point to. And now there are so many of us, you know, Again, to do the self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, if you see somebody who's energized and you say they must be 60, you know, we don't know. The person could be 80. You see what I'm— you know, so if you have the mindset old means decrepit, yes, you're going to find lots of evidence. But if you have the mindset old can be passionate, energetic, and happy, you're going to find instances of that. So again, the questions you ask yourself are crucial.

Yeah, I mean, I think the rules even that we apply in our society when it comes to older people, there is this wealth of experience and wisdom that only they could have through lived experience.

I don't think so. But I think it would be a shame to have lived 70 years and not grown.

Yeah.

The more mindful you are, the more positive experience you've had. You know, that's why I do some of this in the courses that I teach, to try to take the younger person and give them the wisdom. There's no reason why you have to wait, you know, until you're older. You know, remember, you know, when you were 2 years old and you fell and you got a raspberry and you're screaming bloody murder. It's just a little bruise. And then you're 5 or 7 and Johnny or Janie doesn't send you a Valentine and your life is over. And then you're 14 and you get a pimple and, oh my God, I'm going to be— and it keeps changing. At some point you should look back and see, yeah, all of this was kind of silly. And, you know, and you change your views and everything changes.

I said to my wife last week, I think it's interesting. There are a lot of scientists like yourself or people that are in academia that I mean, it goes back to sort of the retirement thing, but they never really fully stopped their research and they're still continuing to teach or do things like this. And if I look at that part of the population, I think it'd be interesting to do a study on this, but it seems like the cognition, the endurance, like all these different things go well into like mid-80s, late 80s, like early 90s.

Oh, it can go on forever.

Yeah.

You know, the argument that I'm making, and we have enough data to support it, is that mindfulness is energy begetting. And so if you're in— and you can't enjoy what you're doing if you're doing it mindlessly. A robot isn't enjoying being a robot. And so the more you're enjoying, the more the neurons are firing. There's no reason, there's no reason to stop. I mean, you know, all the stops are artificial. And— but now again, it depends on why you're stopping. If you're stopping because they've kicked you out of whatever you're doing. That's different from freely choosing and choosing, you know, two very important differences. One, choosing because you presume it's all over, you know, life is behind you, nothing ahead versus I'm going to go on to do all these other exciting things. You know, there's a part of the book we haven't talked about, which I think is good because it's kind of, you know, startling and a little complicated, but about decision-making. Let me just give people the bottom line. We never really make decisions. You don't decide to retire. You, you know, at some point it presents itself where this is a good thing. You know, if somebody right now offered me, I don't even know what it could be, but if it were more exciting than my teaching and being able to share these ideas, There'd be no decision. I would just do it. You know, you can't— well, anyway, so the bottom line is, rather than waste— and also decision-making causes the most stress for people because they think there's a right decision. And there is no right decision because as soon as you make a decision in order to take action, as soon as you take an action, you can't evaluate what an alternative action might have led to. Anyway, people can read about it to understand more of what I'm saying. But the bottom line is essentially, rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, you can almost randomly decide, but make the decision right.

That's really good.

So people like me don't decide to retire. So as an academic, I think We're allowed to just keep going. They can arrange things to make it uncomfortable. But at some point, you know, you say, I've done this, and I've been there, done that. And there's this other thing that seems exciting.

One of the exciting things that's happening in our society, I mean, some people call exciting labels, other people call it terrifying, is the whole thing around artificial intelligence. I thought it was interesting. We were talking you know, around the water cooler, and you were talking about, oh, I asked ChatGPT about this thing. Is this something that you actively use a lot? Or—

I don't use it as much. I don't know enough about it to use it as well as one might, but I think it's phenomenal. And of course, like with anything else, you know, bad actors will be just as powerful in the negative direction.

But I mean, I think it's interesting because someone your age would typically make a rule of, oh, that's just, that's young people technology. I don't even want to deal with that.

You know, we have a new study where we're getting AI to teach people to be more mindful. That's the goal. So no, I, you know, people need to understand that these are just tools. And people say to me, you know, that there's all this technology, whatever, people more mindless than they were before. And you can read mindlessly or mindfully. You can use AI mindlessly or mindfully. It's not in the tool. It's in the way you use the tool.

The way I wanted to close was, I mean, again, you've been at this—

No, no, don't leave me.

You've been at this 50 years. This is kind of getting to the crux of what I was saying earlier, and I really would love to turn the table on you and be like, what is the most challenging circumstance you went through in your life where you felt like you had to practice mindfulness?

My mother died when I was young. She was 57. In fact, it was sad for me because I had gotten tenure, which she would have had me laminated if she could have. She was so proud of me. It would have been nice if she knew that. I remember earlier in my life where she wanted me to learn how to type just as a backup. So, you know, big difference from there to my being at Harvard and so on. And I think that I have— I don't know if it was her death that led me to a different view of death. Or it was a different view of death from most people that guided me in my dealing with her death. But I realized early on, and none of this is going to sound spectacularly new or revelations, but for me it was important to realize I only knew her through my thoughts. And I still had my thoughts. And so, you know, she had moved to Florida, and so I wasn't seeing her all the time anyway. So what was the difference between her being dead or alive and the days I wasn't seeing her? And so that meant that much of— most of our relationships are just in our heads, you know, and which is very comforting. It also was the case that I was studying the elderly at a time— this is before baby boomers were getting old— and being old was— Betty Davis said, "Old age ain't no place for sissies." You know, it was terrible. And so there was a way that it felt she never had to go through any of the indignities that many people approach as they get older. And so she was always in my mind, young and vital. Now, I must tell you, it was very strange because she died at 57. I'm 78. It's very hard to think about her and to think about her as it should be, where she was so much younger than I am now. You know, so it tends to be, as my mother, she was always older, and I haven't been able to make sense of all of it. But did you miss her when she died? Well, of course, of course. No, I mean, how did you process that? How do I process missing her? Well, in the way I've just said, that to recognize that you only know somebody in your minds. And I still had— I knew what she would say to everything. So I didn't need to call her to hear her just say, she'd tell me that when I'm looking for something, everything can't be in the front. This sort of stuff.

Yeah, that's good.

And my attachment to her was clear through my research, which was largely a function of the bout she went through with the cancer.

It's almost like a catalyst dedication in a way. So it's beautiful. Well, this was certainly a mind-bending conversation.

And it's interesting people have that expression because You know, we have with so many expressions, you want to straighten things out. Um, so mind straightening versus mind bending.

We'll go with mind straightening.

No, I like the—

but I, I guarantee it'll— it's going to be a catalyst for people to have a new way of being.

That would be very—

hopefully a mindful utopia. So thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Matthew. It was fun. Yeah.