Unpacking Mindfulness and Positive Psychology with Ellen Langer

the mother of mindfulness, the mother of positive psychology, to cover part 2 of her latest book of many, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Ellen Langer, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Aidan.

It's great to have you back. And Ellen's been on a podcast tour promoting this book. But one thing I want to impress on our audience is there is so much in this book. It's almost like a compilation of previous books, a multitude of studies, many of them, most of them are indeed ones Ellen conducted along with some of her students, but also she mentions many, many others. It's an absolute great read. So I highly recommend it and I'll link to it in the show notes. One thing, Ellen, we didn't get to the last day, we talked about prediction and risk and rules, but we didn't really talk about social comparing. And I thought we'd maybe open up with that because as you reveal throughout the book, it's so relieving to not compare yourself to others.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Back in the '50s, late '50s, Leon Festinger proposed a theory of social comparison and he called it a drive that you're driven to see how you compare with other people. He had another part, which was also good that there's informational social comparison. And that I'm highly in favor of. If you see somebody who is serving a tennis ball much better than you, it's good to watch them to see what do they do? Oh, I should have thrown the ball a little higher, that sort of thing. But I take issue with the notion that we have to compare ourselves to other people. When was the last time when you were brushing your teeth, did you say, gee, I wonder how Ellen Langer does this? Okay. And social comparing, we have some data that shows that People who do a lot of social comparing are not happy campers. They tend to do more blame, have more regrets, and a host of negative emotions. The social comparing is essentially mindless because what we're doing is assuming that that other person is full out. They really care at that moment, that whatever behavior you're comparing yours to is representative of their behavior. And so a host of other things that suggest even when we're making these comparisons, we're often coming up with the wrong information. Now, it's good to compare ourselves with ourselves. That's how you improve. So as I just said, gee, this tennis serve was better than the last, but not nearly as good as Ellen's. And so then you try different things and pay attention to what you're doing. But there's always somebody who's better. And we did some research many years ago where we have people who are, I don't remember just what the task was, but whatever it was, they were clearly better than the other person. And so then people would either compare themselves, how am I terrific, or not compare themselves. Then they were faced with somebody who was better than they were. Now, the people who didn't compare themselves the first time around, were fine the second time around, but the others who now felt glorious now had to feel bad about themselves. And I think that if we didn't have such static notions of our competence, much of the social comparing would go away. If you just paid some attention in the course of, I don't know, a few months or however long. So I'll keep using tennis. Sometimes I'm really good at my own level. Sometimes not so good, and it seems maladaptive at the moments I'm not so good to feel bad about it. What seems better would be to figure out why I wasn't that good and start making changes. And something that's hidden behind all of this is the mindless notion that you want to be perfect. I use two examples frequently. Let me use them again. At some point I'll come up with a new one. One is golf. So let's say you're a golfer and you say, wouldn't it be wonderful if I got a hole in one each time I swung the club? Now, if you think about that and you actually achieve that, there'd be no game. It's actually the lack of expert performance that makes the game fun. It's mastering that's rewarding, not having mastered. So an example of that. Is let's say you're a little kid and you're in an elevator and you try to press that button and you can't reach it. And then your mother or father or whoever picks you up and you press the button. And the next time you go, you know, you're a little taller, you still can't do it. And this is fun for the child, right? And then at some point the child is tall enough, presses the button. Now the whole game is over. Tell me when the last time was you were in an elevator where you got excited about being able to press the button. Right? So we can, in essence, do things imperfectly mindfully or perfectly mindlessly. And when we are mindless, what we're doing is essentially a non-event. And so I think we, we need to think differently about errors. We think, need to think differently about our performance at any moment as if that's as good as it can get.

I was thinking about this, reading about regrets, and I'd love to go a little bit more into regrets.

