Mind-Body Strategies for Better Health | Dr. Ellen Langer

Most of us are mindless almost all the time. Being mindful couldn't be easier.

But then if people say, hey, I'm not smart enough, I'm too old, I have a horrible memory, I say, stop. If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them.

How do you get people just to open up their minds and realize all that's possible?

Are decisions an illusion too, then?

Don't worry about making the right decision. You can never know.

It's so interesting how our thoughts and our perspectives have the potential to profoundly shape our well-being.

We can do so much more than any of us imagine.

What would you recommend for managing responses and reactance to overwhelm and stress?

I have a couple of answers to that. The first one is a one-liner that I have people, once they hear it, they put it on their refrigerators, which is—

Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. I want to thank you for tuning into this very special episode. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube to our 1.3 million subscribers there to get the latest and the greatest We encourage people to watch our content there because you get to see us on video. And we also put the extended version on. If you're listening to audio, we keep it to 20 minutes, but let's get started. I want to thank you everyone also for supporting our latest book, Limitless Expanded. It means the world to us. We're on a mission to build better, brighter brains. In the spirit of that, we're going to talk about the power of your mind today. And the question we have for you today, everybody, is how does embracing mind-body unity open up new possibilities to be able to manage and enhance our health. And we have a world-renowned expert here. I'm a big fan, kind of geeking out. I quote Dr. Langer's work consistently almost every single month. And so let me introduce you to Dr. Ellen Langer. She is a bestselling author, professor of psychology department at Harvard University. Many people refer to her as the mother of mindfulness. If I was to read her entire CV, it would take the entire 20 minutes. And her latest book that we're going to talk about today is The Mindful Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Dr. Langer, thank you for being on our show.

Thank you for having me, Jim.

Why don't we start by defining to our listeners what is your understanding of mindful or mindfulness?

I'm glad you asked me because when people hear the word mindfulness, they tend to think of meditation. And meditation, we'll find, is very different from what we're doing. Meditation is a practice that you engage in hopefully to result in post-meditative Mindfulness, as we study it, is more immediate. It's a way of being. It's not a practice. So most people are oblivious to the fact that they're not there most of the time. Now, you don't know you're not there because you're not there to know. 40 years of research has said most of us are mindless almost all the time. Being mindful couldn't be easier. It's a simple process of noticing new things about the things you think you know. Then you say, wow, I guess I didn't know it as well as I thought. And your mind naturally goes to it. Another way of becoming mindful is recognizing the importance of uncertainty. None of us know. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And when we truly understand that, everything becomes new, in which case we just naturally show up. The way we're taught in schools by our parents, oftentimes even the media, teaches us absolutes. And when you think you know something absolutely, then there's no reason to pay any attention to it. So one of my favorites, because I think that the thing people are most sure of is how much is 1 plus 1? Okay, so how much is 1 plus 1, Jim?

We got 2.

2. Okay.

2.

That's very bright of you. Okay. But it turns out 1 plus 1 isn't always 2. If you add 1 watt of chewing Mm-hmm. Plus 1 wad of chewing gum, 1 plus 1 is 1. You add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus—

Mm-hmm.

So in the real world, it doesn't equal 2 as often as it does. Now that I've told you that, imagine— this is very unlikely— but right after we finish, somebody says to you, hey, Jim, how much is 1 and 1? You're no longer just going to blurt out 2. You're going to pay some attention to the context, and then you'll probably answer, It could be 2. And that's the world that we live in, the world where everything can be understood in multiple ways. Things are always changing. And when we recognize that we don't know, we sit up and pay attention. And we don't have to be afraid of not knowing because nobody knows.

Right.

And that also gives you great power when you're talking to one of these people who think they know. Anyway, so what we've done is over 45 years of research, making people more mindful, That is actively noticing new things. And the effects are enormous, that it results in longevity and increase in health. Our relationships are better. People see us as charismatic. Our memory is better. Everything is better, actually. And the fun thing is that it's so easy so that I hope that your listeners, once they hear this, they realize they should be mindful. If you're going to do it, show up for it.

