How Mindfulness Can Literally Make You Live Longer

You are the mother of mindfulness. How incredible.

What I came up with was sacrilegious to some people. People confuse mindfulness with meditation. Mindlessness is not only rampant, it's enormously costly. When you're mindful, people find you more appealing. How could she talk about her own work as being famous? Everybody thinks exercise is good for you. Well, it's not going to have an effect. We have so many of these stuff, studies on this. Mind, body, unity.

This is all based on 45 years of research. Every time you're negatively judging somebody or yourself, you're being mindless.

My mind plays a lot of tricks on me.

Your mind controls your physical health. Stress is our major killer. Decision making and difficult decisions that make us so stressed. Next time you're stressed, James, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?

Okay. This is an incredibly exciting episode. For those that don't know Dr. Ellen Langer, you're about to get to know her. She is known as the mother of mindfulness. She's one of the very founding members of the positive psychology movement. She still is a professor at one of the top universities on the planet and focuses in on positive psychology. She is the author of Mindfulness. If you haven't read it, please get it. I'll put a link in the show notes. But today we're going to look at some incredible things that are going to help you in your life. There's a few things that really stood out for me in this interview. Number one, mindfulness is a way of being. Number two, we've got to embrace not knowing. And number three, mindfulness improves physical health. And Dr. Ellen Langer goes deep. She shares the studies. I mean some of the studies that she's going to talk about. You're going to go, my goodness, I've heard of that study. Her work is truly phenomenal. I'm so honored to have had her here on the show. And I know you're going to get so much out of this. Please enjoy NZ Mortgages powering the Lead on Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages co nz. Dr. Ellen Langer, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Thank you. My pleasure to be here.

I'm so excited that you're here. It's been amazing, this journey of understanding positive psychology from my own point of view. It's been a decade of delving into it. I've came across your work numerous times. You are the mother of mindfulness. How incredible. So can we just before we get into what that means rewind the clock. What got you started on this journey? Why did you go down this path?

You know, one never knows. But the story I've made up, which may or may not be true, is I remember I walked into a mannequin and apologized. And that evening my father forgot his keys for the 10th, 12th time, 1200th time, I don't remember. And it just seemed to me very strange. And so it's funny, James, because I started by studying mindlessness. It was clear to me that people were just not there and they weren't there to know they weren't there. But it was, it was apparent. Then somebody, and I'm assuming the person is pleased that I can't remember who, it was, said to me, you know, you are what you study and some people are just not so nice. So then I said, okay, and I turned it around and I started studying mindfulness. At which point then of course I became aware of all of the Eastern philosophy and Buddhism and what have you. And actually when that happened, I was very pleased because I saw that many of the things that I was coming to from a Western scientific perspective were completely consistent with an ancient philosophy, but they're quite different. And I think it's important for people to understand the difference which you're going to ask me about. Right? Is that the next question or the one after one?

100%.

What is the difference? How do we define that Western versus that Eastern approach?

Okay, well, first of all.

People confuse mindfulness with meditation. And meditation started in the east, right? Now, meditation is a wonderful practice. It has nothing to do with mindfulness per se. You meditate to result in post meditative mindfulness. Right? Mindfulness as we study it isn't a practice, it's actually a way of being that's derived from two things. Either a top down approach, recognizing we don't know anything. People don't realize that. They just don't know. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And so if you fully appreciate that you don't know, you pay attention to everything. If you knew what I was going to say next, why would you bother listening? The other way to persuade yourself is bottom up. So by actively noticing things you think you knew and then you come to see, gee, you didn't know them as well as you thought you did. An example might be, you know, I started painting when I was about 50 and if you had asked me before that time, what color are leaves? And I probably mindlessly would have forgotten that they changed color in the fall and I would have said to you green. Then I start painting. I start looking at the leaves. My gosh, you know, there are so many hundreds of different shades that change every hour of the day, every month of the year, and so on. So this one thing became a multitude of sensations. And that's what happens when you're mindful. All of a sudden, you have choices that you weren't aware were there. Now, when I try to persuade people that they don't know anything, people get very nervous thinking that they don't know. Now they know they don't know. So what they do is pretend. And they think other people know because they are pretending they know I'm here to free everyone. You can't know because, again, everything looks different from different perspectives, and everything is always changing. So to make this hit home, I ask people, what is the one thing everybody around the globe is sure of? How much is one plus one, James?

Well, I hope it would be two.

Yeah. But it's not always two. All right, now, if you're using a base 10 number system, one plus one is two. If you were using the base two number system, one plus one is written as 10. People don't. What is number system? Number system. Okay, let's just talk about real life. If you add one pile of laundry to one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. If you add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one is one. If you add one watt of chewing gum to one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one. The other day, somebody sent me something, said, you know, Professor Langer, if you take one pizza and you add one pizza, you have two pizzas. But if you have one lasagna and you add another lasagna, one plus one is one. It's just a bigger lasagna. All right? So when you think enough about this, one plus one probably doesn't equal two as. Or more often as it does right now. So now somebody is going to say to you, I doubt it. But somebody said to you, james, how much is one plus one? All of a sudden you have choices to which you are otherwise blind. You can say two, you can say 10, you can say one. And probably other variations as well. So the more mindful we are, the more alternatives we are. We have. Excuse me. My life changed many years. Remember, I was the A student you hated who always knew the answer. I didn't, but I always thought I knew the answer, and so on. And, you know, so this man asked me, well, I watch his horse because he wants to get his horse A hot dog. Well, being as smart as I am, I knew that's ridiculous. Horses are herbivorous. They don't eat meat. Good. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it.

