Use Your Thoughts To Improve Health | Ellen Langer

Ellen Langer, welcome to the show.

Hi, nice to see you, Dan.

Likewise. All right, so I have so many questions for you. The book is called The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. So what does that mean, thinking our way to chronic health?

That means that the control we have over our health is far greater than most people realize and essentially a function of our thoughts. So people speak of a mind and a body as if they're two distinct things, which creates the problem of how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? When you put the two together, and realize it's one thing, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So when you put the mind in a healthy place, so too will the body be there. And the Mindful Body is full of fun research that I've done over the past 45 years to support the idea of unity.

There's a term of art that most people have heard, the mind-body connection. You tweak that to mind-body unity.

Because it's not connected. If it's connected, it means it's two things. And if it's two things, then you have the problem. How do you get from one of these to the other? I mean, to speak of a mind-body connection is one step or five steps better than the way things used to be, where the— because it suggests that the mind has something to do with the body. Way back when, the medical model believed that the only way you were going to get sick was the introduction of an antigen. And I'm sure doctors at that point thought it was nice for people to be happy, but, and also not experience stress, but essentially that was irrelevant to their health. So when you talk about mind-body connection, they're saying, okay, yeah, there's a relationship. I'm saying the relationship is far greater than most people believe. And I have support throughout this book to convince people of that. Work of my own, but also work of other people. You know, I think that placebos are actually our strongest medicine. And placebos support the idea of mind-body unity. You take this pill that's nothing, it's a sugar pill. You think it's something, and then magically you get better. That's perhaps the research that people are most aware of. Interestingly, most people are not aware of research on nocebo effect. So a placebo, you take something that's nothing thinking it's something and it does its magic. A nocebo, you take something that's something, but you think it's nothing and it doesn't have an effect. So, for example, an early study on this was with people who were vomiting and they were given Ipecac. Now, Ipecac is what you give people to make them vomit. So if somebody has just ingested a poison unintentionally, presumably you give them Ipecac, they vomit and And they're fine. People are vomiting and they're told that Ipecac will make you stop vomiting and they stop vomiting. It's very important because people, medicine in general may not work if we don't support it with our mindsets. So an early study we did on the nocebo effect was we took chambermaids and the first question we ask them is how much exercise do you get? Now these people are exercising all day long, but they think exercise is what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired. So we divide them into two groups. And we simply teach one of the groups that their work is exercise. They're told making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym. You know, doing this exercise, whatever, is like washing windows and so on. So now we have two groups, one group that's oblivious to the fact that their work is exercise, the other that now has changed their mind. We make sure there are no differences between the groups on as many measures as we could think of. The group that perceives their work now as exercise isn't working harder. They're not eating differently. Right. Yet we find the simple change of mind resulted in weight loss, a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Now, Okay, so the exercise that they were doing wasn't effective without them believing that it was effective. Very powerful. You know, you go to a doctor and you're given medication and you say, you know, it doesn't work. What the doctor is likely to do is up the dosage. And this work suggests what they should do is teach people to collude in their own health, so to speak. But that was the second study we did on this mind-body unity. The first one is a famous study, Dan. How dare I call one of my own studies famous? That's because if you watch The Simpsons Go to Havana, they talk about the study. And what we did was retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So it was as close as I could on a very low budget, make it like a Hollywood scene from 20 years earlier. They would they would discuss topics from the past as if they were just unfolding. And all of this took place in a week. As a result, their vision improved, their hearing— these are elderly men— vision, hearing, memory, strength, and they look noticeably younger. Now, I don't know about you, but to this day, and that study was run quite some time ago, I've never heard of old people's hearing improve without medical intervention, nor even with medical intervention. So the results were very exciting. Mind and body together, we make the mind young and it shows itself on the body. So I have a host of these studies. I'm not going to— and people will read the book if they're interested. I'll just give you one more. The most recent, I did this with my graduate student, Peter Ungl. So we inflict a wound. Now, we're not status. So the wound is a small wound, but a wound nonetheless. And we have people in front of a clock. For a third of them, unbeknownst to them, 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, it's going real time. The question is, is that healing influenced by that clock? Now, most people think things are going to heal when they heal. But it turns out that that's not the case, that the healing time was the clock time, your perception of the time that passes. So we have lots of very exciting studies, you know, suggesting our ability to cure ourselves and prevent illness in the first place is so much greater than people think. And I do this thing with my Harvard students. I'll ask them, how far is it humanly possible to run? Now, they know a marathon is 26 miles. So they start 28, 30. Somebody else yells out 35. Anyway, somebody eventually says 45 or 50. Everybody groans. It's impossible. Then I turn on a YouTube of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico. And they, as a rule, run over 200 miles without stopping. All right. The difference, you know, I would get exhausted running a mile and a half at this point, but, you know, could get myself to the marathon. To imagine the difference between 26 miles and 200 miles represents, in some sense, in my mind, the difference from where we are to where we can be. If we just change our minds.

I'm trying to figure out where to go because I'm so curious about all of this. Let me ask a, in a friendly way, a kind of skeptical question. I have, just to give you a little bit of background, I spent a lot of time when I was a network news correspondent covering all sorts of shysters. And some of the shysters and con men that I covered were involved in the power of positive thinking or manifestation, you know, basically telling people that you can— you don't need to go to a doctor, you can think your way to curing your breast cancer, which I believe is a very dangerous thing to tell people.

I agree.

So what is the difference between what you're saying? Okay, what's the difference between you and them?

