The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way To Chronic Health

Okay, hi everybody. I'm Carol Kaufman, founder of the Institute of Coaching with Margaret Moore and Susan David, and I am here with a legend, Ellen Langer, who you guys probably know as the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she's still a professor. She's won all kinds of awards. If I do all of them, we'll be saying goodbye with me still telling you all the great things she's done. Probably one of the things that's been most exciting is, you know, she's called the mother of mindfulness, but I call her the walking, talking paradigm shifter because Ellen thinks of things and thinks of studying things that nobody would think of, like, at all. So, walk and talk and paradigm shifter woman who has just written a wonderful book. And by the way, guys, you need to buy it and you need to buy it this week. So Ellen, why don't you just sort of introduce the overall concept of the book and then we'll dive into some of the details.

Okay. Well, this book started off as a memoir. And so there's a lot in it. Then it became what it is, but I left some of the sexy stories in it. Essentially, the best way of understanding it is around the topic of mind-body unity. And very simple, I say mind-body, these are just words, we put them back together. And then wherever you're putting the mind, you're putting the body. And that means we have enormous, enormous control over everything we experience, our health, our well-being, and so on. The first study I did that you might recall to test the mind-body unity was the counterclockwise study. This study is— I can call it famous, Carol, because if you watch The Simpsons Go to Havana, they actually discuss the study. They add some sexy parts. But there was no sex in the study. All right. Anyway, so what we did was retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there as if they were their younger selves for a week. So they spoke about past events and things of that sort in the present tense. And the results were phenomenal, that in a period of time, less than a week, without medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength, and they also looked noticeably younger. So that was done quite a while ago. Now fast forward, we have all the new studies, and those are the ones that I concentrate on in The Mindful Body. It was kind of fun apropos of almost nothing, Carol. So the subtitle is Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, and that's really what the whole book is about. The English version is— who knows why should they have an American and an English version? It's virtually the same language, but they changed the subtitle to Thinking Our Way to Lasting Health. And so it's like yesterday I gave birth to fraternal twins. Anyway, so go fast forward. Now let's go to some of the other counterclockwise mind-body studies. So one that people like is a study we did with chambermaids.

Thank you for that.

If you ask chambermaids how much exercise they're getting, they don't see themselves as getting exercise because according to the Surgeon General, that's what you do after work and they're just too tired. Very simple study. All we did was teach half of them that their work was exercise. Making a bed was like working at this or that machine at the gym and so on. So we have two groups, one who realizes their work is sees exercise and the other doesn't. Nothing else different, right? We take lots and lots of measures before and after the study. Nothing varies. They're not working harder. They're not eating differently. Nevertheless, the group that now sees their work as exercise lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Let me— I know we only have a short time.

Amazing.

Let me tell you about one of the newer ones because we have so many and they're all— okay, so this is a wound healing study. Now, it would have been more dramatic if we— I did the study with my graduate student Peter Ungl, and that if we could inflict a big wound, but you don't want to hurt people, and even if you wanted to, hopefully the review board wouldn't let you. Okay, so it's a minor wound, but a wound nonetheless. People are sitting in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is real time. The question we're asking is, does the wound heal based on so-called real time or perceived time, which is the time the clock tells you? Obviously, I wouldn't be talking to you about it now if we didn't find perceived In a similar kind of study, I seem to have this thing about clocks that I never realized until writing this book and putting all these studies together. But in this other clock study, we have people in a sleep lab. They wake up, they look at the clock. My goodness. And they got 2 hours more sleep than they thought they got, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they got. And again, biological and cognitive functions follow perceived sleep. That's why I say, you know, we have studies with diabetes. We have studies with lots of chronic illnesses. Not all clock studies. And we find amazing results that just keep telling me, please get the message out that we can control these things. You know, the medical world and people in the world believe when you have a chronic illness that that means that there's nothing that can be done about it, rather than all it means is the medical world hasn't figured out what to do about it. So we take people with different chronic illnesses, We use multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, stroke, and depression, stress. It works for virtually everything. Because when you have whatever you have, you think it's only going to stay the same or get worse. But nothing moves in only one direction. All right. What we do is we contact you periodically throughout the day, throughout the week, and ask you very simply, how is it now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? That's the important question.

