Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - The Science of Mind-Body Unity: Why Your Cells are Always Listening to Your Thoughts & How a Legendary Harvard Psychologist is Redefining the Limits of What is Biologically Possible.

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

What if the things you do every single day are quietly making you sick… and you don’t even realize it? Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer, author of The Mindful Body, reveals the shocking ways our minds shape our health, aging, stress levels, and even how long we live—often without us noticing. In this mind-expanding of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Langer explains why self-agency and making your own decisions can literally extend your lifespan, how expectations and beliefs shape disease progression, and why the real meaning of mindfulness has almost nothing to do with meditation. Dr. Langer breaks down: - Small, everyday habits that are secretly harming your health - Why stress is the #1 cause of illness (and not for the reason you think) - Whether healing timelines are based on real time or perceived time - Surprising benefits of positive thinking, even with terminal illness - Danger of labels, including words like “try” and “remission” - Why spontaneous remissions exist & why they’re so hard to study - Simple ways to become more mindful right now, even if you’ve never meditated once in your life - Can we train ourselves to not need eyeglasses? - The real power of the placebo effect - Can the mind cure the common cold? - Psychological treatments for chronic illness - Who is more likely to get sick & why - How color influences our biology more than we think - Why spirituality requires presence and mindfulness - How to reframe negative circumstances into positive ones, and the health benefits of doing so - How her mother’s battle with cancer inspired her groundbreaking research This episode will change how you think about healing, stress, aging, illness, and the true power of your mind over your body! You may never see health, sickness, or “reality” the same way again. Head to https://impact.ourritual.com/c/4792730/2005678/24744 , take a quick quiz, and use code BREAKER20 for 20% off your first month. If you’re tired of being tired, this is your chance to finally get answers and get your energy back. Go to https://superpower.com/ and use code BREAK for $20 off your membership this year. Dr. Ellen Langer’s latest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705365/the-mindful-body-by-ellen-j-langer/9780593497944/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science only gives us probabilities. We can't predict the individual case. When we're given a diagnosis that suggests terminal illness, people treat you as if you're dying. Very often, our expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. When you are given agency, your body reacts as if it matters. Spontaneous remissions are not nearly as infrequent as most people assume. My mother gets breast cancer, and a metastasus.

to have pancreas. That's the M-Gay. Nevertheless, he was magically gone and the medical world couldn't explain it. Dr. Ellen Langer, the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, she has done 50 years of research surrounding the notion that the way we think can change the way we view things like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, even the common cold. The very first test of the mind-body unity idea, we had people who had type two. diabetes and there was a clock next to the computer. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. Did blood sugar level follow clock time or perceived her?

The mind can literally heal the body. Across a host of very serious illnesses, we're able to control the symptoms. Our expectations are so much more powerful than most of us assume. If the placebo, the pill, the surgery, the injection wasn't what helped you. What helped you? You did it yourself. I am I am Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

And today we are presenting you with a very, very powerful conversation that has the potential to literally change how we understand health and disease from an entirely different perspective than we've ever looked at before. We're going to break down and explain how the mind can literally heal the body, how they are not two separate entities, but they are one, not only can. but interconnected. Also, if you thought you knew what mindfulness was and how it can change your life, guess what? We've got an entirely different way to think about mindfulness.

We're going to be speaking to a woman known as the mother of mindfulness and the mother of positive psychology, Dr. Ellen Langer. Her most recent book is The Mindful Body Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. She was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. She's still a professor of psychology at Harvard. She has done 50 years of research surrounding the notion that the way we think impacts the physiological components of our systems and can change the way we view things like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, depression, even the common cold. She is going to describe unbelievable examples of 80-year-old men who age in reverse.

how diabetics change the way that they interact with insulin, how people heal from tumors, talking about drastic reductions in the size of someone's tumor, the implications for how the mind can impact the body are almost unbelievable. Dr. Langer's also going to talk to us about the importance of framing. What are the words that we use? Is the word remission hurting people more than it's even helping them when we talk about being in remission from cancer. She's also going to give us practical ways to change our expectations and to change the way that our everyday interactions and activities can influence us.

She's going to talk about how much perception weighs on our actual health outcomes. It's an astounding conversation. We're very excited to welcome Dr. Langer to the breakdown. Break it down. Thank you for having me. We're very excited to talk to you. and you've been sort of treading the boards of mindfulness and a new way to look at health for long before people even knew what mindfulness was. What will people take away from our conversation with you if they are open to looking at a new lens of health and longevity in particular?

Well, all of the work I've done and we'll talk about on mind-body unity says wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body, which gives us enormous control over our health and well-being. It's also the case. And if you read carefully my last book, The Mindful Body, that's good, good book. It says basically, in part, that everything that is was at one time a decision. And decisions are made by people. And for it to be a decision means there was uncertainty. So we tend to respond to things that are as if they're handed down from the heavens. And we don't think to change them.

And when you realize how high your seat is, the work you're doing, the food, your everything, where somebody's decision makes it teaches you that everything is mutable. So it's not just that our thoughts can control our health. It's that every day, anything that's frustrating can be changed. Can you talk a little bit about how this became your life's work? I found the example of your mother's diagnosis very powerful, the example even of your food experience in France. There were kind of three moments that led you to become the Dr. Langer that we know. Talk a little bit about your origin story in that sense.

Before the examples you mentioned, my grandmother was in a nursing home. And when I saw her, she seemed perfectly fine, although they thought she was senile. We didn't have the diagnosis dementia at that point. And so that seems strange to me because at that time, like everybody else, I believe you either have whatever it is or you don't have it. And again, as you can see in a mindful body, I have a psychological treatment for chronic illness that's based on the fact that symptoms come and go. Then she had talked about a snake in her head.

And, you know, I knew that she was just too lazy to say my head feels as if there's sneak in it. And so they thought there were problems that I didn't think were a problem. So this is the beginning. And then I saw people in the nursing home just sitting looking half dead doing nothing. And so the very first study I did in the nursing home was to go and to give these people choices to make that were silly things almost, you know, because the powers that be weren't going to let me change the balance of power. So I emphasize that they were capable of and should be making decisions like where to meet with guests and, you know, in your room, in the dining area, outside, you know, and so on. Anyway, this very simple treatment resulted in people living longer.

