Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible
powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole healed and connected.

Shay Beider Hello, dear listeners. Welcome to a wonderful episode of The Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider. Today we’re joined by the mother of mindfulness, Ellen Langer. Dr. Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard where she was the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology. She’s the author of 11 books, including the International Bestseller Mindfulness. Her trailblazing experiments in Social Psychology have earned her inclusion in the New York Times magazine’s year and Ideas issue, and she has received many awards including three Distinguished Scientists Awards and the Liberty Science Genius Award. Today, Ellen and I share insightful conversation about the relationship between the mind and body and her mind body unity theory that has truly huge implications for health and wellness. We discuss key highlights from her extensive body of research and how her findings transform our understanding of how we actually heal. By tapping into the power of the mind, we have the capacity to better comprehend and respond to the behaviors of those around us. I think this conversation will inspire you to think very deeply about the power of your own mind and how you can consciously transform your thoughts and language to create greater joy, happiness, and health in your day to day. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, and I’m excited to hear what you think.

So let’s get the conversation started.

Well, Ellen, first and foremost, I want to thank you so much for doing the conversations on Healing podcasts. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Ellen Langer Thank you, and it’s my pleasure.

Shay So I know you are a pro and you’ve done a ton of podcasts and your work is just incredibly well known. And I was joking that so many of your studies, I was already aware of them before I even knew they were your studies because they’re just so seminal, you know. There’s studies that have changed the way we all think and act, and then a number of studies that went after them. And I know at this stage in your life and in your career that one of the things that’s most important to you is to help people to shift from a place of suffering into a place of happiness. And so I actually want to start there because we’re going to dive into the research where you get into a lot of fun areas, but I actually want you to begin by sharing why that is so important to you to help people make that shift.

Ellen Sure. Well, it just seems unfair that I should be happy, stress-free virtually all of the time. And I mean that, although it sounds silly, I was very fortunate. I was brought up by very loving, nurturing parents. And even since I was a little girl, people would be upset and I’d say, well, why don’t you look at it this way? And of course, my explanations hopefully became more sophisticated as I got older, but it’s just been something that has been with me all my life. And each book I write, please just listen. It’s not that hard. And then with this book in particular starts off, it started off as a memoir, so there are a lot of personal stories in it and then became what it is today.

Shay This is your most recent book, the Mindful Body that you’ve referenced?

Ellen Yes. The Mindful Body yeah . Was my mother had breast cancer and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. And as you may know, that’s the end game. And then magically it was gone and the medical world couldn’t explain it. And so that was at the beginning of my career and essentially until the mindful Body, I wasn’t able to explain it. But now I think I can.

Shay I just want to say that two things about the book are really beautiful because it started as a memoir. Your life experiences are woven throughout the entire book, the Mindful Body, but also at the same time, it does have a lot of your research and what you learn as an academic. So it’s a very interesting combination between the two.

Ellen Yeah, I think it’s more available than some of my other books because of these personal stories where I illustrate with things in my own life how this or that may be true because some of the things I’m talking about are very different from what most people assume to be the case. But I started to talk about this mind body unity, which can explain spontaneous remissions. People have been brought up to believe there’s a mind, there’s a body. And that’s held back research for quite some time because researchers have never been able to figure out how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body. And I spent years thinking about this mind body, where does this come from? These are just words. So even if just for useful purposes let’s the mind and body back together see it as a single unit. And then wherever you’re putting the mind, you’re necessarily putting the body. And so then decades worth of research have been testing this idea by putting the mind in strange places, taking the measurements from the body and study after study supports this idea.

Shay Yeah, and I definitely want to talk about the mind body unity with you and certainly the story of what happened with your mother is a very good illustration of that. I think if you would like to share a little bit about what happened when she went into this spontaneous remission, but then how the world around her kind of still held her in a place of.

Ellen Yeah. I think you just explained it beautifully that because it was expected by the hospital that she was going to die, she was treated as a dying person, which meant that her limbs weren’t exercised. She wasn’t encouraged to take care of herself, so to speak. And so then once the cancer left, she was now confined to a wheelchair, which it’s hard if you’re not used to being in a wheelchair to see yourself as healthy, even though the cancer is gone. And the people around her when she left the hospital to go home, we’re still treating her as, oh, poor. They didn’t believe that the cancer was gone. And so it’s like the world around her conspired to keep her in this sick mindset. Eventually cancer came back. But this is interesting also, I think because some people like to think that her cancer was in remission.

