Recap: Can mindfulness improve physical health? | Prof. Ellen Langer

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're considering mindfulness. Improving your health often comes with certain sacrifices. You might need to sacrifice time to exercise or money for specialized equipment and food. But mindfulness is different. It doesn't demand our time or cost money. Instead, it suggests we can enhance our health simply by changing the way we think. So is it really possible to think our way to better health? And if so, where do we begin? In this episode, Harvard professor Ellen Langer joined me to delve into the magical connection between mind and body.

Is the traditional sort of view of the mind against the body, and therefore what do you think we've been getting wrong?

Well, Not that many years ago, the medical model used to believe that psychology was just totally irrelevant. You know, it's nice to be happy, they would think, but that has nothing to do with your health. More recently, as most people know, people talk about a mind-body connection. That's not what I'm talking about. My position is much more extreme and, by my understanding, more useful, which is the mind and body should be understood as one unit. Now, these are just words. You know, you could have had mind, body, and elbows, and we would have developed a different understanding of people. But when you put the mind and the body back together, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And so as I report in The Mindful Body, we have lots of studies where we put the mind in strange places and take measures that seem to justify the notion that it's one unit.

And when you say you put the mind in strange places, what do you mean by that?

The original study testing the mind-body unity was the counterclockwise study. This is a famous study, okay? I can call my own study famous because if you watch The Simpsons Go to Havana, they actually talk about this study.

I agree, I think you've really made it if you're on The Simpsons.

So what we did in the study, very simple, we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier. And had old men live there. And I should say elderly men. You know, the older I get, the younger they get. But basically men in their late 80s, 90s lived there for a week as if they were their younger selves. They spoke about all sorts of past events as if they were just unfolding. Everything they did was as they might do it 20 years earlier.

So they imagined as if they were living in a time 20 years earlier.

In a time warp, yes.

In a time warp.

And we took lots of measures, and what we found, it was sort of astonishing, that their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. And all of that without any medical intervention.

Sounds completely magical.

It does. But so then fast forward, we've done lots of studies that I've reported in "The Mindful Body." The next one is kind of fun also. We took chambermaids. Now it's interesting, chambermaids, as you know, are working all day long. And we asked them how much exercise they get. And they say they're not getting very much exercise. What? That's because to them, exercise, according to the Surgeon General, is what you do after work. After work, they're just too tired. Okay, so we take these chambermaids who don't realize they're getting exercise, and all we do is teach them that they're getting exercise. Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym, and so on. So now we have two groups: one who doesn't realize their work is exercise, one now does see their work as exercise. We take lots and lots of measures, and we want to find out after this time, is she eating any differently? Is she working any— no differences that we can to discern. Nevertheless, the group that changed their minds, that now saw their work as exercise, lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down.

So, Ellen, that all sounds pretty magical. Can you help us understand how is it possible the mind is linked to our physical health?

It's not linked. Okay. It's one thing. Every move you make, every thought you have is simultaneously enacted on different levels, right? So there's a physiological response. You know, you raise your hand, your brain is now different from before you raised it. So I'm not saying that there's nothing going on so-called under the hood, simply that my concern are the larger measures that most people care about. It's really a nocebo effect. A placebo, you take and all of a sudden things get better. For a nocebo, you're releasing a way for things to be better, typically. So here you didn't know that your work was exercise, and that's keeping the system in place. And that realization then frees you to enjoy the positive aspects of exercise, you know, which is very good. I mean, there are some people out there like Mark Twain who said every time the urge to exercise comes over him, he just sits quietly and waits until it passes. And I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't exercise. There are many, many reasons to exercise. But to know that you can be healthy without doing all of that exercise if you keep your mind active.

And this is where you're saying just by changing the way you think about something, you actually have this physical effect. I think this ties onto mindfulness. You talk about it in the book, and I would love for you to explain what you mean when you say that.

I'm happy to do that. So mindfulness, and I've been studying this now about 45 years.

It's so simple. Which is impossible to imagine looking at you.

Thank you. I strive for mindfulness.

This is obviously the positive mindfulness. If anyone's on video, they'll be pretty impressed. They'll be starting immediately.

It's so easy and the results are so extraordinary that again, it almost defies belief. But let me tell you, all you need to do is notice. Okay? Okay. Now, people think that that's what they're doing all the time, but our research suggests that almost all of us are mindless almost all the time. We're sealed in unlived lives and we're oblivious to it. So when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And the research says we should wake up. All right, so how do you wake up? There are two ways. The first is that if you just accept, deeply understand that you don't know, you don't have to feel bad that you don't know. Nobody knows because everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So if you approach something you don't know, you pay attention to it, right? You enjoy, you get engaged and so on. If your listeners thought they knew what I was going to say next, why bother listening to me? But it's hard for so many of us because everything we were taught, you know, every fact you memorized in school, everything you think you know leads you to a certainty so that you don't pay any attention. Mindfulness, as I study it, isn't a practice. All you really need to know is that you don't know. You know, when I'm doing this in a large audience, I'll ask the question. I'll ask you, Jonathan, how much is 1 in 1?

