Mindful Thinking for Chronic Health with Ellen Langer

Hey there. Thanks for coming to listen to Everyday Better with me, Leah Smart. We're currently on hiatus while I welcome my second baby into the world and my husband and I spend time with our growing family, but we have close to 300 episodes for you to check out. So I think you'll be able to keep yourself busy while I'm away. If you like the show, make sure that you follow us wherever you're finding us for updates. And a quick note, LinkedIn is no longer producing Everyday Better, but the show will continue with me into its next chapter. And I'll keep you posted on what's next. Here on this feed. Be sure to follow me on LinkedIn, Substack, and Instagram. You can find me at the handle @itsleahsmart, and I hope you enjoy the show. LinkedIn News.

With very simple changes in our lives, we can be healthy, and it's easier, of course, to be happy if you're healthy. When you're actively noticing things, the neurons are firing, and that's keeping you healthy. So our thoughts help us be healthy. In ways that most people don't realize.

So that's Ellen Langer. I'm Leah Smart, and this is Everyday Better. Make sure you hit that follow button to get new episodes of our podcast every week. Our conversation starts in just a few moments. Hey everyone, from LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart, and this is Everyday Better, a personal development podcast where every week I sit down with some of the world's brightest minds and bravest hearts to learn how we can improve ourselves, our relationship to others, and the in the world around us. Today, you're going to hear from the mother of mindfulness. Okay, so you're thinking one of three things right now. Number one, I cannot wait, mindfulness is life, go you. Number two, I'm curious and interested. Or number three, I don't do mindfulness. Now, if you know me, you know I love talking to you skeptics. Not that I don't also so value the curious and cannot wait humans, But I bet no matter what camp you fell in, you think of something very specific when you think of the word mindfulness. Erase it. Ellen has been studying mindfulness for over 40 years with extensive research in her lab. She's a Harvard professor and the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Here's all she says mindfulness is. It's not meditation. It's not packing up your stuff and sitting in the middle of nowhere. It's simply choosing to notice. Anything, to approach what we think we know as if we don't know it at all. Her research shows that simply noticing is enlivening. Your mindfulness gets the neurons in your brain firing. It's energy generating. That being mindful makes you healthier and that ultimately mindful people live longer. And her new book is called The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, helping us all move closer to realizing that mindfulness affects our physical health, the aging process, and so and so much more. Ellen says the mind and the body aren't just connected, they are one. So if we can become more mindful, if we can simply actively notice the world around us, we can improve our well-being, our health, and our happiness. Her studies, which I love, have focused on the passage of time, proving that with our minds, we can reverse certain signs of aging, heal faster, and improve our waist-to-hip ratios. and her book is shifting the paradigm and making us all rethink what we believed about our capabilities. Ellen Langer is one of the greatest psychologists of our century, and it is an honor to share her work with you. Here she is.

The bottom line is we have enormous control over our health and well-being. Enormous control. Total control, possibly. And it's all a function of the way we think. And when I say that, it's not the way we think so we should think about taking medicine or getting exercise. It's the thought per se. What people need to understand is mindfulness, it's the very simple process of noticing new things. And when you notice new things about the things you thought you knew, you come to see, gee, I didn't know it as well as I thought I did. then your attention naturally goes to it. The neurons are firing. We find with lots of our research that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So just going about seeing new things. Now, that doesn't mean you have to give up everything old because all the things you think you know, you don't really know that well. You can't because everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So when I'm giving a lecture, what I often do is start with a very simple thing. So I'll ask you, how much is 1 and 1?

How much is 1 plus 1? 2.

