Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 279 | Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and the Body

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

For those of us who are not dualists, the mind arises from our physical bodies -- mostly the brain, but the rest of the body has a role to play. And yet it remains tempting to treat the mind as a thing in itself, disconnected from how the body is doing. Ellen Langer is a psychologist who is one of the foremost researchers on the idea of mindfulness -- the cognitive skill of paying to one's thoughts, as well as to one's external environment. Her most recent book is The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. We talk about how our state of mind can effect the functions of our body, sometimes in surprising ways. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/17/279-ellen-langer-on-mindfulness-and-the-body/ Ellen Langer received her Ph.D. in Social and Clinical Psychology from Yale University. She is currently a professor of psychology at Harvard University. She is also an artist with multiple gallery exhibitions. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Liberty Science Center Genius Award. Web site Harvard web page Google Scholar publications Amazon book page Wikipedia

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it helps support healthy hair, skin, nails, and joints in a smooth, ready-to-drink shake. So your afternoon reset actually sets you up for success. Vital Proteins. Stay Vital. Visit VitalProtines.com to get started. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. The idea of mindfulness has received quite a bit of currency in public discourse in the past few years. It's usually associated very closely with the idea of meditation, some sort of careful thought in quiet contemplation to looking in on what are the chitter-shattering thoughts flying through your brain and trying to observe them and understand. them and so forth. Today's guest, Ellen Langer, who is a psychologist at Harvard, is the

pioneer of mindfulness. In fact, she is known somewhat affectionately as the mother of mindfulness, but she doesn't, for the most part, pursue it in the context of meditation. For Ellen, mindfulness is something much more active and pervasive and in some sense easy. It doesn't require nearly as much discipline as you might worry about if, uh, is a lot of, uh, is if meditation is your game. And what she has been doing over the last several decades is studying the effects of being mindful, both on our psychology and on our physiology.

So by mindful, she just means literally paying attention to what is going on, to not let yourself fall into a cognitive rut where you assume that you know what is going on and therefore move forward with it, but instead really see, really hear, really proceed, what is going on. And this simple idea, I mean, it really just is that simple, as far as I can tell, has kind of amazing benefits. So we'll talk about some of the psychological benefits, but Ellen came

out with a new book at the end of last year called The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, which is about the physiological, the health benefits of mindfulness. And it's very interesting. She has a lot of studies, right? This is very database. And, And some of the results of these studies are kind of amazing. They typically start with people who are not being mindful about something and either use that to show them how to improve in some way. If you start paying attention to this or if you think about this thing in a different way, I'm speaking in vague generalities here because I want you to listen to the podcast,

not just the introduction. But kind of amazing health benefits accrue. You can think of it as kind of like the placebo effect, right? you take some pill that really isn't anything at all, and your mind coaxes your body into getting better, but turning that on its head to make it much more intentional and cognitive and active, rather than tricking yourself, just thinking yourself into feeling younger, healing faster, generally being more healthy. So, I mean, the data are there. We talked about the fact that we don't really understand the neurological, physiological basis for what is.

going on, but it's a phenomenon that needs to be explained and maybe needs to be taken advantage of by more of us, both in our everyday lives and when we go to the doctors for something bad happening. So I think it's a very interesting perspective on not only just how to feel better and be healthier, but how to live your life in a slightly more mindful way. So with that, let's go. Ellen Langer, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. My pleasure to be here, Sean. So you obviously talk about mindfulness a lot. You were talking about it long before it became a thing in the popular imagination. And these days, I think a lot of people immediately think of mindful meditation. But that is not exactly your angle here. So I thought we would just clear up that possible confusion right away. That's a wonderful place to start. I did research on meditation decades ago. But the work that I focused on. on is mindfulness without meditation. What people need to understand is that meditation isn't mindfulness.

It's a practice you undergo to result in presumably post-meditative mindfulness. And meditation is wonderful, but this is different. Mindfulness, as I study it, is not a practice. It's a way of being that follows from a certain understanding of the world. explain what that means in just a moment. What's amazing to me, Sean, is that it's so easy and the consequences are so enormous. It almost defies belief. All you need to do is notice. Now, if you ask people, are they noticing? Of course, right? And so when I start lectures, what I often do is give them an instance where they're going to reveal their own mindlessness

because 45 years of research has shown me that, sadly, virtually all of us, almost all the time, we're not there. The thing is that when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there, but we're not there. And the reason we're not there is essentially because we know. You know, if you knew what I was going to say next, why would you bother listening to me? And what people don't appreciate, and you as a first-rate physicist know better than I or most people, that uncertainty is the rule. It's not the exception. No matter what you're thinking about looking at can be seen, understood in different ways. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. But we hold it still. And then what we do is we confuse the stability of our mindset.

with the underlying phenomena. Now, the odd thing about this is that people hold things still, and they want to know absolutely what something is, in order to control it. But the very process of holding it still, when in fact it's varying robs us from the control we would have. So I often start these talks, and I might ask,

the one thing that people assure they know is, how much is one plus one? And I must tell you that if I ask somebody this, not on a podcast, I have no doubt that they're going to look at me like I'm crazy or try not to laugh at me because everybody knows how much one. So, Sean, I'm sure you know, but how much is one in me? It's two, but I know I'm just giving you the answer you want. Thank you. And I expect that to happen for the whole podcast. It'll be great.