Wait a second. How could that be? You know, how could it be you're making choices and all of a sudden you're more likely to be alive? So that was the experimental piece. that gave rise to the mind-body unity theory. The idea, which we'll get into in our conversation with you, the idea is that when you are given agency and when you believe that you matter, your body reacts as if it matters. But the important thing is,

how do you get from, okay, I'm in charge, to the body changing? And when we have ideas of mind and body dualism, there's a big problem because how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body. So I thought about this. And, you know, I thought, well, this is ridiculous. These are just words, mind and body. And so let's put the two together. And then wherever you put the mind, you put the body. Now the stories that led to that idea. When these things happened, the idea was nowhere in sight from me. So I got married when I was

obscenely young. And we go to Paris on a honeymoon. And we're in a restaurant and I order a Mix grill. One of the items on the mixed grill was pancreas. Pancreas. I asked my then-husband, which of these things was the pancreas. He points to something. I eat everything else. Now comes the moment of truth. Can I get myself to eat the pancreas? And I've said this before. It still boggles my mind that I thought, just because I was now married, it meant that I had to eat the pancreas. But anyway, I felt that I had to eat it. I start eating it and I literally get sick. he starts to laugh. I say, you know, not appropriate any time, but certainly not on our honeymoon.

Why are you laughing? And he said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago. So I made myself sick. Then I'm probably the only person you know has two important pancreas stories. So now fast forward, my mother gets breast cancer and it metastasizes to have pancreas. Well, as most people know, that's the end game. nevertheless, at one point, it was magically gone.

And the medical world couldn't explain it. So just as I had made myself sick, she had made herself well, and now I was going to study how to explain this or understand this over the next several decades. There was also something else you mentioned about what happened to your mother when the doctors decided that she had cancer. there was a way that she was treated that effectively did not allow for what eventually needed to be her recovery. When we're given a diagnosis that suggests, and of terminal illness, people treat you as if you're dying. And it's very hard in the face of that to go forward feeling robust. And so for my mother, because they assumed she was going to die, they didn't exercise her limbs and what have you.

So then when the cancer finally left, she was in a wheelchair to leave the hospital because, you know, they hadn't exercised her legs. So, I mean, and the main part of all of this, let me take a half a step back to tell people something that puts this all in context. I was at a horse event. And how am I going to make that relevant? Stay with me. All right. And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog? Hot dog, what is he crazy?

Horses don't eat meat. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Now, a normal person would be worried about that. Oh, my God, I don't know anything. I was thrilled because that meant everything that people said can't be, maybe could be. And so when I thought about this and I've written about it, that people need to understand that science only gives us probabilities.

You know, that if you were to do an experiment to see do horses eat meat, you'd have to say what kind of horses, how much meat mixed with how much grain, when are you going to give it to a whole bunch of things, then you'd find most of the horses don't eat meat. And that's a mouthful. So that's abbreviated horses don't eat meat. But in fact, some horses do. And so when we understand that science is basically telling us probably sometimes could be, rather than is,

then we're not as likely to just give up in the face of those expectations that are handed to us. You know, that we can't predict the individual case. And when you come down to it, that's really all we care about. You know, if I say to you, this procedure works 90% of a time, that's great. but you're going to be the 10% or part of the 90%? And there's no way to know. I think a lot of people wouldn't assume necessarily that, you know, reputable scientific inquiry could be so creative, meaning that you would have to have such an open mind in order to approach these things with scientific rigor. Yeah. Oh, yes. But, you know, the scientific rigor that's imposed on or used for every single research study,

should be applauded, but should not be confused with determining absolute fact. We can't know. Now, the problem is when we think we know, we no longer pay any attention. So if I think cancer is a killer, I've got cancer, I'm going to die, then both psychologically and also in very real ways, I now remove myself from the world, I don't do all of those healthy things because I'm going to die anyway. And to understand, you know, doctors, well-meaning, I think they've probably stopped this now, but not that long ago, I'm telling you how likely it is. You know, you say, how much time do I have? And they say three weeks. They haven't the vagus notion.

That if 70% of the people who present this way have three weeks doesn't mean you have three weeks. You know, it's very different. And so very often our expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. So we have to be careful about what we expect. Now, you know, for the last, oh gosh, four or five decades, I've been doing research on mindfulness. And mindfulness as I study, it has nothing to do with meditation. It's the simple act of noticing. But when you think you know, you don't notice.

And so mindlessness, a cute way of understanding it, is frequently in error but rarely in doubt. If you know what I was going to say next, why would you listen? It's realizing that even if I've said it a thousand times, this time may be different. All right. So there are two ways to become mindful as I study. It has nothing to do with meditation.

All right. Either bottom up, which is actively notice new things about the things you think you know. Walk outside. Let's say you've lived where you're living for 10 years. Walk outside and notice three new things every day. And you'll be surprised that you get. If you're living with somebody, notice three new things about it. them. When you get to school or work or wherever you're going, the supermarket, notice three new.

And you keep noticing new things about the things you thought you knew. And you come to see, wow, I didn't know it as well as I thought I did. And eventually, you'll do that without having to do it intentionally like this. The other way is top down, okay, which is understanding that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different. perspective, so we can't know. Nobody knows. So you don't have to feel bad about knowing, then everything is brand new. So the bottom up leads you to realize, hey, I don't know anything, pop down the same thing. And all the research has shown that that's literally and figuratively in limine. You make them more mindful, they live longer. You know, when you're having fun,

you might ask yourself, do robots have fun? But of course not, right? And when we're mindless, we're no different from robots. And so this simple act of noticing feels good. It's good for you. It's the essence of what's happening when you're having a good time. It's easy. And so when you think about the consequences of just being there and noticing, it's hard to find reason not to do it.

We have so much data that when people are mindful, they're seeing as more attractive, trustworthy, they're better leaders, the things we produce are better. It's not just that it's good for our health. It's good for every aspect of our life. And, you know, basically, you might want to use a simple rule. If it's worth doing, it's worth showing up for it. My MBialx breakdown is supported by Superpower.

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Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention My Ambiotics Breakdown to help support the show. Is it true that just the idea of noticing is hitting us with like a little novel and that novelty is fueling us in some way. It's hard to understand when you think of mind-body dualism. How do you get from so I'm happy or I'm engaged? But remember, we're talking about mind-body unity.

Whatever we're doing to the mind, we're necessarily doing to the body simultaneously. So we have lots of studies. Let me tell you about a couple of them so people understand. The very first test of the mind-body unity idea was what we call the counterclockwise study. People might know this because it's a famous study. I'm not being obnoxious. I can say it's a famous study because if you watch the Simpsons go to Havana, they actually talk about it.

All right. So what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier, and we had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they were going to be talking about the passes if it was true. just unfolding, for example. They lived there for less than a week. What we found was that their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger,

which is very compelling. The first of these saying, mind and body is simply one. This study I did with Ali Crum, which he was at Harvard, we took chambermaids, and we asked the chambermaids, how much exercise do you get? And surprisingly, since these women are making beds and cleaning hotel and motel rooms all day long, they don't think they're getting any exercise,

because exercise is what you do afterward, so says the surgeon general. After work, they're too tired. All right. Now, if exercise is good for you, then these women who are exercising all day long should be healthier than similar others who are not exercising, right? But they're not. How could that be? And now we divide them into two very simple groups. And one group we teach, them their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym and so on. And we don't do that to the other group. So now we have one group who's aware, gee, I'm exercising all day long. Now we take a host of measures. The two groups are not performing differently. One isn't working harder than the other. One isn't eating more or less than the other group.

