Beyond Aging: Unlocking the Mindful Body with Dr. Ellen Langer

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance. So you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff here at FRC, and today I have the privilege of sitting down with our Executive Director and bestselling author Stephen Kotler. Joining us is our esteemed guest, Dr. Ellen Langer, a pioneering psychologist who might very well be the reason you're familiar with mindfulness. For a bit more context, Dr. Langer's influence in the world of psychology is immense. For over 4 decades, she's dedicated herself to advancing our understanding of the field. As a Yale PhD graduate, she made significant strides, notably becoming the first female professor to gain tenure in Harvard Psychology's department. Her body of work is extensive, to say the least, with 13 books, including bestsellers like Mindfulness and her most recent work, The topic of today's conversation, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. She's also authored over 200 research articles and received numerous accolades, including 4 distinguished science awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Liberty Science Genius Award. She's rightfully earned the title of Mother of Mindfulness, Ellen and Stephen, it is an absolute honor to be with you here today. And the way that you both in your work has challenged conventional thinking and the insights on breaking self-imposed barriers, it just resulted in a never-ending curiosity for me about how people can lead better lives. So thank you. Stephen, I think you've got our first question in the interview.

Thank you, Ryan. That's a lovely intro. I also want to add that when I think about Dr. Langer's work— so in my generation, if you were growing up and you heard a song on the radio that you really liked and you didn't know who it was, it was usually the Eagles. I always think of Dr. Langer as the Eagles of psychology. If there's an amazing experiment that you've heard about and you're not quite sure who did it, she did it.

Absolutely.

Some of the coolest studies— counterclockwise study, The houseplant study, the haircut study, the Snelling eye chart study. Some of these are familiar to you from my writings, but we're going to talk about way more of them as we go along. But there's literally no way I could do the work I do in the world if Dr. Veronica had done her work.

Your introductions from both of you is so nice that I don't think we should have the interview. You should just go on.

No, it's done. This was it, actually. That was all we were going to do is we were just going to Puff you up and say thank you. All right, let me ask my first question, which is The Mindful Body, your new book, which is obviously you should read, go out, buy 6 copies. Nothing says Merry Christmas like The Mindful Body. Okay. You said it started out as a biography because of your experience, your mother's story with pancreatic cancer. And I won't steal your thunder. I'll let you tell these stories. It started to shift for you, but it's still got a lot of the elements of a biography and it certainly seems to have sort of a history of ideas. So my question is, the central theme of the book, as far as I can tell, is that the notion that there is even a vague mind-body connection is absurd, one and the same thing. And it struck me as I was reading it, I was like, that's interesting. 'Cause in a weird way, it seems like almost inadvertently that was the question your career ended up pointed at and exploding. Did you come in that way?

You know, some of the ideas were brewing for forever. I mean, I was married when I was very young and at 19, so I was 19 going on 40. And we went to Paris for our honeymoon and we're in this restaurant and I order a mixed grill And one of the items on the grill is pancreas. Now, by the way, let me interrupt myself. I'm probably the only person you know who has two pancreas stories. You mentioned one.

It is totally true. I was just thinking that, actually.

Right. All right. And so, you know, I'm a big eater. The first thing that happens when I ask my then-husband which of these is the pancreas, he points to something. I eat everything else with gusto. And now the moment of truth. Am I going to be able to eat the pancreas? I'm going to have to eat it because now I'm a married woman of the world. And I start eating it and I literally get sick. And he starts laughing. And I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. Okay. So here, just the thought was making me ill. All right. And at that point, I wasn't thinking mind-body unity. I wasn't even thinking psychology. But that stayed with me for quite some time. The story you were telling me about my mother, she was about, I guess she was 56, and she had breast cancer. And then the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. Well, as you may know, that's the endgame. So everybody, including the doctors, are preparing for her to die, right? They don't exercise her limbs. They just, you know, they write her off essentially. and then magically the cancer disappears, and the medical world can't explain that. And so the mind-body unity idea explains both pancreas stories and many more. The idea, years ago, decades ago, the medical model was such that they thought one's psychology has nothing to do with one's health. I'm sure everybody thought it's nicer to be happy than unhappy, but still, the only way you were going to get sick as if there was an introduction of an antigen or something. Okay, so then medicine and most smart people progressed to the point of realizing, well, psychology does matter and stress can't be good for your health. And so lots of people talk about the mind-body connection. In fact, some of the people helping me promote this book talk about it as mind-body connection. But it's not if they're just connected. Then you're stuck with the problem. How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And I say, mind, body, these are just words. We put the mind and body back together, and then wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And so since you've read the book, you know there are lots of studies testing this mind-body unity. And what the book suggests, and I think I have the evidence to support it, is essentially every thought you have affects your health. Every move you make affects your health. And, you know, the mind affects the body, the body affects the mind, and so on, because it's one unit. So a lot of the book is about our physical health. But then there's also a fair amount that's just about, you know, successful functioning in this world. And I like language a great deal. I am very sensitive to things that people say and what it actually says, even though that's not what they're trying to convey. So let me give just one example. There's several in the book that we can talk about if you want. When someone says they're gonna try to do it, you know, trying sounds like a good thing. The whole culture takes it as a good thing. I don't. I mean, it's better to try than to believe you have no chance and not do anything, right? But if I gave you an ice cream cone, would you try to eat it? You would just eat it, right? So the word try has built into it a certain expectation for failure. So we do some little studies where we have one group trying to do it, another group just told to do it, and the doing group always outperforms the trying group. By the way, hope is very similar. Oh, what is she saying? I'm going to take apart hope? Well, in some sense, yes, that having no hope is very bad. And having hope is good in comparison. But still, when I get up in the morning and I go to the kitchen, I'm not hoping I'm going to be able to have a cup of coffee, right? I expect that I'm going to. Okay, so hope also has that built into it. Well, I'm on a roll now. Let me give you just one more and then we'll move to physical health. Many years ago, I was asked to give a sermon at one of the Harvard churches. I'm Jewish. And I'm not religious.

