Mother of Mindfulness: A Conversation with Dr. Ellen Langer | Spiritually Hungry Podcast Ep. 166

One of the striking theories is this, what you call the mind-body unity, as opposed to the mind-body connection, which is the way most people either understand or misunderstand the concept.

International Women's Day is right around the corner. We are excited to invite you to a powerful conversation with Monica Berg and inspiring Kabbalah teachers on March 7th on Zoom. This is an opportunity for women to come together, celebrate our collective strengths, and support one another on our journeys. The panel will discuss vulnerability, living our values, and celebrate the incredible strength of women in our community. It's going to be an empowering event and it's free to participate. Register via the link in the description. We hope to see you there.

Hello and welcome to Spiritually Hungry. Today we are so thrilled to bring on Dr. Langer into our conversation. Dr. Langer is a Harvard psychologist considered the mother of mindfulness and the bestselling author of many books, the most recent, The Mindful Body. For over 4 decades, she has explored the mind-body connection and how our thoughts affect our health. More specifically, how mindfulness Can Improve Our Mind and Body Wellness. We are so excited to have this conversation. I think that when we bring Dr. Langer on, one of the places we will start is we talk about mindfulness. That is such a buzzword today. I really want to hear what Dr. Langer says on it, because I think it is a bit different than what most understand. So let us welcome Dr. Langer.

Thank you very much. That is a wonderful place to start. You do not know how many podcasts I have done where I mention mindfulness, talk about it, and then realize an hour into it, people have no idea what I am talking about. So basically, when people hear the word mindfulness, they tend to think of meditation. And meditation is fine, but it is not what I have studied. Meditation is a practice that you engage in to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as we study it, is immediate. It is so simple when you think of the consequences that result from it that it almost defies belief. All you need to do is notice new things. New things about the things you thought you knew, and then you see, gee, you did not know them at all, and your attention naturally goes to them. The two ways to become mindful, top-down or bottom-up. Top-down is to recognize we do not know anything. Now, the way we are all talking, you have to understand that I am Harvard, Yale, all the way through. Okay? So I have been trained. I have gotten all my As and A pluses. So when I say I do not know anything, maybe others can generalize. It started when I was at this horse event, and this man asked me if I would watch his horse because he was going to get his horse a hot dog. As I said, Harvard, Yale, all the way through. No one knows better. Some might know as well, but horses do not eat meat. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Many would worry about that, but for me it was exciting because it meant all sorts of possibilities were available. And so what does it mean horses don't eat meat? All of our knowledge, medical— we'll stick with medical for the moment— are derived from experiments. And what people don't understand is if you do an experiment and you get a difference that's meaningful, what that means is that if you were to do the exact same experiment again, which you can never do, you are likely to get the same finding. That is translated as a definite. Virtually everything we think we know is based on this mistaken assumption of everything staying still. So I do this frequently, and maybe I will stop after this last time. But if I were to say, Monica, how much— oh no, women are not supposed to be good in math. We will go to you.

Hey, hey, hey, let us fix this up. Wait, no, you will see, Monica, you will be happy.

Michael, how much is 1 1?

2.

Yeah, but no, not always. If you were to add 1 wad of chewing gum plus 1 wad of chewing gum, you would get 1. 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, you get 1. You add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, you get 1. So it turns out in the real world, 1 1 does not equal 2 probably as often as it does. Now, just think about it. If right after the show somebody comes over to you, very likely, and says, Michael, how much is 1 1? You are not going to mindlessly blurt out 2. Right? You are going to pay some attention to the context because you know the answer you have is not always true. When you are mindful, you are aware that everything is changing. Things look different from different perspectives. So not knowing is not the exception. It is the rule. All of the health information we are given tends to be given to us as absolutes. And when you know something absolutely, you do not have to pay any attention to it. And so all the times people think they have no control of their health, they are missing wonderful opportunities. Anyway, more about that. I guess I will give you a chance to ask me another question, but I often do not, by the way. You press a button and I just go on.

I love your energy. I love it. It is super high and animated. So when you speak about mindfulness, it is also about being less mindless, right? I think most of us are conditioned.

Yes. So this is a funny story, Monica. Years and years— and I have been doing this for decades, right? And some nasty person, I have no memory, which is good, for who it was or the particular occasion. But they said, I am told you are what you study. I said, well, if there is some truth in that, then I will turn it around. And that is when I went from studying mindlessness to mindfulness. When you're mindless, you're not there. The interesting thing is that when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And 40-some-odd years of research has shown me that virtually all of us are mindless, not there almost all of the time. And the advantages of being mindful— so when you're mindful and you're actively noticing new things, which can either be starting realizing you don't know anything, so you sit up and pay attention, or noticing new things about the things you thought you knew. So you see, you didn't know them as well as you thought. Either way, the neurons are firing, and all of the data shows that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. When you're mindful, people find you more charismatic. When you're mindful, it leaves its imprint on the things that you do. 45 years, more years than you are old, Monica. You, Michael, are much older.

Oh, thank you. I always get that.

Lots of time to make people more mindful and put in different measures. And so memory is better. You are more charismatic. You are more effective. Greater leadership, greater health. You live longer. Your memory is better. Your attention is better. Your relationships, everything. There is no downside to being present. And you have lots of people who say, be in the moment. And that is sweet, but it is empty because when you are not there, you do not know you are not there.

No, that is not the fact.

So I am telling you how to be there.

The thing is, I want to ask you, do you feel that— is it rethinking what you think you know? We all think we know more than we actually do. Or is it identifying the negative false thought? Because I think a lot of our beliefs are damaging. Like when it comes to aging, you have done so many studies. I want to give Michael a chance to talk too, but I am really excited to talk to you. You did one study in particular called the Counterclockwise Study. So I would love for you to take us through that. Do you think that a lot of it is that we think negatively either about our circumstance or about our age?

No, I think we do not think. I mean, if I introduce you to a bowl, so it is not positive or negative, it is a bowl. But then if you needed it to be a hat for your dog because it is a torrential rainstorm out there, it would not occur to you to use it that way because it is a bowl. But you raised an interesting point. Probably very important for— this is one of the major parts of the book, is the idea of mind-body unity. Now, you mentioned mind-body connection. I am not talking to connection. Okay? So we went from where the medical world thought psychology was totally irrelevant. I am sure they believe individually that it is nicer to be nice and happy than to be miserable, but that had nothing to do with your health. Then you go to, well, they are connected. And that is a problem because how are they connected? You know, how do you get from a fuzzy thing called a thought to something material? And I say, this is all nonsense. If we just see mind and body as a single unit, then wherever you are putting the mind, you are necessarily putting the body, which gives us enormous control over our health and our well-being at the same time. So the study you mentioned, the Counterclockwise Study, which I should say is a famous study. How dare she call one of her own studies famous? It is because if you tune in to The Simpsons Go to Havana, they describe the study. Okay. So if you made The Simpsons, you know you have made it. Very simple idea. What we did was retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there. As if they were their younger selves. So, they would be talking about things of the past as if they were just happening— Castro and the Cuban Missile Crisis and whatever else. In only a week, we found their vision improved, their hearing improved. And you tell me when you have ever heard of an 80-year-old's hearing improving without a hearing aid or any medical intervention. Their memory improved, their strength. And they looked noticeably younger. All in a week, just by changing their minds. That was the first mind-body study. And I have a host of them. As Michael knows.

