Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Power of Mindset: How Your Thoughts Transform Your Physical Health | Dr Ellen Langer #587

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Today’s guest has spent over 50 years conducting ground-breaking research showing that your thoughts can have a profound impact on your body. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 537 of the podcast with Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Dr Ellen Langer. Ellen has spent decades studying how our beliefs and perceptions can directly influence our physical health - from how we age, to how we heal, and even how our immune system functions. In this clip, we explore some of her landmark research. Ellen is a wonderful human, full of knowledge, expertise and passion. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore⁠⁠ Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/537 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Today's bite-size episode is sponsored by the brand-new formulation of AG1, the daily health drink that has been in my own life for over six years. Now, some of the upgrades in the new formula include more magnesium, which supports muscle function and the ability of our nervous systems to relax, and it also now contains five instead of two strains of bacteria to reflect the latest advancements in microbiome science. It also contains key nutrients in bioavailable forms the body can easily and readily utilize maximizing their potential benefits.

AG1 makes it simple to be the best version of you. Over 70 ingredients, one scoop once a day for less than a cup of coffee. And right now, AG1 are giving my audience a special offer worth 58 pounds, which is almost 80 US. you will get 10 free travel packs and an awesome welcome kit with your first subscription. To take advantage, go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More bite size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 537 of the podcast with Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Dr. Ellen Langer.

Ellen has spent decades studying how our beliefs and perceptions can directly influence our physical health, from how we age to how we heal, and even how our immune system functions. In this clip, we explore some of her landmark research. The implications of your work and what you're talking about are so, so profound for people when they really understand how much our mindset influences every single aspects of our lives.

Some of your studies, the counterclockwise study, the chambermaid study, the nursing home study, these are legendary. In fact, a lot of lists, I'm sure, will have heard about them without necessarily knowing that you were the creator and the author of these studies. So could you just go through some of these top-line studies to explain some of your work to my audience, please? Okay, well, so I got into all this in the first place with a nursing home study, where we took people in nursing homes and we either gave them tender loving care, is the comparison group, or we gave them choices to make and a plant to take care of. And

we went back 18 months later and twice as many people in the group that we gave these active choices to were still alive. So then the first thing that came to me was, well, wait a second. How is it that making a choice translates into longevity? And that led me to the mindfulness work. But the mindfulness work here, you know, how is it your thoughts have all these powerful physical effects on you. And I started to think that, well, it was clear to me that it had this effect on us.

This was before people were talking about mind-body connection. We had a mind and a body, and the big question was, well, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And these are just words. So I argue, let's put the two together, even if it's just for useful purposes, juristic purposes, although now I think it's literally true. Put the mind and body back together, then wherever you're putting one, you're necessarily putting the other. Wherever you're putting the mind, you're putting the body. And the question is how you get from one to the other

goes away. Now, I've been talking about this week. We did they, I published the counterclockwise study in 1981 a long time ago. It takes so long for things to change. And people finally start talking about mind-body connection. That's wrong. You have the same problems. How are they connected? See it as one thing. So the first study that we did, and the BBC did replication of this called the young ones,

but to go back to the study itself, what we did was to take a retreat and retrofit it to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they discussed past events as if they were just unfolding, for example. In a period of time as short as one week, we found their vision improved. When have you ever heard an old person's vision improving without medical indignature? The hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they look noticeably younger. That was the first test of mind-body. The second test, which was a few decades later, was we take these chambermaids.

This is the work I did with Ali Crum. And very simply, first asked them, how much exercise are they getting? These are women who are exercising all day long, clean hotel and motel. Still, they thought they're not getting any exercise because exercise they believed, according to the surgeon general who sits at a desk all day,

is what you're doing after work. And after work, they were just too tired. Very simple study, divide them into two groups. And we're going to teach one group that their work is exercise. They're changing their minds. They're taught working on this machine at the gym is like making a bed and so on.

They teach them they are getting lots of exercise. So you have two groups. Now, one who doesn't think they get any exercise, one that does. They're not eating any differently from each other. They're not working any harder. Nevertheless, simply changing their minds to see their work as exercise resulted

in a loss of weight, a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure kingdom. An example of another, we take people who have type 2 diabetes, we take many measurements, we're going to have them play computer games, and there's a clock there, and they're told, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. That ensures that they'll look at the clock, and be known to them, the clock is writ. So it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time, or real time. And the question we're asking is, well, blood sugar level vary based on clock time, perceived time, or real time.

