The One You Feed - Mind Over Matter: The Power of Mindfulness for Wellbeing with Ellen Langer

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

In this episode, Ellen Langer brings her extensive research and wisdom to the power of mindfulness for well-bring. Her unique perspective offers a refreshing take on mindfulness as a way of being, not just a practice. With a focus on self-awareness and open-mindedness, her work emphasizes the transformative power of mindfulness in improving decision-making skills and overall well-being. In this episode, you will be able to: Discover the key differences between mindfulness and meditation, and how they can positively impact your daily life Uncover the profound impact of mindfulness on chronic diseases and how it can transform your well-being Explore the psychological effects of stress on health and learn strategies to cultivate a more mindful lifestyle Learn how the mind-body unity can significantly influence your health outcomes and overall well-being Gain practical strategies for improving mindfulness and well-being, empowering you to make more mindful decisions in your daily life To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you're mindless, you see somebody do something, you have one explanation for it. The more mindful you are, the more nuanced everything becomes, and you're aware that things can happen for many different reasons. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ellen Langer. She's an American professor of psychology at Harvard University. In 1981, Ellen became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard.

She studies the illusion of control, decision-making, aging, and mindfulness theory. Today, Ellen and Eric discuss her new book, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way into Chronic Health. Hi, Ellen. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Eric. I am really excited to have you on. As I was telling you beforehand, I have followed your work for a long time, and you're really in the psychology field and sort of by the nature of the fact you've talked about mindfulness in the mindfulness field, you know, a real leader for a long

time. So this is a real honor. We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is called The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred

and fear. The grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I think that it's fine. I probably would have had a good dog and a bad dog rather than a wolf. It's easier to imagine a little puppy. Surely all of us have had experiences where we were our best selves or our worst selves. I think that too many people assume that we have to be stressed. There are just going to be times where are the bad wolf or our bad selves. And I think that the more mindful you become and the wiser you become, the less likely that bad wolf is going to show up.

And I think obviously that when you say feed the wolf, that's an interesting question also. How do you feed it? I think that just by an awareness of how much control we actually have over our health, our happiness, our well-being, our social interactions will lead us to be doing the right thing that would lead to food for the better animal or something like that. Yeah, yeah, or something like that. And I too would prefer two dogs, being a fan of the dog as I am. So let's start with asking you to maybe define a couple things real quick. You used two words in there that I'm interested in. The first was mindfulness, and the second was, I think you said, the wise thing to do. So I'd be interested in also what wisdom means to you. Yeah, let's talk about

mindfulness. So many people confuse mindfulness with meditation. Meditation is fine, but it's not the same thing. Meditation is a practice you go through in order to result in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness as we study it is more immediate. It's not a practice. It's a way of being. And it's so simple, Eric, it almost defies belief when you look at the consequences of being in this state of mind. All you need to do is notice. Now, everybody thinks they're noticing, because when they're not noticing, when they're being mindless on automatic pilot,

they're not there. So they're not there to know they're not there. Sadly, 45 years of research that I've been doing says that most of us are mindless most of the time. So all you need to do is know you don't know. Now, everything we've been taught works in the opposite direction. You know, you go to school and you're taught absolute facts. Your parents tell you absolute facts. Because everything looks different from different perspectives, these absolutes need to be questioned. And so what I

often do when I start these talks is take a fact that everybody is sure of. So how much is one plus one, Eric? Two. Right. But it isn't always two. If you're using a base 10 number system, one plus one is two. If you're using a base two number system, one plus one is written as 10. Easier to understand, if you add one pile of laundry to one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one is one. You add one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. So in the real world, one plus one doesn't equal two as or more often as it does. And the importance of this is once you realize this, you respond to everything differently. You know, if somebody came up to you after we finished speaking today and said, Eric, how much is one

plus one? A very likely event, right? You're not going to just blur it out to anymore because now you're going to be a little unsure. You're going to pay attention to the context and you're going to answer more mindfully. And you'd probably say it could be two if you want to give them what they expect, or you might want to shock them and say it could be one. And so basically, when we know we don't know, we approach things in a very different way, with an openness that doesn't exist most of the time for most of us. Now, all of us know we don't know. The problem is we think we should know. So people pretend, they avoid situations. I'm here to free everybody. Nobody knows. Nobody can know. Because again, everything looks different from different perspectives. And when you know it's okay not to