There were no mirrors. There were only photographs of their younger selves from 22 years before. Right? And they even—

Yeah, we did.

So they were now acting, and their entire environment and experience of life was that of their younger selves. And because they faked it, they lived it, they were there again, and everything reversed, which is fascinating.

[Speaker:ELLEN LANGER] Right. So not relevant so much to the mind-body unity, but important since you mentioned it. So I am on a shuttle with them, a little bus, and playing music from the past, which people— this was run in 1979. That is before Google. So even finding out what the music of the past was, was a major thing. Okay, so we are on the bus about to get to the retreat, and all of a sudden, I realize there I am with these 8 old men, which are not so old anymore now that I am older, but still, and 8 suitcases, and none of my male graduate students or postdocs are with me. So as soon as we get off the bus, I make an announcement to them. And this was the comparison group. And I said to them, you are in charge. I do not care if you move your suitcase an inch at a time. Or unpack it here and take to your room a shirt at a time. But I'm not doing it. That, I thought, was crucial in helping the comparison group because all of a sudden, the world was expecting that they were capable. And I think that that's the largest part of all of this. We assume that we can't. There is no experiment that one could run that could prove we can't anything. All you can prove is what you have tried did not work. And so, lots of the findings, positive findings, were good for the comparison group that was just reminiscing. They knew now was now and then was then. And over and above that was the group that conflated now and then. And that was the first of many studies. I know you want to ask me a question about it, but I do not want you to. I want to get on to—

Go, go, go, go.

Go on. It is your show.

No, no, no. I was going to ask, one of the striking theories is this, what you call the mind-body unity, as opposed to the mind-body connection, which is the way most people either understand or misunderstand the concept. Is there a way to scientifically prove that?

That it is not a connection? Well, that is what most of the book is about. I have got lots of these studies. I will mention just a couple to you. The next one we did in this series, was with chambermaids. So oddly, chambermaids who are exercising all day long do not see themselves as exercising. They think that is what you do afterward because that is what the Surgeon General, who sits behind a desk all day, tells them. So if exercise is so good for you and they are exercising all day long, they should be better than people who are similar socioeconomically. And do not— they are not. Now, simple study. We just divide them into two groups. And one group, we teach them, your work is like exercise. Making the bed is like working at this machine at the gym, cleaning the windows, working on this. Okay, so now we have two groups: one who realizes their work is exercise, one who does not. We take a host of measures. They are not eating any differently from each other. They are not working any harder. But now, the important thing: for the group that now sees 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. Just from their change of mind. So unity. We change the mind and the body cooperates.

That is kind of like think, then, be, then.

In another study, we have people who have Type 2 diabetes, and we give them all sorts of tests. We have them play computer games, and we tell them, change the game you are playing every 15 minutes or so. And that is done just so they will look at the clock next to them. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. So for a third of the people, it is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, half as fast. And for a third of the people, real time. The question is, does blood sugar level follow real, which everybody believes, or perceived time, the time the clock is telling them? And the answer is perceived time. You wake up in a sleep lab, you think you got 2 hours more sleep than you got, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep you got. When you believe you got 2 hours more sleep than you actually got, biological and cognitive measures reveal superior performance. It goes on and on. One of the ones that is, I think, very interesting— it is not one of these clock studies— is about what I call the borderline effect. So let us say I give the two of you an IQ test. Who should I pick on now?

Pick on me.

Compliments to Michael.

Okay.

So Michael gets a 69. And you get a 70, Monica. A 70 is in the normal range. A 69, he is cognitively deficient. Now, nobody in their right mind— you do not have to know anything about numbers— would think there is a meaningful difference between 69 and 70. You could have sneezed, yawned, and you did not see the— a million possible explanations, a few at least possible explanations. So at the start, the two of you are the same. My guess, although I did not do this research, is that if we check back 3 months later, you are going to be vastly different. Because, Michael, you see yourself as unable. You are not going to be reading as much. You are not going to be trying. You are going to give up quickly and so on. Well, Monica is just going to go on being better and better. Okay, so with respect to disease, whatever medical measures are taken, There is always a group that is equivalent to the 79. They do not have it. And a group that is equivalent to the 69. They do have the disease. Right? Right. You know, that when you have it, there is somebody who looks very much like you, and they tell them they do not have it. And so we follow people out over time. We did this with diabetes. It should be true for virtually any disease. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well, I see that a lot with people who have different illnesses that could be genetic. Like if a father, my father, had dementia and cognitive decline, and I remember watching him for 7 years struggle and suffer, it does start to affect you if you allow it.

Yes, but it is too bad. My father had the same thing, Monica. I am telling you, right before he died, where— and he is in this home that is geared to people who have dementia. And we are playing gin rummy. And I am saying to myself, should I let him win? And while I am having the conversation, should I let him win, he says gin. And he beat me handedly. You know, and I think that it is a shame when people are given genetic information because the fact that the person had it in the first place does not mean it was genetically determined. And so it does not mean you are going to catch it. And even if it were, That does not mean you cannot turn it inside out around and not get— My mother, who I mentioned before, who died of breast cancer, she died at 57. And when I was 56, something like this.

Right. When I read that, I thought—

And then 57. And I say, okay, maybe it is not so accurate. So I am still holding on to 58. And then I am fine. But you can imagine that the belief that I am going to get this, how it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With dementia, as you get older, you forget. Now, people take this forgetting far more seriously than they should. And my Harvard students— this is the best of the best— when I give an exam, they do not all get 100. So they have forgotten, right? But when you are 20 and you forget, you just forgot. When you are 70 and you forgot, uh-oh. Am I becoming ill? And then when somebody asks you questions, you're afraid you're not going to get the right answer, you're not going to remember, you're talking to yourself so you're not learning what's being said, and so on. Many things pass as memory loss that I think have little to do with memory loss. When I was an up-and-coming and I would meet people, I would learn all their names. Tell you the truth right now, I do not care. I mean, the two of you, I see your names on the screen. I am not going to forget them. But if you would just introduce yourselves, Monica, Michael, a little while from now, I would not— I probably would not remember, but it is not because I am becoming demented. It is not because— it is not a memory problem. I did not care, so I did not learn it in the first place. And if you do not learn it in the first place, when you do not know it in the second place, it has nothing to do with memory. So as you get older, your values change, the things you pay attention to. And that is often the explanation.