Everything is the same until we get to the big measures. Those women who now see their work as exercise lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure, just by changing their minds. It's not just that they're perceiving things differently, meaning they're not noticing. Now we're talking about the meaning that we're assigning to activities and how we understand that activity to be related to our well-being. Right. I mean, the only way this study is going to work is if people think exercise is good for,

for you. And so now they seem their workers' exercise, therefore they should expect health changes, and that's what we get. Let me give you another study that I recently did with my graduate student, Peter Ungo. So we inflict a wound, not a big wound because that would be nice, and even if I wanted to do it, the powers that be wouldn't let me. But it's a war. And we have a person sitting in front of a clock. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. So for a third of the people, it's going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. And for a third of the people, it's real time. And the question we're asking is, does healing result as a function of perceived time or real time? Now, most people assume it's going to heal when it

heals. But no, it heals based on how quickly you think time has passed. And we have lots of studies like that. We have a sleep study. People wake up in a sleep lab. Again, I screw around with the clock. You see you got two hours more sleep, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep you've got. Cognitive and physiological functions follow perceived amount of sleep.

Yeah, I was just going to mention the sleep clock experiment. Many of your studies focus on time and ways to manipulate time is also, it's an easy laboratory manipulation. to do. So the notion being that if you convince people that they got more sleep, even if they got less sleep, that perception is enough to make them decide that they are rested. And if you convince them that they got less sleep, even though they got, let's say, a full uninterrupted eight hours. And I think of this for anyone who's had a small child, especially one that wants to nurse all night. You know, so much of it is about your perception. And I think that's sort of the,

this thread that runs through all of your research and throughout the book as well. And understanding that our perceptions are under our control. So that, again, names that we can control all of these things where otherwise we might feel sort of helpless. If we want to make it tangible for someone who has a cut, for example, like how far does this extrapolate and does it hold up under like months of not sleeping? Is there any biological reality? Is it all subjective?

Most of the time I do these studies to talk about possibility, and I don't know how far you can push it. But let me tell you an example that may speak to that. And it's wild. So years ago, I was part of the Division of Aging at the Harvard Medical School. And the chair at that point was Jack Rowe physician. I called Jack one day. I said, Jack, how long does it take a broken finger to heal?

He said, I don't know a week. I said, what would you say if I said I could heal it by psychological means and five days. He said, all right. I said, what about four days? He said, all right. I said, what about three days? He said, no. I said, okay, what about three days and 23 hours? The point is, at one point, you know, all of a sudden you can't do it. There are certain biological limits to what we're talking about. There is a floor effect. There has to be a floor effect, just like there's a ceiling effect. We're all taught certain things. And, you know, a break takes. however long to heal and, you know, things unfold in a particular way. And it's very hard for us to

wrap our heads around, but that was just a theory. That was just an idea. That was just an explanation for what happens with many people, not necessarily all. And, you know, so you asked me about limits. You know, I don't know. But I know that I've undertaken virtually all these studies with the idea in mind to show people that the possibility is far, far exceed what we assume. And that rather, you know, than assume, as I said before, the doctor says you have three weeks to live, that, you know, now I should say, well, how could he or she know that? They can't. And how can you make that wrong? How can you actually turn things around for yourself? You're not going to if you don't believe it's possible. If you believe it's possible, you may be able to. I'm not suggesting,

you know, that if you have stage four cancer and if left alone, you would die within the week, that, you know, you'll be able to, you know, do a marathon. But I am saying we can't be sure of it. That can't happen. You can't prove that something can't be. When you believe it can, that it's a possibility, you organize yourself differently and you enjoy more of what you're doing. You know, lots of people call me who are given these death sentences health-wise. And, you know, and I say to them, I think that if I were told I had three weeks to live or three months to live, I do my best not to waste my time being depressed. I would try to get all the living I could in.

And the research that I've already mentioned to you suggests that if we start doing that, if we're fully out there enjoying ourselves, that means we're being mindful. That means the neurons are firing. We may very well be able to turn some of these things around. Spontaneous remissions are very hard to study because you don't know, right? You know, somebody who's got a diagnosis. We're expecting them to go downhill. We can't follow all these people and assume maybe one of them is going to reverse.

first, but I think that spontaneous remissions are not nearly as infrequent as most people assume. You know, imagine you go to the doctor, you know, you're in the hospital and you say, I don't want to die in the hospital, I want to die at home. And so you go home and all of a sudden you start to say, you know, the hell with this. Let me, I want that glass of wine now. And I want to get out of bed, you know, if I still have any strength to do so. And let's say that there is a spontaneous remission. How likely is it that the first thing, rather than just going and enjoying your life, is I'm going to call the doctor and tell him he was wrong. You know, do you know what I'm saying? And then you have all these people living in areas where there are no hospitals, very few doctors. and so they don't go to the doctor in the first place so that if the tumor actually goes away,

there's no one to know. They didn't even know they had the tumor in time one, so they're not going to know what they don't have at a time two. So it's a very hard thing to know just how widespread this is. But if we assumed that it's more widespread than people assume now, people, you know, now would assume, oh, one in a million. You know, one in a million you're not going to organize yourself to make it real. You say, well, you know, maybe it's much more likely. And then your whole attitude changes.

Lots of illness results from basically just giving up. That's powerful. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about some of the diabetes studies that you've done. As you so cleverly said that in a laboratory setting, using a clock is. is an easy thing to do to turn back time. But what we did was we had people who had type 2 diabetes come to the experiment, and we took all sorts of measures. Now we were going, and the reason what I'm going to say is confusing,

just hold on for a moment, it'll become clear. We were going to have them play computer games, and there was a clock next to the computer. And we told them, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. And that would ensure they look at the clock. And again, the clock was rigged. So for a third of the people, it's going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, half as fast.

And the remaining third, it's real time. And the question we were asking was, did blood sugar level follow clock time or perceived time? And by this point, your listener should know it's perceived time. Our expectations, beliefs are so much more powerful than most of us assume. And so basically the reason I keep doing all these podcasts, keep writing all these books, is to wake people up to that. You know, in my view, in so many decades of this research, I found that most people are mindless almost all of a time. And so essentially you're sealed in an unlived life. And, you know, it's time to break the seal and get engaged to enjoy whatever is available.

to you and none of us know how long we have you know we have um people now uh baby boomers people my age who are held bent on they're going to live longer and so they're out exercising some of them hating it and taking all sorts of drugs and suffering so on and with the goal of adding more years to their lives my view is rather than trying to add more years to your life you should add more to your years. And oddly, that will probably result in a longer life. You talk about how important belief and expectation is to how we're living. How do people start to change their belief and expectation? Whenever you're taught anything is, you know, let a bell go off, how do you know it is, who says so? And that it is sometimes for some people.