And that's when I realized all those things I knew could be wrong. Now, lots of people would be worried by that, but for me, it was exciting because it opened up a world of possibility. It meant all the things people say can't be. Well, maybe they can be. And I started to pay some more attention to science and not to get into anything too boring, but science doesn't give us facts. Science gives us probabilities. It says if we were to do the exact same study again, which we can never do exactly the same thing, we're likely to get these findings. And then rather than say, most horses under these circumstances seem not to eat meat, it's translated as absolutes. Horses don't eat meat. And that's what we're taught in schools. That's what our parents teach us. That's what we read. And all of that is. Is making us a world of full of mindlessness, which is, you know, this mindlessness is not only rampant, it's enormously costly. You know, I believe I have a slide that says virtually all of our problems, whether personal, interpersonal, professional.

Global, are the result, direct or indirect result of mindlessness. And when I give the talk, I say, because it's printed, I feel that I should say virtual. But just between us and the other 20, 40 million people I've spoken to, I really mean all of our problems. And so, you know, and that's a very big statement. But even if it's only partially true, you can imagine the way things can change if we become more mindful. And this act of noticing. And when you're actively noticing, the neurons are firing. And 45 years of research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. And everything gets better. It's easy to do. It's exciting. It's what you're doing when you're having fun. We should be mindful all the time. And when I say that, some people shudder. That sounds exhausting, but no, could you have fun all the time? That people confuse being mindful with, let's say, thinking. And thinking has gotten a bad rap. Thinking is fun. What's not fun is worrying that you're not going to get the right answer. But the process is clearly fun anyway. It's not only good for us, it bears its imprint in the things that we do. And we wear It. When you're mindful, people find you more appealing. It changes everything. And, you know, so it's good for you. People like you better. They see you as charismatic. You have choices available to you, and the impact on your health is extraordinary. So I can't see any reason.

This is amazing. Thank you for sharing that.

Yeah. You want to talk or I. Can we dig into the health of it? Sure.

No, this is amazing. I would love to chat about the health impacts. What have your findings been around mindfulness impact on physical and mental health?

Okay. Well, very early on, we found that when we gave elderly adults exercises and being mindful, this act of noticing, they lived longer. And I had that in three experiments. However, the results are even more exciting than that. Let's step back a little bit. So I think about mind and body. And, you know, most people just assume you have a mind and a body. And to me, I say, okay, if you have a mind and a body and your mind is affecting your body, how does it get there? How does this fuzzy thing called a thought affect something material like the body body? And I said, these are just words. Let's put the mind and body back together. Now, if you see it as one thing, wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So we've done many exciting studies testing this idea. And the first one people may know of, it's been out there for quite a while. It's called the counterclockwise study, what we did, and it's a famous study. You say, how can she talk about her own work as being famous? It's because if you watch the Simpsons Go to Havana, they talk about the study. So that's when you know you've made it all right. So what we did was to retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier. Then we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So they would be discussing events in the past as if they were just unfolding in a time as short as a week. We found their vision improved their hearing, improved their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. And I don't know about you, James, but in all these years since we did that study, I still have never heard of an elderly person's vision or hearing improve without medical intervention, and then even rarely with medical intervention. So those results were very exciting and started many, many studies that I report in the mindful body. The other part of it is when you recognize that mind and body are one, it goes in both directions. Every thought you have is affecting your body. Every movement of your body is in some ways affecting your mind. When you recognize that everything that is. This is going to be a little complicated, but let me try. Everything that is was at one point a decision, right? We weren't handed down the rules. Let's say, how do you play tennis? From the heavens, right? Somebody decided you have two serves, all right? Now, the more mindful you become, the more you realize that if it was a decision, that means there was uncertainty. If there was uncertainty, that means there are other ways of doing things. And when you recognize all of this, you just break all of the rules. So for me, if you want to play tennis with me, we're going to have three serves. Because I find if I throw it up and I kill it, it doesn't go in. And then because I'm playing doubles and I don't want a double fold, I have a worse second serve. But with my three serves, I throw it up, I kill it. And then the second, I throw it up and I kill it again. And I've learned from that first, and. And I still have the backup third serve. The point of all of that is that everything, everything is mutable. Most of us take what is as if that's the only way it can be. And when you become more aware of everything being put there by people and people who may be different from you, in which case it doesn't make sense to do it their way. People who lived at another time, values and so on, have changed. Life becomes much easier because if it doesn't work, you change it, you know? But people don't do that for a fun reason. So in a course I teach, I asked my students. A friend of mine had begun the first Gay Pride parade. So I go to the board and I say, this is the route she had people take. She starts down here and you go. And then I say, why? Why that route? And these are Harvard kids, very smart. And they say, well, maximum viewing space, maximum safety, maximum this, maximum. And I say, no, she was down here and needed to deliver a package to somebody up here. The point of that is that as soon as we impute important reasons to everything, we become less likely to change it. And sometimes when I'm giving these talks, I'll look in the audience and see if there's a big person. Usually for some reason, I attract six foot five men. All right, so I'll invite one of these six foot five men to the stage. Now, here we look silly, I'm five, three, he's six, five Now I'll ask him to put his hand up. I put my hand next to his. His hand is three inches larger than mine. And then I just raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? I think not. So the more different you are from the person who wrote the rule, the more important it is for you to vary what you're doing so that it suits you. Otherwise, you're never going to be as good as he is.

