Our guest today was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she is still Professor of Psychology, the recipient of three Distinguished Scientists awards. She's the author of 11 other books, including the International Bestseller Mindfulness, as well as the Power of Mindful Learning, counterclockwise and on becoming an artist. Her trailblazing experiments in social psychology have earned her global recognition.
She's known worldwide as the mother of mindfulness, and the mother of Positive Psychology, we are honored to have her with us and our focus is on her latest book, which is a must read, the Mindful Body Thinking, our Way to Lasting Health. It is a great honor to have her with us. Ellen Langer, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Ellen, from our exchanges, I was struck by your humility and I'm gonna ask you to park that humility for a moment and let our audience know the impact of your work. Because we're so familiar with the term mindfulness and we have this kind of mental model of what it means. But this was a word almost unknown when you began your work back in the seventies.
I was in Chicago a while ago, and there's even a restaurant, the Mindful Burger. So the word is certainly out there. And professor Philip Mayman published a paper that actually showed, I'm going to be immodest, as you requested, that as I would publish the word became that much more common. But people need to understand what I mean by being mindful. Many people think of meditation, and meditation is fine, but it's just not what I'm studying. Meditation is a practice.
Mindfulness as I study it is not a practice, it's just a way of being. Once you recognize a few very simple truths as we'll, call them. All you need to do is know that you don't know. Now and being mindless. I think the easiest way to understand that is being frequently in era, but rarely in doubt. So everything you're taught by your parents, by in education, by the news is always put in absolutes. And it turns out that everything is always changing.
Everything looks different from different perspectives. So these truths are just not some of the time. Now, if you know that you don't know whether this is gonna be a time, it's true or not, you sit up and you pay attention. So let me give you an example. if I asked you, Aidan, how much is one plus one?
Two. Okay, and this is the thing that we think we know best, but it turns out one in one is not always two. If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. If you add one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus, if you add one pile of laundry, plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. So in the real world, it doesn't equal to as or more often as it does.
Now, just imagine after we finish talking a very low probability event, somebody says to you, Hey Aidan, how much is one plus one? You're no longer gonna just mindlessly blurt out two, you're gonna pay some attention to the context and then you're going to answer more mindful and say, it could be one. Or you might say it could be two.
All right, so what happens once we recognize that we don't know, we tune in now it's very hard for people to take all the things they know and just assume that they're wrong. Alright? And 45 years of research has shown me that mindlessness is the rule, not the exception. Almost all of us are mindless almost all the time. So how to become more mindful.
If you pay attention to the things that you think you know, and just ask yourself to notice three new things about the person you live with, about that water bottle you just drank from. You know about anything. You notice things. And if you notice them, you come to see you didn't know them as well as you thought you did, so your attention naturally goes to them. Or if you're able to just accept the fact that you don't know then you would also just tune in.
Now, what happens when you have this sense of everything is new? I. Because everything is changing and you're actively noticing the neurons are firing. And all of this research shows that it's literally and figuratively, enlivening. It's the way you feel when you're having the most fun. So you can't be mindless and passionate, you know, mindless or even finding something humorous. So it feels good.
And so when I say to people, you should be mindful all the time, some people shudder ' cause they think it's like thinking, and even thinking has gotten a bad rap. You know, thinking is fun. What's not fun is the mindless worry that we're not gonna get the right answer, . And you don't have to practice being mindful. You just have to accept that you don't know. So if you came to visit me right now I'm speaking to you from Mexico, so you've never been to the place that I'm at right now.
You wouldn't have to practice anything. You wouldn't have to prepare in any way. You'd come in and you'd be curious and you'd look at the paintings on the wall and you said, yeah, I wonder did she paint that? You know, and so on. So it's not a practice, it's a way of being. Years ago I noticed that I was being mindless in that I was working in a job that I didn't really like. I was on the hamster wheel, I had the fancy car, wore the Armani suits, all this stuff.
And I realized I had children and they were young. And I was never mindful. I was never present. And I had this moment of waking up and I think that is a great start. And you mentioned that , there was a couple of things that were moments in your life, and one of those moments was when your mother may she rest in peace battled with cancer. And this experience of minding her and observing how she dealt with that battle had a profound impact on your work.
yeah, I would say that the experience with my mother's breast cancer is how it started was the reason for decades of research that I've conducted. So she had breast cancer, it had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the end game. Then all of a sudden it was gone. You know, how could it be gone? The medical world couldn't explain it. And that was going to be a goal for me to see if I could explain it and then share the information so other people could experience that as well.
