The Mind and Body Are One Thing with Ellen Langer

So, John, what are humans for in a world where machines can think?

Well, we'll find out on our new show, The Mindset Economy.

We will, coming January 2026, wherever you get your podcasts. So, John, from day one of The Evolving Leader, we've been exploring how our body and our mind should be considered an integrated whole rather than separate entities.

Yeah, we've had a diverse range of guests all pointing to the same conclusion that for centuries logic centered in the brain, that the mind has been the ultimate pinnacle of human evolution. But what that's all missing is the evidence that it's the body that was the original sensory organ, and it works together providing the brain with the data to make sense of things.

Yeah, and I'm thinking of many guests, but particularly, I'm thinking about Annie Murphy Paul and her work on the extended mind. I'm thinking about Lisa Feldman Barrett on how our emotions are constructed from the interplay of our physical feelings and our language and our memory. And this idea is really important for leaders because it opens up new ways of being and helps us to make better sense of the situations that we face.

And in this conversation, we're deeply honored to have a true pioneer in the field. Ellen Langer for decades has proven out the fact that the mind and the body are one integrated whole.

It's an incredible conversation. So let's get going. Hi folks, welcome to The Evolving Leader. I'm Scott Allander.

And I'm John Gomes.

How are you feeling today, Mr. Gomes?

I am feeling peak excitement here. This, I've been looking forward to this conversation for months. And from the moment that our guest said yes, I had to kind of, I let out a whoop in the office and everybody was going, what's going on? And so I just gathered up like the 5 or 6 books that happened to be around that a guest had written and just went, and she's coming. So, so yeah, I'm feeling very excited. How are you feeling, Scott?

Yeah, I'm feeling, I'm feeling electric. I'm feeling a buzz. I woke up actually a little bit tired because I've been having some late nights this week. But as soon as I remembered what this morning was about for me, I got, I got really excited because I know we've talked about our guests work together many times, and I'm just so excited she's here because today we are joined by a pioneer and a giant in her field. For over 40 years, Dr. Langer has studied mindlessness and mindfulness in everyday situations where mindlessness is pervasive and very costly. Her research at the Langer Lab has brought to life in some very vivid ways that mindfulness without the need for meditation can dramatically improve our lives, enhance well-being, health, and relationships in everyday situations and a wide variety of environments, from schools to businesses to nursing homes. She's published hundreds of research articles and 13 books and has written extensively on the illusion of control, aging, stress, and decision-making. She's the recipient of 3 Distinguished Scientist Awards, the Stats Award for Unifying Psychology, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Liberty Science Genius Award. For many years, her students at Harvard have voted her one of the university's favorite professors. Dr. Langer, welcome to The Evolving Leader.

Hi, Scott. Thank you. That was a very nice introduction.

How are you feeling, Ellen? Welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm feeling just fine, eager to talk to the two of you.

So before we dive into your work in detail, um, maybe we can start with a broad narrative arc of your career and the significant milestones so that our listeners can build kind of a big picture of your journey?

Well, I've been doing this for so long that I don't know if I can remember each of the milestones, but relevant to my new book, The Mindful Body, there were several things that led to this, some positive, some negative. A large part of the book but certainly not all of it is about mind-body unity, which I'll discuss in a moment. And the book started off as a memoir. So I was recalling things that had you not— I was recalling things that actually helped me answer your question. I was married when I was very young. I was 19 going on 30 when I went to Paris for my honeymoon. And because I was now all grown up, after all, I was a married woman. When we went out to eat, I saw there was a mixed grill that I ordered. On the mixed grill was pancreas. And I asked my then-husband, who was more worldly than I, which of these is the pancreas? And he pointed to something. And I ate everything else with gusto. Now came the moment of truth. I had to eat the pancreas because after all, wouldn't every married woman do so? And I ate it. As I started to eat it, I was literally getting sick. And he starts laughing. And I said, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. Okay. So that was the very first instance of this mind-body unity. I have two pancreas stories, which is fun because most people don't even have one. The second one was my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas. And as you may know, that's the endgame. And then magically it was gone. And the medical world couldn't explain it. But the mind-body unity idea could explain it. And I think, as a side note, that spontaneous remissions are far more common than the medical world recognizes. So these things led to my believing there was something going on that the field of the world I didn't think was really capturing. And I had also early on done a study where we took elderly people, we gave them choices, simple decisions to make. So they were made mindful, and they lived longer. And so now, how could that happen? How could it be that this fuzzy thing called a thought could result in bodily changes? And that was what I was trying to discover. And what I thought was really— the field talked about mind-body as if these were two separate separate things. That's the way the medical world understood the word, what was going on. And to the medical world, the medical model decades ago believed that the only way you were going to get sick was the introduction of an antigen. So I'm sure they felt being happy is nice and being stressed is not good, but those were irrelevant to health. Then everything moved forward and people then started to talk about mind-body connection. You still have the problem, how are they connected? How do you get from the thought to something material? I said, this is ridiculous that there's so much evidence mounting. I had so much myself. Maybe we should be talking about mind-body unity, that this is one thing. And if we put them back together, then wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. Now, to actually answer your question, what was a milestone? When I got tenure, Harvard was willing to support my first study on mind-body unity. And this was a study that's called the Counterclockwise Study. I can say, John and Scott, this is a famous study. The reason I can say that in all immodesty is if you turn on The Simpsons Go to Havana, they actually discuss the study. But essentially, all we did was retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier. So it looked like you were stepping back in time and, you know, low budget, not a Hollywood setting. And we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So we put their mind back in time, essentially. They talked about the past in the present tense and watched movies and TV and had discussions all about the past, but as if it was just unfolding. And in a period of time less than a week, what we found was their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. All of this without any medical intervention. So that was the first test of mind-body unity. And then in the counterclockwise— and the, excuse me, the Mindful Body book, I talk about lots of the studies that we've done since that time.