Okay, so we have to stop buying into and becoming mindless of all the absolutes we're given. Horses don't eat meat, for example. Next, for almost all of us, we do everything we can to get that good thing, run as fast as we can from that bad thing, overlooking the fact that things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. It's our minds that make them so. And so if the next time there was something bad, you stop and you ask yourself, how might that actually be good? And if the same thing is potentially good or bad, you just sit still.

You don't need to run from it or run towards it. You can just be. And you do this sort of thing often enough. You see, I was played a part in cognitive behavior therapy decades and decades ago, where you would be taught if you went to a cognitive behavior therapist to reframe the current situation. but if you, I'm not talking about reframing. You say if you do that often enough, you don't have to, you know, a moment before my computer was going bananas.

Now, so what? If I said, oh my goodness, I'm not going to be able to, you know, when you realize the advantage, if it did just go on, you know, go out, then I would go and I'd have a late lunch. That would be good, too. what happens, it's all potentially good. And you're not lying to yourself because things are not in and of themselves good or bad. But because they're not good or bad and seeing the bad gets you stressed and crazy, it's probably not wise to do that. Now, interesting because I think the major cause of illness and the major thing that leads to people's unhappiness is stress. And stress is

stress is not a function of events. Stress is a function of the views we take of events. So if you open up that view and notice, let's say I'm afraid I'm going to fail the test. I'm afraid my spouse is going to leave me. I'm afraid the podcast is going to be awful. Whatever you're afraid of. And you now ask yourself, you know, why might that be wrong?

You know, for every time you're stressed, there's actually an expectation that something, something's going to happen, and when it happens, it's going to be awful. But we can't predict. We think we can predict, but we can't predict the individual case. We can predict a treatment is successful, let's say, for 75% of the people who are given it. We can't predict for which individuals it'll be affected. All right. So we can't predict. So say to yourself, you know, here are three reasons, five reasons, why it might turn out to be other than I'm thinking. the person won't leave. I won't phone the test. My computer won't go on the

the blitz. You know, whatever. Now then is the harder part. Let's imagine this thing that you were dreading does happen. How is that actually a good thing? And if you can master how this thing you dreaded is actually an advantage, then you're home free. And you do that a few times and it becomes easier and easier and more natural. So I don't know, it must be 60 years, 50 years, we'll say, since I reframe something, because it doesn't occur to me as negative in the first place. Can you give us an example? I ask you, do you want to meet my friend Joe? He's very impulsive. Why would you want to meet Joe? Right. Or I say to you, do you want to meet Joe, my friend Joe, he's very spontaneous. Yeah, I want to meet Joe. Well, spontaneous and impulsive of the same thing.

but they lead you in very different places. In fact, this is another important piece for me. Every single negative description, negative thing we say about ourselves or somebody else has an equally strong, but oppositely valence alternative. In English, for every bad, there's a good. For every good, there's a bad. And so the next time you call yourself or somebody else, you know, let me give you a second, I, I am so gullible, it defies belief. I am. I really am. I'm also impulsive. Now, if I want to stop being gullible and you're going to help me stop at your point, look at Ellen, you were taken by two psychopaths. Michael, I know. That's why I want you to, I'm never going to change. Why? Because going forward, I'm not being gullible. Going forward, I'm being trusting. And as long as I value being trusting, there are times I'm going to be

gullible. I value being spontaneous, which is why at times I'm going to seem impulsive. So the point is, every time you call yourself, oh, how could I have done this? Or look at how, you know, what a monster you are, and you find the positive understanding of why that person did it, you typically don't even want to change them anymore. But if you want to change somebody's behavior, you have to change the behavior from the perspective of the actor. You have to get me not to value being spontaneous, not to value being trusted. But it's very powerful. And what happens is it changes your relationship to yourself.

It changes your relationships with other people. All of that then makes you more mindful and improves your health. When you talk about expectation and removing your expectation from something happening like, well, the podcast, my computer shuts off. I shouldn't be doing this podcast. I'm going to go have lunch. It wouldn't be, maybe I shouldn't be doing the podcast. It'd be, oh, well, you know, since I can't do it right at this moment, let me do something else. Yeah.

There is an element of spirituality that seems embedded in some of this thinking because there is a trust that things are going to work out generally okay or as they should. Do you assign any sort of relationship or trust or faith in how you're describing changing our expectations? Once you recognize that nothing is anything independent of the way we label it and that the culture gives us these labels, we don't have to accept these labels. So an example, a student years ago, we changed the label from victim to survivor. Very different, right? But it's just one word. Our language is loaded.

It leads us to have many more expectations than we presume. You're told when you're young, we used to, now cancer has been many people survive. But in the old days, a few decades ago, they didn't. And so you were taught cancer as a killer. So you're a young person, who cares? Cancer is a killer. So you learn cancer is a killer. And then eventually someone in your family, your parent, are you yourself?

get cancer, it doesn't even occur to you to question that, just as you have found it so hard to question that you might be able to heal instantly, you know, the inside out version of that. You know, I'm not sure just what people mean when they say spiritual, but it's hard for me to imagine being mindlessly spiritual. I mean, you know, you can be mindless and somebody else can call you spiritual, but for you to experience being spirited, just, you know, spiritual. So you have to be present, and the only way to be present is to be mindful, which is to take the world as probably to realize the control we have, the way we label things. We shouldn't label things absolutely. You know, that you, if you take a label, and again, you're young and you see, oh, old means loss of memory, decrepit, you know, going upon.

so many ways, then eventually you wear that label. It's hard then to say, oh, no, no, I didn't really mean all of that. Everything we learn should be done as a probability rather than an absolute fact. And as I look at the two of you, physically you're very different. And so when I give these lectures in person, I'll often ask, and there's always, it's amazing. I'll say, is there somebody very tall in the audience? And there's always a man at least six, five. So I invite him up the stage, and there I am at 5.3, and he is at 6.5. Okay, so we look silly together. And then I simply raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? It seems crazy. I ask him to put his hand up. His hand is three inches or more larger than mine. Should we hold a tennis rack

at the same way? All right. Now, so the point here is that the more different you are from the person who wrote the rule, the more important it is for you not to mindless. follow the rule. And so if I'm 5'3 and my hand is as large as it is and you're teaching me tennis and you say, here's how you hold the tennis. Right? I go, well, maybe. I take it as, you know, as a suggestion, not absolute. Talk to us about how pervasive our world is that is based on these assumptions. It couldn't be more pervasive. No, I'm suggesting. That's how we came up with, I said before, virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. Your parents teach you this is how you do this. Schools, you're taught. The one I use that I find compelling, I ask, how much is one plus one?