And this is all part of my MINDBODY Unity idea, which is a big part, but not the only part of the mindful body. So, you know, you have a mind, you have a body supposedly, and the question is. How do you get from this fuzzy thing called the mind to the body? And no one can answer that. And I thought about it, I thought, well, well this is silly. These are just words. And if we put the mind and body back together, it's one thing. Then wherever we're putting the mind, we're also putting the body.
Now that doesn't mean that there's nothing going on physiologically, it just means it's all happening more or less simultaneously, rather than you have a thought and this kicks this and that kicks and that, you know, and so on. So we've done lots of studies showing that this mind body unity is very important to help us be healthy, you know, and happy. And so the very first of these was a study done forever ago called the Counterclockwise Study.
Now Aidan, this is interesting 'cause you asked me to be immodest. This is an important study
I'm just gonna jump in because I think that study, I'm hoping the movie is made. I saw Awakenings, which was about Oliver Sachs, and I know there's a script written about you, about your work with Jennifer Aniston as proposed person act in that. I hope that movie gets made in the future as well. 'cause this was one of the turning points in this idea of how you think and mind body unity. I, love this study.
The reason I'm calling it famous is because if you tune into the Simpsons, go to Havana, they discuss the study, so you know, then you've made it anyways. But the idea is very simple. What we did was retrofit a treat to make it seem as if it was 20 years earlier. And then we had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they were speaking about past events as if they were just unfolding and by putting the mind and body back together, which drove the study.
Now their minds are in an earlier time and we took measures their bodies and what we found in a period of time as short as a week, their vision improved. Their hearing improved. And tell me, have you ever heard of an elderly person's hearing or vision improving without medical intervention? So that itself was incredible. Their memory improved, their strength improved, and they look noticeably younger.
Now, truth be told, they didn't look 20 years younger, but still the measures revealed that they looked younger. And so that was the first test of is mind, body unity.
You recreated that study as well recently?
Yes. In Italy and it was also done in the Netherlands and South Korea and in England. Those were demonstrations, not studies. But, so then we did this next study with chamber maids. This is interesting because chamber maids who are exercising all day long don't see themselves as getting any exercise. They think exercise is what you do after work and after work they're just too tired. So all we did was change their mindsets and we taught them that work is exercise.
You know, making a bed is like working at this machine, at the gym. Dusting the windows, you know, is like this other machine and so on. So we have two groups. One who doesn't realize their work is exercise. The other that now believes their work is exercise. The groups were not eating differently, consuming more or less, they weren't working any harder. Again, just that change of mindset. And we found the group that now saw their work as exercise, lost weight.
There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Interesting. Right. I'm not gonna go through all the studies. I hope people will be interested enough to read the book the most recent one is a study on wound healing. So we inflict a wound, not a big wound because you know, we're not sadist, but a little wound and people are in front of a clock. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged and for one group it's going twice as fast as real time.
For another group, it's going half as fast as real time. And for the third group, it's real time. And the question is, does "clock time", "perceived time" have any effect on healing? And the answer is yes. Healing followed perceived time, not real time. And the implications of this, you know, are enormous. But there's lots of other work that I talk about in the book that also speaks to the idea of mind body unity. If you imagine fatigue, , most people think the body can only take so much, right?
And then, and so first thing I did was I asked my students at Harvard in this health class, how far is it humanly possible to run before you just can't take it anymore. These are smart kids, so they know a marathon is 26 miles, so that's where they start. Then it becomes like an auction. They say 28, 30, 35, you know, then somebody typically yells at 50 and everybody groans.
Okay. Then what I do is I turn on a video of The Tarahumara, which are a tribe that live in Copper Canyon, Mexico, and they can run over 200 miles without stopping. And the important thing is to look at the difference between, even if we say 50 and 200 is enormous. And that's the difference between where I believe we are and the minimum of where we can be with respect to every aspect of our health and other aspects of our wellbeing.
Now, so I was reminded when I was writing the book about a study I had read that Frank Beach had done, I think it was in the fifties, and he took little boy rat and introduced, a little girl ran, and they'd copulate. Until the little boy rat couldn't take anymore, he was just so fatigued, right? He needed a time out. Now, what Frank Beach did was for half of the little boy rats, he would immediately introduce a little girl, a new little girl rat, and he was ready to go.
And the point being, as soon as you change the context, you have renewed energy. And the way to understand this, so imagine you're at work and your word processing, you know, all day long and your back hurts and your fingers are hurting. And then at the end of work to relax, you go home and you play the piano. Same activity, but a different context, and you have renewed energy.
So we have lots of things like this that speak to mind, body unity, and to say nothing of all of the work on placebos, you know that you take this pill and it's nothing, right, but you believe it's something and by taking it, then you heal. Now what I've been trying to get people to, to ask themselves that if the pill is nothing, then who's doing the healing? You are doing the healing.