Can we just ground everybody in a basic definition of mindfulness? Because a lot of people are confused about it. Perhaps they've tried something, you know, maybe a Headspace app or something like that.

But they're not convinced. John, I think that's— I mean, I've been working in this area for so long that the most basic thing I myself forgot, which is kind of mindless of me. All right. You know, and I'm called the mother of mindfulness because I've been studying this since the early '70s. And so somebody thought that mindfulness was just meditation and looked at me, you know, you're the mother of mindfulness? I said, yes, Buddha was my husband. I'm talking about mindfulness without meditation. And by the way, meditation isn't mindfulness. It's great, but it's not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you undergo in order to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as we study it, is more immediate. It's the simple— it's so simple that it's going to be hard for people to grasp all of the positive consequences that result from it. But it's simply noticing, noticing new things about the things you think you knew. And then you see, gee, you didn't know them as well as you thought, and your attention naturally goes to them. And that this act of noticing is the experience of engagement. So it feels good. And we also find that it's energy beginning. Now, one of the reasons that, or the main reason I think that we don't notice is because we think we know. And a way of understanding mindlessness is being frequently in error, but rarely in doubt. So now it's fun for me and I'm going to say to you, but whoever knows the answer first can take the question. How much is 1 1? Because this is the thing that we know the best.

Go on, Scott. You're the math expert, Scott. Go on.

Yeah.

Well, I was going to say 2, but I feel like I'm stepping into a trap.

Okay, of course. Yes. I mean, why would I ask the question, right? Very clever of you. But it turns— so this is the thing we know the best, that we're taught 1 plus 1 is 2, and then we don't pay any attention to anything, right? But if you're adding 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. One wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. So in the real world, it doesn't equal two as more often as it does. All right, now that you know that, just sort of imagine very, very, very likely as soon as we finish, somebody comes over to you and says, Scott, how much is one plus one? You're no longer going to say two that quickly. You're going to look at the context. And then you're going to answer more conditionally. You're gonna say it could be two. Right. And that's the way we should be approaching everything in the world with this understanding that everything can be seen in multiple ways. And you need to pay attention to see which way is the most appropriate for that context. And so the— all of our institutions, schools, parents, podcasts, you know, talk about things as an absolute terms. And when you know something absolutely, there's no reason to pay any attention to it. But everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So you can't know. And so anytime we think we know, we're actually being mindless. So I was at this horse event many years ago. And remember, as you introduced me, Scott, I'm Harvard, Yale all the way through. I mean, I was an A++ student. Okay. I'm at this horse event and this man asked me, can I watch his horse because he wants to get his horse a hot dog? Well, yeah, come on. I mean, horses don't eat meat. I know that. I must have gotten it right on some test at some point in my distant past. And, but I'm trying to be nice, even though I think this is ridiculous. He goes, gets the hot dog, he comes back and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I think I know could be wrong. And that was very exciting for me. While it might have worried somebody else, it was exciting for me because it meant all sorts of things are possible that people are oblivious to, that have just accepted that we can't. Let me give you another example of the mind-body unity and then come back to things not seeming— not being impossible any longer. For us to think about at least. So we did a very simple study where we're going to study fatigue. And we look at fatigue as context-dependent. Now, people believe, you know, the body is built to get exhausted, that's all there is to it. Okay. And the first one was just so simple. We asked people to do 100 jumping jacks and tell us when they're tired. They get tired around 70. We asked another group, do 200 jumping jacks, tell us when you get tired. Turns out they get tired at 140. And we have lots of these studies showing that, gee, you change the context and you're not tired. One that your audience, and at least I'm sure the two of you will love, was not a study of mine, but a study Frank Beach did, I think in the '50s, where he took a little boy rat and he introduces a little girl rat. And they copulate and then the little boy rat can't take it anymore, right? He's just exhausted, fatigued, and he needs time to— before he can come back. Okay, he needs a refractory period. However, when Frank Beach introduced another little girl rat, he was ready to go immediately. All right, now people, it's hard for people because we all get tired and it seems just nothing we can do about it. When I teach this in my health class, I ask people, how far is it literally possible to run, humanly possible? And they know, and just as Scott was hesitant to answer my how much is 1 1, they know I wouldn't ask the question if the answer were 26 miles because that's a marathon. We've seen people do it, right? So it becomes like an auction. Somebody says 28, 30, 35. They never get past 50. And the person who says 50, Elicits all sorts of groans from everybody. Oh God, really? Right? Then I play them a video of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Mexico who can run over 200 miles without stopping. Now just think about it. I can't run 3 miles, you know, but I know that it's humanly possible to run 26. Well, this suggests that, wow, we are so off base when we're trying to figure out what we're capable of. And that's what all of this book is about in so many ways, that most of what we want is just a thought away. If we can change our minds, we can change virtually everything because the mind and body are one. But another one of the mind-body unity studies is the next one in the series. I'm not going to go through all of them, but let me just tell you two more. Was a study with chambermaids. So what we did was first we asked chambermaids, how much exercise do you get? And they say they don't get very much exercise. And that's because they think exercise is what you do after work, and they're just too tired. Because the Surgeon General says that, because the Surgeon General is at a desk all day long. All right. So now what we do is we divide them into two groups. And very simply, we teach one of the two groups that their work is exercise. Mopping is like, you know, this exercise at the gym, making a bed like this other, so on. So now we have two groups. One is oblivious to the fact that their work is exercise. One believes their work is exercise. In a short time, we start taking another set of measures. And first thing we find is that the two groups are not differing in how much they're eating or how hard they're working. All that is different is the mindset. This work is exercise. As a result, we find they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure. Blood pressure came down. Remarkable. One of the other studies— we have many of them— is a study on wound healing. So what we did was inflict a wound. Now, I'm not going to hurt people, so it's a minor wound, but you can call it a wound nonetheless. And people are in front of a clock. And one condition, and unbeknownst to them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For another condition, the clock is going half as fast as real time. And the third condition, it's going real time. The question we're asking is, does that wound heal based on real time? Or is it influenced by clock time? And it turns out, it's clock time, perceived time. We don't need to get tired. And both this— excuse me— healing depends on our perceptions of how long it's going to take to heal. I was interrupting myself because one of these other studies is very quick. I'm clock crazy. So in this study, people are in a sleep lab, they wake up, the clock tells them they got 2 hours more, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they got. And again, biological and cognitive functions follow perceived amount of sleep.

