Thinking Our Way to Health, with Ellen Langer and Sean Fargo

Welcome everyone, I'm Sean Fargo with Mindfulness Exercises. Today I have the distinct honor and pleasure of speaking with Dr. Ellen J. Langer, who's often referred to as the mother of mindfulness and the mother of positive psychology. She's written many amazing books over the decades about mindfulness. She has a new book out called The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. For those of you not familiar with her, Dr. Langer was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she's still a professor, the recipient of 3 Distinguished Scientist Awards, the Arthur W. Stotts Award for Unifying Psychology, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Liberty Science Genius Award. Dr. Langer is the author of 12 books, including the international bestseller Mindfulness, as well as The Power of Mindful Learning, Clockwise, and On Becoming an Artist. Her trailblazing experiments in social psychology have earned her inclusion in the New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas issue. She's known worldwide as the mother of mindfulness, the mother of positive psychology. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Welcome, Dr. Langer. It's an honor to be speaking with you today.

Thank you very much, Sean.

So this book that you just released called The Mindful Body has been making a lot of noise lately. It's garnered a lot of praise and attention. You know, there's a lot of mindfulness books out there, but this one is rather unique. It provides a lot of insights into your experience with your research, learning how people relate to their bodies, relate to time, relate to perception. And, you know, a lot of this book is around how we view our health, how we deal with uncertainty, how we try to control things. What do you hope that most people get out of it?

Okay, well, as you made clear, I've been studying mindfulness for a very long time, and I'm on a quest, and the quest is to change the world. I believe that we have far more control over our health and well-being than people imagine. And so with each book, I hope to persuade more and more people. It's probably important for your audience to recognize that what I mean when I say mindfulness is different from what many people presume. Mindfulness, as we study it, has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is fine. It's just not the same thing. When you meditate, it's a practice to lead to post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, the way we study it, is much more immediate. Not better or worse, not mutually exclusive. It's just different. All you need to do, and this is really amazing, Sean, to become mindful is to actively notice new things about the things you know. Now, why does it have to be about the things you think you know? Because then you come to see, gee, you didn't know it as well as you thought you did. When people recognize that everything is changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, it turns out we don't know very much. In fact, uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. And most of the courses you take in school, your parents, almost everybody is teaching you absolutes. And these absolutes are just wrong almost all the time. And when you think you know, you don't sit up and pay any attention. So, Sean, let me ask you a simple question. How much is 1 in 1?

Conventionally speaking, 2.

Okay. And so, I mean, at that point, if I ask people, they just tune out and say, oh, God, what is she going to talk about? But it turns out that 1 and 1 is not always 2. If you're adding 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. Right. So the thing that we think we know the best is not true all of the time. And so if you've just heard what I've said and somebody should ask you, how much is 1 and 1? The appropriate thing to do is to recognize the context and say, well, what is this person getting at in this context? And then to answer, it could be two, because as we've just seen, it could also be one. All right. So you notice new things about the things you think you know to come to say, gee, you don't know them as well as you thought. Then your attention naturally goes to them. Or you can just start off the way I do, knowing that you don't know. And again, it's okay not to know because nobody knows. Now, we found this very simple thing, this act of noticing new things, which is the essence of engagement. And as you're noticing, the neurons are firing. And all of these decades of research show that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. Not only are people healthier and happier when they're actively noticing new things, they light up. So people find them to be more charismatic, more trustworthy. And this mindfulness seems to leave its imprint on the things that we do. So when you do it mindfully, it's better, recognizes better. So you feel better. People like you more. Your relationships, everything is better. And it's so easy that my quest is that when people recognize this, everybody will start to become more mindful, which will lead to, in a sense, a much nicer world than the world we currently live in.

Absolutely. You know, a lot of our listeners are mindfulness practitioners and mindfulness meditators. And unfortunately, you know, a lot of people kind of relate to formal meditation practice as a bit of a chore or something they should do. A lot of us feel stuck with our practice at times.

I know for myself, the second time I meditated, I tried to do it faster. Which you obviously shouldn't be doing. So, yes, I can appreciate what you're saying.

Yeah. And in terms of exercises of actively noticing, there's this wonderful section on page 169 of your book. You write that when we recognize changes in sensation, intensity, and durability inside the body, external cues like the time of day, we notice more about our experiences and feelings. Which parts of our body are most or least affected? How are the sensations changing over time? How do these changes affect our behavior? By noticing these changes, we regain control over our health, and symptoms come to be experienced as less insurmountable. And so that's a wonderful list of things that we can actively notice in the body, as well as noticing external cues like time of day. I'm wondering if you can offer any other examples or insights as to how we can actively notice change in our experience.