We are doing the healing, and my goal is to find a way to allow this to occur more naturally without physicians giving us a make-believe pill.
One of the things you said, Ellen, in the book, was when you witnessed this with your mother, and I thought this was so powerful to understand this. 'cause many of us witnessed this. A doctor gives you a diagnosis. You don't maybe seek a second opinion. You accept it and you become almost beholden to that diagnosis, but it coud be wrong, because you talk about the importance of the borderline effect.
I'm so glad you mentioned that. I don't talk about that enough and there's so much that I'm excited about in the book and I can only mention so much. This is fun. Imagine that you and I took an IQ test and you got a 60 you got a 70 which would put you in the normal range and I got a 69, which would make me cognitively deficient. Now you don't have to be a statistician to know there's no difference between 69 and 70, right?
I could have sneezed, misread it, been a little tired, you know, so many different explanations. But now that I'm put in the category, what we used to call retarded of cognitively deficient, I don't engage in intellectual activities. The world treats me differently. I see myself differently. And my guess is, in a very short time, if you and I took tests again, now, there'd be a very big difference between us.
You know, sort of like a donut is going to expire on Tuesday, and it's now Monday at 1159. And then it's 12 o'clock, then it's 1201. So at 12 o'clock the donut is okay to eat, but at 1201 it's ridiculous.
I keep saying this to my wife, Ellen. It's not pre-programmed to self-destruct, like, mission impossible. Like it's 1201. I'm done.
I think the most important thing for people to understand is that science only gives us probabilities. It only gives us maybes. And the mistake we make is to take those maybes, those diagnoses, prognoses as absolute, which then as we've just said, makes them self-fulfilling prophecies. You know, if you do a study and you get significant results, the assumption is if it's significant that if you do it again, you're probably going to get the same findings.
And when those are translated into absolutes, we give over our health our independence to maybes And I, I'm not suggesting that medical facts are worthless. I'm suggesting they're not worth nearly as much as people assume. And there's another way of looking at this, which is, whatever can be predicted for the group cannot be predicted for the individual. Let me make that a little clearer. You and I go to a Mercedes parking lot, and let's say there are a hundred cars, alright?
Almost all of those cars are gonna start when you turn the key in the ignition. Would you bet your life savings that any particular car chosen at random is going to start? Well, people, no. 'cause you know, there are lemons, right? Michael Jordan makes a million baskets, but he misses on occasion, right? And so when the medical world is telling you, which they never should, they can't know things like this. You have three months to live.
You know, you should absent yourself from those numbers because they can't be sure. And and that's very important. It's also other thing that occurred to me the other day not entirely relevant, but I'll make it relevant. So, when I talk about people being oblivious to what I'm trying to teach this mind body unity to give us control, right?
If it's one thing, then wherever I put my thoughts, I'm putting my body, which makes me very powerful, that I realize people don't even have body unity, you know? So you take a medication for one part of your body, oblivious to the fact that it's affecting your whole body. Now the point of that I find interesting and important to share is we have many chronic illnesses where people think that they're uncontrollable.
And all chronic means is that right now the medical world doesn't have a sufficient cure for them. It doesn't mean that there won't be or isn't at the moment, things we can do. And if you realize that your whole body is one thing, then whatever is ailing you, if you can help the other parts of you, you're going to implicitly explicitly as well here help all of you. So there, there are always things we can do.
And, you know, in this awareness of people's mistaken beliefs about chronic illnesses led me to a treatment, a psychological treatment for chronic illness. So if you were diagnosed with a chronic illness, most people assume your symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Right. Chronic means I'm not getting better. It's only gonna go downhill. But nothing only moves in one direction. Sort of like the stock market. You know, if the stock except on, you know what, when was it?
1929, you know, after the stock market is going down, it goes down, then it goes up a tiny bit, then it goes down. Or if it's going, let's be more positive. If it's going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. So too, with any of our symptoms. So what's happening when the symptom for a moment is better? All right. Well, we can't ask ourself that question if we don't acknowledge that these things happen. So what we did was very simple.
We take people, and we've done this with a host of chronic illnesses. And all we do is call them periodically. How are you now? How is a symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called? And why? Now that, why question is very important because then you begin a search. Yeah, why is my pain less now than it was before? And that search is mindful. And as we've already said, I have 45 years of research showing that mindfulness itself is good for your health.
And I believe that if you're, if you look for a solution, you're more likely to find one than if you presume there is no solution. All right. So we've done this with people who have multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, Parkinson's arthritis, a host of real things. And in each case, people are able to alleviate their symptoms.