Such an important point, because we are always changing. And I think change also is misunderstood. It is kind of like, oh, no, we work so hard to get to a certain stage, and once we get there, we cannot let go of anything. And we try to control all of these aspects of our life.

No, that is perfect. That is perfect. We are changing all of the time. We just do not pay attention to it. And to presume that it is negative is sad because whether something is positive or negative is in our minds. Events are not positive or negative. Consequences are not positive or negative. We always have the option of seeing it one way or the other. I play a lot of tennis. And I play it differently now from when I was 25 years old. Not just that I do not run as much. I do not have to run as much because I have more experience. I know if you are facing this way, chances are the ball is going to go over there rather than over here. Right? See, what I am saying is you become wiser, and that requires less from us. And also, since we talked a little about the counterclockwise study, If you ask people and you want them to really be honest, and you say, do you really want to be— so, you take a 70-year-old, do you really want to be 50? No. People want the strength they might have had at 50, whatever else they had at 50, but to give up their experience, I don't think so. And I think it's sad for people not to— wait till you get here. Monica. Michael, I don't know. He said a little different. Should I tell her? Everything just becomes easier. You know, I was talking about something the other day where if I had spilled something on my shirt, I might have walked around like an idiot all day so people wouldn't see it, not realizing seeing me walk around like an idiot probably isn't flattering either. You know, at this point now, all right, so I spilled something on my shirt. What is the difference? The people who don't know you don't know you, so it's not going to matter. The people who do know you know you do not typically spill things on yourself. Or even if you do, you have other assets. Life just gets better and better unless you hold yourself back and mindlessly make yourself miserable.

Exactly. And then ultimately make yourself sick. I think that the issue is people often think that they have less opportunity as they get older, and then regret kicks in. So what are your thoughts around regret?

Regret is all mindless. When you make a decision— Well, first of all, our understanding of decision-making, experts included, is all mindless, I believe. When you cannot make a decision between two things, that just means psychologically they are the same for you. So randomly choose one because it does not matter. Now, if they were in fact different, if I say, do you want A or B? Michael is going to say he does not care. Now, I say, Michael, A is $100 and B is $10,000. There is no complex calculation. You are just going to choose the $10,000. And you get there by gathering information to make the things that are the same look different. The trick is that, or the key to it, the kicker, whatever it is, you can name it after I describe it, is that there is no natural end to the information you could take in. So every new piece— so let us say we have $100 versus $10,000. Oh, what could be bad? And then you find out if you take the $10,000, you are going to be on a list where people are going to come in. Who knows? But it is a terrible thing. And then you get another piece of information that said that is only on Thursdays. And then it just keeps changing. When you are trying to decide, if I say to you, Monica, do you want to meet my friend Susie? She is very impulsive. You are going to say, no, why the hell would I want to meet her? Right. Okay. That would be your decision. If I said, Monica, do you want to meet my friend Susie? She is very spontaneous. You say, yeah, bring her on. Okay, well, spontaneous, impulsive are the same thing. And the point is that when you are trying to look at the costs and benefits, every cost is also a benefit. Every benefit is also a cost if you just open your mind to look at it that way. So it can tell you what to do. Now, you can forget everything that I have said. Let me just give your audience permission. Rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, what you want to do is make the decision right. That means you could just flip a coin, and then whatever outcome you have, make it work for you. Now, when you have regrets— see, I did not think I was going to remember why I have gone on like this. It was a question about regret. When you have regrets, what you are saying is, gee, the thing I have chosen does not work. And you mindlessly assume the unchosen alternative would have been better. The unchosen alternative could have been worse, could have been equally bad, could have been good. There is no way of knowing. And that the unchosen or chosen alternatives by themselves, again, are neither good, bad, or indifferent. It is the way we frame them. Yes. So I had my students, graduate students, I said, okay, live for the week without making any decision. Flip a coin.

Oh, wow.

And they did that and they came back. Wow, that was fun. They had no stress.

I am going to try that maybe.

No, you should try it because now it is easy for me. I could buy a car in 5 minutes. If I am deciding between, let us say, a Three Musketeers and an Almond Joy, it could take me an hour. So, I, too, periodically forget that it just does not matter. You cannot know. Decision-making requires— the way people make decisions now requires knowing what each of the outcomes is going to feel like. And you can never know.

Well, you can kind of guide yourself to make a decision based on knowing how you might feel if you get to that.

No, you cannot know how you are going to feel. Well— Let me tell you. Prediction. Decision-making relies on prediction, and prediction is an illusion. Okay, so let us say we see John and Jane fighting at a party. And Monica, I say, what do you think? They are going to get divorced? You say, what are you, crazy? Sometimes people fight. Okay, let us say we did not have that conversation. 2 weeks later, we find out John and Jane, whatever I said, are getting divorced. Ah, I knew it. You should have seen the way they went at each other in the party. So we are so good at looking back and making it all make sense that we think we can do that going forward. And I am talking very fast because I know you are going to interrupt me. I am acting like an assistant professor who just wants to get through their notes. I mean, the important thing is that people understand what I am saying. But okay, so this last part that— now I have lost my train of thought. Yes. So we can predict for the group, but we can't predict the individual case. So if I were to say to you, let us go to a Mercedes dealership. Let us say there are 100 cars. And if we turn the key in the ignition, almost all of them are going to start. One or two might not start, right? So it is a great car. It is just not perfect. There may be a lemon or two. Now, if I said to you, would you bet your whole life savings and your future savings— and I will match that if you are wrong— that you pick any Mercedes there, that it will definitely start when you turn the key? You are not going to take the bet. On some level, you know. Now, when it comes to the decisions we make, whether it is to have some medical procedure, that I am happy if this thing works for most people, but I really want to know, is it going to work for me? And there is no way to tell that. You cannot predict the individual case. And that is what decision-making is all about, right? Well, if these things are just like they were in the past, then I should know. And people tend to do the right thing in making their decisions, but they do not feel good about them because they think they should be doing some complex analysis. Have I totally confused you?

No, not at all. No, I cannot argue with you. It is your show.

You can argue with me.

No, because I think about big decisions. By the way, I fully and fundamentally agree with you, but I just want to push a little bit just for all of our listeners as well. If you are deciding to—

Should I have a baby or not?

Not just a baby, but a baby at age 50, and it is baby number 7. Whatever is driving you.

Let us make it easy. Should I have children or not? Or have an abortion. The only way you could make a decision like that was if first you had a child and you saw what it was like, then you erased that whole experience so you came back to square one and lived your life without having the child. You cannot do that. We make decisions to take action. As soon as you take the action, it changes the whole equation. You cannot compare. And the mistake is thinking that you can. And then you have the people who are ambivalent, which is very mindful. I will do this. Oh, but then that is— Oh, no, but maybe this. And they go back and forth. And it is sort of mindfulness gone wild because the problem is that they think there is a correct decision. And so if they keep searching, they are going to find the right— and there is no right decision.

