Mind Body Wisdom and The Illusion of Control with Ellen Langer

High-performing teams have human leadership. Human leadership creates trust, purpose, and belonging at all levels. We've developed 3 core workshops to elevate your team with human leadership. Find out how to bring human leadership to your workplace at www.wearehumanleaders.com. Life consists only of moments, nothing more than that. If you make the moment matter, it all matters. What does it mean to be truly mindful? I'm Alexis Starner, and together with Sully Clark, today we're exploring just that. In today's conversation, we explore the mind-body connections through decades of powerful trailblazing research with Harvard University professor and the mother of mindfulness, Ellen Langer. This conversation will radically shift your perception around what it means to be mindful and mindless, from reversing the signs of aging to healing from dire medical prognosis, through to the illusion of control and how leaders can better engage workplaces to be more present and mindful. This conversation with Professor Langer covers it all. Ellen J. Langer was the first tenured female in the Harvard psychology department and has since led decades of groundbreaking research into mindfulness, human behavior and its opposite, earning her title as the Mother of Mindfulness. Ellen J. Langer is the author of 11 books, including the international bestseller Mindfulness, which has been translated into 15 languages, and more than 200 research articles. She is the recipient of, among other numerous awards and honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest from from the American Psychology Association, and the Award for Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to the Application of Psychology from the American Association of Applied Preventive Psychology, and the Adult Development and Aging Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychology Association. Langer's trailblazing experiments in social psychology have earned her inclusion in The New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas issue, which will soon be the subject of a major motion picture. A member of the psychology department at Harvard University and a painter, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This conversation is nothing short of mind-altering. Now let's dive in.

Welcome to We Are Human Leaders. Ellen, it is a delight to have you with us. We'd love to start by getting to know you a little bit better and hearing about your personal journey that's brought you to the incredible work you're doing today.

Well, you know, Sally, Alexis, I'm a lot older than you are, so if I shared my personal journey, we wouldn't have time to talk about the work. So, you know, my journey just began. I was very, very fortunate to have two loving, supportive parents, and I think that made all the difference in the world. Because it gave me an optimistic, positive outlook on life. And so since I'm a little girl, you know, you would say, oh, this terrible thing. And I say, no, look at it this way. And so that eventually worked its way into my work. Is that enough of a personal journey or you want more?

All right.

Here's another one that's relevant. This is most relevant to my new book, which is The Mindful Body. So I was married when I was very young and I was 19 years old and 19 going on 40. And we went to Paris for our honeymoon. And so we're in a restaurant went there and I ordered mixed grill. And on the mixed grill was pancreas. Well, you know, I mean, could I eat it? I had to prove something because after all, now I was a married woman. And so I asked my husband, then husband, which of these items was the pancreas. He pointed to something. And I ate everything else with gusto, smile on my face. But now came the moment of truth. Could I eat the pancreas? And I start eating it and I literally get sick to my stomach. And as I'm getting sicker and sicker, he starts laughing. I said, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. And that was the beginning of mind-body unity idea, although I didn't know it at the time. But where we are at the present and where a lot of this book is about is people have a conception of mind and body as separate. In fact, we can go back not that many decades ago when the medical world thought psychology was totally irrelevant to health. Well, fast forward to today. Most people know that it's relevant and talk about a mind-body connection. I'm not talking about a mind-body connection. I'm talking about the mind and body being a single unit. It's very different because as a single unit, you don't have to answer the question, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And so I've done lots of studies. Some are reasonably dramatic, I think, that I report in The Mindful Body. And it also, because mind and body are one thing, it means every thought you have is potentially— well, not potentially— will affect your health and well-being. And so a lot of the book deals with the, we'll say, wrong thoughts that we have, the way we don't understand things in a way that's to our advantage. And we have to learn how to speak better to ourselves. But I can just keep talking, or I'll pause for a moment. I'll give you one chance to ask me a question, then we'll go from there.

Ellen, thank you so much. And the research that you've done in so many ways is so groundbreaking, and we'll dive into some of those studies in a little bit. Before we move through to that, I'd love to just pause for a moment and look at this concept of mindfulness. Now, you've been described as the mother of mindfulness. And there's a very common misconception, I think, that mindfulness is synonymous with meditation, or in fact is meditation. Can you just help us unpack that for a minute? What is mindfulness? What isn't it?