2.

No.

Okay.

You see, that's what we're most sure of.

Okay.

That's, you know, you know this better than you know your name, right? Okay, so if you were to add, uh, 1 wad of chewing gum plus 1 wad of chewing gum, 1 1 is 1. 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus— 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry is 1 pile. In the real world, 1 1 probably doesn't equal 2. So now When the thing you think you know the best, you see, gee, you didn't know it. Maybe you can generalize some. But let me tell you something that happened to me. It was a while ago now, where I was at this horse event, and this man asked me, would I watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog? I'm Harvard-Yale all the way through. Nobody knows better than I do horses don't eat meat, right? He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that Everything I think I know could be wrong, right? And the point, to me, that was exciting because that opened up all sorts of possibilities for us.

You make it sound really easy. Oh, just question everything. But I feel like it's almost like I'm talking to a black belt karate saying, oh, we just do this. And I'm like, well, I don't even understand how to walk into the ring.

That's right.

It feels like this is, so this is too big a step. Let's say someone's saying, I'd like to try and understand this, help me to understand. You know, like the first steps.

Okay.

How would I start to approach this? Is there like a—

Okay, yeah, there are a few things you can do. The first thing is look around you, look at something that you think you know, and notice the ways it's different.

Different from what you expect it to be.

Yeah, exactly. All of a sudden, oh, I didn't see that. Notice about somebody you care about. And you know, it's interesting because as you notice something about somebody you care about, they end up feeling cared for. And it actually, and we have data, improves the relationship. All right, so you just start noticing. And this should build on itself because the act of noticing feels good. So you don't want to stop. When you're having fun, you're being mindful. You know, if you were to, let's say you enjoyed crossword puzzles and you did one, you're not going to do it again right away because you know the answers. It's not fun. You listen to some, a joke is only funny if you don't know the punchline. All right, so if you're having fun, are you tending to be mindful?

Is that what you're saying?

You can't have fun unless you're mindful. So just make sure you're out there having fun. When something happens where you're no longer having fun, then question, you know, why didn't it go right? How can I make it right? And I'm just asking people now to add to that, how is it not going right was actually an advantage in some way? And you can always find that. And we do it with people. Okay, so here's, I think, the best way to become more mindful. Every time you're comparing yourself with somebody else, you're being mindless. But every time you say, "I'm telling you, Jonathan, you are just so inconsistent, it drives me crazy," I'm being mindless as soon as I call him anything. Now, once I realize from your perspective, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "You know, today I'm gonna be impulsive, inconsistent, stupid." So what are you intending? Well, it turns out you're intending to be flexible. Okay. I am gullible. I am so gullible. I can't stand myself for being gullible. But that's because when I'm being gullible, it's because I'm trusting. It's nice to be trusting. And the point here is very simple, though I'm making it sound complicated, that every single negative way of understanding somebody or ourselves has an equally strong but oppositely valenced. For every negative, there's an equally strong positive way of understanding it. And so now we go back to your wife. You and I are together now, Jonathan, and your inconsistency, your stubbornness, whatever it is— let's say you're being too impulsive— is driving me crazy. Once I see that what you're intending from your perspective is to be spontaneous, oh, wow, I don't want him to become less impulsive.

You don't want me to come back a little bit when you're talking about reframing, exactly, seeing this in a different— yeah, the same behavior is a different understanding, quite differently.

Yeah. So we did a study. We give people about 200 negative adjectives and behavior descriptions, say check those things about yourself you keep trying to change but you can't change. So for me, I check gullible and impulsive. Now you turn the page over, in a mixed-up order is the positive version of all of those. Now the question is, check those things you really value about yourself. Well, I value that I'm trusting and I'm spontaneous. And as long as I value being trusting, I'm not going to be able to stop being gullible.

They fit together.

So we all know when somebody's driving us crazy or when we're casting aspersions. And now if we accept that it's our mindlessness And we ask, how did that make sense from their perspective? Our relationships will improve. And the more you do this, the more you want to do it because everything just becomes nicer for you.

Very last question I'd like to ask. Do you view this as an addition to sort of traditional medicine, or is this an alternative?

I don't see it as either one. I see it as a different way of doing everything that's done. You know, that when we recognize that our psychology makes a big difference in our health, then we might approach doctors as partners in our health. We don't just turn ourselves over to them. When we recognize that any experiment only gives us probabilities, that's a good guess. So when the doctor's telling you to do something based on a good guess, you're gonna take it indifferently from as if it comes on high, "You must take these 3 pills 4 times a day." And so you become engaged in your own healthcare in a different way. Doctors know they don't know. Everybody who is expert at whatever they do knows they don't know. And so it'd be a relief not met with hostility. You know, they should still be respected for what they do know. And knowing a best guess is still not having the vaguest notion. But when we're aware that everything is changing, Everything looks different from different perspectives. Any business that holds things still, any profession, is behaving mindlessly and missing out on all of the advantage that would accrue from this more mindful noticing.

As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoë, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life. By fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high-quality hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber. Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives. Simply add 1 scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains 4 grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at zoe.com/daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.