#1 Harvard Psychologist: Use Your Mind to Heal Your Body

Mel Robbins (00:00:16):

Hey, it's Mel, and today on the Mel Robbins podcast, you're going to learn how to use your mind to heal your body. From the number one Harvard psychologist and professor Dr. Ellen Langer, she has been researching this subject and teaching about it for over 50 Years.

 

Ellen Langer (00:00:31):

The control we have over our health and wellbeing is enormous. Everybody accepts that a placebo is effective. I think it's our most effective medicine. So what's going on? You take this nothing. You think it's something and then it acts like something. Everything that is was at one time a decision, which means it's mutable. Everything can be changed. If something doesn't work, change it Close to 50 years of research has shown me virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. And when you're mindless, you're not aware that you're not there, you're not there, but you don't know that you're not there. No matter what you're doing, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. Most of us are sealed and unlived lives and we're oblivious as it is right now. We don't see what's right in front of us. We don't hear what's being said. We are oblivious to the choices that we have. Rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, what we should be doing is simply make the decision rain.

Ellen Langer (00:02:16):

Thanks for having me.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:17):

I am so thrilled you're here. I can't wait to get into this. And I guess where I want to start is, the person who is with us right now has made time. They have no time, but they've made time to be here with you, Dr. Langer, to learn from you what might change about their life.

 

Ellen Langer (00:02:35):

Once you understand what I mean by mindfulness and how easy it is, it has nothing to do with meditation. No matter what you're doing, whether you're doing a podcast, reading, eating, taking care of a child, playing tennis, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. Everything changes. I had this slide when I used to give these lectures as I still do, and I say on the slide, virtually all of our problems, whether personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect consequences of us, of our mindlessness. Now, it's interesting because then I tell them just among us and the other 10 million people I've said this to, I really mean all. So that's enormous, right? I'm saying all of our problems are a result of our mindlessness. So if we're able to get people to understand how easy it is to change their mind, to become more mindful, whatever ails them should dissipate.

 

Mel Robbins (00:03:41):

So what made you want to study the mind body connection in the first place?

 

Ellen Langer (00:03:46):

Let me tell you three stories.

 

Mel Robbins (00:03:48):

Okay?

 

Ellen Langer (00:03:49):

So I got married when I was a obscenely young, don't tell anybody. And we go to Paris on our honeymoon, we're in this restaurant and I order a mixed grill on plate was pancreas. So I asked my then husband, which of these is the pancreas? He was more sophisticated than I points to that I eat everything. I'm a big eater. Now comes a moment of truth to interrupt myself. I still don't understand why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas, but somehow I felt as a young person, a sophisticated woman of the world, I was now married, should eat it. I start eating it and I literally get sick. He starts laughing, say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas earlier. So I had made myself sick. Now we go to my mother who had breast cancer and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas.

 

(00:04:51):

That's the end game, okay? So the medical world was no longer treating her. She became crippled because they weren't going to exercise her limbs, which made sense if you assume she was going to die. And then magically the cancer was totally gone. So somehow I made myself sick. She made herself well. And of course, during those times I hadn't yet conceived of mind body unity. But I had another story that was kind of fun. I think I tell it in the mindful body, but I haven't told on a podcast before. So when I was about, I guess I was 14, I had a friend and I lived in Westchester and I had a friend who lived in the Bronx and she was 15 or 16. So she was in charge. She was the older woman, and I would go visit her every Saturday. And every Saturday for whatever reason, we'd go and have, she would have a hot fudge Sunday or a banana split. Now, I was always on a diet, so I never had it. Nevertheless, while she was eating, I was eating it with her in my mind. And I swear to you, Mel, that when she was finished, I was full. These things together suggest in each case that here I'm thinking that I'm eating, but I'm not eating and my body is feeling satisfied and think I'm eating this pancreas and it's chicken, which I love, and then I get sick. Or my mother, however she did it where the pancreatic cancer goes away.

 

Mel Robbins (00:06:22):

So do you believe your mom healed herself based on her thoughts?

 

Ellen Langer (00:06:25):

Yes. It wasn't based on anything in the medical world could explain. So what else is left?

 

Mel Robbins (00:06:31):

So those are examples of things that happened before you could articulate this theory about mind body unity. So how do you articulate the theory now?

 

Ellen Langer (00:06:41):

Yes, your mind, people have no idea. I think in general about what we're capable of, the power is enormous. And so the way I encapsulate this to make clear it's our physical wellbeing as well as our emotional and mental way of being, is to question what people mindlessly accept without knowing they're accepting it, which is mind-body, dualism,

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:11):

Mind-body dualism, dualism. What does that mean?

 

Ellen Langer (00:07:13):

Exactly. Nobody knows what it means, but everybody acts.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:15):

That's why you're here.

 

Ellen Langer (00:07:16):

Exactly. Everybody acts as if this is true. You have a mind and you have a body as if these are separate. All right? And so if they're separate, you run into the problem of how do they speak to each other? Now everybody knows that the mind is affecting the body in some way.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:34):

We know that because if you're stressed out, if you're ruminating, if you get really negative, you know that it makes your body feel bad.