Yeah, that's what everybody says. But no, it's not always 2. If you add 1 wad of chewing gum plus 1 wad of chewing gum, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. In the real world, 1 plus 1 probably doesn't equal 2. As or more often as it does. Now, the point of this is that this is the simplest thing that everybody thinks they know. So now I'm telling you the simple thing that you're sure you know, you don't know. It all depends on the context. So when we see we don't know, then you pay attention. If your listeners thought they knew what I was going to say next, why would they listen, right? And so what I'm trying to get people to understand is that with everything changing, Everything looking different from different perspectives. We never know. Nobody knows. And that not knowing is good. In fact, if you wanted to improve your life and do nothing else, just accept that everything is uncertain. Let me interrupt myself. So I was at this horse event, and your audience needs to know, for reasons that are not going to sound as obnoxious as when I first say it, I'm Harvard, Yale all the way through, right? I'm that straight-A student that you resented. I even learned what was underneath the picture. Okay, so I go to this horse event and this man asked me to watch his horse because he was gonna get his horse a hot dog. Hot dog? I, being the smarty pants, know horses don't eat meat. They're herbivorous. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I knew that everything I think I know could be wrong. And when you recognize that you don't know, then everything becomes potentially interesting. It's scary to think you don't know when you mistakenly think other people know, but nobody knows.

So I've heard you say this, so uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. In theory, I go, I love that for me. But in my day-to-day life, when I'm trying to time what time I can go to the train or make sure that I keep in touch with certain meaningful relationships or individuals because I want to make sure that I talk to them as often as possible because I guess it's actually because life is uncertain. You never know. And I want them to know I love them. When I'm thinking about uncertainty being the rule, not the exception, opens you up to this whole field of all these crazy possibilities that makes it scary.

So many things for me to comment on. So the first thing is that if you don't make that call to that person you haven't spoken to, something bad is going to happen. And you have no way of knowing this. And it could be the case that— so let's say you need to call me and you're driving yourself crazy. You're stressed. When am I going to find time? And my life now is so filled that if you called me, it's just going to be a pain. I'm sorry, I love you, but still. All right. So the assumption is that the other person is just sitting there waiting for you to make this call. And that's rarely the case. All right.

I have to stop because that happened to me yesterday. I have my brother and my mom are on that list. I live across the country from them in New York. I called my mom and she's like, I have to go. And it was like 5 minutes into the conversation. So I called my brother and he's like, I'm walking to a baseball game. And I was like, what is happening right now?

Yeah, I think that people think they can predict. It's very hard to accept that you can't. But we're so good at looking back over what's happened and making it make sense that we mistakenly think going forward we can understand what's going on. So let's say John and Jane are at a party and they're fighting. All right. Now, if I said to you, so are they going to get divorced? You'd say, who knows, right? Sometimes people fight. Okay. But if I didn't say that to you and then the next day you find out they're getting a divorce, you go, ah, you see, I knew it because they were fighting, you know. So predicting is an illusion. Postdicting, which people call Monday morning quarterback, is easy. I do this little exercise with my graduate students on a decision class, and I say, I have taught a version of this course for 40 years. I have never missed a class. What is the likelihood that I'm going to be here next week? So you go around the room. Now, these are Harvard students, so they're bizarre for sure, right? They say things like, 97%, 90%, as if they're doing some calculation. But each of them basically is saying, I will be there.

You're going to be there, right?

That's right. Now I say, now let's go around the room and I want each of you to give me a good reason why I might not be there. The first person, this is really strange, always says, you've always been there, you deserve the time off. The next person says, you get a flat tire. The next person says, you have to take your dog to the vet. We get you know, 12, 15 good reasons. And then I say, okay, what is the likelihood I'm going to be here next week? And that certainty, that 98% drops to 50%. Going forward, anything could happen. Are we going to be able to complete this interview? Who knows? My internet can crash all of a sudden. Things happen. All right. And that's a good thing. When we recognize that we can't predict, that makes everything potentially new and interesting. Now, here's the important key. Part of the reason we want to be able to predict is so that we can bring about good things for ourselves and avoid bad things, right? Once you recognize that things in themselves are neither good nor bad, they're just things. The way we understand them makes them good or bad. So you and I go out to lunch and the food is wonderful. Wonderful. You and I go out to lunch and the food is awful. For me, wonderful. I'll eat less, which is better for my waistline. All right. So, you know, no matter what happens to me, life is good.

Well, it sounds to me like what you're saying is— I wrote down uncertainty in big letters and I drew two arrows. One coming out says scary and the other coming out says new and interesting. And sounds to me like what you're saying is it's a choice.