know, then everything is potentially new again. And so in these 45 years of research, we found that the simple process of noticing results literally and figuratively enlivening. Everything gets better. And to answer the second question about wisdom, you can't be mindless and wise. You can be mindful and not wise only because you haven't experienced whatever the situation is. You know, if you've never been there, if you're a young child, but as you get older, what you need to do is embrace your experience. And there's something I write a lot about that. It's kind of interesting to me, Eric, that I have so many, 45 years is a long time, right? So I have lots of findings. Many of these findings are showing enormous improvements in chronic disease, people living

longer and so on. But the thing that actually was the most important to me was when I realized that it's a very simple thing. Behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm going to be obnoxious, clumsy, and whatever. So whenever we're casting aspersions, evaluating somebody in some negative light, what we're doing is looking at their behavior from our own perspective, mindlessly. If we look at it from

their perspective, you get a very different thing. I'm going to share this with you so you can see how relationships will change almost instantly. So you can't stand me because I am so gullible, which I am. Now, and you can convince me, oh, and look, we can't be friends unless you just stop. And I'll look back. I can't believe how gullible I am. And I'll try to change, but I'm going to fail. And the reason I'm going to fail is that going forward, my intention is not gullible. My intention is to be trusting. You, on the other hand, are so inconsistent, it gets on my nerves. But from your perspective, what you're being is flexible. So if I want to change your behavior, I have to get you to stop valuing being flexible. Perhaps what will happen is I'll

now start to value the very behavior that got on my nerves before. You know, this happens around New Year's every year when people make their New Year's resolutions. And almost always they fail because what they're doing, I'm trying not to be gullible, you're trying not to be inconsistent. But again, going forward, that's not what we're being. So you can see, I think that for every single negative description of behavior, there's an equally strong, but positive alternative interpretation. There's an equally strong but positive alternative interpretation. Right.

And people are moving forward in this world because of that positive interpretation. So when you're mindless, you see somebody do something, you have one explanation for it. The more mindful you are, the more nuanced everything becomes. And you're aware that things can happen for many different reasons. Yeah. And it makes life much more interesting, much kinder, basically. Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I think a lot of us have some ideas of things that we can do to feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to make it more likely that you do it. It can be really helpful to reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to

do it. Our brains are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call reward value. Basically, is this thing worth doing? And so when you're getting ready to do this thing that you want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on why actually helps to make the reward value on that higher and makes it more likely that you're going to do that. For example, if what you're trying to do is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to

remind yourself of why. For example, I want to exercise because it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. Part of your definition of mindfulness that I've seen written is this idea of being sensitive to context and perspective. Yeah. Which perspective to me is you can't not take a perspective, right? It just happens automatically. But what I can do is know that that is happening and then say, and what else, right? And what else am I not seeing? What else am I not thinking? You know, I've done a lot of Zen practice and one of the key phrases in Zen is not knowing is most intimate, right?

It's this whole idea that, like, if you want to be closer to life, you've got to know you don't know and wake up to that. Yeah, and as soon as you know you don't these distinctions from any particular perspective, recognizing alternative perspectives, the neurons are firing and you seem alive. We have evidence that when you're mindful, people see you as charismatic. When you're mindful, you're healthier. You're likely to live longer. Everything is just improved. In fact, it's even the case that the things that you do bear the imprint of your being mindful. So you seem better, your relationships are better,

your health is better, and it's so easy. It's sort of unclear to me why anybody who's listening wouldn't immediately try to change in this way. And now the problem is that when you're mindless, again, you're not there to know you're not there. And so it's not so easy to change. But when you're learning anything new, you certainly can learn it in a mindful way. If you add to it, it could be, yeah, that's one way, perhaps on the one hand, on the other hand, and so on.

You make it richer and a little more tentative. If you've been doing something a thousand times like a robot, it's often hard to change it. However, there are ways. And simply when you're suffering, you know, when something didn't go right is the time you're talking to yourself. And now is an opportunity to talk to yourself more mindfully.

Yeah. Let me ask a question that taking what you've said so far and kind of goes right into the core of the book, right? And you say early on, our psychology may be the most important determinant of our health. Yeah. That's a pretty bold statement. Oh, and I mean it even more strongly than you just quoted me as saying. Your editor told you to tone it down. Yeah. You know, the medical model not that long ago had

been one that said psychology was virtually irrelevant. I'm sure doctors wanted people to be happy and not stressed, but they didn't think that that was relevant to health. The only way you were going to become unhealthy was the introduction of an antigen, right? Now things have moved quite a bit and people realize stress is unhealthy and so on. But I don't think it's moved nearly as much as it should be. And psychology is probably the most important determinant. So almost everything I'll say now and that I write about is based on lots of studies that we've done. This particular thing is not yet borne out, but still I believe it, which is that stress, I think, is the major determinant of our health.