I have, you know, I say yes, because I hold on to the Yellow Ladder sermon. I would love to hear the Yellow Ladder sermon.

Okay, well, you're gonna hear, you're gonna hear. So, you know, I know virtually nothing about religion, but I say yes to virtually everything. And so I say yes. And now I have to write this sermon. So forgiveness comes to mind. It sounds sort of religiously, I could get away with it, right? And I start thinking about it, and I come up with something that is really, for many people, sacrilegious. Okay, so here we go. Ryan, if you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to say?

10 out of 10 are going to say yes.

Yeah, of course. Now, Stephen, if you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? What are they going to say? Blame is bad. Well, let's just think about it, because you can't forgive unless you first blame. So that's the first problem. Our forgivers are our blamers. Now, both of you can answer this one. Do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad things. I'll give you the answer since you didn't seem to know.

I'm just trying to come up with something funny to say at this point.

No, it's okay. It's okay. So things in themselves are neither good nor bad. It all depends on the way we view it, frame it, and so on. So what do we have? We have people who see the world negatively, who then blame and then forgive. Hardly divine. All right. So again, forgiveness is better than not forgiving somebody, but it's better not to blame in the first place. So if you recognize that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, the person who's doing the behavior, or else they wouldn't do it. Then instead of forgiving them, you want to understand what they were doing from their perspective. So, Ryan, I can't bear you because you are so inconsistent. But from Ryan's perspective, he's flexible. You can't stand me because I'm so gullible, which I am. But that's because from my perspective, I'm trusting. Turns out every single negative, miserable thing we're going to say about people has an equally strong, but oppositely valenced alternative. For every negative, it can also be seen as positive. Now, you may want me not to be so gullible, but when you recognize that what I am being is trusting, then you probably don't want me to change. And I certainly, Ryan, don't want you to give up being flexible. All right? So if we are mindful, so we're aware of why we're doing what we're doing, then we don't think less of ourselves. Because somebody else has called us some name that seems to be true. But no. Anyway, we find that for people who want to change, they keep trying and trying and they fail. And the reason they fail is because I can keep trying not to be gullible, but I'm not intending to be gullible, so I'm not going to be successful. You want me to stop being gullible? What you need to do is persuade me to not be so trusting. And so on with every negative thing we say about people. Now, when you're mindful— and I probably should have begun by—

Yeah, would you define? Yeah, because you have a different definition that I love.

Okay, I'll tell you what mindfulness is, and then you help me get back to finish that sentence.

Okay, will do.

So mindfulness, as we study it, has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is good. It's just something separate. Okay? When you meditate, you take yourself away from the world, and for 20 minutes twice a day, you're repeating your mantra. And the meditation is not mindful. Meditation is a practice to set you up for post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as I study it, is not a practice. It's just a way of life. Once you have certain understandings, everything for you changes. So when you recognize that everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, then it's not the odd case, but the everyday, all day long case that you don't know. You can't know for sure. Right. And when you know you don't know, then you sit up and you pay attention and everything becomes new in a sense. So you can just accept that. It's so hard because we've all been trained in a very different way in this world. Or you can go out and notice 3 new things. All of a sudden, the things you thought you knew— gee, walk out that door every day, but you never saw these things. Notice 3, 5 new things about a close friend, a person you live with, about ways of doing your work. And you do this often enough and you convince yourself. But when I lecture, it's like, because I want to get to the chase immediately, I often start with one of several things. But for example, I might ask you, how much is 1 1? This is the thing everybody knows for sure, right? I've scared you. Okay, but had I not scared you, it depends what the—

it depends what we're adding.

I would say context matters. Yeah.

Okay. Well, but that's only because he read my epic tome, The Mindful Body. Everybody and their mother and their child says 2. And if I ask somebody out as walking along outside, they'd think I was crazy. Of course, 1 and 1 is 2, but it's not always 2. If you add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. Excuse me. One wad of chewing gum plus one wad of gum. In the real world, it doesn't equal 2 as a morpheme as it does. So in the rare event after we speak today, somebody now asks you, how much is 1 plus 1? You're not going to mindlessly say 2. You're going to pay some attention to the context, and then you're going to answer, it could be 2. All right. Very different. Okay. And the way we're taught in schools by our parents, many people who are lecturing, you know, in medical textbooks, everything is given as absolutes. And there aren't any absolutes except that statement that's absolute. You know, most of what we quote and assume is real is based on science, but science only gives us probabilities. It says if you were to do this study again, you're probably gonna get the same finding. And that's recorded as absolute. My whole life changed, you know, for me several years ago. I'm at this horse event and this man asked me, could I watch his horse because he wants to get his horse a hot dog? Okay, well, Ryan told you, you know, all the awards, just how smart I'm a genius, right? It's all I could do but laugh. I wanted to be nice to this guy, but horses don't eat meat. I'm sorry, right? He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I think I know could be wrong. For me, that was actually exciting because that meant there were all sorts of possibilities to which other people, you know, were blind by thinking that they know. And so all of us together. So what does this mean about how we define mindfulness? So it's actively noticing new things about things that you think you know. What happens is you're actively noticing the neurons are firing. And our research shows that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. Now, lots of people say, stop and be in the present. And it's very sweet, but it's empty because when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And all of this research shows that for virtually all of us, we're not there almost all the time. But when you're there, when you're mindful, you're sensitive to context, you're sensitive to perspective. And the act of noticing is the essence of engagement. So it feels good. Now, you could have rules and routines, but they don't overdetermine what you do. They guide what you do. And so if they don't make sense, you don't do them. Whereas when you're mindless, the past is totally determining what you're doing in the present. You're oblivious to context and perspective. Rules and routines govern your behavior. And so one of the things we might talk about later or now is that this being mindful, this act of noticing is energy begetting, not consuming. It's what you're doing when you're having fun. So if the two of you came to visit me now, you've never been to my house, you wouldn't have to practice being mindful. You'd walk in, and since it's all new, you'd notice and say, oh, what books is she reading? Is she neat? Who did that art? Was that some of hers or somebody? And so on. Right. If you travel, because you're expecting to see new things. You're open and you see new things. But there are new things to see at home, not just in the area you live, but literally in your home.