Great. So 1 plus 1 is 2 if you're using the base 10 number system. If you're using the base 2 number system, 1 plus 1 is written as 10. Now, most people don't know there are different number systems, and that's okay. If you add one pile of sand plus one pile of sand, 1 plus 1 plus 1 is 1. If you add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud plus 1 1 1 plus 1 1 of chewing, plus 1 of chewing gum. Okay, so that in the real world, 1 plus 1 doesn't. equal to probably as or more often as it does. Now, just think about it. Now that you know that,

if somebody else were going to say to you, hey, Sean, you're a smart guy. How much is one plus one? You wouldn't mindlessly say two. What you do is pay some attention to the context and you'd give a mindful answer and you'd say, it could be too, you know, which is very different. So this is the case for all of the facts that we learn. And let me tell you something that I say often, but it's so important, it changed my life. I was at a horse event, and this man asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to get his horse a hot dog. Well, you know, I mean, I'm an A-plus student just like you. Nobody knows better.

Some may know as well. Horses don't eat meat. It's that simple. They're herbivorous. and I'm trying to keep myself from being evaluated. You know, I mean, how could you go get your horse a hot dog? So I say nicely, go, you know, I'm happy to watch your horse. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it.

And that's when I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong. And there's something really sweet about that, Sean, that all of us who got these A's, because we memorized everything, are going to be wrong, an awful lot, and those who didn't memorize them in the first place, you know, there'll be instances where they see these students surpass us. But at any rate, what it suggested to me was that all sorts of possibilities exist, things that we reject because of this learned, overlearned information

that's simply wrong in some context. right and so you know you take those two facts and you say well wait a second if i don't know what happens is that a lot of people then become scared you know i mean if you know and i don't know i've got to either pretend avoid you or just be in the interaction stress what people need to understand is it doesn't make sense to make a personal attribution for not knowing. I don't know, but it's knowable. Instead, they should make a universal. Nobody knows. And once you know, nobody knows, then everything becomes potentially new and exciting again. So the process of being mindful, you can achieve it in two ways. One is you just spend time noticing

new things about the things you thought you knew, the person you live with, if you live with anybody, three new things about them. And all of a sudden, you'll see, gee, you don't know them as well as you thought you did, and then your attention naturally goes there. Or you can accept what I'm saying, test it for yourself that we don't know. And if you start off knowing that you don't know anything, you sit up for everything. And you're not sort of a victim of the mindsets that plague most people. So I made a statement, let me just throw this out also. In a slide that I used to use, I would say virtually, and I mean really all. Okay, but we're academics, we're not supposed to be so.

And also, I'm talking about the absolutes not making sense, so in some sense it wouldn't make sense anyway. But my belief is virtually all of our problems, personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect results? of our mindlessness. So now if you think about how easy it is to change from being mindless to being mindful, wow, all sorts of things happen. And I have 45 years of research showing some of these very big effects. Do you want me to let you ask the question? Because I'm like a machine now. I can just keep talking. We're going to get to the studies because the studies are amazing, and that's my favorite part of this. But it's interesting. The emphasis you just placed, on the role of uncertainty?

Is that something maybe not what I would have guessed? I mean, I'm completely sympathetic to the idea that we human beings tend to either think that the probability of something is zero or one. Either it's false or it's true, and we find that value. And so you're saying that one big aspect of being mindful is accepting the uncertainty and all these things that we like to think are true or false. Yeah, because when you're thinking of anything, you know, rather than come up with a single answer, you're able to come up with multiple answers.

And so then you can't be sure, you know, if any of them are correct. But the way most of us have been brought up, you know, and it happens, it affects our relationships, it affects our understanding of how we can positively affect our health. It affects everything, you know, but if I say that you're an X, whatever that is, okay, then what I'm going to do is just look for confirmation every time you do this stupid thing. Right. But if I'm mindful, I'm not generalizing across all situations, all hours of a day, whatever. And then I'd be more likely to notice, you know, well, gee, you are actually very kind just a moment before.

And so my thinking that you're a little gruff, which of course I don't, if I knew you better, I might. but I don't. And anyway, so the main idea is that because you're no longer faced with single answers, the world becomes much more interesting. You have many more choices. And all of that relies on an appreciation of uncertainty. And it's interesting to me because people love choice. And I did some early research where we gave elderly people choices and they live longer.

So choice is important. So they love choice, but they're afraid of doubt. And you can't have choice unless you have doubt. So we need to change our understanding of some of these things. Oh, is there some kind of systematic way of delineating what things we tend to notice and be mindful of versus what things we just assume and let run in the background? own? Do you know the famous guerrilla study? Oh, yes, I do. Yeah.

Okay, so people are watching a video of basketball game on the middle of the game. Somebody dressed in a gorilla suit walks on the court, and people don't notice it. You know, so what you notice is what you've been taught to expect. I did a study that was the same thing only not nearly. as dramatic and fun many years, many years ago, well before that, where we simply gave people an index card and asked them to read it. And the index card would have on it something like, Mary had a little lamb, or I love Paris and the springtime. And I'd show you the card and you'd read, Mary had a little lamb. I'd say, okay, I'll pay you for accuracy.

Mary had a little land. How many words are on the card? It doesn't matter. You know, people see what they expect to say. So in some sense, the more we learn, the less we know. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award because it feels like this, right? Can you feel like that? That's farmhouse fresh skin, all right? I'm blowing. And everyone asks how. The best skincare is farmhouse fresh and the award is you, your best you. Visit house fresh skincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. Okay, so can we talk about diff Iwear for a second? Because I'm a little obsessed. They have the cutest sunglasses and prescription frames. And honestly, the vibe is like, whatever you're feeling

that day. There's a pair for it. Chill day, got you. Going out, got you. And every purchase gives back, which I love. Go to diffiwear.com and define your style. That's diffiware.com. You're Welcome. Oh, okay, very good. Okay, so one other thing I want to get on the table before we dive into the specific studies that you've done is the role of time in all of this. In particular, sometimes we talk about living in the moment, you know, being present. And is that related to the kind of mindfulness you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting that it's a very nice thing to tell somebody to be in the moment.