So basically, wherever you are, be there completely. You make a decision.

And you live that. And make it make sense to you.

And if it does not make sense, find a way to make it make sense. But the point is not to go back and, I should have, or go forward, I could have, and now I do not have any of these opportunities. Because that leads to stress, which leads to aging, which leads to all— Exactly.

Yes. No, I am glad you mentioned stress, because I think stress is the number one killer. This is something I believe, but I do not have direct research evidence. But I think that if we took people who were diagnosed with, let us say, cancer— pick 3 different kinds of cancer, have 200 people in each group— no one, when they get a diagnosis like that, is going to feel good. So we give them a few weeks to adjust to it. Then we measure their stress level once a month or so. I believe that degree of stress will predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, over and above nutrition. Even over and above treatment.

Wow.

Now, so that is extreme. But now everybody in the medical world, which is why they changed the medical model to a biosocial model, knowing that there is some connection. They have not gone full to mind-body unity, but I am working on it. Stress is not fun. Stress is psychological. Events do not cause stress. What causes stress is the view you take of the event. The more mindful you are, the more views you have, potential views you have available to you, and the less stressed you are going to be. To be stressed, you need two things. First, a belief that an event is going to happen. And we just said you cannot predict. Second, that when it happens, it is going to be awful. Okay, so you believe an event is going— you are going to fail the test, your husband is going to leave. You are going to miss the plane, whatever it is. Now, if you give yourself 3 reasons why it is not going to happen, you are immediately less stressed. But let us imagine it does happen. Now, ask yourself, how is that actually a good thing? And an example I give in the book, and I am not suggesting that people should experience major fires, but I did experience in a fire that burned 80% of what I owned. And I moved to the Charles Hotel. I was a sight to be seen with my little dogs. This was around Christmas. I go out Christmas Eve and I come back to the hotel. The room is full of gifts, not from the hotel owner, not from the management, but from the so-called little people, the people who park my car, the chambermaids who clean my room, the waiters and waitresses who serve me. It took me years of telling that story and not crying. Now, I clearly can do that. Every Christmas, I am reminded of how good people can be. And I do not remember anything that I lost in the fire.

Let me ask, in the moment right after you came home or found out about the fire, what was your initial reaction?

I was not happy, but I called the insurance person. He came over the next day, and he said it. And this is not boasting, but maybe it is, but it is true nonetheless. He said he has been at this job for 25 years. This was the first time in his career that the damage was worse than the call. So, oh, my God. Oh, my God. And I guess they are not so bad. This was all right. Not so bad. I had already lost all of this stuff. It did not make sense to me to throw my sanity away with it. And that is very important because people call me a lot when they are given these dread diagnoses and they think they are going to die and what have you. And I say to them, I cannot tell you how to feel, but I can tell you that if somebody told me, and if I believed it, that I had 6 months to live, I would not waste a minute of it being stressed, depressed, blaming people. All right. The first thing I would have is a hot fudge sundae, and then I would go full out living.

But in truth, probably based on all of your work and research, you probably would just not accept that diagnosis. Right?

Well, that is the truth as well. But still, if I did accept that something was going to happen, I would make the best of it. Complaining and stress do not get you anywhere. In fact, another way for people to deal with their stress is to review the last 3 times they were stressed and what happened. Most of the things they are worried about never happen.

That is the truth.

So, we can use the rule, no worry before it is time. And I think one of my other one-liners that people seem to like that is useful is when something happens, ask yourself, Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?

I love that.

Most of the time, all right, so you missed the bus, or you burnt the steaks, or somebody stole your wallet. I mean, they are not really tragic.

I think we are overly complicated because then comes along the blame and the guilt. And if I had just done this and that. And that is that negative self-talk that really disrupts that unity you are talking about.

It is terrible. Monica, I talk about blame in the book. In an interesting way. Many, many years ago, I was asked to give a sermon at Harvard. Well, I am barely Jewish. I have no idea what things are religious. I say yes to everything. So I say yes, and I am trying to think, what am I going to talk about? So I said, forgiveness sounds sort of religious. I could get away with it. So I start thinking about forgiveness, and it was amazing to me. I came up with something that was almost sacrilegious. Here it is in a nutshell. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you? Good. It is good. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to tell you?

It is bad.

It is bad. But before you forgive, you have to blame. So our forgivers are our blamers. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things?

Bad.

Bad. But things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame, then forgive. Hardly divine. There is another way of dealing with life, which is to recognize that behavior makes sense from the perspective of the person who is doing the behavior, the actor's perspective, or else they would not do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning that says, you know, today I am going to be obnoxious and clumsy. And whatever.

Miserable.

All right. So what are they intending? And I did a study many, many years ago where I gave people 200 or 300 behavior descriptions, and I said, what is it that you keep trying to change about yourself and you keep failing? Okay, so you circle those things. So for me, gullible. Oh, God, I am so gullible, and I can't stop being gullible. Impulsive. I can't stop being— I'm not going to tell you the others. Okay. Now, you turn the page over. In a mixed-up order are the positive versions of each of these. Now, the question to participants is circle those things you really value about yourself: trusting, spontaneous. Well, as long as I value being trusting, I am going to be gullible. As long as I value being spontaneous, I am going to be impulsive. And the point is that rather than be annoyed at what this person has done, if you examine it from their perspective— so you are annoyed at me for being gullible. Now you realize it is because I am trusting. Do you want me to stop being trusting? Probably not. But if you want me to stop being gullible, you are going to have to persuade me to stop being trusting. And everything then becomes different. All the annoyances— I am sure the two of you spend a lot of time together. I am sure there are ways you get on each other's nerves. Try it. Recognize that she is not doing it to you. He is not doing it because of some ulterior motive. There is always an explanation that makes sense. So then our relationships improve.

I work with a lot of couples, and actually one of my books is called, "Rethink Love." I am challenging people to constantly rethink what they think they know. Good. I think that when we have absolutes about somebody or something, it does not allow us to see it or the person in anything other than that one thing. Right?

Yes, that is perfect. Yes. I am done.

Even if being gullible, like for you, let us say that you did not like being gullible, but then you do not want to be a distrusting person, so you do not mind being gullible, but it is about how much energy you give to each one. Right?

