Your Thoughts Shape Your Body! These 2 Things Cause All Your Stress! Dr. Ellen Langer

Stress is the major killer, but we can control our stress because stress is psychological. You go from, it's going to happen, to maybe it won't happen. You feel better. And the more mindful you are—

If you think your mind and body aren't connected, you need to hear this. Dr. Ellen Langer is a Harvard psychology professor and author. In this conversation, she'll teach us how to use mindset to live stronger, healthier, and more intentional lives. You've done some insanely cool research.

We had elderly people in a retreat that we had retrofitted to seem like it was 20 years earlier. Their vision improved, their hearing, their strength, their memory, and they looked noticeably younger.

What is that point where we can no longer talk ourselves into a better future?

We can never know what the limit is. Yeah. But what people need to understand is the important thing about the mind-body unity is the enormous amount of control it gives us over our health. I have lots of findings where we make elderly people mindful, they live longer. We're able to improve vision, chronic illness, and so on. People have said that can't be done, and I paid no attention and then did it.

Wow.

All you need is—

That is just wild. Before we get into the episode with the mother of mindfulness, can you do me a quick favor and click the subscribe button? It helps our channel grow so much. Dr. Langer, welcome.

My pleasure to be here.

It's such a thrill to have you here. I want to start with mindfulness.

That's a good place to begin.

You are the mother of mindfulness. Let's go. Why should people care about being mindful?

Well, no matter what you're doing, you're doing it mindlessly or mindfully. And the consequences of doing it one way or the other are enormous. You know, when you're mindful, the neurons are firing, and 50 years of research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So why should you be mindful? Let's make it a little different. Ask the question, what's the problem with being mindless? So if you recognize that when you're mindless, you're no different from a robot. And if you ask yourself, do robots have choices? Can robots be happy? Of course, the answer is no. Very often, we're programming ourselves. So every time you memorize a fact or think you know, when you do the same thing over and over again with the intention of not having to think about it, you're programming yourself to be mindless. And in my world, mindlessness is never an advantage. People go crazy when I say that. So I'm saying it's always good to be either mindful or potentially mindful. The potentially mindful means that you don't have to pay attention to it right now, but don't think that you've mastered it, that you know it, because it too is changing.

There has to be a spectrum of mindfulness.

You know, sure. We can't— you know, they're just words. Yeah. So I could have, you know, mindless, extremely mindless, mostly mindless, mindful about this, mindful— and, you know, but basically I don't see any difference between those two categories are different enough that we don't have to mince words. And people wouldn't pay any attention. Remember, the important thing is that everybody thinks they're mindful.

And we think about our listeners, right? Like, how do you know if mindful is so good?

Right, how do you know if you're mindful?

How do you know if you're mindful?

Okay, well, if you're having fun, you're mindful. If you're feeling miserable, you're being mindless. So that's our first clue. Events don't cause stress or unhappiness. What causes stress or unhappiness are the views we take of events. If you take a single-minded, "Oh my God, it's gonna be awful" view, of course you're going to be stressed. But that same event can be repackaged, understood differently. And when you do that, you know, if you can look at the same thing in 3 different ways, one makes you feel awful, one makes you feel good, and the other doesn't make you feel anything, most people are gonna stay away from the one that makes you feel awful, unless somebody has said, and people do often say these ridiculous things, that the world is awful, life is hard, and anytime you don't feel that way, you're just being Pollyanna.

You're talking about reframing, I suppose, is another way of saying it.

Yeah, we did that early work back in the '70s.

Do you wanna talk about that study? 'Cause I think for listeners who are connecting, trying to figure out, okay, how do I become more mindful, and if being happy happy and thinking about an event, for example, that might be negative, but kind of reframing it in a way that brings the positive to light. That is a skill that you can develop, right?

Sure. But I think the most compelling for me, because this is all to explain to people that events don't cause stress or unhappiness. It's the views we take of them. So I went out to dinner. This was around Christmas. I came back and all my neighbors were outside because my house had gone up in smoke. 80% of what I owned was destroyed. That's pretty terrible, right? I called the insurance company. He comes over the next day and he said in his 25 years of the job, it's the first time that the damage was worse than the call. Most people, "Oh my God, oh my God." He gets there, not so terrible. But for me, I had already lost everything. Okay, so it's only the beginning of the story. I'll try to make it quick. So I can't stay in the house. There is no house. I move into the Charles Hotel and I'm a sight to be seen with my two little dogs, whatever. And, you know, I think that contributed to whatever is going to follow. It's Christmas Eve. I go out. I come back to the hotel room and the room is full of gifts, not from the manager of the hotel, not from the owners of the hotel, but from the so-called little people, the people who park my car, the chambermaids who made up the room, the waiters and waitresses. You know, it took me years to be able to tell that story without a burst of tears.

That makes me want to cry.

Tears in my eyes. And when I think about it, I don't remember anything. It's only one thing that I lost in that fire. But every single Christmas, I get a renewed faith in people. So it's brought me much more joy than sadness.

That's a beautiful story. You're laying out, I think, what is a lovely default mindset and probably a path to human happiness. How do you, so if, or just to like give a map to people. All right. We're starting to build, I think, on the picture.

Yeah. Okay. Start from the beginning is most people, I think everybody knows they don't know.

Right.