Oh, big differences. It's funny you should ask me this. I've never been approached with this kind of disbelief, but it's all right. Um, first of all, let me say, the snake oil salesmen, uh, part of the reason that they're effective they're effective is because the pains you experience follow a normal distribution. Sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small. And so you get a regression to the mean, which means that now all of a sudden the pain is killing me, so I have to do something about it. I go to this con man and he gives me snake oil and I'm going to actually be better because the natural course of pain is that it will convert to the main, right? So I go ask for help when it's enormous. And if nothing happens, the next time around, it's not going to be as bad. And I attribute the improvement to the snake oil salesman. Another thing to be aware of, Dan, is that sometimes the wrong people may actually give some of the right advice, right? Without knowing why. But I would say the major difference is that all of my work is based on 45 years of research. And with lots of additional work that's out there by other people that supports all of that. Let me give you a fun study that Frank Beach did many years ago. So he took a little boy rat and a little girl rat, and they're going to copulate. And then, as I'm sure you're aware of, a little boy rat at some point is going to be exhausted. He needs a refractory period. If immediately you introduce a new little girl rat, he doesn't need that refractory period. He's ready to go. So we have a sense of things like fatigue is wired in. There's nothing we can do about it. And as I've already shown you with the tarryomora, you know, that there's a great deal we can do. So we had a study where we had people in a sleep lab. They wake up and the clock tells them they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, 2 hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they actually got. And biological and cognitive functions follow. The perceived amount of sleep. Now, you'd have to show me the particular person that is annoying you, and I can tell you what it is he's saying that makes no sense or where he's picked up some of the research. And I've been doing this, as I said, for 45 years. It's out there in the general world. All one needs to do to be persuasive is sprinkle whatever nonsense they're saying with some actual facts. You know, I don't know what to tell you except that I stand by all of this work. The medical world seems to agree because it has gone from the psychology has nothing to do with our health to acknowledging that, yes, it has a great deal to do with our health.

To be clear, I'm actually— I'm not skeptical of you. I'm just trying to figure out how. But I am very skeptical of people who talk about the power of positive thinking and manifestation and And, and so I'm just trying to figure out how do I draw the line? Like, what are the, what's the difference in the actionable advice? So for example, the snake oil salesman to whom I'm referring will just, just say, look, it's all about making sure you think positively at every step of the way, which is a very hard thing to do. And what's the difference between that advice and what you would say we should do when we're trying to use the power of our mind to impact our health?

The first thing is, I'm considered the mother of positive psychology, but not because I'm telling everybody to be positive. My message to everybody first is to be mindful. Now, what I mean by mindful has nothing to do with meditation. It's the very simple process of actively noticing new things. And when you actively notice new things, that puts you in the present, right? And that gives you choices and all sorts of things that our mindlessness robs us of. Now, when you're mindful and you have many explanations for any event and explanation A and B get you crazy, explanation C makes you feel good. Chances are you would lean towards the one that's positive. But, you know, it's not so much if you see the world as positive and negative or even just positive, that makes real the negative. You know, the concept of tall suggests short, that there are these dimensions that matter. And I don't think that we should try to be positive. I think that what we should do as much as we can is to get rid of the mindlessness that controls our lives. My research suggests that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. So, Dan, let me— I'm going to ask you something. How much is 1 1? This is the thing everybody thinks they know. How much is it?

How much is 1 plus 1? I've never been good at math, but I think it's 2.

Okay. And so much so that you're probably going to disparage me silently, right, for asking such a silly question. But it turns out this thing that we think we know better than anything else is not always 2. If you add 1 wad of chewing gum plus 1 wad of chewing gum, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. And Somebody who heard me on some podcast speaking sent me something that said, if you add one pizza and put on top of it one pizza, you have two pieces. However, if you have one lasagna and you add on top of it another lasagna, one plus one is one. It's just a bigger lasagna. All right. So in the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal two as a more often as it does. Not only that, but mathematicians like yourself, Dan, probably know that one plus one equals two if you're using a base 10 number system. If you're using a base 2 number system, 1 plus 1 is written as 10. All right. So what does all this mean? This means that the things we think we know, maybe we don't know them. Now, when you know you don't know, you tune in, right? You know, if you knew what I was going to say next, why would you listen to me? And what I'm telling people is that uncertainty is the rule. It's not the exception. Everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And so when you think you know, it's because you're confusing the stability of your mindset with the stability of the underlying phenomena. Things are changing. You want to hold them still in your head, do so. But they're changing. So I'm at a horse event and then we'll go to news stories because I've told these before. But I'm at a horse event. This man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog? Well, I'm Harvard, Yale all the way through. I'm the A-plus student you hated in school. I know nobody knows better. Horses don't eat meat. He comes back with the hot dog. He gives it to the horse and the horse ate it. At that moment, I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. All right. Now, what people don't realize is that science only gives us probabilities. It says, if you were to do this exact same study again, which you can never do exactly the same study, but if you were to do exactly the same thing again, you're likely to get these findings. But the world out, you know, parents, teachers, periodicals report these probabilities as absolutes. If you know something absolutely, you don't pay any attention to it. All right. So there are two ways to become mindful as I study it. One is bottom up, as I just said, take things you think you know and notice new things about them. And then you'll see you didn't know it as well as you thought. Then your attention will naturally go to them. Or top down, which is to accept that everything is changing. So uncertainty is a myth. And that means everything then is new. Now, the reason people have so much difficulty accepting uncertainty is because they think other people do know. And I know I don't know, but you seem to know. So I'm going to pretend I know or I'm going to avoid the situation. I'm here to free everybody. Nobody knows. And so the posture, I think, that is most successful in life is to be confident. But uncertain. And I think that when, you know, if you were going to come visit me, you've never been to my house, you wouldn't have to practice anything. You'd walk in and you'd notice things. You'd say, oh, did she do those paintings? What is that? You know, and all that noticing would enable you or be the essence of you being engaged. So as you're actively noticing new things, the neurons are firing. And the 45 years of research has shown me that that's literally and figuratively enlivening. So in very early studies, we took elderly people, we gave them instructions in this mindfulness, active noticing, and they did. They lived longer. We have that in a few studies. Not only that, but that when you're actively noticing, you're in the present. And, you know, and people out there, it's very sweet. They say be in the moment, but that's an empty instruction. Why? Because when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And most of the time we're just not there and we're oblivious to it. And being there is fun. It's what you're doing when you're having fun rather than being more or less like a robot where the past is dictating the present. You know, when you're actively noticing, you understand things can be understood in many ways. You have all sorts of choices. Your behavior tends to be rule and routine guided rather than those rules and routines determining everything you do. And what happens is that when you're actively noticing, you seem alive to people. You know, it's the essence of charisma. So it's fun for you. People are going to like you more. You have more control, more ways of understanding any event. And we have other research where that mindfulness leaves its imprint on what you're doing. The products tend to be better. So given that it's so easy, and you know, people think it's hard because they confuse it with thinking. And even thinking has gotten a bad rap. Thinking isn't hard. What's hard is when we are worried that we're not going to get the right answer. People in their spare time away from schools and work do all sorts of puzzles and games that require them to use their minds. For pleasure. Um, anyway, so, um, so where do we go now? You're driving, or am I?