That's so important. Thank you, Alexa. Wonderful place to start. So meditation is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you engage in, presumably to lead to post-meditative mindfulness. All right. What I'm talking about is just something very different. It's not a practice. It's a way of being. When you realize, you know, so you don't know what I'm going to say next. And because you don't know, you're paying attention to me now because everything is always changing and everything looks different from different perspectives. Everything is new. And that's the way we should approach it. So what I'm suggesting, and we have lots of data, that if you actively notice new things, about the things you think you know, you'll see you didn't know them well at all. All right. Then your attention naturally goes to it. And you do this often enough and you come to say, geez, I can't trust that I know anything. But you don't have to feel bad about that because nobody does. All right. So everything is new. An alternative way of getting to this spot is just to accept the fact that uncertainty is the rule. It's not the exception. So let me give you an example from my own life. Now, remember, I'm Harvard, Yale all the way through. This matters to the story. I'm at this horse event, and this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him? Because he's going to go get his horse a hot dog. Believe me, no one knows better than I— as well, but not better— horses don't eat meat. But I watched the horse, he comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I know could be wrong. Now, for me, that made everything exciting, because everything I knew that placed limits on us, for instance, needed to be questioned. All right. Now, we get most of our facts, many of our facts, at least from science. And what people don't realize is science only gives us probabilities. Essentially, you do a study and you get a finding. Now, if you did the exact same study, and it can never be exactly the same, but let's make believe it's the exact same study, you're likely to get the same findings. Those are translated as absolutes, not most horses or horses under these circumstances seem not to eat meat. It's horses don't eat meat. Right. And that's the way we've learned everything. So a way of understanding mindlessness is frequently in error, but rarely in doubt. People think they know. And so to shake that for people, I might ask them if I'm giving a talk, how much is 1 and 1? Sally, how much is 1 and 1?

2.

2. Yeah, she knows. Sally knows it can't possibly be that easy, or else why would I ask? Okay, well, it turns out that 1 and 1 is not always 2. If you add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 wad of chewing chewing gum plus 1, what? I'm chewing gum. 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile and so on. In the real world, 1 plus 1 probably doesn't equal 2 as often as it does. Okay, so going forward now, if somebody— and of course this isn't going to happen— if somebody said to you, Sally, how much is 1 plus 1? Now you're going to try to look at the context and see what is it in this context. And my guess is you'd be smart enough to say it could be 2 rather than it is 2. All right. So when we understand that we don't know Everything comes alive. And the research made very clear over all these years, 45 years of doing this research, that as we're actively noticing new things, the neurons are firing and it's literally and figuratively enlivening. When you're being mindful, people find you charismatic. They find you more attractive, more authentic. When you're mindful, it leaves its imprint on the things that you do. So everything is better. So your health is better, your relationships are better. And the most important part, the last thing I'll say about it right now, is that it's easy and it's fun. So when you're enjoying yourself, you can't be enjoying yourself unless you're there. How do you be there? By paying attention to what's going on. So it's so easy and the consequences are so enormous that I suggest you immediately put everything down and start being mindful. I love it.

Ellen, I have a question, but I'd love to share something personal as well. And simply that, you know, I grew up in a very intellectual environment and very much science-focused. And, you know, my brother's a mathematician, so I'm would have answered that question way better than I would have. But we always had this real focus on research and on, I think, this, you know, quite understandable tendency that humans have to generalize in order to understand and to make these sort of broader statements that aren't actually getting to the true truth of things, as it were. And I love this shift, I think, that's happened for me personally over the years that almost feels like I'm finding my own truth. It's common sense somehow. It's hearing these things and hearing the findings from your research just simply feels so intrinsically right. Somehow, like something we've always known and now we're just shedding light on it. And something you mentioned earlier, Ellen, that was that it's not a practice, it's simply a way of being.

Yeah, once you accept that you don't know, you naturally tune in. I mean, if the two of you were going to travel all this way to my house, you wouldn't have to practice being mindful. You've never been here before. As soon as you walked in, you'd notice things. You'd be curious. Did she do that painting? Look at that. Is she reading that book? You know, whatever. And that's what people need to appreciate, that it's what we're doing when when we're having the most fun. It's the act of becoming engaged.

And I can imagine just sort of linking it to work in a business world, with engagement being such an important aspect of employee experience. I imagine it's something that can be profoundly impactful for leaders to bring into their work lives as well. Is that something that you've seen in practice, Ellen, and seen impact?