Yeah. I really love that. Sometimes we don't evaluate our assumptions and our attitudes about things. You mentioned our health. We tend to live our lives sometimes as we grow older or we have more life experience. I'm in my 50s through ailments, right?

Yeah.

You mentioned in the book stiff knees or frayed nerves, diminishing eyesight, and we have a belief system that we're mindful of that If you were to ask, it's just like it's going to go in one direction. Usually it's a decline for the worst.

Exactly. And so then what happens is it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, that if you believe when you get old, you fall apart, when you get older and you start to fall apart, you say, well, what do you expect? And you don't do anything to make yourself better. And the experiments that we've done, most of which are— all of them actually are reported in The Mindful Body, show that the amount of control we have over our health and well-being just so far exceeds anything that most people assume. It's very exciting. You know, that one of the things that we talk about in the book, a large amount actually, is mind-body unity. And most people grew up in a time where we talk about mind and body. And if you have a mind and a body, the question is, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called the mind, a thought, To the body. And I say, let's put them back together. And if we make the mind and body one thing, so it's not connected, it's one thing, then wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And so we do lots and lots of studies where we put the mind in unusual places, take the measurements from the body, and get support from all of them for the idea of mind-body unity. You can ask me about the first of these. So let me tell you about the first.

I also want to point out that mind and body, 1+ 1 equals— could equal 1 in this case then.

Yes.

Going back to 1+ 1 doesn't have to equal 2, uh, it could equal mind and plus body could equal 1 unity.

That's great. Thank you. I hadn't realized that. I'm going to steal that from you. Okay. All right. So the first study we did on mind-body unity is called the Counterclockwise Study. Where what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and we had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. Right. So they would be discussing past events as if they were just unfolding, watching movies from the past as if this was the first time they saw them and so on. And the results were kind of incredible that in just one week without any medical intervention, Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger.

Wow.

And people misunderstand some of the things about that study because I'm not saying you're actually 20 years younger. What the study says is that you can do the things you were able to do 20 years ago if you just let yourself expect that you can do them. So, you know, we have so many of these studies reported in the book, but one of the most fun ones, I think, A very recent one on wound healing. So we inflict a wound, not a big wound, because it would be— the review committee wouldn't let me do it. And I don't want to hurt people, but it's a wound nonetheless. And we have people in front of a clock. Okay, so for a third of the people who had this wound, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. It's rigged. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. And for a third of the people, it's real time. And the question we're asking is, does that wound heal based on real time, which is what everybody would assume, or based on clock or perceived time? And the answer is perceived time.

Okay.

People in a sleep lab wake up and they see by looking at a clock— I'm big on clocks— that's also been rigged, that they slept 2 hours more than they slept or 2 hours fewer or the amount that they actually slept. Biological and cognitive processes seem to follow perceived amount of sleep.

And that's very measurable, right? And so for the wound healing, they have a preconceived notion about how fast they should heal?

Yeah.

Or I was wondering, like, in terms of the reference point, because obviously if they're sped up time, they would feel, you know, their body would act accordingly. It's so interesting how our thoughts and our perspectives have the potential to profoundly shape our Our well-being.

Enormously so. Yeah, I think that you just assume it's going to take time.

Right.

But we have another study that we're doing right now where people are actually told how long it would take them to heal. You go to the doctor with almost anything, you know, you break your leg, you're going to ask, how long will it take me to heal? And they tend to give the average or the far end, you know, of how long it's going to take. It might take you—

And that's the prognosis, to say someone's diagnosed with a broken leg, but the prognosis is setting the expectation for, right, for how— what the experience is going to be like in the healing process and how long it's going to take.

What we do is now we give people the quickest healing time, and we say some people heal as quickly as— all right, and now we're going to see if your cataract surgery or your broken legs or, you know, whatever actually will A lot faster. And all of the mind-body unity work suggests that it, it should, it will, but we won't know yet. You'll have to have me back on the show, uh, next year.