And they pretend, they think they should know. So I'm here to free you of that. You can't know because everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Now, so that means the first thing you wanna do is make a universal attribution for not knowing. I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows, which is very different from a personal attribution. I don't know, but I'm supposed to know, so I'll hide or opt out. Okay, so then you find out, and you explore, and you don't want to be completely successful. This is what people don't understand. You can either do things perfectly mindlessly or imperfectly mindfully. So an example I'm fond of using: a little kid is in an elevator. He tries, he can't reach the button. The adult picks him up to press the button. Next time he's in, he gets a little close, he's a little— he still can't reach the button. But it's a whole big fun. The adult picks him up, presses the button. This goes on and then finally he walks into the elevator, he presses the button and he can reach it. When was the last time you were excited about pressing the button in the elevator? So, once we know something fully, it becomes essentially a non-event. So, the challenge of it is what's exciting, not having mastered it. It's the process of mastering. And, you know, and it— once you know that it's that discovery that's exciting and that you're never gonna get to a final answer— I mean, science knows this. We keep searching, but there's no final answer unless you wanna say God did it, and then we have our final answer. It's asking the questions, searching for the answers, that's fun. But it's only fun if you don't think someone's gonna yell at you for not being smart enough or not being able to answer it. And that's the problem when I talk about we should be mindful all the time. People, mindful all the time? Because they think of it as—

'Cause it's scary.

Yeah, it was. They think of it as thinking. I'm thinking all the time. Thinking is fun also. What's not fun is worrying that you're not gonna get the right solution. And this active thinking, you're feeling alive. I mean, you know, everybody has a friend or they themselves at some point, they see somebody fully engrossed in what they're doing. You say, oh, I wish I had that passion. Well, this is the way to develop the passion. And what people don't understand is that to make your life meaningful, you don't have to embark on a gigantic adventure. Life only consists of moments. All you have to do is make this moment matter. And, you know, when people think about the stresses that are existing now, you know, and often say to people, thread a needle, just thread a needle. So you're threading that needle. You don't have time to worry about wars and whether the stock market's gonna explode because you're threading. And just so you get the— personal experience of your feelings are choice. Your feelings are a function of the way you're going to view things. Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow. If you spend your time thinking only doom and gloom thoughts, it would be irrational not to be upset.

So is mindfulness, if we're to kind of take the classic definition and your definition, it is truly about being in the moment?

But see, people say, Be in the present. And that's sweet, but it's empty because people don't know how to be in the moment. And I'm telling you, the way to be in the moment is just know you don't know. All you have to do— and you know you don't know anyway, which is so funny. But accept that no one knows, and then everything is brand new and everything is fun. If you knew what I was going to say to you, why would you listen?

Right.

You know, and that's what we do. We try to Make everything the same. We call people by certain names. You know, you're a, mm, whatever that is. Because you don't want to be caught off guard when the person misbehaves. But we put people in boxes, and we do all of this in the service of having more control over the world. But since we're creating a fiction, we're actually giving up control.

You say control is an illusion.

Yeah.

Talk a little bit more about that.

People find it hard to accept, when I say we don't know, they think, yeah, there are certain things, you know, sure we know. I say, okay, so I often start these by asking people, how much is 1 1? Everybody knows this, and dutifully you'll say 2. But it's not always 2. First of all, I don't wanna sound fancy, it's only 2 if you're using a base 10 number system. If you're using a base 2 number system, 1 1 is written as 10. That's just to make clear that I'm smart, right?

Right, right.

You take 1 watt of chewing gum, you add 1 watt of chewing gum, 1 1 is 1. You take 1 cloud, add 1 cloud, 1 1 is 1. You take 1 pile of laundry, add 1 pile of laundry to it, 1 1 is 1. It's just— somebody sent me this a few weeks ago, it was fun. You take 1 pizza, you add 1 pizza, you have 2 pizzas. You take 1 lasagna and you add 1 lasagna, 1 1 is 1. It's just a bigger lasagna.

Yes.

You know, so in the real world, it doesn't equal 2 as or more often as it does. If you think about it, before when you mindlessly accepted 1 1 is 2, that's the end of the game. Now if somebody says to you, how much is 1 1? You have some choices. Yeah. I could say 2, 1, 10, and possibly other configurations. The larger point is when we think we know, well, let's see, a way of understanding mindlessness is being frequently in error but rarely in doubt.

When you zoom out and think about human potential, what discoveries have you made that helped you understand something about human potential that no one knew beforehand?