I'd love to ask you a question here because what has constantly captivated me in reading the studies that you do is that they are, they're at the high end of counterintuitiveness. They really, every single time you read one of your studies and the counterclockwise study was one of the first that I came across when I was starting off in my career. You have this kind of moment of excitement about the fact that there's some mystery in life that is being revealed to you. So you've kind of given us a basic definition of what mindfulness is and this basic idea of paying attention, noticing, and how that informs a type of mindset, what you're paying attention to different information. And the chambermaid study is a great one. It's a reframe of work as exercise. When you start to notice that you're bending over, you're squatting, you're picking things up and so on, you start to reframe that as exercise. And you've brought to life loads of amazing evidence that shows that's what's happening. But what is primary? What's the primary thing that's actually happening that's translating that belief into a physiological change?

There is nothing going on that is of the sort that you're asking about. It's one thing. The mind and the body are one thing. This is what we're testing. Now, it doesn't mean there aren't things happening under the hood, so to speak, physiologically. However, they're not causal. And essentially, they're happening all at the same time. So I raise my hand, my brain is different. I have a thought, my brain is different. And that affects every organ in the body as one thing.

That's super helpful because I think everybody listening is searching for a different answer to that. And that's why I raised it.

Because we've been living with mind-body dualism for so long that, you know, it is how, you know, when I saw that horse eat the hot dog, it was the same thing for me. What? You know, how can that possibly be? He's not supposed to do that. But, you know, it's interesting because once I saw him eat the hot dog and I thought about it afterwards and I realized, wait a second, Most of what we know comes from science, and science can be trusted. But people don't realize science does not give us absolutes. So, you know, science can't do a study that says all horses don't eat meat. All right. Depends on how big the horse is, how hungry the horse is, how much meat is mixed with how much grain, a host of factors. All science tells us is that if we were to do the exact same study again, and it can never be exact, doing it in time, it's a different time, that we are likely to get the same findings. That probability is translated as absolutes. All right. So even with respect to serious diseases, when you're told, for example, you have cancer, we don't know that you have cancer. We know it's likely given these findings that we have. That you have cancer. When a doctor might tell you, which I think is just appalling— I have great respect for the medical community— but, you know, tells you you have only 6 months to live, they cannot know that. And what people need to understand is that even when you're given a probability, the probability is for a large number, not for the individual case. So let me make that clear, because prediction is actually an illusion. We are not able to predict. We can post it. We can look back and make everything look like it made sense. But let's say I say to you, we're going to have a wager, John. And here's a nice Mercedes dealership, 100 cars. And we'll pick one at random. You can pick any one you want. And if that car starts, when you turn that key, I will give you $1 million. If it doesn't start, you give me your pinky. Okay. Or you can either give me a million dollars or one of your fingers. All right. People are not going to take the bet because they know just sometimes things happen. Right. So we're never able to predict to the individual case. Now, when I teach this to my students, I tell them, look, I have taught a version of this course for 40 years. I have never missed a class. Never. What is the likelihood that I'll be here next week? So we go around the room. There are 12 students at the seminar, and these are Harvard kids, so they're not going to say 100%. They say silly things. 97%. I don't know how, you know, the next one says 99%. Essentially, they're all saying, I will be there, and they're sure of it. With. Now I say, okay, let's go around the room. And I want each of you to give me a good reason why I won't be here tomorrow, next week. The first person, oddly, invariably says, I've been there so long, I deserve the time off. The next person says, my dog has to go to the vet. The next person says, I got a flat tire. We get 12 really good reasons. And then I say to them, okay, now tell me, What is the likelihood I'll be here next week? And that 100% drops precipitously to 50%, realizing we don't know. Looking back, we can make a story. And so we think we know going forward. We have no idea. I mean, you know, if your listeners say, what am I going to say next? Will their computer signal go out? You just don't know. And not knowing is actually good. Because when you don't know, then you sit up and you pay attention. And when you're being mindful, mindfully noticing the things around you, aware of the implicit uncertainty in everything, the neurons are firing. And a host of experiments that we've done show that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. It feels good. That's the thing. So if the two of you came to visit me right now, I'm in my house in Provincetown, Mass. Beautiful here. You've never been here before. As soon as you get here, you don't have to practice being mindful. It's all new to you. You're going to notice. And it's going to be fun for you. All right. So we have the case where doing this, being mindful, is energizing. It feels good. It's good for your health. What happens on other studies that we've shown is that when you're mindful, people find you more attractive, more trustworthy, more authentic. It's good for your relationships. Then we have other studies where we have people performing their tasks either mindfully or mindlessly. These are orchestras, for example. And when they're mindful, the performance is better and people can hear the difference, see the difference. So it's a win-win-win.