Yeah, well, interesting. We did a study that at first doesn't seem like it speaks to leadership, but it really does. So we had symphony musicians, different orchestras, playing pieces either mindfully or mindlessly. When they were playing mindlessly, they were told, remember a time you played it where you loved your performance and just replicate it. That's the mindless. The mindful was told, each of the musicians, make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know. Now they're playing classical music, so it's indeed subtle, right? The performances are taped and then they're played for people and asked which should they prefer. People overwhelmingly prefer the mindfully played piece. And the musicians overwhelmingly prefer playing it that way. Okay. So while I was analyzing the data and writing this up for publication, all of a sudden it occurred to me, you know, here we had superior coordinated experience by everybody doing their own thing. And the reason that it was better, because everybody was in the same present moment, which then led me to conclude that perhaps the most important job of the leader is to promote the mindfulness of all those being led. And we need to have more respect for people. You know, I was in South Africa a while ago giving a lecture, and so I took a little time off and I'm in this very fancy hotel down by the swimming pool. And what I noticed was that there was a large amount of the hotel's real estate that wasn't being used. And the only person who knew this other than me, perhaps, was the cabana boy. Right now, you know, when you recognize that everybody has information that could be useful, not just those at top— on the top, we tend to involve them more in the decision-making and understanding how to go forward and so on. So I think that a mindful organization is one that tries to promote the mindfulness of all the people that are working there, where people don't think they have the best solution because the solution they're thinking of was a solution for yesterday, yesterday's solution to today's problems. There are probably newer ways of dealing with things, and that everybody, no matter what their pay level, probably has something to offer. So it becomes a homier, a nicer place to be. And when people are in a place that feels good, they're going to work harder because the work is in part going to feel like play. And that's what we should do, is make sure the work feels more like play. So I don't know, the two of you are probably working right now. I'm not working, I'm playing. But you should enjoy doing the interview, you know, life is short. So you don't want to sort of take time out of your life to do this drudgery, this work. I think we've made a mistake by distinguishing between work and play. And so people think work is stressful. Nothing has to be stressful. So we took work situations, and we actually made them play. People thought they were playing a game. And when they did that, they enjoyed what they were doing. When they took the play situation and saw it as work, their minds wandered, they were bored, you know, and so on. So people in the business world often talk about work-life balance. And I think that's a mistake. I think it should be work-life integration. It should be one thing, you know, that you should play hard, you should work hard, and you shouldn't be stressed in either environment.

Ellen, thank you so much. There's so much for us to dive in there. And I can't help but think that from everything I've just heard you say, it seems to be a very conscious choice. Taste as to whether or not we experience things as work or as play or as stressful?

Well, no, because we're mindless. Most— you see, this research has shown me that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. And when you're mindless, you're not there to know you're mindless. So it's not such an easy fix, but it's an important thing to recognize. And that, you know, there are even people now talking about positive stress because it motivates you. And I think that's a big mistake, even The researchers are people I respect. You know, I mean, stress is bad. You don't want to create concepts like positive rape. Rape is bad. You know that you can motivate yourself differently. And stress is purely psychological. When you're stressed, you're saying something is going to happen. And when it happens, it's going to be awful. Well, it turns out that we can't predict. Prediction is an illusion. We're very good at post-dictating after the fact, but not going forward. So let's say an example I've used too often now, but let's use it again. You're at a party and you see Don and Jane fighting. Okay. If I said to you right then, are they going to get divorced? You say, people fight. Who knows? Right. But let's say you're at the party. You see this, you go home a week later. Somebody tells you, you know, Don and Jane are getting divorced. Yeah, I knew it. You should have seen them go at each other at the party. And so it's very important to know that we can't predict and we don't need to be able to predict because we can control our experience to events. So you stress, say to yourself, what are 3, 5 reasons that this thing you fear is not even going to happen? And by the way, most of the things people are worried about never happen. Okay. So now you went from it's definitely going to happen to maybe it won't happen. You feel a little better. Then is the more fun part. Take this thing that you dread and turn it around and say, how is this a good thing? Because things and events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events. So if you open it up more mindfully, see it in many ways, see how it can be good. The way my life plays out is I really don't care what happens almost with anything. I live with somebody. You decide what television program we're watching, what theater we're going to, where we're going to go to dinner. I don't care because I'm going to have a good time. No matter what, because having a good time is solely a function of the degree to which you're willing to engage the present circumstances. All right. And if, let's say, the dinner were awful, that would be great because then I'd eat less and that'd be better for my waistline. All right. And then I could focus more on you rather than be distracted. Everything is good.

You know, I love what you're saying, Ellen, about— I keep hearing this word presence that you're mentioning, and I feel like that's very deeply connected, if I'm understanding correctly, with mindfulness.

Yeah, but some people— and it's a very sweet thing where people say, be in the moment. It's an empty instruction because when you're not there, you don't know you're not there. And so what I'm telling you, the way to be there is specifically to notice new things. Notice new— you open the front door and notice new things about the street. Notice new things, 3, 5 new things about the person you're living with or a person at work. And what happens is that they become more interesting to you. And then the person who's being noticed feels more cared for. And it's the beginning for the relationship to improve. But the other reason, another way in which mindfulness is so good for relationships and good in the work setting as well, is that you come to understand everybody's behavior from multiple perspectives. Now, what does that mean? Right now, most people, if you call somebody, oh, God, Sally, you're so inconsistent, it drives me crazy. All right. So you've made a commitment in some sense to see Sally as inconsistent. If you were mindful, you'd recognize that nobody wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be inconsistent. So from their perspective, why are they doing this? And then you'd recognize, well, Sally is being flexible. Oh, well, no, but you say flexible is good, inconsistent is bad. Alexis is impulsive. Impulsive is bad. Spontaneous is wonderful. I myself are extraordinarily gullible. Gullible is bad. But that just means I'm trusting. And so when we recognize that every single negative way of understanding ourselves or somebody else has an alternative and opposite, the balance, but just as powerful, then, you know, you want me to change. You want me not to be so gullible. Well, then you're going to have me be less trusting. And when you realize this, you probably don't want it. And so you can see the more mindful you are, the more options you have for understanding yourself, for understanding other people, for imagining how events are are going to unfold. And you're not a victim of your prior thoughts.