Now, and the thing, this was my replacement for placebos because you can't give yourself a placebo because you have to give yourself something that you're making believe it does something. And if you know, you're making belief, you know, I don't, although that even could work because there are some people who set their alarm clocks for the wrong time. And but still they managed often to get to work on time.
But be that as it may, this attention to symptom variability can easily be conducted by yourself. You take your smartphone and you set it to ring in an hour, and when it rings in an hour, you ask yourself, well, how is my back pain? Is it better or worse than before? And why? And then you set it for two hours and 15 minutes, you know, random times. And you go through this throughout the day, the week. Sometimes it takes longer than that. And now several things happen when you do this.
The first thing, and this is relevant to the research I did when I first became a psychologist, you feel that you have some control over your life and that feels good, right? The second is that there are gonna be times when you see, gee, it doesn't hurt as much. So Gee, that, you know, that feels good. 'cause I thought I'm always, you know, always whatever, never, always anything, but, you know, so now you wake up to that.
When you're looking for, as I said, the why now, why is it better or worse than before? You're being mindful the neurons are firing and that's good for your health. And finally again, that if you look for a solution, I think you're more likely to find it.
I loved a quote you, you opened. In this part about the attention to variability with Tolstoy's quote, you said, "No disease suffered by a live man can be known for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine."
Because of that difference of each of us, and you say, "noticing subtle changes and asking why they have occurred, and then testing for this variability and testing your hypothesis can dramatically affect all diseases." I love that because this is the piece about being mindful and you say, for example, most of us are wired to spot the negatives because we go, oh yeah, it feels bad.
Well, I don't think we're wired to, I think we're taught to.
We're taught to we're programmed to or socialized to. But one of the things I wanted to mention is, so a lot of people have problems with addiction or believe I drink too much. For example, I'm in Ireland, right? We have a problem with that over here. Many countries do. But you say, for example, not. If you are actually mindful and you pay attention to variability, I'd love you to share this because this is a template that you can use for anything.
Yeah. Yeah. Well first of all, people need to understand, 'cause the word variability sounds big and mysterious. It just means change. And mindfulness is noticing change rather than assuming everything is the same over and over again. Noticing the small differences.
Now I had suggested for people who want to drink less to create a little diary for themselves and a two by two where you want to drink, yes or no. You take a drink, yes or no, and you know, you tune in every couple of hours in the course of a day and just mark it off in the little notebook. And you're going to say that there are times you wanted a drink and you didn't have one. What, how did that happen if you think you have no control over it.
And then there are also times I didn't wanna drink, but I took it anyway. And those two cells tell us that we have a lot more control over addictions than most people assume. It's also the case that if you I make a big deal of this in the book people's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it. No one wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I am gonna be obnoxious, stupid, and clumsy. So when they're doing that, what's happening? Right?
Nobody drinks because they wanna hurt their liver. So why are they doing it? And if you approach things from the perspective going forward, why this person is doing what they're doing, you stand a better chance of being able to change circumstances. So if I said to you here we have Aidan, when he he gets upset he does X and it helps him, is that irrational? Nobody's gonna say it's irrational right now.
So rather than make you feel that you have no control, that you're worthless, that you're less good than everybody else who somehow seems to be able to be on top of these things, you see that your behavior is sensible. It's easier then to move to perhaps another way of dealing with the problem. You know, and so take, give people more respect for themselves and so that's part of it.
I think, you know, as soon as you are doing something more than a person you're close to is doing, you run the risk of them telling you that you're addicted. You know, one person's passion is another person's addiction. So if you and I were married, which would be cute, since I'm so much older than you are, but what's the difference? And I was on my phone all the time and I wasn't giving you the attention you wanted. You'd say, I'm addicted to my phone.
It's interesting, Aidan, I was in South Africa many years ago and before I was on this show, it was a new show. No idea why I was there. But the newscaster asked me, can I ask you something? Before we start, I say, sure. He said, what do you think about kids being on their cell phones all the time? So another kind of addiction? And I said, you're not gonna like my answer. 'cause clearly he wanted me to say, bad, take 'em away. You know what have you.
And I said, I believe, I don't have data for this, but I believe that if you present anybody with a caring, nurturing, interesting, exciting in-person conversation, they're going to prefer that to being on the cell phone. And rather than tell the kids to get off their cell phones, I think parents need to up their game. And partners who are accusing you of being a workaholic a phone addict, you know, whatever else.
It's so interesting that because I played professional sport and my wife would go to me, oh, well you were obsessed. And I, my version of that is, that's what it takes to be professional. You have no idea what it's like to be a professional athlete, so therefore you don't know, because my kids are now interested in training and she's like going, I don't want them to be obsessed like you. And I went, I wasn't obsessed at all. This was what you had to do.