And sure, the main thing, by analogy, imagine you're wearing a white shirt. Versus you're wearing a busy plaid shirt and you spill a little spaghetti sauce on your shirt. On the plaid shirt, you're not even going to notice it, so you can't take care of it because there's too much going on. It's too busy. On a white shirt, you do notice it right away. And the point being, the calmer we are, the more able we are to recognize small changes. And it's much easier to fix something. To use a silly example, if you gain 2 pounds, it's no big deal. It's easy to lose those 2 pounds. If you don't notice until you've gained 10 pounds, then it's much more difficult. And so the question is, how do we keep ourselves in this serene, relaxed place? And that's by doing most of the things that I already said, recognizing that Things out there don't make us upset. They don't stress us. What stresses us are the views we take of it. And things themselves are not good or bad. It depends on the view we take. The more mindful you are, we are, the more choices we have as to how to understand what's going on right now. Most people suffer from a good deal of stress. Stress is unnecessary. Stress is a psychological concept that starts off by thinking you believe something terrible is going to happen. We can't predict, so we don't know if it's going to happen. And if it happens, it's not necessarily terrible. Whether it's good or bad depends on how we approach it. So many people have said this. I've been saying this for decades. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of it. So if you open it up and see how this thing may be good, maybe bad, and if you see it as potentially good, then you're not going to worry about it. So a simple little exercise for people, since you like exercises, is the next time you're stressed, you say to yourself, here are 3 reasons why this thing is not going to happen. It may not happen. So you went from believing it will happen to maybe it won't happen, and you feel a little better. And then turn it around. Let's assume it does happen. How is that actually a good thing? So a very simple example, Sean. You and I go out for lunch. The food is good. Wonderful. You and I go out for lunch. The food is bad. Wonderful. I'll eat less. It'll be better for my waistline. And if I'm not so involved in the food, I'll probably pay more attention to you and what you're saying. So it's good for our relationship. Everything can be understood in multiple ways. But when you're mindless, you think you know, and you stop your search for information. And typically your responses are less effective than they could be. And your understanding of other people. In a simple example, let's say you have a date. Somebody you've been hoping to go out with, and before they get there, you see yourself as very anxious. Now, chances are the date will not turn out to be as good as if you saw yourself as excited. It's the same thing, but it's a positive view of what's going on rather than a negative view. And you're all, oh, I can't wait. And then person walks in and you start off in a very different place than having to recover from this negative place. You're anxious, you're afraid the person is going to recognize that you're anxious and so on. So the point is that we have much more control because we have so many more choices as to how we're going to understand things. You don't get as upset with other people once you understand why they did what they did. You come to appreciate them. When you say it like that lunch that you and I had where the food was awful, that's wonderful because I'm not going to gain weight and now I can devote myself to you. So you end up sort of much more even rather than up and down, depending on sort of a victim of circumstances. It's remarkable how once we assume this posture and recognize that we really are in control of how we feel, it's much easier to then pay some attention to these larger health issues. And I think most of them won't even occur. Here's maybe an unusual thought, and I would bet money that in 20 years almost everybody will agree with me, but I think that stress is the major killer, that no matter what you have— let's say we go to people who've just gotten this terrible diagnosis, let's say cancer, some kind of cancer. Nobody is going to be happy. Once they hear something like this. But after 3 weeks, people will differ, and you're going to have some people who are so stressed that that's all they think about is the cancer. And you'll have other people who have come to terms with it in some way. So let's say we assess people's level of stress throughout the year, throughout the next several months. I believe that that stress will predict, determine the course of the disease for the person over and above genetics, nutrition, and oftentimes even medication. And stress is psychological. So if you don't have to experience stress, you're probably not going to get most of those diseases. And if you get them, you're going to get past them much more easily. So it's sort of, you know, I think people should put on their white shirts, metaphorically speaking, and notice small changes and then fix them. Before they become big. People in the past, medical people, believed that psychology had nothing to do with our health. The only way you were going to become sick is if there was an antigen. Now people realize that psychology matters, but they still don't realize how much it matters. And so people start talking about the mind-body connection. I'm not talking about a connection. My thesis is the mind and body are one thing. If you see it as one thing, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. When I'm talking about mind-body unity as one thing, that means every single thought you have affects your health. So being happy is not a trivial thing. When you're being happy, the only way you can be happy is by this act of noticing. And that's very important for your health. So let me tell you about some of our studies to make the point clearer and also makes clear how much control we have over our health. The original study was the Counterclockwise Study. Very simple. We did this a long time ago. We took a retreat and we retrofitted it to 20 years earlier as well as we could. You walked in there, it was a time warp, okay? And we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So they spoke about current events that were events in the past, but as if they were just unfolding right now. As a result, in only a week, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger without any medical intervention. It's kind of amazing. So we go fast forward several years later. We did a study with chambermaids. Turns out, even though these women exercise all day