It's so liberating when you say that like, that's something I've never considered. And also I think about dis ease in the body, whether that turns up as a lump, whether it's an autoimmune disease. Through your research and findings with positive psychology, have you found connection between our ability to change how we're thinking?

No. No for sure. Let me give you an example of some of the other Mind Body Unity studies because they immediately speak to chronic disease. And then I'll tell you a treatment that we've come up with. And people need to realize that I. I'm talking fast. This is all based on 45 years of research. So I hope that they'll read the mindful body to get a more full view of the different findings. The second study is kind of fun in the Mind Body Unity series. So we go to chambermaids. Now. Chambermaids are people who are exercising all day long. They're the people who are cleaning hotel motel rooms. Right. Oddly, James, when we ask them, how much exercise are you getting? They say they're not getting any exercise because they think exercise is what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired. Very simple study. Ali Crum and I do this. We divide them into two groups and we simply tell one group, you know, your work is exercise. Making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym. Dusting the windows is like working at this other machine. So, so now you have two groups. One group realizes their work is exercise, the other group doesn't. We take many, many measures before we start, and then at the end, they're not eating any differently, one from the other. One group isn't working any harder than the other. Nevertheless, the people who just changed their minds and now see their work as exercise lost weight. There was a change in body mass index, waist to hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down. Now, there are other parts of this that are amazing. That's amazing enough for people. But pay attention to what's actually going on here, because this was a test of what is called the nocebo effect. Everybody knows what a placebo is. A placebo is you take nothing, you think it's something, and it makes you better. You think of medicine that's going to make you better. It makes you better. A nocebo is the reverse. A nocebo is you take something that's real but think it's not, and it takes away the effect. So an early study, I don't remember who did this, was these people who were vomiting, were given ipecac. Ipecac is what you give somebody to make them vomit if they've just ingested poison. Okay? So they're vomiting, they're giving medicine that typically makes you vomit, but they're told it stops you from vomiting and it stopped them from vomiting. The relationship between that and the chambermaid study is everybody thinks exercise is good for you. Well, it's not going to have an effect if you don't believe it's going to have an effect. Now think what happens when you go to the doctor and you're given a medication and the medication doesn't work. What the doctor is likely to do is up the dosage or change the medication, when, in fact, what the doctor needs to do is get you to collaborate, so to speak, in your own health care. Anyway, so let me. We have so many of these studies on this mind body unity. I'll just give you one more. The most recent that I did with my student Peter Ungol. We inflict a wound, and I know you're thinking, my God, she has sadist. No, why was a minor wound, but still a wound. All right? And we have people in three different groups. They show up individually with their wound. They're in front of a clock. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. Or for the other group, half as fast as real time. Or for the last group, real time. Now, most people would assume that wound is going to heal when that wound is going to heal. But what we're testing is do our perceptions of the passage of time affect the healing? And of course, I wouldn't be telling you if that's not what we found. Clock time determined healing. Now, you go back to what I said before about science only gives us probabilities. So you go to the doctor, and I don't know how long it would take for. Let's say you break your arm and you ask, how long does it take for it to heal? And I don't know. But let's say, for argument's sake, the doctor tells you it's going to take six weeks. It's going to take you six weeks. But there's no way the doctor can know that some people are going to heal faster, some are going to heal slower. And so that many of the illnesses and the symptoms we experience are a function of our become self fulfilling prophecies and are just not necessary. And I have so much that supports all of this. I can tell you about.

Sleep fatigue. Fatigue is largely a psychological construct. What? No, when I get tired, I get tired. People are saying, I'm saying yes, but that's because you're thinking your mind has nothing to do with how tired you get. So I asked my students.

I say, how far is it humanly possible to run without stopping? They're smart kids. They know a marathon is 26 miles. So they start, they say 28. Somebody yells 32. This goes on until eventually it's like an auction. Somebody yells 50. Everybody, oh, everybody groans. Then I turn on a YouTube of the Taraja Mara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico, who can run over 200 miles without stopping. Now the difference between and I can't run the 50 miles or even the 25 miles, I mean, I'm not saying I can't, never could, but you know that right at this moment I can. But the difference between even the marathon, that people can run the 26 miles and 200 miles, I think is a poor representation of where we are and where we can be far greater than those 200 miles is what I'm suggesting. We've barely touched the surface of the ways we're actually able to control and determine most aspects of our health.