 

Ellen Langer (00:07:42):

But you see somebody vomiting and all of a sudden you feel like you're going to regurgitate and there's no reason except that person has stimulated this. So you're walking down the street and the fo a leaf blows in your face and all of a sudden you're startled your blood pressure and pulse increase until you say, oh, it was just a leaf. So we have lots of experiences like this, but way back when the medical world believed that psychology was independent of health, and I'm sure doctors in the past still wanted you to be happy, but I think that they believed it was totally separate from the disease process and the medical model. The belief was to get a disease, you have to have the introduction of an antigen without that. Okay? Now people, and I think that I might have had some part in bringing it about, although people still get it wrong when they talk now about the mind body connection, what do they get wrong? That's better than we have two separate things. Now they're connected. Well, the reason it's wrong, how are they connected? How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called a body? And you can't it. I say, wait, these are just words. This is going to sound silly, but you could have had mind, body and elbows, and then we consider people in a different way. I say, let's just put mind and body back together. You're one person. It's one thing. Now think of it. If it's one thing, wherever you're putting one mind and body, you're putting the other. What that means is that our minds have enormous control over our bodies. And once we recognize that, then we can harness some of our own power and cure. Many of the disorders are certainly help along many of the problems that afflict too many of us.

 

Mel Robbins (00:09:39):

So when you use the word mindful though, you're not talking about meditation. You've got a very different definition for what mindfulness is. When you're talking about the power of your mindset and its ability to influence your body. Dr. Langer, what does mindfulness mean to you?

 

Ellen Langer (00:09:57):

Okay, yes, very important. So when people hear the word mindfulness, in spite of the fact that I've been doing this for over 50 years, people still think of meditation. Meditation is fine, it's just different to meditate, you take yourself out of the world and you sit still for 20 minutes, twice a day. It's a practice and what it's supposed to do, it's not mindfulness, it's supposed to lead you to become more mindful. Mindfulness, as I study, it is not a practice, it's just a way of being and it results from a deep, deep but easy appreciation of the power of uncertainty. We're taught by our parents, by schools. Everything you read are giving us these absolutes, these rules as if we know that this thing is true right now is going to be true forever. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So we can't know. Now, this came to mind to me years ago, but it's really, for me, it was a very important incident. I met this horse event. Remember that I'm a straight A student obnoxiously, so right? And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him? Because he wants to get his horse a hot dog.

 

Mel Robbins (00:11:09):

Wait a minute, horses don't eat hot dogs. They eat carrots, they eat grains, they don't eat meat.

 

Ellen Langer (00:11:16):

But I say yes, because I say yes to virtually everything. He came 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. Now, a normal person would be scared about that. For me, I was thrilled because that opened up a world of possibilities. And then I thought about it, and the people don't know a lot about science, but what's very important for people to understand is science only gives us probabilities. Alright? So if you were to do this experiment with horses, you'd have most horses of this kind weighing this amount on this particular day who've been not eaten for this amount, these number of hours, given this amount of grain mixed with this amount of meat. When you do all of that, most of them don't eat meat. It's a mouthful. So it's shortened. Horses don't eat meat,

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:07):

Correct.

Mel Robbins (00:13:00):

Dr. Langer, when you become more mindful, what benefits do you see in your life?

 

Ellen Langer (00:13:04):

Well, the first thing is that you're engaged, you're awake. You're no longer responding like a robot. So you are, and I wrote a book a while ago on becoming an artist and shed the journey. And as you start to paint or do some new activity, if you let yourself become totally engaged, it's exhilarating. And then let's say the phone rings and all of a sudden your mood changes. And so you realize, wow, how you are more typically people take as a baseline being mindless when you're not feeling energetic, excited, or at least peaceful, you're not being mindful. So to feel any of those things when you're happy a robot isn't happy, a robot isn't relaxed, a robot isn't serene. So anytime you're feeling not like a robot, you're experiencing the joys of being mindful. And again, it's so easy. All you need to do is be there and recognize that the world we've been brought up in has taught us how not to be there, not be there. I think in some ways to turn control of our lives over to other people.

 

Mel Robbins (00:14:18):

For somebody that may be listening somewhere around the world and they've never even considered that what they're experiencing in terms of their day-to-day life is that sort of robot mindlessness that hasn't even entertained the thought that there's an entirely different way to experience your life starting today.

 

Ellen Langer (00:14:47):

When people, if you're rushing someplace, just slow down, not as a rule just to see that everything is still going to work. You still have the same eight hours at work or 24 hours to be alive in a day, and your mood racing is not going to make it happen any better, any faster. Just to recognize you have options. Every time you call something by some name, call it by a different name, take every taste that doesn't appeal to you and make it tasty for yourself. I don't know, it seems to me so sad that people just go about their business, oblivious, oblivious to all of the joys that are right before them. This is a nice takeaway that people often seem to get lost. Not realizing life only consists of moments. That's all it is moments. And so what am I going to do for the next 20 years now that the kids are out of the house? Or what am I going to do now that I'm retired? Just take care of the moment and then the next moment. And before you know it, you've had a life lived. Well, when you're mindless, you have no choice. When you're mindless, you're no different from a robot. The only difference is that you unintentionally programmed yourself where a robot is programmed by the programmer and just think, are robots happy? No. Do robots have choices? No. Why would we want to live our lives like that? And so as a result of not questioning this sort of thing, people end up sealed in unlived lives.

