The Mindful Body – Ellen Langer

Welcome to a special conversation on the Retirement Wisdom Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Casey. Can changing our thoughts change our health? That's the focus of the new book by legendary psychologist Ellen J. Langer. The book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And the research in this book makes a compelling case that indeed our thoughts and our perspectives can profoundly influence our well-being. So if you know someone who's growing older, or perhaps you're even growing older yourself, this is definitely a book you'll want to read. Ellen Langer is the author of 11 books, including the international bestseller Mindfulness. 15 languages and over 200 research articles referenced it. She is the recipient of, among other numerous awards and honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association, the Award for Distinguished Contributions of Basic Science to the Application of Psychology from the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, and the Adult Development and Aging Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association. Her trailblazing experiments in social psychology have earned her inclusion in the New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas issue and will soon be the subject of a major motion picture. A member of the psychology department at Harvard University and a painter, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1981, she became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. Another one of her books, Counter-Clockwise, published in 2009, answered key questions about aging based on her extensive research and expanded our awareness of what's possible.

Professor Langer, thank you so much for joining us. Very excited to have this conversation with you today.

Thank you for having me, Joe.

So let's start with a definition. How do you define mindfulness?

Yeah, it's interesting because people think they know what mindfulness is. What it is, but we have a very specific understanding. It's when you're actively noticing new things. Now, the interesting thing is that people think they're noticing new things all of the time. What our research has found is that virtually all of us, almost all the time, are mindless. But when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And lots of people say, be in the present, which is very sweet, except it's an empty instruction because You think you are there, so why would you do anything different? The way to be there is you simply notice. When you notice things about things you thought you knew, you come to see, gee, you didn't know them as well as you thought you did. Then your attention naturally goes to them. And so when you're doing this act of noticing, the neurons are firing, and our research makes clear that that's both literally and figuratively enlivening. There's another way to become mindful. And for some people, that may be easier, for others more difficult. Once you recognize that you just don't know, none of it's okay for you not to know, because I don't know. Nobody knows. Everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And so we tend to hold things still, and that way we think we know it. So if you knew you didn't know, you'd tune in, right? And so what happens is the culture, schools, Textbooks, speakers tell us absolutes, and nothing is absolutely true. So I'll do Joe as well. I'll show people this. How much is 1 1?

That I can handle. 2.

Right. Now, this is the one thing that everybody's sure of, but it turns out 1 1 is not always 2. If you're adding 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 1 is 1. If you add 1 pile of laundry to 1 pile of laundry, 1 1 is 1. 1 wad of chewing gum plus 1 wad of chewing gum. In the real world, it turns out 1 1 doesn't equal 2 as or more often as it does. So what would happen then, right after we finish today, and you're with somebody and for some bizarre reason they say, "Hey, Joe, how much is 1 1?" You'd pause for a moment and you'd pay attention to the context, and then you'd answer, "It could be 2," which is a very different thing. You know, you're taking notice because you realize You can't be sure because, again, everything is changing. Another thing I'm fond of telling people, many years ago, I was at this horse event and this man asked me if I could watch his horse because he was gonna go get his— I'm Yale, Harvard all the way through. I know for sure horses don't eat meat. And it was wonderful. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that made me question everything I thought I knew. But for me, that was exciting because that meant all the things that believe can't be now came into question for me. And that's what my research has been about, essentially questioning the things that other people take for granted, especially but not exclusively about our health.

So how did you first notice the mind and body are integrated?