So I have lots of findings that, you know, where we make elderly people mindful, they live longer. We're able to improve vision, chronic illness, and so on. The one thing that I came to wasn't— it wasn't an experiment. It was just a thought experiment. When I realized that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do that. That means every time you're taking yourself to task, you're being mindless. There was a good reason you did it. When somebody else is a good there's a good reason that they did it. Now, it's interesting that, you know, it follows easily to understand that when you understand that your behavior made sense or else you wouldn't do it, you stop yelling at yourself, you feel better about yourself. When the person you care about did whatever they did for some good reason, your relationship is going to improve. But this morning, before I came here, I realized This is the secret of happiness. Okay. And it's not a secret. It just follows. Okay. So when you look at all of these billionaires, and there's lots of people, all they want to do is make money. Now, are these billionaires happy? No, I don't think so. Certainly not 201. And, you know, I've been at Harvard for forever, as we've just said. So a lot of status. Are all my colleagues happy? No. And you look at these CEOs who have a lot of power. I mean, the amount of antidepressants that are taken by this culture is enormous. People are not happy. Now, if you want to be happy, then being at Harvard, having the status, having the money, having the power is not the way to get there. Why do people want these things? I believe they want these things so that they can respect themselves, like themselves. I'm pretty good. Okay. Now, you can like and respect yourself without all of that. And the way to do it is to recognize your behavior makes sense. Underneath all of this is a realization that every, every single negative characteristic can be equally understood as a positive version. Okay. So, you don't like me because I'm impulsive. But that's because from my perspective, I'm spontaneous. I don't like you because you're so damn inconsistent. That's because you value being flexible. Every word, everything we take ourselves apart for has another way of being understood. We did the study a while ago. This is fun. We give people 200, 300, I don't remember, of these behavior descriptions: impulsive, inconsistent, Lazy, as many as we could think of. And we say to people, circle those things about yourself that you keep trying to change and you can't. So for me, it'd be impulsive and gullible. Okay, then you turn the questionnaire over and it says, now circle those things you really value about yourself. My spontaneity and my being trusting. And as long as I'm trusting, I'm going to be gullible. Right? And so the point of this is, if you want me to stop being gullible, or if I want me to stop being gullible, don't tell me to stop being gullible, 'cause that's not what I'm doing when I'm doing it. You've gotta get me to stop.

You're being trusting.

You gotta stop valuing being trusting. I'm not gonna give that up. I prefer it, even if I get taken periodically. So you can see that, you know, of course nobody wants to be inconsistent, but everybody wants to be flexible.

So how does this play out in a relationship? 'Cause I feel like there's a lot of wisdom here that couples can use.

Oh, sure.

No, I understand.

Yeah, I know it. No two people are going to want or need all the same things, no matter how well-matched you are. There are going to be times where it doesn't work. And so if the person does something that feels bad to you, you can take them to, "How could you do that?" and make trouble. Or you can look at it from their perspective. If you do this often enough, you don't even need to know their perspective. You just know that there is some other perspective. Right.

So there's a lot of people who have, or I think their default is kind of just chronic negative emotions. How do you think about negative emotions just generally?

Well, negative emotions—

'Cause that seems to be—

Are mindless.

Right.

Yeah. You know, that the assumption is that there's one reality out there, that we're all experiencing the same reality. You know, for whatever negative emotion you're experiencing, ask yourself if everybody in that circumstance is experiencing the same thing. Well, if not, if it's even one person, why not? You know, it's not that thing that's making you feel this way. And the more mindful you are, the more alternative ways you come up with of understanding the circumstances, the less stressed and miserable you're going to be.

Is being mindful less effort than being mindless?

Well, it's interesting. You know, it's interesting you asked me that because most people assume being mindless is less effort.

Right.

And it turns out that mindfulness is energy begetting. You know, so you can use me as an example, which is almost an embarrassment. But for many people, when I lecture or whatever I'm doing, you know, most people, they start off here. Well, they start off here. They're high, you know, and then they get more and more tired. And then the show is over. For me, I work myself up and they have to kick me off the stage. Because I'm all excited. You know, so the more, the more. The more, the better. And so I say, you know, look, if you're in a park with a 3-year-old and that 3-year-old walks into the street, isn't it better to just mindlessly grab the child out of harm's way? I said, no. First of all, if you're mindful, the child's not gonna walk into the street in the first place. The second, that, you know, cars are not random. You know, there's a driver. And the driver's giving signals whether they're gonna pull to the right or the left. How do you know how to move the child out of harm's way? So you should be there. Now, I think if people recognize the example I gave before that when you're not there, you know, different from a robot, how does that bias anything? And we're taught this in everything. You're taught a sport, a musical instrument, much of what kids are taught in school. It's just over and over and over again until you don't have to think about it. Oh my God. You know, just think about that because if you learn this when you're 20, now you don't have to think about it when you're 30. You're gonna do it differently. And 40, hopefully it just gets better and better. Why lock yourself in?

So if we're to try to really apply mindfulness, what would be the actionable takeaways for folks?

Okay, so the first thing is to recognize that we don't know. Okay, so uncertainty, we want to learn how to exploit the power of uncertainty. And we feel okay with not knowing because nobody knows. Okay, and when you don't know, then you can set yourself up to find out. Now, if you took things that you thought you knew and walk outside, notice 3 new things, look at somebody that you've known for forever, notice 3 new things about, Just keep noticing new things about the familiar. You'll see that you didn't know it as well as you thought you did. But the times that we're most likely to suffer from mindlessness are also the times that cue us to be mindful. When you're unhappy, when something happens, when all of a sudden you're stressed, for example. If you remember that events don't cause stress, What causes stress are our views of events. So as soon as you're stressed, and everybody, you know, you must have a guru in your mind, even if, you know, with somebody you probably think they're better than you think they are. And you say, how would this person respond here? And then you recognize there are different ways for you to be. And that to realize that you don't know how things are going to be, That things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. Give yourself 3 reasons why this thing is actually an advantage.

Yeah.

An advantage? I just lost my job. Yeah, because it's an advantage because if the job were working for you, you'd still have it. Yeah. And life is too short to throw it away like that. So now you have an opportunity. Go find something that actually meets your needs where you can devote yourself to it and enjoy it.

I love that point about like meeting needs, you know, that, that, hey, that just isn't— it's not built for you.

Everything. That's perfect because everything that was built was built with somebody in mind.

Right, right. And it might not be you.

Exactly.

That's okay.

Exactly. You know, I mean, it's easiest to see that with size. You know, have you ever been to Vietnam?