 

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When we are mindless, we just think we know. And so we're oblivious to all the ways things could be different from what we know.

 

(00:16:38):

So if you're playing a sport and you're taught, this is the way you hold the tennis racket. For many people they think that is the way, but who decided? When I give lectures, sometimes I'll ask, is there a tall man in the audience? For reasons I don't understand, Mel, there always is a six foot five guy. I ask him to come to the stage. So here I am at five three. Here he is at six five. We look ridiculous together. I ask him to put his hand up. He puts his hand up. His hand is three inches longer than mine. Then I just raise the question, should we do anything similar, anything the same way, anything physical the same way? And I don't think so. Now's the important point, especially for your female listeners. If he created the rules for how to do this, the more different I am from him, the more important it is for me not to do it exactly that way, for me to change it ever so slightly so that it more meets my own needs, physical being and so on.

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:41):

And yet we just go through the world.

 

Ellen Langer (00:17:42):

This is the way you do it. This is the way. And so one of the titles for the book that you have there that I'm very excited about, the mindful body. When you write a book, then you have to think, what should you call it? And one of the names for the book early on was Who says So? And that's what one of my pieces of advice to all of the adults listening at some point become your 3-year-old self again, who says, so who decided this? Because it turns out that everything that is everything was at one point a decision. That means somebody said it should be like this. And as I'm saying now, the more different you are from that person, the more important it is for you not to mindlessly fall in line. Just accept that everything is uncertain, not just that two and two, one and one doesn't have to equal two, that horses don't eat meat, that nothing is certain. Then you approach everything as if it's brand new.

 

Mel Robbins (00:18:41):

So for the person who's just starting to have their mind open up, wait a minute, all these absolutes I believe don't necessarily, I could think something different. Could you give a couple examples of what this might look like day to day in someone's life? You've already said, well, who said that? Who says as an example to challenge kind of your own thinking?

 

Ellen Langer (00:19:06):

Well, when you're about to do anything new, when somebody says, this is how you do it, you have to recognize, well, that may be how you do it, but not necessarily the best way for me to do it.

 

(00:19:20):

When people say virtually everything, lots of people buy into the notion that as you get older, it all falls apart. To me, it just gets better and better. That when you think about it, Mel, so you're two years old, you scrape your knee and you're crying bloody murder, you're five or six, Johnny or Jane doesn't send you a Valentine's. You're going to be rejected for life. You're 13, you have a pimple. Life is over. The belief as you get older, it falls apart on believing that mindlessly often leads to it falling apart. I'm at the age, I'm 78, and lots of my friends and I talk about senior moments, which is cute that we have a name for it. You can't remember something. Part of the reason you can't remember is because so much. And if you only know one thing, it's probably easy to remember it. But any rate they see themselves forget and then they worry are they going to get dementia?

 

(00:20:16):

And so that worrying helps facilitate more forgetting because now you're not taking in the information. You're worried about whether you're going to be able to retain it and so on. And then you withdraw a little from other people because you don't want to be seen this way and just snowballs rather than recognize that when you were young, you probably weren't infrequently forgetful either. So I teach a health course at Harvard and big lecture class, and I teach on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings, and on Thursday before I'm going to do the health lecture, I ask the students, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday? Nobody knows. The thing is, the difference is when you're 20, you don't care that you don't remember when you're 70. Oh my goodness. Is this the beginning of the end?

 

Mel Robbins (00:21:09):

Could you offer some examples that you've seen in your research?

 

Ellen Langer (00:21:12):

So let's take the word try. Okay, well try. Sounds good, right? It's certainly better than giving up. I'm going to try. But you wouldn't try to eat an ice cream cone. You just eat it, right? So trying has built into it an expectation for failure. So we did a study study where we have one group tried, whatever it is, many different tasks. Another group that told to just do it, the doing group always outperforms it. And then somebody told me, that's the Yoda study. I said, oh yes, okay, great. I don't have to be the first for any of these things. It's always nice when other people have the same ideas. But the point of it is to recognize how often we underestimate ourselves that when you're trying, how often we think we can't do it, and people have it all wrong. People think they want to be expert. Now, if being expert means you're a hundred percent successful, consider this. You're a little kid, you are in the elevator, you're trying to press the button, you can't reach it. So the adult with you picks you up, you press the button and this keeps going. You get taller, getting closer and closer to it. Great fun. Now, when was the last time, Mel, you walked in an elevator and were excited about pressing the button?

 

Mel Robbins (00:22:30):

Never. Unless I'm going to bed after a long day work, right at the hotel.

 

Ellen Langer (00:22:35):

The point is, we can either do things imperfectly, mindfully, or perfectly mindlessly. We don't want to be able to do, we think we want, you're playing golf, you think you want to be able to get a hole in one every time you swing the club. And the first two games might be fun, but after that, no, there's no, if you want to win at, I dunno, tic-tac toe, play it against a 4-year-old, that we gravitate towards things that are going to be challenging. And the problem is that I think we've confused what we call work and play. And I hear people, so it's the same thing. There's a bad better, but there's a better than better way in my view. So we have work and we have life, whatever that means to people. And then somebody comes along and says, we should have work life balance.