All emotion. This is what people don't understand. All emotions are choices. When somebody said, you made me angry, and if they had said that to 20 other people, would each of them get angry? Of course not. Your emotions are a function of the view you take of an event. If you take a positive view, then you're going to feel positively. You take a negative view, you're going to be stressed. In fact, people seem to think that stress is natural. Everybody experiences stress. Well, no, they don't. And certainly not to the same measure. Stress requires two things. First, it requires a belief that something's going to happen. And we just said we can't predict. Second, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. So I suggest a very simple way to, to deal with these stresses is first, just say to yourself, give yourself three reasons why it might not happen. So you went from thinking this thing is definitely going to happen to now maybe it will, maybe it won't. Now let's imagine that it does happen. How is that an advantage? And there's always an advantage. So when you see that it could happen, it could not happen. If it happens, it'll be fine or not fine, all depending on the way I think about it. Then you can just be. And it's very important because, you know, I study health and I believe that the main cause of illness and the main cause of the negative consequences of that illness— so you get an illness, what is the course of it going to be, is stress. And now we think, well, if stress is what is making me sick, and stress is a psychological concept, then gee, doesn't that mean that I can control my health? And the answer to that is yes, and through many other means that we've studied.

So what's funny is, as I'm listening to you start to unfold this, is anything really good or bad? Is it possible to look at something differently so that even if the thing we're afraid of happening does happen, we We can fall up. Do I control my health through my stress, my physical and emotional health through my stress? I love it because it's starting to sound more like where I live, which is in the middle. I think a lot of people think in dualities, and I've heard you talk about this, the duality of science versus spirituality, duality of good versus bad, yes and no. And I think while we're capable of having conversations about complexity, we don't like to because it introduces discomfort. That's my belief, is it introduces a level of discomfort because we like to find a duality. We like to find the thing that we can say we're certain about this, or this is, as you've said, absolute, instead of things that are not absolute.

People want certainty because if they're certain, then they think they know what they'll do. If I'm certain doing this is a good thing, I'll do it. If I'm certain that's going to bring about bad things, I won't do it, and so on. But that certainty is just a mindset. The underlying phenomenon can't be predicted. It's changing. And so when you really want to control your health and well-being, what you need to do is recognize that everything is changing and uncertainty is the rule. And you don't need to be afraid of uncertainty because there are no positives and negatives independent of the way we think about it. Let me tell you something that happened to me that seems terrible. Many years ago, I was out at a friend's house for dinner. I came back at 11:30 at night. And all my neighbors were outside. There was a major fire that destroyed 80% of what I owned. I had to move into a hotel. This was Christmas, and I go out Christmas Eve, and this shortly after this fire, I come back to the hotel. The room is full of gifts, not from the management, not from the person who owned the hotel, but from the people who parked my car, the waitresses, the waiters. It was spectacular. And I'm only recently able to talk about it without it bringing tears to my eyes. It makes me feel good about people. I don't remember what I lost in that fire. And so the positive, all I remember is the kindness of all of these strangers. Ask yourself when something goes wrong, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?

Mm-hmm.

Oh my goodness, I missed the bus. I stubbed my toe. It's rarely tragic. And by asking yourself that, then you come back to yourself and then you can go forward in a calmer way and be more mindful.

I love this question. Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? And I laugh because I think about missing the train and I talk about New York a lot, but I live in New York and you miss the train and go, oh my God. And in that moment you can watch a million people do this. You can watch yourself do it. You act as if it's a tragedy, but in reality, the next train will be there in between 3 to 6 minutes and life is going to continue. So I love the idea of that question. What I'm thinking about with this mindfulness piece and with your new book, The Mindful Body, is when I first learned about you, I became fascinated because of your counterclockwise study. Can you talk about that study? And then how do we bring that up to today, to the mindful body?

The mindful body is largely about mind-body unity. People talk mind-body. These are just words. I say that put the mind and body back together as one unit, then wherever we're putting the mind, we're necessarily putting the body. Now, we've done many, many studies, but the first test of the mind-body unity was a counterclockwise study, which I find now I can refer to as a famous study because it turns out The Simpsons Go to Havana, that episode of The Simpsons, deals with the study. So it's out there. First study up. First study up.