Well, something happened when I was very young. First of all, this book, The Mindful Body, started as a memoir. So I have lots of personal stories, for better or worse. And here's one that I do put in the book. I was married when I was 19. Could you imagine? But I was 19 going on 40, and we went to Paris for our honeymoon. And while in Paris, we went to this restaurant and I ordered a mixed grill for dinner. And on the mixed grill was pancreas. Well, now I had to prove to myself, to him, to the world I was a woman of this world. I was now sophisticated. After all, I was a married woman. I'd be able to eat that pancreas. So I asked him, which thing on the plate was the pancreas. He pointed to something. I'm a big eater. I eat everything else with gusto. Now came the moment of truth. Could I eat it? I start eating it and I literally get sick to my stomach. While I'm feeling ill, he starts laughing. I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago. All right, so I had talked myself into being sick. I have another pancreas story, which is kind of fun. Well, it's not fun, but it's fun only because it's pancreas. How many people have one pancreas story? I have two. Well, my mother had a bout with breast cancer, and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. That, as most people realize, is the endgame. And then magically, it was medical science can't explain this. The view that I had come to about mind-body unity could explain it. Indeed, just as a sidebar, I think that spontaneous remissions are far more common than the medical world knows. And you can imagine how difficult it is to study that if the medical world says you've got 6 months to live and you decide to go home, eat a lot of candy and be with your family, whatever, for the last days, and then magically you're better, you don't think first, let me call my doctor and tell him he was wrong. And so there are all those unreported recoveries at any rate. So the idea of this mind-body unity is that mind and body are just words. And if we put them back together and treat the person as one whole thing, then wherever you're putting your mind, you're necessarily putting your body and vice versa. So we did a series of studies where we put the mind in unusual places and then take the measurements from the body. The first one of these was the Counterclockwise Study. I refer to this as a famous study, which I'm allowed to, because if you tune into The Simpsons Go to Havana, they describe the study. So, you know, you've made it in this world at that point. At any rate, let me just tell you briefly, because there's so many new ones that people haven't heard about. I'm not going to tell all of it because you can read them in the book, but just to whet people's appetite. So in the Counterclockwise Study, what we did was retrofitted a retreat to make it look like 20 years earlier. Then we had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So for example, they would be speaking of the past events as if they were just unfolding now. As a result of this, in just a week without any medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they looked noticeably younger. That was very exciting. Then we go fast forward many years later, And we do a study with chambermaids. Well, it turns out chambermaids, these are women who are exercising all day long, but they think exercise is what the Surgeon General says it is, which is what you do afterward. And they don't do anything afterward because they're just too tired. Okay. So what we do is we divide them simply into two groups, and we're going to teach one group that in fact their work is exercise. Working, you know, making the bed is like working on this machine at the gym and so on. Okay, so we have two groups. The only difference is one now has changed their mind and they think their work is exercise. We take lots of measures. They're not working any harder. They're not eating any differently. It's just the change of mind. What we found was there was a significant loss of weight, a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Now, there are many, many of these studies. Let me just skip to the most recent, which is fun. So what we did was inflict a wound. It would have been very nice to make this dramatic, a big gushing, but of course I didn't want to do that. And even if I were sadistic and wanted to, the powers that be wouldn't allow it. But it's a wound nevertheless. And the people who we've given this wound to are in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is rigged and it's going twice as fast as real time. Time is rushing by. For a third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. And for a third of the people, it's real time. So the question we're asking is simple: does that wound heal based on clock time, perceived time, or what we call real time? And the answer was perceived time. And we have many, many of these sorts of studies. We even have studies on fatigue. Now, people think that after you do whatever you're doing for a certain period of time, you're just going to break down. And it turns out, not always. That fatigue in some sense is a psychological construct. So just imagine the simplest version of this would be, we ask people to do 100 jumping jacks and tell us when they're tired. They get tired at around 60, 60 or 70. Now we ask another group, do 200 jumping jacks and tell us when you're tired. And they get tired at about 120. So they're doing the same thing, but they believe that in one case you're two-thirds of the way. It's always when you're around two-thirds of the way through the exercise that you start to feel the pain. There was a wonderful study that Frank Beach did. I think it was in the '50s. He took a little boy rat and a little girl rat and they would copulate. Then the little boy rat says, I have had enough. He needs a refractory period. Okay, good. And it'll take some time until he is ready to go. However, if immediately you introduce another little girl rat, he can go at it right away. Right. So the point is, if you change the context, we get renewed energy. And we can always change the context because contexts are in our head, not in the environment. So there you go.

I read your book on the counterclockwise study and started to put pictures of the year my wife and I were married, 1980, and then two baseballs from my first year following baseball, 1967, Impossible Dream Red Sox. And my wife said, "Oh, that makes sense." Explain the study. "That's why you act like a 10-year-old." But just wondering your advice on how can people use the findings of the Counterclockwise study.