And then it came back and I spend time and have done research on the difference between remission and cure. And it’s very, very important because when you get a diagnosis of in remission, especially for something like breast cancer, the medical world almost arbitrarily has you wait five years before you can breathe a sigh of relief and say that you’re cured. And that five years is in fact based on very little. Now when you have a cold and the cold goes away, you don’t see yourself as in remission, you see yourself as cured. And if you get another cold, which after you’re 30 years old, you’re probably going to have many of these. You don’t see it as the same cold. Now all colds are the same in some way, which is why we called them colds, but just as certainly each one is different from the last one. And so too with cancer, so if you have cancer and the cancer goes away, you should see yourself as cured if cancer should return, it’s in some ways the same cancer as with the cold, but just as reasonable to see yourself as cured. Now, when you see yourself as cured, you act differently. In this world, you do things that actually promote your health, you stand toll, you engage in activities, you mindfully spend your hours in the day. When you see yourself as sick, your posture, everything changes and you’re not doing those things that in fact promote healing so that even if the cancer were to come back, you’re stronger now than you would have been if you had just seen it as in remission. So we did a simple little study where we saw people who were on a breast cancer awareness walk, and we asked them how they saw their cancer, if they saw it as in remission or cured.

And then we followed up at a later time, and it turned out that those people who saw themselves as cured saw themselves as happier, healthier on every measure we took. They were in a better place. So I think that it’s one of those things where almost the medical world doesn’t want to be blamed in some sense if it comes back. So it’s safer for them to give you the more negative understanding. Years and years ago, the medical world used to follow what was called the hanging crepe philosophy. When people dying black crepe was placed around the bed and it continued after they stopped using the black crepe. Essentially the idea was that if you tell somebody that they’re going to live and they die, you’re faced with lawsuits, right? You said you was going to be okay, right? If on the other hand, you told somebody that they were going to die and they lived, everybody is excited and nobody is going to sue anybody.

Now, that was a reasonable thing perhaps to do way back when before we knew that much of our health becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning that if you see yourself as sick, you do sick sort of things, you cut yourself off from those behaviors, ways of being that actually could promote health. So I think that it’s outlived its usefulness, and I think people need to recognize that nobody knows. Nobody can tell anybody how long they have to live, right?

Absolutely. And I think that, and so many people spend so much time trying to add more years to their lives, and I think everybody would be better off trying to add more life to your years. And in doing that, our research shows that we make people more mindful, they live longer. So in doing that, you actually are promoting your own health.

Shay Right? And I want to put in context the ideas that you’re putting forward, like this concept of mind body unity. Obviously this  has come out of your work. You’re a professor of psychology, you were the first woman that was tenured in psychology at Harvard, you’re often referred to as the mother of mindfulness, which you describe as noticing.

Ellen People need to understand because when they hear the word mindful, they think of meditation. And meditation isn’t mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you engage in to result in post meditative mindfulness. Alright, mindfulness as we study it is just a different process here. It’s not a practice, it’s a way of being. And all you need to do is notice. Now the problem is everything in our culture has erroneously taught us to think we know. And when you know something, you don’t pay any time looking at it trying to figure it out. You already know it. My whole life changed many years ago when I was at this horse event, and this man asked me, well, I watch his horse for
him because he was going to go get his horse a hot dog. Well, I’m a straight A student, the one you hated in class. So I knew it’s ridiculous.

Horses are herbivores, they don’t eat meat. I can’t tell you how happy I wish he came back and his horse ate the hot dog because at that moment I realized everything I think I know could be wrong. Now why does that make me happy? It made me happy because so much of what I knew and had been taught were about limits to what we can do, what we can achieve. It was about the way to do this or that in absolute fashion. And all of that needed to be questioned. And that’s what my work has done for all of this time, is to question the things that people seem to just take for granted. The idea is when you know don’t know, you pay attention. If your listeners knew what I was going to
say next, why would they listen? Right So we are brought up by our parents, teachers, most institutions to teach us absolutes. And those absolutes are wrong. Nothing is known for sure. Certainty is the rule, not the exception.