Hmm, that's an interesting concept, Ellen, this idea of being a victim of our prior thoughts. And so often, we are fated to repeat our patterns because of the mindlessness that we operate in.

Yeah, it doesn't occur to us that it could be otherwise. I think that's true. But you know, so most of the Mindful Body deals with these mistaken thoughts that we have about ourselves, about the world. A couple of them, let me tell you about, because they're kind of fun, where people try— you're told to try what you're doing. You don't want to do it. Try it. Now, trying is better than giving up, but it really doesn't go even half the distance it should go because trying has built into it a strong possibility of failure. You wouldn't say to somebody, try to enjoy your ice cream. So when you're trying, you think you're probably not going to succeed. Hope. Hope is much better than feeling no hope. But still, you don't go down to, you know, go to the kitchen in the morning after you get up to get coffee, hoping that it's it'll be there. You know, it's going to be there. Here's one that's really fun. It turns everything inside out. So many, many years ago, I was asked to give a sermon in one of the Harvard churches. I'm not religious. Sermon somehow, I don't know. For the first time, I was a little nervous about this. What could I talk about? And forgiveness. That sounds good. Sounds kind of religious. That's the best I could do. Well, I came up with something that was almost sacrilegious. Edges. So here it is, nutshell. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's good. Okay. And if you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's bad, right? But you have to blame before you can forgive. So it's interesting, our forgivers are our blamers. Now, you blame people for good things or 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, blame, and then forgive. Hardly divine. Okay, so the alternative— I don't want anybody, friend or intimate other, to forgive me. What I want them to do is understand me and to know why I said or did whatever I did, because there's always a good reason. All right. So even for those of us who think we're doing pretty well, I have advice that may lead them to be able to do a little better, you know, and the health part is also relevant here. So I had a friend who had a very bad case of cancer. And I went to see her. And I said, Eva, so how are you? Because she had just come from Mass General Hospital. And she said, they told me my cancer is in remission. And I stopped. And all of a sudden, it hit me. And I said, wait a second, Eva, if I had the same test, presumably they tell me I don't have cancer. But they're telling you, you have cancer in remission. Now, if you you have cancer, you're waiting for it to come back. And again, you're stressed. And we did some simple research where we went to women who are on a cancer awareness walk, breast cancer awareness walk, and we simply found out, did they see their cancer as in remission or cured? And then we checked back 6 months later. And those who saw it as cured were happier and healthier on every single measure we took. So the words we use to talk to ourselves really matter. You know, I had given a talk to, again, about 5,000 women with breast cancer. And this man was there who— there were some men in the audience as well, and his wife had died of cancer. And after listening to me, he came up and he was really upset, which I wasn't happy about. I don't want to upset anybody. And he said, you can't be right, Professor Langer, because my wife fought her cancer. And, you know, so I calmed him down and made him feel okay. And then I thought more about it. And then I realized, you know, again, the word fighting the cancer It says this is a very powerful opponent. And again, suggests the very real possibility of losing the fight. You wouldn't use fight if there's a 2-year-old, a 4-year-old pulling at your trousers. You know, it's an annoyance. Anyway.

I think this is such an interesting point, Ellen, because, you know, the way we talk about it, I'm a former lawyer, so I love words, I get really nerdy about word use. So I love to sort of delve into this granular level. But, you know, I feel like in our our societies, we and the media, there's a lot of fear-mongering. And this language and this, you know, militaristic type language that we use around our bodies and our health is ubiquitous. It's almost normalized. So it almost feels like a bit of a revolution to be thinking of it in these different terms, in kind of undermining that, the whole energy of it, by seeing it more clearly, more mindfully.