Better or worse than before, and why?

Why is the biggie.

Okay.

Okay. And that results in 3 things. First, gee, you thought you were always in pain, for example. And now you see that sometimes you're in a little less pain, so you feel a little better. Second, when you're answering the question why, you engage in a mindful search. And as you, as you know, for the last 45 years, we've collected lots of data showing that when we make people more mindful, they live longer. All right. It improves their health and virtually everything. And we should take a timeout for just a second.

Yeah, I was going to ask you.

What do I mean by mindfulness? Nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is good, but this is just different. Mindfulness is simply noticing new things. Noticing new— if you walk out the door and notice 3 things about the outside of your door that you think you know, you'll see you don't know it. Notice 3 things about your spouse. Whatever. Everything is always changing. And so the things that we think we know is an illusion. We don't know them at all. All right. And so because we've learned so many things, and we think we know, we don't pay attention. And, you know, so we're mindless virtually all the— almost all the time. All right. But when you're mindless, you don't know you're being mindless.

So this active noticing Why don't you share what you mean by mindfulness? Because my understanding is, I don't know if I've got the name right. I think of it as creative mindfulness, which is how do we notice something in a new way? How would you describe it? Because it's very different from normal. It's really—

Right. It's not different from normal. I mean, this should be the norm. Yeah, well, actually, I agree. So lots of people talk about paying attention. It's not just paying attention. It's noticing new things. Now we could take a step back and recognize that when we say, when I say everything is changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, that means we don't know anything for sure. So I often start, and Carol, I might ask you, how much is 1 and 1?

Yeah, right.

You're going to dutifully say 2. But it's not always 2. And this is the thing we know better than anything else. If you add 1 watt of chewing gum plus 1 watt of chewing gum, 1 plus 1 is 1. One pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. Well, thing we know best is possibly wrong in certain circumstances, then it's easier to accept maybe she's right. Maybe we don't really know anything. And if you don't know something, then you naturally pay attention to it. If you were going to come visit me right now, you've never been to my house, which is sad, we should correct that. But you'd be curious. You'd look around. You look around and notice things. So the interesting thing is that this act of noticing is the essence of being engaged. And as you're noticing, the neurons are firing. Okay, so it's literally and figuratively enlivening. And so let's take people who are stressed, because I imagine most of the people listening would fall into that category more so than other chronic illnesses. So somebody who's stressed thinks they're stressed all the time. Nobody is anything all the time. And so by doing this little thing, how are you now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? Carol, you might find out that you're fine most of the time, but when you're talking to Ellen Langer, you're extremely stressed. If that were the case, the cure is simple. Don't talk to me. All right. Now, but stress is interesting in a bigger way because everybody knows that stress is psychological. And I believe that the main problem for virtually all disease is stress, which is why I can say that the mindful solution is readily there for us to use no matter what the illness we're talking about. We don't have time to go into too much detail, but just quickly focus on stress for a moment. You know, I tell people such a simple thing. And I think this is a good takeaway for your audience. Next time you feel stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Okay, never is it a tragedy. It's, oh my God, the dog ate the homework. Oh my God, I'm— I didn't finish the project, you know, so on. And just by asking that question, you know, you start to calm down. Now stress requires two things. One, a belief that something's going to happen. And two, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. Well, it turns out that we can't predict. Prediction is an illusion. And anybody who doubts that, I will propose this wager that we go through, that we'll go to a lot of Mercedes, fine vehicles, right? Expensive. These are the kind of— this is the kind of car everybody wants to drive. And I will wager you that we choose one car at random. I will give you $100,000 if the car doesn't start. But if the car does start— excuse me, I'll give you $100,000 if the car does start. But if it doesn't start, you give me every cent you have in the bank and the same amount over the next several years. People are not going to take that people know that you can't predict the individual case. And when we're being stressed, what we're doing is not saying, would most people feel this way? It's, how am I going to feel? All right, so, so to feel stressed, you have to believe something is going to happen. So the first thing to do is just give yourself 5 reasons why it won't happen. And immediately, it seems less likely.