Regrets suggest that, you know, you should have chosen one of the other alternatives available to you with the implication that that would've been better. Could have been better, could have been worse, could have been the same. And further that we regret things because we take whatever consequence occurred as if it's positive or negative. And this is a hard thing for people to understand, but events are neither consequences are neither positive or negative. They just are. And if you recognize that what makes it positive or negative is the way you frame the event, then you have a massive amount of control. So let's say right now, all of a sudden the internet goes out. Oh my gosh. But it wouldn't for me. I don't know how it would be for you. I'd miss you. But I have so many other things I want to do now, I would just start doing them. So it'd be an advantage. So I talk about this in so many different ways, but let's say you're coming over to my house for dinner and you're supposed to be there at 6 and you're not there at 6. Now I can get crazy, regret that I invited you, be annoyed and so on, or I can do something. And so let's say I start writing, get this great idea. And you come in a half hour late, an hour late, what I'm going to do is thank you. Because if you had been there, I wouldn't have had that great idea, which might turn out not to be so great, what have you. All right. So our experience of this world is not foisted upon us. We can choose how we want to be. When you're mindless, you understand a single understanding of events. And that's why we have good and bad, right? And that if something is good, you have to kill yourself to get it. If it's bad, you have to get out of its way. When you recognize that it is neither good nor bad, it all depends on how you frame it, then you can— we can go back to regrets, that whatever happened, there's no reason to regret it. You make it work for yourself. There's always a way. An example that I used in The Mindful Body, and I'm not, when I'm gonna tell you this, suggesting that people should look forward to their houses burning down, but nevertheless, I had this major fire that destroyed about 80% of what I owned. That's pretty bad, right? So it would seem. And I'm not for a moment suggesting, Aidan, that when that happened, I said, oh, of course I was stressed and upset. However, because of that event, I had to go to the Charles Hotel. I had to go to a hotel. I went to the Charles Hotel and I was a sight to be seen walking through a lobby with my two little dogs and there every day because I didn't have a house any longer. And then it was Christmas Eve and I went out and when I came back to the hotel, my room was full of gifts. No, not from the hotel manager or the CEO or any of the big shots, but from whom we might call the little people, the wonderful people, the people who park my car, the chambermaids, the waiters, waitresses. They had filled my room with gifts. I can't tell you how touched I was by this. And for years, I couldn't tell the story without crying. Now, I barely remem— I only remember one thing that I lost in that fire. But all I remember every Christmas is what I see as the basic goodness of people. And so the, the pleasure far exceeded whatever pain. And what I lost was fun too. I was going to be teaching a big course. And my notes all burned. Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? And I couldn't impose on my colleagues, and the course is going to happen very soon. We can't just cancel it and so on, that nobody else could teach it. So I decided to teach it. So what was I going to do? And I thought about it. I got in touch with a student who had taken the class the year before that got an A, and I borrowed her notes. And so it was like a game of telephone. And because it was all lively for me, rather than saying the same things over and over again, even though when I began the course, I apologized to everybody up front, it turned out to be one of the best classes I had ever taught. We don't know. Anyway, so back to regrets for just a minute. If you know why you're doing what you're doing, then you're not likely to regret not doing something else. So let's say, for example, that there's a party to go to and I wanted to go to it, but I'm really, I'm just too tired. Some days you just feel all I want to do is stay home by myself, relax, watch television, read, whatever it is I want to do. All right. Now, if I'm aware that I'm choosing not to go to the party because I need this time alone, then I find out there was something miraculous that happened. I don't know what would be miraculous, but let's say Oh, I don't know, 3 ex-presidents walked in the room or somebody was handing out $10,000 to everybody, whatever it is where you say, oh my gosh, how could I have missed this? I would know why I missed it. And it just would not have the same effect on me. If you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, then you can immediately see, oh my goodness, look what I lost, how I lost out. So I gained from that night and that awareness made it so I wasn't going to do to have any regrets.

Beautiful. Beautiful. That's a wonderful way to live. I was wondering, did you ever hear Alan Watts's story of the Chinese farmer?

No.

Can I play it for you? It's only a short little story. I think you'll enjoy it.

Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away, and all the neighbors came around to commiserate that evening. So sorry to hear your horse has run away. That's too bad. And he said, maybe. The next day the horse came back bringing 7 wild horses with her. And everybody came around in the evening and said, oh, isn't that lucky? What a great turn of events. You've now got 8 horses. And he said, maybe. The next day his son tried to break one of these horses and ride it and was thrown and broke his leg. And they all said, oh dear, that's too bad. And he said, maybe. The following day, the conscription officers came around to recruit, to force people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the people came around and said, isn't that great? And he said, maybe. You see, that was the attitude of not thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage. Because you don't really know. The fact that you might get a letter from a solicitor, I mean from a law office tomorrow, saying that some distant relative of yours has left you a million dollars, it might be something you would feel very, very happy about, but the disasters that it could lead to are unbelievable. Distant relative who put up a trust fund. Conventionally, what was it? Uh, so, uh, you never really know whether something is fortunate or misfortunate. So there are many, many versions of this, but the important point of it is that we can't predict that things are always changing and it all depends on the view you take. So. It's not just that anything you experience is only temporary, whatever your experience is, but that experience itself is under your control. One of the things that I talk about that I don't think people are aware of or readily accept is that emotions are choices. You made me so angry. It killed whatever. Nothing is making you anything. And therapists talk about this a lot. That once you understand another point, it makes it much easier to choose the right way to respond to a situation, the comforting way. I've been doing research for 45 years and people sometimes say, what's the most important finding? But this is the most important to me. Behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, the person doing the behavior, or else they wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be nasty, forgetful, and obnoxious. Okay, so when we're calling them by these names, what's actually going on? And so what happens is that if you say to yourself, from that other person, my spouse, my friend, my boss, my employee's perspective, why might they have done what they've done? You're always going to find a reason. That then is calming to you. So let's say, for example, I'm very gullible. I really am. And it can get on your nerves. Okay, now if you said to yourself, rather than I do something and I'm gullible, oh God, and you're off and running being annoyed at me. You said to yourself, what's another way of understanding being gullible? And you'd come up with trusting. It's the other side. Every behavior. I'm impulsive. That means I'm spontaneous. I'm consistent. That means I'm boring. I'm inconsistent. That means I'm flexible. And so on. Everything can be understood in a positive or negative way. Nobody intends their behavior to appear negative. And so we're, we're misunderstanding people and being frustrated when we needn't be. We did this study forever ago. We gave people about, I don't remember, it's been so long, 100, 200, 300 behavior descriptions. And a very simple instruction. Check off those things that you keep trying to change about yourself, but have difficulty changing. So no matter what I do, I can't stop being gullible. Check that. I can't stop being impulsive. Now you turn the page over and in a mixed up order are the positive versions of these behaviors. Now the instruction is check those things you really value about yourself. And for me, my spontaneity and my being trusting. As long as I value being trusting, I'm going to be gullible. As long as I value being spontaneous, I'm going to be impulsive. What this means is that if I want to change my behavior, I have to change it from the perspective that was operative going forward, not looking back. I can say, ah, damn it, I can't stand being so gullible. And I try to change, I'm going to keep failing. But if I recognize it was motivated in this positive way, all I have to do is say, stop being trusting. I don't want to stop being trusting. And my guess is if you saw my behavior like that, you wouldn't want to change me either. And you can see how this very simple mindful activity is enormously helpful for our self-esteem, for our relationships. And so on. So what, when people are mindless, they take a single understanding of events. Any event can be understood in multiple ways.