I had no idea.

It was very true.

Amazing.

So the Counterclockwise Study, we took elderly men to a retreat that we retrofitted to 20 years earlier to have them live as if they were their younger selves. So putting their minds back in time, they would be talking about the past, but in the present tense. Everything they were doing was as if it was 20 years earlier. We had a comparison group that went to the same retreat, discussed the same topics, so on and so forth. But for them, they were reminiscing.

So there was like no reference for them of, of what was happening in present day. It was all references to food, clothes.

Exactly. Everything that you saw, they would be discussing political events from the past, watching movies from the past, having discussions, everything about the past. But you're dealing with it as if now is the past. And the results, I must say, were phenomenal. This is without medical intervention. Their hearing improved, their vision improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeably younger. It's mind-boggling when you think about it. I don't know anybody whose hearing at 90 years old has improved without the use of a hearing aid or some such thing. So we've done lots of studies like this now where we want to take the mind, put it in different places, take the measurements from the body. So the next study we did was a chambermaid study. We simply asked them at first, how much exercise do you get? They said they don't get any exercise. That's because they thought exercise is what you do after work and they're just too tired. Now we take one group of these chambermaids and we simply teach them that their work is exercise. We show them making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym and whatever. So after this discussion with them, they all now believe that their work is exercise. Okay, we talked lots of measures before we start, lots of measures when we're finished. They're not eating any differently from the group that doesn't now realize their work is exercise. They're not working any harder. However, in this short period of time, simply changing their mindsets, they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Just by changing their minds. All right, so now I did that study with Ali Krumm, who's now a professor at Stanford. So we inflict a minor wound, and what we have are people who are in front of a clock. And for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. They don't realize this. For a third of the people, the clock in front of them is going half as fast as real time. And again, they don't realize this. For a third of the people, it's real time. And the question we're asking is, is that wound going to heal based on real time or based on perceived time? How long they think it has passed? And the answer is perceived time. And we've done that similar study with colds, with diabetes, with sleep. I'm reasonably persuaded after much of the research that we've done over 40 years is a long time. With very simple changes in our lives, we can be healthy. And it's easier, of course, to be happy if you're healthy. When you're actively noticing things, the neurons are firing and that's keeping you healthy. So our thoughts help us be healthy in ways that most people don't realize. Most people know about the placebo. So what is a placebo? So a doctor gives you a pill and it's a sugar pill. It's inert. It's not really anything. but you think it's medicine. And so you take that pill and then you get better. But if it's not the pill that's making you better, who's making you better? You're making yourself better. So now we have lots of studies designed to enable people to do this for themselves. These studies, we call them, they're all about attention to symptom variability, which sounds like a mouthful, but it really is just being mindful. Noticing change. So when you get diagnosed with a chronic disease, most people mindlessly assume it's going to get worse or stay the same. You don't think it's going to magically get better. Mm-hmm. So we don't look for ways it gets better. Now, nothing progresses in one direction only. No matter how you're feeling, there are little blips. Sometimes you're a little better, sometimes you're a little worse. But the way we're taught to pay attention to ourselves, we don't notice these things.

We're taking a quick break. We'll be right back with the mother of mindfulness, Ellen Langer. And we're back with Ellen Langer. So here's my question. So we're talking about the ability for the mind and our thoughts to make us healthy or to make us sick. Sick. Is that how you'd put it?

Well, yes. It's not that we say, gee, today I want to be sick, but you notice some symptom, or you go to the doctor and they tell you you have something, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I am 76 now. If my wrist starts to hurt, what do I say? Well, what do you expect? You know, I'm getting old. Of course my wrist is going to hurt. So you're 35, If your wrist hurts, you're not going to assume your wrist should hurt. No one has ever told you that at your age you start to fall apart. So you do things to make yourself better. So now you're taking care of your wrist. I'm not taking care of my wrist because I'm expecting I'm going to fall apart. So 6 months out, I'm going to be in worse shape and you're going to be in better shape. Not because I'm 76 and you're 35, but because you took steps to make yourself better. And I just presumed there was nothing I could do. Now, when we have chronic illnesses, the way people understand chronic is that you can't do anything about it. And I think that that's a big mistake. And this is a point I don't have data for, but it just seems to me common sense that if every part of your body is as healthy as it can be, then the one part that's not as healthy probably is going to do better than if you let your whole self fall apart.