This is the absolute that everybody is sure. They say two. I said, but it's not always two. First of all, if we want to be sophisticated, one plus one is two if you're using a base 10 number system. If you're using a base two number system, one plus one is written as 10. Who cares about number systems? You add one pile of laundry to one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one wad of chewing gum to one watt of chewing gum to one plus one is one. You add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one is one. In the real world, one plus one doesn't equal two as are more often as it does. Now, what's the difference?

So before somebody asks you how much is one plus one, you say two. That's the end of it. Not only that, but you're probably dispatched the person for asking such a silly question. Now you're asked, all of a sudden you have a choice. When you're mindless, you have no choice. I could say one, I could say two, I could say 10, and you pay attention to the context and decide what you're going to do. And life becomes more engaging and interesting.

I love that example because two people together can do things that, you know, maybe five people can't if their dynamic is right. But talk to us about glasses. This example struck me because, I have a personal relationship with glasses. I got glasses at a very young age. But I've never really believed that I need glasses all the time and we're all under the fallacy of glasses.

People assume with almost everything that they look for stability. So if you go to a doctor and you're given the Snelling Eye chest. And that's that chart with all the descending letters in size. And what you're shown on those charts, the letters that are out of context, they make no sense. which is very different from if they did make sense. They're in black and white, not in color. I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I can see that restaurant sign, you know,

much further in the distance. So our motivations and our abilities change in the course of a day. But the medical world can't evaluate us every hour of every day. And so what we do is we're given a number and we hold that constant. Well, let me tell you a story that led to some of this. You know, I used to have a contact lens that I wore in one eye, so I would have near, you know, be able to read with one eye and distance with the other. And one day I come back from work and getting ready for Ben and I go to take the lens out of my eye. I can't get it out.

I'm killing myself. And then I realized, though, I never put it in. And then I, the next thing I realized was I was fine all day, you know, and I never wore them again. All right. point. The point is that if we allow it, our vision will vary. It'll vary based on how much sleep we've had the time of day. If you notice when you can see and you say it's three o'clock in the afternoon, well, maybe you just need an energy bar, which we used to call a candy bar, but now you can eat it guilt-free because it's an energy bar, or a nap or something. You have choices

that you don't once you assume it's because there's something wrong with your vision. So, the point is, if you go to the doctor and you find out you need glasses, then it's like the laxative, you wear the glasses every day all day long, you're training your eyes not to be able to see. Now, remember in the counterclockwise study, well, these are elderly men, and in that time of less than a week, their vision improved, you know, so that what I suggest, and there are many studies where we do this and talk about in the books is sort of a psychological treatment for chronic illness is what I call attention to symptom variability. Whatever we have doesn't stay constant. Whatever aches and pains, you know, they vary. Variability may be small, but it still varies. And so the

question is why? Why now am I a little better than the last time? You know, and so if you do this with vision, and why now can I see, but at four o'clock I can see. Then you entertain possible reasons, and you test them out. And so we find that across a host of very serious illnesses, from Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, a bunch of diseases of this sort, that we're able to get on top of control, miliorate the symptoms,

simply by asking the question, how is it now? Is it better or worse than the last time I checked in? And why? And when you ask that why question, you're being mindful, which is itself good for our health. So we call people at different times of a day and we ask them this question. How is it now? Is it better or worse than before and why? But people can do that for themselves. Just set your smartphone to ring. ring in an hour, then ring in an hour and 40 minutes, so two hours and six minutes. It doesn't matter. Just keep varying it, which is what people do. They have a chronic illness. They assume the symptoms will stay the same or only get worse. Do you start to find patterns in the why that reflects stress or emotional conditions?

Yeah, whatever it is. But by asking the question, you're more likely to come up with an answer than if you don't. Now, so let's say you're stressed and you think you're stressed all the time. No one is stressed all the time to equal measure. So now I'm going to call you periodically and ask you how are you now? And is it better or worse than the last time I called? And why? You might discover, you know, you're okay most of a day. But when you talk to Ellen Langer, it's terrible.

In which case, the cure is easy. Don't talk to me. All right? You know, so it's harmless, you know, and it's a way that we've, tell people with very serious illnesses. Just by reversing what we almost always do, which is hold things still. Horses don't eat meat. One in one is two. This is whatever it is, as if things are not naturally changing. You know, the spiritual language for something very similar is to hold the possibility of something more, to hold the possibility that it could be different than the way we think it is.

that the way we think it is is not the way it is. And if we think differently about it, it becomes different. You talk about something that I really related to, that people set themselves up with the language they use all the time with the notion of trying. I'm very sensitive to language. And so I find, you know, I have a lot of chapter in the book, a fun chapter where I call Better Than Better.

And we have lots of people and lots of my colleagues do wonderful research to get us from here, which is bad, to hear which is good. And I said, ah, but there's a better place to be. And the trying is one example. The word try. You don't try to eat an ice cream cone. You eat the ice cream con. So the word try has built into it in expectation for failure. And so giving up is not good. So trying is better than giving up, but better than trying. trying is just dual. When we did that study then, when my students informed, oh, that's the Yodas study. And I said, good. Maybe more people will pay attention to it. The one I found the most fun was I had been asked many years ago if I'd give a sermon at one of the Harvard churches. And I said yes, because I say yes to everything, almost. But I'm Jewish and I'm not religious. So now that I've said, yeah, what am I going to talk about? So, all right, I think, well, I can talk about forgiveness. It's not religion, but it's religine. You know, like you get away with it.

And so I start to think about it and realize something sacrilegious. So if you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you? It's good. It's good. Right. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad, what are they going to tell you? It's bad.

Right. But you can't forgive unless you first blame. Well, that's interesting. Our forgivers are our blamers. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? Well, you blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here?

We have people who see the world negatively who blame and then forgive, heartily divine. Now, if you blame, it's better to forgive than not forgive, but there's a better than better way, which is what I was describing before, which is to understand that other people's behavior makes sense from their perspective when they do it or else they wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to be obnoxious, aggressive, nasty, and incompetent. Whatever we're

calling somebody, again, there's a positive version of that. And so you might want to forgive me for having been gullible. It's unnecessary once you realize it's, you know, that what I am is trusting. And I don't have to forgive you for being inconsistent. Rather, I prefer to value you for being so flexible. So everything changes. So forgiveness is good if you blame, but if you understand, that obviates the need for forgiveness. And it's the same thing with health, that we have people who are told that they're in remission. Now, of course, being in remission with cancer is better than having an active case of cancer. But why do they call it remission? You know, if you have a cold and the cold is gone, are you in remission? If we're talking about the

nomenclature of what the word remission means, it means that you are under more acute monitoring than if you did not have cancer and then if you were part of the general population. And it means that, yes, they're going to check cancer markers, which in many cases can indicate that you have a tumor that's growing that is going to kill you? Like, I mean, that's just the clinical explanation of what remission tends to mean. Not that many decades ago. The medical model was such that they believed that psychology was irrelevant to one's health. The only way you were going to get sick was the introduction of an antigen. So you tell somebody that they're in remission. Again, well, that's better than having the act of cancer. But now I'm still a nervous wreck. Is it going to be come back or not coming?