Exactly. Exactly.
There's loads of moments when you read this book and I highly recommend it. You will have loads of these moments. One of the ones I wanted to mention was I've given up drinking altogether now and I wasn't a heavy drinker anyway, so it was quite easy for me to do. But one of the things that changed my perception of alcohol altogether was I have a Garmin, a sleep tracker, and when I wadched the sleep tracker, I saw what it did to my deep sleep.
Now, the reason I say that is you've done sleep studies and also you show, well, what you think about your sleep has a dramatic effect on your sleep.
yeah. This was another one of the Mind, Body Unity studies. So we have people in a sleep lab, and we did this at the medicals, Harvard Medical School. So they're hooked up to, you know, getting lots and lots of measures. They wake up and unbeknownst to them, the clock tells them that they got two hours more sleep than they actually got two hours fewer, or the sleep they got. And biological and cognitive functioning seem to again, follow perceived amount of sleep.
aidan_1_02-08-2024_150955: There was a great Henry Ford quote, "whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." And it emphasizes how much attitude determines success or failure. But it's almost it more about attitude. In your world, it's the thoughts and beliefs and the mindfulness or mindlessness. The reason I share that, Ellen, is you did a study with two of your then students, Jaewoo Chung and Laura Hsu, to control for things like status and pay.
And I think this was so important for people. Most of our audience, they're executive CEOs or entrepreneurs, and the idea of the clothes people wear have a dramatic effect on how they think. Yeah, this was an archival study. Essentially, it occurred to me that if I go into some fancy store dress shop and I want to walk out with a mini skirt, they're not going to let me, right? They're going to say it's age inappropriate. Right.
You know, you get to a certain point you're a little more modest and what have you. And so thinking about that, it made me aware that clothes are a way to tell the world how old we are and to determine how others treat us. And so we if you're wearing a uniform, then you eliminate the age related cue, right? Because if you're 30 in the job or you're 50 in the job, you're wearing the same uniform. And so we compared people who wore uniforms. Versus those who were not in uniforms.
And those in uniforms aged better were healthier because the world wasn't saying, Hey, you know you're old. It was the same thing with balding. You know, that you're taught when you're young that when a man gets older, he may become bald. Now, that doesn't mean that when a man is bald, he's older. Right? There are many reasons that men may lose their hair, and it happens for people at different times in their lives.
But if you start off with the belief, you know, you have a full head of hair, you're a young kid that if you don't have your hair, that means you're old. All right? And so then we look at people who bold prematurely. And again there are health problems that you wouldn't otherwise predict. Yeah, they the evidence for MINDBODY Unity is so, ubiquitous. That for me, it's hard to imagine ever believing that it wasn't one thing.
You know, everybody has had the example not everybody, but you see somebody regurgitate on the side of the road and all of a sudden you feel sick. Nothing is happening to you, right? Why should it make or you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face and all of a sudden you're startled, your blood pressure increases, your pulse, your breath, and so on.
Again, just because of a thought that you have, and I tell the story, and people might enjoy the fact that when I started to write the Mindful Body, I started it as a memoir. So there are lots of personal stories there, and I use the personal stories to explain whatever point, you know, I'm trying to make as my time with the Hell's Angels and so on. I'm not gonna tell 'em about it. They can read about it. But when I was I guess I was 19 and I was married very young.
But times were somewhat different then, and I was different even at different times. And we went to Paris on our honeymoon. We go into this restaurant and I order a mixed grill, and one of the items on the mixed grill was pancreas. I asked my then husband, which of these is a pancreas, and he points to something. All right. Now you have to understand I'm 19 going on 30. It feels I'm a woman of the world now. I have, I don't know why now. It seems so silly.
But then I believed I had to eat the pancreas otherwise, , I couldn't show how sophisticated and all grown up I was. Okay. So I eat everything else on the plate. Now the moment of truth, can I eat it? I start eating it, and I literally get sick. Meanwhile, he starts laughing and I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. All right.
And so I had experience very early on that our minds were very crucial in the whole disease process and all aspects of our health.
It's so important, Ellen. , as a parent, so my children 11 and 14, I use this all the time on them. I use placebos. Like I'll give them, you know a sugar pill and go, this is a, this is I kept a packet of these from when I was a pro sports player. These ha heal your leg really quickly. And I'll give them to, and then I'll ask, you know, how's your leg? And you go, yeah, it feels a bit better. And I go, I told you now I'm gonna only keep these for when you're injured in the future.
And. I truly believe in that. Now, the problem the reason I'm saying that is the problem is, again, we've been socialized and trained to not believe in that. That's woo-woo thinking. Your work time and time again shows it isn't, and I'm sure you've come into many instances where people have challenged you?