I look forward to that. In terms of bringing this into practical application, that people's— I mean, they look into your Counterclockwise study, and you even remove the mirror so the gentleman couldn't see themselves. Is that right?

Yeah.

And all of that, they're watching old movies, maybe old newspapers and so on. And then obviously very measurable, their eyesight, their physical strength, their hearing, all that's very measurable. How can people take this idea of mindfulness and put it into practice? Let's say somebody feels like they're not getting a good night's sleep and they're always looking at their metrics on their devices or they're losing their eyesight.

Yeah, these devices are great, but they also cause a lot of trouble. And we're given information like you should sleep 8 hours a night. Well, science, whether it's medical science, any science, only gives us probabilities. It can't give us absolutes. So it would be most of the time, or for many of us, 8 hours is a good amount of sleep. But because people mindlessly say, I need 8 hours, that if they find they've gotten 7 hours, they set themselves up for problems. And, you know, the example I think of to me speaks volumes. You know, let's say you just ran a marathon. And what I did was I stayed home watching television, eating candy all day. So I'm on the couch all day long, you're out running. It seems inconceivable to me that we should need the same amount of sleep.

Right.

And yet that's the way people organize themselves. Um, you were talking about vision. This is one of my favorites because again, with these old men, we got an improvement in vision that right now you go to the doctor, you read that Snelling eye chart. So And I'm bizarre. I know it. You know, so for me, all I see, these letters are getting progressively smaller, that there's an expectation that soon I'm not going to be able to see. So we did a study to change the expectation. So the letters, instead of getting smaller, get larger, suggesting soon you will be able to see and people can see what they couldn't see before. But the other thing about vision that I find so interesting is that you're looking at these letters that make no sense in a context that's stressful to start. And then the doctor gives you a number that says you need glasses, as if the way you saw at that moment was the way you always see. I don't know about you, Jim, but if I'm hungry, I can see that restaurant sign very far away. People see colors differently from black and white, things that are moving, things that are familiar. And so one of the things I suggest to people is that Unless your vision is so bad that you're going to cause yourself great injury, you know, take your glasses off because you're training yourself not to be able to see. Almost as if, you know, if you took a laxative every day, it would be hard if you stopped taking it to, you know, to naturally go to the bathroom. That you train your eyes to be dependent on the glasses. If you didn't do that and you go through the day and you see— when you have trouble seeing and when you don't. And, you know, you might find out that for me, for example, I'm a morning person. So around 3 or 4 o'clock, if that's when I went to the doctor for the eye test, my eyes would be worse. But the alternative to glasses might be to rest, you know, to have an energy bar. Those energy bars I find so funny. When I was your age, we used to call them candy bars. You know, you're not supposed to have a candy bar, but an energy bar sounds fine. Also, apropos of nothing, is that if you change the shape of a piece of cake so you make it in a muffin tin, muffins are okay, cake is not. Anyway, we do strange things for ourselves. But, um, and all of those affect us greatly. Do you know the chambermaid study?

Which one is that?

This is the one where we took chambermaids and we asked them first how much exercise they get. So these are women who are exercising all day long, but they think they don't get any exercise because according to the Surgeon General, exercise is what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired to do anything. So we take half of them and we simply teach them that their work is exercise. Making the bed is like working on this machine at the gym and so on. That's all we do is change their minds. Okay. So we take lots of measures. They're— and, you know, at the beginning and then at the end of this, they're not eating any differently. They're not exercising anymore or exerting themselves any more than they did before in the other group. Nevertheless, just changing their mind to seeing their work as exercise, they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. So you have so many of these studies in the book. It seems to me, I don't know how to get people just to open up their minds and realize all that's possible. And then it occurred to me that when people are going to test some of this, they're probably going to say to themselves, they should try.

Right.

And I'm very sensitive to language. And so there's a lot of this in the book. Trying is better than giving up.

Okay.