So if we took people, this is a study I'd like to do but haven't gotten to do, if we took people who were just diagnosed with some dread disease, some kind of cancer, let's say, and then nobody, if they get that diagnosis, is going to be pleased. So we give them a little while to adjust to it. And after, let's say, three weeks, we start evaluating their stress level. I believe that that stress will be a better predictor of the course of the disease than genetics, nutrition, even treatment. That's how important. And stress is psychological. Events don't cause stress. What causes stress is the view you take of the event. The more mindful you are, the more potential views are available to you. And once you generate an oh my God view

and a huh, that's pretty good view, most people are going to cling to the pretty good view. But we've been taught there are good things, there are bad things. People kill themselves to get to the good, do everything they can to avoid the bad. Once you say it is neither good nor bad, it's nothing until you frame it,

you're basically at peace rather than racing around trying to avoid or garner these rewards. Let me ask a question because I think that the mind-body connection, and you go further, and I actually agree with you to say that like to even talk about them as being connected is to understate the case. They are one thing, right? Which I don't understand how we don't see that. I mean, they are literally connected in every possible way. But what our mind does is a huge determinant on our overall health. And I think that there's enough studies that show this to be unequivocally true. Here's the rub that I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, which is, if I am diagnosed with cancer and that cancer continues to progress, isn't there a sense in which we could be saying that the way I'm thinking about that and the way I have processed thoughts

in my life is the cause of that and thus I'm a bad person? You can tell me blaming the victim. that and thus I'm a bad person? You can tell me blaming the victim? Well, kind of, yeah, yeah. No, I understand completely. I think that if we were all taught the kinds of things that I keep writing about over these 45 or so years, then it could be conceivable. But when the world tells you that you have no control over these things, that we have a bunch of chronic illnesses where the symptoms are going to stay the same or just get worse. And it doesn't matter what you do. How can you be responsible for believing that? Can I back up a second? Because there's something I just wanted to tell you about stress. And then I'll talk to you about the humidity. So I have a couple of one-liners that people find useful and I thought I'd share

one with you, which is next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Oh my God, I missed the bus. Oh my God. Most of these things, if you just say to yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Many of us just become more relaxed and able to deal with it. And also just for people to realize that most of the things we're stressed about never happen. And so a simple little thing for people to do might be next time you're stressed, think about the last two, three times you were stressed and what happened. And you'll see the event didn't happen or it happened and you were just fine with it. So again, then we would relax.

Now, as far as the mind body unity, so before there was no relationship, you had a mind, you had a body, right? Now we'll talk about mind and body being connected. You have the same problem as having two things where, how are they connected? You know, how do you get from a fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body. And that has delayed lots and lots of research. And so I said, mind and body, these are just words. And if we put the words back together, and we put the mind and body as one thing, the amount of control we have over ourselves is enormous. Because wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body.

You put the mind in a good place, that's where the body is going to be. And as I'm sure we'll talk about at some point, I have a host of very exciting studies testing this mind-body energy. What I thought you were going to say when you started to talk about the person being diagnosed with some dread disease, separate from should we blame the victim or does it sound like we're blaming the victim, is something that I don't say often enough, but I think people really need to understand

that science can only give us probabilities. And so if you are given a diagnosis, you have cancer, we don't know that you have cancer. There's no study that gives us absolutes. All of our research, whether it's psychological, medical, any research, says if you were to do the exact same thing again, you're likely to get these findings. And those are translated as absolutes. So when you recognize that it's a maybe rather than an absolute, again, you know, you feel better and don't give up and try to do things to, in fact,

make you part of the percentage that doesn't actually have or the people who, for whom the diagnosis won't go in a certain direction. And so when the medical world gives us information, somebody might be told, and this I think is criminal, although I have great respect for most physicians, for a physician to say you have three months to live, there is no way they can know that. And so too much in the medical world becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. And if you assume something's going to happen,

then you do those things that make it more and more likely, you know, you don't get out of bed, you don't eat good foods, you don't keep your mind active, and you slowly give into whatever the illness is. Yeah. And when I was talking before, it was less about us blaming the victim versus the victim blaming themselves. And then thus seeing that like, oh, I guess I'm not being mindful enough. I guess I'm not having a good enough attitude, which then, of course, perpetuates stress. So it can become. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's exactly right.

I think that when people are given the diagnosis, they should be told a few things. They should be told a few things. They should be told about the probability, that it's a maybe rather than a definite most of the time, and that people have not been taught to understand the amount of control they might have over their illnesses. So it would be foolish for us to blame ourselves when we become ill. Not in those words, but essentially it's information that can be given to patients. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It might be helpful now to have you talk about the borderline effect, because I think this really draws a clear line that says you have something or you don't have it. When, as you've said, really things are on a continuum. So talk about the borderline effect and some of the studies you've done around that, because I think this is really fascinating. Okay, yeah.