And so the point is that you can just as easily see yourself as cured. And if you see yourself as cured, you go about your living rather than suffer the stress of worrying about the cancer. Now, if, let's say, you're cancer free and you get cancer again, in some ways it'll be like the last cancer, because we call it cancer, but in just as many ways it'll be different from that, which allows us to see them as different. Same thing with a cold. You know, when you're cured from the cold, probably on some level, there's still some remnant, but you don't see yourself as in remission. And then when you get another cold, it doesn't scare you as much. Because why I've beaten hundreds of these or tens of these?

Can you actually talk a little bit about the common cold? You know, that's one of the things that many people would assume this is cut and dry. You get exposed to a virus. You get a cold. And then the virus works through, you know, whatever process it needs to. And when the virus is dead, you do not have a cold anymore. When people think they're going to get a cold, because we lead them to believe they're going to get a cold, they're more likely to get a cold when they don't believe when they're going to get a cold.

And, you know, the research needs to be replicated, but it takes so long to get permissions and to get these things done. And it was during COVID and so on. let's just leave it at there's no reason to assume with the wide body of disorders, diseases, infirmities that we have studied, that the common cold would be any different. It's interesting because this goes back to what you were implying before about what can't be, you know, that everybody accepts the word placebo. Everybody knows that placebos are effective. Now, placebo is a nothing.

You take a nothing pill, sugar pill, and you think it's something, and then it heals you. When you have a cold and you take something that you think is going to heal you, you organize yourself differently. And part of that, all of that, helps the healing. The way that Jonathan functions, even when he's sick, he just keeps saying, I'm not sick. I'm not sick. He's just kind of grumpy and has all the symptoms of sickness, but he won't call it sick. So it's like he was never sick. But there's some other part of this that we have to pay attention.

Sometimes it's fun having a cold. You get to stay in bed, watch television, eat muffins, have somebody take care of you, if you're fortunate. And so we don't always want to be as well as we think we would like us to want to be. Well, Jonathan doesn't like anyone taking care of him, so that tracks. Here's the limit question you were asking yourself before. My guess is you feel a cold coming on. At that point, you probably can, you know, take a right or left turn and prevent that from happening. Once it's full-blown, it's harder to do that because we all have a very strong image of what it's supposed to be like.

Either our throat will hurt, we'll cough, our nose will be stuffy, you know, for a few days and so on. you know, having a global pandemic also introduced a lot of conversations about symptomatology and course and things like that. And, you know, for many people, especially people who did not support, let's say, vaccines or the vaccine schedule in this country in particular, many people said, I got it and I'm fine. And there were many, many people who got it and weren't not fine. And this whole conversation about preexisting conditions came about. And it's interesting, I got hit very, very hard by COVID, very hard. And I'm a person who generally, I mean, I have a lot of medical stuff that I deal with. I have two children, one of whom is very physiologically similar to me. He got

hit similarly, very, very hard. And we had almost the same exact course. And my other child, who's more like his dad was literally like, stop asking me, I'm fine, let me go about my business. So there's also, I think, such a huge conversation. And I think COVID in many cases made a lot of people think that they were authorities on medical health, and in many cases, even our government, I think, has admitted they were not the exact authorities. Yeah, and, you know, as far as who's going to get hit by what, you know, or not, there are so many potential explanations. But I do feel that if we took these people, randomly put them into two groups, taught one of them to be mindful, and they were mindful in the way I've described.

that they would be less vulnerable. Can you talk a little bit more about placebo because you go through some of the most incredible cases of what it means to apply placebo? The sham surgery experiments regarding knee replacements is one category. But can you talk about both the knee surgery sham experiments and also the drilling the hole in your head, Parkinson's experiment?

They're remarkable for reasons that we, wouldn't occur to the normal reader, well, that's remarkable first to me was that they let them do this. You know, if you know how hard it is to get permission for even giving people a questionnaire. But so what happens in the Parkinson's study, people have Parkinson's are going to have surgery, and one group actually has a surgery. Another group doesn't have the surgery, and yet another group is given a sham surgery where they actually drill. The surgery presumably is going to help with their symptoms, correct? Oh, yes, well, that's the reason to happen. Yeah. And so we have different expectations. Without the surgery, they shouldn't expect to get better. With the surgery, they should. But one of these surgeries is a sham procedure. They actually drill into your head. So this has to be real, right? Because it kills. That surgery resulted, I think, in people getting better for at least two years. And the two years was only because that was the last time they, you know, they checked.

checked in on people. Now, you know, now when you, it's interesting because if you take a placebo, if you're better with a placebo, and then somebody tells you it was only a placebo, there are one or two different reactions. One person, you know, oh my God, I guess I didn't really get better and then you fall back into whatever the problem was. Or if somebody helps you, if you can't do it for yourself, to see, look, you know, if the placebo, if the pill, the surgery, the injection, didn't, wasn't what helped you.

you, what helped you? You know, you did it yourself and to realize that all of us are able to give ourselves so much better health care than we think to do. And in many cases, I mean, I've heard a lot of people say they don't want to have knee surgery because of this sham experiment. And the the knee surgery experiment was they literally performed a fake knee surgery and people recovered, I believe it was statistically significant that they recovered at the same rate as people who had had an entire knee replacement. You look at the diagnosis. Any diagnosis is just a probability. We can't be sure you're not. So you have a certain number of people who are going to get better on their own. We have a certain number of people who, whatever it is they have, they only have a small version of it.

You know, your COVID, the big version versus, you know, many other people's small version. We talked about this with HIV also, that the distinctions for what determines legitimate HIV positive status, especially when we're talking about babies and adoption rules across countries. So one country might say, this is a baby that we cannot put out for adoption because it's HIV positive. And another country would say we would not even designate this child as HIV positive. And you know that once you're wearing a diagnosis, you behave very differently. Right. So this is one of the first questions you asked me. I mean, somebody, you know, is told they have cancer, they withdraw from the world, they feel sorry for

themselves and rightly so, perhaps. People stay away because they don't feel comfortable being, you know, they know cancer isn't catching, but what do you say after you say, I'm sorry, you've got it? So their social interactions are reduced. They voluntarily withdraw from lots of the activities at the other way. And all of those things that are good for us, you know. So if you, believe that for whatever reason that you're going to be okay, then you're not doing those very things that take away from your being okay. There is a story of a man. You talk about it in the book. I'm just going to go ahead and read this. He had orange-sized tumors. These are very, very large tumors. He was given two weeks to live and they gave him an experimental drug. Can you tell us

what happened to this man twice? Yeah. So the tumor goes away. and then he reads that the drug was actually a placebo. So then the tumor comes back. We had a guy who was told he had two weeks to live. He was given what he was told was an experimental drug. This tumor, which by all accounts should not have vanished, vanished. He was then told it became clear to him that he would have been given a placebo. And what happened?