I want to pull us back to language because you asked me to connect you back to mindfulness and language. And let me ask you a question also. One of the things I've never heard you talk about, but I've always noticed it, is you came of age in psychology at the same time as all that core foundational work on language, Chomsky, Lakoff and all those thinkers in the early linguistics. And I know some of your very earliest work was on framing and reframing and the power of language. Is that where it came from? Did one bleed into another? Was just that in the milieu? Is part A. And part B is, tie the language stuff back to health for us also, which is the thing you do in your book so well. And I want you to talk about that a little bit.

Okay, I forgot the first part, so let me just answer the second one. Tie into language. So I went to visit a friend who had a very, very bad case of cancer, a very unusual kind of cancer. And she had just come back from Mass General. And I said, how are you? She said, my cancer is in remission. And right at that moment, something went off for me. I just, you know, wait a second. If I took the very same test Presumably they tell me I don't have cancer. Why would those tests say I don't have it? But you have it in remission, right? And, you know, when you get a cold and the cold goes away, you see yourself as cured. You don't see yourself as in remission, right? And if a cold comes back, you see it as a new cold. Well, it could be and should be the same thing for cancer. All right. And so we go to women who are on a breast cancer awareness walk, and we simply find out whether they see their cancer as in remission or cured. We check back 6 months later, and on every physical and psychological measure we took, those who saw themselves as cured were, you know, far superior. You know, in remission, imagine how stressful that is. It's sort of— it's lurking. I don't know. And then the medical world comes up with this thing. I've argued with people about this. You know, a 5-year rule. It's not clear where the 5 years comes from. You know, that if you don't have it for 5 years, then we're going to say you're cured. But that's 5 years where people are stressed. And, you know, for me, stress is the major killer. There's a study I wanted to do. It was before COVID and it's very complicated. We never did it. But it would be if you take people who were just diagnosed with cancer.

Now, nobody is going to say, oh, I was going to say, somebody get this past IRB board.

Right. But let's give them 3 weeks to, you know, to figure out how they're going to adjust to it. And then we check back in and see how stressed they are, let's say every 2, 3 weeks or once a month, whatever. I believe that stress will be a better predictor for the course of the disease than anything else, than their treatment, than nutrition. That's interesting. Then—

oh, I want to test this. This is a cool study.

Yeah. So, but anyway, regardless, all the people in the medical world know that cancer is not good for you. And cancer is psychological. Cancer— excuse me, I believe that, but I meant stress is no good for you. Cancer isn't good for you either. Stress is no good for you. But stress is the function of the views you take of events. Events are neither good nor bad. They're nothing, right? The view you take determines— the more mindful you are, the more ways you can see it. And then you can choose. If you see something is only awful, it would be strange not to feel terrible. If you see something could be awful, could be great, could be whatever, it's much easier to tolerate, adjust to it, ignore it. You know, if you're stressed— and stress is interesting because it relies on two things. One, it relies on a prediction that something's going to happen. And two, that when it happens, it's going to be awful. Well, it turns out— and this is a hard one, I probably shouldn't have gotten into it in this interview— but turns out that prediction is an illusion. You cannot predict. Now, you think you can predict because you're so good at postdicting, looking back and saying, ah, I knew it. Going forward, I mean, what am I going to say next? Is my internet connection going to fall apart? Is whatever you did to fix your screen, Stephen, you know, going to break? Will my dog start screaming? Will I say, oh, I'm so hungry, I'm going to get up and go get a pancreas? You know, going forward, we have no idea. Looking back, we know. So, and prediction is going forward. So this thing that you're dreading, if you just give yourself 3, 5 reasons why it won't happen, you immediately feel better because you thought it's going to happen. Now maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. And then comes the fun part. Turn it around and say, okay, let's imagine it happens. What are, um, how is that actually an advantage? And, you know, so you and I go out to dinner, the food is great. Wonderful. You and I go out to dinner, the food is awful. Wonderful. I'll eat less. It'll be better for my waistline. I'll have more— pay more attention to you than to the food. No matter, no matter what the circumstances, there's a way of understanding it. And you're not lying to yourself. You're not rationalizing. It's real. And you do it often enough, it comes quite naturally. So then you end up in a place, a place where I'm fortunate enough to live most of the time, where, you know, everything is good. You know, you want to go to the movie, we'll go to the movie. You want to go to this movie, I don't really care because I'm going to have a good time no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing, which is probably why I tend to say yes more often than Maybe I should, I don't know. But anyway, so I tied all that together. Now, if you remember the other part of that question—

No, the other part of that question is—

We can move on to something better.

Let's move on to something else. I want you to talk a little bit. Brian, I know you had questions and I'm not letting you ask any of them.

I barely let you speak. I didn't know I had to let him speak also.

I know, right? You've talked a lot. You talked a little about it today. I want us to go into it a little bit. Because it's such an interesting concept. You talk a lot about the power of uncertainty. And I want to— let me add a caveat to this, which is, as a general rule, uncertainty stresses humans.

It's a stressor. No, okay, so right now, and that's very important.

Right.