Speaking of the multiple ways, this is a beautiful segue for your work on mindful learning. And you say in chapter 3 of this book that there are pressures against seeing every student as smart in some way.

Yeah, this drives me crazy. I was on some podcast and we were talking for some reason about learning disabilities. And it occurred to me that if you take a person who's dyslexic and you give them a page to read, a page, I don't know, has 200, 250 words on it. At most, the person is going to misread 3 words. That means they got over 98% correct. Why do we highlight the few errors? All right. And if we recognize that we were mostly right, then it'd be easier to look at. If I go back to tennis, if I thought there's nothing I can do, every time I swing, I miss, it's going to be very hard for me to do anything but walk away and say, I don't want to play this game. It's too hard for me. But if I see everything is okay except my, my first serve, so it's one little thing, then I can fix it. So with the memory. If people actually paid attention to the particular words they forgot, why those words and not the others, they may very well find a solution. When people give exams to, from Harvard to whatever the other end of the spectrum is, the exams are typically given to find out what the student doesn't know. And I take issue with that. I think I wrote a little song for my grandkids. To me, again, it's important. I'm not going to sing it for you, but I should.

You mentioned it in the book and it was actually something I was going to ask you to do. So please do.

Okay. I'm not going to say it again. I'm going to say it.

Okay.

But if everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something. Everyone can do something else. And the way our world is organized is basically around a normal distribution. So it's upside down U. If you look at the normal distribution, which is the way we describe Beauty, talent, everything. There's some people who can't do it at all. They're the losers. Most people in the middle, and then you have the people on the other end. Wow. And what happens is we put ourselves on this continuum and think that's where we have to be. I don't, because I say, who decided the criteria? And you change the criteria, you change who's winning. In some sense. And so I had this experience. I, I don't know if I talked about it in the book or not, but so here I am, a winner, right? I teach at the world's best university. I'm a very senior member at that university. Um, I've won Genius Award, distinguished. Okay, so yay me, right? So I'm talking to, uh, somebody who's at our house. He is going, a very large truck of furniture is going to be delivered and be put in the basement. I see the size of the truck. It's open. I see the amount. I said, there's no way that all of that is going to fit in this room. He, who sees himself as a loser, he's missing most of his teeth. He never got a formal education. He then unpacks the truck so that every item is accessible. It was amazing. So here I am, the genius who couldn't, said it couldn't be done. And to me, it just, it strikes me, it's just so unfair. It's not, it's good that I feel that I can do most things. It's motivating. But to have anybody think that they can't without, and it's okay. The way I start this video when I have my Harvard student singing this little song is by saying that I can't sing. Actually, a friend of mine says, when I say I can't carry a tune, she says, yes, you can, just not very far. Okay. So I can't sing, but I can do a lot of other things and I enjoy singing. So why shouldn't I sing? And that's the case for everybody. And our system of education, the way we bring children up, buys into this notion of here's the criteria and sorry, kid, you just don't make it. And that's sad. When I was young and I would give a lecture, I'd go away. And the first thing I do is I always go into the room to see where I'm going to be like, and then I rearrange the furniture. Because for me, I, at that time when I was young, I knew that if I'm here and the audience is all the way there, it's going to make me nervous. So I move the things up, I move the podium down. Most people wouldn't think. Now, if you said to somebody, can you move the furniture? Everyone would say yes. But I think, but most people just take what's given as if it makes sense for all of us across time. And as a result, I think. Leads us to be less effective and as a result of that, less happy than we might otherwise be.

I love that you said that. We have forthcoming guests on the show, Howard Gardner and his multiple intelligences. And I think that you talk about that in this book as well, that it's almost like a waterbed effect that if somebody is not good at this thing, they're really good at that thing. And you mentioned this, for example, with smell and blindness.

Yeah. And the thing that bothers me is that we have people who are called super smellers. We have other people called super tasters, super memorizers, super whatevers. As soon as you add that category, we're saying the rest of us can't get there, so you don't even try. And again, I think all of this can be changed.