I'm— I don't know if driving. I'm just kind of, uh, uh, um, participating mindfully, let's just say. Um, okay. I want to get back to the impact on health. So let me give you a concrete example. Right before I came to this interview, I was talking to my wife who's having a tough day. She has a, what's called a complex headache syndrome. So she gets awful headaches and it's really terrible. And I, so I walk from that interview into this, from that conversation into this interview and I'm thinking, okay, well what could I advise my wife who's in terrible pain based on what I'm hearing from you?

Well, there are many things. Towards the end of The Mindful Body, I talk about a psychological treatment that we've used successfully for many chronic illnesses. I call it attention to symptom variability. That's just a fancy way of saying being mindful. So when you're mindful, you're noticing change. All right. So when people have whatever illnesses, let's say the headaches, for example, they tend to think that your wife would think she's in pain all the time and big pain all the time. Well, no one is experiencing any symptom all the time. But the moments you're not experiencing it, you're just living. So you're oblivious to the fact that you have that relief. Anyway, what we do is we call people periodically and we simply ask them, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than before? And then the important question is why. All right, so several things happen with this. The first is that when you're diagnosed with a chronic illness, people tend to think that there's nothing they can do about it. And that's wrong. It's just that the medical world hasn't found a solution for them. All right, so now you notice, gee, right now it's a little better than before. So you feel good. Second, You know, and by just engaging in the whole process, you don't feel helpless. So first, you don't feel as helpless. Second, you notice sometimes you are better. Now, when you're looking for why now am I better than before, that starts a mindful search. And that mindfulness itself is good for your health. And finally, I think that you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. Than if you're not. Now, we've done this with people who have Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, stroke. I mean, you know, real, real things. And in each case, we get success. What I wanted to do very early on is once I realized that how powerful placebos were, which was to me such strong evidence that we're doing it ourselves, I wanted to see, is there a way for us to do it ourselves without without involving the medical world. And this is the closest I've come to it. Now, you might say, well, I'm calling your wife or whomever. How is she doing? Everybody has a smartphone these days. Set the smartphone to ring in an hour. Ask yourself, how is the symptom? Is it better or worse than before and why? Then set it to ring in 2 hours and 10 minutes. Just keep varying it over the course of a week, maybe 2 weeks. And the good thing about this is that there's no downside. There are no effects that you might get, you know, with medication or what have you. And I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't see their physicians, but there's often a long wait period then. And the physicians, remember, now we've just determined, don't know because none of us know. All right. They have some good answers, but they can't be sure. And so no matter what, you have to participate actively in your own health care. You know, people don't understand. This is a little confusing, easy, I think, when it's being read, but prediction is an illusion. Now, you can predict to the group, but you can't predict the individual case. And when you're suffering, it's good to know that whatever it is helps lots of people, but you want to know, is it going to help you? So let me give you an example that I've used before. I will give you a million dollars. We're going to go to a Mercedes parking, Mercedes shop. So lots of fancy cars and pick one at random. You can pick the one. And if you turn the key and the engine starts, I'll give you a million dollars. If the engine doesn't start, you give me, let's say, $500,000. People won't take the bet. Because they know, you know, even the best of us make mistakes. Products are not uniformly excellent. We just know that if we did this at a used parking lot, that more of the Mercedes will start than the used cars, but not every single one. You know, Michael Jordan occasionally misses a foul shot. Ellen Langer occasionally makes a foul shot. If we're only going to each shoot one basket, you want to be careful. All right. And so the doctor's information is all about probabilities, not, not what is necessarily going to be good for you.

The advice that you gave that I would give to my wife about paying attention to the symptom variability. It's interesting because you said earlier that your version of mindfulness is different, doesn't require meditation.

Oh no, it has nothing to do with meditation.

Yes, and the way a meditation teacher would tell someone to work with pain is to pay close attention to it and notice its changing nature.

The meditation teacher would tell your wife to meditate, right? And meditation Meditation is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you engage in to result hopefully in post-meditative mindfulness. And, you know, I did some early research on meditation. I'm not anti-meditation, but what I'm talking about is just different. And it's not a practice. It's a way of being that naturally flows from recognizing you don't know. So when your wife says, I'm always in pain, she thinks she knows she's always in pain. If she were mindful, she'd know nothing is always, and she would naturally tune in. But, you know, when the meditation teacher, and I don't think they would do this, but, you know, and say, follow that pain. It's not the same thing because I'm talking about the changes in the pain and when those changes occur. I think it's quite different, but if the same, wonderful. Two ways to get better and probably many more out there, or just take an aspirin.