So you start the book with an important insight that the research on risk misunderstands risk-taking. Can you talk us through the idea that it's an entirely subjective observer phenomenon and also how our social identity plays an essential role in our perception of risk?

Sure. I mean, everybody knows risk-taking is subjective because Some people take them and some don't. So, but that's not the important piece here, which is that in some very real way, I think we're all much more similar than most people believe that they are to their neighbors, their spouses, and what have you. And that if you saw what I saw, if you felt what I felt, You'd do what I did. So if I have my hand on a radiator and you have the hand on— you have your hand on the radiator and I lift my hand quickly, you seem stronger in some way. But if you felt what I felt, I think you'd lift your hand as well. All right. So essentially, and this is very important and it's part— help me remember to come back to it— something that's very important for our relationship. And for our relationships to be successful. So let's say I'm driving and you're sitting next to me and I'm driving that Mercedes I've started, okay? And I make a turn at 80 miles an hour. You go, wow, oh my God, you know, wow, am I a risk taker? Now what that means is that you would never do, your belief in your competence is such that you would never do what I just did. However, nobody takes an action that they don't think is going to be successful. They could be wrong in that belief. But when I take that turn at 80 miles an hour, it's because I believe I'm going to be able to make that turn at 80 miles an hour. Okay, not because I think, hey, who knows, maybe we'll get killed, maybe not, what the hell, I'll do it. Okay, now, It's very important if you think about it, if you wanted— because risk-taking is admired in many ways, maybe not the taking a turn at 80 miles an hour, but let's stay with that for a moment— that if you wanted to be able to have the guts, whatever it takes, the courage to make that turn at 80 miles an hour, you might think that what you need to do is go to some coach who's going to say, you can do it, you can do it, and so on. You're still not going to do it and be able to do it. What you need to do is be a better driver. So Mario Andretti, who is a race car driver, when he takes a turn at 80 miles an hour, he's not taking a risk. Right? If you asked me to dive into a small body of water from, you know, great height, I wouldn't do it because I can't dive. I would be scared, right? When Greg Louganis does it, the wonderful swimmer, he's not taking a risk. He knows how to dive. But if we had either Mario Andretti and Greg Louganis taking, risking money, you know, you pay $100,000 to take the psychology test and the win, if you get it right, is let's say $10 million. They're not going to do it. I'll do it. Because I know psychology. So you want to seem to be taking more risks, learn more about the thing you're afraid to do. So then you're not afraid to do it. The larger piece here that I was teasing you with, with its effect on relationships, is that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, Today I'm going to be bigoted, selfish, gullible. Okay. So when you see anybody doing anything where you're casting aspersions, and about yourself as well, when, oh God, how could I have been so stupid, lazy, you know, whatever. It's because we're observing the behavior and ignoring the sense the behavior makes to the person who's enacting it. Now, When you're mindless, you tend to only have one view of things. So it doesn't occur to you that actors and observers are seeing very different worlds, right? I'm observing, I see the two of you now, you see me. It's different, right? Okay, so let's say I want to be, you call me gullible. And I am. I mean, it's amazing. It's almost embarrassing how gullible I am. All right. And so when I look at myself after you talking to me about how could I have done this or that, then I say, yeah, I'm not going to be gullible anymore. And I may change very briefly, but I'm always going to become gullible again. Because from my perspective, I'm not being gullible. From my perspective, I'm being trusting. All right. So if you want me to stop being gullible, what you need to do is get me to stop valuing being trusting. Now, Scott, you are so inconsistent that you get on my nerves. It's terrible. Okay. But from your perspective, you're being flexible. And John, you're so boring. But that's because from your perspective, what you're being stable, consistent, somebody we can count on. So it turns out for each and every negative way of describing yourself or somebody else, there's an equally strong but oppositely balanced alternative. For every negative, there's a positive way of viewing it. And so, you know, we did a study forever ago where we gave people like 300 of these behavior descriptions. And we said, circle those things you keep trying to change about yourself. And you're not successful doing so. And so if it were I, I'd circle impulsive, gullible, and I won't tell you the others. Okay, then you turn over the piece of paper. And there's the positive version of each of these. And now we tell people, circle those things you really value about yourself, my spontaneity and my being trusting. Right? So as long as I value, again, being trusting. I'm going to, at least at times, seem gullible. So it's wonderful for a relationship to simply recognize that the person you care about is not doing this thing to get at you, is not doing it because of some failing on their part, that it makes sense, and that your mindless view is preventing you from seeing the sense that it makes.