No.

It's lovely and the people are lovely, but they're tiny. Yeah, tiny. So all of the public seating is for somebody, and even being thin. And it's when you have that experience where you realize, well, somebody decided how big I'm supposed to be.

Right.

Right. Yeah.

So interesting. The other thing that you mention is this use of conditional language. Thank you for mentioning that.

That's very important because people, first of all, people don't realize that they're buying into this absolute world of certainties, facts, and so on. And our language can help us remember that. When we say something, rather than say, "It is," "It could be," "It would seem that," "It might be," "Probably," because that's as good as it gets.

My marketing department always gets mad at me for using— I'm like, "I can't, as a scientist." Exactly.

We don't know really. Exactly. You know, we can't use But, you know, we've been taught to make things seem certain.

Open.

Yeah. And what it does to keep things open, as you say, it closes our minds. Because once you think you know, you don't pay any attention. And so all of the language that would lead to the not knowing— but you see, here's the part that people get wrong. People don't like to speak in probabilities, uncertainties, because they think it makes them seem weak. Because we've mistakenly conflated certainty and confidence. And the winners of the world, the real winners, I believe, are confident but uncertain. See, I don't know, and I know I don't have to know, and I know you don't know either. And so nobody scares me.

We're on the same level of not knowing.

Exactly. Nobody scares me by their knowing. I'm not afraid of being found out that I don't know. In fact, it's funny, as you get older, you can always pass it off as, "Well, I used to know that, but now that I'm older, I've forgotten it." But, you know, it's a very empowering position. And when you recognize that, then you can be confident. Why not be confident? Because you don't have to pretend you know more than you don't know. And if you also know what I have already said, that if you know it so well, then you become mindless. So there's no there there.

So not knowing opens the door in kind of this just default position of discovery.

Yeah. It's knowing that it's a good thing not to know.

Yeah.

Because knowing is mindless. Because you can't know. Everything keeps changing. So now you don't know. Everything is kind of new. You stand tall. You get to enjoy it. As you're standing tall and enjoying it, And being mindful, people are finding you more attractive because mindfulness is very attractive. You know, people who are mindful are authentic because why bother not being so?

You're not pretending.

That's right.

You can't when you're being mindful.

Yeah, you don't need to. And pretending is definitely mindless because you have a way of how things should be from the past that you're bringing into the present rather than just being. And when you recognize everybody doesn't know something, Everybody knows something else. It's okay not to know. Why pretend you know? But stand tall in the not knowing rather than "I don't know." Then, you know, people hit you over the head, "I don't know, gee, why don't you tell me?" "Oh, you don't know either, let's find out." It's very empowering to start to exploit all of the power in uncertainty. It means everything you've been taught that can't be, maybe it can be. And creating is the— that's what it means to be mindful, is noticing new things, creating new things. And it's easier to create when you realize everything that already is was only somebody else's creation. So, you know, you can use it as such, or what you can do is change it so that it better fits you.

So actively noticing new things, using conditional language, and then we've talked a lot about reframing.

When we recognize that things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad, what that should tell us is that there are many ways of understanding any circumstance, and that as soon as we understand it in multiple ways, we have a choice. How do we want to experience it? If this way makes you feel good, that way makes you feel bad, why bother paying attention? Neither are correct. There's not one single way of understanding things. But it's definitely— or, excuse me, it would seem on so many ways not to be our advantage to think now we know what it is and trap ourselves. We don't want to let at any point our selves at the moment determine our future selves.

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Yeah, well, you know, you might ask— so I know we're going to talk about the mind-body unity.

Yes, yes, yes.

And so let me tell people what led to this eventual theory that's been driving my research for decades now. Two things. One, you want to talk about my mother, we'll start with my mother. My mother had breast cancer and it had metastasized to her pancreas. And that's the endgame, right? So the medical world didn't exercise her limbs, which, you know, they think she's gonna die, why waste the person power to do all of that? Anyway, then magically it was gone and they couldn't explain it. And so the only way that I could understand this is somehow she made herself well. Now, before this, there was a story that also was going to lay the groundwork for the mind-body unity. So I was married when I was obscenely young. I've done everything in strange ways. I go to Europe on our honeymoon.

You're only 19 at the time. That's right.

I was even younger because I was secretly married before that, but you have to read the book to get all those details.

Yes. Sorry, I didn't want to give it away yet.

So we go into the restaurant and I order a mixed grill. The man I was married to was more sophisticated than I, and I said, "Which of these on the mixed grill is pancreas? Which of these is the pancreas?" He pointed to something. Now, to this day, I don't understand why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas. But at 19, I was 19 going on 40, and so if it was on the plate in Paris, I'm supposed to eat it. I eat everything. Now comes the moment of truth. Could I eat the pancreas? I start eating it and I literally get sick. He starts to laugh. I say, "Why are you laughing?" He said, "Because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago." Wow. So I had made myself sick. My mother had made herself well. And all of this with the— because of the way we were thinking about it. Circumstances.

So these kind of anecdotal experiences are really what framed your experimental approach.

Yeah. I was thinking of, you had somebody who was taking photographs before, and he said, "Smile, that's easy for me," and then he said, "Now a serious one," and I couldn't become serious. And I remember when I was young, and I'm glad I don't remember who it was, but this man who said to me, "Why are you smiling?" Immediately stopped smiling. And now, of course, I'm older and freer. I said, "Well, why aren't you smiling?" And that turns out that there's data, not from our lab, but that smiling is correlated with longevity. You know, you smile when you feel good. When you feel good, you're relaxed and your body is operating in some sense as it should.