Well, so I came up with a way of dealing with chronic illnesses, of all things, that also speaks to relationships in the way you are suggesting. So when people are given a diagnosis of a chronic illness, the presumption is there is nothing that can be done about it. And really, all that means is that the medical world has not figured anything out. And later, if you remind me, I will tell you you can do about it. But people presume their symptoms will stay the same or just get worse. Nothing only moves in one direction. When the stock market is going up, it does not go up in a straight line. It goes up, it goes down a little, it goes up. And that is the same thing with everything that we are doing. There are changes. So what we do is we call people periodically, and we are calling them— it is called attention to symptom variability. Symptom variability, any variability just means being mindful. When you are mindful, you notice things are different. Okay? So you have the chronic pain. And so I call you at random times and I say, how is it now? And is it better or worse than the last time we spoke? And why? Well, when you do this repeatedly, several things happen. The first, people feel that they are doing something. They have some control. Which the medical world has not helped them to feel over their disease. Second, that when you are asking yourself, well, why is it better or worse right now? Well, before, when you realize that it is better and you thought it is only terrible, you feel there is improvement. But then when you ask yourself, why is it better or worse? To get the answer, you are becoming more mindful. You are looking over things. What did I eat today? Who did I see? How active was I, and so on. And that mindfulness is itself good for your health. And then finally, you are more likely to find a solution if you are looking for one. So stress. There are people who are stressed, who think they are stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. So you are stressed. When you are not stressed, you are not thinking about stress. Then you are stressed again, thinking about it, so that intervening time gets forgotten. So let us say, Monica, you think you are stressed all the time. I call you or somebody calls you. And how are you now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? And we do this for a while. And then you find out, you know, you are really stressed when you are talking to Ellen Langer. Okay, well, the cure is easy, right? Do not talk to me. Or make the conversation different. Now, that noticing changes is the same thing in relationships. You drive me crazy because you are always whatever it is I want to put in. But if somebody called me or I set my phone to ask me the question, is he or she like this right now, more or less than before, and why? And I come to realize, gee, you are not always whatever annoying thing it is. And in fact, you are rarely that way. But when you are that way, since I do not think of the times you are not that way, it seems overwhelming. I am sure you spoke about that in your book.

Yes. One of the really, I think, exciting aspects of your work is around the placebo effect. Yes. I just want to quote you for one second, and then if you can share some more. "I believe this makes placebos our most effective medicine." That is quite a revolutionary idea.

Well, most people— I deeply believe it. And one of my major goals in my research over the past several decades is to find a way— you take a placebo, it is a nothing, right? It cannot be a placebo unless it is inert. You take it and you get better. So who is making you better? You are making yourself better. And I want to get rid of the pill that is not doing anything. The doctor in the white coat. That is unnecessary. You are doing it. I want to give that control to people directly. And that is what this attention to symptom variability. We have done this with multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson's, arthritis, chronic pain, a host of real biggies. And in each case, we get very positive results. So what the placebo is doing is telling you you can get better. And I think part of the way it works is that now you are looking for how you are better and when you are feeling that way and so on. But yeah, I think some of the placebo literature, not from my lab, is incredible, although I think the work that we are doing is important, too. There is a study with people who have Parkinson's, but they take people who have agreed to be in the study. They open up their heads, do a few motions that are meaningless, and then close their heads up. So the person believes they just had surgery for Parkinson's, and then they get better. Wow. Yeah. And so all medicine, all medicine, has a component of placebo. And placebos are remarkable, but they have a bad name. And we need to understand that in order to bring a drug to market, the medicine has to be tested against a placebo. Now, the pharmaceutical companies are not happy when the placebo either outperforms or equally performs the medicine, because then they cannot bring it to market. But the rest of us who are not in the pharmaceutical business should be thrilled because all it tells us is that, wow, we have enormous control. People have no idea. You just think of the mind-body studies I have told you, and there are so many more. Let me give you an example of— we do work on fatigue, and I believe that fatigue is largely a psychological construct. So the simplest test, Let's say I ask a group of people, do 100 jumping jacks and tell me when you're tired. So I'll get tired around 70. I take another group and I say, do 200 jumping jacks and tell me when you're tired. They get tired at 140.

Exactly.

And that's consistent. Now, so I say to my class, a health class, how far is it humanly possible to run? Because people think, oh, it's wired in. You just get too exhausted. And they know— these are Harvard students, so they know a marathon is 26 miles. So it has got to be more than that, or else they would not have asked the question. So it usually starts at around 28, 29. It becomes like an auction. 30, 35. And when they get to 50, whoever yells it out, everybody else groans. Ugh, 50 miles. Then I play them a YouTube of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico. These people run over 200 miles without stopping.

Wow.

Now, the difference between 50— and I cannot run 5 miles. I can, but not at this moment. The difference between 50 and 200 is enormous and is not even as great as I believe the difference is between what we think we can do with respect to almost everything and what, in fact, we can do.

I love this.

Almost everything we do, we stop ourselves from going beyond. Well, I have done that, therefore, now I can be tired. And you will like this, especially, Monica, I think. There was a study I found that Frank Beach did. I think it was in the '50s or something. And he takes a little girl rat and a little boy rat. It is actually Michael who is going to like this. And they copulate.

Oh, I knew you were going to change the security.

And then the little boy rat, So fatigued he cannot take anymore. He needs a refractory period. However, if you immediately introduce a new little girl rat, he is ready to go.

Of course.

So what happens— imagine on the personal level that you were processing all day long and your back hurts and your fingers, and you just cannot take anymore. And then you go home and you play the piano. So you change the context. And you have renewed energy.

[Speaker:ELLEN LANGER] What is interesting is I was a marathon runner, and it is 26.2 miles. That 0.2 matters a lot when you are running it. But just hearing what you are saying, I think that, again, that is why I just love this conversation and your work so much, because I noticed a shift in my thinking 4 years ago, and a few things happened. First, I lost my mother-in-law, Michael's mother, who was a mentor to me and like a mother in a lot of ways. Then I lost my father a year later. And then I ruptured a tendon in my ankle and I had to have surgery. At the end of that, then these insidious thoughts about dementia or cognitive decline, or even just— I am an avid athlete still. But now I am like, well, those isms that are so negative. Well, You have overused your body at this age, and that is why it is not showing up. Or, oh, at a certain age, things start to fall apart. All those things that I have heard a whole lifetime, by the way, never affected me, never got into my subconscious, nothing. Now it is like boop, bop, and they just come up. And I think that that is just the biggest problem that we have today. Menopause, all the things that we hear. You hear a lot of excitement about When you turn 20 and 30 and 40 and then, oh, midlife, midlife crisis, menopause, aging, disease. So who is talking about the great next 50 years? You know what I am saying? That is part of the problem.