In the kind of polarizing world that we are in at the moment, this idea of the research that you have done into perspective taking and how we can benefit from empathy, I think that's incredibly useful. Can we talk a little bit more about what you've learned about perspective taking and how to increase it?

Well, this is all— I mean, mindfulness is all about perspective taking. You know, that people believe that the way they see things is the way they should be seen, oblivious to the fact that from a different perspective, it makes, you know, I mean, just imagine what we've already said, that a kid in a class when asked how much is 1 and 1 says 1. And what are most teachers going to do? They're going to correct the child. They're going, the child's going to end up feeling stupid. The kids will laugh at the child when a more mindful approach would have been for the teacher to say, how did you come to that, Scott? And then Scott says, you know, you take one wad of chewing gum and one wad of chewing gum and it's one and everybody learns something. And, you know, so if you just say very simply that there's a sense that this must make And you can either come up with it as, let's say, trusting and gullible, or you can just assume that there's something that is driving this that's reasonable. So you don't look down on the person.

It seems that it takes more calories to do that, right? So, you know, you mentioned earlier that our brains would rather be certain, right? So we feel certain. It's easier to sort of just say, this is the way it is.

Yeah. But what we're doing— it's so funny, Scott, because to We want certainty because we think then we'll have more control over things. But since things are changing, when you're holding it still, you're deluding yourself. You know, the mindset is holding it still, but all the while the world around you is changing. And so you're giving up the control you actually could have. So, yeah, now when people want certainty, it's because largely because they think it's available. And, you know, so we have a world of people who are constantly pretending they know because they think you're supposed to know. And so they don't have the meaningful conversations that they might otherwise have and so on. So I'm here to free everybody and to get people, instead of making a personal attribution for not knowing, I don't know, but you may know. So therefore I have to hide to recognize nobody knows. And it also makes you very powerful because when you're face to face with one of these people who knows, now you know they don't know and you can embarrass the person by poking them at the edges with questions and what have you. But in either case, not knowing is good. And what we need to do is exploit the power and uncertainty. When we don't know, we sit up and we pay attention. And then we're able to take advantage of benefits to which we'd otherwise be blind and avert the danger not yet arisen. And again, doing this is the essence of when you're having fun, you know, that you don't have fun mindlessly, right? When you're mindless, you're not there. Now, the problem is, and you can't, people can't listen to me and then say, oh, I'm going to be more mindful. And just leave it at that, because— and think that, you know, you should be in the moment. It's a sweet but empty suggestion. Because when you're not in the moment, you're not there to know you're not there. So you can't easily correct it. But 45 years of research has shown me that virtually all of us are not there almost all the time.

So you've done a lot of work on how we can get better at noticing these unconscious assumptions that shape our life, and particularly in the context of aging. And I'd love to hear more about some of those, those studies and insights you've gained from them.

Yeah, well, it was many years ago that I recognized this strange thing, and I took offense to that, that when you're young, you're developing. And then all of a sudden, you know, it turns around and you're aging, and aging means something negative. And so lots of my work has been aimed at finding growth in late adulthood. And, you know, there are changes, but many of the changes have nothing to do with necessity, rather by choice. You know, let's say you're a young up-and-coming in business and you think it's good for you to learn everybody's name. And, you know, so you make sure you know everybody's name. Then you get to a certain point with, frankly, who cares, right? If you're going to meet the person again, you'll have another option. So if you don't know somebody's name, it's not necessarily because you forgot it. Oftentimes we think we've forgotten things that we didn't learn in the first place because our values have changed. There's some very easy to understand things that happen because of our beliefs that getting old, we fall apart. Let's say, John, you hurt your wrist and, you know, you don't expect your wrist to hurt. You're too young for that. So you do something to make it better. At my age, I hurt my wrist and I say, well, what do you expect? As you get older, you start to fall apart. So I don't do anything to make it better. And so, you know, a month out, the difference between us has nothing to do with age. And it has to do with you believing you could heal yourself and, you know, taking the steps and my just accepting it. So there's lots to be said about aging. I think that the original Counterclockwise study made clear that things like our vision and hearing, which we assume are just going to get worse and worse, doesn't have to be that way. And I think that people now trying to find ways to add more years to their lives. And what I'm fond of saying is I think they're better off adding more life to their years. And as a consequence, they'll probably end up living longer. But you want to extend the useful part of your years.

I'm interested in understanding how you've applied it to yourself as well, because you obviously show up with a huge amount of energy and focus and presence. In every— I've watched loads of videos and you're always the same.

Yeah, thank you. Or not. I don't know if saying it's good or bad. But yeah, I don't really have a sense of myself at my age. In fact, my spouse said to me, I was helping this woman and it was clear I was helping her because I thought she was old. And then it was said to me later, you know, She's probably 10 years younger than I am. So I just, I don't see myself as any particular year. The only time I become aware of it is because of technology. And when you're supposed to put in your birthday and you go down from 2020, well, I go, my God. And, you know, I don't know why somebody can't do it by decade. So you don't have to feel quite so ancient. But people are living much longer these days. So, you know, perhaps at some point I'd be mid-middle-aged now.

Yeah, that really resonates, that whole scrolling thing down. That really resonates.

