Mindset Shapes Destiny Dr. Ellen Langer Reveals the Mindful Body & the Power to Heal | Episode 72

But people don't go far enough. So they talk about a mind-body connection. What I talk about, and have a lot of research evidence for this, is mind-body unity. It's one thing. And if you see that, then wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So speaking of sleep, we did this study where we had people in a sleep lab and they wake up and they see the clock and we've fix the clock. So they think they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep that they did get. And in fact, biological and cognitive functions follow perceived sleep rather than actual sleep. We have lots of these studies that I think help make the point of this mind-body unity. The first one, which you might know of, is called the Counterclockwise Study. And I can say this is a famous study because if you turn on The Simpsons Go to Havana, they talk about the study.

Why Knowledge Matters. Welcome. I'm Yannick, your host, and now joining me, Professor Ellen J. Langer. Professor Ellen J. Langer is the mother of mindfulness, and to me, truly, her scientific work and findings are the true blueprint for a happy and healthy living. And I cannot stress more how much her work has so far, in such a short amount of time, influenced myself on a personal level. Ellen Langer is professor of psychology at Harvard University. In 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. For over 30, 40 years, Dr. Langer has studied mindfulness, mindlessness in every situation. Mindfulness has been shown to be literally and figuratively enlivening and results in better health, well-being, improved relationships, and so much more. And she did it in nursing homes, schools, business, in fact, in every area of life. Welcome Ellen Langer. Jay Langer on the show. I'm so pleased to have you.

Thank you, Yannick.

I have been talking to you, uh, a few years ago already, and I have to say, you truly live it. I can really truly say that you also walk the talk. It's so enriching, and you're such a loving, humble person given the fact what you have done so far. So let's dive into it. Please define for us.

Yeah, that's probably the most important thing. What do I mean by being mindful? You know, Janik, it's so easy that it almost defies belief that this very simple process results in health, longevity, improvements, as you said, in interpersonal relationships. You're seen as charismatic. Everything seems to improve, and all you need to do is actively notice new things. Now, most people think they know whatever it is, you know, everybody has their list of things they're sure of. But because everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, we can never know, right? So when we're sure, we're actually being mindless. Now, if you actively notice new things about the things you thought you knew, you'll see you don't know them, and then your attention naturally goes to it. Another way of becoming mindful is just to accept that you don't know. And people are afraid not to know, but that's largely because they think other people know and they don't want to look stupid. All right. So I'm here to tell you your guess that nobody knows. You can't know. And oftentimes when I'm lecturing, to prove this point and make it come home for people, I ask a very simple question: how much is 1 1? So this is something that everybody thinks they know. Janik, how much is 1 1?

Well, in abstract mathematics, of course it's 2.

Okay, right. And everybody says 2, and if I was speaking to you on the street, you'd just walk away from me thinking, what is she talking about? Why am I wasting my time? But it turns out that 1 and 1 is 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 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. So in the real world, 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2 as or more often as it does. Right. So if the most basic thing we think we know, we don't really know, people should take a lesson from that and realize with everything with everything changing, with everybody changing every day. As soon as we think we know, we're confusing the stability of what's in our minds with what's actually going on. You know, many years ago, Yannick, I was at a horse event. Now, you haven't told people, but I'm Harvard-Yale all the way through. All right. I mean, I have awards, you know, very impressive. Okay. So even a genius award. So now I'm at this horse event and this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog? Well, I've just told you how smart I am. So, you know, I try not to be rude. I tell him I'll watch his horse, but I'm thinking to myself, what is he, crazy? Horses are herbivorous. They don't eat meat. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. Which made me realize that everything I think I know could be wrong. In fact, one way of seeing mindlessness is that we're frequently in error but rarely in doubt. Now, most of our facts, or many of our facts, one way or the other, come from science. Science doesn't give us absolutes. Science gives us probabilities, essentially saying if you were to do the exact same experiment again, which you can never do exactly the same thing, but if you were, you're likely to get the same finding. You know, so many horses don't eat meat is very different from horses don't eat meat. Okay, so these probabilities, these maybes are translated into absolute facts. That's what we teach kids in school, whether it's medical school, graduate school, or elementary school. That's what your parents are teaching you. That's what most lecturers are teaching you. So they're teaching us absolutes. And as a result, we're going to be wrong. In several contexts. So if you just understand what I've said so far, and now after we finish talking, Janik, somebody says to you, "Janik, how much is 1 1?" So you're no longer going to blurt out 2. You're going to pay attention to the situation, and then you'll probably answer, "Well, it could be 2," rather than, "I know it's 2." All right? So everything becomes new. Everything becomes interesting again. And that when somebody tells us something that we don't agree with or we don't understand, rather than disparaging them, we're more likely to ask them what they mean. You know, so if you were a teacher and little Yannick, when you asked, "How much is 1 1?" and he says, "1," rather than look at him and have the class look at him as if he's stupid, What you would do now is say, "Janik, how did you come to that?" And then everybody would learn something.

Would you say that mindfulness is a precursor to increase your consciousness?