You, you were saying this as well. There was a beautiful saying I put, I actually put it into ChatGPT to get an interpretation of what it meant. But what you said basically was when you put on the glasses or the lenses, regardless of whether you need them or not, you don't know whether you don't need them or not.

Yeah. And what happens is that you're training. I think that when eyeglasses were first invented, it was supposed to be temporary. Sort of like if you have trouble going to the bathroom and you take a laxative, and that's fine, but not if every day you're taking the laxative because you're teaching your body to depend on it. And in the same way, I think people are teaching their eyes to depend on the glasses. So I had this wild experience. I used to wear a contact lens in one eye, one reading, one for distance. And one night I come back from the office and I'm trying to get ready for bed. So I take the lens out of my eye and I can't get it out. I'm killing myself. And then I realized I never put it in. And my vision was fine all day. And so what happens, and you know that a lot of this book, The Mindful Body, is about our health and the control, the enormous control we have over our health, is I talk about medical numbers. You know that I used to do this thing, I'd give a talk and I'd say, does anybody know their cholesterol level? And somebody's so proud of themselves and I would say, okay, so what is your cholesterol? And they'd give it. And I'd say, that's great. And when was the last time you measured that? They say, oh, 5 months ago. I say, oh, and you haven't eaten or exercised since. And if people don't laugh, then I say, you'll die a healthy man. The point being that everything is changing. The medical world can't be on top of this. There's no way to follow each of these with the repeated measures. So just think about the eye chart. You go into a doctor's office and you're shown the Snelling eye chart. And so here we have letters that make no sense, only in black and white, and the letters get smaller and smaller. And this is one point in your life, in your day, in your week or month. And whatever that number is, you think that's the way you see it. But our vision changes in the course of it. Our vision is different if you're looking at something familiar versus unfamiliar. When I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign very far away. If I see you and I don't want to see you, I also can see you very far away, right? For many people, their vision is better at certain times of the day. For me, it's better in the morning. I tend to be a morning person. So around 4 o'clock, my vision is going. So that doesn't mean I need glasses. It may mean, you know, I need a rest, a nap, which I don't take, or an energy bar. And this is funny also, Aidan, I think, because we used to call them candy bars. And you couldn't have a candy bar, but you could have, and you can't have a piece of cake, but you could have a muffin, which is just cake shaped as a muffin anyway.

Or put protein in it. It's a protein bar, right?

Exactly. Yeah. I'm sure there's some difference, but not enough to make it so you feel guilty eating the candy bar and virtuous eating the energy bar. At any rate, everything varies and because of our mindlessness, we tend to hold things still. Everything depends on context, but again, we act as if there are absolutes. Many years ago, I was at a horse event, and this man asked me if I'd watch his horse because he wants to get his hot dog a hot dog. I'm Yale-Harvard all the way through. This is outrageous. It's silly. Horses don't eat meat. And I'm trying not to be smug, and I say, sure, I'll watch your horse. He goes, gets the hot dog, he comes back, and the horse ate it. Everything I thought I knew could be wrong. That what we don't realize is so much of our information comes from science and science are experiments that are done where the experiment can only give you a probability. The, there's no science that can say all horses don't eat meat. It would say these horses on these, on this moment. With the amount of meat mixed with green or whatever, 80% of them didn't eat. That's translated as horses don't eat. As soon as, and we're, we're told about chronic illnesses, there's nothing we can do for ourselves. All that really means is that the medical world hasn't come up with a solution. There are always things we can do. And so with the vision and chronic illnesses, I proposed in The Mindful Body the attention to symptom variability. This is just a code word for being mindful, noticing change. That's what being mindful is. All right. Now, when you're given a diagnosis of a chronic illness, most people assume the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing only moves in one direction. When the stock market is being gloriously rewarding, it's not going up in a straight line. It goes up a little, then it goes down a little bit, goes up more, and so on. All right. And it's the same thing with our symptoms. Sometimes they're a little better, sometimes they're a little worse. And we don't take advantage of that variability and ask ourselves why. Why is it now better or worse? And in doing so, we may actually be able to control illnesses that are considered uncontrollable by the medical world. So we did this. We, we call people periodically. How is the symptom now, Aiden? Is it better or worse than the last time we spoke? And why. Right now, 4 things happen when we do this. The first is when people have a chronic illness, they feel that they have no control over their, their health. So now you start to feel maybe you do have control. Second, as soon as you're now noticing that sometimes it's better, you feel good because you thought it was maximally awful all the time. Third, that when you look for why is it better now than it was, or even worse, than it was the last time, you begin a mindful search. And I have years and years of research showing that mindfulness is good for our health and tends to lead to a longer life. So it's not an immaterial thing. So you're trying to find a solution for whatever it is. When you're mindful, the neurons are firing, and in some sense, your whole being is getting uplifted. Fourth, or whatever number I'm up to, is that I think you're much more likely to find a cure if you're looking for one than if you're not. So we did this now with biggies, with Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, a host of things. And in each case, we get an enormous, a significant reduction in symptoms. I came up with this because for me, the placebo is the strongest medication out there.

I'm going to try and tie this together, some of the stuff you've told us. So that what we said about children and the bell curve.