I'm taking notes here.

Here's the better part. Yeah, let's assume it does happen. What are 3 or 5 reasons that that's actually a good thing? To understand is that events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events. Open those views up and realize any situation can be understood in multiple ways. Why choose the understanding That's crazy-making. That's great.

That's great. So even just for all of us, this is great for me because I'm under a lot of stress at the moment because I have major—

I'll send you the bill in the morning.

Yeah, yeah. I'm taking notes for me, babe. But for all of us, I think that's really helpful because most of us are successful. And with success, there's a certain amount of stress if you're going to choose to see it that way. But you're really saying, okay, first, what are, you know, 5 reasons my worry won't happen?

And most things, most things don't happen, as it turns out.

And then, okay, and, and if it does happen, what's the opportunity there? Why is it actually potentially good for me?

And then we'll add the last 2 things together that if it's difficult for you to come up with the opportunity, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Ah, and you put that in a package with a bow. You know, there are lots of people who think stress is just part of this world. You can't avoid it. And I must say, I mean, you know, I'm old enough that I've experienced some big things on the negative side, on, on, you know, so I'm not saying I've never experienced stress, but I must say, you know, that it's a very rare occurrence for me.

And what I know, you also embody what you say because I haven't seen you up close for— oh, well, so guys, you don't know that Ellen was the very first person who gave the very first keynote at the very first Harvard Coaching Conference. And she looks younger today than she did then.

I don't think so. It's the Zoom.

But no, you even talked about it in your research, that the looking younger as a result of really noticing and living the kind of life that matters.

Yeah, I think that what people need to stop doing is trying to add more years to their lives. What instead they should be doing is adding more life to their years, and then the rest will unfold naturally.

So I want to share with you something you did that is— I'd love to hear your take on it. So Years ago, I heard about when you gave your lecture and part of it was, there was a study on orchestra, I think, conductors. And the people playing were told, "Play this Mozart piece in a way that's different from any time you've ever done it before." Yeah, the key to this was that they—

so this was a test of if we make the orchestra musicians mindful, would that show itself in the music? And they were told, make it different in very subtle ways that only you would know, because after all, they're playing classical music. And if everybody made giant changes, you know, it probably wouldn't be a good sound. And we told the comparison group, remember a time you played this piece where you liked it and then just replicate it. We taped the performance and then we show it to people who know nothing about the study. They overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played piece. There was something about this that was really interesting to me that I didn't realize, Carol, until I wrote this up for publication. Okay, here we have a study where we have essentially in the mindful group, everybody doing their own thing. Hmm. And that led to superior coordinated experience, because they were all in the same present situation, which led me to say that my— about leaders. The best job for leaders is to provoke the mindfulness in those being led.

Wow. Everybody just pause and absorb that.

Yeah. And while they're pausing that— yeah, well, while they're pausing, let me just say mindfulness, as we study it, we find that it makes you happier, makes you healthier. While the neurons are firing and you're engaged, people find you more attractive. More authentic. So, you know, you're going to be seen as somebody people want to spend time with. Not only that, as Carol pointed out, studies like the orchestra study show that this mindfulness actually leaves its imprint in the things that we're doing. Now, go back to what I said before when I invited Carol to my house. We want Carol to come visit me. She's never been here. She's going to notice, and she's going to enjoy herself. The point being that doing all this mindfulness is easy. It's what we're doing when we're having fun. So now we have the key to almost all our ills, dare I say. And it's easy, and it's fun. It's hard for me to understand why anybody would not immediately adapt it.