Don't we release endorphins when we smile?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's a neurochemical relationship.

Well, there's a neurochemical relationship. To everything. And this is what people don't understand. So when I'm talking about mind-body unity, most people are oblivious to whether— to their beliefs, their subtle beliefs in mind-body dualism. You have a mind, you have a body. And most people, just as they weren't taught it, it's just part of the everyday understanding of things. Okay. Now, the problem with dualism, having a mind and a body, is how do they talk to each other? So, you know, you're walking down the street and you see somebody vomiting. All of a sudden, you're feeling sick. I mean, there's a real physical reaction that you're having, right? Well, nothing's happened to you. It's just your thoughts. So the question is, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? Now, for me, mind, body, they're just words. If I had designed the whole thing, it might have had mind, body, and elbows, and we'd have a whole different conception of people. So I say, let's put the mind and body back together. And when the mind and body are one thing, you don't have to talk about how you get from one to the other. It's one thing. And then we put the mind in all sorts of places, and we're necessarily putting the body. Now, I know you're a great understander of neuroscience and physiology, and it's important for people to understand I'm not suggesting there's nothing going on inside. What I'm suggesting is it's all happening more or less simultaneously. I raise my hand, my entire body is different. I have a thought, my body is different from when I didn't.

I believe that wholeheartedly, yeah.

And so the important thing about the mind-body unity is the enormous amount of control it gives us over our health and well-being. Now, so, you know, I've been doing this for forever. I started when I was 12. Not really. I just got married, yeah. No, you know, for so many years, and I may have had some of the influence on getting people to go from the implicit mind-body dualism to mind-body connection. It doesn't get you anywhere better. How are they connected? I said, forget connection. Let's see it as one thing. And then we've done many exciting studies where we put the mind in unusual places. Take the measurements from the body, and we get evidence for this conception over and over again.

So we talked a little bit about reframing, just the power of that. You've done some just insanely cool research that I think grounds this concept of reframing. Let's talk about the Clockwise study and the exercise study that you've done.

Yeah, so these were the first tests of the mind-body unity. So what we did was we were going to have elderly men, These men, you know, when you say somebody's 80 and today I'm almost 80 and look at how energetic. Yeah. This was back in 1980 when old was old. So it's sort of—

'80s, '60s.

Exactly. Exactly. So these people were old.

Yeah.

So we were going to have them live in a retreat that we had retrofitted to seem like it was 20 years earlier. So the whole idea was to bring these men to a place where they were going to be their younger selves. It wasn't quite a Hollywood set. I didn't have the finances for that, but anything about the present was basically missing. And then they talked about events in the past as if they were just unfolding. They watched movies from the past as if they had just come out. Everything was that now was then. So we had these men, we take them back in time, We find their vision improved, their hearing, their strength, their memory, and they look noticeably younger in less than a week without medical intervention.

We think about language, just even like, I always tell my friends, I'm like, you're not old, stop saying you're old. Like, how do you think about just language, everyday language, and how you talk to yourself influences how you move and how you interact and the things you pursue?

No, I mean, if our language is crucial and we don't pay attention attention to it. You know, it's interesting, in The Mindful Body, I have a lot of things on language, fun things. People seem to think that trying is good. So you have a kid who's not doing anything and you go, "Just try, Johnny." And of course, trying is better than giving up, but trying has built into it an expectation for failure.

Totally. I always say trying supposes failure. Like, it's just like it gets you out.

You don't try to eat an ice cream cone. You just say— so I did a study with this, The data are as you would expect. And then somebody told me that's the Yoda study. I said, that's great. I just care that it's out there. I don't have to be there. Another one is hope. Hope. It's like hope, forgiveness, trying. These sound like such good things and they're better than the worst. Hope is better than being hopeless. But when I get up in the morning and I march into, march, sometimes march into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, I don't hope there'll be coffee there. I just assume there'll be coffee there. So again, hope has built into it an expectation for failure. And the bad thing about that is our expectations too often get fulfilled.

Yeah, it's funny. I coached a team at Princeton University for 13 seasons.

Yeah.

And we literally—

On what kind?

Field hockey.

Field hockey.

Yeah. We're not allowed to say try. Same with my kids.

That's great.

You don't say, I'm gonna try. I'm saying, no, you're either gonna do it or you're not gonna do it. You're gonna either— it's, you're gonna commit to it because you wanna do it and then it's Well, we've done a lot with sports.

You get people to be mindful, their sport is going to be improved. That's what I started to say before, that in sport, people think you do it, do it, do it until you've got it down pat. You don't have to think about it. But the people who are truly experts never assume they've got it down because their bodies are changing, their wisdom is improving.

Context is changing, strains change.

So you want to be there. And almost everything we tell little kids is wrong, I think. Most of our mindlessness, I believe, comes from our early education, which we're trying to change now. We have mindful schools going up, and our parents are all well-meaning.

I agree. I mean, just in my decade and a half of coaching, it's really clear, like, just how you talk about winning, how you talk about results, how you— frame your opponent, like all of that has an enormous impact on results.

I don't know if this would work with hockey, but it works with tennis. So I'm playing against somebody, or it can be in doubles and it can be my partner, and they hit a miserable shot, so who cares, right? Why should anyone expect? And if every shot were perfect, there'd be no game. You want that play with somebody 5 years old. Exactly, it's ridiculous. But so I would say, and then I can almost hear them, Goddamn, you know, taking themselves to party. Can be so stupid. And then I say to them, next time, just hum. Just hum.