Yeah. Well, another thing that people get wrong is they all think they want to be fabulously successful. You know, whatever you're doing, you want to be the best at it. And it turns out you can either do what you're doing imperfectly mindfully or perfectly mindlessly. Because when you perfect it, you're not there for it. Right? So an example might be you're a golfer and what you want— boy, if I could get a hole in one every time I swung that club, but then there'd be no game. And so people need to understand that, you know, and other people have said this in some sense, that it's the journey, the mastering, not having mastered. And when you can make that change, that you do several things differently. One is you're more willing to take the first step, you know, and because you know, you don't know, but it's okay not to know, and that you're going to go on this adventure to see if you can do this thing. And people need to understand, you can never prove that you can't. That's very important. Science can't prove that you can't. All science can prove is that the way you try didn't work. And even that didn't work right now. It doesn't mean if we change some of the parameters. So I say to my students in my health class, first I ask them, how far is it humanly possible to run? And these are smart kids, so they know a marathon is 26 miles. They know I wouldn't be asking the question if you couldn't run further than a marathon. So they start around 40 miles, and then somebody gets braver, 45. I say, okay, And then I play them this YouTube of the Tarahumara tribe in Copper Canyon in Mexico, where these people run 250 miles without stopping. Right now, that's a whole different thing. You know, why have we stopped ourselves? And we do this with respect to almost everything. We stop short of what we can do. We have some research. And so I said before that if we take the mind and the body and we put them back together, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And one of the things we've done that's relevant, I think, to business is we've looked at fatigue. Now, people think the body is going to get tired when the body gets tired. But remember, we have the mind and body as one unit. So a simple way of understanding this, and I won't go into much detail, is that if I asked you to do 100 jumping jacks and tell me when you get tired, most people get tired around 70. Now, take another group of people and I ask them, do 200 jumping jacks and tell me when you get tired. They get tired at 140. So we get tired around two-thirds of the way through the activity. You could sort of— the image I have is somebody word processing all day long and really getting exhausted, and then they leave for the day, they go home, and they start playing the piano. It looks the same, but it's not. You want renewed energy? Change the context. I'll tell you, there was a study that Frank Beach did in the '50s. I've never heard anybody talk about, but I think is amazing in this context. Takes a little girl rat and introduces a little boy rat, and they copulate. And then what happens is the little boy rat needs a refractory period. He needs a rest. Unless if immediately they introduce another little girl rat, he's ready to go right away. So, you know, you get tired, but you change the context and you have renewed energy. And I don't know just how far we can push this, but when you add that to We're getting— I couldn't run 5 miles, no less 26 miles. But, you know, when you see that people— you organize yourself differently when you know the limits are far greater than what you've achieved.

That's brilliant, Ellen. It's fascinating to think that our perception of our experience has so much power. It's everything over how we experience it.

It's everything. Oh, you don't know the half of it, Alexis. I mean, did you get a chance to read The Mindful Body?

We've read parts of it, and some of the research that I'd actually love to speak to you about, Ellen, is some of the research around the illusion of control, if we can take it there, because that's something that as leaders as well really impacts our ability to make decisions. So can we go there? Can you help us explain or dispel a little bit around—

Oh, sure. As long as we have time.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

In fact, let me start with the health results, right? Very quickly, and then we'll go back to the other. So the first test of the mind-body unity was a counterclockwise study. It's a famous study, which I'm allowed to say, because if you watch The Simpsons Go to Havana, they talk—

it's such a brilliant study.

If you've made The Simpsons, you've made it, right? So we took old— we retrofitted a retreat, made it seem as if it was 20 years earlier, had old men live there as if they were their younger selves, talking about the past as if it was just unfolding now. As a result, in a period of time as short as one week, without any medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeable. Younger. Now, faster forward, we did a study where we have chambermaids, and chambermaids are working all day long, but they don't see their work as exercise because they think exercise is what you do after work, because that's what the Surgeon General in this country says. Okay, all we do is teach them that their work is exercise. They don't work any harder, they're not eating any differently, but simply by changing the way they understand their mindset about their work. They lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Let me just— two more fast, okay? Because I have so many of these, but they're really mind-boggling, I think. So people have diabetes, show up, and we give them all sorts of tests. Then we're going to have them sit down and play computer games. The reason for that will be clear in a moment. There's a clock next to the computer, and we tell them, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so, and that's to ensure that they look at the clock. Well, unbeknownst to them, for a third of them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of them, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of them, it's real time. The question we're asking is, does blood sugar level follow perceived time, clock time, or quote real time? And it turns out it's perceived time, meaning we have far more control than we realize. We have another study where we inflict a wound, a small wound, and again, we're using the clocks. So you're in front of a clock that's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time. That wound heals based on perceived time, not real time. It's kind of amazing. We have lots of these. And that's why I'm talking to you in the first place, actually, because I think it's so important that people realize the control they have over their lives. Not just their happiness, and we'll get back to that, or their effectiveness, but their physical health. Okay, so what do you want to know about the illusion of control?

Well, I think firstly, it's something that— control is something that we believe ourselves to have in certain contexts. So I would love to know a little bit more around your research in this space. And for many of us who feel the need to be in control of certain situations, perhaps what the downside of that is and how we can help control— how can we loosen our grip on this thing we're gripping So tightly on.