 

(00:23:31):

You shouldn't be all work and no play. I said, no. What you want is to have work life integration. You want it to be one thing. You want to be the same person you are at work and at play. Sometimes you got to take it seriously. And when you work, you have to learn not to take yourselves so seriously. But we've been taught there are things that are hard, that are unpleasant, and that

(00:24:49):

Once you think you know, you don't pay any attention

 

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And things are constantly changing. And when you're mindless, you can't take advantage of all of the wonderful things around you and you can't avoid the pitfalls because you're essentially not there. To me, if you're going to be there for something to do it, you should show up for it. And that only then can you reap the rewards of being part of the activity. But in making it sound too confusing, you want to be a machine or do you want to be a person? And when you're happy, you're a person. When you're playing games, when you're enjoying yourself, if you're listening to me and there's something I've said that's interesting to you, at these times you're being mindful. When you're being mindful, the neurons are firing, you're engaged, go walk outside. You've walked outside of your place every day for however long notice, three new things, three isn't magic, six new things, two new things. And all of a sudden, how come I passed this every day? Why didn't I see that next time you're with your best friend, your spouse, notice three new things about them and you just keep noticing new things about the things you thought you knew.

 

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And at some point you come to see, Hey, I didn't know it as well as I thought I did. And then your attention naturally goes to it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:06):

You've done just remarkable landmark research on this. You mentioned 50 years of research. One of the most fascinating studies, at least for me, was involving elderly men.

 

Ellen Langer (00:26:17):

So the idea was if we can take the mind and put the mind in a younger place and take our measurements from our bodies, will we get any effect? So what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and we had elderly men live there as if they were the younger souls. Now it's interesting because they're around 80, but that was not when 80 is now the new 60. Yes. They were really old. In fact, when they would show up to see if they could be in the study and I'm here and they're coming in and they're walking and I say, what am I doing this? Because I didn't know if they were going to be able to live through the day. No. And so I set them up at this retreat where I'm in charge of everything in their lives. I mean, if I realized then what I was taking on, but I'm glad that I did it because the results were very exciting. So basically we have old men living in this place, not Hollywood, I couldn't afford it, but as well as we could make it seem as if it was 20 years earlier.

 

Mel Robbins (00:27:20):

Got it. So they're all living in a building where it looks like, oh wow, I've gone back in time.

 

Ellen Langer (00:27:25):

Yeah. And so they would be speaking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and other events of the past as if it was just happening.

 

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And so they'd be watching television shows and movies from the past as if they had just been produced. Alright. So as well as we could, we took them back in time in a period less than a week. What we found was their vision improved, their hearing improved their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger, what all without any medical intervention. So it was very exciting. Now, but this is a famous study, Mel, and as I'm fond of saying, isn't it obnoxious for me to call my own study famous? No. Because if you turn on who, no, if you turn on the Simpsons, go to Havana, they talk about the study. So that study has been out there for a while now.

 

Mel Robbins (00:28:21):

So what does that tell you? When you saw this and you're like, less than a week, I make somebody think and act and talk like they're younger.

 

Ellen Langer (00:28:27):

What it tells me is that our thoughts are preventing all sorts of very positive behaviors. What happens is, so you go to the doctor and you take the snelling eye chart,

 

Mel Robbins (00:28:39):

A who?

 

Ellen Langer (00:28:41):

It doesn't matter. You look at the eye chart.

 

Mel Robbins (00:28:42):

Oh, the E and the Fs and the Gs and the Hs.

 

Ellen Langer (00:28:44):

Exactly. Yes.

 

Mel Robbins (00:28:44):

Okay.

 

Ellen Langer (00:28:45):

Now a normal person just answers what letter is for me. I say, wait a second, this thing is rigged as you go down. They're creating the expectation from me that soon I'm not going to be able to see. I said, what would happen if we reverse the eye chart? Where now the letters get larger and larger, thereby changing my expectation to soon I'll be able to see. And when we do that, people can see what they couldn't see before. What? But just think about it. You go and you're reading letters that have no meaning.

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:18):

I'm sitting there looking at shapes. I'm like, is that an I or an H? A flip or a what? Is that a J or a J?

 

Ellen Langer (00:29:23):

Yeah, and it's in black and white. What does that have to do with the real world? I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I can see that restaurant sign very far in the distance. Colors are different from black and white. Things that are moving are different from things that are still, for me personally, I see best believe probably around 10, 11 o'clock in the morning

 

(00:29:45):

Rather than four o'clock in the afternoon. But that's not what happens. You go to the doctor, you can see for whatever reason you're given a prescription and then you put on glasses, which are now going to ensure that your eyes don't get better on their own. So we take the eye chart. Now, most people believe when you get about two thirds of the way down now you're not going to be able to see. So that's a mindset. So what we did, we started the eye chart a third of the way down. So now two thirds of holy constant, the two thirds part, but they're much smaller letters, and again, people could see what they couldn't see.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:19):

So you took away the big stuff, you started with the middle layer, and that tricked people into being like, oh, I can do the top layer.

 

Ellen Langer (00:30:26):

Exactly. So the whole point as you're getting to it is to recognize that who says you can't do it and you don't want to be able to do everything perfectly because then it's like playing tic-tac toe, tic-tac toe with a five-year-old. You're always going to win, but there's no there.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:45):

So based on the years of work, my mind is now I feel like I have popcorn popping in my brain as that's good. I'm grabbing onto these ideas and entertaining the possibility that I know nothing. Nobody knows anything, right? Nobody knows what's going to happen and how that's exciting, even though it used to be terrifying.