So one of the things that I think people would prosper from hearing about is about stress Because stress, I think, is the major killer. That, you know, if you took people who were diagnosed with any disease and let's say, and you were able to measure how stressed they were repeatedly, that I believe— I don't have data for this, but I believe that stress level would predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, nutrition, and even treatment. And what people need to understand is that stress is psychological. Stress is a function of your thoughts. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event. So if you open it up and look at it more mindfully, you have many more choices and life just becomes better, easier, and you end up looking younger or whatever. But that if you said to yourself, realize rather that stress requires two things. One, it requires a belief that something is going to happen. Now, as I said a moment before, we can't predict, okay, what's going to happen. Second, so if you're stressed believing something's going to happen and you just ask yourself, give yourself 3 reasons, 5 reasons why it won't happen, I think you immediately feel better. But now let's assume it does happen. How is that actually a good thing? And so when you do this, you end up in a place where it can happen or not happen. It's fine. I'm fine either way. We go out. I don't keep using the same example, which is probably mindless of me. But let me use it. This will be the last time that let's say we go out for dinner and the food is wonderful. Great. It's a win. Now we go out for dinner and the food is awful. For me, it's still a win. That means I'll eat less and that'll be better for my waistline. I'll pay more attention to what you're saying rather than, you know, only attend to the food and so on. So the way you feel is going to be a function of the way you understand the world. And if you take a single-minded view and that view is negative, obviously you're going to be in trouble. I have a one-liner that that some of my friends have put on there, written down and put on their refrigerators to remind them, which is, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Almost always, the things that we're stressed about are simply inconveniences. And when you realize that, then you take a deep breath and, you know, you can get back to yourself. If you looked at the things that you were stressed about in the past, you'd recognize that almost all of them never happened. Again, helping you go forward. So now one of the biggest stressors for people are making decisions. And my view of decision-making is again radically different from what most people assume, decision theorists in particular. That, you know, so you're worried about making the right decision. But you can't know what the right decision is because we've already said prediction is an illusion. Not only that, I just told you that things in themselves are neither good nor bad. It's the way you understand them. So how do you do a cost-benefit analysis when every cost is a benefit, every benefit is a cost? It's not going to tell you what to do. And so my suggestion is Don't worry about making the right decision. Simply make the decision right. So I had my students, I said, okay, I want you to spend the week in between classes until you come back next week and don't make any decision. Use whatever simple rule you want, the first alternative that occurs to you or flip a coin, but have some decision, a way you're going to decide independent of what you're actually deciding. Okay, so just don't make decisions. They spend a week like this and they come back in the following week and, you know, they said it was stress-free and wonderful. And so I think that people in general are doing the right thing. People are not really doing cost-benefit analyses. Sometimes they gather information just so when someone says, how could you have been so stupid to do that? Then you can come back with, well, because of A, B, and C information you've gathered. So people are probably doing the right thing already, but thinking that they're doing the wrong thing and they're stressed. You know, let's say, should somebody have a baby? How can you decide if you should have a baby? You have no idea what your life is going to be like if you have a baby. You have no idea what your life is going to be like if you don't have a baby. And that's why it turns out that people who don't have children are happy. People who have children are happy. People who have children are miserable. Other people, people don't have— it's if you can't know, you can't decide. And but you can always make whatever you're faced with work.

Friends, if you're enjoying The Evolving Leader, I encourage you to order a copy copy of John's new book, Leading in a Nonlinear World, which provides a new understanding of mindset and how to build it in order to thrive in a more uncertain future. It's available online at all major retailers, and there's a link in the show notes. I'd like to come back to what you said about, you know, when you're not there, you don't know you're not there, right? Because which is the problem of awareness, right? So your Talking about all these incredible— we could spend an hour on each of the things you've talked about already. In your research, did you find differences in the way people are mindless? So for example, I work with individuals and leaders, and sometimes I find people are a bit mindless in the present because they're really stuck in the past, or they're mindless in the present because they're worried about the future. How did, how did your research depict the different ways people might be mindless, and how if they're not there to know that this is the way they've distracted themselves and the way that they're being mindless, how do they develop that level of awareness?