But it's an empty instruction for the reason I already gave you that when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. So what I'm doing is basically telling you how to be in the moment and just by noticing new things. And that will put you in the moment. And, you know, the thing that if I contrast it, let's say with meditation, which is 20 minutes, twice a day and practice, And you see how easy this kind of mindfulness is that if you came to visit me, you've never been to my house, you don't have to practice being mindful. You'd walk in and you say, oh, did she do those paintings? What is she?

What is that? And as you're doing that, when you're actively noticing the neurons are firing, and 45 years of research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So it feels good. You can't be happy and feeling good unless you're being mindful. Good. Although it does. You should be mindful all the time.

But if I say that to people, then they shudder because they think of mindfulness as thinking, and they don't understand thinking either. Where thinking isn't hard. What is hard is the fear that you're not going to be able to figure it out or do it well. But, you know, so I think people should be mindful all the time. time unless two conditions are met. One, you found the very best way of doing something, and two, nothing changes. And clearly, you know, I think those conditions are never going to. That's rare. Otherwise, if you're going to do it, if you're going to do it, be there.

Yeah, okay. But so I'm probably completely on board with this, but if I wanted to raise a worry, it would be it sounds exhausting. It sounds like it's going to take energy. No, that's what I was just saying. Yeah. Could you be having fun all day long? I do. I don't remember.

If that sounds appealing, this is the way to do it. You know, that if we have data, if it were necessary to present, that it's energy begetting, not consuming. You know, that it's not exhaust. And again, what's exhausting is the fear that you're going to do it wrong, that some negative consequences going to occur, you know, so on and so forth. But the act of noticing is, you know, is the essence of it all, whatever that is. So let's, yeah, let's be a little sciencey here and put some data on the end of the phone. You claim that people are not as mindful as they could be. How do we judge?

Oh, I don't claim. I assert. I don't claim. Claiming already sounds like I shouldn't do it. Oh, no. I create things all the time. I'm all in favor of it. But how do we measure it?

How do we know how mindful versus mindless people are being? There are many ways. You know, if, let's say, gave you, if you were mindful, and we've been using this actually as silly as it sounds, if I give you an index card and you read, Mary had a little lamb, and it says Mary had a little lamb, you're mindless. You know, if you, for me, I became aware of this, what is it, 45 years ago when I, I'd walk into a mannequin in the store and I'd say, I'm sorry. I mean, what's going on there? And then we do this all the time.

There are two ways of becoming mindless. One is you do it over and over and over again until you now are sure you can do it without thinking, which people mistakenly try to make these behaviors second nature. Now the problem with that is that once you make it second nature, you're never going to improve. and circumstances are going to change. And do you want to lock yourself in when you're 20 years old? Because when you're 32, you may be stronger, wiser, and so on as you get older.

So you don't want to put yourself on automatic pilot. The way that we become mindless, that's more pernicious, I think is where we learn to be mindless on a single occasion. And that's, you know, your teacher tells you, for example, one and one is two, horses don't eat meat. You just accept it. And you accept it because you're oblivious to future circumstances where you might need that information. Now, when you process something mindlessly, it's not available anymore. It's not available for you to play with it and say, well, maybe this time, not under those circumstances, and so on.

So how do you measure it? You throw in a monkey wrench and do people see it or trip over it? That you can, you know, two people can be doing the same thing, one mindlessly and one mindfully. But the next thing that they're doing might very well reveal which state of mind they were in. It's also, we have a lot of data now about how when you're mindful, people find you more attractive, more trustworthy, when you're mindful, the neurons are firing. You know, there are probably many physiological measures that we could take. But I think people in some sense, everybody's heard the expression and have a lights on,

but nobody's home. We sort of know when somebody, or they have one oar in the water, that we know when somebody's not there. And now I'm giving people a label for it. So it's a little bit contrast with... In these studies, let me just say, in a bit of that, in the studies, each study we make one group mindful, at least one group, and not the other groups. And we have many, many measures. It depends on what we're having them do. But as we talk about the research, that'll be clear.

What were you saying? I could talk to a couple of neuroscientists who were interested in music and sports, and they were interested in the phenomenon of being in the zone, where you're kind of not being too cognitive and mindful. Is there a compatibility between that? Yeah, yeah, no, it's totally, it's the same thing, you know, that the noticing new things is the means to get to that place where you just are. Okay.

So, and we can call that, you know, the zone, so to speak. You know, it's interesting because Chimatsuhalia, well, we called him Mickey, can't pronounce his name, who studied Flo when he was alive. And he was a personality psychologist. I'm a social psychologist. So we were talking to different audiences and people would ask him, well, how is flow related to mindfulness? And people would ask me, how is mindfulness related to flow?

And very, very similar with one, very important. important difference. The flow state was taken to be something very rare. And being mindful is something available to all of us virtually all the time. But in both cases, you're closed. Is there some sense in which in the flow state or being in the zone, you're mindful to the right things, to the relevant things, or is that a misapprehension? No. Yeah, no, I don't know how we would know what was relevant. You know, people often confuse mindfulness with vigilance, for example. And it's very different because when you're mindful, in some sense,

this might sound too Californian, but it's like a soft openness. So if I'm on a, you know, horseback riding through the woods, if I were vigilant, I may watch out for the branch so I don't get knocked. off the horse as I go flying past it. And in the meantime, what happens is I don't see the boulder that my horse now trips over. If I'm mindful, I'm not looking for something in particular. I'm just aware. But certainly you point out that I can be mindful about content A and not mindful about

content B. And you can't be mindful of everything at the same time. But one of the, I'm pretty sure that you're best off not being mindless with respect to anything. So you're either being mindful or potentially mindful. But as soon as you think you know, you don't tune in, you're not noticing subtleties, and you're giving up control. So one of the studies that you did, which will lead us into others, is with the classical musicians where they've been playing the same pieces over. and over again, and you encouraged them to be a little bit more mindful. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. All we did was we had musicians symphony playing either mindfully or mindlessly. The mindless

group, we're told, they all played the same piece of music. Remember time you played this piece and you were pleased with your performance. Can you just try to replicate it? It's going to be the same always, that, you know, the mindless group, it's going to be same old, same old, the mindful group. is find something new. So for the mindful group, they were told, remember when you played this before, now we'd like you to make it new in very subtle ways that only you would know. They're playing classical music. So it has to be subtle, right? Otherwise, very subtle, yes. All right. And we taped the performances, and we asked the musicians how much they enjoyed playing. They always enjoy playing it mindfully, making it new, because they're present while they're doing it.