Yeah, let's go straight to that. People don't need to know the research around it. Okay. So when you really, really understand something that I already said, that we can't predict— if you can't predict— so you're in charge, Alexis, you know, should we do A or B? Well, if you can't predict anything about A or anything about B, how can you make that decision? Okay, so let me free people from something that causes enormous stress. Best guess. People think, because decision theorists have led them to think, that you should make your decisions by doing cost-benefit analyses. Cost-benefit analyses make no sense for two reasons that I've already said. One is that every cost is simultaneously a benefit. In and of itself, it's nothing. It depends on how we understand it. So if you're mindfully going to look for it, look at it, and you see the ways it's good and the ways it's bad, the very same thing, it doesn't tell you what to do, right? A plus one, a minus one, at least a zero. It's not guiding you one way or the other. All of your decisions— if you were to make a decision, should you have— I'll make it simple— a pear or an apple, you're presuming that that apple will taste like the last apple you had. Well, the apple is different, you're different, what you ate today was different from what you ate. You can't predict whether it's going to taste the same. But if you can't predict if the apple or the pear is going to taste the same, on what basis can you make this comparison? When you start gathering information, everybody thinks that you get a of information. Each piece of information can change the sense of what you're doing. You know, I want to buy this house. So far, all the information says I should buy it. Then so I could just buy it. Or then I get one more piece of information and it says they're going to build a highway right in front of the house. Then I shouldn't buy it. Okay, so I'm not going to buy it. Still on the market. Now I find out that the government that's going to put in this highway is going to pay top dollar to everybody on the road because of the income. Then I should buy it. And things keep changing. All right. And there's no way to know when you should stop gathering information. All right. So those 3 or 4 things that I've said enough lead me to the conclusion that rather than spend your time trying to make the right decision, all we need to do is make the decision right. So you can flip a coin, you can use a heuristic. The first thing that comes to mind, you're going to choose, or the last thing, or what I do, I just say, Alexis, whatever you want is fine with me because it doesn't matter. And then you make it work. And there's evidence that all of us can do this, you know. Should I go to the party? I don't want to go. All right, I go to the party reluctantly, and it always turns out nice because once you're there, you might as well have a good time, right?

It sounds though, Ellen, like you're saying, like, we're over-indexed in our reliance on historical data when making decisions. Is that right? Because in business, that's everything, like, you know, what happened in last, last year, or—

Yeah, exactly. And it's all You know, you know, as well as I, that the whole idea of a business plan is ridiculous. I mean, you have no idea. You're telling people how many people are going to want this thing that doesn't yet exist, and how much they're going to pay for it without knowing what the economy is going to be like, whether there's potential, you know, competition, you know, so all of these are really just exercises showing people that you're willing to go through the initiation rites, you know, that you're reasonably articulate. It and so on. But business, like every place else, has an overwhelming tendency to use yesterday's solutions to solve today's problems because they think, but then they think that that's what they should be doing. And I think that if everybody became more mindful, you would find new solutions, even who to hire, you know, who should be the CEO. So you're going to pick somebody based on yesterday. But now, and this is probably makes sense to you, that next week AI is able to do most of the jobs better. Okay. Should that person still be? Because he knows nothing about computers or data gathering or whatever. He's a good manager. Things change. When I talk about predictions, let me give you another colorful example. Many years ago, many, many years ago, before either of you were born, I had an opportunity to go to shop at this commissary. So things are very cheap. It was in the Army, right? And I get excited because I love a sale. Okay. So I buy up— I can't tell you how many pairs of nylon stockings, almost all of them, because I'm saving a fortune. 2 weeks after I get back home, pantyhose come out, making all those stockings, you know, be a pun, immaterial in some sense. We're always doing things based on yesterday. And that's okay, because we can deal with the consequences. But we need to recognize that we shouldn't be stress, one of the biggest stresses there is, especially in business, are making decisions. I did this thing with a decision-making graduate course I was teaching at Harvard, and I said, okay, what I want you to do is spend the whole week till we meet again not making a single decision. That again, the first thing that comes to mind, you can say, I'll take A, I'll take the last thing, flip a coin. If there are 6 options, roll dice, whatever you want to do, just don't bother bother with any cost-benefit analysis. And they came back at the end of the week thrilled. It was a stress because I gave them permission to do it. But so now I'm giving everybody permission to do it because you can't know and you can make whatever happens work. So with the illusion of control, way back when, I was probably where lots of your listeners are, believing that there was an absolute reality independent of people. And, you know, there were probabilities that we could count on. And so the illusion of control then was when somebody thought they had a better chance than the odds really said that they had. It was all very rational. And then I did the illusion of control studies showing how we can move around this rationality. It was part of the backbone of behavioral economics. And now I said, yeah, I was wrong. I was wrong about a lot of it that we don't know. You know, the illusion of control is something from the observer's perspective. You, Alexis, look at Sally when she's playing poker, whatever it is, and she's betting a lot because pretty sure she's gonna win. And you know that her 3 pair, 3 of a kind is just not that good, given the cards on the table, right? So you'd say she has an illusion of control. But from Sally's perspective, people don't have illusions. From Sally's perspective, it's real control. And when you believe you have control, you sit up tall, and you're going to take different actions than when you believe you have no control. It's good to believe you have control. And nobody can prove that you don't have control in that situation. Okay, it's a little—

it's fascinating.

Too much, right?

No, it's both deeply disconcerting and liberating simultaneously.

You know, we have a million more questions we could ask you, Ellen, but I'd love to come back for a moment to the mind-body unity theory, partly for personal reasons, if I'm transparent, because, you know, there's a lot of illness in my family, there's a lot of sort of genetic reasons why I should be very concerned about various things. And yet, so speaking to someone who is really looking to understand how the mind-body unity works and how I can, for want of a better word, use it for my benefit. What would you advise me?