That really inspires me a lot, going back to kind of personal experience. So I had a mother who had breast cancer in her early 50s, thankfully survived it. I had a grandmother, so her mom, who also had it, survived it. But a grandmother on the other side who died because of it. And I found a lump on my chest about a year ago. And of course the first thing I go to is, here we go. It's gotta be breast cancer. It's turned out to be gynecomastia. It's not very serious. It's not even visible really. But still my mind is like, will it change? Will it evolve into something? Oh, that pain. I wonder what is going into my lymph.

No.

And my mind plays a lot of tricks on me. Do you have any tips for me in a practice?

Well, yeah. Well, before we get to the tips, it's funny because you asked me how did I get into it, all of this. And now you remind me the. The most important thing that led me into the study of health was my mother's bat with breast cancer. So her cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the end game. Pancreatic cancer. The medical world wrote her off, no longer exercised her limbs and so on, and then magically, it was gone. They want you to write it up as medical history. And I said there was nothing medical about it. And, you know, these spontaneous remissions, I think, are far more common than most of us realize. People out there who have a lump don't even know they have a lump, and the lump is gone, you know, and so on. At any rate, that was what started me on all of this, that how could it be? How could the cancer be there and then be gone? And that's how I came to the mind body unity idea. But let me tell you something even funnier, because I think I'm probably. I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating. I'm probably the only person, you know who has two pancreas stories. Okay, so the Mindful Body started as a memoir, and in it I tell many tales that are, I think, interesting. I'm not going to tell people now, but my bat with the Hell's Angels and so on. But one story I tell, I was married when I was very, very young. I was 19 going on 30, and we went to Paris for a honeymoon. And now, you know, I have to be all grown up because after all, I'm a married woman. I don't know why I thought that, but that's what I thought. In this restaurant, I order a mixed grill. On the mixed grill was a pancreas. And for reasons that I can't figure out, I thought I couldn't be a sophisticated woman of this world unless I could eat the pancreas. So the dish comes, and I asked my then husband, which of these is the pancreas? And he points to something. Okay, I then eat everything else. And now comes the moment of truth. Can I eat the pancreas? I start eating it and I literally become sick. He starts laughing, which seemed to me a strange response. And I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas earlier. All right, so here we have a situation now, you know, that was going to result in my mind body unity theory, but obviously at that age, I hadn't formed any part of it. But here you have. I made myself sick. You have My mother's story where somehow magically she made herself well. And so my life's work has been to try to figure out how to make that happen more intentionally, you know, so you're asked, what can you do? You know, there are many things that we can do. It's interesting to me that when any of us get a diagnosis of a chronic illness, we take that to mean there's nothing you can do about it. That's all it means, is that the medical world hasn't figured out a treatment for it. All right, so what you can, the first thing you can do is become more mindful. Because when you're mindful, the neurons are firing. And we have lots of evidence that that makes you healthier. You also feel happier and so on. But what happens instead? You become depressed because after all, you have this disease you don't know how to deal with, you can't do anything about, and you retreat inward, so probably reducing your mindfulness. Second, by realizing that you can do something, you start to feel better because feeling helpless is not good for our health or our well being. Now, there's data that I present in the mindful body that's really, it's wild. Not from our lab, from many labs, though, it's imagined exercise. Do you know that if you imagine yourself lifting weights.

You will get virtually the same advantage as you would if you actually lift the weights? So your mind now you can do these exercises and be mindful. And then we've come up with, I'll call it a treatment. And we've done this with lots of disorders. So whenever you have a chronic illness, I think more than likely you think the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. You know, if the stock market is doing well, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up, it goes down a little, it goes up, goes down some, and so on. And so too with our symptoms, nothing stays exactly the same, but we're oblivious to it. So what we do is we call people throughout the day, throughout the week, and simply ask them, how is the symptom? Now, is it better or worse than the last time we spoke? And here's the important question, and why, okay, lots of things happen with that. The first, by having something to do again, you don't feel helpless. Second, as soon as you notice there's a moment when you feel better that brings a very good big sigh of relief. And now you think that, well, maybe there are things that you can do. Third, when you Start asking, why now? Then you begin that mindful search and the mindfulness itself is good for you. And fourth, I believe if you're looking for a solution, you're more likely to find one. Now, we've done this with people who have multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, stroke, Parkinson's, a host of big disorders, and find successful results across the board. I did this in search of a way for us to give ourselves a placebo. See, I can't take a sugar pill and tell myself it's not a sugar pill and then get better. So what could I do? So you might say, well, here you still have somebody else doing this. We were calling people, but everybody has a smartphone. Set the smartphone to ring in two hours and ask yourself, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time you checked in? And why? Then set it, you know, for an hour and 26 minutes. It doesn't matter, just vary the times over the course of the day, over the days of the week. And you know, the good thing about it, you know, when you have many drug treatments, there's a downside, right? You know that, what was it? The surgery was successful, but the patient died. I mean, you know, you hear these things on television, they're frightening. You take this drug and you hear it could lead to, and then terrible, terrible things. There's no downside to this attention to symptom variability, it's not going to hurt. It doesn't have to keep you from the doctor's office. It can be coordinated with what the doctor, what the doctor is doing. And when I say attention to symptom variability, that sounds. Oh, scary, a big thing. It's just being mindful. I fancier word. When you're mindful, you notice change. Okay? When you're attending to variability, that means noticing change. And you know, so that's a very exciting thing for me because.