Certainly. That when you're mindless, you're not there. Now, the problem is, when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. But 45 years of research has sadly led me to conclude that most of us are not there most of the time. And again, being there is so easy. Now, if you came to visit me in my home right now, Janicki, you've never been to my home. I don't know if you've ever been to Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I know you haven't been to my home. You'd walk in and you'd look around. You'd want to see what art do I have hanging up? What books am I reading? Am I messy, neat, whatever? You wouldn't have to practice. Your curiosity would be aroused and you'd be mindful. And the point is that mindfulness is easy and it's energy begetting, not consuming. And it's what you're doing when you're having fun. So it's the essence of engagement. So here we have something that couldn't be easier, that's available to all of us, that doesn't need a practice to learn how to do it. That results in better health, better relationships. You know, while you're actively knowing, the neurons are firing. And as you said, that's literally and figuratively enlivening. You just seem alive and people find you appealing. So there's no downside to it. So I am— and that's the reason I agreed to talk to you about it in the hope that at least some of your listeners will make the change and start becoming more mindful.

On an ordinary day, what's generally your highlight of the day?

Oh, that's interesting. You know, I mark the edge of the optimism continuum and I'm always happy, virtually always. So, you know, I'm happy now that I'm speaking to you. After I get off the phone with you, I'll put my dogs in the car and go to Dartmouth, Mass. And in the car, I'll be having fun. Fun, you know. So, um, I surely there are some days where something special happens, but I think if you make the moment matter, you can't do better than that. And then you have a day that matters, a week that matters, a life that matters.

What's the first thing you notice anew when you get up in the morning?

How much sleep I actually got. But, you know, you see, when I tell you that the way to become mindful is open your door and notice 5 new things. If you're living with somebody, notice 3, 5 new things about them and so on. But when you do this often enough, you don't have to come up with 2, 3 things. Everything becomes potentially interesting again.

You know, it's amazing, Professor Langer. That's precisely what I always do. And what I figured out by looking into the mirror, I can tell how sound my sleep was. And now, of course, with Fitbit, but I already started this 10 years ago. And it's amazing. You look into the mirror and when I had very good deep REM sleep and deep sleep, I my, my eyes are just much darker.

Yeah, that's very interesting. But let me tell you, so in my new book, The Mindful Body, and this is going to come around to sleep, just give me a moment to get there. One of the main organizing principles in the book is to recognize mind-body unity. Now, many years ago, the medical model saw psychology as irrelevant. So the mind was irrelevant to the functioning of the body. Now most people recognize that being happy or unstressed, either one, they're not the same, is not just nice, but it's actually relevant for our health. But people don't go far enough. So they talk about a mind-body connection. What I talk about and have a lot of research evidence for this is mind-body unity. It's one thing. And if you see that, then wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So speaking of sleep, we did this study where we had people in a sleep lab and they wake up and they see the clock and we've fixed the clock. So they think they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep that they did get. And in fact, biological and cognitive functions follow perceived sleep rather than actual sleep. We have lots of these studies that I think help make the point of this mind-body unity. The first one, which you might know of, is called the counterclockwise study. And I can say this is a famous study because if you turn on The Simpsons Go to Havana, they talk about the study. But essentially, this is the first one in this series of studies. What we did was took elderly men and have them live in a retreat that we retrofitted to 20 years earlier. They spoke about past events as if they were just unfolding. So as well as we could, we made now then the past 20 years earlier. Living there for just a week or less had the effect of improving their hearing, their vision, their strength, their memory, and they look noticeably younger. So that was the first of these. I— you know, people can read the book to see what the— some of them are very exciting. But let me give you the most recent. We inflicted a wound. Now, you know, we don't want to hurt anybody, so it's not a major wound, but a wound nonetheless. And again, we use a clock, a rigged clock. So a third of the people are in front of a clock that's going twice as fast as real time. A third of them are in front of a clock that's going half as fast as real time. And for a third of them, it's real time. And what happens is that the wound heals based on how much time you think has passed rather than how much time has actually passed. We have so many of these studies, one that people might enjoy is a chambermaid study. Chambermaids, interesting, they work all day long, but according to the Surgeon General, which they took as truth, that exercise is what you do after work, and they're too tired. So they're exercising all day long, but they don't see that they're exercising. So all we did was divide them into two groups, and we taught half of them that their work was exercise, just changing their mind about what they're doing. Okay, and they're doing this for a couple of weeks. They're not eating any differently. They're not working any harder or less hard. Nevertheless, by simply changing their mindset to now see their work as exercise, they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Our minds are so much more powerful than we realize. And we've just begun, I think, to scratch the surface. So that, you know, that's a good part of the book. But then there are lots of other things in it that I think people might find interesting. Let me backtrack for just a moment that when I started this book, it was going to be a memoir. So there are lots of very personal stories in it.

But I just quickly want to say something to this because it's very important that actually your study with the elderly home was intended to become a movie, and the star who was playing you was Jennifer Aniston. You even also talk about this anecdote and how incredible this actually is. So you jumped a little bit ahead. I have so many questions, so just please go ahead. Thank you so much.