So the borderline effect is another way of showing this mind-body unity. Let's say you have a donut, and the donut's freshness is going to expire at 12 o'clock. Nobody would think that at 12.01 they shouldn't eat the donut's freshness is going to expire at 12 o'clock. Nobody would think that at 12.01, they shouldn't eat the donut, right? It's expired, but, you know, so between 11.59, 12, 12.01, it's really all the same. So there's some point where you're given a diagnosis. There are some people who are just below that. They don't get the diagnosis. Some people, you know, the rest who are above it get the diagnosis. But right at that borderline, there's somebody who is no different from you any more than the donut is at 12 o'clock and 1201. Let me give a different example I think makes it better.

That let's say you take an IQ test. We have many people taking IQ tests. You get a 69, somebody else gets a 70. Now the person who's getting the 69 is going to be seen as cognitively deficient, but the difference between 69 and 70 is meaningless, right? You could have sneezed and misread a question or been a little tired and so on. And nevertheless, once you're told that you're cognitively deficient, how do you organize yourself? I mean, you become a very different person. And then two months later, you're likely to be at 69,

a score of 69 different from somebody who got a score of 70. So it's the same thing with any physical disease. You have diabetes. There are some people a little bit lower, not significantly different from you, they don't get the diagnosis, you get the diagnosis, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it doesn't matter if there are 20 different measures that you've taken for any disease, that no matter how you combine them, there's still going to be somebody who, you know, right below that borderline is no different from the person at the borderline and is not told that they're sick. Well, what your studies have shown is this idea that the

outcomes for those people, the people who are at just under the diabetic line and just over, I mean, you show dramatic changes in their long-term outcome and prognosis based on just the fact that they had the diagnosis or they didn't, which is amazing. Right. And so the way of understanding that is if at time one, they're not different because at that borderline, it's like the 12 o'clock versus 1201 donut. At that borderline, they were same. Down the road, they're different. We assume then it was the diagnosis and the effect is psychological. You know, when we talk about this mind-body unity, there's lots of evidence that people already accept without realizing. Most people understand placebos. They know you take

this nothing pill, you think it's something, and then you heal. That's probably the best medicine we have are placebos. We have lots of our studies that now speak in a similar way. One that's fun for me to describe is fatigue. You know that most people think the body is the body and at some point it just wears down and the way you think about things has nothing to do with it. There's a study that Frank Beach did in the 50s, I think, where he takes a little boy rat, introduces a little girl rat, and they copulate. And then a little boy rat needs a refractory period. He can't go on. He's exhausted. read. He can't go on. He's exhausted. However, if immediately a new little girl rat is introduced,

he's able to start all over again. Let me give you a human example. Let's say your word processing all day long and your back is hurting, your fingers, you're tired, and then you go home and you're able to play the piano. All right. As soon as we change the context, there's renewed energy. the piano. All right. As soon as we change the context, there's renewed energy. And so I asked my students, when we talk about fatigue, how far is it humanly possible to run? They know a marathon is 26 miles. So these are Harvard students. They start above that. So let's say somebody will yell out 28, 30, 35. And when somebody says 50, everybody groans because that's outrageous, right? Then I turn on a video of the Tarahumara, which is a tribe in Copper Canyon, Mexico, who as a rule are able to go over 200 miles without stopping. And that's a very big difference, right? The 26, 50 to two. And I think that that represents a small part of the difference

that I believe exists between what we think we're capable of and what we're actually capable of. And so in our fatigue study, well, we have done a few of them, but the one that's fun is we have people in a sleep lab. They wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep than they got or two hours fewer or the amount of sleep they got two hours more sleep than they got or two hours fewer or the amount of sleep they got. And cognitive physiological indicators follow perceived amount of sleep rather than the actual amount of sleep. That's amazing. I mean, you also talk about studies where you tell people they're drinking a sugary drink and you tell other people they're not and then you test their blood sugar afterwards. And if they thought they had a sugary drink and you tell other people they're not, and then you test their blood sugar afterwards.

And if they thought they had a sugary drink, even if it wasn't sugary, their blood sugar goes up. So that's amazing. I have a question for you about all this though, because we certainly do know the placebo effect works, but it doesn't work all of the time. My mother had a back surgery last summer. And if we follow the thinking, which is that a sham pill is not as good as a sham injection, which is not as good as a sham surgery, meaning the placebo effect should be stronger in each of those. And yet her experience of that was that she was no better, right, despite a great deal of hope going in. So we know cases where the placebo effect doesn't appear to be working. Do we have any idea what the mediating thing is? Yeah, Eric, we don't really know that because we don't know what individual people are actually thinking.