Okay, so I have so much to say, Aidan. The first thing is that if you're doing this with your kids, what you want to do as they get better is teach them that it was a nothing, so you did it for yourself, right? Because we don't want people to become dependent on placebos. Now the second thing, that since things I'm saying and write about are so different from common thought, you would think that people come at me they may be coming at me and I may just be oblivious to it.
But, you know, I gave a talk the other day and unbeknownst to me there were many physicians in the audience. And I wasn't anti medical, but you know what I'm saying is very different from a medical approach. And nobody gave me any flack. And then I spoke to some afterward and then I realized like they know, they don't know.
You know, and that's all I'm saying is that if you know the person who's telling you what to do can't know for sure, then maybe you'll do some things on your own and you can't really argue that. Right? So I'm not saying that the medical world has nothing to offer, but we need to be aware that it wasn't that long ago, a few decades ago, where the medical model believed that thoughts psychology was irrelevant to health.
The only way you were going to get sick was the introduction of an antigen pathogen. Right. And then eventually that gave way to the Biosocial model where people see stress matters. And I'm just trying to move it to where it really belongs that the psychology is not okay. It matters. It's really the whole ballgame And with that means that we can exercise enormous control.
One of the things on that you were saying was firstly you changed my view on this. So I see advertisements for anti-flu medica or cold and flu medication to help you through cold flu. But actually the power of the advertisings can be as influential as the taking the tablet itself now. And you did a reverse study of that where you tested people and kinda go, I wonder can influencing people to think they have a cold, give them a cold.
yeah. And this study was really mind blowing in some sense because we gave people some tests and we let them know that they were going to get a cold. And without the introduction. Of a cold virus and there are a thousand different kinds. We no cold virus introduced. They ended up getting sick. Now, you know, that can be woowoo. I don't know how that happened. There are two possibilities. One is the woowoo, you know, it came out of nowhere.
The other is, you know, we've all had a cold at some point, and then we get better. But the getting better is probably not a hundred percent. So, you know, there's something that's dormant that we then woke up. But I, it's interesting to talk about a cold because I have a lot in the book about language and a way that reveals how little control we think we have over our health and colds. I talk about colds in a different way here.
So I went to see a friend of mine who had a very bad case of cancer. And I said, Eva, how are you? She said, I'm in remission. And at that moment, a light went on. I said, wait a second. If I had the exact same test, presumably they tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it you have it in remission? All right? Because if it's lurking, then you have to be stressed and you know, to believe you don't have it, a clean bill of health.
You walk around, carry yourself differently and you know, I think in a way that's much better for your health. And so then I compared colds with cancer. You get rid of the cold. You don't see yourself as in remission. You see yourself as cured. If you get a cold again, you see it as a new cold. And you're okay with that because you've beaten lots of these before, so it doesn't scare you in the same way.
And I think that the medical world does a disservice by this five year rule, which I've done a lot of research trying to figure out where this comes from. I can't find a database for it that if the cancer's not there, you're not cancer free unless five years pass and you still don't have it. You know, so for five years you're stressed. And as you know, as a function of reading the book, my belief is that the major killer is stress.
A study that I wanted to do during covid and it's very difficult, so I'll never end up doing it. But is if we took people who were just diagnosed and we can happen diagnosed with anything, so let's use five different kinds of cancer. And you know, nobody, well, nobody that I know, at least who is di given a diagnosis of cancer is happy about it, right? Everybody's gonna be stressed. So give them a little time to deal with it.
And so now let's say after three weeks after you're given that initial diagnosis, we start measuring how stressed the person is every few weeks or once a month, whatever. I believe the stress level will be a better prognosis for how the person will do than genetics, nutrition, even the treatment. And you know, so that's a big claim. But it's also making clear that in stress is psychological events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events.
If we open it up and more mindfully, look at whatever it is and recognize, you know, your stress. When you think something is going to happen and when it happens, it's going to be dreadful. We can't predict what's going to happen. So if you gave yourself five reasons that it's not going to happen and already going to be less stressed, maybe it'll happen. Maybe it won't.
Then one step beyond that, since events are neither good nor bad, it depends on how we package them, frame them, that will determine our experience of them. That if you say, let's assume this thing is going to happen, how might it actually be a good thing? So then rather than, oh my God, this terrible thing is definitely gonna happen, you are, this thing may or may not happen. And if it happens there will be advantages to it.
And I think, you know, I have a one liner in a different book, not in the mindful body that people find helpful, which is when something happens and you're stressed, just ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? And almost always, you don't think, oh my God, I missed the bus. Oh my God, I didn't finish the project. Oh my God, I got into a car accident. You know? Then you breathe differently and it passes.