Well, what I was going to say was, you know, in line in terms of support for the idea that we haven't even begun to realize the kinds of lives we could be living, not just longer, but richer, happier. And there are, there are things that psychologists teach us that take us from a bad place to a better place. But what I'm trying to do is go well beyond that. So a simple little thing. So trying to do something. Now, trying is of course better than, you know, presuming you can't do anything. But trying has built into it the expectation for failure. You know, when I go down to the kitchen in the morning— oh, let me say it differently. If I gave you an ice cream cone, I wouldn't tell you, try to eat it. All right. So we give people tasks. We have one group try, another group just do it. And the doing group always outperforms the trying group. Where I was headed a moment before is hope. Hope sounds good, right? It's certainly better than being hopeless. But still, hope has built into it again a notion of failure. You don't go into the kitchen— this is the example I was confusing a moment before— and hope there'll be coffee. You just assume there's going to be coffee. All right. Now, one of my favorites is about forgiveness. Now, under certain circumstances, surely forgiveness is better than not forgiving. However, even that has problems that limit us. So I was asked to give a sermon at one of the Harvard temples, at churches. And I'm not religious. What can I talk about? And I thought, okay, forgiveness sounds sort of relevant. I mean, it's not a godlike concept, but At any rate, so I started thinking about forgiveness. And Janik, I came up with something that was actually sacrilegious, I think. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you? Forgiveness is good. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's bad. But, you know, you can't forgive unless you first blame. So that's interesting. Our forgivers are our blamers. Now it gets worse. That 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. It all depends on how we understand them. So what we have here is the people who see the world negatively blame and then forgive. Hardly divine. And so the alternative to all of this is to recognize that from the person's perspective who's doing whatever action, it makes sense or else they wouldn't do it. And so if we understand why they did what they did, there's no need to forgive. But certainly if you blame, you're better off forgiving. What I'm saying, there's an even better way of being. And this idea of behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective. Is very powerful, I think, because there's always a tendency for us to compare people and who's better in this way or that way. And we disparage people. Many people are very evaluative. And next time you find yourself saying something negative about somebody, recognize you're probably being mindless. And if you ask yourself, what does that— what sense does that make from that person's perspective? you may come up with a very different understanding. So for instance, "Janet, people can't stand you because you're so inconsistent." That's because you're flexible. "People hate me because I'm so gullible." That's because I'm trusting. Every single negative word to describe somebody has an equally strong but oppositely valenced alternative. And so when you recognize this, you know, you might want me to change and stop being so gullible. But when you recognize that's only happening because I'm trusting, you probably wouldn't want me to change. So you can see how becoming more mindful— because when you're mindful, you see things in multiple perspectives, you have many more choices available to you— that relationships improve and we just care about ourselves more, and by extension, other people as well.

From a mindful perspective, what does it say about the culture? And this is more general, but we coming more later specific to the book, because your book is to me the most empowering book, scientific-based book that you can ever, ever read for people to me. And I will go and I chose to my school and I will really encourage even the board, to make sure that this book will be discussed in all our PLCs, you know, because it's so empowering, the implications are huge. Now, just in terms of mindfulness, and I'm sure you have a brilliant answer, what does it say about the culture where all, at least perceived, is about feeling over facts? Again, I said, Sometimes when we look at the news, it's everything about this, but when we don't really look at the facts.

I think that schools, parents, unintentionally often teach us to be mindless. Now, one reason for that, and if you say, why is it that everything is set up to make us not pay pay attention to the choices that we have available to us, not be our best selves, and so on. In some way, I don't have evidence for this, but it would seem that it keeps the status quo. And, you know, so those people on top who know that there's no important reason that they be there, they know what they don't know. We know that there's a certain amount of chance that comes into any of our successes and so on. But if people can get you to appreciate, to accept my superiority, for instance, then I can stay here. And I think that what we need to understand as a culture is that the things that we seek are not zero-one. We can all enjoy a happy and healthy life. And that, you know, we see great inequities. We have people who have almost nothing, and we have billionaires who can never spend all the money that they have. And one might naively think, well, these billionaires must be happy. But no, they're not, because, you know, they get into the game. If I have '10 billion dollars and you have 20, you're better than I am.' You know, people are constantly evaluating themselves because we don't pay enough attention to why we do the things that we do. And we allow ourselves to be compared to other people. You know, I've argued about schools. Grading makes no sense. You know, you give people a C, a D, fail them, but these are the people who fight back in some way and often fight back against the culture at large. Why accept the fact that you're worthless? So they have to prove that they're worth something. The people who get B's, that would seem fine, except who wants to feel average? But the interesting thing about grading is the people like me who straight A's are not happy either. Because you're not sure exactly why you got the A. You're not sure you're going to be able to continue getting A's, and now everybody expects that of you. I think that what we need to do is recognize that everybody knows something and that other people don't know. Everyone can do things that other people can't do and explore our talents. You know, when you give an exam to students, students, what you're saying implicitly is this is the most important information for them to know and we'll see how well they do or don't know it. And how do you make that decision? And is that the most important, you know, information across all time? I mean, you know, it's kind of silly. I think that if we test students, we should be finding out what they do know rather than trying to box them into a corner to see what they don't know. But that takes us in a whole different place. The, the main point, I think, is that to live the life that most of us would enjoy living is something available to all of us. And the way to get there is to stop comparing yourself mindlessly with other people and stop thinking you know, and realize that our limits have not even been approached in the slightest. Let me give you an example of what I'm thinking here. So I asked my Harvard students, smart kids for sure, I say, how far is it humanly possible to run? Now they know a marathon is 26 miles. I wouldn't be asking the question if the answer were 26 miles. So they throw different things at— one will say 30, somebody else bolder says 35. No one has ever said more than 50. Now, and I play them a YouTube about the Tarahumara, which is a tribe near Copper Canyon in Mexico. These people are able to run 250 miles without stopping. That's an enormous difference, right? Now, if you were trying to get yourself to run a great distance, now you'd have a very different, you know, stopping point for yourself, right? You wouldn't think that when you got to 20, you'd organize yourself differently. And back to the mind-body unity, we have studies on fatigue. That show that fatigue is largely just a mindset. So we ask people, a simple way of understanding this, I say, I want you to do 100 jumping jacks and tell me when you're tired. So most people get tired around 70. Okay. Now we have another group of people. We're going to ask them to do 200 jumping jacks and tell us when you get tired. They get tired at 140. All right. We're always able to do more than we think we can do. But more important is for people to realize that— and others have said this before me, certainly— that it's the journey that matters. You know, that we can never prove that we can't. Science can't prove that we can't. All you can ever show is the way you tried didn't work. So then you try another way. And that it's the doing that where the neurons are firing, where it's exciting and you're engaged. And if you ever get to the point where you can do something perfectly, it ceases to be meaningful. You know, you can either be perfectly mindful or imperfectly mindful or perfectly mindless. Remember as a little kid trying to reach that elevator button? And that was so exciting. You're struggling and you can't, and then finally you press the elevator button. Well, how many adults do you know who get excited when they walk into an elevator that they can press the button? So when we know it fully, it ceases to be much fun.