I will tell you a funny story. So I was going through menopause younger than now, and I was complaining to a friend. And she said, Ellen, I cannot believe you. If I said this to you, you would say, see, it is losing weight. I said, "That is right, because I am perspiring all night long." But then, to my dismay, I never had another hot flash. But the moral of the story is whatever is being experienced can be understood, good, bad, indifferent, and those valuations can change over time. I wrote a blog forever ago. You are 2 years old, you scrape your knee, and you are crying bloody murder. And then you are however old you are when you go to elementary school. So you are 8 years old and Johnny or Janie does not send you a Valentine. Oh, my God, the world is going to end. And then you are 18 and you have a few pimples. Oh, my God, you cannot go out. And it just keeps going. And that is why I said to you that it just gets better, because at some point you realize it is all so silly. And so, I try to do with my students. Wisdom comes with aging, but I do not understand why we have to wait for it. All you need to understand is that we cannot predict anything, that whatever happens can be understood as an advantage. It is a shame. I mean, the kind of thing you are talking about, an example I often use is, let us say, A 20-year-old hurts her wrist. Well, she believes her wrist is not supposed to hurt, so she takes steps to make it better. So I am 77. I hurt my wrist. It would be sad if I thought, well, what do you expect? You get older, you just fall apart. So then I would not do anything. So now, a month later, when my wrist is still hurting and hers is not, is not because I am old. It is because I did not take the steps that she took, because the world convinced me that—

You should not.

That is what happens. It just all starts to fall apart.

Exactly. You also did a study with the reverse eye chart. Can you talk a little bit about that?

This is another mind-body study. So I go into the doctor's office. I am like everybody else. I am given the Snelling chart. Now, different from everybody else, as I am reading down the chart, and the letters are getting progressively smaller. I say, hey, they are giving me the expectation that soon I won't be able to see. I wonder how important that expectation is to my vision. So we do a study where instead of the letters getting smaller and smaller, the letters are getting larger and larger. So now you are given an expectation that soon you will be able to see, and people can see what they could not see before. And most people start to have trouble around 2/3 down the chart. So we start the chart a third of the way down. The letters are smaller and smaller. And now 2/3 of the way down this eye chart, the letters are much smaller than through the regular— 2/3 of the way down the regular, and people can see. And also, just think about in the medical world, has no choice in some sense but to take single measures. I mean, you cannot measure your blood pressure every 15 minutes in a doctor's office. You cannot take an eye test every 15 minutes. So we are given numbers and we hold them still as if that is the way we see. Let me interrupt myself and help me remember to come back to this. I used to give a talk and I would say, how many people know their cholesterol level? And you have one person leaving there, they are so proud of themselves. I said, and what is it? And they give me the number. And then I'd say, when did you have it measured? And they'd say, 6 months ago. And I say, and you haven't eaten or exercised since? And then if they haven't gotten the point, I say, if you never measure it again, you're going to die a healthy person. So things are always varying. Now, with respect to vision, that I don't know about you, but I see I can see a restaurant sign much further away if I am hungry. I see things that are moving different from things that are still. I see things that are familiar to me much more easily than things that are unfamiliar, things that are colored. So when you have in an eye test black and white letters that make no sense and decide that is the way you see, it is a problem. Now, what happens, and it is typical, for the medical world. I don't know that they have many choices. But now, Monica, you need glasses. Well, do you need glasses? Because that is the way you saw under these circumstances where you are expecting not to see letters that are in black and white and make no sense. I suggest we do that attention to variability. And unless you are really blind, you don't wear your glasses, and then you see, do I need my glasses right now? And if so, why? Why didn't I need them before? And you might find, oh, let's say 3:00 in the afternoon, you need your glasses. Well, probably because you're tired. So take a nap or have an energy bar, which I must say is hysterical. We used to call them candy bars. You shouldn't eat a candy bar, but you can eat an energy bar.

Touché. Exactly. The funny thing is, I will tell you a story. When I was around 22 or 23, I got in 2 or 3 car accidents around the same period of time. My father was not very happy. I was even younger. I was 18, I think. The insurance went up, etc. So I was convinced by professionals that I needed glasses and that I could not see from the side, etc. I bought into that for a good 6 months. And then I remember thinking one day, You know what? I see just fine. I am just afraid of the future right now. I was 18. Which school I go to? What is the future? Everything is changing. We are all graduating from high school. All my friends are moving somewhere else. Once I caught the fear, my eyesight was just fine, by the way.

Yes. Yes. For me, and what led to some of the work is, I used to put in a lens in one eye. So it was depth for one eye and reading for the other. And at night, I was trying to get the contact lens out of my eye. I'm killing myself. I can't get it out. Then I realized I never put it in. But I saw fine all day. Now, of course, this isn't true for people who have trained themselves to need the glasses. People have to untrain themselves, I think. If you took a laxative every day, it would then be hard for you to go to the bathroom on your own. You are telling your body, that you need it. But yeah, to think that as you get older, your vision has to get worse. As I said, I'm 76, soon to be 77. Yeah, that's old. I don't need glasses.

Yeah.

I wasn't asking what you spoken about your mother and her cancer diagnosis, how it And how you— Yes. Sorry.

Well, what happened with my mother? So she was young. She was 54 when it first happened. They tell her she has breast cancer, and then the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas, which is the endgame. Right. And then magically, it was totally gone. And that is what set the stage for the next 4 decades of my research. How could that be? Because the medical world could not explain it. The idea of mind-body unity does explain it. And if you just think about spontaneous remissions for any disease that is supposedly incurable, we have no idea, as with my mother's cancer at her level of the pancreas. People assume that is it. And yet it went away. We have no idea how frequent spontaneous remissions are in the real world. You know that if I went to the doctor and I had something, dread disease, and I decide I want to go home and die at home, and then all of a sudden I am magically fine, I do not think it would occur to me to call the doctor and say, haha, you were wrong. Right? Then you have all the people who do not know that they have whatever tumors they might have in the first place. So I do not know what the numbers are, but there is every reason to believe that spontaneous remissions are not quite as infrequent as the medical world thinks. And it is very hard to study them, which is one of the reasons.

I guess my question is, theoretically, how far in your mind does that go? Meaning, if a person really believed or new, whatever word you choose, that the mind-body unity, can the mind, in your opinion, eventually actually heal that? Yes.

Oh, yeah. No, I think that the difference between 50 miles as the maximum humanly possible and 200, I think that we are nowhere close to what we can do. But now we are all products of this culture. And you can't escape lots of the negative information that is out there. And if you say to yourself, well, maybe they are wrong, is not the same thing as it not occurring to you in the first place.

So with your mother, for example—

If you could live to 109, why could not you live to 110? I mean, we could go up slowly. So, if they say you have to die at 109, I say, could you live to 109 and a week? Yeah. Well, and if you lived to 109 and a week, how about 109 and 2 weeks? And so on. I did this with my friend. I was part of the Division of Aging at Harvard Medical School, and Jack Rowe was the chair, a dear friend. And I said, Jack, how long does it take for a broken finger to heal? He says, I don't know, a week. I said, what if I told you I could heal it psychologically in 5 days? He said, all right. I said, what about 4 days? He says, all right. I said, what about 3 days? He said, no. I said, okay, what about 3 days and 23 hours? Where is the point?

But how difficult is it, though, for people in our society to come to that belief?

Well, change the conditions of what they believe. We are all conditioned to believe. Even when people talk about cancer, they are in remission. That is terrifying. Is it ever really gone? Is it going to come back again?