 

Ellen Langer (00:31:07):

But the reason we have to understand that it's exciting is because we don't have to be afraid of negative consequences because consequences in and of themselves are not good. They're not bad, they're just events. But when we frame them as awful, then we're going to experience them as awful. All you want is to constantly be inspired, excited, engaged in something, and when you're not sure, it's easy to become engaged. If you knew what I was going to say next, why listen to me,

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:39):

You have reading from your book page 53 of the mindful body.

 

Ellen Langer (00:31:44):

Ah, 53. Yes, I remember it well.

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:45):

You remember that, right? It's called Just try Harder. If we find that something is unpleasant to do, we may try to overcome the feeling and do it anyway. Given that the distaste is in our head and not in the task, thinking differently about it is likely to be more successful.

 

Ellen Langer (00:32:02):

So we have to get rid of the idea that there are good things and bad things. I like things, I hate people. I like people. I hate tastes that are good for us, bad for us. All of this is a function of our mindsets.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:18):

You did this incredible study that you ran at a hotel with housekeepers.

 

Ellen Langer (00:32:23):

Oh yeah. So this is the second study in testing the MINDBODY Unity idea.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:28):

Okay,

 

Ellen Langer (00:32:29):

So here we take housekeepers who first thing we do was ask them, how much exercise do you get? Now these are women cleaning hotel and motel rooms all day long. Oddly, they say they're not getting any exercise, and that's because they think exercise is what you do after work and after work they're just too tired. Okay, so now we take these women, divide 'em into two groups. One group we're going to teach them that they work is exercise. They're told working at the gym on this machine is making a bed, is working in the machine. We teach them that everything they're doing is in fact exercise. So very simple studies. We have two groups. One group that now knows their work is exercise. The other group that doesn't realize their work is exercise. We take hosts of measures before we start, and at the end, the two groups are not eating any differently. One group isn't working any harder. They're basically the same except one group believes their work is exercise. As a result of that change in mind, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down from changing their minds.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:40):

Why do you think that happens? Is there something about the lack of stress or judgment that shifts the chemical?

 

Ellen Langer (00:33:47):

There may be some explanation like that, but I believe that our minds and bodies are one, and if our mind is set to see what we're doing as something good for us, it'll generally be good for us.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:05):

I think that makes sense because if you see it as something bad for you, you're creating a stress response and resistance to it.

 

Ellen Langer (00:34:11):

And nothing itself is good or bad. So you can take anything. It just comes to mind. But it was just so ridiculous. But I remember doing something for somebody years ago and I thought I was being so generous and she was a very negative person and she thought it was grandiose, which I imagine that, I guess it was because most people wouldn't go to that length. So you can take anything, even this gesture that was coming from kindness and make it into something negative and you could take negative, it doesn't reside in the thing.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:47):

Got It. It resides in that,

 

Ellen Langer (00:34:48):

In the way we appreciate or show a lack of appreciation for the thing.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:53):

Well, there's really interesting research about optimism and pessimism.

 

Ellen Langer (00:34:56):

Yeah, because when you're optimistic, you're more mindful. When you're optimistic, you interact with people, you're not afraid of people, you're expecting good things. So you're out there in the world being, when you're pessimistic, you cut yourself off more or less. You see everything is negative.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:12):

You're bracing for the worst to happen instead of saying,

 

Ellen Langer (00:35:14):

And that's very important. You have these people who are called defensive pessimists, so they're always prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. But hope is interesting. Talk to me about hope. Okay, I love language, so hope sounds good, right? Hope is certainly better than being hopeless.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:35):

Yes.

 

Ellen Langer (00:35:35):

But when I get up in the morning and I go into the kitchen, I don't hope there's going to be coffee. So again, hope also has built into it a negative expectation. I know that there's going to be, and if it turns out there isn't, all right, so what I'll deal with it, but to believe in all these negative things is a burden. So the defensive pessimist, you see, when you recognize that things in and of themselves are neither positive or negative, when you're defensively pessimistic, you're seeing the negative and that's going to have an effect on you. And those things could have just as easily been seen otherwise.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:15):

Why is it important to believe that things turn out even when you're in a moment in your life? You know what I mean? Where things are really, because I'm sure that there are people that are not that look at the surface takeaways of your work. You're like, ah, toxic positivity, think positive, think positive think. But that's not what you're saying.

 

Ellen Langer (00:36:38):

No, not at all. That follows some of the positivity follows from what I'm saying, but it's certainly not the major message.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:46):

And the thing that came to mind, and I don't know if this is a good example, is the number, the trend and the number of people that are in their twenties and thirties that I hear saying, well, based on climate change and based on this and based on that, I don't know if I'm going to have kids. I don't know if I want to. And so I can hear the rigidity in that absolute statement.