You know, your case is just so convincing, and as we go through it, it just overwhelming, basically, the facts that you're presenting, you know, that you conducted at Harvard and all over the world. So now just quickly back to, to the feelings. Would you argue that feelings— because I truly believe in that— if feelings point always back to the, to the value that you hold, then feelings are very helpful as a pointer to when you do something. And I think one of the big problems is that a lot of us forced or unforced, do not necessarily, and you mentioned about billionaires who are not happy, they do not live based on what they are truly meant to be and truly explore their potential within, as you say, as you make the case. And as I said, we go further in the book, it's just mind-blowing.

Yeah, I don't know what to add to that. When you started to talk about feelings, my first response was about emotion in general. And this is kind of interesting because emotions are choices and people don't realize that. You made me angry. Nobody is making you anything, right? So to have an emotion, what you need to have is some physiological arousal and an understanding, you know, and that a way of understanding the world is up to you. So let's say you have a date, a new person is coming, they're going to show up at your house in a half hour. You can experience yourself as anxious, which is negative. Oh my God, what's going to happen? Or you can take the same feelings and see yourself as excited. When something happens to you where you feel angry, for example, If you ask yourself, would everybody be angry in this situation? And if not, well, what are they telling themselves about it? In a slightly different way, you know, the way we talk to ourselves is so important. I was giving a lecture on cancer and this man approached me afterwards because he was challenging what I had said, which he had the right to do, of course. And he said, His wife fought the cancer. You know, and I said to him, yes, but realize that if somebody is fighting something, they've already lost most of the battle. That if a 2-year-old were tugging on your trousers, you wouldn't see yourself as fighting the 2-year-old. Okay. When you're stressed, People think that situations make us stressed. Stress is a function not of events, but of the view you take of the event. If you open it up and see it in many different ways, chances are you won't be stressed. In fact, most of the things that we worry about never happen. And if you even just went past, you know, reviewed some of your past about things that you were worried about, and you saw, one, most of them didn't happen, two, those that happened didn't play out the way you were expecting, then we'd immediately calm down. I have a bunch of one-liners that are derived from many years of research, and one of my favorites is about stress. You know, you should ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Because, oh my God, the dog ate the homework. 'Oh my goodness, I won't finish the project on time,' 'I burnt the roast,' whatever it is, these, you know, so what? Go on.

You know, because this, you give really the practical way and you also the illustration that there is a thing, emptiness of inherent existence, really, and this is true, this is truly like scientific now, In your studies, you showed us how this actually unfolds. But now, coffee or tea?

And what do you want me to say about coffee or tea?

I want you— I want to know what you prefer.

Oh, I prefer coffee.

Morning?

Yes, in the morning. Hot coffee.

Great, great.

And why did you ask me that?

I'm just curious. I'm curious because I want to know how it is like to be Ellen Langer.

Because Nagel actually said— You have the opportunity to ask me anything, and the thing you're most curious about is whether I like coffee or tea?

Of course. But one thing also Nagel actually said, and this is really— this is why I'm asking this, because Nagel at Princeton, I think he said once, we can never know how it is like to be a bat. And I know that too, but I just want to have like some feeling how it is like to be Ellen J. Langer, you know?

Yeah.

What you have done, no, seriously, what you have done, your research, who you are.

Well, I'll tell you, let me tell you something about myself that people might be surprised at. I have a theory of mindful decision-making that's very different from the way most people think they should be deciding. And so for me, I'll tell you the theory in a moment. But I, you know, you, if we were spending time together, you could decide what restaurant we were going to. You could decide if we're going to this movie, that movie, or the theater. You could decide if we're just staying home. I don't care because I'm going to be happy no matter what.

