Episode description

Picture this: It’s the turn of the millennium. The dust from 9/11 is only just beginning to settle. Shrek, Rush Hour 2 and Donny Darko are packing cinemas. LeAnn Rimes, Shaggy, and Kylie Minogue top the Aria charts. Apple begins their technological invasion with the first iPod and honest little Johnnie Howard is the Prime Minister of Australia.

Can you feel yourself back in that time? Can you picture what and who you used to wear/eat/do? Has immersing yourself in the events of 20 years prior made you feel any more youthful? Any more topped up with vim and vigour? Perhaps even more supple?

This hypothesis formed the groundbreaking research of Harvard psychology Professor Ellen Langer: Could you reverse the age-related physical and mental decline by immersing yourself in the environment of your younger self? Can you shatter the societal expectation of aging and live a youthful life until expiry?

Langer, a psychology PhD at the time, began her foray into mindset manipulation by designing a pot plant study conducted in a nursing home. She gave plants to two groups instructing one that they need to care for the plans and decide their location, and informing the other group that they are not required to do anything about their new indoor foliage. 18 months later, twice as many of the grey-haired green-thumbs were alive compared with the control group.

This led Langer to formulate that a person’s setting could be manipulated to improve their physical and mental state and thus turn back the clock. Unable to send old people back in time, she brought an earlier time period to the old people! In 1981, Langer helped 8 men in their 70s shuffle off a van and into a converted monastery made to look identical to a 1959 house. And we mean identical - interior decor, wall art, music, books, magazines, photos… it was all impeccably period-accurate. None of this Starbucks-coffee-cup-in-a-Game-Of-Thrones-episode malarky!

A control group also spent time in the monastery though in an area void of any nostalgic decor and both groups spent 5 days in their allocated settings.

The results beggared belief! Both groups improved physically and mentally however the experimental group’s gains were much more significant with an impromptu touch football game erupting on the final day of the study played by these previously frail men.

Enter the critics! You have to understand, the power-of-the-mind stuff was not trending back then as it is today. In the 1980s, positive thinking and environmental manipulation on this scale were scarcely above witchcraft! Ellen was academically harangued for her hopeful hypotheses and lost her inquisitive drive. That was until the BBC recreated the experiment in 2010 with Ellen consulting called “The Young Ones” (no, not that “The Young Ones”) again showing remarkable improvements in the senile subjects: wheelchairs swapped for canes, spines were straightened, egos rekindled, and Bafta Awards were nominated.

Her own vim and vigour restored, Ellen went on to conduct hotel chambermaid experiments (chambermaids informed they did, in fact, do a lot of exercise in their job lost more weight than those who believed they didn’t), hair salon studies (recently did women happy with their new do had lower blood pressures compared with those sporting a tragedy), and flight simulator tests (subjects dressed as Maverick from Top Gun performed better on eyesight testing than those in schlub duds).

So when next you reach for the collagen supplements, the botox needle, or even the scalpel, think of Professor Langer and turn back the clock instead by ditching those societal expectations, believe you are in fact younger, and remember who you were 20 years ago.

SOURCES:

• Better Believe It - A psychology professor’s quest to explain—and demonstrate—the power of the mind over our health. Dec 2022
• Ellen Langer: expert on, and victim of, the illusion of control March 9, 2015 9:20 AM by Andrew
• What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set? Bruce Grierson. Oct. 22, 2014
• Ellen Langer – Wikipedia
• Rodin J, Langer EJ. Long-term effects of a control-relevant intervention with the institutionalized aged. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1977 Dec;35(12):897-902. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.35.12.897. PMID: 592095.
• Rodin, J., & Langer, E. J. (1978). Erratum to Rodin and Langer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(5), 462. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0084387
• Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect January 3, 2008
• Crum AJ, Langer EJ. Mind-set matters: exercise and the placebo effect. Psychol Sci. 2007 Feb;18(2):165-71. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01867.x. PMID: 17425538.
• Ellen Langer Harvard

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