Mm.

Doesn't have to be on tune, clearly, because when you're humming, that's mutually exclusive with how could I be such an idiot? And that negative self-talk and puts you back in the present context.

Not to mention it stimulates the vagus nerve.

That's exactly right.

Which, you know, is going to give you that little parasympathetic relaxing kind of boost. To put you back into the performance zone. I love that. Okay. The exercise study.

Okay. So the exercise study. So fascinating. So what we did was we first asked chambermaids, chambermaids are the women who are cleaning hotel and motel rooms, how much exercise do you get? So the first— it's interesting because these women are exercising all day long.

Like, literally.

And they don't think they're getting exercise.

I was a chambermaid.

Oh, yes. All right. See?

In a motel.

It's exhausting, right?

It's so exhausting and disgusting.

So they think exercise is what you do after work, and after work they're just too tired. So we had a very simple study. We divide people into two groups. We're going to teach one of the two groups that their work is exercise. We simply tell them making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym, and, you know, so after a short discussion, this group believes that they're actually getting exercise. The other group doesn't. And we take so many measures before we start and at the end. We want to make sure at the end of this they're not eating any differently, they're not working any harder, everything is the same. Now, the important measures. The group that changed their minds lost weight, there was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. All from the change of mind. Now, interesting, if you think about this, most people don't know the subtleties in some of this stuff. They know placebos. They don't know a nocebo. So let me share. A nocebo. So placebo, you take nothing, you think it's something. It does the work. A nocebo, you take something, but you think it's nothing, and it wipes out. And so here, by doing the exercise, not thinking it does anything, it has no effect. Now, that's really important because, again, that all the control we actually have over our bodies— you know what Mark Twain said about exercise? Every time the urge to exercise comes over him, he just sits still and is quiet, and he knows soon it'll pass. So it's not the case that throughout our history everybody has been gung-ho exercise. But the important thing is that if you believe you're getting the exercise, it will have the effect of exercise. If you don't believe, it's going to wipe out the effect as a typical nocebo. Yeah, so—

Do you think it's associated with just the guilt of feeling like you're not exercising and like you're not, you know, like, what's the mechanism behind that?

Okay, so, oh, you know, this is the psychophysiology person in you, the neuroscientist. Okay. It's very, very hard for people to truly understand mind-body as one. Because with it being two, you have to ask, how do you get from here to there? That's what mechanism, right?

Right, of course.

How is it happening? It's all happening now. Now, it doesn't mean there's nothing happening internally. It's just that it's all happening more or less simultaneously. You know, so I have a thought, it's affecting every part. I go like this. It's affecting my toes, my blood, everything at once.

Can you talk about the milkshake study in that context?

That was Allie's study.

That was Allie's.

Yeah, yeah.

Allie Kromm was the co-author and your student. Yeah.

So no, Allie did this fun study. I'm probably going to misrepresent it in some sense, but the essence was if you have a milkshake and you think it's good for you, it'll be good for you. If you think it's bad for you, it'll be bad for you. If you're given some physiological data that says you're the kind of person who, when they have this, it will be even better for you. Our thoughts are affecting us every step of the way.

If you're told you're fast, you're faster. If you're told you're slower, you end up being slower.

Yeah, no, we have, you know, Dan Airely did some fun studies with medication that If you're given a pill, and I'm making the numbers up, but let's say the pill is 50 cents versus $5. That $5 pill, you're gonna get better faster. If you take a pill, placebo, that's good, but if you get an injection, that's even better, where it's just saline solution. If you have sham surgery, that's— the more you suffer, the more you're going to believe. And we have this in the culture. There's this view of no pain, no gain. I said, "Oh, to my mind, if you have pain, you better gain to make it worthwhile, but you should be gaining without pain." Every time you're being mindful, every time you're playing, you can't be playing unless you're mindful, and mindful means you're learning things, and that means you're gaining.

Yeah, and maybe just to tie this up, talk about just fixed states. I am diabetic. I am depressed. I am, you know, like those kind of like really like ways of thinking that are just boxy ways.

Exactly. No, people— I had this student many years ago and it was wonderful. She had MS and somebody would ask her how she is and she would say she's great. And they would look at her sort of sideways because they know she had it. You know, her mind is active, and she'd go through the different parts of her body that are operating, you know, full speed ahead. Now, we don't want these diagnoses on labels to become self-fulfilling. You know, I did a study on labeling forever ago that was kind of fun where we made an interview, a videotape of a person being interviewed. We showed that videotape to different kinds of people, sort of therapists, where we called the person being interviewed a patient, or we called that person a job applicant. The exact same video. Wow. When we called him a patient, the therapist saw he had hidden this, bad that, you know, whatever. When we called him a job applicant, he was seen as well-adjusted. You can see whatever you want to see. Remember that everything can be understood, you know, in so many ways. The same data can be used to prove You know, the point and the opposite point.