You know, we don't know if she thought, well, you know, surgery is I don't want to do it. And these things don't work anyway. But please, please work. So essentially, you know, rooting against you or thinking against yourself and there's no way to figure that stuff out. But placebos have been enormously effective, even with these sham surgeries, you know, the surgery for Parkinson's. So they cut open a person's head, do some minor things, nothing medical, and then sew it up so the person now is sure that they've had the surgery, and they're cured. And, you know, now, are they cured for the next 20 years? Well,

there's no research that's able to continuously look, but for a year or two after, the effects seem to maintain themselves. I think we have lots of evidence about the mind and body being connected, that being one thing, rather, that we should pay more attention to, which would make us more apt to believe the powers that we might have that we're not yet using. Everybody knows, you know, you're walking in the fall and all of a sudden a leaf blows in front of your face and you get startled. Nothing's happened, right? It was a leaf.

But the thought that it was something is what led to your pulse and heart rate and everything going up. When people see people regurgitating on the side of the road or wherever, you yourself feel like you're going to vomit. I mean, we've all had these. I had an experience that I report in The Mindful Body, a little more dramatic than these perhaps, that started my thinking about mind-body unity well before I had those concepts in mind. I was 18 years old, 19, and I was married. God, people don't do that anymore. But at any rate,

we went to Paris on a honeymoon and we go into a restaurant and I order a mixed grill. On the plate was going to be a pancreas. Now, for some bizarre reason, I thought, now that I'm married, I'm supposed to be a woman of the world, much older than my ears, more sophisticated. Surely I can eat the pancreas. So this was going to be a woman of the world, much older than my ears, more sophisticated. Surely I can eat the pancreas. So this was going to be the challenge for me. So I asked my then husband, which of these items was the pancreas? He points to something.

I eat everything with gusto. Now the moment of truth. Could I eat the pancreas? And I start eating it and I literally get sick. He had a very strange reaction to that. He starts to laugh. Terrible. I said, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. So clearly I had made myself sick. And if you can make yourself sick, there are probably ways, we found ways we can make ourselves well.

That's something that I haven't talked about a lot, but I think is very important, which is all of the things we can do for ourselves when the medical world gives us a diagnosis of a chronic illness. The one that I describe in the book, the attention to symptom variability, is the strongest. But before we get to that, there are other people who've done research on imagined exercise, you know, so that you're lifting weights without actually lifting the weights. You're just imagining it. And the results are almost as if you're actually doing it yourself. And there's a fair amount of evidence. So let's say you're not able to exercise. well, you can still do something. And I have, again, decades of research showing that being mindful means the neurons are flowing and that's going to be good

for your health. So instead of giving in to the disorder, keep living, you know, your life as fully as you can. That will be good for your health. The attention to symptom variability was my way of coming up with sort of a placebo that we could give ourselves. You can't give yourself a placebo if it requires you believing that it's not a placebo, right? So this won't start off similar to a placebo, but let me tell you about it. I call it attention to symptom variability, which is polysyllabic and sound. What is that? It's just being mindful.

When you're mindful, you notice change, all right? That's what variability is. So when people are diagnosed with some chronic illness, they tend to think that their symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse, but nothing stays the same. There are always slight movements. Now, sort of imagine the stock

market. When the stock market is going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up and it goes down a tiny bit and it goes up down, you know, and so on. What's happening during those moments when there's relief from those symptoms? So what we do is we call people at random times throughout the day and we simply ask them, how is the symptom right now? Is it better or worse than the last time we spoke and why? And what happens is that why creates a mindful experience for you, right? So four things happen when we do this. The first, just by doing something for yourself makes you feel good because with most of these chronic illnesses, people feel helpless. Second, as soon as you see that it's not always that it's worse, you feel better. Third, you become more mindful in trying to find out why now rather than before.

Is it better? And fourth, I believe you're much more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. you're much more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. So now we did this with people with Parkinson's, stroke, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, biggies, right? And across the board, we find symptom relief. And so how is this similar to the placebo? You don't need me calling you or anybody else. You set your smartphone, ring in an hour.

It rings. How is the symptom? Is it better or worse than before? And why? Set it again for two hours, an hour and 30, it doesn't matter. Vary the times. So even if you can't figure out why is it better now than before, you feel useful, you're becoming more mindful, you will be healthier as a result of all of this, You're becoming more mindful. You will be healthier as a result of all of this. And there are no negative side effects. You know, so it's not going to interfere with any other treatment you might want to pursue.