But trying has built into it an expectation for failure. You don't try to eat an ice cream cone or an energy bar or that muffin cake. You just do it. So the word try has built into it an expectation for failure. So we do some little studies where we have a few different kinds of tasks. One group tried to do it. The other group is just told to do it. The doing group always outperforms the trying I get that.

It's interesting. In our work, we do memory training, and I talk about lies, L-I-E. It's a limited idea that is entertained, limited idea entertained. And one of the mindsets that people believe is that through the aging process, their memory is going to decline and maybe become self-fulfilling because all behavior is belief-driven. So in that example, because people come to me at all the times, I do these demonstrations where I'll memorize 100 people's names in an audience or something.

Yeah.

And I tell them about my learning difficulties and my traumatic brain injury and other things. But then if people say, hey, I'm not smart enough, I'm too old, I have a horrible memory, I say stop. If you, if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. So in, in the reference for these, being mindful of our, our beliefs and attitudes, assumptions around memory as we get older.

Yeah.

How would— what's your, what's your first principle approach to—

Okay, so, um, I don't think we want to buy into any mindsets, you know. So I teach Harvard students, right? And when I'm talking about, um, our research on aging, aging and about memory, I start to ask them a couple of questions. Like I said, what was the last thing I said in class last week? Nobody remembers. So the first thing is that young people are not infrequently forgetful, but they just don't worry about it.

Mm-hmm.

When you talk to yourself about, you know, not remembering, so now there's interference, you're less likely to remember. But it's also the case that your values change. You know, Jim, when I was your age and up and coming, I would meet people and I'd made sure I knew their names. Sadly, don't tell anybody, but let me admit that I don't really care now. You know, that if I need to know your name, that means we'll have continued interaction and eventually I'll know your name. Okay, so now if somebody says to me, what's his name? And I don't know it, I think I don't remember it. But it's not that I forgot it. I didn't learn it in the first place.

Right.

So if you don't learn it, it's not a matter of forgetting it. And there's this other thing, I think I have this in the book, which is kind of cute. A friend of mine says to her mother, Mom, what's Susie's last name? And her mother says to her, Susie who? And she then says, Susie Goldberg. Okay. The point being, if you don't need the information, it's less likely that you're going to be able to recall it. But yeah, I think that the fear of memory loss is grossly overstated and there is some memory loss and so what?

And I appreciate that perspective. You know, we talk about motivation. Some people are just not motivated or care to remember the name and they're okay with that or they're not listening for it or observing it. In the book, you talk about level— was it level 1, 2, 3 thinking?

Yeah.

And how it could potentially help us to change our mindset by applying different points of views or perspectives?

So let me give an example. Let's say you see a young person acting out or whatever, and we say the child is uninhibited. Then you have most people, level 2, who are inhibited. Now, if you see an older person acting in some ways like the child, it's a very big mistake to say that they're childish, they're uninhibited, they're disinhibited. At some point you say, who cares? You know, and you behave differently. So very often—

Right.

When you're at that level 2 and you think you know and you see the level 3, you might, instead of thinking of them as less than, every time you see a difference between your behavior and somebody else's, you could imagine that they actually have something to teach you. You know, you have another elderly example is a person drops their cane. An older person drops their cane. Somebody sees this and they ignore it. Okay, it's level 1. Somebody else rushes in and helps. That's nice. That's level 2. The other person at level 3 may wait just a moment to see if they really need help picking it up because they're going to be so much better off if they can do it themselves. So the point is 1 and 3 are both not helping, but they're very, very different.

Because they're mindful.

Right.

about the situation and be able to see more points of view. How does this relate to— so in The Mindful Body, you suggest that there may be not just one way of how we can improve, let's say, chronic stress or chronic illness. How does that tie in with what people have heard as the placebo effect?