All of it is, all of it is talking about the enormous effect of our expectations on our behavior and in our lives.

And I was thinking it's the internal talk as well, or the programming that we've had from society. And you mentioned, for example, the Pygmalion effect, but the Pygmalion effect I'd love you to share that, but then how that goes across everything in life, really.

Yeah. Yeah. The Pygmalion effect was a wonderful study that Rosenthal and Jacobson did many years ago. What they did was they went into a school and they gave a bogus test to these elementary school students and randomly picked out a handful of them and told the teachers that these were diamonds in the rough. But these kids were extraordinary. Now they were no different from the other kids. It was a random selection. They come back at the end of the year and these children are now flourishing. Because imagine a school situation where you say something, if I think you're an idiot, then I barely let you finish the sentence and then I go on. If I think you're a genius, oh, you mean, and then I reinterpret it and so on. And as I'm doing this, the whole class and you especially are learning more. Getting more confident, and so on. So the Pygmalion effect is a very clear and powerful demonstration of the importance of our expectations. Now, in the medical world, the analogy is to placebos, right? So you take the pill, that's just a sugar pill, or to be a placebo means it's inert. Yet because you now think it's going to make you better, magically, it makes you better. And my whole life's work in part has been to try— if you think of the placebo, the pill isn't doing it, so you're making yourself better. And my life's work has been how to give this control to us more directly, where we don't need to get pills involved, doctors giving it to us, so on and so forth. And this attention to variability Goes a long way. That's the attention to variability that I just mentioned to you also explains the vision that you say you're wearing glasses, you put them on because you think you always need them. That's what you expect. So you don't get to see and you're training your eyes to need them. And if you didn't wear them and then saw when you need them, put them on, and then you didn't need them on, you took them off and so on. You'd find the times that you needed, and an example I gave before, 3 o'clock. I'm really spent. That's when I need to put my glasses on to read clearly. Then I have my alternative energy bar, candy bar, or a nap.

This thing I keep coming back to from your work is if you don't use it, you lose it. Then add that to expectation that, oh, it's just because of my age and that self-talk, you're basically Pygmalion and affecting yourself.

Oh yeah. Our expectations determine everything. Everything, you know, that if you expect that there's no cure, you're not going to come to see a cure. If you expect you're going to fail, you overlook successes, take a big crunch out of your motivation, because if you're no good, why over time, why would you keep doing it? And our expectations are driven by even by labels. So a study I did forever ago. We took, we had an interview that we videotaped between two people. We called one person on the interview either a job applicant, so it looked like it was a job interview, or we called him a patient. Now, when we called him a patient and we showed the video to therapists, when we saw him, called him a patient, they saw him as sick. He had hidden this, that problem, and the other. When we called him a job applicant, They found a different way of understanding each of those behaviors. And we can go back to what we were saying before, that if you have the expectation that I'm going to be gullible, you're going to lose patience with me. You're going to notice things, then you're gonna put in that category being gullible, even if they didn't really fit. And you're going to overlook the alternative, which is to see me as trusting.

To link that again, to keep it on children, you did an amazing study with autistic children, and again, The lesson for this is beyond being mindful with children. It even goes into the workplace, that leadership being mindful or doctors being mindful can be so impactful on the people around them.

What we did with autistic children, people on the spectrum, kids on the spectrum, if you recognize, as with the fire example that I gave you, everything can be understood in multiple ways. There are strong advantages that these kids have. That we're overlooking. As I said, with the kids with learning disabilities of dyslexia, turns out to remember most of us are mindless. Most of the time we think we know, but the kid who's dyslexic, not sure. And if they're not sure, they can't let themselves behave like robots. And so we find people who are dyslexic are more creative. It's a very big upside. And I think that's the first thing we have to do when we give somebody a condition is to see what is the advantage. So kids who are on the spectrum are often hypersensitive to other people, other people's consciousness, so to speak. Now, if most people are mindless and they're picking this mindlessness up, it's going to be very off-putting. And we all have experience like that. The culture has the expression, the light's on, but nobody's home. When you're talking to somebody. They're just not there. It's, it's hard to take the interaction seriously and you want to get out of it as quickly as you can. Right? So imagine that for kids who are autistic, perhaps this is on turbo. They're seeing this much more frequently than you are. So what we did was to have the people that they're interacting with be either mindful or mindless. And lots of the problem goes away when they're interacting with people who are mindful. I'm not suggesting that that's all that's going on with kids who are diagnosed with this. Simply that we need to open up our understanding. We have such a clear sense of what's a good way to be, who's able to achieve that. And all of these were just decisions that somebody made at some time that I think, and most of them need to be rethought. Again, all of us. Can change not just what we're doing, everything around us to make it meet our needs. But you're not going to do it if you take what is as if it's handed down from the heavens. If you ask people, could you change these things? Everybody's gonna say yes, but they don't think to change it. That's what being mindless is. It doesn't occur to you. What we can do is recognize that the rules were made by some people to serve their purposes. And the more different you are from them, the more you need to recognize it.