To say to people there is nothing that a chronic illness means that there's nothing you can do about it is simply wrong. And medical wouldn't tell you that. It just means the medical world doesn't have a solution yet. It doesn't mean that there isn't a solution. And you're not eliminating the fact that there are medical causes to the things that go wrong with us. You're just simply saying that we have a whole lot more influence on how the outcome that occurs based on our ability to be less stressed, more mindful. Active in our own care. Yeah. Active in our own care.

I like that. That's a good way to say it. Yeah. Yeah. Because right now, people too often just hand themselves over, which might make sense if science gave us absolutes. So if you knew something was absolutely true, and I needed to know it, I could easily ask you and trust it. When I recognize that you don't

know, you may know maybe more about it than I do, but you don't know for sure. And then it becomes less smart for us to just turn ourselves over. And some of the very early work I did back in the 70s was how important exercising control over your own health, believing that you have control over your health, how good it is for our health. So no matter what the circumstances, just turning yourself over would not be wise. I want to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context

of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. about that is that, I mean, I think it would be hard to do because again, the thing you would be asking the person to use is the thing that is becoming problematic and their ability to report on their symptoms would be, but I'm just curious whether you have. Yeah, we started, you know,

these things are very hard to run. They take a lot of person power and money and so on, but it should be an easy thing to follow through with this attention to variability. So let's say, you know, what happens is when you're with somebody who has dementia, it's very hard for you not to lose patience with them. We forget that it's not willful, you know, but they're saying the same thing they just said two seconds ago, and so on. And we tend to think that whatever we're witnessing is sort of generally true for them. And people do this to themselves. You know, you forgot something. You're 75 years old, and you see yourself forgetting, and you don't pay any attention to what did you forget?

You know, how much did you remember? In other words, when you see somebody do something, and you don't generalize, and you say, what did they forget? Why did they forget this and not these other things? Let's be more differentiated about it. Then you put this horrible disease back into perspective. And we can do this for ourselves just for the memory problems, which are interesting in and of their own right. You know, people, again, because of their mindlessness, don't realize that the way you respond to the world when you're 40 may be very different from the things you care about when you're 75 years old.

So if I'm 40 and you're introducing me to people, let's say at work, I'm going to feel that I have to learn their names because these people may be important to my future in some sense. I'm 75, you're introducing me to the same five people. I don't care. It doesn't matter what their names are. If we're going to have continued interaction, at some point I'll learn the name. Now, if you asked me what that person's name was, I would think of myself as having a memory problem. But to remember something means you have to learn it in the first place. If you don't learn it in the first place, when you don't know it in the second place, it has nothing to do with memory.

So a large part of what we see as a memory problem is not caring, you know, not paying attention to the same things. Again, if everybody finds a particular TV show interesting in the family, and the 80-year-old doesn't find it interesting, we tend to think it's because of some attention problem they have. You know, rather than realize that they've been there, done that, it's just not so interesting. So there are often many other explanations for the ills that people seem to suffer as they get older. But for dementia, early stages, it's a perfect opportunity to test attention to variability. People are not forgetting everything. So what are they remembering? What are they forgetting?

Why are they forgetting what are they remembering? What are they forgetting? Why are they forgetting what they're forgetting? And part of it could be that they didn't care anymore about it. My father went into a dementia facility. He was 90. And I went to visit him and we started to play gin. And while we're playing, I say to myself, and this is sad to me that I would do this, playing, I say to myself, and this is sad to me that I would do this, given that I've been studying older people since I was very young, but I'm saying to myself, should I let him win? And while I'm entertaining the possibility of letting him win, he then says, Jin, and beat me fairly, you know, which just is another indication of when we lose things, we don't lose it all at once. And if we recognize the things that we could still do, I think we would feel better. And that

would possibly help us recover some of the things that we've lost. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut

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Yeah, well, the first one was done a long time ago. We call that the counterclockwise study. So what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier, and we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were the younger selves. So they would be speaking about past events as if they were just unfolding. We'd be watching an old movie or TV show and then discuss it as if it was just filmed and so on. Current events that, not current, they were from 20 years earlier. And in a period of time, as short as a week, what we found was amazing, I think. Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. And I don't know about you, but I still to this day, and the study was done in 1979 or

something around that, I still have not heard people's hearing or vision improving without medical intervention. and rarely when you're 90 years old with medical intervention. So it was astounding, and that led to a host of studies that I report in The Mindful Body. So one of the things that we hear about in psychology a lot these days is replication failure. I'm curious, I assume that a lot of these studies you've done have either replicated or there's been follow-on studies that have shown the same sort of phenomenon? Yeah, yeah. So let me tell you the next study in the series, all testing the idea of mind-body unity. Wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the

body. So we took chambermaids. These are people who are exercising. Their work is exercise, right? But we ask them, how much exercise are you getting? And oddly, they say they're not getting any exercise because they think exercise is what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired. Study couldn't be simpler. We divide them into two groups and we teach one group that their work is exercise. We teach them to think differently about their work. Making a bed is like this machine at the gym and so on. So now we have two groups. One group doesn't realize their work is exercise.