Okay, so there are two things to pay attention to. The first is that that's the way it is. Now, whether it stresses you or doesn't stress you, so you can make believe, and this is what people do, they confuse the stability of their thoughts with the stability of what's going on underneath. Things are changing. We can't stop things from changing. However, what is stressful for most people about not knowing is feeling that they should know. Not only that they should know, but that person over there knows who's going to demean them, fire them, do whatever when they find out that they don't know. And so the secret is out. He doesn't know. She doesn't know. Nobody knows. Nobody can know. And so when you make a universal attribution to uncertainty, nobody knows, then everything is new and is potentially exciting. When you make a personal attribution, then you have to hope nobody asks you about that thing about which you're uncertain anyway. So this uncertainty is what leads us to sit up and pay attention. And when we're paying attention, what happened in this mindful way, which is not just attention. Okay, but when you're, you know, aware you don't know, and now you're going to find out, all of a sudden you're in that present. You can take advantage of things that, you know, other people are blind to. You avoid the danger, not yet arisen. Um, it's so interesting because, you know, when you see people, you know, who have a passion for what they do, and maybe the two of you— I certainly, everything I do, as I was describing, even the eating, I do with great gusto. And lots of people, you know, envy that as as if it's something that is hard to come to. And all you need to do is start actively noticing. I was teaching something the other day, and somehow the Birdman of Alcatraz came up. So here's a guy who's in a cell, cut off from the world, being punished, and a little pigeon comes to that little window in the cell. And so he starts noticing things about the pigeon. And then he becomes excited, one pigeon after the other, and learns all about pigeons. It doesn't matter what you're actively noticing, but that noticing not only makes you excited and you light up, and then other people find you more attractive. And again, it's energy begetting, not consuming. Not only that, not only do you become happier, healthier, more popular. You know, I've been doing this for over 40 years. There is lots of opportunity to plug in different dependent measures, but it also leaves its imprint on the things that you do. You do it when you're mindful, you end up with something that's better. I can't see a reason for anybody, once they understand this, to ever not be mindful as often as they can. Now, I got a call many years ago from these things. There's always somebody who wants to take something good and make it into— anyway, so she was going for a PhD somewhere in something. And she calls me, she says, Professor Langer, can I ask you a question? I said, sure. That's why I answered the phone. She said, is mindfulness just a fad? Just a fad. I said, okay, let's say every time you make toast, You burn the toast and then somebody comes along and shows you that you just have to turn the dial down a slight bit on the toaster. Are you going to go back to burning the toast? I mean, unless you prefer burnt toast and then there wasn't a problem in the first place, you know, that once you've got it, it stays with you because it's easy and it's so good for you and it feels so good. So then we're brought up to believe so differently. Where people think, well, if everybody is mindless, it must serve some useful purpose. And I think that the only time one should ever be mindless is if they found the very best way of doing something and nothing changes. And of course, conditions that I don't think can be met. When someone says, okay, you're in the park and you've got this 2-year-old kid and the 2-year-old wanders into the street, shouldn't you just reflexively pull the child out of harm's way? I said, first of all, if you were mindful, the child wouldn't have ended up in the street in the first place. Second, that if when you're taking the child out of the road, you pay a little attention to the way that car is moving, you're going to be more likely to move out of danger than into danger, right? Because the guy can turn this way, that way, and so on. Not only that, that Oftentimes being mindful is faster, but even if it's slower, it's only nanoseconds. And you say, how could it be faster? Well, if you're used to doing something and you do it following these 10 steps until you get it done, and I come in or somebody else who is mindful, paying attention to all the pieces at this moment, and I only need 2 steps to do it. It's going to take me less time. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about without an example? I do.

I had a weird follow-up, sort of tangential follow-up, which is we haven't talked about any of the research.

Go on, tell me your follow-up. Okay, so I was going to ask you a research question.

Yeah, so here's a research question, but it goes— so one of your very first studies, the houseplant study in the nursing home. Which is on perceived control, and I'll let you talk about it and answer this question. But my question is perceived control in that study clearly led to longevity, beneficial health outcomes, and yet perceived control seems like the inverse of the power of uncertainty. So my question is, how do we reconcile these two ideas? Or am I just— is this me being boneheaded?

No, no, no. I think that's I think that's smart. Well, first of all, when we gave people choices and simple decisions to make and a plan to take care of, what we were doing was leading them to become alive again. Right? So they're thinking about something as opposed to thinking about nothing. Now, when you're mindless and you don't see that you have any control, the system is literally turning itself off. And we all have control all the time. Right? I can move this way. I can raise my hand, I can speak loud, I can, you know, whatever. There are always ways. All right. So, you know, you're looking at the second part of it. The first part is comparing it with being mindless where you're, you know, the system is off. So now we've turned the system on and good things are going to happen. The kinds of decisions we had people make, I don't think certainty was relevant. You know, to it. So for example, they were taking care of the plant. It's interesting because some of them might have thought this is an exact procedure they should follow, in which case they would have been doing it mindlessly. And I wasn't thinking about this at the time. It didn't occur to me. But, you know, we— do you want to go to the movie on Tuesday or Thursday? Well, when you're in a nursing home, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, they're all the same. Right? So you're making a choice, but it's not a choice where you're going to be like, on Tuesday I have to go shopping and Wednesday I was going to the theater. Anyway, so for me, once we got those dramatic findings, people who were making these mindful choices were living longer. I'm thinking, well, you know, how does that happen? How do you go from thinking to again living longer? And so then it all starts to build. And then we've done 3 or 4 studies with elderly people where we make them encourage them to be more mindful, noticing new things. And again, we find they live longer. What people don't realize, I think, to take us to the non-elderly or the hopefully eventually elderly population, is that everything that we're doing to extend our lives, you know, it's fine. You want to eat well. Cut out too much red meat or whatever it is we're told today to cut out. The most important thing is to add more life to your years, and that will probably result in more years to your life. And we can be helping ourselves even with the, the scariest diseases. And that's what some of the research is about. You know, to my mind, The most effective drug out there is a placebo. And, you know, there are placebo surgeries, right? You cut open a person's knee. You don't really do anything, but the person doesn't know that. And then all of a sudden, their knee is better. Placebos are incredible. When you think about it, what is a placebo? It's a nothing pill, right? So you take this nothing and then you get better. Clearly, it's not the pill. You're doing it yourself. And so my work for so many years has been devoted to how can we do that ourselves without the whole charade, without the placebo. Yeah.