Ellen, one of the things you talk about later on in the book is a beautiful concept called mindful contagion. And here you even talk about as a salesperson, for example, or even as an executive coach, it's a part of what I do. The more mindful you are, the better the results you're going to have. And the more the other person is going to respond to that. I'd love you to share this concept.

Okay, there's the example that you gave that sort of makes intuitive sense. And, and I have those studies, but then I have the woo-woo that I had to fight with the publishers to include. And for fear that all the other real strong, reliable science doesn't get thrown out if you don't believe it. So let me unpack this. So if you are with somebody who is mindful, it's relaxing for you because you know you're both in the present. When you're with somebody who's mindful, all the subtle cues tell you that they're not gonna be judgmental. Everything about it is supportive for you. And so we find when you're with people, whether you're autistic or a superstar, your performance is going to be better when you're in the presence of mindful people. Now then, we did this study. There's so many studies in this book, but this one was with people who are heavy drinkers. So remember, I believe that whatever seeming problem you have, there's another way to look at it. And I think that many people who are heavy drinkers, like the autistic child, are super sensitive to the cues out there. Again, since most people are mindless, it's uncomfortable, and if drinking reduces that discomfort, it's not irrational. So what we do is we get people who are heavy drinkers to, for an experiment in wine tasting. Okay. So they come, we always give lots of tests and what have you, and now they're told, you can drink as much as you need to discern which of these wines you like better than the other and why and so on. And the experimenter is mindless or mindful. When the experimenter is mindful, people drink less. So if you are picking up something that's making you uncomfortable and you don't know how to call it, you think it's yourself, you want that feeling to go away. And that feeling is not there when you're with people who are mindful. Woo-woo studies on contagion, and just give an example of one of them. This is really out there. Okay. So that if we give people an index card to read, that people, I won't give it away, but that people virtually always misread. Now, when you're standing next to somebody who is mindful, you read it correctly. There, there's something in the air. We did a study where we had people met. Have you traveled in Europe.

Loads. Yeah.

It used to be the, the feeling when you went into these large cathedrals that there was a presence there and it was probably just the architecture, but who knows? But that's the feeling I'm trying to replicate here where we have people meditating and then they leave the room. So you have no idea that anyone was there. Now we bring the research participants in and we give them all sorts of cognitive tests. Versus we bring the participants in and there weren't the meditators there. When the meditators are there, they outperform the other group. Something in the air. And we are replicating that now.

I love that study. You know, The Hidden Messages of Water, that book came to mind that it's energy as well.

To, well, if you think about it, you know, so if you're trying to make your organization more mindful, You don't need to teach each and every person to elevate the whole corporation. And I don't know exactly what the number is, but there you go.

And you, like, I thought about that from even we've all met people and we, you go, didn't something I don't like about that person, or you walk into an office and you can feel the culture from that office, whether it's good or bad. No.

So I had that at Harvard. So I've been at Harvard for 46 years, I mean, since I was a little girl. And it was almost all men. All the tenured people in the department were men, for example. And when you're in the middle of science, like a fish doesn't recognize water, you're surrounded by it. And then I had to go over to Radcliffe for something, and which was mostly women. The place just felt different. And it's interesting because I hadn't thought about that until you just brought it up. So thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I was saying to Ellen before we came on air, you're like this star creator. You're like, like the record producer that creates all these stars. Many, many of your students have gone on to become stars. And one of the studies you mentioned in the book, I loved the debilitating mindset of deterioration with age. So this is linked to the counterclockwise, but this was your, then she was your student and then she wrote her own book. Rebecca Levi.

Yeah. Yeah. What people presume is that as you get older, you just fall apart. And if you see yourself as falling apart, you don't do anything to change it. But much of the reason that this happens has nothing to do with necessary consequences of aging. It's all because of the mindsets we bought into. In the simplest way, let's say that you and I both hurt our wrists. How old are you, Aidan?

47.

47. Okay. So at 47, your wrist is not supposed to be— the game isn't over for you. I'm 76. Okay. So now if I believe that as you get older—

You look wonderful. You're obviously reading your own medicine.

That I believe that— so let's say if I had believed as you get older, you fall apart. So when my wrist hurts, I don't do anything about it because after all, it's supposed to fall apart. And if I don't do anything about it, it's going to get worse and worse. You are not old, so you believe you're supposed to do something and you do it. And then at the end of this, it would be foolish to conclude that the difference in our risk is literally because of our age. It's because of our mindsets about our age. Now, a lot of the people believe that as you get older, you're necessarily going to have memory problems. And most of us do. And let me just say as a side thing for people, don't worry about it. The best thing to do is to recognize that people think you forgot what you never knew. Okay, so, but that aside, that there are many reasons that we see ourselves as forgetting that are independent of actually forgetting. What am I trying to say? So when I was, I don't know, let's say 25, 30 years old and I'm an up and coming, and I'm meeting people, really important that you learn their names. At this point now, Aidan, in all honesty, your name is written on the screen here. And, and that's why I know your name because otherwise I don't care. You're lovely and now we're friends because we've talked several times, but let's say it's the first time we're meeting. I just don't care about many of the things that I cared about when I was younger. So now let's say somebody afterwards says to me, when I'm 30, what was his name? I'm going to know it was Aidan because I needed to know it because Aidan may have some influence on my career, my life. Now somebody says to me, who was that per— I don't know. And then I worry that I forgot, but that's the mistake. I didn't forget. I didn't learn it in the first place. Right.