And we then play the recordings for people who don't know that it was a study. And they overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played piece. What was most interesting to me about this study was that when I wrote it up, I realized how it spoke to leadership in a way that was not part of my original understanding of what we were doing. Here you have superior coordinated experience by everybody doing their own thing. If everybody is in the same, you know. And it led me to believe that the major role for the leader is to create this situation to promote other people's mindfulness,

which you're more likely to do as a leader when you realize you don't know what the best thing is going to be. You know, it's kind of funny as an aside, when you're hiring big shots, you're hiring a CEO for a mega company or what have you. You're always hiring people for yesterday, not for tomorrow. And so in some way, we really don't know who the best people are going to be. We really don't know exactly what course of action anybody should take in advance. And so the best thing to do is to promote everybody's awareness of the ongoing situation. There is a stereotype of the genius orchestra conductor or architect or whatever that they kind of don't let everyone do their own thing, that they're a little bit hyper-controlling.

But you're saying there's another mode of success they could tap into. Yeah, yeah. But I think it depends on the performance, you know, that if I'm, when I'm writing, it doesn't really matter to me what the publishers may think and edit them. At that moment, it's mine, you know, so that I could at those moments, I guess, when I'm rejecting their help look the way you've just described. So it depends on what they're doing. And it also depends on who the, what the group is, who composes the group, right?

I mean, let's assume for a moment that you're a spectacular genius and you're dealing with people who have very little experience. They know very little, they care very little. That could be a situation where, in fact, you probably want to just go solo. You mentioned writing, which is very close to home for me. I guess in the previous examples that you mentioned, I was thinking about something physically active, playing a sport or an instrument or walking around or whatever. So mindfulness, so what does it mean to be mindful when I'm writing?

Do I make sure not to use my favorite phrases over and over again? No, no, I don't think so. Yeah, well, you would know you were using the same phrases until you stopped and you were, you know, reading it over. And then you could be mindful and say, how else might I say this? But, you know, what I find when I'm writing, the same thing when I'm painting, that I'm not really, it's like something takes over, you know. So, and that's like when you were saying before about being in the zone or, you know,

or what have you. I think that, yeah, how would you teach somebody to write mindfully? You know, it's interesting. There are so many natural things that we would do if we weren't taught indirectly to be stressed because, you know, many people are having trouble writing. It's because there's stress.

It's not because there's trouble writing, you know. And it's always, it's interesting because mindfulness is a process. I could have called it being creative, you know, or mundane creativity. But I think people have a misguided notion about creativity and focus on the outcome. And when you're being mindful in some sense, it's all about process that oddly tends to lead to a better outcome. And I think when you mention the stress, that's very, that's the stress of writing. that seems to hit on a central point that we're going to keep coming to again and again that I've perceived in the studies you've done, which is this difference between what we're

taught to expect and then what we actually come across, right? I mean, a lot of this seems to be loose in your expectations or, you know, let go of your favorite expectations. Exactly. No, exactly. That's why, you know, if we were teaching ourselves or somebody else to be mindful, all the content would given conditionally. It would seem that it could be one way of looking at it, perhaps, rather than is. So one plus one is not two. You would say one plus one could be two.

From this perspective, one plus one is two and so on. Yeah, and that keeps it all looser. And as it's looser, if that's the right term for us here, that keeps much more available for us and then allows us to be more creative. Okay, so can we talk about Diff Iwear for a second? Because I'm a little obsessed. They have the cutest sunglasses and prescription frames. And honestly, the vibe is like, whatever you're feeling that day, there's a pair for it.

Chill day, got you. Going out, got you. And every purchase gives back, which I love. Go to Diff,Iwear.com and define your style. That's Diff, Iwear.com. You're welcome. So you've mentioned some of the psychological benefits. I was just going to give you an opportunity to tell how do we measure those psychological benefits?

You even mention that people are more charismatic? Are they happier? What are the things that we can quantify about when you train them to be mindful they get better at? Well, it depends on the specifics. But, you know, there are lots of nonverbal measures of charisma and happy. and what have you, you know. If you were playing a part in a movie and you were supposed to be sad, you wouldn't be smiling, you'd be slouched over, you wouldn't be making eye contact, you know, so on.

But I think that, you know, that maybe in the world of physics that you live in, there are cross context measures. In most of these studies, it really depends, you know, that if I'm doing a study, you know, with elderly people and I'm going to make them more mindful, and we've done this several times, the most sort of the biggest dependent measure is longevity. So they live longer. Now, you can't do that if I'm doing a study with 20-year-olds, right,

making them more mindful. I'm not going to live long enough to know if, in fact, they live longer. So it really is experiment. specific in some ways. Good. Well, but that brings us to a very famous set of experiments when we get to the physiological effects here. So tell us about the counterclockwise study, which I bet that some audience members have heard of, but some have not. Yeah. Well, those who haven't heard and I have to go get a sandwich or something right now so they won't hear me describe it, just have to tune in to the Simpsons go to Havana. And in that episode, they describe this so it's been out of the same way. So it's been out of the

there for a while. This was the first test of the mind-body unity idea. You know, I spend a lot of time, I'm very sensitive to language, and I don't buy into a lot of the things that other people seem to, for better or worse. And I'm thinking mind, body, they're just words. And they're words that I think have confused and prevented lots of progress. Because if you imagine, you have a mind and a body, then the important question is, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material, the body? And there's no easy answer to that, but everybody has experienced it. You know, I have fun stories in my new book, The Mindful Body, started as a memoir. So I have lots of examples. I'm going to hopefully try to remember how to get back to where

I was going because I want to give you this example. but everybody can generate their own. So I was married when I was young. We go to Paris for a honeymoon. I order a mixed grill. On the mixed grill is pancreas. Now, because I was just married, I felt I'm a woman of the world. I felt obliged to eat this pancreas.