 

Ellen Langer (00:37:14):

Yeah, you can't know. You think you can know. People don't realize that prediction is an illusion. We don't know. So an example, say Michael Jordan and I are going to have a shooting contest, so you'd put your money on Michael Jordan, but if we are going to shoot a hundred baskets, surely he'd win. If we can shoot one basket, is he going to win? He sometimes misses. I sometimes make it also, what if he said to himself, let the old woman win. What is it going to cost him? There are so many ways of understanding how I could make that basket. You can't predict what's going to happen. Remember, as I said before, science only gives us probabilities. So when I had this medicine that I've given to hundreds of people to test the efficacy of the medicine, it's not the case that it works for every single person there.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:08):

In the example of the basketball, what I find exciting about that example

 

Ellen Langer (00:38:12):

Is that I won.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:13):

Yes, anything could happen, anything could happen. Oftentimes it doesn't, but anything could happen. And what I'm starting to really,

 

Ellen Langer (00:38:21):

And it doesn't matter, that's what people have to understand. You engage in it in order to hopefully bring about some event, but if you're doing it mindfully, you're enjoying the journey anyway.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:36):

Based on your many years of work, are there other studies that you love that are less talked about that you think are important for us to know about that the results were exciting to you in the MINDBODY unity?

 

Ellen Langer (00:38:50):

Well, in MINDBODY Unity, the most recent that my graduate student Peter and uncle and I recently did, so we inflict a wound, not a big wound because we're not sadist and the higher ups wouldn't let us do it anyway. We were okay, but we inflict a minor wound and individually the person, the wounded person is in front of a clock and unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged and it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time or real time. The question we're asking is, does that wound heal based on clock time, perceived time? Well real time. And the answer is perceived time. Just think about it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:31):

Well, hold on, let me just ask. So that means that the person who's watching the clock that is sped up, meaning their perception of time is that time is passing quickly. Oh, two hours just went by.

 

Ellen Langer (00:39:42):

Yeah, that they'll heal more quickly.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:44):

And you're measuring the body response physically.

 

Ellen Langer (00:39:48):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:48):

That physically your healing mechanism speeds up because,

 

Ellen Langer (00:39:52):

Yeah, well just think about it that when you ask a doctor, say you break your arm and you ask the doctor, how long is it going to take to heal? I don't know how long this takes, but let's make it up. Let's five weeks, six weeks. I dunno. Which one do you want? Let's suppose take the average

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:06):

Six. Sounds horrible.

 

Ellen Langer (00:40:07):

Okay, you want six? Okay, we'll take five because I'm in charge now. Okay. No, so the doctor tells you it's going to take five weeks to heal. You can't possibly believe that everybody who's broken their arm is going to take five weeks to heal. If somebody is an Olympic athlete and somebody else is a couch potato, it doesn't feel like they're both going to. So what is determining who heals more quickly? There's always some give, and what we do is we align ourselves with this absolute and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

(00:40:42):

We did, we did so many of these mind-body studies, a study on diabetes. We take people who have type two diabetes, we give them a host of tests. We are now going to have 'em sit in front of a computer and we're asking them to play computer games. This will be clear in a moment, and there's a clock next to I'm big on clocks, a clock next to the computer, and we tell them, we want you to change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. So they have to look at that clock. The clock is rigged. So if for a third of them the clock is going twice as fast as real time for a third, they're going half as fast and for a third it's real time. Then we assess their blood sugar level. Blood sugar level follows perceived amount of time, not real time, whatever that is, because the mind and body are a single unit.

 

Mel Robbins (00:41:39):

Huh, that's amazing.

 

Ellen Langer (00:41:42):

Let me tell you a story about something that happened recent, recently that people are going to get crazed with this, but that's part of the reason I'm telling it. Okay, so my partner and I are leaving Mexico. We had this giant armi. She steps on the shelf of the giant arm war because she wants to see if there's anything that she put on top to hide the armi now forces her to the floor, knocks her head onto the concrete floor, okay? She's trapped by this armoire that weighs twice what I weigh. Okay. If I hadn't been there, she would've bled to death. Okay? So it's imperative. I have to lift this thing that weighs twice what I weigh and I'm able to lift it enough for her to get out from under. Now when I tell this story that it's not yay me, that people say, oh, it's the adrenaline.

 

(00:42:38):

It drives me crazy as if adrenaline has a mind of it. Oh, adrenaline, please come. I need you now. It's all one thing. My adrenaline, my biceps, my fingers, everything. It's all one thing. Working in a coordinated way to accomplish what needed to be accomplished. When we get fooled into, in my view, mind body dualism, then somehow it's my mind and my body. They're separate and I have to figure out how to organize them. And we give up a lot of control. A very important example that's out there, not our research, well, some of our research, but earlier is on the placebo. Just everybody accepts that a placebo is effective. I think it's our most effective medicine. So what's going on? You take this nothing. You think it's something and then it acts like something. In fact, the chamber made study that we talked about is a no sibo, which most people don't understand. What is most people? Most people is you do something but you think it's nothing and it wipes out the effect. So they're getting the exercise, but they don't realize that it's exercise, and so it doesn't have the effect. So we can bring it about, we can make it disappear, we can control, we have over our health and wellbeing is enormous. You add that to what I was saying before about everything that is was at one time a decision, which means it's mutable. Everything can be changed. If something doesn't work, change it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:13):

The super interesting thing that you said about the placebo,

 

Ellen Langer (00:44:17):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:18):

Is that that is a concrete example

 

Ellen Langer (00:44:21):

Of mind body, unity

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:22):

Of mind, body unity.