So let me ask you, let me bounce off of that. Two different random studies, the haircut study, the haircut blood pressure study, and the Snelling eye chart. And I'll let you talk about, explain them both. But my question is, in both of those, in the haircut blood pressure study, people's blood pressure dropped in the Snelling eye chart study. Their vision improved through kind of mental interventions. How long did that last? How long does this exercise last?

Yeah, I think that probably best to the first test of the mind-body unity idea was the counterclockwise study.

Yeah, that's fine.

And that's important for how long to answer the how long it lasts question. All right, so what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier. We had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they're speaking about past events as if they're just unfolding now. Okay. In less than a week, what we found is their hearing improved. When have you ever heard a 90-year-old's hearing improve? Their vision improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeably younger. Right. And so we put the mind in that younger place and that it unfolds in the way I just described. And then we go to the chambermaid study. And we've got so many of these, I can't go over all of them. But I'll tell you the chambermaid and one or two of the more recent ones. Chambermaids are exercising all day long, right? From an observer's perspective, they're 40 hours a week making beds, cleaning rooms, but they don't see themselves as exercising because they think exercise, according to the Surgeon General, is what you do afterwards. And after work, they're just too tired. So all we do, divide them into two groups, and we teach one group that their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym and so on. Okay, so now we have two groups. One group that realizes their work is exercise, the other that doesn't realize this. We take lots and lots of measures. At the end of the study, we find the groups are not working any harder, one or the other. They're not eating any differently. All that differs is the mindset. My work is exercise. I'm getting a full day exercise. As a result, they lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure again came down. Okay. All just from their change of mind. Now, let me tell you one of the more recent studies, but we have so many, and all of them just scream, wow. We have so much control over our health that we haven't tapped. So we inflict a wound. You know, I'm not a sadist. And even if I wanted to make it a dramatic study, you know, the powers that be wouldn't let me do it, right? But it's still a wound, small wound, but a wound nonetheless. And people are divided into 3 groups individually. Now they're going to be in front of a clock. The clock is rigged, but they don't know it. So for one group, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. Time is rushing by. For another group, it's going half as fast as real time. It's taking forever. For the third group, it's real time. And the question we're asking is, does the wound heal based on real time, which is what everyone would assume, or clock time? Perceived time. And it turns out it depends on perceived time. One of the follow-ups to this study is when you have a surgery or you break your leg, whatever it is, and you ask the doctor, how long is it going to take till you heal? You're probably going to be given an average. What we're doing is study where we give everybody the best healing time because somehow we're able to organize ourselves and get better. Much more quickly than the medical world thinks. Let me interrupt my interruption, which I think I was even interrupting you. So we have fourfold interruption.

It's very meta.

I just want to give people an example of how we're so far away from how much we can do and by orders of magnitude. So I ask my students, these are Harvard kids, and I say, how far is it humanly possible to run? So they know a marathon is 26 miles, right? So they know it's not 26, or else why would I ask the question? So then it's almost like we're having an auction. Someone says 30, 35, 40. They never get beyond 50. Then I show them a video of the Tariya Mora, which is a tribe in Mexico, in Copper Canyon, and they can run 250 miles. Now, the difference between 50, which nobody can run, right? You see people barely getting over the finish line in a marathon. I can't do a 5-mile race, 5K, whatever. But the difference between 50 and 250 is enormous. And I think that metaphorically, the size of that difference is the size of the difference for all the things that we want to be able to do, healing included. Science can never show that you can't. All it can show is that the way you tried didn't work. And a little piece there, and there's so much, I don't want to confuse people, so maybe they'll just take little bits and pieces out of this. But People think they want complete success and without realizing that you can either be imperfectly mindful or perfectly mindless. Now, so remember you're a little kid and you're in the elevator. Oh, can I reach the button? It's all very exciting and you can't quite reach it. Okay, maybe a parent will pick you up and you reach it. Now comes the big day. You can press that button. You're tall enough. And after that, I mean, how many times have you been in elevator excited that you can press the button? The point is that once we know we can do it, there's no there there anyway.

So is there any limits to that?

I mean, well, that's— yeah, Ryan, and I've been asked that before, and I say I don't think that's the right question. I don't know how you would ever know what the limit is. So let's say if you said How long a life can one live? And so now there are some predictions about little babies born now, maybe 120. Now just think about it. You know, see, if you start off and you say, can people live to 140? You'd say no, because no one ever has lived to 140. If you change the question, you say, how might you live to 140? It becomes a whole different thing. All right. Now, if somebody can live to 120, Would it be that hard for you to imagine they could live to 120 in a week? I mean, why?

You know, add a week to it. You don't mean I live 120 years inside a week. You mean— No, no, no.

I say that. No, I meant— So we say the limit is 120, that you can live to 120. And I say, well, I think somebody might be able to live to 120 plus 1 week. And people aren't going to argue it. I have a friend, Jack Rowe, when he was a chair in the Division of Aging in the medical school, and I was on the— you know, I was there with him. And I called him one day and I said, Jack, what— how long does it take for a broken finger to heal? Because I don't know, maybe a week. I said, what would you say if I found a way to cure it psychologically in 6 days? He's like, all right. I said, what about 5 days? He said, sure. What about 4 days? Okay. What about 3 days? No way. I said, okay, what about 2 days and 23 hours? Whatever the breaking point is, you see. And I should have— it was 4 days. Might be 4 days and 23 hours might make it easier for people to understand that. It doesn't matter. The point is, We don't have any way of knowing all that we're capable of. All I know in my study of the psychology of possibility, that there is so much more and so much more improvement from where we are now that it's a sin in some sense not to avail ourselves of it. Which is not saying that, you know, the places that I show we can get to, I'm not suggesting that's the best it can be. All I know is it's a lot better than most people presume.

