PNTV: Mindfulness by Ellen Langer (#200)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, you guessed it, another great book, Mindfulness by Ellen Langer. Mindfulness. Ellen Langer is one of the world's leading research scientists, the first teacher, tenured female professor in Harvard's department of psychology. We recently did an episode on another one of her great books, Counterclockwise. We're going to do another one soon on her book Mindful Learning. She's been at this for over three decades. Really inspiring. We've got a philosopher's note with a bunch of big ideas. We have five that we're going to look at now. So the first big idea, false limits. Before we jump into that though, I will share the fact that Ellen separates, differentiates her conception of mindfulness as coming from a Western orientation, some more of a Western scientific approach. Mindfulness, mindlessness vis a vis a more Eastern concept of mindfulness. So separate concepts here just to make that quick differentiation, false limits. So Ellen's work is based on, as we talked about in counterclockwise, the psychology of possibility. This psychology of possibility. And when we bring mindfulness to our lives, we realize that a lot of the limits that we set for ourselves are false. We mindlessly accepted so many limitations. And she challenges us to bring more mindfulness to what we think we're capable of. And she uses some examples, classic one that we've talked about many times. Roger Bannister, 1950, whatever, 2, 9. Sitting there thinking he can run a four minute mile. @ the time, everyone's saying it's impossible, physically impossible to break the four minute mark. He does. So he is not limited by other people's conceptions of what was possible. Right? He did the impossible. Pretty exciting. And then of course, a ton of other people did it. She asks her students, how far do you think a human being can run in one spurt? How far do you think a human being can run in one spurt without stopping? And her students thought about it and they thought, well, you know, we know a marathon 26 miles and that's probably not the upper limit, so maybe 35 miles. They said something like that. And she said, okay, well that's nice, but there are individuals in Mexico, Copper Canyon, who can run 200 miles without stopping. What? 200 miles? False limits of what we think is possible. And then how many marathons do you think one person can run in one year? 5, 10, 25, 51 a week? It's pretty crazy. Most people would say that's impossible. One guy ran 250 marathons in one year. That's nuts. Difficult but not impossible is a theme we come back to a lot. Spartan up, the Swedish explorer who hops on his bike, rides to the Himalayas, ascends Everest, summits without help from a Sherpa or oxygen, extra oxygen, comes down, rides his bike back to Sweden, What? Difficult but not impossible. So those are all interesting things, but it's less about going out and running, we're doing some adventure, and more about questioning the limits we put in our lives. So what limits have you put in front of yourself? What stories are you telling yourself? But what's possible, not possible, and can you stretch that a little bit more, is the essence of the first big idea. Now, one way to help us do that is to change the way we're framing challenges. So think of these two questions. If you ask yourself, can I do it? Can I do it? You're going to get a very different response in your mind than if you ask yourself the question, how do I do it? How do I do it? There's a presupposition that you can do it. You're not sitting there saying, well, I don't know, can I do it? Yes. Ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence, focusing on how do I do it? Then you're out of the outcome and you're into the process, which is the next big idea. Then we're going to jump to process precedes outcome. Process precedes outcome. We've been talking a ton about process vis a vis outcome. She makes a great differentiation, uses an example for graduate students. Her graduate students, when they're struggling with their dissertations, often look to published authors in their field and think that their book, which is so good and so far away from their little early passes at their dissertation, they think that the book somehow just fell out of this person's mind. They were just happened. And they negatively compare based on the outcome. And they forget that this brilliant individual whom they admire went through a series of things. They had a process to achieve that outcome. When we obsess on outcome, we're going to be oriented in a fixed mindset mentality, negatively comparing ourselves and thwarting our efforts to do anything worthwhile. But if we can look at the steps that that individual went through, we can get inspired. We can say, look, if they can do it, I may not want to do what they're doing or even how they're doing it, but I can see that it was actually a process and it involved a ton of failure, which we've been Talking about a ton tall bench of whores, failure hall of fame. I mention in the note because it's very parallel to what Ellen talks about here as well. We've got to realize that the individuals who achieve these great outcomes experienced a ton of failures and mistakes in the process, she says. There's no such thing as failures. There's just solutions that were ineffective. Ineffective solutions. You tried something, it didn't work, no big deal. Neutral. Let me just see if I can do it a little bit better. Outcomes follow process. Process precedes outcomes. Focus on process. In admiring other people, seeing what they do in your own life, this is a good one. Bringing Mindfulness to Depression Ellen talks about chronic in quotes, diseases, a whole other conversation around the words we use and the priming that comes from that. But chronic issues such as depression oftentimes people, when they're mindless about certain things they experience often they think that they always have the certain state. So with depression, for example, people tend to think that they're always depressed, always. But that's not the case. If you bring some mindfulness to it and you do what she recommends we do, which is to notice variability. One of the things you do in your mindless is everything's the same. When you're mindful, you notice variability in your environment. So if you're suffering from depression, you can look at that and say, well, look, some days I feel terrible and some moments during days I feel really, really bad, and other times I actually feel okay. I might even be happy. Now, they might be briefer than I like, and overall I might have the experience of depression. But there are pockets in my day where, if I was mindful, can see a variance. Well, that's really exciting because then all of a sudden you can challenge your false limits that you're just depressed. You can't get out of it. You can say, but look, for those five minutes or 50 minutes or even five hours or whatever it was, but even just five minutes, I was happy. Then you want to say, well, what was I doing that preceded the outcome of me being happy? What was the process? Was I interacting with a certain group of people? Was I doing something creative that inspires me? What were you doing? Identify the things that led to your success and then do them more often. And be willing to believe you can go beyond your current limits and create what you want. Now, you can apply that same model to chronic illnesses. If you have chronic back pain or chronic whatever, you don't always have those symptoms and you want to start unpacking it and see, are there certain behaviors you engage in that make it worse or. Or make it better and obviously do more of that, which makes it better, less of that, which makes it worse. That's our fourth big idea. The fifth one is work versus play she talks about. And all these ideas are grounded in different research studies, which is what makes them particularly interesting for me. Work versus play. They brought people into a lab, split them into two groups, asked them to do the exact same thing, which was to sort cartoons. One group, they said, this is work. The other group, they said, this is play. Guess what? The work group got distracted. They didn't enjoy the experience. The playgroup had a great time throughout the process. One word, work versus play. So we need to look at how we're framing things in our mind. Are we telling ourselves that things are going to be hard, that it's work, it's tedious, it's unfun. A lot of things can be those things, but you can frame it differently and say, this is a game. I want to take that mundane, tedious, in quotes, stuff that I usually have to do and see if I can make it awesome. See how well I can do it, how quickly I can do it, or if I can do it in a different way. Bring mindfulness to it, make it a game, make it play, and your enjoyment of the experience is going to go up. Huge, huge concept. Work versus play. We want to dissolve the dichotomy between the two as much as we can. And one of the ways to do that is to simply reflect, frame it vis a vis the words we use to describe what we're doing. Really powerful stuff. Fun study. So there you go. Look at the variability. Remember, process precedes outcome. And then this question is really big. Can I do it versus how do I do it? How do you do it? I didn't do this during the time I talked about it. But think about a challenge in your life and ask yourself the can I do it? Then ask yourself the how do I do it? Actually feel how each feels differently. Notice the variability in that. Bring mindfulness to it. Focus on the how process of how you're going to rock it, and then challenge your false limits. How are you limiting yourself? What story you're telling yourself? Can you expand that into the possible? The answer is yes, you can. Have fun with that. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See.