So I want to tell you how you bought me an entire year of a career. All right. So this was a number of years ago, guys, and I was shifting from being a therapist to a coach. And I had this one year where I had a lot of coaching clients, but I still had some therapy clients. And I was, I was bored. I had just been doing therapy forever. So I perhaps brutalized your actual research. But the way I applied it to myself was for each session, With each person, I was going to think, okay, how is this session going to be different from any other session? And two things happened. One is I sort of fell in love with my work again. The other one was really amazing. And so I'm wondering about this for coaches. I had one— most of my clients were pretty healthy, but I had one woman, this little hunchback schizoaffective person who was so boring. I used to have to like pinch myself or like drink Coca-Cola to stay awake. But that day I went, okay, how is this session with her going to be different from any other session? And number one, I woke up. Number two, she woke up. She started saying things, this little somewhat crazy-ish woman, that were wise and interesting. And I got to tell you, I was like, oh my, the quality. I mean, you've talked about mindful contagion or whatever, but it was really something about me practicing mindfulness, as you say, like, how is this moment different from any other moment? What can I notice in this moment? And it not only impacted me, I was stunned at how it impacted her.

Yeah, no, that's wonderful. I'm glad you told the story and that it had that effect for you. There are several takeaways from that. The first is just as soon as you notice, notice new things about the person you've been living with, if you're living with anybody, and the relationship will come alive. But another way to make everything come alive and to become a little less judgmental is to recognize everybody's behavior makes sense from their perspective, or else they wouldn't do it, even if they're doing it mindlessly. So, you know, they don't have access to why they're doing it. No one wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be obnoxious. I'm going to be impulsive. You know, whatever it is that we call people. So if you say to yourself, why, what is this person doing that I can better understand from their perspective? So for example, what I'm saying is, Carol, every single, every single negative ascription we have for somebody has an equally—

Say that again. It's a really powerful sentence. And I went to write it down. And I bet there's x hundred people wanting to write it down as well.

What can I— Okay. Oh, we need to recognize that every single negative understanding we have— adjective, adverb, okay— every negative ascription we have for behavior has an equally strong but oppositely valenced alternative. For example, you can't stand me because I'm gullible. But from my perspective, I'm trusting. You get on my nerves because you're so damn inconsistent. But from your perspective, you're flexible, every single word. So now if you find the word— so Carol and I, let's say we're having it, we have a very close relationship. I'm driving you crazy because I'm so gullible. Now when you see that I'm not being gullible, or I'm being gullible, but by another understanding, I'm being trusting. Do you really want me to change? No. And it's very important for therapists because people keep trying and failing. I don't want to be gullible. I keep trying not to be gullible. But I'm going to continue to be gullible unless I stop being trusting, which I don't want to do.

So what was the question? It was, what can I understand about—

somebody does something and you call somebody by some name, right? You know, whatever negative thing. I just This guy is so boring, you know, whatever. All right. And then you ask yourself, what, from his perspective, what is he doing? What's a positive take on being boring? And you might get stable, someone you can count on, because that's what boring is to you. There's the same old, same old, but that means you can count on them. And so now, do you want to change that? Do you want him to be unstable? You know, okay. And so we did this study forever ago where what we did is we gave people, I don't know, 100, 300 behavior descriptions, like, as I said, gullible. And I said, check off all of those that you keep trying to change, but you fail. I would check off impulsive, Gullible. Now you turn the page over, and in a mixed-up order are the positive versions of all of these words. So now we ask people, check those things about yourself that you really value. My spontaneity and my being trusting. Well, as long as I value being spontaneous, there are times I'm going to seem impulsive. As long as I value being trusting, there are times I'm going to end up gullible.

So one person says, what about someone who is emotionally volatile? What would be a positive perspective on that?

Aware, sensitive, you know, noticing nuance. You know, you know, very often when you say something that gets somebody else crazed, You think it's they who have the problem because you're not paying attention to the way you've worded what you've actually said.

And so Amina wrote, tell me if this is right. She said, "What can I see that I could really benefit from seeing today?" So is that close to your kind of like what I really want to help people have, like the question you can ask yourself? So I get the opposite thing. But it's sort of like—

see, well, what's interesting is that it doesn't matter what you're doing, right? That as long as you're doing it mindfully, you'll reap the benefits. So if you're mindfully giving a podcast, if you're mindfully watching your favorite television show, if you're taking a walk and noticing things, all of those will be beneficial. Where the reverse of it is actually deadening. You know, if you're, if you're not increasing your life, you're decreasing it. You know, when we're mindless, the neurons aren't functioning. And in some sense, we are turning the whole system off. Exactly.