Is longevity a mindset?

And how would you define longevity?

Oh, I thought you were going to ask me to define mindset.

I—

long— ooh, okay. I— okay, so longevity, I would define longevity as I would ask somebody, How long do you expect to live? And longevity would be the upper limit of somebody's expectation on a long life.

No, I think that if you expect to live to 100, you're very likely going to live to 100 because you've organized yourself to live to 100. You know, if you're 20 years old and you hurt your wrist, you do things to make it better because you're not supposed to have a bad wrist at 20 years old. When you're my age and you hurt your wrist, I know too many people think, well, you get older, you just start to fall apart. And so then you don't do anything. And so in a very straightforward way, my wrist is not going to get better. Yours is, the young person. And not because it has to be that way. So our mindsets determine how much effort we'll put into, you know, what we're going to do to get better. I think that if you wanted to live this long life, other than read this book several times every few years— all right, I'm joking, but not really, because there's a lot in it that says that if you're living the right way, according to me, you know, where you're actually enjoying yourself, you don't take yourself so seriously. If there's some stress that happens, you ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? And you realize, you know, yeah, it's not such a big deal. If you pay attention to the things that used to stress you and you see, gee, most of them don't even happen. And paying attention in this way that is rewarding, exciting, then you're— I can't imagine that you're not going to live a long life. But again, I think the goal is to add more life to your years rather than, you know, I don't know anybody who in the abstract at least, you know, wants to live to 100 and have the last 20 years of their lives, you know, where they're barely alive. So the full active years of your life, to a very large extent, depend on your mindsets. What do you expect for yourself and how do you present yourself to the world? So that was the other piece I'd forgotten we were going to get to on this counterclockwise study. Somebody would ask me, well, do these effects continue? And my life was very exciting. I just got tenure. It was a very big deal and so on. And I didn't do the follow-up study. But you could imagine that after you're— you spend this week where you're on your own cooking for yourself, you know, socializing with people in this retreat, being your younger self, that if then you went home and everybody was overcaring for you and treating you as if you were incompetent and going to fall apart. And, you know, people forget that young people are also not infrequently forgetful. So every time this person who was in the study now goes home and forgets something, ah, he's becoming demented. So if one went back to that environment, I would imagine the effects would reverse itself immediately if they went back to an environment that was supporting the growth, which is another thing. This used to drive me crazy that when you're young, you're seen as developing, and then magically, all of a sudden, you start aging. You know, that's why a lot of my early work was about growth and late adulthood. And, you know, if you ask me, and I mean this quite seriously, if you could cast a spell and make me 25, I would say, no, please keep your potion. I'm not interested. You know, that, you know, been there, done that. And it's too exciting now. You know, when you're 2 years old, you scrape your leg. Oh my God, you're crying as if the world's going to end. You're 7 years old. And Johnny or Janie didn't send you a Valentine and you feel terrible. You're 20, you know, what is it, 15 years old and you have pimples and oh my, and you're 20 years old, will you get into college? And, you know, at some point, and, you know, I'm surely past that point, but, you know, let's say in your late 40s, you start to realize that none of that mattered. It just didn't matter. And again, part of my books and my teach this way, I don't understand why people have to wait until they're 40 or 50 years old for it to all come together. You know, and if we could change our system of education, if we could stop seeing people as winners or losers, as zero-sum, you know, we can't all be winners, that I think that mindful society that we would be living in would be one right from the start where we'd have a great deal of wisdom and happiness.

So I'm going to take a left turn as we're wrapping this up.

I was hoping—

I'm going to take a left turn. Here's my left turn. Have you worked on flow? Did you ever work with—