But the thought of it was not appealing to me. I asked my then-husband, which of these things is the pancreas? He points to something. I eat everything else with. Gusto, now the moment of truth, will I be able to eat the pancreas? I started eating it and I literally get sick. Then he inappropriately starts laughing. Here I'm sick, why are you laughing?

And he said, because that's chicken, you ate the pancreas a while ago. So I'm eating chicken. I love chicken. And I'm literally becoming ill. All right. If you see somebody regurgitate, you know, you yourself start to feel ill. But how to explain it as a scientist is a whole different thing. I said, okay, I want to argue it's better just to see the mind and body as a single unit,

which would mean anything that's happening on any level is more or less simultaneously happening on every one. Every thought is affecting every part of your body, even though we don't have the equipment sophisticated enough to measure how your toes, let's say, you're different, you know, as you're smiling. And every moment is affecting, you know, your cognitive life as well. Okay, so I say, let's put the mind and body back together. Now wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So the first test of this was the counterclockwise study where we took a retreat. It had been a monastery.

We got rid of all the religious icons. We decorated it to seem to be 20 years earlier as well as we could on a low budget. Then we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So there were lots of discussions that they had every day. those discussions were about past events, but they were discussing them as if they were just unfolding. So everything was now for this group, a comparison group,

did everything exactly the same, except they talked about the past as if it were the past. They knew that was now, and then it was that. All right. So by putting their mind in this younger place, we found their vision and improvement, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger. Now, I don't know about you, but I still, to this date, have never heard of an elderly

person's hearing improved without medical intervention. So it was quite astounding. And so then, and when I say they looked younger, measurably younger, because you're a man of measurement, but in all honesty, they didn't look 20 years. Okay, sure. So now, okay, so then we went on and the mindful body I report a host of these mind-body unity studies. I'll give you the next one in the series because it speaks to something really interesting that just occurred to me recently. All right.

We take chambermaids and we first ask these chambermaids. These are people who are cleaning hotel and motel rooms, what happens. How much exercise? do you get? Well, because the surgeon general describes exercises what you do after work, and they're just too tired, they don't think they're getting any exercise. So we take lots of measures. Study is very simple. We divide them into two groups, and one group we teach them that their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym and so on. So we have two groups now. One group that knows their work is exercise, the other group that is unaware of them.

We want to make sure they're not eating any differently. They're not exercising anymore. They're not working any harder. Everything is the same except for they change in their mindset. Now that they saw their work as exercise, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure. You know, which is remarkable, right? Oh, yeah.

But I've recently been thinking. So everybody knows about placebos, which is by probably the strongest validation of the mind-body unit idea, right? You take a nothing, a sugar pill. It's got to be inert or else it's not a placebo. You take it thinking that it's going to make you better and it makes you better.

This study with the Chambermaids was a test of the nocebo effect. The nocebo effect is something that would have, have a positive effect, but not knowing that or believing that it's harmful, gets rid of that positive effect. I don't remember who it was, but somebody did a study with Ipecac. You know, Ipacac is supposed to make you vomit. You give it to somebody who's just ingested poison, accidentally, presumably, right? Well, so people who are vomiting were given Ipecac, remember, designed to make you vomit, but they were told it would stop. your vomiting, and it stopped the vomiting. Very powerful. All right. So the new thought was that I've been

spending so many years, so much time each year trying to persuade people of mind-body unity. I realize people don't even have a sense of body unity. What I mean by the one is that, you know, anything to my mind that you're doing for any part of your body, will affect your whole body. But I think it will only, as with the chambermaid and the exercise, affect your whole body if you believe it will affect your whole body. So we're doing a little study now when we have people lifting weights to shape their arms and increase their biceps, where they either are taught about the whole body is connected or they're not taught that. And then we'll measure the stomach muscles, the calves, you know, and so on.

So there's something very, you know, think about it, Sean, that if you're given medication, let's, okay, we'll make you very depressed. You're seeing a therapist. The therapist gives you antidepressants. That if the antidepressants don't work, what the therapist is likely to do is either change the medication or up the dosage. when it's probably or possibly the case, all they need to do is to tell you how you need to be an active member of your own health care. So at any rate, so let me, I'll give you just one. There's so many of these studies, but the most recent, this is a study Peter Ungle and I just did where we inflict a wound, a minor wound.

And we have people in front of a clock. And I knew Peter contacted you about this study early on. You were very sweet to respond. I don't remember what he asked you or what you said, so I'm assuming it was brilliant and certainly hope. But anyway, okay. So we have people, we have three groups of people. Unbeknownst to them, to all of them.

For a third of them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. for a third of them, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of them, it's real time. The question we're asking is, well, that wound heal based on perceived time, what the clock tells you, or real time. And the answer is perceived time. We have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, we full again with the clock. It tells you you got two hours more sleep than you did, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep you got. and biological and cognitive processes seem to follow perceived amount of sleep.