Yes. But that is a mistake. That is a mistake of the medical world. When I have a cold and the cold goes away, I do not say I am in remission. I am cured. And then if I get another cold, I am not so scared because I have beaten off many of them. When the cancer goes away, it goes away. Now, I went to see a friend who had a very bad case of cancer. I described the story, I think, in The Mindful Body. And I said, so, Eva, how are you? She said, they said I am in remission. Now, remission is great. It is much better than having the disease, but it is not nearly as good as being cured. And I said to her, wait a second. If I went for the exact same test right now, presumably they would tell me I do not have cancer. So why is it I do not have it and you have it in remission? And so— and if you see it as in remission, then you are stressed. Exactly. And if you are stressed for 5 years while you are waiting for a clean bill of health, you are making yourself sick. Now, if it is in remission and cancer— you get cancer, this new cancer will be like the old cancer in some ways, but in other ways it will be brand new. So you have the right to see it as a new cancer. And then it is also less scary because you have beaten it before. No, I think it is an uphill battle. But before I published the first paper on remission versus cure, because this was— I am telling people in the medical world. I spoke to Susan Love when she was alive, and she was the world's leading breast cancer oncologist. And she said she could not agree with me more. So then I felt comfortable. You can choose to see it however you want, but the way you label things has a very big effect on how you are going to go forward in the world. It is like you see the glass as half full or half empty. In some sense, it is both. But if you see it as half full, you have enough to drink. Then you go and you just live. And when you are living, you might even find more liquid. If you see it as half empty, then you are spending your time worried that you are not going to have enough.

Right. So that lack mentality. I often say to people, I do not believe in labeling because then you have to have all of the attributes that go along with the diagnosis or the title or whatever the case may be. Right? I mean—

Yeah. No, labels can be— not all labels. So I am in Mexico now, and we rent the house when we are not here. And there is an iguana. And the guests would not be comfortable with the iguana. So I wrote this whole thing for them that the iguana's name is Ada. And if you see her, it is very good luck. And by naming some of the things that we are afraid of, we become less scared.

And part of the—

The more important point that both of us are saying is that labels are not casual. They come with very important consequences. May be positive, may be negative.

And in our society, unfortunately, when it comes to negative things, we take the weight of that, which often is a cycle of making it worse.

Exactly. But even things like I had said, the borderline, we have all of these things that are right at that point. So let us say we are all in school. Monica, you and I get, let us say, an 80 on the test. And— I cannot help it, Michael— Michael gets a 79. We get Bs. Michael gets a C. All right? And that is going to follow him through. And we are students. And so he comes to drop out of school because he knows he cannot make it. It is easy to see how with almost anything you can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, making yourself sick is something that people are less aware of. Did I tell you? I am doing so many of these. The pancreas story with my— when I was married.

No, tell us.

No.

Okay. So I was thrilled to see most people do not have a single pancreas story. I have 2 of them. Yeah. So one I already told you was my mother's breast cancer. The other, I was married when I was very young. And I was, you know, 19 going on 30 or 40. So I was a woman of the world now because I was married. We went to Paris on our honeymoon, and I ordered a mixed grill at dinner, and on the plate was pancreas. I asked my then-husband, which of these is the pancreas? He was more worldly than I. He pointed to it. I ate everything with gusto. Now, the moment of truth. Could I get myself to eat this? Because I have to. I don't know what sense it made, but at the time it made sense that if I am a married woman, I should be able to eat the pancreas. It was a sign of my being grown up. I start to eat it, and I literally become sick. He starts laughing. Totally inappropriate response, right? I am sick and he is laughing. I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that is chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. So I made myself sick. I am sick, and I think that is what people all over the world are doing to themselves. I am here to say there is a way to make ourselves better.

You mention in your book that you are actually working now on studies with people with Parkinson's. I am assuming it is too early to publish these findings, but I am assuming you are finding that through mindfulness—

No, we found it already. Those studies are done.

They are done?

Okay. Yes. Through the big disorders, diseases, a lot of chronic conditions that we use the attention to symptom variability and found remarkable improvements. That for many people, you get the diagnosis of a dread disease, you tune yourself out of the world, you are depressed, so you are becoming less and less mindful. The system is closing down, and that is going to make things worse. It is interesting. Something I did not realize until just the other day, that when I say most people are oblivious to what I am calling mind-body unity, people are oblivious to body unity. Now, what do I mean by that? That you just had a sip of water or whatever it is you took, Margaret.

Green tea.

That is not just affecting your vocal cords. It is affecting your entire body. It is one body. So now when you have a chronic illness, what people understand that to mean is there is nothing you can do about it. Right? There is always something you can do about it. Build the rest of you up. If we took an Olympic runner or Monica when she is her most athletic self and a couch potato— you, Michael. No, we take a couch potato who is— not doing it. He was watching television all day long, eating chocolate, which to me sounds wonderful. But anyway, and we expose them to COVID. I do not have data for this, but I do not think you are going to be equally likely to get it. The person whose body is stronger, I would believe, less likely. But even if we find that both of you get it, I do not think you are going to experience it in the same way. And you have people who have some of these dread diseases who do just fine. Even with COVID it is a piece of cake for them. And others where it plays out in horrible ways. And I think a lot of that is controlled by our psychological response to whatever we have.

I agree. They either, when they hear the diagnosis, they become more of the disease and less of themselves. The more they give in to that disease, and they hear about all the symptoms and all of the side effects of any drug they have to take, all of that, they become that and consumed with that. So then your free will, your control, your influence becomes less and less over the outcome.

This leads us in one of my favorite quotes in the book. You quote Rumi, who said, "You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?" Yeah.

What people need, I think, to understand, first of all, this book was first written as a memoir. So, there are lots of very personal stories in it, but the stories are told to help make some points. So, for example, when we talked about the illusion of decision-making, here, I had this interaction with Hells Angels. And as it's unfolding, I said, okay, what would you do? After the fact, you could say I made the right or the wrong decision. But before, it is not an easy thing. And I think that if talking about crawling instead of flying, the first part that I just said has nothing to do with the quote that you read to me. I am going to try to make it relevant. I think that the only thing that keeps us down is ourselves. And the culture often teaches us, here is bad. Now, here is a better way. And so, we think that is as far as you can go. And so, I spend a lot of time in the book talking about better than better. And you can never prove that you can't. And what people need to understand is all of the success that they want they don't really want it the way they think they do. So let's say you play golf. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I got a hole-in-one every time I swung the club? No, there would be no game. Right? An example I use a lot is you're a little kid and you're in the elevator. And remember how exciting it was? You're trying to reach the buttons and you can't reach them. And then your mother or father would pick you up. And then the next time you were a little taller. This is kind of a game. And then you get tall enough where you could press the button. Have you ever in your recent past gone into an elevator where it was exciting? So the point is, the struggle is the whole game. Not being there, but getting there, as people have said.