And just quickly, Actually, we are coming to this question too a little bit later on, but you can go ahead because I wanted to ask you also something a little bit more personal because The Mindful Body is also a very, very personal book. And now I see where really your drive comes from and your research because it was, it comes truly from the bottom of your heart. Because your mom, she passed away in her 50s. And I think a lot of your book and of your research really comes also from there because this was very tragic.

The, the health work certainly does. But even well prior to that, I was very, very fortunate. My parents were wonderfully supportive and loving. And so I was just able to be happy. And, you know, so then I'm interacting with other little kids and this one's unhappy about this, that one about something else. And I, from a very early age, of trying to find a way to make them feel better. So why don't you look at it this way as opposed to that way and so on. So the multiple understandings of things was very dominant in my life. It was also the case that when I was in school, I was socially sophisticated, whatever that means for a little girl. And so I had the friends who were popular and what have you. But because I was also in the honors classes, I was, you know, also with these other girls and boys as well. And they had very different views of things. And it was very interesting to me because one group would think, only of this particular thing as being an advantage, and the other group thinking that's a big disadvantage. So, you know, I think that helped make me become more mindful. Now, my mother's bout with cancer was very important to all my health research. She had breast cancer and it had metastasized to her pancreas. And you might know that that's the endgame. All right, so everybody is expecting her to die, and then magically it was gone, and the medical world couldn't explain it. And so I was going to spend the rest of my career trying to explain it, and I think that we have. And I think things like spontaneous remissions are far more common than people realize. Another thing from my past that's kind of fun, that speaks to this mind-body unity, which both the story of my mother's death— well, life— and this other story speak to. So I was married when I was very young. I was 19 going on 40, and my then-husband and I went to Paris for our honeymoon. And we go into this restaurant and I order a mixed grill. And one of the items on the mixed grill was pancreas. I ask him, because he was more worldly than I, which of these is the pancreas? He points it out. And I, I'm eating everything else with gusto. But now comes the moment of truth, because now I'm a woman of the world. Can I get myself to eat the pancreas? I start eating and I literally become sick to my stomach. At which point he starts laughing. Why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. Okay, so I'm eating something that I loved, but thinking it's something else and getting sick. So both of those stories, and oddly, both of them about pancreas. I mean, I bet you don't know anybody who has a single story about pancreas. Now I have two, but both of them encourage me to think of the relationship between our thoughts and our physical well-being.

And also one thing is very important is that, and you mentioned this also in the book, and usually we start neglecting it, is that we should pay especially attention to what we take for granted because it's so dear to us, right? Let's say, you know, I remember still this when I was in in middle school, I was crazy in love with a girlfriend, right? And but how it is, right? Because back then I didn't understand that love is a verb, right? So and after, I don't know, it winds down after, let's say, 2 or 3 months and I just basically ignored her, right? I took it for granted and I didn't even say hello to her.

That's terrible.

Yeah, please, please go ahead. Well, no, that's why it's so important, right? We should pay— because this is something I also took away from, because this is precisely notice and also new things in the old, right? And old things in the new, right?

Both of those will lead us to be mindful. Yeah.

You know?

Yeah. And what people need to understand is that when you know you don't know and you sit up and pay attention, Everything is exciting. Everything is new again. And it's the essence of what you're doing when you're having fun. So that, you know, people think when I talk about being mindful all the time, it's, oh my gosh, that, you know, how could you be? It sounds exhausting. And that's because they're thinking of being mindful as thinking. And thinking has gotten a bad rap. Thinking is fun. What's not fun is worrying that we're not going to get the answer. Thinking that somebody else is doing it better than we are and so on. But the act of just noticing is what happens when you're engaged. And, you know, you see people who are just loving what they're doing. And lots of people admire that, they envy it. And all they're doing is noticing and then you become interested. Even if you take, you know, the Birdman of Alcatraz. So this is an old story, but he's in a jail cell. Now you might imagine, oh my gosh, you know, what way to spend one's life. Well, he earned the privilege of being there. I don't remember what offense he had committed, but nevertheless, there's this little window and a bird comes. And he knew nothing about birds, but all of a sudden he starts paying attention to the bird and noticing different things. And this sustained him for all the time that he was in prison. You know, in our house in Dartmouth, not too far away, there's an osprey nest. And I was never into birds, knew nothing about osprey, but then I started watching them. And they became fascinating. You know, the more you watch and notice, the more interesting whatever it is becomes. And, you know, so to think that it's tiring or that you should be doing something other than this is just sort of sad to me. Because all of the people that people envy, the people who are having a good time doing what they're doing. And if you're enjoying doing what you're doing, you're going to probably do it even better. Because you can do a lot of it and it's available to all of us.

Adversity equals opportunity. This is also one phrase how I could summarize your book because— and you gave the example of painting beautifully. You basically started teaching the nurse when you were in the hospital, you know, because she was curious. And then what you said, it's just so beautiful. You said, You know, my process of painting starts by the time I do my first mistake.