Say a little bit more about how if, and I agree with you on this, meditation is a way to improve your mindfulness, but you don't believe we absolutely need to meditate in order to be mindful. So what would you recommend that we could do in order to increase our mindfulness quotient?

I've already said two ways. One is top-down, which is hard for most people because the world, everything you learned in school, your parents tells you that you know. You know one and one is two, horses don't eat meat, and whatever other facts you have. But if you were able to accept uncertainty, then you'd approach everything as brand new. Now, the other is to take the things you know. So go home. You think you know your wife. I don't think you know as well as you think you do, and notice 5 new things about her. And you'll see those new things, and that'll be good for you. And she, by the way, will feel seen and more cared for. So it actually improves relationships. So it's bottom-up or top-down. It's not a practice. It's understanding. It's an understanding that the world is in flux, and that it's a false thing to try to control things by holding everything still because everything is actually varying. Our language often holds things still. You know, again, I hope nothing I'm saying suggests that I'm anti-meditation. It's just something different from what I'm talking about, you know, and that for many people that meditation is, you know, is a little woo-woo. And for those people, they can immediately make changes based on what I'm saying. Now, on the other hand, what I'm saying in some ways is so simple that there are some people who are going to go, no, this big problem I have can't be solved by what Ellen Langer says. And, you know, so maybe they should meditate. There are many ways to get to where we want to go.

Based on my experience as a meditator, much of what you're describing is trained through meditation. And I don't think everybody needs to do it in order to get what you're describing.

Well, there are some real differences, Dan. So, you know, so magically, meditators are supposed to become less judgmental. And I don't see how that happens. But in my scheme of things, it's very clear how it happens. Because once you recognize that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it, you change immediately your understanding. So you don't like me because I'm so gullible. But nobody from their perspective is gullible. You don't wake up in the morning and say, today I'm going to be gullible, obnoxious, and clumsy. So when we see people doing these things, what's actually going on? Well, it's because I'm trusting. And now that you know I'm trusting, you're probably not going to want to change me. But if you do want to change me, the way to change me is not to get me to meditate. The way to change me is to get me to stop valuing being trusting. And by the way, I can't bear you because you're so inconsistent. I'm sure your wife has told you. Now, but from your perspective, it's not you're intending to be inconsistent. You're flexible. So it turns out each and every negative description has an equally strong but oppositely balanced alternative. So somebody boring is stable. It goes, I did this study quite a while ago. You might like this. I give people like 200 or 300 behavior descriptions. And I said, check off those things you keep trying to change about yourself and you fail. So for me, I check off impulsive, gullible. I won't tell you the others. Then you turn the sheet of paper over and in a mixed-up in that order are the positive versions of these. And now the task is check those things you really value about yourself. My spontaneity. Am I being trusting? And as long as I value being spontaneous, I'm going to seem impulsive at times. As long as I value being trusting, I'm going to end up gullible. And so much of the time when we're trying to change people, it's because we have a fixed notion and also think that they do these things all the And nobody does anything all the time. So if you're inconsiderate, your wife says to you, I want to— I should ask you to make it more fun. What does she accuse you of, Dan?

What does she accuse me of?

Oh, don't tell me. It doesn't matter. So let's say your wife says you're inconsistent.

Okay.

She's going to pay attention every time you're inconsistent. Yeah, he's done it again. But what she needs to do is notice all the times you're not inconsistent. And then realize that, no, it's not a good thing to have given you that label that holds things still because your behavior is also varying. I think that in general, you have all these people trying to change people. And the only way you're going to successfully change people is if you change what they're doing from the perspective of from which they're engaging it. An example I use is, say, drinking. You have people who are heavy drinkers and, oh my God, you know what you're doing to your liver? Nobody's going to stop drinking because their drinking has nothing to do with their liver. But if you said to people, if I said, and I think I have someplace in this epic tome, a person gets anxious and does X. And that relieves the anxiety. Is it a good thing to do X? And you'd probably say yes. And then we say, well, X is consuming alcohol. So if instead of diminishing people for what they do, we understood the advantages to what they do, then we can provide alternative ways of reaching that same goal. Rather than, you know, you have no control over this drinking or anything else. You know, that We have a study, a wine tasting study that I report in the book where people think it's a wine tasting. We just have heavy drinkers who are participants and they're told to give us the answers about the particular wines. They can drink as much as they want. Now, the experimenter is either mindful or mindless. Okay, so when the experimenter is mindless, they're just repeating numbers to themselves or whatever. They're not noticing anything new. Always in these studies, the mindful is new, the mindless is same old, same old. And so the mindful people are noticing things about the participant and what have you. When you're in the presence of the mindful experimenter, you drink less. All right. So I think that some of this heavy drinking is because people are ultra-sensitive to other people's behavior and they I don't know what to call it. You know, being with people who are mindless is very uncomfortable. For the heavy drinker, I think it might be even more uncomfortable. Well, this is a great asset that they have that many have not been made aware of. This picking up all sorts of social cues to which other people are blind. And once you call it what it is, Then you can find alternative ways of making use of that skill rather than trying to get rid of that. So it's a very profound idea, I think. You know, as you know, having done all this research for so many years, some of the findings are, you know, are big. But this one idea turned out to be more important to me than anything else I've ever written. The idea that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else they wouldn't do And that's what makes you nonjudgmental. Now, meditators are supposed to become nonjudgmental by meditating. And I just, I don't see how that happens. I think that somebody says, you know, I'm really a nasty SOB. Maybe I'll learn how to meditate so I can be a nicer person. And so when they meditate with the goal of being less judgmental, but I don't see how the meditation itself leads to that.

I could venture a theory.