Well, I think that all of these mind-body studies, you know, you can't read the clock. I mean, you know what time you're setting it for. You can't give yourself a placebo. And I think placebos are our strongest medicine. And everybody knows that the doctor gives you this pill, the pill is inert, it's a sugar pill, and It's a nothing pill, but you believe it's real medication, and then you heal. So it's clearly not the pill. You're doing it yourself. So the question is, how can we do it ourselves? And I'll tell you that in a moment. But just so people understand that all of the mind-body studies, the ones I described and alluded to, they are to say, gee, we can control our weight without exercise. We can control our blood sugar level. I didn't tell you, in another study, we have diabetics come in, they're going to play computer games. And that was the first time we used the rigged clock, and their blood sugar level followed clock time rather than real time. Right. So once you know you can do something, people organize themselves in very different ways. Okay, so I have many studies on what I call attention to symptom variability. And that's just a fancy way of saying mindfulness. So mindfulness is you're noticing change. Okay? So when you're given a diagnosis, some dread disorder, chronic illness, what that tends to mean to people is that it's never going to go away. And if it changes, it's only going to go from bad to worse. Well, nothing moves in only one direction. There are always little blips where things are a little better, a little worse. And so what we did in the first round of these, we would call people with big illnesses, and I'll tell you which in a moment. And we'd ask, how are you now? And is that symptom better or worse than before? And why? Well, 3 things happen when you do that. First, since you thought you were always suffering, let's say in pain, for example, and now you see, yeah, aren't you sometimes, I'm not in as much pain. So you immediately feel a little better. Second, by looking for why now is it a little better, that sets you off on a mindful search. And as I said before, that mindfulness, that active noticing, is good for your health. You know, in the earliest studies, we may have gave old people these opportunities to be mindful and they live longer. So the effects are quite real. And third is that I think you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for a solution. So now we took people who had multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, stroke, depression, stress, chronic pain, and ran them through this little treatment. So you might be saying to yourself, yeah, but you asked me, how can people do this for themselves? Okay. Because here we were calling people. Most of us have a smartphone, and if not, you just need a smart friend who can do it. But let's say a smartphone. And you set your smartphone to ring in an hour. And when it rings, you ask yourself, well, how do I feel now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? All right? And then you set it for an hour and 40 minutes, and you do this throughout the day, throughout the week. It's not always easy, by the way, to figure out why, but sometimes it is. I mean, Joe, let's say you suffered stress so much so that you thought you were stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. And so now what we're going to do is you're going to do this, attend to the variability by asking yourself different moments, how am I now? Am I more or less stressed than before and why? And then you might find out that you're maximally stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Well, if that were the case, you could see how easy it is to solve the problem. Just stop talking to me. All right, so you have two things operating at the same time. One is you're helping your health by this active noticing, and two, you may very well find a solution. And we had significant improvements across all of those disorders. So I think this holds a lot of promise for us.

So in your new book, The Mindful Body, you write of the opposing mindsets of seeing the world through the lens of scarcity or plenty. How can people shift their mindset?