Yeah, okay, so there are so many things. First of all, you have to recognize that any diagnosis is a guess because we said science doesn't give us anything but probabilities. So that means that it's not true for a lot of people. Maybe you're one of those people, number one. Number two, when one has a diagnosis for a chronic illness. It's very scary. And people believe there's no control. But that doesn't mean that there is no control. It just means the medical world hasn't come up with any control. And I believe, even in a simple way, you know, if you make the rest of you healthy, all right, that's going to, you know, imagine we have an Olympic athlete and a couch potato, and they're both exposed to COVID. Who's likely to have the worst case of it? So we can always make ourselves stronger. But there's actually more that we can do. So let's go back a a step. I believe that placebos are probably our strongest medicine. Now, you take this nothing pill, it's a placebo, it's inert, and you get better. So what's going on is you're making yourself better. So how can we make ourselves better? You can't give yourself a placebo because you know it's not— it's a sugar pill, right? But we've come up with what I call attention to symptom variability treatment, which sounds like a whole big thing. It just means being mindful. When you're mindful, you're noticing changes. Okay, so here the changes you're noticing are in your symptoms. Now, most people who have chronic illnesses think that what they have is going to get worse or stay the same. That only moves in one direction, right? Nothing only moves in one direction. There are always little blips. Even chronic pain. Still, there are days you're better, days you're worse. And we don't pay attention, notice those times that we're better. So all we do is— and I'm going to tell you how you can do this for yourself. But first, we call people throughout the day at various times and ask them, is the symptom better or worse right now and why? Well, what happens is two things right away. The first, when you say the symptom is better or worse, you recognize that it's moving around, so you feel better, especially if it's a little better. The second, when I ask the question why, you start to become more mindful.

Yeah.

Why is it? Is it the afternoon? Is it the food I ate? Is it the way I'm sitting? What things have changed from the last time I was in pain? Okay. And finally, that if you look for a solution, I believe you're more likely to find one. So we do this. We call people at various times all day long over 2 weeks. And for diseases as big as multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, stroke, Parkinson's, arthritis, it will work for stress and depression as well. We get an alleviation of all the symptoms. Now, just sort of imagine to make this homier and so people can understand. So let's say, Alexis, you think you couldn't be more stressed. I mean, you are so stressed you don't know what to do with yourself. Okay. Now, when a moment comes and you're not stressed, when you're not stressed, you're not thinking about not being stressed. You're getting on with being. So you go from maximally stressed, no stress, maximally stressed again, forgetting that intervening time.

Okay.

So we keep calling you and asking you, how are you now and how did it compare to before and what's different? And let's say you discover when you're talking to Ellen Langer, you're really stressed. Okay, then the solution is easy, right? Don't talk to me. All right. You know, if it's that you only have trouble, you're only forgetful, or you only have whatever the symptom is in the afternoon, maybe you're just tired, in which case, you know, have an energy bar, you know, take a nap and see, does it help? But remember, you were talking before about how important it is for people to feel in control. So while you're testing out what's going on, you're feeling good rather than, you know, passive and a victim. All right. And we've had these wonderful results. Now, you don't need somebody calling. All you need to do is set your smartphone to ring in an hour, and then you ask yourself, how am I now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? Then set it for 2 hours, then set it for an hour and 20 minutes. You know, vary the time. And I think that for both of the reasons I gave you, that people are being mindful while they're doing this, they feel in control. And they're going to come up with things that actually help them. You can alleviate even the biggest problems. You know, when you have people who have early dementia and it's very hard for especially the caretakers. And so there's a way of saying, oh God, my mother doesn't remember anything, you know? And so ask the same question over and over again, you lose patience, which you shouldn't lose because all you need to remind yourself is not willful. You know, she's not doing this to annoy you. She's not doing this because she doesn't care enough to try to remember. But if you pay attention, into what things she's remembering and what things she's forgetting, because nobody forgets everything, then again, you're doing yourself a service because you're being more mindful. You're doing the relationship a service because you're paying more attention to her. And you may come up with, gee, it's these kinds of words that remind her of some bad experience that she's having trouble with, or these times of the day, or so on. And so I like these sort of solutions that I come up with because they feel good and they're good for for you even if they don't solve the problem. You know, you're here, you're doing something for yourself and you're growing and you can help other people in this way. But the data seem to suggest that the symptoms go away. So Sally, so with whatever diseases you're worried about, first, there is a probability. It's not an absolute. So don't assume that you're getting it. Assume that you're not. Make yourself as strong as you can be just because that's— life is more fun that way. You know, so you're uplifting and you're living every moment to its fullest. And so chances are nothing will happen, but if it happens, you'll be able to cope with it because you're stronger. And then you'll do some of this mindfulness and this attention to symptom variability. And because those are big diseases that I mentioned.

This is so powerful, Ellen. Thank you so much for sharing that. For me personally, but also just in the context of the people I know around me who are struggling with these things at the moment, it really gives me different language and perspective. And I can't wait to share this episode with them too. So thank you.