The tumor came back, right? So that's already amazing. They then gave him what they called a double, strength medication. They said we have a new experimental medication. It's double strength. It has the possibility to heal you. And what happened? The tumors shrunk again. He then found out there was a final report saying that the drug that he was given was essentially worthless. He died shortly thereafter. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I think that if we go back to what I've said about mind-body unity, you know, that wherever the mind is, the body will be.

And if you assume this thing is going to kill me, both, you know, in a social psychological way, as I said a moment before, you're doing things that will hasten your own death and also that the body is getting its messages from the mind. You know, there was this mental institution. And one ward on the institution were called the hopeless ward. And they were doing some renovations, so they moved everybody from the Hopeless Ward to a more hopeful ward.

And people got better. And then the renovations were finished. So now they were moved back to the Hopeless War. And more people died than would have been expected by any metric. People tend to live until their granddaughter gets married, you know, things of this sort, and magically die soon after. you know, that for many of us, we don't die until we're ready to die. I mean, that's different if you get hit by a car or shot by a bullet or something. Those are choices.

I made the choice to walk in front of that bus. That's right. But I mean, the larger point shouldn't get lost in all of this, that we have enormous control over our health and well-being. And most people now are exercising only a small, percentage of that. And we need to wake up and enjoy the lives that we're living. Some of the most powerful examples that you give, painting warts with bright colors and telling patients that they'll vanish when the colors wear off actually leads to the warts going away.

We've seen that asthmatics can improve after using inhalers that it turned out were drug-free. 50% of colitis patients had less inflamed intestines after being given a placebo that they were told would help with inflammation. I know that it's not necessarily your line of research, but I'm sure you're aware. There's a lot of doctors and thinkers who are talking about sort of the biological basis of manifestation and visualization and positive thinking. And what I would often say is toxic positivity. But people like Joe Dispenza, people like Bruce Lipton, you know, they have. careers built around what are the literally molecular and cellular properties of change that can happen when we manifest, when we believe, when we place ourselves in this sort of higher vibration

state, what's your perspective on either the biological mechanisms that might be underlying what's going on here or the sort of ability that we have to sort of market this kind of thing as we can change yourselves when we change your mind? Anything that happens on any level is simultaneously happening on every level. And so I don't know the particular neuroscience. It doesn't matter, but to not to believe there is a simultaneous change to me. It doesn't make sense. For a while now, neuroscience has been the coin of the realm.

And so Jeremy Gray and colleagues years ago did this study. I may get this little cocky, but the essence should come through, where he gets people research results from real study. And then another group is given research results, the same results, but with made-up ridiculous neuroscience data. And what happens is when there's neuroscience in it, people believe it. I think that that's part of the good thing about what Bruce and Joe are doing, regardless of the ultimate veracity,

that you give a little mechanism and people say, oh, that must be true because now they can explain it. Because people need to be convinced outside of what they were previously taught is the only way that it can be. They need to, it's like a little, you need an explanation.

They think they do. But, you know, right now you and I are speaking. I'm in Massachusetts. Where are you? California. Los Angeles. California. So how can we be speaking and seeing each other? I don't have a vagus notion. And my guess is, if you start to talk to me about some of the, you know, technology, when push comes to shove, you don't really understand it either. But we just accept it. And people accept that placebo's work without the vagus notion, how can placebo work? But you hear often enough placebo, placebo, you know, at some point, you accept it as real. So what people are, you. are willing to accept or not accept is not, to my mind, tied very closely to scientific proof.

Can you talk about the color of medications? This blew my mind. Antidepressants are what color is yellow, because yellow is common. And acids are white. You know, that colors mean something. And there is a book where they have the color of football. So you're the visiting team and the walls where the members of the team are going to get ready for the game are painted pink. Pink is coming, you know, and this stuff is real. There's some data that if you are wearing red on a date, the person you're with is going to spend more money on you. Now, you know, obviously, once you hear these things, you can make sure it doesn't work for you. Colors, smells, sounds, you know, remind us of things.

and when we're reminded of something, then our minds take over and behave in a somewhat predictable way. I mean, this has been so, so informative, so also very entertaining to hear all of these examples and also the way that you frame it. The prevalent view that we operate under is, you know, what's known as this biopsychosocial model, you know, which implies that biological and psychological and social factors are all interacting. as you sort of send us off, is that enough or is the way that you are framing things even more possible for a deeper understanding of mind and body? I have been talking about mind-body unity since 1979, thinking about it before then, but in 1979 when I did the counterclockwise study, it's nice to feel that, you know,

one has had some effect. And so the mind-body dualism became mind-body connection. But mind-body connection still doesn't answer the problem, which is how do you get from the mind to the body? This is something where it's all or nothing, you know, that mind-body connection is no different in my mind from mind-body dualism. And what we need to, at least for heuristic purposes, is to see them as one thing and then see how far we can push it.

And then that allows an answer to many of the good questions you asked. I don't know what the limits are to so much of this. You know, I can easily create a situation where a person will be less likely to be tired on very little sleep. But does that mean they can go a lifetime without any sleep? We thank you so much for being here and highly recommend the mindful body thinking our way to chronic health. I actually heard about you from my ex-husband. So I'm giving a shout out to him for telling me. all about you and we're so grateful we finally got to speak to you. Women like me stand on the shoulders

of women like you. So thank you so much for all of your, your pioneering work. Absolutely. Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me and for making this fun for me. She's a style of speaking that's very similar to what it's like to try and speak at any meal that my family has ever had. So like I get it. But I think that a lot of what I have a problem, it's a lowercase P problem with Dr. Langer is a lot of this is semantic, and that's exactly, it's exactly her point. So for me, the word spontaneous and impulsive are actually not the same word. Oh, you like to define a word. No, they don't mean the same thing because impulsive has a derogatory flavor. And that's because we speak as humans and we come up with words. One of them means spontaneous. I'm up for anything.

Impulsive means that you do not give thought to what happens after you do an action. And sometimes those actions have negative consequences that you have not considered. That's what impulsivity is. And we can measure it with neuroscience. So there is something to the difference between those things. But I love this notion. And it's actually something that you find through a lot of 12-step groups, finding the asset that is hidden in a defect, right? So that when you look at someone, and especially if you're having trouble in a relationship, this is strongly recommended.