Yeah, that's a very good question. Because first of all, the placebo effect is the best and the earliest evidence of mind-body unity, right? You take a pill that's a nothing pill, right? It's a sugar pill. If it's It's a placebo by definition. It doesn't have any active ingredients. You take it and you get better. Well, if it's not the pill that's making you better, what's making you better? You're doing it for yourself. And that's what all of my work has been aimed at. It's been so important to me to get people to exercise this control that they actually have over their own bodies. Now, when you have a chronic illness, Most people believe the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. But nothing moves in only one direction. Sometimes it's a little better. Sometimes it's a little worse. And we hold it still always with our minds, ignoring what's actually going on. So now what we do is we call people periodically. So, Jim, how is it now? Are you in more or less pain than before? And why? Well, 3 things happen. With this, the first you see, gee, I'm not in as much pain as I thought I was all the time. Second, by asking why, why now is it a little better or a little worse? You get you engage in a mindful search that itself is good for your health, independent of anything else. And third, I believe if you are looking for a solution, you're more likely to find one. And the problem is people confuse chronic. Injuries, chronic diseases, with them being uncontrollable. All it means is that the medical world hasn't come up with an answer. You can always make the rest of your body stronger, which I can't imagine wouldn't help us no matter what disease we have. At any rate, so we call people periodically throughout the day, throughout the week. As a result, the symptoms seem to go away. We've done this with Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, stroke, biggies.

Wow.

Right? Even with stress, people who are stressed think they're stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. Right? So what happens is you're stressed, then you have a period of time where you're not stressed, so you're not thinking about the stress. And then you're stressed again. And that intervening non-stress period somehow doesn't come to your awareness. And so let's say I call you periodically. How is your stress now? Is it more or less than before? And we go through and why the big question is why. And then you find out, lo and behold, you know, I'm stressed when I'm talking to Ellen Langer. Well, if that's the case, don't talk to me. Right. You can see how it can help now. So how can this replace placebos? Because you can't give yourself a placebo. And here I'm saying that we're calling people. There are many ways. Most people have a smartphone. Set the smartphone to ring in an hour. Ask yourself, is this symptom better or worse than before and why? Then set it again to ring in 2.5 hours. It doesn't matter, various times across the day, across the week, and so on. And the results have been very, very exciting.

I like that, using the phone as a prompt or trigger. So clearly you change your attitudes or assumptions about something, it could impact what our community is interested in, which is brain function, mental well-being, brain function like focus, memory, mental well-being, reduced stress, some peace of mind. And so you can't give yourself a placebo. Then what would your advice be to our listeners of where to start? Let's say I have a torn rotator cuff, which I do, which I got from sparring, and it's, it's, it's pretty chronic. I don't feel the pain all the time.

You could have somebody You know, a friend, spouse, whatever, calling you periodically or asking you, so how is it right now, Jim? Or do it yourself. You just set the clock on your phone to ring and then you ask yourself, how is the pain now? Is it more or less than before and why? And when you ask, is it, you know, you'll know immediately whether it's more or less. And then you start figuring out, well, what did I do differently, you know, in this last hour than I might have done before? And you guess and you come closer and closer. And by And by thinking about all the different things that could be the reason, your mind is active, the neurons are firing, and that is, you know, we have 45 years of research, is literally and figuratively enlivening.

Hmm.

So what happens is it's good for you, even if you can't figure out why your rotator cuff, you know, hurts less in the morning. But people seem to be able to come up with something. And it's interesting because I hadn't thought about this until you asked me this question right now, Jim, that even if they don't have the right answer, if you said, you know, right now your rotator cuff is fine because you had an energy bar masquerading— a candy bar masquerading as an energy bar. So then because you thought you figured it out, you'd be less stressed. And it turns out that I think stress is the major culprit across all disease and all injury. And interestingly, or maybe not, to me interesting, that stress is a psychological construct. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event. So if you open it up and consider it from multiple perspectives, Being mindful, then you're going to end up with alternatives that are less scary to you. And then the body relaxes, which helps the healing.