So here's my question about thoughts when it comes to health. Since I was a little kid, my mom used to call me her little worrier. I never knew what experiencing anxiety was until I was in my late 20s. And it was only recently that I also started recognizing that anxiety isn't just a problem or a challenge of the mind. It's also a challenge of the body. And I'm learning more and more about the fact that, like, these things are connected and—

They're not connected. They are one thing.

So let me ask you this. My work is my work, and I will be doing it for as long as I can because of the fact that I am a huge believer in our ability to have power and agency over our lives. And I think so many of us are not raised with that, are not surrounded by that, and oftentimes give up on ourselves or on the things we believe in. And I don't mean just like wanting a nice car, but believing in being fulfilled and being satisfied and finding contentment and joy in our lives. I think so many people give up on that because they feel it's just not possible because they haven't been surrounded by people people who say, hey, it's really possible. You can find it and you can create it. I believe that in general, but I also then hear people say things like, your thoughts make things happen. And I go, what about crazy little old me who's got anxiety, who thinks all sorts of things? You know, does that mean that every thought I have means something? And what I've come to is no. But I wonder if what you're saying is yes.

I'm saying yes, no, and everything in between. I have a one-liner Predict today and lose tomorrow. Prediction is an illusion. When you're trying to predict something, you're looking through a single lens. Our predictions give us tunnel vision, right? And you don't need to make predictions when you recognize you can deal with the outcome. It's very interesting because you were saying before about how hard it is to make these decisions. What if I make the wrong decision? And I spend a lot of time in this book Talking about a mindful theory of decision-making, let me just sort of give you the very bottom line. Rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, make the decision right. You know, you missed that bus. Now in your mind, everything pointed to it was important to get there on time. The world's gonna fall apart if you're not there on time, so on and so forth. The next bus might not come. In the meantime, there can be somebody right next to you who finds you so appealing where you have a conversation and he offers you a very different job that's much better than the job you're racing to catch that bus to go to. There are opportunities all over the place. I'm doing a little study where people come to the office for an appointment and then I'm not there. I tell them I'll be back in a half hour. You know, there are many people who'll do nothing for that half hour and then they'll be upset that I made them wait. So let's say you're coming to my house for dinner, 6 o'clock, and now it's 6 o'clock and you're not there. And at 6:10, you're not there. I'm not just gonna be sitting there. I'm gonna start writing. I'm going to paint. Yeah. I'm gonna watch an episode of whatever I'm watching. I'm gonna be doing something. People don't recognize All we have are moments. That's all. And if you make the moment matter, then it all matters. If you simply actively notice new things, when something happens where you think you misbehaved in some way, if you say to yourself, you know, people's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it. So what is the reason that I did that? So you might not like me because I'm so gullible. But in fact, the reason that I seem gullible is because I'm so trusting. Oh, don't you like me for that? I can't stand you because you're so inconsistent. From your perspective, you're flexible. And so it turns out each and every negative understanding we have of our own or anybody else's behavior has an equally strong but oppositely balanced alternative. We would be happier with ourselves We'd be happier with the people around us if we understood what they were doing and what we were doing from our perspectives. When you open things up in this mindful way, recognizing that everything can be understood in so many different ways, you become less judgmental. And as you become less judgmental of other people, you also become less judgmental of yourself. The point is that if we do whatever we're doing mindfully, actively noticing things about it, That's the essence of engagement, and that's the way all of us want to be in this world. Admire, envy somebody who's passionate about whatever they're doing. Yeah, that's all passion is. You notice new things, you enjoy it more, you come to do it better and better. I think that over time you end up just happy and accepting of other people, accepting of yourself.

So If you were to give someone one piece of guidance, when you think about like, and this isn't fair, but in the 40 years of research you've done and in the classes you've held and the students you've worked with, the people you've met, what piece of guidance would you give to someone who is intrigued, excited, and interested in the work that you're doing and wondering how they can apply it?