Yeah, that's a very good question. Well, first, no, I didn't differentiate how you ended up mindless. But it's a function, you know, how do we— why did you think 1 and 1 is 2? Because that's what you were taught. And, you know, and it could have been you're older and you're reading in the newspaper or you're listening to a lecture or, you know, whatever. And that's where you get the misinformation, the belief that this thing that sometimes isn't all the time. All right. But how do you fix something when you don't know you're doing it in the first place? It's a wonderful question. I wrote a book called On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity. It's got my art in it, but it's not really about art. It's about interpersonal mindfulness. And the way I suggest there to do it One way is to throw yourself into some new activity. So for me, it was painting. It could be photography, poetry, you know, whatever it is, but it has to be new. So you have the experience of, oh, wow. All right. And then as soon as that feeling changes, so let's say John calls you, Scott, you know, you're happy clam. And all of a sudden, because you're there, you can experience, hey, wait a second, it's fleeting. Then you know, and either don't answer the phone phone or change the relationship or what have you. I think that once people recognize that everything is changing, and often, you know, so if you just actively notice 5 new things about people at work, person you live with at home, how effective this or that thing is that you're doing. You know, when I started painting, before I started painting, I thought, Trees are green. All right, in the fall, there are many colors, but they're green. And then I'm painting because now I say, oh my God, there are so many greens. You know, what should I do? And I'm looking and there are hundreds of different greens. And all of those greens change depending on where the sun is, you know, and so on. All right. So we went from a single thing to many things, right? Looking at the same stimulus, so to speak. And you do that often enough and you just, it just becomes very natural. When you realize that you're not going to get punished for not knowing and then not knowing comes with so many rewards, it will be self-sustaining. But one thing that people can do immediately is as soon as they feel them, hear themselves being judgmental and evaluative, of putting themselves or somebody else down to recognize that they're being mindless. All right. And so then that goes a long way because so many people are judgmental of themselves or others almost all the time. Another thing that one can do is that as soon as you're stressed, you know, you go through what I've just said a moment before and ask yourself, how else might you understand the situation if you were mindful? You're noticing not everybody exposed to these circumstances are going to be stressed. Well, what are they doing? What might you do? How might you open up your view of the situation and see how it might actually be an advantage and how it probably won't even happen anyway? And then you have people who are mindless with respect to their own healing. And so, so much of my work is devoted to making us healthier. You know, if you're happier, you're going to be healthier, but we can do things about our health immediately. So we have a mindless notion that if you have some chronic illness, you're going to stay the same or get worse. And nothing stays the same. And it never moves in only one direction. So we have this treatment for chronic illnesses. It's also good for stress. It's also good for other aspects of relationships. It would be clear maybe in a moment, which I call attention to symptom variability. That's a mouthful. It's just really being mindful. Being mindful, you're noticing change. So what we did here across lots of diseases we would call people periodically and say, how are you? Is the symptom better or worse than before? And why? Okay. And we do this throughout the week, a few weeks, depending on what the disorder is. Now, that leads to 3 things. The first is that you notice, gee, you're not always as bad as you thought you were, and as much pain, for example. So you feel a little better. Second, by asking yourself, why now? Why now is a little better? Or a little worse, you're engaged in a mindful search. And we've already said that itself is good for your health. And finally, I believe if you're looking for a solution, you're more likely to find one. And that's when people are, you know, are just so mindless, Scott. The doctors give them these probabilities, diagnoses. They assume it's going to play out the way it sometimes plays out. They give up and We find that it doesn't have to be that way. That we've done this with people who have multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, stroke, Parkinson's—biggies, you know—and in each case, we're able to get rid of the symptoms. And you can do this for yourself. And it all started, I was looking for a replacement—not a replacement, but oh, a way to give yourself a placebo. You just think everybody believes that placebos do the work they do. It's because of the mind-body unity. How could it be that you take this nothing and all of a sudden you're better if a doctor gives it to you? And I thought, why do we have to go through that charade? Because placebos have been shown to be effective across almost all diseases. Okay. At least 27%, presumably, of the people who have it are able to get better with a nothing. So if the sugar pill isn't making you better, what's making you better? You're doing it yourself. And so a lot of my life's work has been to find how to get people to be able to do this more directly. So that led to these attention to symptom variability studies. And most people have smartphones. And so you set the phone to ring in 2 hours and it rings and you ask yourself, how is it now? Is it better or worse than before and why? And then set it to ring an hour and 10 minutes later and just keep doing this various times through the day, the week, you know, and so on. And what happens here by asking yourself, why is it better? You feel better because you're doing this mindful search. By going through this procedure, you feel better because you're taking some control over your health, rather than just waiting, you know, for to hear something from the medical world.

How can we, how can leaders build more mindful organizations? Yeah, okay.