Sure, go on. It's your show.

I don't know if I could say this is true for everybody, but in my own experience doing some meditation, the more you get familiar with how wild your mind is, the more you understand that everybody's got a wild mind, and that can inexorably lead to empathy.

You know, I don't buy it, but I'm happy to do a study where we teach people that everybody has a wild mind and then we'll have them step on your toes and we see how much empathy you have. But, you know, be that as it may, my desire is not in any way to diminish. You know, meditation is very good. I would think that you would have answered and said it's calming. And when you're calm, there's less need You don't need to be evaluative and judgmental in the first place. But calm—

Maybe that too.

Okay. No, that one, not two. But I think that mindfulness as we study it also has a very powerful effect on stress, which, by the way, I believe is the major killer. And I think the world eventually will come to that view. You know, not infrequently you open up, no reason that you would, If you open up medical journals, somebody will show its effect on this disease and somebody else on that disease without generalizing across all. But at the least, everybody now knows stress is bad for you and stress is psychological. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of events. The more mindful you are, the more potential views you have. And, you know, if you have 3 views, you know, you no longer believe that this thing is going to happen. Them. You know, it's interesting because stress requires two things. First, it requires a belief that something's going to happen. Second, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. So to believe that something's going to happen, the more mindful you are, the easier it is. But anyone can say to themselves, what are 3, 5 reasons that it won't happen? So you went from thinking this thing is going to happen to now maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. You immediately feel a little better. But now is the harder part. Part. Let's assume it does happen. How is that actually a good thing? Because people don't realize that outcomes are— they're not good, they're not bad, they're nothing until we frame them. So let's say, for example, right now my internet goes out. I'm not going to panic. I'm going to go have lunch. It's going to be very nice rather than sitting here being hungry. All right. You know, the point is that Shakespeare said, how did Shakespeare say it? Things are neither good nor bad. Life is what we you make it or something like that. Epictetus has said that, you know, it goes all the way back, all the way forward to Ellen Langer, that the way we understand the world determines how we respond to it. The more mindful we are, the more choices we have as to how to understand it. I'll give your listeners something. I have these one-liners and some of my friends find them very useful and put them on their refrigerator. So next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy. Oh my God, the dog ate my homework. I banged the car up. I burned the dinner. I missed the appointment. So what? And so then you immediately become calmer. But the larger point is that stress hurts us physically and stress is psychological. Now, here's where I differ from many people out there, but, you know, You know, if we're around in 50 years, we can see if I'm right. I wanted to do this research right before COVID but I didn't get around to it. I wasn't able to. That if we took 500 people, it doesn't matter how many, who were just told they have cancer, vary the cancers, it doesn't matter either. Now, nobody is going to be happy, you know, with a diagnosis like that. So let's give people 3 weeks. 6 weeks to deal with it, to come to some terms with it. Now, if we measure their level of stress every 3 weeks or every month, I believe— I don't have data yet— I believe that that level of stress will predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, over and above nutrition, and dare I say, over and above treatment. That's how important stress is. Well, if stress is really this killer that I'm suggesting and we control our stress by being more mindful, that's a tool we don't want to pass up. And let me tell you something else. The way the book starts, because this book, The Mindful Body, was at first going to be a memoir. So there are lots of personal stories, some sexy stories like my interactions with Hells Angels, but you'll have to read it to find out about that one. I tell the story about my Well, no, first I'll tell you that I have two pancreas stories, which I'm very proud of because I don't know anybody who has two stories about the pancreas. All right. So I was married, secretly married when I was very young. So I was 19 going on 30. We went to Paris on our honeymoon and we go into this restaurant and I ordered the mixed grill. And on the mixed grill is pancreas. Well, I don't know if I can get myself to eat it, but I think now I'm a married woman, I have to eat it. It doesn't follow logically, but in the mind of a young girl, it made sense. All right. So I asked my then husband, which of these is the pancreas? He points to something. I eat everything else with gusto. Now the moment of decision. Can I get myself to eat that pancreas? And I start eating it and I literally get sick. I say, why are you laughing? So inappropriate, right? And he said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago. So I made myself sick. The other pancreas story is my mother had breast cancer. The cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. Well, as you know, that's the endgame, right? And then magically it was totally gone. And the medical world couldn't explain it. And I was going to spend the next several decades to see if I could. And the mind-body unity goes a long way in that regard. Now, spontaneous remissions, the medical world doesn't tell you, you know, thank you. I think in some ways you're giving people false hope, but you can't know. You know, the example that I'm fond of using is I'm in the hospital and I'm dying and I decide I want to die in my own bed. I'm not attached to my own bed, but a lot of people seem to be. So, You go home and let's say you get spontaneously okay. You go through a spontaneous remission, the cancer is gone. I don't think people would say, gee, I have to call my doctor to say he was wrong or she was wrong. So there are all of these spontaneous remissions that are not recorded. There are people who don't go to the hospital in the first place, you know, that who don't know they have tumors. The tumor's there, the tumor's gone. We don't know how frequent or infrequent this is. You know, the medical world, and I have great respect, you know, I teach these students before they end up going to medical school. And they're very smart and, you know, and caring. But there's information that they're taught that they give to people that in some sense they have no right to give anybody. You cannot, you know, no matter who you're with, no matter what their condition is, you cannot say to them, them things like you have 3 months to live. Or, you know, the more mindful doctor might say you have 3 to 6 months. They have no way of knowing that. But often these diagnoses become self-fulfilling prophecies. Now, to go back to this thing about chronic illnesses. So people believe a chronic illness, there's nothing they can do about it. There's so much you can do about it. I've already said now several times that actively noticing the neurons are firing, and that seems to be very good for our health. Most people, I think, when given this terrible diagnosis, turn inward, close out everything, start to shut down. Instead, what they need to do is increase their mindfulness. Now you have people who believe exercise is good for you. This is wild, Dan. Exercise is good for you, but they're stuck in bed. Well, out of other people's labs, there's evidence that imagined exercise is virtually as good as real exercise. So you're lifting weights and I'm imagining lifting weights. And it comes from many labs around the country, around the world. All right. Our minds are just so powerful and we don't recognize it because we're taught very differently. You know, we're taught normal distributions, you know, whatever the dimensions. Some people don't have any. Most of us have a middle and some have a lot. It doesn't matter what that is. Talent, beauty, money, no matter what. And there are so many questions we could ask that argue against that normal distribution. You know, the ways that I can find myself to be a winner, even though all those measures that other people derive led me to fail. All right. So I'm throwing a lot at you. And I also don't know where to go because I'm very excited, as you can see. It's like I want to tell everybody everything. And I guess I should say I, if, if they care about any of this and they read the book, you know, they'll find many of the things that, um, I would've liked to tell them now.