And it turns out perceived time. Yeah, this stuff, Ellen, is just so fascinating because it also highlights arguably one of the biggest holes in all of medicine and the way we practice, which is we just don't take into account our mindset or our thoughts or our beliefs. Well, everybody knows that, you know, placebo is something inert. You believe it's going to be effective and hence it's effective. So the Chambermaid study, this was actually a nocebo study, which is important in its own right. Now, people know placebos, you take something that's nothing to lead to a positive response. A nocebo, you take.

real medication, and you believe it's not effective, and it wipes out the effect. So explain that in the concepts of the chambermaid study. They're not taking a medication. No, no, no, no, because people are exercising, but they're not getting any of the benefits of exercise because they don't realize they're exercising. Yeah. So we say all of these things that are good for you. You know, many, if not all, are good for you if you believe they're good for you. That element And belief is not inconsequential in any of these circumstances. You know, so there was a study with Ipecac. So I don't remember who did this, but, you know, so Ipecac is what you take to make you

vomit in case you have accidentally or on purpose ingested poison. All right. So whoever this was took Ipecac with people who are having trouble doing too much vomiting. And they're given the Ipec and they're told it'll stop the vomiting. And you know what happens? it stops the vomiting. People who are rubbed with poison ivy,

who believe it's not poison ivy, or rub with another leaf that they believe is poison ivy that isn't poison ivy, you know, get the rash when they believe it's poison. I spoke with Camilla Nord, this neuroscientist from Cambridge University, and Camilla basically shares some research showing that in psychedelic trials, some of them, when you're given the placebo, and you think you're taking a psychedelic, but you're not, you still hallucinate. You know, in medicine, and I think with the public, we've used the term before,

oh, it's just a placebo effect, right? You just got to change. Exactly, as in underplaying the value. And then there's another study, I'm pretty sure it's in your new book, about diabetics. There's a belief that giving people more information is a good. good thing, right? That would be the conventional belief. And I think much of me subscribes to that belief, but... But it doesn't matter that whether you give them more or less, it depends

on how the information is received. So if more information leaves people to be more certain, and more certain leaves them to be more mindless, then that's how the problem arrived. Well, maybe you could explain that through the lens of this diabetes, pre-diabetes study. They were told they were on the borderline of pre-diabetes, right? Could you explain that study? Sure. So I call this the borderline effect. It's not just in medicine, no matter what you're doing, there's always a point where people

above this borderline respond one way, people below it respond a different way, where there's no meaningful difference above and below. So, for example, let's say you're grading papers, and you give one student. an 89, or they take a test and they get an 89. That makes it a B. Another student gets a 90. That makes it an A. Nobody's going to think there's any meaningful difference between 89 and 90, but there's a real difference over time between a B student and an A student. In terms of their perception of themselves, you mean? Much as them, but the world's perception of them as well, right? You know, you take a typical example.

you take an IQ test and if you get 69, then you're cognitively deficient. You get 70. You're in the normal range. But again, one could have sneezed, misread the question. But once you're labeled, you've got

this cognitive problem or you're normal, over time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's the point to a lot of this. That we once we get these labels, we then behave a according to those labels, and they become true, even if they weren't.

Well, this, you know, you write about the effects of our beliefs on our immune system. I think it's at ASEA roles. You talk about this idea that the immune response begins in the brain, and positive expectations boost antibacterial and anti-tumor activity. I mean, that was incredible, those studies. And I just, just come back to that borderline effect for a minute, Ellen. What's that study? Am I remembering correctly? The patients who were told that they were at risk of diabetes, they were more likely to get it?

Yes. We looked at the people who fell right below the diagnosis, compare them to those right above. So one is told they have the disease. One is told they don't. And that label became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. What about the relationship between our third? thoughts, our beliefs, our expectations, and our immune system? Well, if we go back to what I'm saying about the mind and the body, it's one. If you recognize that it really is one thing, then every thought is simultaneously affecting every part of our body.

Now, it's interesting because the coin of the realm for neuroscience now would be something like MRIs and fMRI, right? They're going to look at the brain and see how the brain changes under these circumstances or those circumstances. And of course, the brain is changing. However, my belief is every part of the body is changing.

Every part, and it's happening more or less simultaneously, that your eyes, your skin, you know, that in the book I talked about how a teardrop of happiness is biochemically different from a teardrop of sadness. I had this strange experience because I, you know, have always been up for anything, almost anything.

And I'm with a friend in Kansas City, and we go to an iridologist. Somebody looks at the iris of the eye. Now, I don't believe any of these things, but I also am always, you know, who knows, right? So I go, she looks at my eye, and she tells me I have a gallbladder problem. So at the time, I thought, this is ridiculous, right? You know, what nonsense. Anyway, I came home, and I did have a gold butter problem. Then I start writing about mind-body unity and realize, yes, it's all right there.

We don't have the machinery, the technology, to notice the subtle differences. But if we developed it, I think we'd have support for this. So when you say the immune system, every system, I go like this, my brain is different, every part of my body is different. Yeah, it's ridiculous. if you have the fixed belief that actually, I've never been taught that there's a relationship between what you can see in the eye and my gallbladder. Therefore, this must be rubbish, right?

Because what are we seeing now, right? We're seeing so many things that traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Indian medicine, IVDA medicine, has been saying for years, not everything, but many of the things, we're now going, oh, wow, now we've got modern science to support the facts that, oh, different organs have different rates of genetic expression at different parts of the day.

Well, these guys have been saying this for thousands of years. We've poo-poohed it in Western medicine for many years until recently when we're now, oh, yeah, there's a thing called circadian biology. And right, each cell in the body has got, it's so on circadian clock. And I'm like, yeah, but... And I think a lot of this, a lot of this results from our T-Chane absolves rather than... Exactly.