So let me tell you about the orchestra study, because it had a surprise finding that I thought was relevant to leadership that I didn't realize until I wrote the paper up. So here we take many orchestras and we're going to have them be mindful or mindless. When they're mindless— and they're all going to play the same music and we're going to tape the performance. So when they're mindless, they're told, remember a time you played this piece and you were really happy with it and just replicate it as well as you could. The mindful musicians were told, make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know. And they're playing classical music, not jazz. So you can be sure the changes are subtle. All right. We record it. We play it for people. They overwhelmingly prefer the mindfully played piece and the musicians prefer playing it that way. So now I'm writing it up and I realize, wait a second, here we have enhanced group performance with everybody doing their own thing. All right. And that was because they were all taking their cues in some sense from the same ongoing situation. And so that led me to think that the major job of the leader is to increase the mindfulness of those being led. And rather than— and also that, again, since everything is always changing, the leader needs to know that he or she doesn't know. And when you know you don't know, then you pay a different kind of attention to other people who might know. You know, I'm fond of also saying, telling this little story. I was lecturing in South Africa and I took an afternoon off and I'm down in this fancy hotel at the pool and just resting, reading, whatever. And I noticed there was a massive amount of real estate that was not being used. It was clearly part of the hotel and it was not being used. And the only person who would know it was that lowly cabana boy because he was the only one down there. And so if we recognize when we know that we don't know, it would be nice if we also knew in some ways that everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. And when you see that everybody knows something else, everybody becomes more valuable, right? And so if we mix and match many of the things that I've said, that you have your leader who's putting down John, right? John, he's just not doing what you want him to do. And if you said to yourself, his behavior must make sense from his perspective or else he wouldn't do it. And you figure out why he might be doing it. You feel better about him. He can feel that. You're looking at him differently. Your relationship improves. He's going to be working harder, enjoying it more. And that's another thing, you know, there are people, I don't know, you know, somebody had said I must be from Mars. We have people saying seek work-life balance. No, again, you know, it's always, we're able to move things from bad to better. But there's always in my mind, this even better place that we don't seem to want to get to. And that work-life balance is certainly better than work-life imbalance. But I think we should seek work-life integration. Be the same person you are wherever you are and don't be afraid to be that person. And so when I teach this, I, you know, People think their work has to be hard, has to be stressful. Nothing is necessarily stressful. It shouldn't be stressful. There are ways, I know it personally, of living your life mostly without any stress at all. And so people think that there's a big difference between work and play. And I think that we should make everything playful. If you're going to show up to do it, if you're going to do it, you should show up for it. So there's this wonderful video. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Piano Stairs. And these people, I think in Scandinavia, in subways all over the world, apparently there's an escalator and stairs. And invariably, except for the young boy, you know, who's running up the stairs because he's on his way from the gym or whatever, everybody is on the escalator. Then what these clever people did was lay down piano keys on the stairs. So as you go up, doo doo doo, you know, and it makes, it's great fun. And in almost no time, everybody leaves the escalator and everybody, no matter age, gender, is taking the stairs. And what I say to my students is, that's wonderful, but why wait for somebody to put these keys on the stairs? You know, I doo doo doo all the way anyway. You know, There's a way to make whatever you're doing interesting, at least. And many of those things become fun. You know, so a surgeon, I don't think, you know, needs to be laughing while he or she is performing surgery, but maybe so. But at least make it interesting, because if it's not interesting, you're not going to be there. And if you're not going to be there for it, there are going to be errors. And depending on which group you're talking to, Scott, you know, to improve their leadership ability, some of those errors can be very costly. What else should we be asking you?

And I don't know if you have to— if you have a hard stop right now, if there's anything you didn't—

No, no, I don't have a hard stop. Let me, let me just say, you know, there's lots more in this book. I have a goal, you know, I keep writing these books, you know, why should I be the only person who's happy, healthy, you know? Virtually stress-free. I keep trying to share it. And the way to get there, I just think, is fun and easy. So there should be no— there's no downside for people to at least try the things I talk about in the book. But something occurred to me that when I was saying to you that the world knows that, as I said before, imbalance is not as good as balance, work-life imbalance. But okay, we have this with almost everything. So one of the things that I found kind of fun— I like language, and so I'm very sensitive to things. And we have some studies on trying. So trying is certainly better than thinking you can't do it and giving up in the first place. But trying is not really as positive as people think. It has built into it an expectation for failure. You wouldn't try to have an ice cream cone. You just have it, right? Hope. Hope also has built into it an expectation for failure. You don't go down to me when I go to the kitchen in the morning. I'm not hoping I'm going to have a cup of coffee. I assume I'm going to have a cup of coffee. All right. The funniest one of these, I think, and maybe we can end it after this, was about forgiveness. So I was asked many years ago to give a sermon at Harvard. Well, I'm not religious. And not only that, but I'm Jewish. But I say yes a lot. And so I'm going to give this sermon and I don't— what am I going to talk about? So I can't think of a topic. I say forgiveness. That sounds sort of religious. See, I could get away with it. And I start thinking about forgiveness and like, oh my gosh, they've got everything wrong. Okay, so here, John, if you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to say?

Probably say it's good.

Okay, Scott, if you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to say? Probably bad. It's bad. But you know, you can't forgive unless you first blame. So that's interesting. Our forgivers are our blamers. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? When you blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame, have an opportunity to forgive. And I think it's hardly divine. Now, of course, forgiving is better than staying in that negative place and not forgiving the person. But there's a much, much better way to be in this world, which goes back to understanding that that person who you're blaming, their behavior made sense from their perspective, or else they wouldn't have done it. So that mindful understanding replaces the need for blame. And when you don't have blame, then you have no need for forgiveness. I mean, I think the very last thing I would say is that the amount of control we have over our health and well-being is enormous. And most people, um, you know, have no idea that if they want to be someone different, if they want their bodies, their minds, their happiness, their day-to-day experience to be different, really all you need to do is change your mind.

Ellen Langer, thank you so much for joining us. I, I could honestly listen to you for hours, and this was, um, the conversation I needed to have today. So we really appreciate you being here.

Oh, that was great. It was fun for me as well. Thank you so much.

Stay well. And folks, get, get your copy of The Mindful Body. We'll put a link in the show notes. Get, get your copy of Mindfulness Counterclockwise, On Becoming an Artist. Get all the books. Get them all because you're going to enjoy every minute of it. And we barely scratched the surface today. And next— until next time, remember, the world is evolving. Are you? So after 5 years of The Evolving Leader, I guess you could say our show is evolving.

Yeah, it's time to move forward after hundreds of shows with thousands of insights and some quite emotional. It's time to do something new, bring this chapter of The Evolving Leader to a close.

Yeah, this is very exciting. We've been talking about this for months now and I can't believe we're here.

Yeah, we want to do something in direct response to the changes in the world.

Yeah, which are significant, from AI to climate change and a whole host of new social and political and economic realities, all of which are setting the context for this new show.

So welcome to The Mindset Economy. Yeah, we'll look at how to thrive in a world where machines can think.