It is one of the illusions we have, right? We think once we have everything we ever wanted, all the success, then I will be satisfied.

Then the misery starts.

That is the beginning of the end. You had said, I love this, you said, "I was never the type of person who is going to take one idea and beat it to death. Part of that is that I have so many ideas. If whatever it is I am excited about now does not happen, it does not matter because there is always the next possibility." So I am curious, what is next and what is on your mind?

I can tell you what is next, but then the question, if that turns out to be what's going to be next.

I have no idea what's after that.

But for me, I do live in the world of possibility. So I get very exciting things happening all the time. And one that people know about is they were making a movie about me where Jennifer Aniston was playing me. And it didn't end up happening. But good things happen. I'm friends with all of them. But that didn't matter to me because then there was this other thing. And if that doesn't happen, there's this other thing. There's always something. As far as what I'm studying, I end the book with a story about my grandkids. They are twin boys, now they are 8, to demonstrate. So the world right now is vertical, right? And we sit on top. And what I want to do is make it horizontal. That I want people to recognize that. And there's a little song. I'm not going to sing it. But if you Google, if you go to YouTube, you'll hear me singing it with my Harvard students to the old tune of the Sara Lee commercial. Everybody doesn't know something. Everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something. Everyone can do something else. We learned about the value of people who were delivering food, selling toilet paper during the beginning of COVID We forgot that too quickly, right? They were more valuable than the architect and whatever. But I mean it in a very big way. And that right now you have schools, for instance, that try to test, find out what you don't know. And I think that's wrong. I think we should try to find out what people do know. And if we do, all of— with the added thing about people's behavior making sense or else they wouldn't do it. Right now, people are competing for what they see as a limited pot. You have to have— if you have a winner, you have a loser. And the things that are important are not zero-sum. And I think there are things that we have built into our culture that help maintain this mistake. So, you have a normal distribution. Which says it is a bell shape, right? Some people on the end, oh, God, pathetic. They do not have any of whatever it is. Then you have most in the middle. They have a moderate amount. Then you have the few big on the other end who are really terrific without paying any attention to who decided the criteria. It is very important, especially for women, because the more different you are from the person who chose the criteria, criteria, the more important it is for you to ignore the criteria. So when I am giving a talk, I look in the audience, and for some reason, there is always a 6-foot-5 man. I ask him to come up on the stage. I am 5'3". We look silly, right? I ask him to put his hand up. I put my hand next to it. His hand is 4 inches larger than mine. I say, should we do anything the same way? Now, if we are training all of me, the smaller in this case, to do it the way they do it, we are never going to be as good. But who said that is the way you should do it? So an example I use is when I play tennis. So it was not sent from the heavens that there should be two serves. This was a decision that was made to meet some people's needs. It does not meet my need. I throw the ball up, I kill it. It does not go in. Now I have my worst second serve because I am playing doubles, so it will go in and no one will be mad at me. If I ruled the world— and so if you are playing tennis with me, Monica, this is the way we are going to play. You have 3 serves. The first one, I kill it. It does not go in. Now I have another one and I can learn from the first one. I kill it and it is going to start going in more and more. And I still have my follow-up third serve. You see what I am saying? That if each of us wrote the rules, so that it met our individual needs, we'd all have more opportunities to be successful. You know, I say with the 6-footer standing next to me, we're both sitting on a toilet that's the same height. Biologically, one of us are not getting our needs met. It affects everything. You know, so we have a world of winners and losers, and I'm saying no, those winners are only winners under certain circumstances, and surely, the losers could be winners if we turn those circumstances around.

I really love the way you are saying that. It is kind of like—

So that is what I am trying to do is if everybody can be happy, we make everybody more mindful, everybody values everybody else, and people start to recognize the individual things that they can do. I mean, another thing that comes to mind, you can see the way this happens where we limit people. So we have some people who are called supertasters, some people who have supermemories. Well, so what that says is that here is a category that we cannot get to. So you do not even try. And I do not believe that any of those supermemorizers, whatever they are doing, could not be taught. You would not learn it overnight. Same thing with increasing your taste senses. So again, the important part of the message is you can't know that you can't. And doing is the stuff that makes sense. As you're mindfully engaged in what you're doing, the neurons are firing. It's literally and figuratively enlivening, and there's no downside. By the way, to your point, My single most.

What makes something normal? If you get a big enough group that goes into this area, and that is the percentage, that is normal. Anything outside of that is less than or abnormal. We have to change the way that we think about everything. I have often— I always have said I hate arbitrary rules. I do not mean to be—

All rules are arbitrary.

Yes, that is true, actually.

People talk about objective and subjective, whatever it is, measures. Who decides what's objective and what's subjective? So you have man-made, a man-made error, or a machine-made error. They are not different. Who made the machines? You see? So we try to falsely create the sense of objective. And when we do that, those on top can stay on top. Because everybody else has a justification. They just do not have what it takes. And people suffer. And the sad thing is those on top are suffering. The kids who get Fs and Ds in school, they are the ones who may become serial killers. I do not know. They are not told that they can feel good about themselves. Then you have the Bs and the Cs who are told they are average. Who wants to be average? So you would think the A students, well, here is our group. No, because the A students do not know why they got the A. They are not sure they are going to get it again. They know everybody expects it from— Nobody is happy with this.

Exactly.

So how are you going to change all this? So what you are working on now, how do we create that change?

Well, for me, I do podcast after podcast. I write paper and book after book. Book. I am most excited about The Mindful Body, which has so much of the work I have done over 4.5 decades. And you just hope that little by little, you make a difference. When people talk about the Counterclockwise study, they have just heard about it. That was a study I ran in 1979, and I published in 1981. That is a lot of years ago. So things take a while. But on the positive note, we have very wild studies. I am not going to share them with you. People can read them in Mindful Body, but on mindful contagion, which suggests that if you have a whole group, you do not have to make the whole group mindful. We make a subset and then it will spread. But your question and concern is still important and valid. Because even making the subset mindful is not so easy because we are up against a barrier that somebody wins, right? And the people who are winning like you to think that they deserve to be where they are, that it was not just by dint of some chosen criteria. By different criteria, somebody else would be there, and so on. Period.

Thank you so much. Like I said, we thoroughly enjoyed the book. Certainly thoroughly enjoyed speaking with you. I really believe that this information, hopefully reaching more and more people, like you said, at least that subset to create, to really begin to change in our world.

Yes. If people find parts, the whole interesting, and then they share it, and they share it, and so on. It gets out there. I just wish it would get out there more quickly.

We are going to do our best. Thank you so much. You are so inspiring. Really enjoyed our conversation and look forward to doing it again at some point.

Yes. No, I have enjoyed it too. I thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye-bye. Stay spiritually hungry.