Now, Ellen, something else that we know about you is that you are a gallery exhibiting artist. And if we could, I'd love to understand what painting means to you. And has this given you any lessons in mindfulness? What kind of teacher has this served in your journey?

Yeah, it was when I turned 50, around 50, I started painting. I wasn't one of those kids who could draw, you know, so it just never occurred to me to do this. I still can't draw. And it was one summer where it was just raining every day. And so the tennis I would usually be playing, I couldn't be playing. And I bumped into a friend who was an artist, and she said, so how are you keeping yourself busy? And I, I don't know why I said this, honestly. I said, I'm thinking of taking up art. I don't know why I said it. I was not thinking of taking up anything anyway. But so then, having said that, then I started playing around. And the first painting that I did was on a shingle because I had nothing else to paint on since I had no intention to paint. And I I painted a woman on a horse riding through the woods. And so as a psychologist, this really interests me because here I'm painting on wood and I have her going through the woods. So was there anything there? So then I got into this thing. I would paint, I'd have some experience, then I'd go and do a study to see if it's just me or is it everybody else. And, you know, so many things that pertain well beyond the world of art. You know, the game didn't come alive until I made a mistake, because then you make a mistake, that means you can't go You shouldn't go back to where you were thinking of going. You go forward to some new place, then you're necessarily mindful. And if you could get rid of the idea that it has to be good. And one way of getting rid of that, by the way, is recognizing today in today's world, I don't know how much I think that the Impressionist paintings, the good ones go for $10, $20, maybe more than that million dollars. They were rejected in their day. So who says? What's good, what's not good. And so it's interesting because I started doing this— this is more than I should probably tell, but anyway, I have this friend who is an art collector, very knowledgeable, but she drinks too much. And she saw some of my art and she said, Ellen, there's something there. Now don't go thinking you're Rembrandt. Now I wasn't going to respond to her because I knew in her inebriated state she wouldn't appreciate it. But I said to myself, and Rembrandt isn't me. And what I meant by that is if I do a true me, whatever it's going to be, Nobody can do it better. And I'd rather be a first-rate Ellen than, you know, Ellen Langer than a millionth, whatever, 500,000th-rate Rembrandt. And, you know, so if you let yourself just do it and ask yourself questions about it, it becomes great fun. And yes, it's very mindful, but too many times people are too evaluative. And so a dear friend of mine was seeing how much fun I was having with this and then starts drawing drawing a dog, and then sees it looks nothing like a dog, she throws the paper away and she will never try to draw anything again. And I said, that's ridiculous. You know, you look at the thing you drew, look at the dog, and you say, oh, the dog's nose, you know, needs to be lower in the drawing, unless you want it to be a person-looking dog, which is also fun. And then you shape it, you know, but she was just too critical of herself. So it's a way to become easier on ourselves by constantly asking, who cares? And what's the difference? You know, that especially if you're not painting for any gallery sort of thing. And for me, you know, I came at this, I had this painting, I loved it. And I didn't know if it was any good. I just knew that I put my heart and soul into it. And there was an exhibit, I was a member of the Art Association and Museum in Provincetown. And I had gone to shows that they had there. And I didn't realize, foolishly, that a juried show was different. And a juried show meant somebody was going to say it's good or bad. The paintings that were there for this were far better than the members show where anybody who was a member bring their painting. So I go in with this large painting, I walk in and I see the quality of the other paintings, I turn around and I'm ready to walk out. And then I say, no, I can't be a hypocrite because I'm saying it shouldn't matter. And so on. And, you know, so I made myself go through it, it got selected for, you know, and but then I also got another whole set of enemies, because I was like an interloper, you know, the whole thing was strange. But anyway, it's great fun, just great. And cooking is the same thing, you know, that you can paint by numbers, you can cook by just following a recipe. And that could be fun. But you want to vary it a little bit, you know, so that it's it's yours. And remember that the meal that you're cooking is probably not the last meal you're going to eat. So again, it doesn't matter. And so one of my one-liners that I think people should pay attention to is you want to take what you're doing seriously, but don't take yourself so seriously and be playful. And then life just opens up and it becomes exciting.

What a brilliant note for us to end on, Ellen. This has been an unmitigated delight. Thank you so much for joining us on We Are Human Leaders. It's been a real pleasure.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Mindfulness is the cure for everything, the essence of being alive, as Ellen Langer teaches us.

Wow.

This conversation shifted your preconceptions about mindfulness and what's possible for you in this lifetime. It certainly did for Sally and myself. Professor Ellen Langer's latest book, The Mindful Body, is now available by Penguin Random House Books, and you could find a direct link to the book itself in our show notes. At Human Leaders, we understand the value of mindfulness in both our personal and professional lives, which This is why mindfulness underpins all of the work that we do. Embed mindfulness into your leadership style and into your organization. Work with us. Learn more at www.wearehumanleaders.com. Thanks for being with us in this episode. We'll see you next time.