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Yeah. Okay. So it's interesting. We have to understand that all medical information, all data, no matter what, are only probabilities. All right. So when you're told you have X and it's gonna go in this particular way, it's a guess. And so one way to take control of it, if you're given some negative news, is to think about all the ways you're dissimilar from most people. And the more dissimilar, the less likely what's happened to them is likely to happen to you. And even if you are exactly, you know, like that person, it's still only true for most people undergoing these circumstances. Our health is not separate from our happiness. The mind and body are one. So when we're actively noticing new things, our body is being replenished. And, you know, I've got hard data about all the ways that that's good for our health. And also, I think that— did you read the— you're gonna have to say yes. I'll ask anyway. About the attention to symptom variability? Yes. Okay. So this is a way that we can take control of our health. When people are diagnosed with a chronic illness, what I think people believe is that there's no control. They have no control over it. And that's not what chronic means. All chronic means is the medical world doesn't know what to give you to control it. It doesn't mean that there isn't some way or that there won't be some way in the future. Okay, so now when you have a chronic illness, let's say chronic pain, people have chronic pain, I believe, think they're in pain all the time. No one is anything all the time. Now, We do this thing where we're going to call you periodically and ask you, how is the pain right now? And is it better or worse than the last time we called? And why? Several things happen when we do this. The first, just by engaging in this treatment, you don't feel helpless while you're waiting for the medical world to tell you what you have or what path it's likely to take. Second, as soon as you Notice that it's not the same as it was yesterday. And it doesn't matter if it's better or worse. Just wait a second, this thing is changing. And let's say it's better. Hey, you know, I'm a little better today. Now when you ask the question why, people engage in a mindful search. And that mindfulness itself is good for your health. And then I believe that if you're actively looking for the whys, for how can I make this better, you're more likely to find it. Well, we've done this with very big disorders, with Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, a host of things. And in each case, it's brought great comfort to people. And I started this in a roundabout way because for me, placebos are as strong as medicine. And placebos mean that our minds are in control of most of our health. Okay, so for everybody who— I think everybody knows this, but just to make sure— you take the sugar pill, the pill is nothing, you think it's something, it does the work. So that's why I developed this attention to symptom variability. And that sounds like a mouthful, but attention to variability just means noticing change, and that's all mindfulness is, noticing change. And when you think it's the same old same old, you're not there. You don't pay any attention to it. And so the bottom line, I realize, you can do this for yourself. You know, so everybody has a smartphone. If not, get one, rent one, borrow one, and set it to ring in a half hour. And when it rings, ask yourself, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time, and why? Set it now to ring in an hour and 10 minutes, 2 hours, an hour and 45 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, doesn't matter. Just keep varying it over the course of the day, the course of the week, and amazing things happen. And it's interesting and you're doing it yourself. And wow, look at this, I'm not in pain all the time. You know, the stress. There are people who think they're stressed. No one is stressed all the time. So let's say you think you're stressed all the time and we do this with you, or you do it yourself where it rings How stressed are you now? Is it more or less than the last time? You can discover, you know, you're only stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Well, then the solution is easy. Either talk to me differently or stop talking to me. Right. And stress, I believe, is the major killer. The major killer. Now, everybody has come a long distance. You know, the medical world not that long ago believed that anything psychological was irrelevant to disease. The only way you were going to get sick was the introduction of an antigen. Now, everybody has progressed through that, but not completely yet. And if stress, if I'm right, that stress is the major killer, and we can control our stress because stress is psychological, well, then we've got a good part of the game beaten. Stress is interesting. I have some one-liners for people. If they ignore everything else that I've said, this could be helpful. Next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or inconvenience? It's almost always a nothing. You know, I missed the appointment. I didn't get the project done in time. I banged the car. You know, so what?

Generally not the end of the world.

Exactly. And so then you breathe a sigh of relief. But in order to experience stress, you need two things. One, you have to believe that something is going to happen. Okay, you're making a prediction, and that when it happens, it's going to be awful. Now, we can't predict. So how do you know you can't predict? The easiest thing to do, probably, is to give yourself 3, 5 reasons why it might not happen. So you went from thinking this, oh my God, he's gonna leave me, I'm gonna fail the test, I'm not gonna get the job, I'm gonna whatever it is. Give yourself 3 reasons, 5 reasons why that's not going to happen. So you went from it's going to happen to maybe it won't happen. You feel better. Now's the fun part. Let's assume it's going to happen. You're not going to get the job. He's going to leave you. Whatever the others that I said. How is that actually a good thing? And it's very hard for people. First, let's say he's going to leave you or she's going to leave you. Oh my God, I can't, you know. Well, People don't understand that relationships require two people, and if one of them is not there, it's not a good relationship, right? And that you'd be better off, you know, with that relationship— first of all, finding out it's not good and trying to make it good, that's fine. And if not, you know, if you can't make it work, I think leave. Life is short.

As a psychophysiologist, like, I think From my perspective, I'm like, let's make the physiology as robust as possible so then we can approach the world. It's easier to have a growth mindset. It's easier to have like these more fluid perceptions of the world. It's easier to kind of shift from this really kind of like fixed way of thinking to, you know, this more flexible, fluid way of thinking. What is that point where we can when we can no longer talk ourselves into a better future?