So I just want to say one thing is, could you repeat the title of your book? Because someone has said Hey, what's the title of the book? So why don't you show it?

I was going to show you a copy of it, but I don't have it handy. But yes, the title of the book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And if you forget that and you just Google my name, it will come up. Or you go to Amazon and put in my name. But the mindful mind—

So actually, guys, here's what I would like you to do. If you have found one thing that Ellen said useful, interesting, and applicable, buy the hardback of her book. Hardback, not Kindle. If you can, buy the hardback, on Kindle, on Amazon. Why is that? This is launch week. So by next Tuesday, Amazon, Wall Street Journal, everybody's going to decide whether it made the bestseller list that week. It will make it later if it doesn't. But that's the way you could have the most impact on Ellen's life right now is hardback Amazon. Sorry, Barnes Noble, whatever. They use Amazon. Hardback this week. The Mindful Body: Thinking Your Way to Chronic Health.

Right.

All right.

Thank you.

We only have 4 more minutes. Could you share what's the most important takeaway to you for your own life that you've gotten from your work?

Well, it's kind of interesting. People ask me that as if I do a study and then I learn from it and then become whatever I've learned. But it works the other way around. I find that I'm a happy camper. Well, why am I happy? What am I doing that's different from what other people are doing? Why am I healthy? Why didn't I get COVID? You know, whatever. But I think that the major takeaway, which bears repeating, is that we have more control over our health and our happiness, far more than we realize. And oddly, the key to this control is by exploiting the power in uncertainty. We don't know, but you don't have to feel bad about knowing because nobody knows. All right. And you make this universal attribution for not— everything is changing. How could you know? And that makes everything interesting. And if you say when you meet your partner or somebody you're interested in, that they're brand new today, you're going to sit up and pay attention. They're going to feel noticed and the relationship will flourish.

That is a beautiful thing. And what's your— can you give us about a minute on the variability? Because I see we still have a little bit more time.

That's great. No, I've got it. Hours worth of information to give people. So this attention to variability, attention to symptom variability, is just being mindful. When you're mindful, you're noticing change. When we're looking at our diseases, we hold things still. When we attend to the ways they're changing and ask why is it better or worse, that's the means for us to get control over our health. Just being mindful. Noticing leads us to not just light up and become more charismatic in other people's eyes, but it's actually good for us. And what you started to say before about it being contagious. Yes, if you're mindful, that will make the people around you more mindful for many reasons, not the least of which is you become less judgmental. And so people feel safer. And when people feel safer, they open up. And life becomes real, you know. And I think that once you experience a true interaction with somebody, a supportive one where you're not playing a game, you're not trying to compete with each other, you're just trying to learn from each other, it's hard to go back to some of the nonsense that we endure too often. And I have a song that I wrote for my 8-year-old twins. I'm not going to sing it, but you can find it on my website. But the—

I'm going to look. Do you have your paintings on your website?

Yeah, some of them. That the bottom line is that— or the— this is the full line. Everybody doesn't know something. Everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something. Everyone can do something else. So when we recognize, you know, and I use the example of singing, I can't sing, but so what? Singing is fun. There are lots of things I can do. Why shouldn't I sing? All right. And so if you pay attention to the things that you know, the things you can do, it's easier embarking on new activities where, in fact, you have no idea how to do them.

Well, Ellen, that's just wonderful. By the way, a bunch of people said bought the book, bought the book. More of you do that. Ellen, thank you. You are such a goddess and you've contributed so much. There's so many things you've contributed to that people don't even know about in behavioral economics and all kinds of medical stuff. It's really, you are a wonderful phenomenon and thank you for spending this time with us. Thank you.

Thank you, Carol. This was nice.