The other group now has changed their mind. As a result of that, well, the first thing we do is we want to make sure at the end, are they eating any differently? No. Are they working any differently? Harder? Less? No, no differences. Nevertheless, just by the change of mind, now seeing their work as exercise, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. And this is really a study in the nocebo. pressure came down. And this is really a study in the nocebo. You know, just as a placebo is something positive you take that, you know, brings about positive outcomes, a nocebo would be taking away the positive effect that you might expect. You know, so a study somebody else did a while ago

is Ipecac, which is used to make you vomit in case you accidentally consume poison, right? So people who are having trouble, who are vomiting, are given ipecac, but they're told that, they're not given it by name, the medication will stop their vomiting and their vomiting stops. Which is, you know, if you think a little bit about that, you know, we have people, let's say you're getting an antidepressant and the antidepressant doesn't work, the therapist is likely to increase the dosage, even change the medication. When instead, the person needs to be aware that they need to participate in the effectiveness of any of these drugs.

Because you can stop the effectiveness of the drug just by not believing in it, like your mother might have with that operation. At any rate, that was a conceptual replication. The next one was a study you alluded to on diabetes. We had people come in who had type 2 diabetes, and we're going to sit them in front of a computer. All of this will become clear when you get to the end of it. And next to them is a clock, and they're told to play computer games for the next 15 minutes or so, and then change the game they're playing. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. So for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's going half 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, will their blood sugar be affected by the actual passage of time or their perception of how much time passed? And it was the perception of how much time, which means we can go quite a distance in controlling these type two diabetes. So we have lots of these studies. The most recent, we inflicted a wound, a minor wound, but still a wound. People, I think I'm clock crazy. We use clocks again. And the clocks were rigged. You're in front of a clock, it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time or real time. And it turns out the wound heals based on clock time, perceived time. So in study after study, coming out of our lab and labs all over the world now, it seems we have an enormous amount of

control over our health that we've only begun to realize. That is all remarkable. I wanted to pivot here for a second, and I wanted to talk about a phrase of yours, which is, don't try to make the right decision, make the decision right. First of all, one of the most stressful things for people in making decisions about things that are important. Most people believe that the way to do this is gather information and then do a cost-benefit analysis. And it doesn't work. It can't work. Because when you recognize, as we were talking about with stress itself, things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So if this cost is also a benefit and the benefit is also a cost, when you add them up, they're not going to tell you what to do. When you're gathering information, how much information? Because the next piece that

you don't look at could have changed the decision entirely. And so that's why people keep gathering and gathering. There's no natural endpoint. But most important is that decisions are made to take action. The moment you take the action, you cannot evaluate the other alternatives. So if you're asking yourself, would you like peach pie or blueberry pie? Okay, so you decide, however you decide, you're going to take the peach pie. You take the bite of the peach pie. Now your palate is no longer naive in some sense. So when you taste the other pie, you can't make the comparison. Should I go to Harvard or Yale? So you decide to go to Harvard and you don't like it. So now you're going to go to Yale. It's not the same thing because you're

no longer a newbie. You're no longer first semester freshmen. So we can never evaluate the quality of our decisions. Now you add to all of that that when you make the decision, whether it's experienced as good, bad, or indifferent is solely a function of the way we choose to think about it. So this is complicated. And I spend a lot of time, because I'm arguing with, you know, Nobel Prize winners and what have you, who are telling us to do very different things from my recommendation. And my recommendation is very simple. Randomly choose, just make the decision, don't worry about it, and then make it work. Then make it right. And so I told my students in a decision-making class, go spend the week. I don't

want anybody to make any decisions. Have a rule of thumb, you know, flip a coin. You can say to yourself, whatever the first alternative is, that's what you're going to take, but no decision-making. And they came back and they all had a wonderful week that was stress-free. So, you know, regrets are mindless. Regrets that we've made the wrong decision, that we've done the wrong thing, suggests that the alternative that wasn't taken would be better. It could be worse. It could be the same. And not only that, it is neither good, bad, or indifferent, independent of how we make it. So if you know why you're doing what you're doing, then after you do it, you don't regret not having done something else. All of our negative emotions, it turns out, Eric, too much for us to go into now, but they're all a function of our mindlessness.