Well, first, a growth mindset is just being mindful. Right. So it's very available to all of us. And so the question you're asking is, what are the limits? And we can never know what the limit is. But what people need to understand is trying to surpass whatever their own limit is should be fun, and then it doesn't matter if you don't surpass it, because once you get there, the game is over and you have to come up with essentially a new game. And, you know, I don't— I think everybody now, because there's so many people like me, baby boomers, so the world seems obsessed with living longer. And I think people are going about it the wrong way. I mean, it's nice if you enjoy running, run. If you enjoy, you know, being a vegan, be a vegan. You know, whatever it is that's fun for you, but make sure it's fun. For you, that I think that rather than spend your time trying to add more years to your life, what we should be doing is adding more life to our years, and that will probably result in our living longer. And, you know, what you want to do is live fully, and 50 years of this research on mindlessness has made clear to me that virtually all of us are sealed in unlived lives. We're not there. So then some of the things that happen to us that seem negative— oh, you had a heart attack— well, if you lived through it, or you got a diagnosis of cancer, all of a sudden you realize, wait a second, you know, I might not be here forever. And then you reorganize yourself and start living. And the living doesn't have to be big things. You know, I remember, again, this is just a clang association, but it was kind of fun. I was in Australia, and I was— several of us had presented, and then they get all of us on stage, and out of nowhere, the person who's running the show wants us each to talk about our bucket list. Okay, so I'm last. So the first one goes, and they've always wanted to go, and this one always wanted to do deep sea, whatever they want to do. And they come to me, and I realize, I said, I don't have a bucket list. You know, that if you're always making the moment matter, you can't do more than that.

Yeah.

And that making the moment matter is not a very hard thing. You know, I know when I was younger, I wanted to go see all these sites in Europe and, you know, they were wonderful. But there were all these sites at home that I haven't seen that would be just as wonderful. You know, once the glass is full, it's full. And filling it is easy. That's what people don't understand. You don't need You don't need a lot of money. You don't need a lot of power. All you need is go ahead and do it and recognize you don't know and see how much fun you have finding out.

Yeah, I love that. I've never been like a huge vacation person because I feel like I love just—

Well, that's, you know, I was going to— Yeah, no, I think that's beautiful.

It's beautiful.

I thought years ago, I never did anything with this and it's not spectacular, but it's kind that if you wanted to ask people one question to find out how mindful they were, it would be, "How much do you need a vacation?" Because if you're working the right way, you don't need it. You want to, you know, enjoy doing something different. And again, the world goes from bad to better, missing the better than better. So somebody decides, Everybody is spending too much time being stressed about work, as if work has to be stressful, which I'll argue. Yeah, totally agree. And then they say you need to add some life to that work. So everybody talks about work-life balance, and I go crazy. I said, work-life balance is better than work-life imbalance, but it should be work-life integration.

Yeah.

You should be one person at work and during life. And that to say work-life balance suggests work has to be bad. And that goes back to people believing there are good things, there are bad things. Good things you have to kill yourself to get, bad things you have to run away. You know, the things are not good, they're not bad. And the more you recognize, the more you can just be still and enjoy whatever happens. You know, and it really becomes fun. You know, that to know that First, to know you need much less than you think you need. So that becomes easy. But I was doing a podcast, virtual, and I was trying to explain some of this. And I said, "Look, let's say my internet goes out." Some younger people, some, "Oh my God, oh my God, I'm in the middle of a—" To me, "All right, I'll go have lunch." What's the difference? You know that with almost everything. We make big deals out of it, and it's good if we take something small and we really enjoy it and made the small thing a big deal. But going in the opposite direction seems to me a waste of time. You know, that if it doesn't work, change it. If you can't change it, don't do it. Who says that that's the way to be successful? You can have a good time just threading needles.

Yeah. Everyone needs to find their version of threading the needle.

Well, yeah. And I think what they need to do— right, but subtle— that you can find your way of threading somebody else's needle, or you can notice the way you're already threading it and say, who says I should do it differently? All day long people are telling me You know, when you're cooking, you're not supposed to put the onions in until the oil is— who said so? I mean, and then what's the difference? You know, and then you learn. And, you know, and this, a little of this goes with that, you know, to recognize it's sort of too many people are living their lives like following a recipe without realizing that the people who created the recipe experimented and that recipe meets their needs. Maybe you like it a little more savory or a little sweet, you know, tart, more tart, or, you know, whatever. And the other is, you know, painting by numbers, where we keep waiting for someone to tell us how to do it because we're afraid to do it ourselves because we're afraid we're gonna do it wrong. And there is no wrong. When you're mindful, you don't know exactly where you're going to go. And let yourself go there because it's at no cost. You know, that— and then you find all sorts of new ways of doing things. And even with the painting. So I did studies where we had people make a mistake versus not make a mistake. We force you to make a mistake. And this is kind of cute because I said to you, "I want you to draw a picture about mourning." So most people are doing cock-a-doodle-doo in their pictures, right? Then we interrupt them halfway through with a questionnaire. How hard is it to think about mourning? And now all of a sudden they see M-O-U-R-N, grief. It's not cock-a-doodle-doo, it's a whole different thing. I made a mistake, I'm making roosters and sunshine and this is bad. And okay, so that's a setup where one group is told, if you make a mistake, forgive yourself, let yourself make the mistake and go back to where you were going. Another group is told, if you make a mistake, continue from that point forward. Okay, so now if you're continuing from that point forward, it has to be mindful because you didn't know you were gonna make that— okay. And then we have the final products evaluated, and those where the person made a mistake and went forward, so the mindful creation, was more appreciated. Even then, the situation where there's no mistake. So even mistakes are good.

Well, I'm mindful of time. I know I could keep you here all day long. Dr. Langer, what does it mean to be human?

Well, I think to be human is to be mindful. Otherwise, we're no different from robots. I love that. And, you know, and what does it mean to be mindful? It means to be engaged. To be excited, to be enjoying what's there to be enjoyed.

Well, thank you so much for this conversation.