We have part of a program called Quick Success where it's our monthly lives where we connect with our community. We have a book club every year and we bring the authors in. And one of the questions was actually around from our members there about stress in terms of, and I think you answered it, what would you recommend for managing responses and reactions to overwhelm and stress?

Okay. So I have a couple I have a couple of answers to that.

Do you have too much to read but too little time? Are your shelves full of books that you haven't read yet and become shelf help, not self-help? And that's why I created the Kwik Reading Course. 15 minutes a day, 21 days will absolutely transform your life.

Just go to kwikbrain.com/reading, use the code PODCAST15, The first one is a one-liner that I have people, once they hear it, they put it on their refrigerators, which is, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Because most of the time, the things that stress are, you know, I didn't finish the project on time. I forgot to make the phone call. You know, you didn't do something that really is not so earthshaking. And as soon as you ask yourself, is it a tragedy? And then you relax a little bit and you just go forward and fix things. Another thing that people can do is since stress relies on 2 things, the first is a prediction that something's going to happen. And second, that when it happens, it's going to be terrible. So you can attack those separately. The first, people don't realize that prediction is an illusion. We can't predict. We can look back and make everything make sense, what people call Monday morning quarterbacking.

Are decisions an illusion too then? Are making decisions a form of illusion or is that something we have?

No, no, no. I talk in The Mindful Body about mindful decision-making, but let me finish the stress and then remind me to go to decision-making. I'll do it quickly. So you give yourself 3 reasons that this thing might not happen. For reasons. And then you say, well, maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. So you already feel a little better. And then the hard part, imagine that it does happen. Now, all of those things that you were so worried about, how might they be interpreted differently and actually be an advantage? You and I go out to lunch, the food is great. Wonderful. You and I go out to lunch, the food is awful. Wonderful. I'll eat less. I'll pay more attention to you. Everything can be understood differently. So now you have this thing may or may not happen. And if it happens, So it won't be terrible, might actually be good. Okay, decision-making. It's so important to me. I don't know that I'm going to be articulate enough to make it as exciting to people. Let me give you the bottom line and then I'll tell you how I got to it. The bottom line is don't worry about making the right decision. You can never know. Instead of worrying about making the right decision, make the decision right. Okay, so decision-making, what you're doing is making a prediction. If I do this, these things will happen. If I do that, these other things will happen. And we just don't know. There are so many possibilities. If you're given choices to make a decision, first, if I asked you, do you want an apple or an orange? And you hate oranges, there's no decision, right? You just take the apple. If you're making a decision, the experts and decision theorists often say you should do a cost-benefit analysis. And then you add it all up in some complicated way. Well, if every cost is a benefit and every benefit is a cost, an equal measure, because it's all a function of the way you frame the information, then you can't add it up. It's not going to tell you what to do. Not only that, they have to be wrong about doing cost-benefit analysis. Even if you ask yourself the first question, what decision should I make right now? And how do you make that decision? You do a cost-benefit. And how do you make that decision? It becomes an infinite regress.

So you're making a decision then in the moment that's mindful and obviously you can't predict the future, what'll come, the consequences, but you make it good enough?

No. What I'm saying, I did this with my students. This is a graduate course in decision-making. I say, okay, after I explain this thing to them, which I think is easier to understand if you read it in The Mindful Body, but I say, spend the week, do not make any decisions. Use whatever rule you want. Flip a coin or say the first alternative that comes to mind is the one you're going to choose, but don't make any decision. They come back and they all had a wonderful week because they didn't have any stress about what to decide. And whatever happened, they made it work for themselves. People are so sure that they can predict, and that leads them to feel that they should know which of these choices is the one that they should select. We can't predict. So I say to this decision class, for years I've done this, and I would say, okay, I have been teaching a version of this course for 40 years. I have never missed a class.

Wow.