Um, what's coming, one thing that's coming up in my mind as I listen to you talk is, um, uh, how we frame getting older in our minds. Like, is it, what, what is the e— I think sometimes I'm 53 and sometimes I can find myself looking in the mirror at a, the wrong moment and telling myself some whole story about how I'm getting old, I'm going gray, everything's over. And I, I, I have this suspicion that that is a very unhealthy line of thought to follow.

It is. It's very— no, because it becomes self-fulfilling. You know, the— if when you're younger, you're told when you get older, you're going to fall apart, then you get older and you start to fall apart. You say, well, what do you expect? And you don't do anything about it. If you didn't have that mindset, you know, and then it's interesting because so many people worry about getting dementia. And, you know, so as soon as they forget something, not at your age, but at my age, I'm 77. So you're a baby right now. All of my friends, somebody forgets something, everybody starts looking, one, you know, are they losing it? And I do this thing with my classes on— I teach this health class on Tuesday and Thursday. And on Thursday, before I give a lecture on aging, I'll ask them, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday? Tuesday? Nobody remembers. So they're 20 years old, they don't remember. But the not remembering doesn't mean they're falling apart. It just means they didn't remember. You know, and there are lots of reasons why you, you think that you're not remembering that have nothing to do with anything important. To me, the most salient is, if you were to introduce me to 3 important people when I was 40 years old. I would have learned their names, you know, known something about them. If you introduce me to 3 important people today, Dan, frankly, I don't care. So I'm not going to learn their names. Now, 10 minutes later, excuse me, when I don't know their names, I didn't forget them, right? You have to have learned something in the first place to forget it in the second place. So as you get older, your values change, you take in different information. And, you know, so there are many possible reasons for not remembering. Also, you know, when you're younger, let's say you're working, or you're in school, you're that young, everybody is talking about the party next week. And there are flyers up and whatever. Or now you're 75, and you're invited to the department party because they want you to feel cared for. So you get one invitation and that's it. No reminders. So that person is going to forget the party is next week. If you forgot, Jane is going to say to you, Danny, you're going to the party, and then you'll remember. So your lives are very different. And I think the best thing is to see yourself as changing rather than deteriorating. You know, to me, there are so many ways where we just get better and better. And that doesn't mean that, you know, when I'm playing tennis, I'm slower than I was before, but I'm also wiser. I don't have to run around as much because I have a better sense of where that ball is going to arrive based on your position when you're hitting it. You know, and I talked about when I was 19, at that point in my life, if I spilled something on this white shirt, like a fool, I'd walk around like this all day so no one would see it, which is really bizarre to me because it's like I didn't realize people could think I'm Strange, but clean versus that I have this spaghetti sauce on me. You know, then you get older and, you know, who cares? You know, people who know me know that I'm usually wearing clean clothes. People who don't know me, why do I care? The older you get, the more times you experience the same sort of thing. And you see, it goes different way each time, you know, you become less certain about consequences. You get to choose more. You know, when you're 2 years old and you fall, you scream bloody murder that you have a raspberry, as it's called. And you're 7 years old and Johnny or Janie didn't send you a Valentine. Oh my God, nobody's going to love me. You know, you're 15 years old and you have a couple of pimple. You get to a certain point, you know, in your 40s where all of this starts to feel silly. So for me, there's a very real way where it gets better and better. And, you know, and I think it does for other people, although I don't think they either realize it or are willing to admit it. When I did the counterclockwise study, so here I'm going to make people younger. I don't think they would let themselves fully go back in time. You know, I don't want to be 40 or 50 again, or even 60. You know, the more mindful you are, the more you're getting out of every day you're living. And I wouldn't want to give that up. Although, you know, surely I would like to have, you know, maybe the strength, you know, what have you that I had before. But we need to see growth in late adulthood. Rather than focus on the ways we are missing things. And for things not to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Given that we're talking about aging, and I know I brought it up again as somebody who's 53 and thinking about it involuntarily sometimes, how could I operationalize some of the wisdom from Counter-Clockwise into my life now.