Well, as self-serving as it will sound, I think that people need to become more mindful. It's easy. You just notice. That's all. You don't have to practice it. You just notice. So if you start off knowing you don't know, then you're going to pay attention. You pay attention, you're going to see things that other people overlook. You're going to be able to avoid dangers before they arise. You become fully involved. As you notice, the neurons are firing. As you notice, it's enlivening. And depending on what you notice, I mean, Wilson probably noticed ants as a kid and then grew up to be a Harvard professor writing Consilience and his other great books by just noticing ants. But it's the noticing that feels good. Now, interestingly, we have so much data supporting this. First, this act of noticing, you feel good and it's healthy. Okay, we make people more mindful, they live longer. Second, when you're in this state of active noticing, you light up. People find you charismatic. They see you as more trustworthy and authentic. So your relationships improve. Not only that, but when you do something mindfully, we have another set of studies, your mindfulness seems to leave its imprint on the thing that you're doing. So it's better. It's simply better. So it's easy. It's good for you. Your relationships improve, everything improves. You know, I've been doing this for so long that we have so many measures that we've taken of making people more mindful that I actually believe, and this is a big statement, but I believe it, that virtually all our ills, whether personal, professional, are the result directly or indirectly of our mindlessness. And that means all of those ills can be cured by our simply turning it around, recognizing we don't know, appreciate that everybody has something to offer, that there are so many different perspectives on whatever we may be doing, realizing that every person is seeing the world from a slightly different perspective. And that's exciting. And that what we need to do is open ourselves up to all that information rather than think we need to be on top. All you need to do is notice when we recognize that events themselves are neither good nor bad, but our thoughts determine how we experience them and we can control our thoughts and more than likely if we're mindful, then we don't have to be afraid of things. You know, that— and that's what I mean by falling up, that something happens. Well, it's an opportunity.

Ellen, I want to ask you to complete these 3 statements for me as you see them. The first statement is, better humans are—

are mindful, are aware that whatever is, is going to change, that you can't keep things still.

Making better work means—

that you don't blindly follow the rules, that were put there at another time by other people. Everybody around the world right now is using yesterday's solutions to solve today's problems. And we don't know if any of those skills are going to be useful for tomorrow. So what we want to do is to be there.

And finally, Ellen, what do you believe a better world would have?

That's the easiest one for me. When the world is more mindful, it's more nurturing. It's a warmer, more loving place to be. And that would be good for not just you, for me, for everybody.

Ellen, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure. I can't wait to read your book 6 times. I really appreciate it. And thank you for your work. I've loved having you and I've learned a whole lot, so I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. It was nice talking to you.

That was Ellen Langer, award-winning Harvard professor and psychologist, author of now 13 books, including her recent The Mindful Body, and conductor of some paradigm-shifting research. You can find The Mindful Body wherever you get your books. Now, if this is a new concept for you, I encourage you to dig deeper. Learn, learn, learn. Get your hands on her book, a study, and do some self-experimentation. I love a quote that I heard once that I'll share with you, which is, never trust a self-help help book without a bibliography. Now, this is a science book, but Ellen has an extensive bibliography. There is so much research to suggest that what she's saying has so much weight. Let the research and let your evidence be your proof. If this conversation has you thinking differently about your whole body, mind obviously included, share it with the first friend who comes to mind. You never know how it could help them. And Support other people like you in finding our show by leaving us a rating before you go. And while you're at it, write a one-sentence review telling me what you love about Everyday Better. And as always, you can get me in your inbox by signing up for our weekly self-improvement newsletter, giving you practical tips on how to level up with small steps every day. Find it at linkedin.com/everydaybetter. That's linkdin.com/everydaybetter. Everyday Better is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Alexis Ramdow. Our associate producer is Grace Rubin. Asaf Ghidrone is our sound engineer. He makes sure we sound good in the studio. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Enrique Montalvo is executive producer of LinkedIn Editorial Productions. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Koop is head of LinkedIn original audio and video. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn, and I'm Leah Smart. Thanks for coming with me, and I'll see you next week.