We have many of these studies, all suggesting that we have far more control over our health than people realize. And it's interesting because, I mean, most people think, even with something like fatigue, you know, that you're only, it's only humanly possible to do whatever before you just can't take it. And, you know, which may be the case, may not. All I know is we're nowhere near, nowhere near where I think we can be physically. Now, it's interesting because there was a fun study that Frank Beach did back in the 50s, I think. He'd take a little boy rat, introduce a little girl rat, and they'd copulate. And then a little boy rat, as you can identify, just can't take anymore.

He knees a wrist, a refractory. Okay. Now, if instead of giving him that rest, immediately he's introduced to a new little girl rat. So a whole different context, right? He was with Mary, now he's with Susan, right? He's ready to go right away. And a way of thinking of this is imagine your word processing all day long, backwards, exhaustion, and then you go home and you play the piano, you know, doing the same thing, but it's not the same thing. At any rate, where was I headed with this? Oh, yes. So I ask about fatigue as a psychological construct, rather than, you know, we have mind body so you know it's physical, it has nothing to do with your mind. I ask my students, how far is it humanly possible to run? And they know a marathon's 26 miles, so they, and they know that can't possibly be it. I mean, so they say 28. Somebody else is. 30, it becomes like an auction until somebody says 50 miles, then everybody grows and then it's over. Then I play a video of the Tariamara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico.

They're able to run at least 200 miles without stop. That's a very big difference. I couldn't imagine myself even running a marathon, no less 50 miles. But even if we take 50 and compare it to 200, And that represents the difference that I believe from where we are and where we can be. And part of the way of getting there is to recognize two things. One is that everything is mutable. Now, what I mean by that is, is at one point, a decision, which means there was uncertainty, which means there were alternatives. So if it doesn't work for you, change it.

The other is about stress. And, you know, I'm mixing and matching here. I'm probably going to lose people in the process. But, you know, you can ask me to speak further about any of these. That years and years ago, a few decades ago, the medical world and the medical model believed that psychology was irrelevant to illness. Now, doctors are nice people, caring. So I'm sure they wanted you to be happy.

But the belief was that is irrelevant to whether you're going to be sick or well. The only way you're going to get sick is the introduction of an end. Now everybody knows stress is not so good. My feeling is much more extreme, which won't surprise you now that you know my research. I believe, actually, that stress is the major killer. and that if I was going to do this research before COVID and it's never happened, it's too complicated, so it probably won't. But what I wanted to do was to take people, a few hundred people who were just diagnosed with cancer, very the cancer, right? And then, you know, you have to, if you're given a dread diagnosis, you need a little while to adjust to it.

Sure. But let's say we go back after three weeks and measure now every week. how stress people are. My belief, and again, I don't have any data for this, my belief is that that measure of stress will be the best indicator of how the disease will unfold better than nutrition, even better than genetics, better than treatment.

And if you read the medical literature, which we've got so many literatures to read, neither of us are fully up on it, But, you know, every other day there's another disease that's found to be, suffer an enormous impact from stress. And stress is psychological, right? Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events.

If you're mindful now, you have multiple views and can choose how to understand the situation. I have a one-liner for people, since my goal is in part to reduce everybody's stress. stress. When next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost I miss the bus. I didn't get the project done on time. I bang the top. It's almost never a tragedy. So then you breathe, you know, and put things back in perspective. Or if people are worried about something and they just said to themselves, remember the last three times you were worried. because chances are of a thing that you're worried about didn't even happen. And if it did happen, if we're talking about it today, you probably got through it.

So it's sort of no worry before it's time. And so the more mindful, the less stressed one is. The less stressed one is the healthier one is going to be. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award because it feels like, This right there. That's Farmhouse Fresh Skin, all right? I'm blowing. And everyone asks how. The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit farmhouseresh.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. Okay, so can we talk about DefiWare for a second?

Because I'm a little obsessed. They have the cutest sunglasses and prescription frames, and honestly, the vibe is like, whatever you're feeling that day. There's a pair for it. Chill day, got you. Going out, got you. And every purchase gives back, which I love. Go to diffiware.com and define your style. That's diffiware.com. You're welcome. Well, as a physicalist, this is fascinating to me. You know, philosophically, I think that there is not a distinction between the mind and the body, right? the mind is an aspect of the body. I'm not Renee Descartes. But you're sort of going way beyond that to say that not only is the mind a manifestation,

a physical thing's happening in our body, but there's this feedback loop or this tight interconnection between what we think of as the mind and what we think of as the body, maybe more than most doctors would be willing to countenance. Yeah. Oh, no. I think, yeah, no, I think that what I just was telling you about the nocebo. Now, there's nocebo literature that goes back a long time, but it was only, you know, recently that I myself recognized, you know, the importance of some of these things. I don't know where to go after that.

Okay. Well, I can ask the next question, which is, again, I want to sort of get straight on the mindfulness aspect of it. Because, you know, in the clock study, when you had different clocks running a different... Oh, it's, no, and those clock studies, yes, I think that's really important. There, I'm making use of people's mindlessness. Oh, okay. So let's say the chambermaid study, if you grew up in some place in the world where nobody talked about exercise, nobody had a conception of exercise, then my telling you, your work as exercise is not going to have the effect, right?

I see. I see. You're saying that our everyday mindlessness. If you have a mindless notion, exactly, exactly. And, you know, that if you right now, you're 90 years old and you mindlessly believe that you're, as you get older, everything falls apart, then everything is going to fall apart. So now I put you at a time when everything was quite together and you were healthy and you mindlessly believe that, you know, it will play out. The point of those studies is just to show what we're capable of bringing about. But eventually, you know, people can, for instance, give themselves a placebo.