Yeah. This occurred to me, and I tell the story there. I had somebody who at the time was very close to me. And I get all excited. You describe yourself or your wife describes you as a 10-year-old. I'm right there with you. And so I come home and say, "I got these sneakers on sale," or a cantaloupe, whatever it is, all excited. And she always reacted you know, like there was something wrong with me. Like, how could I be so selfish? And I didn't understand it at first because for me, I was sharing. I got these sneakers on sale. You want sneakers? Let me tell you where to go. Right? She had a view of things being scarce, which meant that now there were fewer sneakers for anyone in the world to get. And so while I thought I was sharing, she thought I was bragging. And it's very important to understand that everybody's behavior makes sense to them, or else they wouldn't do it. And so when you find yourself not understanding, you have to sometimes do a little work. Say, what sense could this make? Now, how do you deal with somebody who believes things are scarce? You could explore the ways that they're not scarce. You know, in that instance there, I mean, it would've been silly, but we could've called around to lots of stores and shown that I don't know how many people want these. Probably they're on sale because people didn't want them. So chances are it's not going to be scarce. But even when we talk about other sorts of resources as being scarce, you have to stop and say, well, who calls it a resource? That we tend to think we need many more things than we actually need. And when you recognize that most of the interactions we're having with people where we're dealing with life as if it's zero-sum. There's one winner, there's one loser. Then you want to sit back and say, well, how can we both win? And I think that it's typically much easier than most people assume. I think that we're trained to be mindless. And, you know, you might ask me, well, why? And I don't really know, but my best guess is— I'm not going to let you say, maybe you wouldn't ask me, but I'm putting those words in your mouth— why is it that The default is mindless. And I think it's largely because what it does is maintain the status quo. The people on top know they know nothing more or less, they know better or worse than anybody else. But if they can lead us to believe that they have all this information, that they deserve their position, then we stay essentially where we are. And I take apart schools, for instance. Now, as you might imagine, for better or worse, and the horses don't eat meat example says that there are times it's for— I was a straight-A student. Okay, so now you have the D students, the students who fail, and the students who get Ds, and they don't feel good about themselves. And it's not surprising to me when they strike back, you know, and some of them strike back and become killers and so on. The B and C students, who wants to be average? But now when you go to the A, students are no happier because you don't know why you got the A. You can't be sure you're going to get another one. Now everybody expects this of you. The whole idea of grading us ignores the fact that the criteria which we're being measured is up for grabs, that it can be reordered based on multiple factors. I don't know if that's going to be clear to people. But I tell this story in the book about this man who's a lovely man, but he's uneducated. He thinks very little of himself. And we were having an enormous amount of furniture delivered that was going to be stored in the basement. And I'm a genius, remember that. And I say, "There is no way that that furniture is going to fit in that space." And this man who No reason to think that he's— He's certainly lower down on the chain than I. And he not only fits it all in, but makes it so every single piece is available for use. And it just struck me at that time that it's just not fair. And so then I've been on this crusade, you know, which I write some of it in the book, to make people aware everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else. If the people who know something you don't know were in charge, you could just as easily feel like the failure. An example, people don't realize that everything that is was at one point a decision. We act as if all of these things were handed down from the heavens. My favorite example is tennis. So in tennis, you have 2 chances for a serve. Okay. Now, why not 6? And why is it 2? So for me, if I throw the ball up, I kill it, it doesn't go in. And that's okay because I have my backup, who's second serve. But if I created the game in the first place, you'd have at least 3 serves. First one, I'd kill it, wouldn't go in, but I'd learn from it. Then I have another opportunity to kill it. Okay. And so then I'll still have my backup, who's third serve. The point is that if I created the game, I would be a better tennis player. Now, I don't mind playing with people by their rules, but it would be foolish of me to think that I could not be a better tennis player had I created the game. And the rule in general is the more different you are from whoever created whatever it is, the more important it is for you to change. Everything is mutable. Everything can be rearranged, but we don't recognize it because the rules are given to us in a sort of a thou shalt not move the furniture. I mean, if you just think about it, until recently, a man— it could have been a woman, but let's say a man who's 6'5" and let's say he's married to a woman who's 4'5". They were sitting on the same toilet seat. For one or the other, they're not doing good things for their bodies, right? And why did it take so long for that to change? At any rate, so I change everything. Something doesn't feel right, I move it around, I do it differently. Sometimes I'm rewarded for that. Sometimes I face some scorn. But regardless, once we know that we can be more than we've ever been and that the best way of getting there is to figure out how to do it our own way, then people can achieve all sorts of things. And let me tell you something else. I ask my students, how far is it humanly possible to run? Now, these are smart kids, so they start off with a marathon. And what a marathon is, what, 26 miles? 26 miles. Okay. So they know this. So then they know I wouldn't ask the question if you couldn't run more than that. So they might say, you know, 35, somebody will say 40 who feels very brave. But it turns out that there's this tribe in Mexico, the Tarahumara, that can run 250 miles without stopping. All right. Now put that together with what I said about fatigue before, and you can see how We organize ourselves to do better and better. And that's what people have to do, is expect more from themselves. They have to expect growth. It doesn't matter how old you are, that so much of what happens to our bodies is a function of our limited beliefs. And that's part of what all of this book is about, to get us to change that so that we can exercise the control overall well-being that's readily available if we just sit up and notice.