Whatever you focus on will grow. whatever you focus on will grow. If you focus on the negative, it will be louder. If you focus on the positive, it will also be louder. That's sort of that notion that I absolutely relate to. You said negative implications or impacts after you do something, what the impulsive person doesn't consider is the potential impacts before they do something. So you just switched it. So I wanted to help us clarify. However, there is in spontaneity, there is often, if you're really spontaneous. There can be a little bit of overlap between impulsivity. Yeah, it's the line between madness and creativity. You love to live there. I loved what she talked about in terms of noticing

three new things about someone who you may live with or be in a relationship with. That's really cool. Because we all end up being like, I know this person, I know what they do, they start to talk, I know what they're going to say already. Why do I have to listen to them? Well, I also was thinking, like, is that part of the definition of love? Is finding new things about your partner, especially over time, right? Like, when you think about it, especially if you're with someone over the course of time and you start to see them aging and you start to see new parts of them or new wrinkles or new,

like, can you find beauty, right, in new things that you notice, especially when you're with someone long enough for those things to kind of start shifting. What is love but the application of attention? What is love but a secondhand emotion? I thought of two things that kept with me during this episode. When she talked about the idea of noticing and the need to continually notice, notice three things when you go outside, notice three things at the grocery store, are the devices that we're carrying in our hands destroying our ability to notice. Not just that I'm spending my time on the device, so I'm not looking around, but the fact that I'm being rewarded by going on the phone and getting this novelty reduces my

interest in seeking the novelty elsewhere, programming me to think about what the world is, and then I take those expectations into my real life. That's very, very astute. You know, she actually has a scale that she devised. It's called, I think, the Langer Mindfulness Scale. You know, I was reading some of the characteristics. And, like, in many cases, like, I am not, I don't fall under the category of mindful people because, oh, you, you just shook your head with tremendous certainty, like, this was written in your soul. Like, when I was born, I knew that before I even knew you. But, no, one of the things is, like, are you open to new ideas and creativity? Like, nope. No.

You like to know how things go and you want a level of certainty that this leads to that. I mean, this is the other thing. Like, in order to do certain things in life, like, someone has to feed the kids and, like, have gas in the car and, like, put on your underwear, you know, like. You don't want the three-year-old mindset is what she describes, where you're, like, questioning everything. You shouldn't do that with, I wonder if I don't fill the gas tank, if the car will still go, like that, there are some things we know.

And that's what I was talking about, you know, in terms of a floor effect. Like there is a what's called a floor effect of certain things, meaning, you know, if I cut my hand open, the cells of epidermis, yes, I could be the person who like magically heals. Yeah. And it just magically closes up. But generally speaking, there's a floor effect to how long a bone will take to no longer have a fracture in the calcium structure. You know what I mean?

Like, it's not just like... We were talking to a 21-year-old who had broken their collarbone, and he said, I healed like a middle-aged diabetic for some reason that bone didn't fuse properly, and I wonder what are the factors that an otherwise healthy, vibrant person would heal? That could also have been a wrong assessment.

They could have been looking at the wrong scan, and now you've got this 21-year-old kid who thinks, my bones don't heal and maybe I shouldn't do this because what if I break this? And if I break this, what do I do? I thinking about this with labor, with birth, how much this comes up. I was told after the birth of my first son by an OB, your body probably just doesn't know how to go into labor. Some women, their bodies just don't know how to go into labor. And I'm thinking that doesn't even make sense. What? Like I'm the one who was supposed to die in the jungle because I would never give birth and the baby would just like,

what? That doesn't make sense. So with my second son when I went into labor and was alone until I pushed him out, I called the doctor and I said, guess whose body knows how to go into labor. But that's in your head, right? It gets in your head. And then that's the story you tell and how many women are told, this is going to be your story. Or even with hormones, this is going to be your story. There's also something, while there couldn't be a floor, like you likely aren't going to have spontaneous healing, although the thing that got me into energy work was a spontaneous burn healing of my fingers,

which was a crazy experience. You can also change, like, does that cut leave a scar? Does it heal in three days versus seven days? Does it linger? I don't know that I would say you can change that. You can influence it. We're going to continue this on substack because there is actually so much to talk about in this outro.

The second thing that occurred to me while she was talking, and I don't think you're going to like this, but it has implications not. only to the group that I'm about to mention, but to everyone who gets a diagnosis. There's a slippery slope here because in some ways we need to be honest and recognize when we have something we need to work on, but at the same time, when we label ourselves, there's no getting out of that label. It's people in 12-step rooms who say, I am this. Oh, that's interesting. I'm a drug addict. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a codependent. I'm some sort of.

addicted to something. I would use the example of alcoholism in particular for people who are in AA. This is actually, and I think Moshe Kashir may have talked about this when we had on our podcast. One of the criticisms that many people have is this notion that once you are labeled an alcoholic, that you cannot drink alcohol and that total abstinence is the only, quote, cure. So yes, there are some people, but I think that's a, it's a, it's a shade different, but I think this notion, I think the notion is very interesting, but it is a shade different. from I think Dr. Lanker's work. And I want to clarify, I'm not encouraging people to drink or say that you can't.

You are. You're encouraging people to drink and not believe in alcoholism. I'm not. What I'm saying is that the labeling of I am this versus I'm recovering or I am, you know, I'm changed my relationship with something. Like some of the language that we use to then identify ourselves, I think there's this line between identifying a problem. problem so that you can manage it in your life and get help and becoming this patient for life

mentality. Look, I think we see it even outside of 12-step, you know, conversations. We see it in the rampant diagnosis and self-diagnosis of things like ADHD, OCD, right? To say, I have OCD, I'm so OCD. There are many, many things about people that are persnickity, that are what we used to call anal retentive, does that mean you merit an entire diagnosis that then is the label that you hashtag not necessarily? And when we get to medication conversations, especially with children, when do you medicate a child who has attention deficit problems versus this is a clinical issue and this child needs to be medicated all day versus there are certain situations that when this child is placed in, this is how they behave. But they focus perfectly.

well when blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's true for many of these diagnoses, even spectrum stuff, anxiety. When do you say, especially with children, you deserve a medication so that you are not suffering like this? Or what's going on in the world around you that is producing this diagnosis? Is it who you are? Is it situational? And once we put that label on them, right? And we've talked about this even with labeling, you know, with the spectrum. If you tell a child, you are autistic, right? That's different than letting this child sort of evolve and for them to learn.

Obviously, there's certain children for whom that label's very helpful, but that label itself can be, you know, complicated. Very well said. Head over to Substack. My and Be Alex breakdown on Substack to join the breaker community. On this particular episode,

you're going to get more of understanding yourself through diagnosis and the challenges and labels that those carry. I'm also going to ask my very personal question when Dr. Langer was talking about changing beliefs and expectations, things not being good or bad, and changing the narratives that we have and that we carry all the time, what came up for me was how does that relate when people are not doing things the way you want them to? How does it relate when you're in a situation that you don't like and you think it should be done differently? How does it relate when almost every thought we think

if you start to unpack it, has an expectation associated with it that is impacting us physiologically. We're going to do a deep dive into the narratives we carry and how we can actually start breaking free to see things differently and to feel differently. Miami Alex breakdown on Substack. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time. It's Miami Alex breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction.

And now she's going to. bring