 

Ellen Langer (00:44:23):

Yes, exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:24):

And simply believing that it's working physically made it work in study after study after study.

 

Ellen Langer (00:44:30):

But you know what happened is that placebos get a bad rap because if somebody gets better with a placebo, it says, no, no. The pain was real as if we have a mind and a body, and that body was really experiencing pain, and now all you've done is screwed around with my mind. It's one thing.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:47):

You also can't sell the drug, the placebo works.

 

Ellen Langer (00:44:49):

What I want to say, that's in my view, the reason that placebos get a bad rap. If you are part of a pharmaceutical company, you have to do a trial with real medication and a placebo. And in order to bring this drug to market to make billions of dollars, that drug has to outperform the sugar pill, the placebo. You're not rooting for the placebo. And nevertheless, even when it does outperform, the difference is often small. So many people getting help just by this sugar pill. And then when you say to people, look, if it's not the pill that's making you better, what's making you better? We're making ourselves better.

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:32):

I mean, you can't give yourself a sugar bill because you know it's fake. But what you're saying, Dr. Langer, if you want to apply this research to your life, you're saying that if you have a daunting condition that makes you feel like you're at the effect of it, whether it's depression or ms, which you've mentioned, or some other condition that you can use, the mindfulness self-awareness and noticing that you're talking about that it's been proven in studies, simply notice your symptoms. Ask yourself why you may feel better or worse. Just doing that over the course of time based on the studies, can decrease the symptoms that you feel and make you feel physically healthy. That's incredible. Do not discount the power of the mind body unity and your own thoughts and beliefs. In fact, you have done remarkable work challenging the language that healthcare professionals use because it does matter based on the research. Yeah. So how should you talk differently about your health? Can you share about some of that?

 

Ellen Langer (00:46:34):

Yeah. Well, one of the things that bothered me is when people have cancer and then the cancer is gone and the medical world tells you it's in remission. Now, that was fine years ago, decades ago, before we knew that stress was crucial to one's physical health. And the reason for that is that when you're told it's in remission, you're happier than it's active.

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:04):

It's true, but it sounds like it's going to come back.

Mel Robbins (00:47:20):

Which also compromises your immune system if you're stressed, embracing because you're only in remission.

 

Ellen Langer (00:47:26):

I think stress is, and we'll talk right after this, stress, I think some things people might find interesting, but in this case here, we have a person who doesn't have cancer. So it started from me as most of my things in real life. I go to visit my friend, my friend Eva, she has a terrible case of cancer. I go see her and she had just come back from Mass General. I said, how are you? She said, her cancer's in remission. And then the bell went off, wait a second. If I took the exact same test, presumably they'd tell me, I don't have cancer. Why is it you have it in remission? And so then I spent a lot of time thinking about, again, things go from bad to better, but there's a better than better way that we keep overlooking. And I likened it to a cold.

 

(00:48:15):

So you get a cold and then the cold is gone. You don't say the cold is in remission. And then when you get the next cold, it's seen as a brand new cold. It's less scary because you beat all those that came before it. So you're in remission. If cancer comes back in some ways just as a cold, it'll be the same kind of cancer, cold as a, but just as certainly if it comes back, it will be different. Everything is both same and different. I'll see you tomorrow. I'm the same person. I'm also a different person. And so reasonably you can see the cancer as cured or in remission when we see it as cured. We go about living our lives. We become more mindful, open, happy, successful, enjoying ourselves, probably even better than we did before we had cancer, because all of a sudden we realize life doesn't go on endlessly. So let me make the moments matter and the moments can't matter. If you're mindless,

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:17):

Based on all this research on the mind body, unity, what would you recommend we say if you have been diagnosed with cancer and then you just cure it? Don't use the word remission.

 

Ellen Langer (00:49:32):

Well, I think that if the medical world tells you you're in remission, you should remember what I'm saying now.

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:41):

But what would you say instead?

 

Ellen Langer (00:49:42):

I would say you're cured.

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:43):

Great.

 

Ellen Langer (00:49:44):

If you're cured from a cold, doesn't mean you won't get another cold.

 

Mel Robbins (00:49:48):

Well, and I think it's important because the language matters. And you talked about stress, that if you are in remission, you are bracing for five years. It is in the back of your mind. Exactly. Which means you're activating the stress response medically speaking.

 

Ellen Langer (00:50:02):

Exactly. Stress. Now, Mel, I believe, so everything I've said so far is based on hard research. I don't have the research for this particular statement. Nevertheless, I believe it as fully as one can and still be mindful.

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:15):

I agree with you,

 

Ellen Langer (00:50:15):

Which is stress is our major killer. I was going to do this study years before COVID with people in China, and it just didn't happen. Where we take people who are diagnosed with cancer to hundreds of people, different kinds of cancer, and anybody who's just told they have cancer is not going to be a happy camper. Everybody's going to be stressed and unhappy. So let's give them three weeks to adjust to it. And then after three weeks, we measure them once a month. How stressed are they? I believe that that degree of stress will predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, nutrition, and even treatment.

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:56):

Well, isn't that because stress impacts your immune system?