So you have this whole other side to you, the artistic side. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your journey as an artist.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. I wasn't one of those children in elementary school or junior high, whatever it is, who could draw. So it never occurred to me to take up art. And I have— I spend the summer very often in Provincetown. It's an artist community. And there was one summer, I don't remember when, many years ago, where it just rained and rained and rained, so I couldn't get out and play my intermediate tennis. I was in the house a lot. And during this time, I had to deliver something as a favor for somebody to this person who was an artist. And so I do so, and she asked me, "How am I keeping myself busy?" And I don't know why I said it. I'm thinking of taking up art. Okay. Then she said, "Okay, well, "Let me give you some of these very small canvases and just let yourself go wild." And then the same thing happened with this other artist. It's an artist community. And now this was my go-to statement. I'm thinking of taking up art. I wasn't before this, as well as I knew. And she said, "You just go wild with it. Get yourself a giant canvas." It didn't matter what anybody was saying. The idea was just do it. So I went home and I did it. —And I had, I just, all I had to paint on was a shingle. And so as a psychologist, it was fascinating to me because my first painting was of a woman on a horse. I used to ride horses racing through the woods. And so it seemed to me, wow, I'm painting on wood and I am painting a painting of the woods. Maybe there's something there. And then I was living a life for a while where I would I'd have some experience. I'd say, "Was this just me?" And I'd go and do a study to see if it's more generally true, and I would go back and forth. It's been great fun. For me, I wasn't limited by rules because I didn't know what the rules were. I didn't even know there were rules. I just did it. And so it was a mindful adventure. Anything can be engaged that way. You know, if you're gonna cook, stick religiously to the recipe, it's not nearly as much fun as, oh my gosh, I don't have any sugar. That means I can't make it, or what could I substitute it with? I don't have any cream. Should I use yogurt? Things that look like it. You don't have to be a genius in the kitchen. And part of it is just to go back to the way you and I claim to be, that you have to be lighthearted. You should take what you do seriously, but not take yourselves too seriously. You know, so if I'm painting it, why should I expect it to be a masterpiece? And so if I put aside the mindless evaluation, it's much easier to do it. And if you're cooking, if you don't believe this is the last meal you're ever going to eat, or that everybody is going to evaluate you based on how good the meal is, then it's easy to play around. I actually believe that we should bring that playfulness to everything that we do. And when you're at play, you're necessarily being mindful. So the thing that people have to realize is that not only is mindfulness good for you, this act of noticing, but that it's easy. It's the essence of engagement, and it's what you're doing when you're having a good time. It's not a practice. You know, so, Joe, if you were going to come visit me You've never been to my house. You wouldn't have to practice it. You'd be curious. You'd say, oh, what is she reading? Is that a new painting? I hope she throws that one away. Whatever you were noticing, you would notice. And that the data have made clear that when you're being mindful, you light up. People see you as charismatic, more trustworthy. And not only that, but our mindfulness leaves its imprint on what we do. So if you painting, doing anything mindfully versus mindlessly, the mindful product will be superior. So since it's so good for you and it's easy, it's beyond me why anybody would hesitate to become more mindful.

So the idea for The Mindful Body began, as you mentioned, as a memoir, an idea memoir you wrote. Yeah. You conclude the book, though, with a vision of how mindfulness can have a broader impact in the world. And I was just going to ask about one example that you used was a mindful hospital. I was wondering.

Yeah, yeah. You see, I think that virtually everything should be upgraded. You know, that you do something, and even if it took you a long time, there's no reason to assume that that's the best it can be. So we should come back to these things. It's interesting because I do a lot of research, and there's a lot written in the book about stress. I actually think stress is the major killer over and above genetics, diet, over and above everything. And stress is a psychological concept. Now, way back when, the medical world thought that psychology was important, maybe to be happy, who knows? But it had nothing to do with health. People don't believe that anymore. Now they know that there's a relationship between stress and health. I don't think anybody goes quite as far as I do. People talk about mind-body connection. They're not connected. It's one thing. And that gives us far more control over our health. Okay, so then if we look at hospitals, and you can do this with virtually anything, that hospitals were built way back when, based on the medical model, when psychology didn't matter. Now, they've been upgraded, but not really. Okay, so it just struck me as strange that you go to a hospital to get better, presumably, and we know stress makes you worse. And I don't know anybody other than perhaps the attending doctors and nurses who walk into a hospital and don't feel immediately stressed. So I said, there's no reason for that. We should redesign the hospital based on what we know now. And that's part of what I outlined in the end of the book. But we should redesign education. We should redesign sports. I mean, everything. What happens is that we build something at time one, and then we just keep using it and doing it without recognizing how the world has changed. So we end up, Joe, in this strange position where we're always trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions. And most of the time it doesn't work.