But if you took a placebo, if you were in a study where you were given a placebo, which is probably our strongest medication, and some really major disorder was now healed, and the medical world told you, hey, look, that was, just a placebo so you must realize you did it yourself and so that you're capable of doing it yourself so then maybe we wouldn't need the placebo so I talk about um this uh treatment we've come up with that makes use of all of this that you can do it was my way of um giving ourselves a placebo when you're diagnosed with some dread disorder um chronic illness

most people believe that it's only going, it's going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing stays the same. And nothing moves in only one direction. You know, so the stock market goes up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up and goes down, a little bit goes up,

and it's sort of a stepwise kind of thing. So nothing stays the same. But we're holding it the same. We're not attending to when we're feeling better. So what we did across a host of diseases, we simply call people and say, so how is it not saying back pain? It doesn't matter what the symptom is. Because this thing is called attention to symptom variability, which is just a fancy name for mindfulness, because when you're mindful, you're noticing change. All right. So he's like,

how is it now and is it better or worse than before? And why? Well, four things happen with all of this. The first, now that you're doing something, you feel good. All right, because when you have an illness and you're dependent on the medical world, you become helpless, and that takes its toll. Second, as soon as you see that, hey, you know, I'm a little better at this moment, that feels good because you thought you're always in the worst possible place. Third is the most important. When you ask yourself, why is it better or even worse now than it was before, you engage in a mindful search for your answers. And that mindfulness is good for your health.

Fourth, for me at least, I believe you're much more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one than if you're not. Now, we so we did this with people who have multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, stroke, chronic pain, real things, right? And in each case, we're able to ameliorate the symptoms. And so how does this like giving yourself a placebo? Everybody has, or most everybody has, and if you have a chronic, you have a, chronic illness and you don't have, get yourself a smartphone. And you set the smartphone to ring in an hour and ask yourself, is whatever the symptom is better or worse now than before and why? Then set it for two hours and ten minutes. You know, just keep varying it. And what will happen,

you know, what I love about some of the things that I do in these studies is that there's no negative side effect. You know, so if, let's say you're doing this and you're feeling better, you know, and you don't find the cure to whatever it is, there's nothing lost, right? Yeah. And we know that there were side effects, you know, the operation was a success, but the patient died. When you hear these commercials with these different drugs and they say, you know, and it'll produce, you know, these 49 symptoms, very scarce.

So the success of this has been very exciting. And it's also there are other things that people think the medical world needs to realize. When people believe, I've given a diagnosis for chronic illness, that plays to them as if it's uncontrollable. Now, what people need to recognize is you can never prove that anything is uncontrollable. All you can prove is that the way you tried to control it didn't work. So we need to replace uncontrollable with indeterminate. And when something's indeterminate, yeah, we'll try it because why not? Now, there are many things we can do for ourselves and we have chronic illnesses

separate from this attention to symptom variability, which is the strongest, I think. The first is keep ourselves mindful because as the neurons are firing, that's going to have a positive effect on our bodies. Two, when we recognize that the body is all connected, fix the parts of the body that you can fix. I mean, I think that this is a thought experiment, but if we took an Olympic athlete and a couch potato and they both got COVID,

my money would be on the Olympic athlete healing fast. Yeah. Okay. So there's this other thing. I don't know if you remember this from the book. There's people doing research on imagined exercise. It's wonderful, and it all speaks to mind-body unity. So you have people who are lifting weights, and you have the consequences.

Then you have a group of people who are imagining lifting weights, and the consequences are almost the same. So there are all sorts of ways you can improve your healing. And then if we think about the wound study, you know, that we're doing this now with different disorders, where if you, let's say you break your leg or something, and you're likely to ask the doctor, how long is it going to be until you heal? First of the doctor has no idea because all medical science, like all science, only gives us probabilities, right? They don't, you know, we don't know you yourself, Sean, whether you're going to heal better than everybody, take longer than everybody. We can't predict the individual pace. And people, we can talk about decision making because that's why most people end up stress.

But just to finish this. Okay, so now the doctor, the doctor might tell you the average healing time or the doctor might tell you the average healing time. or the doctor might tell you the longest it takes so you're not disappointed. But the doctor in doing so is creating a set of expectations that all the research we've already talked about suggests it will be self-fulfilling. So, you know, what would happen if the doctor would, you know, some people heal really, really quickly. You know, so if the average time, let's say, were four weeks and the doctor told you, you know, some people may even heal in a week because you can't know. You know, but then people would organize themselves, both in this hard to understand mind-body unity way, but then also in a very mundane way. You know, if you're 20 years old and you hurt your wrist, you do things to fix it.

At my age, I'm 77, I've been taught, although I don't believe it, that I'm going to fall apart. So if my wrist hurts, I just assume, you know, that's what you expect. So I don't do anything to fix it. So when the 20-year-old's risk gets better and the seven-year-old's risk doesn't get better, it's not necessarily because of the difference in their age, but rather their mindsets that led them to different ways of taking care or not taking care of themselves. That's my dog. That's good, cool.

Do we know much about the physiological mechanism behind this kind of thing? Is that even an answerable question? Like, how does what literally help us? You know, you know, yeah. There's no doubt that, as my colleagues would say, you know, there are things going on under the hood. But I'm not looking under the hood. But I am suggesting that whatever is going on under the hood is happening again, more or less simultaneously.

And that everything is being affected. There was some, I couldn't find this study, but I remember learning this long time ago, about how a teardrop of happiness is biochemically different from a tear drop of sadness. There's so much evidence for this mind-body unity idea. And given that it gives us such control over our health, it seems to me people should accept it, embrace it, as quickly as possible. Well, also it sounds like there's a lot of papers to be written by biologists, or doctors to figure out what is going on when you do that.