long, I mean, that's the work that they do, they don't realize they're exercising because exercise, according to the Surgeon General, is what you do after work, and after work they're just too tired. Very simple study. We just teach them that their work is exercise. That's the only change. We take lots of measures. We find out they're not working any harder at the end of the week. They're not eating any differently. All that's changed is their minds. As a result of this change in mindset, they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Just by changing their minds. I'm not going to go through every study in the book, but there are lots of them that are great fun. Sleep is important, right? Well, people in a sleep lab wake up and the clock tells them they got 2 hours more sleep than they thought they did, 2 hours less sleep, or the amount of sleep they got. Biological and cognitive functions follow perceived amount of sleep, not so-called actual sleep. We have people who have type 2 diabetes come in. We take lots of measures. Then we're going to ask them to play computer games. It's next to the computer. We have a clock and the clock is rigged, but they don't know it. So for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's real time. The question we're asking is, does blood sugar level follow that clock, perceived time or real time? And it turns out that it follows what your beliefs are, perceived time, which means we have lots and lots of control because we're doing the changes in our weight, in our blood sugar level, and so on. Let me just give you one more and then we'll switch to something very different. One of the most recent studies, and we had people who we give a wound, not a gigantic wound because we don't want to hurt anybody, but it's still a wound. And again, I must be clock crazy because again, we're using this rigged clock. So you've got a wound, you're watching a clock. For a third of the group, the clock is going very fast, twice as fast as real time. You think it's real time, right? Half as fast as real time or real time. The wound heals based not on the real passage of time, but on your perception of the passage of time. So for those people where the clock was going twice as fast as real time, they healed faster. The control we have over our health is enormous. Now, I think the strongest medicine we actually have are placebos. So think about a placebo for a second. You take this sugar pill, this pill that's a nothing by definition, it's inert, and you think it's real medicine, and then you heal. And when you think of that, well, how am I healing? Well, you're doing it to yourself. Now, you can't give yourself a placebo because you know it's a placebo, right? So we've developed a way for people to heal from very serious disorders, and we call that attention to symptom variability. It's a fancy expression. It really means just being mindful, because when you're mindful, you're noticing change. Well, when you're told you have some chronic illness, you probably believe that it's going to stay the same or just get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. There are always little blips where it's a little better. And so what we do is we call people throughout the day, throughout the week, and say, how is it now? Is it better or worse than the last time and why? And that's the key. Why? What happens at that point is that people start a mindful search. Why now is it a little better than the last time? And when they do that, as I've already said, that becoming more mindful itself is good for one's health. In fact, years and years ago, we did several studies where we took elderly people. We taught them to actively notice, to be mindful. And they live longer. Okay, so now you've got this chronic illness. Hey, it's a little better today. What about today is different from the past? So again, what happens when you do this attention to the changes? 3 things. First, you see, gee, sometimes it is a little better. Well, that feels good. Second, now you're going to go on a mindful search for why is it a little better? That's good for your health. And third, I personally believe that you're much more likely to find a solution if you look for a solution. And the problem is when people are given diagnoses for these chronic illnesses, they think there's nothing they can do about it, and so they don't do anything. Well, so we did this attention to symptom variability with multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain. Parkinson's, real diseases. And in each case, we find that people are able to heal. So it's very dramatic and it's very exciting. One of the things that I find so interesting, there are so many things that we do where we think that we're doing the best we can and we haven't even come close. So, for example, let's say somebody is trying to do something. Now, trying is better, of course, than not even beginning the task, thinking there's no way you can do it. But trying has built into it an expectation for failure. You wouldn't try to eat an ice cream cone, you just eat it. So every time you're trying, you're believing that you're not going to succeed. And our beliefs tend to be fulfilled. We have simple studies. Some groups are told to try to do whatever the task is. Other groups are told to do it. And it's always the case when you just do it, you outperform the trying group. Hope. Wow. Everybody thinks you should have hope. And I don't want to cast aspersions on all these well-meaning people, but still, having hope is better than being hopeless. But hope again has built into it an expectation for failure. You get up in the morning and you go to the kitchen. You're not hoping you're going to be able to make yourself a cup of coffee. You know, we have a way of doing things that's better than it could be, but not nearly as good as I think it should be.

Dr. Ellen Langer, thank you so much for your time. Next time I'm in Cambridge, I'd love to take you out to a bad restaurant for a bad meal.

Now, now, the sad thing is, Sean, telling the story aside, that the food— I'm going to eat it and enjoy it even if you think it's a bad restaurant with bad food. There's always a way to engage whatever you're doing so that it's fun. But I will go out with you.

I love that.

Yeah.

Thank you. Well, I think you're the bee's knees. I'm a huge fan of fun and mindfulness, and you've found this way to marry them. And so I'm really grateful for your work, for your writing, for your time. For everyone listening, please check out The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We'll put links in the description fields. Dr. Ellen Langer, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

It was fun. Thank you, Sean.

Thank you.