I was thinking about that even that innovation is the kind of core theme of this show. And I was thinking that, you need to have the right conditions in order for innovation to happen, including no stress or a feeling of doom within an inside an organization, 'cause you cannot possibly be innovative in your thinking in that way, but also that for a cold or a flu to take place. You need to be in certain conditions, your temperature needs to be at a certain point.
That's why people get them more in winter, et cetera. But also to your point, your stress levels need to be at a certain level and then you create these perfect conditions as well. Now I wanted to use that as a segue to the first part of the book and go back there if that's okay. Where you talk about the foundational issues, about rules, risk prediction, decision making, and social comparing, which are all so relevant with inside people, working inside organizations.
And this book I don't want people to get the term mindfulness wrong here. It's not about how to meditate or anything that it's so much about how we live and if we live mindfully and pay attention.
And you tell us here, Ellen, if we can adopt a new view of these concepts, we are well on our way to being more mindful, confident and empowered when we make these shifts in our thinking, our relationships with others and ourselves improve and our stress lessons all in the service of improving our health. So I thought we'd start with rules?
Yeah. I mean, I don't wanna seem to be a rebel, but, and also I'm too old to be put in that category. But on the other hand maybe it's appropriate because I've always said who says, so in fact, Aidan one early title of this book was, "Who Says So?". You know, because everything we're told to do was just a decision. Now, if it was a decision that means there was uncertainty. That means there's another way or maybe five other ways that we could do whatever it is.
And so what happens is you have people who make this decision in uncertainty that meets their needs, and then it's sort of given to the rest of us in perpetuity. Rather than say, well wait a second, maybe this needs to be questioned. Maybe it's not the right way of doing things at this point. Now, one of the things when I'm lecturing in person, I often look into the audience and say, is there a very tall person there? Usually male. And almost always there is, he's six foot five.
I invite him to the stage. We look very silly. I'm five three, right? I. Okay. I asked him to put his hand up. His hand is three four inches larger than mine. And then I just raised the question, should we do anything the same way? It seems crazy right now. The rules are going to be written for one or the other of us. They're not gonna work for both of us, and typically they're written by him for him.
The more different you are from the person who created the rule, the more important it is for you to deviate from the rule. And rules should be used as, here's one way I can sort of do it this way. Not that this is the way, you know, if I'm holding a tennis racket the same way he is holding a tennis racket with as much larger hand, something is not going to be good for me. All right? It's perhaps a little off color in some way. But you take a toilet seat. Now toilet seats are all the same size.
And if he is using that toilet seat, and I, not at the same moment, clearly using that, one of us are not getting our biological needs met. And so to recognize that when something doesn't fit, there's nothing wrong with you, it just means that you are different from the person who created whatever it is. An example I use in the book, I'm a tennis player, a medium intermediate, okay? But I have this killer used to have this killer serve. I struggle, I kill it.
It doesn't go in now because I'm playing doubles. I don't wanna upset everybody in the court. So rather than risk double faulting, I have a little wuss, you know, second serve that always goes in. If I ruled the world, I would've made tennis. Three serves. The first one, I kill it. Doesn't go in the second one. I kill it again. 'cause I've learned from the first one. So I'm learning and then I still have my follow up wuss serve.
Now nobody should think, I can't imagine you would find anybody who believes that the rules of tennis were handed down from the heavens, right? It's just people deciding this. I mean, the funniest one I think is golf. I can't imagine the kind of person, I don't I should maybe read about who developed the game of golf, but who decides hitting a ball 300 yards is equivalent to hitting it a half of an inch. Both get, you know but so people decide based on what's good for them.
If it works for you, fine. If it doesn't change it. And when we recognize that virtually everything that was given to us was just a decision made by others, we recognize that everything is mutable. That we have control over everything. And it's sad to me that so few people take advantage of this.
It's so true for innovation that we oftentimes in organizations, the older the organization, the more of these rules and even the origin of those rules is no, no longer known. And people follow those rules where they question and the world keeps changing, like you said, like the world's change. So the rules have to change, but they don't.
Right. Well, you know, as far as innovation goes, let me, we've done some research on this. I think it's in another book. Essentially you do something and it doesn't work. Let's use 3M. Okay. So, you know that 3M was trying to create a glue and the glue failed to adhere. And so if you ask yourself, you've just put in all this money. To create this product that's a failure. What can you do with it? Now if you ask yourself, what can you do with a failed glue?