What's your greatest hope for this book?

That everyone will read it and that my life will then be easier because everybody will be mindful, everybody will be kind. That people right now are very judgmental, especially when they are judging other people themselves. And all the unhappiness is— I don't know, I have very strong detectors. You know, so especially if I'm at a party and I pick up everyone's discomfort, and that would be bad enough, except that I also have rescue fantasies. When I was a kid, I would sit on the edge of a swimming pool waiting for someone needing me to rescue them. And so it would just make my life easier to see everybody being happy because again, as you brought up with the scarcity idea, the things that we all need are not scarce. They're in full supply. You can be happy. I can be happy. We can both be healthy without one of us taking anything from the other person. Once we recognize that we all have special skills, we don't have to envy somebody who can do something we can't. I was sick the day that they taught envy. I've just never envied anybody. If you can do something I can't do, and I want to do it, I learn how to do it. It doesn't mean I'm going to be successful, or if I'm successful, it could take a long time. But envy has built into it helplessness, and I think that's rampant in this culture. So I can't have it, I can't do it, therefore I want to somehow take it away from you. And so I envision, you know, more and more people become aware of what's available to them, that this will grow exponentially. It's already— I've been studying this mindfulness for, what, 45 years? And the word now, you can't pick up a magazine or listen to anybody talking for beyond 40 minutes without them using the word being mindful. And we find in the chapter that I used to call the woo-woo chapter because there were some really odd things that my publisher said, "Don't include them." I said, "No, but they're real. Why shouldn't I include them?" So I included them. And one of these was about mindful contagion. Now, there's a simple understanding of mindful contagion. If I'm mindful, you're going to be mindful because you're going to feel that I'm paying attention to you. I'm being nurturing. I'm being nonjudgmental so that you then can take what initially might have seen as a risk for yourself. And the relationship is better. But it also seems that there's a way that my mindfulness, your mindfulness, a group's mindfulness somehow stays in the air and in some fashion and affects the mindfulness of other people. And there's another thing that's in the book where I'm one of these people who, because I've always been fortunate, perhaps the reason But I always look at the person who's on the raw end of the comparison, the low end of the stick, and say, well, what can they do? And so there are things like people who are autistic. And so we had some studies where what we do is have the person who's autistic interacting with somebody who's mindful or mindless, because I believe that the autistic person is hypersensitive to other people's consciousness. And so that means with all the mindlessness going around, you know, they want to retreat. And so when they're with somebody who is mindful, they behave just like the so-called non-autistic and so on. So there's a lot in the book. I hope that people do read it, that it helps. Highly recommend.

Great book, just jam-packed with fascinating research, practical ideas. And I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with us today.

Thank you. Time for the takeaway segment, ideas to put what you heard today into action. Number 1, what limiting beliefs about aging will you let go of? We often don't really examine our beliefs about aging, and it's a good time to think about what assumptions are you making that You may want to question, what can you let go of in terms of limiting beliefs? Expectations matter and thinking influences our health. Number 2, what rules, quote unquote rules, are you mindlessly following? So this is one I'm highlighting on my personal to-do list of takeaways. And this is something that I think really resonated with me. What can you question that other people are taking for granted, as Ellen Langer said? Her comments about really cooking and not taking ourselves so seriously really hit home. And she talked about ways in which we can bring a sense of playfulness to many things that we do. I think that's a great set of suggestions. What quote-unquote rules are we mindlessly following that we should rethink. Number 3, cause some mindful contagion, also being highlighted on my personal list of takeaways. And that's really about her comments about active noticing. And while it will have a positive impact on our health, it also will impact others that we're working with, interacting with, and enhance our relationships. And that ties back to another set of comments she made about when we don't assume we know everything or that anyone does, it naturally can draw our attention to what's going on and what's happening. So cause some mindful contagion. By the way, you'll see in the show notes a link to The Simpsons episode, the short clip where her counterclockwise study is mentioned. Well worth watching. I hadn't seen that and great. Great way to look at these concepts. Thanks so much for listening to the Retirement Wisdom Podcast. My mission is to help you retire smarter by looking at the other aspects of life beyond financial planning and preparing for retirement. Your next phase is about so much more than money. You can browse all of our episodes across 6 seasons at our website, retirementwisdom.com.

Mm-hmm.