I'm not suggesting— although it might be a fun thing— I mean, if people go to their reunions and listen to songs from the past, all of that could have a positive effect. But I didn't do the study, uh, to suggest that people should rearrange their houses to seem like the past or whatever. It was done basically to show, um, the amount of control we have over these things. You know, that you think you can't, well, you know, I have study after study that shows people like you can. And, you know, and there's something else with that that people don't realize. People think they want to always be successful. And I think that they need to rethink that. You know, that, so let's say I'm playing golf. And I finally, I get so good, Dan, every time I swing the club, I get a hole in one. There's no game anymore, right? So you can either do things imperfectly mindfully, or perfectly mindlessly. And when it's mindless, it's essentially a non-event. So the challenge is the little setbacks, those are actually good things. Because when it's just smooth sailing, there's no— if you want to win all the time, go play tic-tac-toe against a 4-year- old or 6-year-old. You know, we don't really want that. We like the challenge. What we need to do though is not make the attribution that the momentary failure means somehow we're less than in some ultimate sense. You know, I have this work with belief, both. Right now the world is set up vertically. You know, people bad, can't do anything. And you know, then you have those at the top who pretend and lead everybody to believe that they belong there and nobody else should be there. And I want to take this vertical and make it horizontal. So I wrote this little song for my grandkids. It was actually effective. It goes to the tune of the old Sara Lee commercial, which you may be too young for. Sara Lee is, "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee." So this is, "Everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. Everybody can't do something, but everyone can do something else." I was so pleased. I'm driving in the car with them, twins. They were, I think, 6 at the time. They're 9 now. One of them starts to whistle and I say, Theo, you're such a good whistler. And the other one, Emmett, then says, Grandma Ellen, when Theo was learning to whistle, I was learning something else. And, you know, I mean, it's wonderful because rather than feel bad about what he can't do, rather than try to diminish the person who can do it, and this is the way most of us live, right? We're worried you're better than I am. I either feel bad about myself or I try to take you down, and so on. And the whole world has been constructed in a way, I think, that spreads unhappiness. And it needn't be.

It seems like what your grandson was demonstrating was what you said earlier, which is the posture of being confident but uncertain.

Yeah, yeah. Which is fine not to know, because again, if you knew it all, you know, it'd be boring. You know, remember, you're a little kid and you're in the elevator and you try to reach for that button and you're not tall enough. A parent picks you up and then you press it. Okay, now you're a little— you still can't reach it. So it's fun. You can't wait to get in the next elevator to see if you've grown. Then you're tall enough, you press the button. It's over. When was the last time you were excited about being able to press the button in an elevator, you know. So it's the going from not knowing to knowing, uh, that's fun. And the problem is that too often we go from not knowing to thinking that we know and then freeze that. You know, horses don't eat meat, 1 and 1 is 2, um, you know, you have 3 months to live, and, and what have you.

So, so back, back to Counterclockwise, one thing that came up in my mind is, um, you know, while I'm not going to reconstruct my 1989, the year of my senior year in high school, in my house and try to live that way, um, but to, but to be friends with younger people, to, uh, make sure my life is filled with novelty.

Yeah. Um, or you can fill your life with older people and see yourself as the baby, you know, right? If every— if you, you spend time with me and my friends, you're going to feel, uh, since you're so younger, you're going to feel good. But I think that the better way is to recognize that our age is just a number. It doesn't dictate how we have to be or should be in this world. And that, you know, we have too many things where we make them age-appropriate. And, you know, one of the titles I almost used for the book was "Who Says So?" You know, because there are so many rules rules that to me make no sense. And so when I'm giving talks on this, sometimes, Dan, I'll look in the audience to see if there's a tall man, a tall person, it's usually a man. I invite him to the stage. He's 6'5". I'm 5'3". We look silly, right? I'll ask him to put his hand up. His hand is 3 inches larger than mine. And then I just raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? Now, if he wrote the rules to how you do it, and I play by those rules, I'm never going to do it as well as I might otherwise be able to. Right. The whole world, where everything that is, was at one point a decision. And a decision means there was some uncertainty. And that means it could have been other. And most of us just take everything as it is. Let me give you an example. It's a silly example, but it comes to mind. A friend of mine had created the first gay pride parade in Boston. So on the blackboard, I'll put, here's the route the parade took, still takes. And I'll ask them why. Harvard kids, smart as can be. They say, maximum viewing, maximum safety, maximum this, minimum that. And the answer was, she was down here and she had to go to her friend's house up here and deliver a package. All right. So every time we take what is and we find good reasons for it, we sort of more or less lock ourselves in. And there may be better ways. You know, I'm a tennis player. If the rules of tennis were not handed down from the heavens. So the fact that there are two serves, somebody decided two serves. Well, if you're going to play with me, Dan, we're going to have three serves. Because the first serve, I kill it. It doesn't It doesn't go in. Now, in the regular game, the next serve is a wuss serve because I'm playing doubles and I don't want to upset everybody by double faulting, right? But if I rule the world, we have 3 serves. I kill it. It doesn't go in. I kill it again. Now I'm getting better and I still have the backup 3rd serve. So this doesn't mean we have to change the rules to everything, but people need to know that some of the things they see as their incompetence, is not because they're incompetent. It's because they differ in some way from whoever created the activity. You know, somebody who is too big for a chair is not big. It's just they're bigger than the person who created the size of that chair thought they should be. You know, so if you're an American and you go to Vietnam, you're going to see yourself as very big because those chairs are very small. Small and so on. So the bottom line to all of this is that everything is mutable. Everything can be changed. Now, as long as it's working for you, do it. But when it stops working for you, rather than make the personal attributions to your own incompetence or an attribution to there's no way you can help yourself physically, you know, with your health and so on, you need to rethink those things. And I have a massive amount amount of data from our lab, from other people's lab that make me feel comfortable in making this statement.

You talk in the book about a mindful utopia. What do you mean by that?