Brilliant.

And I just, I just had this idea the other day that we don't all forget this illusion of forgetting equally. And that I think those people who are better listeners, not I, I'm a good talker. Those people who are better listeners are hearing the names, whatever the name of the movie, whatever thing it is. So later we'll remember it. And again, I don't, if I'm gonna watch the movie, it, it's, I, I look for a recommendation. I see is it streaming? Where? And I put it on. The name is inconsequential to me. I'm not suggesting it should be, but it is. So when you ask me, well, God sakes, you just spent 2 hours. What did you, I don't know. And again, it's because of these other reasons that I don't know, having nothing to do with memory. So one of the things that's fun is I reflect on my Harvard students. So these are the best of the best, right? I give an exam. They don't all get 100. In fact, nobody gets 100. Why? Because they forgot. So the young are not infrequently forgetful. They just don't worry about it.

I love that. And there's another study then you mentioned, and maybe we'll mention this.

Memory study with Becky.

Yeah. With Pearl Beck, you did this study with on people, and this was the constantly seeing the world anew. And you pondered, I wonder, do they live longer?

People have the mindset, not everybody, but most in this country, as you get older, your memory is going to get worse. In China, they don't have this mindset. And there are populations like the deaf who have enough to deal with. They don't buy into that. So we did a study where we looked at young and old in the normal, we'll call this now, in the United States. Young and old deaf, young and old Chinese. And what you find is the memory problems are just for those of us who bought into the stereotype. Yeah, so that was interesting. The one with Pearl Beck, this was fun for me because this was a very early instance where I'm making a suggestion. She says, no, it's not going to work. And I, let's just do it, right? Because if we knew for sure it was going to work, why would we bother? And, but her version, if she didn't voice this, was that she was sure it didn't, wasn't going to work. So why bother? Anyway, we run it and it works. It worked. It was a takeoff on my experience during the summer where during the summer, you know, because we have summers off that I don't know if it's Monday, Thursday, I just don't know what day it is. I know certain days because something happened. I play tennis, let's say every Tuesday at 12 o'clock. 'clock, whatever it is. And so it seemed to me that no matter how old you are, you tend not to remember if you don't have any need to remember. Right? And so we did a study where we created a need to remember, and then people, lo and behold, this is in nursing homes, remembered. And then we went back and that mental activity led to them living longer, which is all reinterpreted into the mindfulness framework and replicated with several other studies that when you're more mindful, the neurons are firing. And it's literally and figuratively enlivening. It's what you do when you're feeling your best. I don't know why people want to learn things so well that they don't have to think about it. They think to make it second nature. And whenever you tell that to yourself, let a little bell go off and say that you're doing it mindlessly. If you're doing it mindlessly, if you're not going to show off, why, why bother being there?

One of the things I thought was so useful for people working in organizations was when you talked about a caregiver. So caregivers mindlessly looking after, maybe it's a family member and they're not seeing them as getting better, as you say, attention to variability, but it actually can help them when they do. And I wanted to say to you, I used this this week in my gym set. So I go to the gym every, every day. And I said, I'm going to do what Ellen said, I'm going to be mindful and pay attention to the muscle I'm working even more than ever before. And I'm like, lo and behold, kind of gone. I lifted a little bit heavier this week as a result of that. I do, I massively believe in this.

Yeah, no, I think we have enough evidence, but it's very interesting about caregivers. In fact, now since COVID it's all become much more dramatic. So people recognize the degree of burnout that medical people experience. And you get the burnout when you think you know, and you just keep giving, giving, and giving. And people are, you know, if you see Mrs. Smith and you're mindlessly thinking Mrs. Smith is the same as she was yesterday and you knew her completely then, interacting with Mrs. Smith is not such fun. But we find that when we make the caregivers more mindless, So they're noticing things about Mrs. Smith. First, Mrs. Smith feels cared for and seen, and then is giving more back to the doctor, nurse, whomever. And both of them end up more engaged and healthier. The book started as a memoir. So there are lots of personal stories there that I use to explain whatever the psychological phenomenon is. But I remember when my mother, who was dying of breast cancer, Needed to be put on a gurney to go to get x-rayed, whatever tool they were using at the time. And I was there, a PhD, and a friend was there with me, also a PhD, loving, caring about my mother. Neither of us were able to wheel the gurney. Some 17-year-old kid had to do it because of insurance concerns. So I, I think that we've let things get out of hand. And we need to take back the human part of all aspects of healthcare, education, industry, that people— this may seem simple-minded, but I genuinely believe it— that in some way, life is a people game. And as long as you're attending to the people around you, you're likely to succeed. It's when you think those rules that you've learned mindlessly, the procedures that you've learned mindlessly are going to carry the day, whether it's in medicine, education, or industry, there's a fair amount of evidence that you're not going to get the outcomes you want where just a little tender loving care gets you much further.