What is the likelihood that I'm going to be here next week? And these are Harvard students, so they're smart but strange. So they say things like 97%. Where are you going to get a calculation like 90%? And we go around the room, 12 people, and they all essentially say they're absolutely sure I'm going to be there. I say, okay, now I want you each to give me a reason why I won't be here. 12 reasons we're going to end up. So the first one always says, you've always been here. You deserve the time off. Okay. The next one says, your dog had to go to the vet. The next one said you had a flat tire. We get 12 really good reasons. Then I say to them, okay, what is the What's the likelihood I'm going to be here next week? And now all of a sudden they realize they haven't the vaguest notion and the 100% drops to 50%. So if you can't predict, then the whole— as you were suggesting smartly so— that the whole idea of trying to make a decision is pointless.

We wrote a book called Limitless. The expanded version just came out. And it's not about being perfect. It's about redrawing the borders and boundaries of what's possible, especially for the mind. So does your data show Do you think that with a little effort, people can, of any age or stage, can perform at a higher level?

Yeah, it doesn't take any question. It takes just asking yourself, well, how do I know that I can't? And you can't know that you can't. All you can know is that you haven't. You can never prove that you can't. You'll appreciate this when I'm trying to make clear to people, because we have— I'll talk to you about fatigue in a moment, but so much data that says we can do so much more than any of us imagine. I ask them, how far is it humanly possible to run without stopping? Again, they're smart kids. They know a marathon is 26 miles. So they know it has to be more than that, or I wouldn't ask the question. Then it becomes like an auction. 25, I mean, 30, 35, 40. They never get past 50. And when they say 50, they're uncomfortable with it. Then I show them a video. There's a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico, The Tarahumara, that can run over 200 miles without stopping.

Wow.

And when you think of the difference between 50, which is a guess, nobody they know has run 50 miles, to 200. And I think it's the size of that difference is true with all of us with respect to almost everything. You know, that you can't prove that you can't doing it. If you do it mindfully, feels good and is good for you. And it almost doesn't even matter if you reach whatever that goal is. You know, we only have moments. And if you make the moment matter, then it all matters. And when people say they can't, clearly, we can't know that we can't. When people think you can't do more than, and experts are always giving a limit until it's surpassed.

Right.

You know, um, it's impossible until someone does it.

And they don't study the outliers, right? Those are kind of just disregarded. If there are people that could run— no, I mean, that the difference is what, 800% in distance?

Yeah.

Uh, which is— which is obviously huge.

Um, yeah, I have been arguing that for years. And rather than study the, the norms, you know, the means, how well the average person can do, If we look at the tail ends and ask ourselves about that, we're going to become so much more informed. What we do as a culture, I find— well, I disagree with it as a rule— that when you get people who have a fine sense of taste, we call them supertasters. They have an ability to remember well beyond what they call super memory. I mean, You know, which immediately says the rest of us can't do it. And I think that the rest of us can do it and should do it. And we won't do it unless we realize it's all possible.

Yeah, it's a tenet to what we teach, that genius is not necessarily born, but it could be built. And I do believe there's a version of ourself that's patiently waiting. And the goal is we show up mindfully, you know, every single day until we're introduced Dr. Ellen Langer, this has been such a— I could talk to you for hours on this subject. Love to have you back on the show. Where can people get The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health?

They can go to Random House, they can go to Amazon, wherever books are sold. Can I add one other point?

Absolutely.

I started the book as a memoir and then it became what it is, similar to my mindfulness book. That means it has a lot of personal stories and I think it makes it a fun read. You see about my having been secretly married when I was very young, my interaction with Hells Angels and so on, to help make the points that I want to make about all of the science.

Beautiful. I want to encourage all our Kwik Reading students to get your copy of The Mindful Body. It will transform your attitudes, assumptions you have about aging, about your memory, about yourself, and open up a whole new world of possibilities. Dr. Langer, thank you so much. To everyone who's listening, make sure you subscribe, leave a review wherever platform you're enjoying it, maybe even take a screenshot and share it with a link to the show. Our goal is to build better, brighter brains, no brain left behind. And thank you to our guest, Dr. Langer, for being on our show. We look forward to having you back.

Thank you very much, Jim.