I have a slide when I give some of these talks, used to at least, where it says that all of our problems, personal, no, it says Virtually all of our problems, personal, professional, interpersonal, global, are the direct or indirect result of our mindlessness. And I say virtual, and it's on the slide because I don't feel comfortable writing all. I'm an academic. But then I tell everybody, just among us and the other millions of people, I believe all of our problems. And that means that if we could teach people, which I think we can easily actually, to be more mindful right from the start, will end up in a very different world. We'll end up in the world where, you know, so you can whistle and I can't, and I can do this other thing that you can't, and, you know, isn't that glorious? I'm not better than you are, I'm not worse than you are. Resources that we're fighting over are not really limited. You know, the things that we care about. It's interesting to me, we have a world where people struggle to get status, to and to get money. And towards what end? It's just really so that they'll respect themselves and like themselves. And there's a whole other way of getting there, you know. And so the things that really matter in life are available to all of us, but not the way we've all been educated. You know, that— and it's interesting to me when we give grades in school. So the kids who fail or get Ds, these kids never end up feeling good about themselves. The kids who get the Bs and the Cs, so they're told they're average, who wants to be average? But the fun thing is for me to think about is those of us who got the As don't like it anymore either because everybody expects that you're going to get As and you're not sure why you got it or whether you'll get it again. And all of it denies the knowledge, the personal knowledge, the skills that all of these people have. And they're taught to say, you know, I won this genius award, Dan, and, you know, and it was great, but I can't tell you every time I do something stupid, somebody around me says, and you're supposed to be a genius. You know, that I think it should all be different. There should be a way for all of us to value our who we are. And I think some of the differences are exaggerated. I think we're more alike, each of us to each other, than most people think. If you felt what I felt, you'd do what I did. If you thought what I thought, you'd respond the way I did. So you and I both have our hand on a radiator, and it's hot. And you'd I take my hand off right away. You keep yours on. The world now says, Dan, you can endure pain. You're just, you know, you're best. You're really high on this dimension. Ellen Langer, you know, a weakling. But what I'm saying now is if you felt what I felt when I took my hand away, you would have taken your hand away also. I think that the world needs to be reorganized from the ground up. So we have ways of changing school Schools, simply things like teach conditionally, not 1 and 1 is 2. Because if you teach kids 1 and 1 is 2, and then you say to a next class, how much is 1 and 1? And Danny says 1, the teacher disparages you, then all the kids look at you as if you're stupid. And it's very hard to ever shake that off. In this mindful school, the teacher would say, Danny, how did you come to that? And you'd say 1 wad of chewing gum plus 1 wad of chewing them, and so on. Things need to be taught conditionally. They need to be— when you ask somebody a question, we should be looking for multiple answers to the question, not just a single answer. So many ways. And I outline this and, you know, I would like to put up mindful schools, mindful hospitals. And I spend a lot of time in the book. You know, do you think about— I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody when they're ill who goes to a hospital that doesn't feel stressed as soon as they walk through of a door. Now, this is supposed to be a place that's going to heal you. Yet the first thing, you know, and then everybody is wearing uniforms that says, I'm not you. It needs to be changed in ways that are not that hard. And I'm actually beginning some of this. The, in Canada, the people I've spoken to not yet want to just start with a whole mindful hospital. I said, let's make a mindful cancer ward and in a a mindful emergency room. But in Mexico, we are talking about starting from the ground up, rebuilding the whole thing. And, you know, so I think that the world as I see it can be a very different place. And the more people who are mindful, the quicker we'll get to that better place. And there's also this part of the book, you know, I had a whole chapter that I called the woo-woo chapter. This is worse than your snake oil salesman. It's so hard to believe, but it was real. And I let the publishers talk me out of putting all of it in print, but I did save some of it. And what we find is that mindfulness is contagious. Now, there's a way the contagion is easy to accept because if you, by virtue of your meditation, Dan, or because you become a Langerian, are not judgmental, I can feel that. And so interacting with you is going to be fun. And I'm going to be more mindful myself. But the mindful contagion that we've found, it needs to be replicated. It's just bizarre. Okay. So if you give somebody a common phrase, let's say Mary had a little lamb. And let's say it's on an index card. Says, Mary had a little lamb. People don't see the double A. They just don't see it. Now, if you're next to somebody who is mindful, you will see it. Their mindfulness somehow affects you. And, you know, it's interesting. I just realized the importance of all of this in many ways relies on people understanding just how mindlessly they are. And I say again, almost all of us are mindless, but when you're not there, you don't know it. So there's this wonderful study that Simon and Chabris did, where people are watching a basketball game with different instructions. In the middle of the game, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks on the court. People do not see it. And when, if you were in a study like that and you saw that you didn't see it, then all of a sudden you realize you're not seeing, you're not tasting, you're not hearing, you know, lots of what the world provides for you. And but when we had people be mindful and we said to them, you know, all basketball games are like all basketball games or else we wouldn't call them basketball games. But just as certainly, each basketball game is different from each basketball game. What I want you to do when you watch this video is notice the Notice the ways it's the same as most possible, and also notice the ways it's different. And that's going to keep you mindful. And when we do that, people tend to see the gorilla. And so, you know, with studies like this, it becomes clearer to me that it's not really that hard, big a change to go from where most people are now to where they could be for their own health and well-being. Well-being.

It's so fascinating. And you, you called it woo-woo, but actually it makes complete— the contagion makes complete sense to me, um, just in my own life of being around people who are awake and engaged and curious and open. You mirror that in, in your own mind naturally. Um, but before I let you go, uh, Ellen, um, for those of us who are interested in becoming Langerians ourselves, can you remind us of the name of your new book and also anything else you've put out that you'd like us to know about?

The name of the new book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. It's funny, Dan, there's a— for all of my books and translated in many languages, there seems to always be an American version and an English version. Not very many differences, but the English version is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Lasting Health because they didn't think people people could wrap their minds about chronic health because chronic always means bad. And that's why I chose it, at any rate. But that's the name of the new book. And I've written many books that people can check out on my website, ellenlanger.com. I think it's ellenlanger.me, but you go to.com and it gets you there. Or just Google my name.

Such a pleasure to talk to you, Ellen. Thank you so much.

It was fun. Thanks for having me, Dan.