A non medical treatment that has worked on disorders that are very different one from the next.

That'S incredible work and it excites me too. I've got friends who have Ms. And Parkinson's. I'll be getting them this book and they will be reading it because I think there's so much in there for them. I look back on my younger days, I was 12 years old and all I wanted to do was win the World Solo Drumming Championships. That was like all I wanted to do.

I didn't know there was physically.

Most people don't.

And it must have driven your ear family crazy.

My sister wanted to kill me oh, my goodness. Ellen. I was. Yeah, my sister was throwing things at me, screaming at me. It was constant. I was rat a tat tat all day long. But I was actually struggling. And you mentioned about the lifting the weights, like thinking about it. And there's benefits that you get even without doing it, if you think about it. So there was one or two specific rudiments, drumming rudiments, that I just couldn't execute very well. And so I started lying down at night and thinking about executing them better and playing them through my head, imagining my hands and arms and fingers moving the sticks. Six, seven weeks passed, and all of a sudden I could execute that incredibly difficult movement really well without having physically practiced it once.

That's right.

That kind of backs up what you're saying.

Yes, for sure. No, there's lots of support for this. If we only stop and look. I mean, the fact that your mind controls your physical health. You know, how many times have you seen somebody vomit, you know, and it makes you sick. Nothing's happening to you. Yeah, right. Or you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face, and you get startled, so your blood pressure and pulse increase and so on, until you realize it was just a leaf. Now, we've all had examples, maybe not as extreme as my pancreas.

French pancreas story, but still. You know, there's something else, though, that I. I would like us to talk about, if it's okay with you. Because the book and my life's work essentially, is not just about our physical health. So much is about our psychological health. And as I said earlier on, that when we realize everything is mutable, everything can be changed, Know we have options open to us. But there's a whole part of this book where I talk about.

Better than better. So I have a lot of respect from my colleagues, and my colleagues are able to get you from oh, bad to okay. But there's a whole, you know, a whole other way of being. So, for example, let's say you blame somebody. So a therapist or a close friend is going to tell you, james, you know, it's not good to forgive them. And they might get you to be forgiving, but I don't want anyone actually to ever forgive me. Well, I'll explain what this means. But what I did made sense when I did it, or else I wouldn't have done it. And I'd rather you understand me. But before I get to that, so I was asked to give a sermon at one of the Harvard churches. I'm Jewish. And I'm not particularly religious. And I also am a person who seems to always say yes. Okay, so that means I'm saying yes to something without knowing what am I going to talk about. And I start thinking about it, but, well, you know, forgiveness sounds sort of religious. Y. It's not religion, but people would accept it. Now I take a deep dive into trying to understand forgiveness. And what I came up with was sacrilegious to some people. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad, what are they going to tell you that's good? If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad, what are they going to tell you? It's bad. But you know, you can't forgive unless you first blame. Ooh, our forgivers are our blamers. Now, things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. Nevertheless, when you blame somebody, you blame them for bad things. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame and then end up forgiving. To me, not divine. The alternative is to understand the person's behavior from their perspective and then understand them. So what am I saying? And I'll tell you something else, James, now that we're such close friends.

Of all the findings, all the thoughts that I've had over these 45 more years, this simple thing is more important to me than any of the others, which is the realization that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective. That means every time you're negatively judging somebody or yourself, you're being mindless. So, James, you might not like me because I'm gullible and, oh, I really am. And you can show me all the ways. I'm. I've been taken by two psychopaths. I mean, just, you know, I am really gullible. And I'll look at it. I'll say, I don't want to be so gullible, but I'll try to change and I'll fail. The reason I'll fail is going forward, I'm not being gullible. I'm being trusting. And you, by the way, get on my nerves because you are so inconsistent. And I can show you all the ways you're in. You don't want to be inconsistent. You're going to try to change, but you're going to fail because your intention going forward is to be flexible. So we did a study many, many years ago. We gave people two or 300. I don't remember these behavior descriptions. And we said, circle those things. You keep trying to change about yourself, and. And you have trouble Changing. So for me, I being gullible, being impulsive. And I won't tell you the rest. Okay, then you turn the page over and in a random order of the positive versions of each of these, now we ask people, circle those things you really value about yourself. And I will circle being trusting and spontaneous. And as long as I trust.