So when I started— you ask such good questions, Stephen. When I started working on mindfulness, people would ask me about flow and Mickey, because his last name, Shavanshahai, is so hard to say. We just call him Mickey. When Mickey was alive, people would ask him, what is the relationship between flow and mindfulness? So he was a personality psychologist. I was a social psychologist. We were coming to many of the same conclusions. However, one very important difference is that for him, as I remember, that flow was a very unusual state and not available to all of us. And for me, mindfulness is available to all of us virtually all of the time now. So it's very similar. There may be some minor differences. That when you're in that space. But how do you get in that space? You can't be— you can't have a monkey on your back, parents in your head yelling that you're incompetent and whatever. You just have to be totally able to be there. And how can you be there fully? Well, you can be there fully when you recognize that anything that happens, you will be able to deal with it. So you don't have to divide your attention in some way. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that multitasking is bad. That's a whole other thing. Okay? So if you want to attend to whatever you're attending to, you can attend to it fully. When I was writing Mindfulness, this was very funny, probably more my stupidity than mindlessness, but I had to be someplace. I guess I was going to a party or dinner, whatever it was, and I'm working. And totally engaged, right? And periodically I look up at the clock and I don't ask myself what time it is. I ask myself, do I have time to continue? And now the clock was broken, but I didn't realize that for hours. I was totally involved in what I was doing. That also, that makes me think you're going to think this is crazy. How do I get to this other thing? We have a lot in the book, if you remember, about fatigue. And fatigue as a psychological construct. Now, everybody thinks, well, physiologically, wait a second, mind and body are one. And so the first test of this, very simple. We have more sophisticated ones. But if I ask people to do 100 jumping jacks, tell me when you get tired. They tend to get tired at 70. I ask another group of people, do 200 jumping jacks, tell me when you get tired. They get tired at 140. So now let me tell you the most convincing evidence that's not mine. This was rats. Frank Beach did this study forever ago. I've never met him. I never even read the study except in one place. Nobody cites it. So he takes a little boy rat and brings a little girl rat, and they copulate until the little boy rat can't take it anymore. Okay, so now he needs a refractory period before he can Go at it again. If, however, immediately a new little girl rat is introduced to him, he doesn't need that refractory period. In other words, change the context and all of a sudden you have renewed energy. So imagine if you want a personal example, let's say you're word processing all day long. Oh, God, your back hurts and your fingers hurt and you can't wait to get out of there. And then you get home and you play the piano. Everything is the same except it's not. Right. And so now when you realize that context is again a psychological thing, there is no context. And so to the extent— and social psychologists are fond of saying that behavior is context dependent— you scream and yell at football games, you're quiet in libraries and so on. The more mindful you are, the more relevant context you can bring to bear no matter where you are. And in that way, have more control over your behavior. So I tell the story in the book when my mother was in the hospital and I come in and they have a rule you're supposed to leave at 7 o'clock. And I said to them right up front, because there were two contexts operating, there was the hospital, what you're supposed to do. But it was my mother. And I said, I'm not leaving until she wants me to leave. I don't care if it's, you know, 10 o'clock, whenever it is. So we can fight about it every day, or you can make believe you don't see it. We can handle it in any way you want. And because there was a recognition— and this is also in the book— about rules are just things made by people to meet somebody's needs. They're not handed down from the heavens, typically. And so when it doesn't meet your needs, perhaps you should question it. The book at one time, The Mindful Body, initially was called Why Not? Then the next title I had for it was Who Says So? And I was suggesting in part that all of us become the way we were at 2 or 3 years old when someone tells you, who says so? Why do I have to do it that way? Why can't I change the way I do it? And this becomes very important the more different you are from whoever it is who created the game, the rule, the routine. Okay? Because, you know, and I illustrate this when I'm giving talks. I'll look in the audience and see if there's a big tall guy. I don't know why, but there always is. I'll ask them to come to the stage. So He's 6'5". I'm 5'3" on a good day. We just have to stand next to each other and we look ridiculous, right? And then I ask him to put his hand up. His hand is 3 inches larger than mine. And I just say, should we do anything physical the same way? You know, one of us is not getting our needs met. Even, you know, I don't want to be off-color, even if it is off-color. But, you know, he's sitting on the same toilet as a woman who's 4'11". One of them is not getting their biological needs met. People take the world as it's handed to them without realizing that it could be other. Now, if you ask anybody, could you change the rules to tennis so it's 4 serves rather than 2 serves? Can you change the height of the toilet? Everybody's going to say yes. But because so many of us are mindless so much of the time, it doesn't occur to us to ask. And so we try to fit ourselves into the world, the routine as it is when it wasn't designed for us individually. So, you know, again, the larger point is that the more mindful you are, the more choices you have available to yourself because the more alternative ways you see things. And so you can meet your needs in a far greater way. I started to say before that the control we have over our illnesses, as evidenced by our response to placebos, was always a big concern to me. How to harness that without having to go through the charade of somebody, you know, as a doctor giving you a pill that's just a sugar pill. And so we came up with what I call attention to symptom variability, which is just a fancy way of saying being mindful. When you're mindful, you notice change. Mindless, everything is staying still. And so I go through more detail and a lot of studies in the book. But just to briefly summarize it, that when you have a chronic illness, most people believe the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. There are always little blips. Even if you're performing really well, it's not going to be a straight line in either direction. Okay? So if you were able to pay attention to when it's a little better or a little worse, either way, but let's say better, and you ask yourself why now is a little better, 3 things happen. The first is that you notice that, say, chronic pain. Okay. People who are in chronic pain think they're in pain all the time. No one is anything all the time, right? So you feel a little better. Well, why? And then look around you. You just ate something, talked to somebody, sat in the seat differently. What is happening? Well, that search is mindful. And as we've said now many times, that itself is good for your health. And third, so first you feel better because you see it's not steady state, then you become more mindful to figure out why. And I think you're much more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. And so we've done this with Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, and with wonderful results. Let's just make— let me make it clear. So let's say Stephen, that you feel that you're stressed all the time. No one is anything all the time. So Ryan calls you— I'll call you. I call you periodically. How are you now? Are you more or less stressed than the last time we spoke and why? And so now you're trying to figure out, you know, why is it a little better now? And after you do all this, you recognize, you know, when you're not talking to Ellen Langer, You're much more relaxed. Okay, put it differently. When you're talking to Ellen Langer, you're stressed. The solution is straightforward, right? Don't talk to me or find a different way of talking to me. You know that we don't make changes unless we realize that there are other ways we could be doing what we're doing.

I also, I want to, I want to tell you a story because this was fairly recent. And so I got the flu, just a flu, but it did this weird thing to my breathing where when I was trying to fall asleep, as my breathing would slow down, my nose and lungs were so congested, it felt like I wasn't breathing. So I was waking up not breathing in blind panic. This wasn't like sleep apnea a little bit. It was total cessation of breath. And I would wake up in an absolute panic. And the first couple of nights dealing, I had no idea if it was the flu. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know I had the flu. I didn't know what it was. And it was— I mean, you're put into total fight or flight. And the way I actually, like, once I realized it wasn't going to kill me, the way I got through it, because it was a terrifying week where I essentially didn't sleep for most of the week, was paying attention to symptom variability and reminding myself that everything you said, this is not permanent. I have no proof this is permanent. Because my thought was, oh my God, this is the rest of my life. I'm not going to be able to sleep. I can't breathe. This is forever. And it was horrific. And because lack of breathing is automatically panic-inducing, I was in fight or flight the whole time. It was really dreadful. And your stuff really got me through it.

It really mattered. That's great to hear. I think people don't realize how to go back to the beginning, how So much of what we do was programmed where we do it mindlessly and have absolutely no idea that there are choices. And some of these— this is not related really, except remotely. I mean, I could follow this directly from what you were just saying, Stephen, but for the sake of time, it occurred to me that people might realize— I ask people, older people, You're driving a car and your car starts to skid on ice. What do you do? And invariably they tell me you gently pump the brake because that's what we were taught for safety's sake. The way you get out of a skid is you turn towards the skid and you jump. Well, that's fine, except now they've changed the brakes.