I mean, in some sense, you're talking about taking a placebo-type effect and making it active and intentional. That sounds like something super useful. Yeah, yeah. And what I'm saying is, well, just think about the whole placebo setup. You have to seek out a doctor who is going to give you a nothing so that you'll believe you're going to get better. I want to get rid of all of that.

you know, just get better. Right. And a big way of getting better is not to become ill in the first place. And, you know, if you take something, this is a very simple example, but let's say you're oblivious, and so then you find you've gained 20 pounds. Nobody gains 20 pounds overnight. If you're aware, you know, and you see that you've gained two pounds, it's very easy to take off the two pounds. Right.

You know, and so I think that in mindfulness would allow for prevention for many of our ills, and then we wouldn't even have to worry about the cure. Good. Okay. So, you know, I was mentioned. Go ahead. And I was going to throw in the decision making because my view of decision making is different from everybody else's

and all the Nobel Prize winners and so on. You didn't read the mindful body, the spark. Okay, okay, it doesn't matter. But, you know, people make decisions to take action. Once you take that action, there's no opportunity to evaluate the other alternatives that you might have chosen. You can never know. All right.

Now, when you recognize that every gain is a loss, every benefit is a cost, every cost is a benefit, these are in your heads. Events just happen. They're not good, better, and different. They just happen. And then we understand them mindfully or mindlessly. If you understand them mindlessly, and then you want to do a cost-benefit analysis, it doesn't really make sense because if the cost is also a benefit,

then you're going to add them up and they're not going to tell you what to do. So if you and I go out to lunch and the food is wonderful, that's great. If we go out to lunch and the food is awful, that's great. I'll eat less, it'll be better for my waistline. I'll pay more attention to what you're saying. Everything is a potential benefit. Not only that, but when people say you should gather in front of, When do you stop gathering?

You know, because the next piece of information could change the decision drastically. You know, should I get this house or this house? And then you decide on this house. Oh, my God, you just found out they're going to build a highway right in front of the other house, which, of course, that would mean you wouldn't. And so on. Ah, but then you find out they're going to pay big money for the people who own those houses. So maybe you do want it.

You can't know. And so it's hard. for people to, you know, I've spent a lot of years thinking about this and writing about it. It's probably hard for people to accept instantly, but let me just give people a one-liner that I think will be helpful. And I do so for their health because the stress we experience, again, worrying about making the wrong decision is the major part of our illness, potentially. illness. All right.

So just rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, simply make the decision right. So I said to my students, okay, don't make any decisions this week. So we meet again in class next week. Use some heuristic. You can use the first alternative that occurs to you or flip a coin, whatever it is. But now, you know, this cost-benefit stuff. And they do so, and they come back.

And it was a wonderful, a wonderful week, stress-free. You know, that there are no regrets. I mean, regrets themselves are mindless. Because, first of all, even in, you know, people who are regretting are presuming that the unchosen alternative would have been better than the alternative you selected. Yeah, it could have been worse. It's the same.

But in fact, it is not. neither better or worse, it all depends on how you understand it. And so, and people know this. You know, if I say to people, everything is good and bad, they say, yeah, they know everything has, cuts both ways, but they really don't know it. Because what they're presuming is, let's say there are 10 parts to this, and six are bad and four are good. So then on average, it's bad.

That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying, each and every part of those 10 things is simultaneously good and bad. And when you fully understand this, you know, right now people kill themselves to get that thing, kill themselves to avoid the negative. And the more mindful way of being is just to be. It doesn't matter if our, you know, I'm serious. It's very real, Sean, that not only. do I make, for me, almost everything is a game, but that, you know, if our internet goes out

right now, I know some people, oh my God, you know, we ruin the whole podcast. For me, it's great, you know, I didn't have breakfast, I'll go eat. That most of these things really just don't matter. And there's a way as you get older, you achieve a certain wisdom that I don't see why you have to wait. You know, all you need to do when you're younger is recognize that everything is changing. There are multiple ways of looking at things. Everything is was a decision. So if it doesn't work for you, change it. You know, I've talked about this a lot, but maybe it bears repeating. When I'm giving talks on this in person, I'll look in the audience to see if there's a very tall guy. Almost always there is. And I'll ask him to come to the stage. So here I am at five,

three. There he is at six five. We look ridiculous, right? And then I just raised the question, should we do anything physical the same way? It's absurd, right? Now, just sort of imagine if he's writing the rules, and I'm trying to play by the rules he wrote, most of the time they're not going to fit. So the more different you are from the person who created whatever it is, the game, the rule, the routine, the more important it is for you to deviate from it. One of the titles that I was going to use for the mindful body early on in the writing was, who says so? And I think we need to remember in a more mindful way than possibly when we were three years old

to ask who says so because it's the people that have put everything where it is and different people might have put it elsewhere. So an example to make this come alive is imagine an insurance company and should insurance cover Seattleis or Viagra? Well, you know, for these sorts of things, there's no rulebook. The answers don't come from the heavens. Now, imagine that the people who are making a decision are a group of lusty 50-year-old men.

versus a group of nuns. Right. And that's the way every decision is made. It's meeting some people's needs and not others. And when you realize that it's mutable, as soon as something doesn't work, change it. And the more mindful you are, the more possibilities you have available

to how you can change it. And just knowing that, that you're not a victim of circumstances, again reduces your stress. So there you go. It sounds good. I'm going to try. That's all I can tell you, Ellen.

I will try to become more mindful. I'm sure that there's exercises that I can, that help me get better at this. But it does seem to have a good time. No, I think, no, my guess is, my guess is that you're, you know, probably very mindful to start. Your profession as a physicist,

you know, we start out not knowing anything, you know, and are looking deeply, would suggest that. Your whole manner suggests to me that you're already mindful. But even though I've been studying this for 45 years, there are still times that I'll find myself sane or doing something that's totally mindless. The difference between us, though,

is that when I find I've been mindless, I say, yes, I might. My willingness is pervasive. I think that's the perfect place to wind up. Ellen Langer, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. This was fun. Thanks for having me, Sean.