Value being trusting, I'm going to be gullible. And as long as I value being spontaneous, I'm going at times to seem impulsive. So the moral of that story is, if you want me to stop being gullible, you have to get me to no longer value being trusting. And my guess is you wouldn't want to do that. If I want to get you to stop being inconsistent, I have to get you to no longer value being flexible. And neither of us would want to do that either. And you. So you can see, you know, they under the way, relationships change based on that, on understanding rather than forgiving. Forgiving means that person, everybody agrees it was bad and the person in some way should be punished for having been so thoughtless, careless, or what have you. This is a very different view of people. It's a kinder view, I think.

Powerful.

Yeah. And it really is to me, it was. And you know, but there when I say a better than better way, let me give an example. And then I found, my students told me after we did this study that it should be called the Yoda study, which I didn't realize, but yes, it should. Okay, now and explain that to you. So, so let's say you're suffering. You know, you give up, you don't want to do whatever it is. And the therapist, your friend, somebody caring, tells you, try, James, just try it. Okay, now, trying is better than giving up. But it's not nearly as good as just doing it. Nobody tries to eat an ice cream cone. You just eat it. So the idea and the instruction try has built into it an expectation for failure. It's the same thing with hope. Hope is better than being hopeless. But the word itself also conveys an expectation of failure. When I get up in the morning and I go to the kitchen, I don't hope I can have a cup of coffee. I just presume I'll be able to have a cup of coffee. And there are so many ways. And the medical world is the last one I'll give you unless you beg for more. No, the. In the medical world, you have notions of, let's say, remission. So your cancer that you said you had cancer, and the cancer is gone. Now you can be told you're in remission. I went to see my friend Eva, who had a very unusual and terrible cancer. She had just come back from Mass General Hospital. I said, how are you? She said, she's in remission. And she was pleased. And at that moment I thought to myself, wait a second. If I take the very same test, presumably they'll tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it I don't have it, but she has it hiding there someplace, possibly in remission? Now, the idea of remission means that you have to still be stressed, right? You know the doctors with your mother's and grandmother's breast cancer, they have, at least in the States, they follow a five year rule. And I can't tell you how many calls I've made to try to find out, what is this based on? It's not based on science. But if you are in remission for five years, then they'll give you a clean bill of health. But for those five years, you're very stressed. And again, my view, more extreme than most people's. But I believe over time I'll be proven right, that stress is our major killer. That if we took people with any disease and we assessed how stressed they were, that degree of stress would predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, nutrition, and even treatment. Now I'm throwing so much at you, but if we add one piece to that, 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. The less stressed you're going to be, thereby the healthier you're going to be. At any rate, the idea of remission versus cure, before I put this out there in the world, I contacted leading oncologists to make sure I wasn't unintentionally going to be hurting people. I said, look, you could call it remission or cure, right? And calling it remission keeps people stressed. Calling it cured, they get on with living. Is it okay for me? And she said, yes, yes. That's what she tells her patients. James, when you have a cold and the cold is gone, you don't see the cold as in remission. If you get another cold, it bears some similarity to it, which is why you call it a cold. But it's also different. In some ways. It's the same thing with cancer. The cancer is there. If another cancer shows up, you can, you know, it's the same. In some ways, it's different. If you Attend to the difference. It's safe to call it cured, you know, it's never going to be the same thing. And you know, just think with colds, most people don't get scared when they have a cold. And I can beat it. I've beaten hundreds of them.

You know, and so too for people who have many times over beaten cancer. So we do a study where we see people who see their cancer as in remission versus those who see it as cured. And we check back six months later. And those who see it as cured are healthier and happier on every measure. We test it. So, wow. But so you can see, you know, that it starts where you've got the disease, then you see it as in remission. So that's better. And as I'm always arguing, there's yet a better way and we need to not settle so much for what I see as mediocre solutions as we can move our lives to things that now only seem like dreams for many of us.

What I hear as well, it's just inspiring is that one, the mindset of positive psychology and mindfulness will give us a longer life potentially, but not only longer, better quality.

Yeah, no, I think, you know, right now the world seems to me a little obsessed with trying to live longer.

There are even awards. I have been called by so many different people to be part of this project or that project to extend life and win I don't know how many millions of billions of dollars it is. I think that rather than spend one's time trying to add more years to one's life, what we should be doing is adding more life to our years. And that not inconsequentially, should result in a longer life. And the life we want to extend is a life that, you know, where we have our wits about us, our strengths. And I think that we can do that to so far to a much greater place than most of us realize.

100% agree with that. And in terms of this, you mentioned it earlier around your colleagues, my simple Irish way of kind of looking or thinking about it is below the line. We deal with trauma. It's a lot of therapy in around here. Depression, suicidal ideation. Above the line is future focused is what's possible, what's positive. And to me, in my simplified version, that's where positive psychology sits. Am I on the right track with how I consider it?

Oh, yes. What you said is perfectly true. I don't know how to characterize positive psychology that people need to understand. It's not about being positive. Positive psychology changed from just looking at things like helplessness to things like effective.

Living. And.