Exactly. Because, um, it's too easy for us to go forward with no matter what we're doing mindlessly, you know, thinking that there's a right way. And as soon as you make a mistake, you can't make a mistake if you're mindful, because if you're mindful, you don't know exactly— excuse me— me where you're going. So if you make a mistake, that means that you are being mindless. And then you get a chance to say, okay, starting now, not before, now, how might I do this? And, you know, I think that— I mean, I just love painting. And what was most interesting to me was that when I was a child, I just assumed that people who were talented, creative, were people who could paint, who could draw, who could play a musical instrument, and I couldn't do any of those things. And so I came to painting when I was 50 years old. And, you know, you don't have to paint. Cook. You know, when people are cooking and they're mindlessly following a recipe, they forget that it was just some other person who experimented and decided it would take 1 cup of sugar, for instance, or whatever it is that is being recommended. So that, you know, vary it to meet your own test, your own taste, and recognize that the failure, it doesn't have any meaning. So if you make a soufflé and it doesn't rise, who cares, right? So I did this thing many years ago. I used to make this cheesecake. It was supposed to be a marble cheesecake. And no matter— and it was delicious, but no matter what I did, it never came out looking like marble. So I decided to change the name. I have a failed marble cheesecake, or I have a successful speckled cheesecake. You know that when we understand the names of everything, it's much more fluid. Than most of us realize. Everything we're doing that somebody has told us to do was just a decision that they made. And that means that there was uncertainty. If there's no uncertainty, there's no decision. And that we can change things so that it better meets our needs. So for example, the game of tennis. Nobody in their right mind would think the rules of tennis were handed down from the heavens. Tennis, right? Okay, so I play tennis, I play doubles, and I throw the ball up and I smash it. My first serve doesn't go in. It's okay because I have a follow-up serve, and now I gently hit it and it goes in, but it's not very good. All right, if I designed the game of tennis, I'd have 3 serves. Why 2? And the 3— the first one, I'd kill it, it wouldn't go in. Now the second time, because I'm going to have my third backup shot, I'd kill it again. But now I would have learned from the first one, so I would end up a better tennis player. Now, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have rules, but what we need to realize is all of the rules, all of the, the ways of doing things were just decisions. And if they don't meet our needs, change them. And if you can change them, if I were playing competitive tennis, I can't make everybody use 3 serves, but I can know that if I had designed the game, I probably would be a better tennis player. And just think of it— this may be a little off-color, but when I'm lecturing, I'll look in the audience and see if there's a very tall man. Or it could be tall woman, but usually men. And I'll find somebody who's 6'5". I don't know why the 6'5" are always at my lectures. Okay, so I would invite them up on the stage, and I am 5'3" on a good day, and we just, you know, stand next to each other and we just look silly, right? And then I would raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? All right, so the more similar you are to the person who created the rules, the easier it's going to be for you to follow those rules. More important, the more different you are, the more important it is for you to make changes. And so even if we take a toilet seat, there is a standard height of the toilet seat. Who decided that? So this man who is 6'5" sitting there versus me at 5'3"— one of us is not getting our needs optimally met.

Right.

So the world I live in is mutable. The world I live in is one where people recognize that everything can be changed and understood differently. And more of us end up successful in this world.

And it's also about doing, as you said, because for example, when you're in love, right? That's what was me when I was younger. So I wanted to keep it just— I didn't want to change everything. But this is contrary to life. Life is constant movement, right? You cannot— that is what it is. And if you understand this, you know, then we start really engaging. And if we read your work, The Mindful Body, oh my God, it's mind-blowing, Ellen Langer. But one thing I want to ask you, will you ever Mindsch, I would love to see your painting. Seriously. I hope one day you will share it with me. Just by a picture, whatever.

Well, you can go on my website. I have many of the paintings there.

Oh my God, you know what? Because I actually went on your website, but I didn't even, you know, that is beside, I was mindless, like, yeah. To another topic, just quickly. Do you think delayed gratification— when does delayed gratification become mindful?

Yeah, well, it's interesting because I'm not a believer in delayed gratification. And this is what I said to you before, that if you and I were going out, you could decide where we're eating, what we're watching, who we're spending our time with, because I'm going to be happy no matter what. And so there's a way of doing whatever you're doing so that it's enjoyable or interesting. And nobody— I don't think you should delay, you know, you should kill yourself all week, delay your gratification until the weekend. There's always a way of doing what you're doing so that it becomes meaningful and oftentimes fun for you. We did a little experiment where we had people do the exact same task But we had one group think they were playing, you know, for a game, and another group that it was work. They're doing the exact same thing. Those who thought they were doing it as work, their minds wandered, they were bored, and they didn't enjoy it. You know, an example that comes to mind is I see many people that when, if I have a dinner party, men, women, doesn't matter how old they are, they always ask to help me with the dishes. And some of them just do the dishes before I even get in there. So doing somebody else's dishes is fun, and doing your own dishes isn't. Well, of course, you can— if you can make it fun when you're doing it for somebody else, you can make it fun in your own house. And I think that to say we should delay gratification, there are some people who are not going to do that because they don't trust that at that future time, the thing that they're waiting for is going to be there for them to enjoy. So I think, I think we need to rethink that. You know, I don't think that anybody goes to graduate school, to medical school, you know, these, these training that takes a long time because of the end result. I think that if you're not enjoying it, finding it interesting as you're going through it, you're not likely to successfully complete it.