 

Ellen Langer (00:50:59):

Everything and not just everything on any level as impacting everything simultaneously. Okay, so now add that to what I said before is that events don't cause stress. What causes stress are views of events. So we can control stress. If stress is a major killer, then clearly learning now. So let me give you a couple of one-liners for people

(00:52:31):

And so I taught them this procedure essentially. And then I said to them to see if they understood it. Okay, so let's say the doctor tells you the surgery has to be delayed, so you have to spend another few days in the hospital. The people who think they got it but didn't would say, it's all right, I'll tolerate it. No, it's a good thing. So what are the advantage to my being in the hospital? Somebody else is controlling all that I'm eating. I won't get a million phone calls in the middle of the night. I have more time to myself. I can read. I can watch whatever movies I want to watch. It's delightful. Okay, so now you tell me I have to spend three more days in the hospital. That's great. More reading, more relaxing, more dieting and so on. And so we would go through it again until they finally got it. And when they did, the surgeries went better. They needed fewer sedatives and pain relievers

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:32):

Because they were relaxed and just in flow.

 

Ellen Langer (00:53:35):

Exactly. And even with respect to chronic illnesses, which I have a lot of information on in the book as you recall, where you're given a diagnosis of a chronic illness and what that means to people is nothing I can do about it. This is going to stay the same or get worse. And all it means the word chronic means is the medical world doesn't have a solution yet. It doesn't mean that there aren't solutions. So we did some research where I take people who have all sorts of chronic illnesses and you recognize no symptom stays the same, and nothing always moves in one direction. It's not. It gets bad and worse and worse with the stock market, if the stock market is going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up, down, a little, up down, and we draw a line through all those curves. It's tending to go up. Same thing with any of our symptoms, but people hold it still and think it's just getting worse because you get whatever you're looking for. That's why I said before, don't be a pessimist. Because if you're looking for negative, you're going to find negative. If you're looking for positive, just look without the evaluation. At any rate, we did a lot of studies on what I call attention to symptom variability. It's a mouthful. It just means being mindful. Being mindful is noticing. Change attention to the changing of your symptoms. So we call people periodically throughout the day, throughout the week

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:04):

Who have a chronic illness,

 

Ellen Langer (00:55:05):

Who have a chronic illness,

 

(00:55:06):

And we simply ask them, how is the symptom now? And is it better or worse than the last time I called? And why? And that's the crucial question. Okay, so what happens now? First, most of us when we have chronic illnesses, feel helpless and awaiting, especially for what's the next thing the medical world is going to give. So now all of a sudden we're doing something for ourselves that feels good. Now when we are noticing the symptoms and we see it got a little better, that feels good. We thought it was only moving in one direction. Now when we ask the question, why did it feel better or even worse, from the moment before that engages in a mindful search and that mindfulness is good for our health, the neurons are firing. It's good for us, even if it doesn't tell us what the actual cause is of the symptom changing. And I believe that you're going to be more likely to find a solution if you're actually looking for one. So we do all this,

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:08):

Even just the working of it's not gotten better, but this is the reason why

 

Ellen Langer (00:56:12):

It could be stress. People who are stressed think they're stressed all the time. Nobody has anything all the time. So I call you periodically. How stressed are you now? Give me a number. I call you later. How stressed are you now you're less stressed and why you pay some time and then you find out, Mel, that you're maximally stressed when you're talking to Ellen in lard. The solution is simple to me. Don't talk to Helen Langer or talk to me differently. But the point is,

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:38):

I feel more in control if I see that

 

Ellen Langer (00:56:40):

Everything varies. So now we did this with people who have multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, Parkinson's, stroke, I mean biggies. And across the board people are helped by it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:57):

That's so fascinating. Earlier you mentioned the word fight cancer. I'm going to fight cancer. What would you recommend we say instead, in order to use the mind body bent like unity to our advantage?

 

Ellen Langer (00:57:12):

I think that, I don't the medical world would like this, but to even call it cancer is a best guess to understand that when we're given prognosis, again, those are probabilities, best guesses. And what I would do is think of all the ways I'm different from other people.

 

(00:57:32):

And so those numbers may not rely on me, may not speak to me. I mean, I myself live a basically stress-free life. And so if you tell me that if I do X, Y, and Z, I'm going to get sick, I would say, well, who are the people in those studies? How similar am I to them? And even if I were completely similar, only a certain proportion of them follow this way. We just don't know. But the most important thing is that people, as I do a lot of research, as with older adults and people are now creed, I mean my friends with everything to live longer. And I think it's a mistake. I think rather than add more years to your life, what you want to do is add more life to your years. And that will probably extend your life and that's what you want to do.

 

(00:58:28):

And each of these, if let's I get people calling me and they say, they told me I had six months to live. I said, I can't tell you what to do. All I can tell you is if I thought I only had six months to do, first thing I'd have is a hot fudge sundae, then I do. You want to not waste any of the moments? The good thing is that all of those mindful activities are the neurons are firing and it turns out that itself is good for your health. So when you're having fun, it's good for your health and it feels good, obviously.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:02):

I love that because you just reverse the prescription that most people are saying that if you put more life into your years now by applying the mindfulness strategies that you're talking about of not knowing,

 

Ellen Langer (00:59:13):

You'll probably live longer.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:14):

Yeah, you'll probably live longer because you're infusing positive thoughts.