It's not going to generate any thoughts, right? Because you already decided it's glue and failure, you know, has its own problems. But if you bring it down to the level of property and you said to yourself, what could I do with this substance that adheres for a short amount of time, many ideas would come to mind. And for them it was the post-it note, which I think made them far more money and continues to do so than yet one more glue out there.
And again, this comes down to framing the language you use.
Exactly. You know, so, and talk about language for a minute that, you know, I have a part of the book, if you remember where I call it better than Better. Where people, you know, people have a problem and psychologists or bosses coaches and business, what have you help you go from bad to, okay. I said, wait a sec, there's a whole other way of being. And so an example that reveals this to me is a language that we use. So here is a very simple one.
You have somebody who's giving up, whether it's an industry or what, or school, what have you. And you get them to try. Okay. Well, trying to do something is certainly better than not trying, just assuming you can't do it, but trying has built into it an expectation for failure. You don't try to eat an ice cream cone. You just eat the ice cream cone. So we have some little studies where we have one group try to do it, another group just told to do it. And the doing group.
Now, after I reported this the first time, somebody said, oh, Yoda said that. I said, okay. So I'm in good company, Langer and Yoda. But words like hope sounds good, right? Everybody thinks you should have hope. You know hope is better than being hopeless. But when I go down in the morning to the kitchen to get coffee, I don't hope there's coffee there. I just presume there'll be coffee there. So again, hoping has built in this expectation for failure. Why does it matter?
Because if you're looking for failure, you're going to see certain things as failure that just as easily could have been seen as successes or something that's on its way to being a success.
I love those stories. Because again, as a parent as well, when you're aware, when you're mindful of catching yourself in the act, you've metacognition of go. I said to my son, try your best instead of do your best. Those words have a dramatic effect. One of the studies you talked about was the people jumping in line in the Xerox
That was one of the first studies on mindlessness. We approach people who, this is when we had Xerox machines, people listening to, you probably don't even know what those are now. But anyway, so these were machines that you used to copy things. You didn't have Bluetooth or any of this other technology. And we simply asked excuse me, can I get ahead of you because I wanna make copies Now what else were you gonna do with the Xerox machine except make copies.
So it was empty information, but when you gave a reason, people were more likely to comply even if the reason made no sense. Yeah. aidan_1_02-08-2024_150955: I had that happen, Ellen, I'm sure you have as well in an airport and people are like, oh, excuse me, I have to get a plane. You're like, hang on. Well, what the hell did the rest of us do? Of course we're getting a plane, like, you know, it's always an awkward moment as well. I thought we'd share one more thing, if that's okay.
'cause we're gonna do part two and we're gonna go into loads of stuff, social comparing risk perceived time, perceived fatigue, blood sugar test. There's so much in the book, and I highly recommend, and I really do recommend and be mindful when you're reading the book as well.
But the last thing I thought we'd land today ship on was the idea of risk and the illusion of control, because that was a really, that was a, it's a profound idea where you realize that, do your best, take the risk because. Even when you take the risk and you're kind of going, oh, I dunno, should I go left or go right? And you're kind of going, oh, should I like you? Should I take this job or should I take this job? You don't know. You can't possibly know when you go that way.
So you can't then have regrets. This is a big one that maybe we should save For
For Let's save it. Let's save it. Yeah. 'cause let's tee it up because it's so important. 'cause there's actually, you're right, there's a lot in it. There's decision making, there's risks, there's also
illusion of predictability. aidan_1_02-08-2024_150955: Illusion of predictability is a huge one as well. I'm so grateful for having you on the show. I absolutely love the book. And I just wanna say we probably touched maybe 10% of it, the amount of studies, because also Ellen brings in loads of previous books, parts of those studies as well before, and I'd read many of your studies, and so much of what you have done is in our lexicon.
We hear these things somewhere in the ether and they probably have been your studies done, for example, that whole idea. Don't ever use the word try, use the word do. I heard that many times that I look for the source, Ellen Langer. So, and Yoda. Yoda from Star Wars as well. Ellen, for people who want to find you and find out more about your work and your books, where's the best place?
I think it's Ellen langer.me., I don't even know what's on the website. Just put in my name and all sorts of things will come up. It depends on if people wanna see my books. Then Google, Ellen Langer comma books which you also have on my website. I think that a nice place to end today is for people to understand that what I am saying is we have far more control over our health and wellbeing than we realize.
And the subtitle of the American version of the book is thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, that, or, you know, the English version Thinking Our Way to Lasting Health. Either way, the idea is that the health, the life we want the satisfaction, peace of mind is only a thought away.
Absolutely beautiful and there's so many little nuggets like that throughout the book as well. Highly recommend it. I'll link to it. Link to the both the.com.co uk and indeed Ellen's book, author of. The Mindful body. Ellen Langer, thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me.