You know, so one of the early studies that I did on stress, showing that we could reduce stress by following some of these mindful ideas, way back in the 70s.

Was a positive psychology study. Before there was positive psychology, we took elderly people and we gave them choices to make and encourage them to mindfully engage their environment. Although with that study, I hadn't yet developed the notion of mindfulness. But, you know, and then we found by increasing that mindful engagement, they live longer. So that was another early study in positive psychology.

I think that people don't want to see it as just being positive, because if you're positive, and that means you don't acknowledge negative, you're just as mindless, you can be happier. But, you know, you want to understand that evaluation is in our heads. It's not in events, it's not in stimuli, it's in our heads. And that anything that can be understood as positive can also be understood as negative. So for me, I mark the edge of the optimism continuum because, you know, if I think about this this way, and it makes me unhappy, but I recognize it could be understood that way, and I think about it this way, it makes me happy. You know, I'm going to choose the latter. So it's not a cockeyed optimism. It's, let's say, a mindful optimism.

And, yeah, sit there with you.

I feel like we're quite aligned with that. And the one thing I wanted to ask you about was the Langer Mindfulness Scale. What is the scale, and how do we figure out where we sit on that?

Well, you know, this was something we derived decades ago. And there's something oxymoronic about a scale because the scale is holding things still and mindfulness is fluid. You can't hold it still and sort of imagine I could give you all the right answers. So you mindlessly answer brilliantly and mindfully on the scale. So we use it in research on occasion. But.

I don't think it's important for people to wrap their heads around. You know, most scales are weighted so that there's a good answer and a bad answer. You know, so the introversion extroversion scale, it's good to be extroversion. You know, as an extrovert, I sometimes envy those introverts who can just sit quietly. But if you had an introvert as one of your guests, probably you would have gotten a chance to say more, which I apologize for. But it's my excitement you know, so, yeah, I'm not, you know, it's an interesting scale, but let's spend our last few minutes talking about something else.

Yeah, well, let's. I love that I'm a bit of an extrovert, as you can tell, but the one thing I would love to know is just around goal attainment. So it could be someone that's saving money or trying to make more money, or it could be someone that's trying to win the Olympics. How does mindfulness support goal attainment?

Yeah, okay, well, indirectly, because goals, if your behavior is goal or routine or rule driven, you're mindless. You know, remember that you think about the goal at time one and then you start to enact your way to reach that goal. But lots of things have changed, intervened. And it would be mindless to think that you had to continue this because after all, you set out on that path to start with. So we want our rules, our routines, our goals to guide us, not to determine how we're going to be. Now, goals are based on predictions, and predictions are illusions. Now, it becomes a little complicated for the end of our time together, but I'm going to throw it at you anyway and people can read about it in the mindful body. Prediction is an illusion. We can predict for the group, but not for the individual. So let's say, I say to you, James, here's a bargain, a bet I want to make with you. Let's go to Mercedes.

Showroom. You know, let's say they'll have 100 cars. I don't know anyone that has 100 cars, but we found one that has 100 cars. And you pick anyone out at random. And if that car starts, I'll give you $500,000.

If the car doesn't start, you give me a million dollars or I'll even you give me $250,000. I don't have to be greedy. Most people will not take the bet. They know, look, there's occasionally there's a lemon, right? So on whole, more of those Mercedes will start than if we went to a used car parking lot. So, you know, I'm not saying it's not good, but you can count on it. So you're told 90% of the people who have this procedure do brilliantly. That's great. But. And I'm happy for them, but if I'm not part of that 90%, you know, I have certain thoughts about the whole thing. An example, you know, so I'm a reasonably good athlete and if I throw foul shots much of the time I make them. Not always, of course. Right now, if I'm shooting foul shots against, I don't know, Michael Jordan, all right, if we throw 20 baskets, shoot 20 times, he's likely to win. However, if we throw one basket.

He might have had a fight with his wife, his boss, his partner. He might have had a bad night's sleep. He might have been celebrating all night. He might have slept on his arm. The wrong. A million things that could lead him at this one time not to make the shot. I, on the other hand, slept well, have been looking forward to this all my life. Okay, so the point is, again, we can predict the individual case. When it comes to our own lives, all we really care about is the individual case. Now you. Oh, my gosh, isn't that going to make people stressed that they can't predict? And the answer is no, you don't have to be able to predict. When you realize the control you have over your experience of events, events themselves are neither positive nor negative. It's our views of them that determine our experience of them, and we're in charge of those views. So for me, you know, I don't have to worry about different things happening. You know, I can sort of pursue a goal, and if it doesn't happen, that's fine. No matter what happens, I'm going to enjoy myself. And it's something that is so easy once people understand it. And also in the book, I have a very different view of decision making. And here's one where I think that what everybody is doing tends to be the right thing. But decision theorists are telling them they're doing the wrong thing and that. Let me give you the bottom line, which is, rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, simply make the decision right. When you're deciding between, let's say, two outcomes and you don't know what to do, that's because psychologically they're the same to you. It doesn't matter. Flip a coin. Now, interesting. You can never assess the quality of the decision because we make decisions to take action. As soon as you take an action, you can't take an action testing the other. You know, should you go to Harvard or Yale? So you decide to go to Harvard. Now you say, oh, maybe I should have gone to Yale. Well, you're no longer the same person. You're no longer a first day, first semester freshman. So we can never assess the accuracy of our decisions. But again, that doesn't matter because there are ways of making it all work. So I Say to my class, it's advanced class in decision making. I say spend the week not making any decisions because it's decision making and difficult decisions that make us so stressed. And again, it's that stress that makes us so sick. Right. I say don't make a decision. Use, you know, flip a coin. Use some heuristic for yourself. You know, the first thing that comes to mind, whatever it is, but no decisions. Okay? Randomly choose. They do that. They come back the next week. I said, so how was the week? It was glorious for virtually all of them because whatever they chose, they made it work. And I think that for people to think they should be doing complex cost benefit analyses is mindless because again, if every cost is a benefit and every benefit is a cost, you can't add them up to know where to go. Right. It's going to be zero.