I think this is also very important. I think it also depends obviously how you define it, but for example, I had like a kind of a back and forth with my godmother and she's like, and I told her, you know, every single day when I woke up the first thing, this is what I do. And especially like the fitness. I really do not like to do it. I really, I still really hate it, but I still do it because of the delayed gratification, let's say, you know. So would you say this is mindful or not? And how, how do you call this?

I would say that it's mindless. I'm saying that no matter what you're doing, there's a way of doing it so that It feels good while you're doing it. And that the thing that makes doing hard for people is not the activity itself. It's the overlay of evaluation. It's the fear that you're not doing it the right way, that you won't complete it on time or successfully or what have you. And then, as I said before, people need to realize that it's the doing, the mastery mastering that's rewarding, not having mastered. You know, you have all these people who have achieved things who are now feeling empty. And I think that— take an example to make it come alive for people. Let's say you play golf. And wouldn't it be wonderful, you think, to be able to get a hole-in-one every time you swung the club? But if you did, there'd be no game. So we really don't want that. If you think you'd always want to win, go play tic-tac-toe against a 4-year-old. You're always going to win. You know, we know that the challenge is a part of the game. You don't do a crossword puzzle if you like word games and then after you've answered the whole thing, do it again. All right. We like not knowing.

Another question, and you also elaborate on that, you know, today, and I also have a personal story on that, biotechnology, for example, we now can figure out basically with a blood test if we have certain cancer cells and so on. And when I go to my, when I went to my family doctor a few years ago, I had some symptoms, you know, in my stomach, and I was like, kind of, well, should we maybe do this and that? And he was like, No, no, no, don't worry about it. And, you know, and I was like, kind of, you know, yes, you have a point because, you know, sometimes if you know something, it can be extremely at the detriment. And I think that is to some extent what you are also advocating, but you're obviously very, very intelligent. You're not against like technology, biotechnology, and all these tools we have in order to make a diagnosis.

Yeah, no, no, no. I just think that we need to be aware that all of these tools, all of these medical tests and so on, come to us through a series of experiments that are probabilities. And there's, you know, so I object strenuously for a doctor to tell you, for instance, you have 6 months to live. There is no way they could possibly know that. When people have cancer, women especially with breast cancer, that there's no cancer that they can detect, they should just tell you you're cured. Instead, they tell you you're in remission and you have to stay that way for 5 years. So it's 5 years of stress. All right. Which, you know, we did research where we have people, women who saw themselves as cured versus those who saw themselves as in remission. Those who saw themselves as cured were healthier, happier on every measure we took 6 months out. Even, you know, so you're wearing eyeglasses, so you go to the doctor and we're all used to reading the Snelling eye chart. Now, you have to realize that whatever number you're given is just a number that's relevant at that moment. You know that for me, if I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign further away. I see things that are moving differently from things that are stationary, things in color different from black and white. So to test our vision with letters that don't make any sense seems to me bizarre. And it doesn't acknowledge that it changes for many people You can see better in the morning for some than in the afternoon. Well, if you're one of those people, maybe that means in the afternoon you're tired. So instead of putting on glasses, maybe you should take a nap or have an energy bar. Or even an energy bar, just think about it. All this is a candy bar, you see, but we call it an energy bar and that gives us permission to eat it. The point is that these— any test is a test of how you are at that moment. And you can't blame the medical world because, you know, if your blood pressure changes 30 times in the course of a day, you can't keep going back to the doctor for this. But we can step in and pay more attention to the ways our body changes. And in fact, let me end with this. Yannick, because we have a strategy that we've used now for helping cure chronic illnesses. And it's very simple. When you have a chronic illness, you assume— one assumes that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing stays the same. Sometimes it's a little better, sometimes a little worse. So what we did was to call people and ask them how they were and was the symptom better or worse than before the last time you called, for instance, and why. Well, 3 things happen. The first, as soon as you see that your chronic pain, for instance, varies, you feel better because that means you're not in terrible pain all the time. Second, by looking for why now does it hurt more or less than the last time, you're engaged in a mindful search. And what we've been talking about and all the evidence that this mindfulness itself is good for your health. And third, if you're looking for a cure, you're more likely to find it. You know that chronic illnesses just mean that the medical world hasn't come up with a cure. It doesn't mean that there isn't something out there. Anyway, across diseases, big things, multiple sclerosis, strokes, Parkinson's, chronic pain, arthritis, depression, you know, lots of big things. We find that by attending to the variability, the change of these symptoms, we can bring relief, which is very exciting, you know, as we wait for our medical appointments.

And this is also like chronic health. That's what, what you're your book is all about. And you just said variability of symptoms, right? So embrace uncertainty because we always want to have certainty, but it's so important too that we can't have that, right? Right.

It's not just that, that, you know, we want certainty because then we think we have control. But things are uncertain. So by holding them still when they're actually not staying still, we're giving up control. And the easiest way for people to accept uncertainty— right now it's hard for people because they make a personal attribution to it. I don't know, maybe you know, therefore I have to pretend. I'm telling you, nobody knows. You make a universal attribution. Nobody knows. Everybody is invited to explore, to look, to learn. And in doing so, The neurons are firing as we're actually noticing things. We're able to take advantage of opportunities to which we'd otherwise be blind, and we avoid dangers before they arise. And it's all so simple to do.