And for yourself as well. That's the thing about this book. I highly recommend it for yourself because just like Ellen said there, when you're looking after somebody and then you're getting feedback that they're getting better, or you're paying attention to that variability, you're going to feel more confident about it. So you're going to lean in even more and go, this is actually working. So that becomes such an important point. Ellen, I have a final quote that I wanted to share. I loved— I pulled a little excerpt from the book just to share the beautiful writing that's peppered throughout the book. But maybe I thought you might want to share for our audience, which is mainly people who are working in transformation and change, what you've seen perhaps as the most successful way to drive change when somebody's stuck in the mindset of yesterday's way of doing things, how do you change and help them navigate the future?

I think all we have to do is wake up. Most of us are sealed in unlived lives and we're oblivious to it. Even about people who want to extend their lives, I think they spend too much time worrying about what food to eat, what exercise to do, all of these things to live longer. And that I suggest rather than worry about adding more years to your life, you want to add more life to your years. And at any age, and again, if you're not going to show up for it, don't do it. This is something that I find sad, but people thought they were making great advances in getting people to look for work-life balance. Now, work-life balance is certainly better than work-life imbalance, but work-life integration is superior to both. And that in, in one of the things that I do stress a lot in the book with example after example, there's some problem to the people who are listening to this. Are going to fix this problem that's here and bring it here. I said, oh no, there's a whole other place that we can go that's better than better. And why do we stop short of that? So sure, with this work-life balance, yeah, it's good to have some fun in your life, but I, people start off accepting that work has to be stressful. Since stress is in our heads, it's not in events. It doesn't have to be stressful. And I enjoy being the same person, whether I'm talking to you, whether I'm playing tennis, teaching my students, writing, no matter, no matter what. I think that people also need to learn. I'm going to throw a few one-liners at you. They need to learn to take what they do seriously, but not take themselves so seriously. Another one that you might share for those of you who are coaches with people who get stressed, and most people do experience stress, is that they should ask themselves, is this a tragedy or an inconvenience? Almost never is it a tragedy. And you might also ask them, think about the last 3 times you felt this way. How did it turn out? Because almost always the things that we worry about never occur. So we can see that we've been successful. We can pause, take a breath. And realize that this thing is not so terrible. You banged the car, you burned the dinner, you didn't get the report in on time. So what? And that's one of the joys of getting older is everything starts to, to just be easier. I think I wrote something a long time ago. You're 2 years old and you scrape your leg and you scream bloody murder as if life is ending. And then you're 6 or 7 in school, 7 or 8, whatever age. And Johnny or Janie doesn't send you a Valentine and you're crushed, you're destroyed, your life will never be the same. And then you're 18 and your face breaks out and oh my God, I can't be seen. That's the end. And it keeps going. And then at some point you realize that all these things were silly. And if you do reflect on that, for me, and I try to teach this to my students, you don't have to wait until you're my age for it to all come together. All you need to do is open up your minds with each of the events, recognize that whatever is can be understood in so many different ways. Why understand it in a way that makes you feel inferior, stressed, and helpless when the other alternative is equally at hand? And when people are teaching us, they tend to teach us these facts where we end up Speaking poorly about ourselves. They teach us horses don't eat meat. One and one is two. All of these things as if they're not contextualized. And so what we have to do when we start to learn something new is bring in that mindfulness, even if we're being taught by an employer or by a teacher or a parent. Mindless. They say, this is the way you hold the tennis racket. Maybe if your hand is 3 inches bigger than mine. I think we should hold it a little differently. So you take all of these absolute rules and you make them more conditional. And that when you do that, then as your hand size changes, or, you know, if you have some burn or whatever on your hand where you don't want to hold that racket the same way as when your hand was feeling fine, you recognize that you have some movement, some possibility, a latitude of acceptance, we can call it. So right now everybody is stuck thinking there's one way to do it. They believe they either know it or they don't know it. If they know it, they're smug and feel superior until they meet somebody who's better at it. When they don't know it, they think that's the end of the game, not that they can learn it. And for me, after all these years, all these books and studies, I still suffer the frustration. It's like, you're on a train or something. It, you're here and it's not like you have to move all the way over there to have all the things you want. It's a tiny change. And if people just make that change, make it slowly, see the effects of opening themselves up, of not seeing things as good or bad, recognizing that their emotions are choices, that we make decisions, but we should do that almost randomly. Rather than spend our time trying to make the right decision, we should spend our time making whatever the choice we choose right. That knowing why we're doing what we're doing, we won't experience regret. There are just so many things. And this plus all of the ways we can have a positive impact on our health. I just hope people read the book so that they can move those, that short distance. To have a happy, healthy life.

I would just say to our audience, read the book, put it into practice. There's no point in keep collecting lots and lots of books and then practicing what's in them. This book has loads of low-lying fruit that actually will change your life. And Ellen, it's been an absolute honor having you on the show. I loved every moment of it. Loved being mindful with you, reading the book mindfully as well. It's been a pleasure joining you, mother of mindfulness and the mother of positive psychology. Ellen Langer, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Aidan.

Brilliant, Ellen. Thanks so much. That was brilliant.

It was fun.

I loved your finale there. It was beautiful.