Well, at least. Exactly. You know, that would be open to all sorts of. I mean, there are so many things, you know, I teach some of this stuff. It's mind-boggling to me that people think they need eight hours of sleep. I mean, how big are you, how small of you? What is your life like?

If you just ran a marathon and I stayed home in bed, eating chocolate, watching movies all day, that night would we both need eight hours sleep? You know, so it's not just that there are individual differences, but within the individual. You know, it's people buy these facts. They talk about them. They teach them. You know, when you see something happen, I think the nature of science is you see it, you then develop a theory to explain it.

So now it seems like it can be no other way. Yeah. And so then somebody has some other experience and, you know, the response to them as well, you know, you're simply wrong, crazy, what have you. Have a beginner's minds, right? That old concepts. Have a beginner's mind. whole idea of stress, our beliefs, the immune system, and there are many studies in your book

talking about this, right? So if people want to dive deeper, please do check out the mindful body. It's such a fantastic read. It really is. You mentioned vision before. People think of, you know, vision static. It is what it is, right? No, just thinking about it, how mindless it is, that you go to the doctor, you're shown this Snelling eye chart with letters out of context. in black and white, and then you're given a number to tell you how will you see. I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I see that restaurant sign much further away than if I'm hungry. I see things in color different from black and white.

I think things that are meaningful differently from things that are meaningless. And so for me, I know I'm bizarre when I, you know, before I did that study, I'm being, my eyes are being examined. I'm looking at the child. I say, wait a second. You know, you're creating and me the expectation that soon I'm not going to be able to see because these wonders keep getting smaller and smaller. Yeah, so you start with something you can do and then you go, oh, we're about to catch you where you can't see.

Exactly. So what we did is a study where we reversed it. It starts with small letters, gets larger and larger, creating the expectation that soon you would be able to see, and people can see what they couldn't see before. Yeah, yeah, I love it. Before we finish, I want to bring up something you said before. that surprised me in the context of your work. Okay, so there was a moment where you lost your train of thoughts

and you said, excuse me, I'm having a senior moment. Right. That was smoking. Yeah, I know you were joking. But now, the reason I said that was only because the other day, I thought I was so clever when I had said to somebody, I'm having a junior moment. No, the reason I'm bringing out to illustrate a really important point from your work

is this whole idea that I've also had mind-blank. when I'm doing this podcast before, right? But because I'm at a different age to you, I'm not going to call it a senior moment, right? Okay, so it's cute. But let me tell you what, before I lecture on my health class about aging, I asked them a question. I say, okay, what was the last, these are Harvard students.

This is the best of the best, right? I say, what was the last thing I said on Thursday? So, all right, you know, class meets Tuesday and Thursday. So it was this Tuesday. What was the last thing I said on Thursday? Nobody remembers. And I go, ah, you know, you all better check to see whether you're suffering from dementia, you know, that young people are not infrequently forgetful. The difference is they're fine with that. They don't see it as the beginning of some impending terrible diagnosis. Yeah. And I think it's so important that, this idea that if our expectation starts to impact, our physiology. We've got to be very careful about what we think is we get older. We have to change this perception that old people are frail and they can't do much and they need help, right? We need to change that. And there's, again, there's quite a provocative section in that section in your

book where you talk about this idea that someone of your age, and I certainly won't ask you how old you are. I'm 77. You're 77. Okay. So someone of your age wouldn't typically be seen in miniskirts or have miniskirts marketed to them, right? And I really like the way you put that because it basically, the cultural norm is a 77 year old lady probably shouldn't be in a mini skirt. It's not appropriate for a woman of that age. But maybe it is. Maybe if you don't subscribe to that and you go, no, I'm going to dress like I was in my 20s or 30s, well, maybe that's going to actually keep you younger. Yeah. The point of that particular research, was to show that there are age-related cues all around us that unbeknownst to us are

determining our longevity, our health, and so on. So there what we did was compare people whose jobs require that they be in uniform. So if you're in a uniform, you're 25, and you're wearing the same basic uniform, it's a different version of it, but for the next 40 years, you're missing an age-related cue. And those people do better because they don't have that age-related cue. And we see, you know, here, and I'm sure it's the same in the US, we have, you know, near residential homes. There are signs on the roads with an elderly couple, you know,

hunched over with a walking stick saying, be careful. And again, that's an age-related cue that on the face of it is there for a reason so people can pay attention and be considerate, right? But there's also a negative consequence off that, or a potentially negative consequence. Although there's one thing that older people do, which is for all other groups, there's an in-group bias. Everybody prefers their own to people who are different, except the elderly. I hate that word now that I'm so old. So let me give an example. When my father was alive, I'm picking him up at the airport. He is now, at that point, I think he was 88.

And I said, Dad, how was the flight? And he said, it was okay, but there were too many old people on the plane, distancing himself from the group. And, you know, which is a good thing in this context because we have the view of old as only representing decrement. Which is sad because, you know, you live your life the right way. It just keeps getting better and better. hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family

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