Did you change anything that you loved doing before that because of your research you stopped doing completely?

Yeah, that's interesting. A lot of people ask me that, and I must be strange in yet one more way, that rather than my research tell me to behave differently, I get the idea for the research in the first place because I see that I'm doing something different from other people, or I see, you know, groups doing things differently. I'm sure that there are examples of what you're asking me for, but They don't easily come to mind. Oh yes, here's one. Okay, so I write about vision, you know, that we shouldn't put on our glasses quite so quickly. We're teaching ourselves to be dependent on them. And I had this time I was wearing a contact lens in one eye. So one eye was to see close, one eye was for distance. I come home from work, it's the end of the evening, and I'm now trying to take the contact lens out of my eye and I'm killing myself because, you know, to try to get that stupid thing out. Then I remember, oh, I didn't put it in in the first place. And I realized, gee, and I saw fine all day. And so I never wore it again. Right. So I guess that's an example of how I've changed along with these data. But some of the things happen. I smashed my ankle many years ago. It was terrible. And I have all this metal in my ankle. And I was told that I'd never walk without a limp and what have you. And I forgot. And so I never walked with a limp. You know, but I think that whatever is can be made differently, can be made so that it better meets our needs. All we have to do is realize that we can never prove that we can't. And trying whatever it is we're trying is actually life-confirming.

You know, you mentioned three levels of thinking, and that's so important to be really— because the first one and the third one is really to some extent the same.

Yeah. Okay, well, I'm going to give you just a very quick understanding here. Very often when we're casting aspersions and putting somebody down because of what they're doing, it may possibly be that what they're doing is actually superior to what we're doing. So an example. So let's say you have little kids. Little kids are uninhibited. Then you have most of your listeners, adults, are inhibited. Now you see an elderly person behaving in a way where it's foolish, I think, to call them uninhibited. They know the rules and just frankly, they don't give a damn, you know? So it's disinhibited. Disinhibited may look like uninhibited, but it's not the same thing. Somebody drops a cane. You have level 1, sees it and doesn't care. They just walk on. Level 2, somebody runs in and helps them. And that's nice. It's better than running away. But level 3, the next level, is somebody who waits because they know that that person is going to feel better if they can figure out how to help themselves. So you have the first and the third both not helping initially, but they're very different. So we shouldn't assume that there's a single way of explaining anybody's behavior. And if we ask ourselves, is there some way where this is superior to what we would do, we actually set the stage for our own growth.

And, you know, you talk about those are the mindful contagion. Which has so deep implication, especially for teachers. You know, and when we say instill the belief in a student, that's actually a thing. And with something is in the air, you actually also did this study at Harvard. So powerful. Please explain.

I'll tell you, but so I, earlier on in the writing of this book, I had a chapter that I called the woo-woo chapter. It was stuff that was just very way out there. And so I don't want all of the important things that are written there or that I've said to be tossed aside because of the strangeness of what I'm about to tell you. But the In the Air— so we had this study where we had meditators in a room. And then they left. Then the subjects, participants would come in and we give them tests to take versus there would be no one in the room and then we'd have participants in there taking the same tests. And what happens when you're in that room where people had just finished meditating, you outperform the other group. There is some way that there's a change that comes over us. Now, I said before that when you're mindful, people certainly find you more appealing. And it seems now— and we can give mundane reasons for it as well— but when somebody is mindful, you become more mindful. Well, for one thing, you can feel that the person is not evaluative, and so you trust them more. You have a sense if you're both mindful, then you're reading from the same ongoing situation. And so because you feel more relaxed, that's going to enable you to be more mindful. And then we have some data that's totally wild that I don't want to make too big a deal of until we finish the replications, that even if you're not making eye contact, just being near somebody who is mindful could provoke your own mindfulness.

What if we tell people what is possible? And that's why, you know, Professor Langer, your book, mind-blowing, mind-blowing.

Thank you very much, Yannick. I think that we want to tell people not what's possible, because we don't know what's possible. We want to tell people that there's no science that can prove that anything is impossible. And so if it feels good, if it's fun and you want to pursue it, pursue it, you know, and maybe, you know, you'll be the one who shows that this impossible is in fact very possible and teach people the way to do it.

And To you too, like your book, it's truly also aging is a gift. How do you experience aging on a personal level? Because you're not saying that aging is a bad thing.

I think that it's funny. You have, when you're a child, you're seen as developing and then magically all of a sudden you start to age. And I think that that's ridiculous. Fabulous, you know, that one should be growing throughout their, their lives. And a mistake I think people make when they start to feel old is to try to add more years to your life. And I think that what we want to do is add more life to our years. And as a byproduct, it will probably lead us to live longer.

Professor Ellen Langer Alan J. Langer, thank you for truly be a gift to me and truly to the world.

Thank you very much, Yannick. It was very nice speaking with you.

Alan J. Langer. That's why knowledge matters. Make your life a masterpiece. Visit now programs. D-ykm.com.