So I like one liner. So let me, let me leave you with another one that lots of my friends seem to put on their refrigerators. I'm going to turn to stress. Next time you're stressed, James, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy. I banged the car, I missed the meeting, the dog ate my homework or the project report or, you know, and then you breathe a sigh of relief. And if that's not persuasive, recognize. Think about the last few times you were stressed and ask yourself, did any of those things actually ever happen? They almost never happen. And if it did happen, somehow, given that we're talking about it today, you were able to deal with it. So stress is far more manageable than most people assume. I'm not one of these people that think that work has. I don't experience stress. Not that I've never experienced it, but.

It. Most things are just opportunities in some sense. There's a, you know, I'm so glad to be mindful. Yeah. Yeah. What did you say?

It's incredible, the ability to be mindful in those stressful moments and respond to them in an intentional way.

Yes. But, you know, sometimes. So there are two different things happening. The first for me, often it doesn't occur to me to be stressed in the first place because I see an advantage. So I was telling you before I was giving this lecture that mattered to me, and I was talking to them about how events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views of the event. I said, and I said to them, okay, so let's say that all of a sudden the Internet goes out. Yeah, I'll Go and I'll have lunch, you know, which would be fine. So it's not that, oh my gosh. And then I'm trying to deal with it, which is a different process. And of course, if you feel stress, you need to talk about. You talk to yourself about it to undo that. But if you do this often enough, you don't see it as stressful in the first place.

That makes total sense. This is gold. And I want to just. I've got one last question, but before I do that, the listener or the viewer. I know you've had an amazing time listening to Ellen. It's been phenomenal. Please go and purchase the book. The link is in the show notes. Anywhere in the world, the link will work. It's for Amazon. And while you're at it, get another copy for a friend, someone who would benefit from this incredible insights to being more mindful in our lives and having a more mindful body for people that might be suffering. This is going to be a great book for people who want to avoid suffering in the future. This is the book to get. So please take action. Get it today. Now, Ellen, I just got one last question and I'd like to ask you to fast forward many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your very last day here on earth. Someone very young that you hold dearly in your heart comes into the room and says, ellen, how do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

Well, it's interesting because I have two grandkids, twins, and when they were five years old, I wrote a little song for them. It's not, as a ditty will say, it goes to the old Sarah Lee commercial. But I won't sing it to you. I'll just say it to you. Everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. Everybody can do something, but everyone can do something else. At which point, you know, they seem to like this. We would sing it all the time. We're in the car and one of the twins, Theo, starts whistling. I said, theo, you're such a good whistler. At which point his brother Emmett says to me, grandma Al, when Theo was learning to whistle, I was learning something else. So if you take that idea and the idea that our behavior makes sense or else we wouldn't do it and that if we do it our own way, nobody can do it better.

Than we can in our own way, that we can all be successful. And if we stop making mindless comparisons with other people buying into mindless Notions of a normal distribution that says some people have a lot of it, you know, good things, some people a medium amount. Some people, you know, don't have any. I think we, we can all realize that we all have special talents and that the things that we seek in this world are not zero sum. There's enough for all of us. So basically, James, my goal, longer term goal, so I have one day I'm alive. I'm going to have to make a lot out of that day, unless we've achieved it before then, is to take the vertical, where you and I sit somewhere near the top and make it horizontal. And that is a time when we all appreciate ourselves, we appreciate each other. We don't do most of the mindless things we do because we haven't been taught to lack that respect for ourselves. So that very simple thing, you know, that what you do makes sense or else you wouldn't do it. And if you can grab a hold of that, then you'll develop the self respect that will let you pursue what, whatever goals you're interested in pursuing.

So powerful. Ellen, There was a listener today that needed to hear that insight and the wisdom. So I just want to say a huge thank you for creating the space today, for sharing so much, but also for the amount of effort that you put into your entire career. It's phenomenal. And that book is going to be downloaded and bought today, I can guarantee it. So thank you so much.

It was very nice to see you, James. Thank you so much.

NZ Mortgages Powering the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages Co NZ.