We've got anti-lock brakes.

And with anti-lock brakes, what you do is you firmly hit the break. So you learn something to be safe, and that very thing you're doing is now potentially going to be deadly for you. And I think that's true with respect to all of the ailments we have. They become literally, well, our expectations that things are not going to get better. Make sure pretty much that they're not going to get better. And I think that, you know, when physicians tell you things— I didn't really explain to people as well as I might have how prediction is an illusion. But let's just leave that, you know, and if people want to know, they'll read the book and they should read the book even if they don't want to know that. But that doctors, you know, I have great respect for the medical world, but they're always dealing with norms, right? What would most people do? And none of us is us. And that's why we can't just turn ourselves over to the medical world. And so if a doctor tells you that given this disease, you have 6 months to live, there is no way they can know that. There's no way they can know that. They could know it maybe on an average of, you know, 1,000 people who present this way, a certain number of them, maybe the majority of them will die in 6 months. But they can't— you can never predict to the individual case. And Really, that's all we care about, right? How is it going to affect me? I wanted to put out there this idea that I mentioned briefly with respect to my mother. It's a good place for us to end. That's sort of where we started. Spontaneous remissions, I think, are far more likely than most people and medical people realize. Because they're, they're not likely to unfold in a way where they can take stock of them and add it to a database. You know, so you're told you're going to die in 2 months and you say, well, I want to go home, you know, die in my own bed surrounded by my family. And so then let's say you get better. I don't think most people in that circumstance will say, well, let me call my doctor right away and tell me. Tell him or her they were wrong. You know, so we have those people. We have the people who never went to the doctor in the first place, who didn't even know they had the tumor, and then the tumor is gone. And then we, we know the people who have some tumor, they don't know what to call it and afraid to go to the doctor and it goes away. We don't know what any of these numbers are. And so when we're given dread diseases, diagnoses where we get so scared, I think we have to recognize that we just cannot tell how this is going to unfold for us. And that if we assume that we will be fine, we organize ourselves in such a way that it's going to be good for our health. And when you assume that, you know, it's all going to be terrible, then again, you become more mindless and the system starts to close down. And I don't know, you know, I tell people things like this all the time because if somebody told me I had 3 years to live, or let's say 3 months to live, I don't think I might complain. I wouldn't waste any of that time. I'd be out there fully living. And when you're doing that, you're actually helping yourself. You know, the medical world has notion of certain diseases as being uncontrollable. They're chronic. We can't do anything about it. And I think that's wrong. First of all, all it means is that the medical, medical science hasn't found a way to know how to handle it. But I, during COVID I remember I had these two slides for some talk or class where I have an Olympic runner She is, you know, and then I have another slide of somebody who looks just like her who's a couch potato, you know, so she is watching television, eating, you know, surrounded by food and chocolate and pizza, you know, whatever. And you look at these two slides and I just raise the question. I don't have any data for this, but that if both of these people were exposed to COVID and both of them got it, do you think they would have an equally an equal chance of beating the disease, the disorder, whatever we want to call it. So in other words, no matter what's wrong with you, there are parts of you that you can strengthen. And in the strengthening of them and figuring out how to make that part of you stronger, again, you're feeling more in control, you're more mindful. And both of those things are going to, in the long run, help you. And worst comes to worst, if you are no better, at least for those last 3 months or whatever time I said, you've had a life that was full. People need to realize that— this sounds sort of Hallmark, but I believe it, and I believe it's important— that life only consists of moments, and that if we make the moment matter, our lives matter. And to waste it in mindless stress to me feels something that we certainly just shouldn't do. Let's end on a positive note. Okay, so what am I saying with all of this? I'm saying mind and body, we put them back together. We have complete control of our happiness, of our health, of our— of everything that we care about. And right now, too many people are sealed in unlived lives. And the way to break that seal turns out to be easy and good for you and fun. All we need to do is know that we don't know and start noticing. Amazing.

That's pretty awesome. Let's end there.

Yeah, that is perfect.

Ellen, super curious, where can listeners find The Mindful Body? Where can we learn more about your work? Tune into what you're, you know, the new insights that you're gaining through your research?

Yeah, well, they can find The Mindful Body in any bookstore. They can find it on Amazon. You can go to my website, ellenlanger.me. If you go ellenlanger.com, it'll take you to ellenlanger.me. Random House is the publisher. Since the book is new, it's out there and it's doing well, that it shouldn't be hard to find. If you just Google me, probably more information than anybody wants will come up and they can choose from it and go to my website. And I think that, you know, one of the most fun parts of the book is that it did start, you know, it did start off as a memoir. So there are lots of fun stories. I think probably nobody would have predicted that I was secretly married when I was, you know, at that young age. I mean, it's sort Hard for me to believe. And then where else can you get the information? I don't know. You call Steven Kotler. You know, he can tell you a thing or two.

So I'm supposed to include Steven's phone number in the show notes.

I think that's what we do.

Thanks, Ellen. This is really good. And that call forwarding thing we set up, that'll come into play.

Yeah, we're going to have a hotline for Christmas.

It's going to be 1-800-CALL-STEVEN-AND-ELLEN. Thank you so much, both of you. This was great.

Yeah, I enjoyed talking to you.

Thank you for sharing all that wisdom and your time with us. Stephen, special thanks to you. You know, your questions always are taking us down a deep rabbit hole and really turn every discussion that we have into just this complete exploration. We're super lucky to have you at the helm. Uh, and then just to our dedicated listeners, I appreciate you tuning in. This episode resonated with you. Please consider subscribing and sharing it with your friends. Uh, please leave us feedback. And if you want to dive deeper into Ellen's work, uh, we'll be sure to link the resources in our show notes. And until next time, uh, stay curious and keep noticing as the world changes around you. Thanks everyone.