Let me just follow that question up right before we end, which is around regret. Because certainly, I think, in what you're talking about, that makes a lot of sense. Let me just follow that question up right before we end, which is around regret. Because certainly I think in what you're talking about, that makes a lot of sense. When my son was getting ready to go to school, we talked a lot about this. Like there isn't a right choice here, right? You're just going to make the best choice you can. And then it's all about living into that choice and making it good. So I can see how like regretting that I didn't eat the peach pie versus the blueberry pie, or I went to Yale versus Harvard doesn't make sense. But regrets can serve another function, which is a way that we can reflect on our behavior and say, hey, that's not the person I

wanted to be. In which case regret is serving perhaps a useful purpose in that case. I don't agree. I think that regret is mindless. I think that people take themselves to task far too frequently, and that's part of why the number of antidepressants being sold is enormous, because they don't realize that their behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it. And going forward, if you know why you're doing something, then you're not going to take yourself to task for not doing something else. Too often, we're doing things without that awareness. Now, the reflection that you're talking about, one can do that without regret, you know, that I've done many things in my life. And I could say, well, gee, I wonder what

it would have been like if I had done this other thing or I had done that thing differently. And you can't know, but in thinking about it, then you're providing yourself with more options in the future. But all of those things can take place without the unks. Right. Because, I mean, I was a homeless heroin addict at one point. From one perspective, that behavior made sense. It was a response to certain situations. It no longer made sense, though. And I guess what you're saying is at that point, I was mindlessly reenacting a behavior that had far long ago lost its useful purpose.

Yeah. And you can do all of that without thinking less of yourself or having gotten into it in the first place. I was saying the other day, I think I've written this in one of my books, probably The Mindful Body. If somebody tells you that they're really anxious, and then they do X, and all of a sudden they feel good, you would think that it's good that they're doing an X, right? It's not the least bit irrational. And then you find out that it's drinking too much. If we didn't teach people that they were weak, and that's why they were engaging in these behaviors, but their behavior did make sense, then they might have the strength to find alternative ways of meeting the same need. Yeah, this is a deep discussion that I could spend a long time on. I think a point of agreement we would absolutely have is that the shame around it

perpetuates the behavior and that if you don't have the shame, you're much better able to evaluate options and make better decisions. That shame perpetuates the problem instead of giving you the resources to change the problem. Right. And, you know, I think that we have a language out there. I talk about a lot of this in The Mindful Body that goes from something that's bad to something that's better. And somehow we settle for that rather than realize there's a better than better way. So let me give an example. I went to see my friend Eva. She had a terrible case of cancer. She had just come back from the hospital. I said, Eva, how are you? She said, you know, well, her cancer's in remission. And at that moment, I thought, wait a

second. If I took the exact same test, presumably they'd tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it I don't have it, but she has it in remission? And so remission is better than having the cancer be active, but not nearly as good as seeing yourself as cured. When you have a cold and then you're finished with the cold, you see yourself as cured. You could see yourself as in remission, and then you get another cold, oh, it's the same damn cold, I can't get rid of it. But each cold is similar to each other, which is why we can call them colds. But just as certainly, each cold is different from each other, which is why we can see ourself as cured. If you have cancer, and then it goes away, if cancer comes back, it's a different cancer. In some ways the same, in some ways different. And it would behoove us to pay attention to the ways it's different.

We've done research where we have people who see themselves as in remission versus cured. We go back six months later and those who see themselves are cured are indeed happier and healthier. see themselves are cured are indeed happier and healthier. Lots of words like this. Another one that's kind of fun for me is forgiveness. Forgiveness sounds good, right? Ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? Forgiveness is great. And if you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad? Blame is bad. But you can't forgive unless you blame. So our forgivers are our blamers. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here, Eric? We have people who see the world negatively, blame, and then forgive, which doesn't seem to me divine. And there's a whole

other way. You know, if you blame, certainly it's good to forgive. But if you understand and are more mindful and recognize that people's behavior makes sense from their perspective or else they wouldn't have done it, you don't blame in the first place. And then there's no need for that forgiveness. The bottom line for me, whether we're talking about relationships, talking about our sense of self, or our physical health, is that we're very far from where we could be, that most of the people who are helping, help get us from a bad place to a better place. And I guess my goal is to get us to a better than better place. So listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode,

if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that. And it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than we think we need to. Because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like

a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up. Ellen, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. It's been fun talking to you. Thank you, Eric. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.