And so people think that they should know, I’m freeing everybody. Now. You shouldn’t know. You can’t know. Everything is changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And so there are some people who believe that others know. And so again, I’m here to tell you no, they don’t know either. So rather than pretend you know, enjoy the fact, the possibility of finding some new way of looking at something, and that itself will change over time. So the way we want to be in this world to be the healthiest, I believe, is to be confident but uncertain, the confidence is a function of our interests in our knowing that nothing is too difficult for us to try to achieve and so on.

Shay It’s interesting in I think one of the things you do very well in the book, the mindful body, is you push limits. Just like you’re describing, a lot of it is challenging our very limited belief systems. Systems and psychological boundaries. And in fact, I was thinking about when you were saying about rules, the way you begin the book in chapter one is you write rules are important, but in my view, they should guide, not govern our behavior.

Ellen When anything is governing our behavior or acting like robots, we’re assuming that what we were told to do was perhaps handed down from the heaven. Now, when I talk about this in person, I often look in the audience and see is there a very tall guy there? And for some reason there always is. So I asked this six foot five person to come on stage with me. Now I’m five three, he’s six five. We look ridiculous together. I asked him to hold his hand up. I put mine next to it. His hand is three inches bigger than mine. And I simply raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? And of course the answer is no. But when we’re taught how to hold a tennis racket at a golf club, how to do anything physical, we’re given one set of rules. So the point is that the more different you are from the person who created these rules, the more important it is for you to deviate from them. So we should take all of the ways we’re told to do things as possibilities, as suggestions, and then find our own way.

Shay And when you think about it in terms of medical diagnoses, and you mentioned this a number of times in different variations and forms in the book, if we didn’t take it all so darn seriously and hold it with such rigidity and even held a medical diagnosis as something that is in some ways still a possibility, right? A study on diabetes I thought really illustrated that beautifully. The pre-diabetic, you want to speak to that?

Ellen Well, the first thing I want to say is that much of medicine and virtually all, is based on research. Now, what people don’t realize is experiments, whether they’re psychology, biology, medical, no matter what, only give us probabilities. It says that if we were to do this exact same thing, we’re likely to get this finding. All right? So those probabilities, those mays are passed on in medical books and newspapers, people talk about them as absolutes.

We’re back to horses, don’t eat meat. And when you recognize that the diagnosis you have is maybe you feel very different about it, I think that you are more willing to try different things to see it as maybe what they’re saying will happen won’t happen for me. Maybe I can control it. Even things like chronic illnesses where people understand chronic to mean you have no control. All the chronic means in that context is that the medical world doesn’t have an answer. And although I don’t have data for this, I feel fairly confident that if whatever was wrong with you, you made everything else about yourself strong, you’d be in a better position to deal with it. If you said, we said covid, initially there was no cure for covid. And imagine you had an Olympic athlete or a couch potato. And the couch potato, let’s make it even worse, is eating candy, watching television all day long and doing nothing. And while the Olympic athlete is that okay, and if they were both exposed to covid, I don’t think they would be equally likely to get it. But if they did both get it, my bet would be on the Olympic athlete as being able to have an easier time with it and get through it faster. So there are always things that we can do. Now, what you want me to talk about is what I call the borderline effect.

And this is indirect support for the MIND BODY unity idea. So everybody knows this some point where everything changes, right? This donut, you’re not allowed to sell it on February 1st. And so the night before January 31st at 11:55, the donut is good, and five minutes later the donut is bad for you because the expiration date is good. Exactly. So we all know that these things are arbitrary. Now, and another example, let’s say that you and I both took an IQ test and I got a 69 on it and you got a 70. Well, you’d be in the normal range.

I would not be, but no one in their right mind would believe there’s a meaningful difference between 69 and 70. I could have sneezed misread the question, whatever. All right? Nevertheless, once we’re put in those two different categories, I’m cognitively challenged your normal, I would bet five months from now there are going to be very real differences between us.

So it’s the same thing for all disease. They give you tests, the tests, there’s somebody at that borderline who just above it and they have the disease, somebody just below it and they don’t have it. And so we find this with diabetes, it should be true for virtually everything. Now what happens? So some are given the diagnosis, some not over time, those who are given the diagnosis, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the point, there’s a time one medically ever, same statistically ever same, but they think of themselves as different. And the difference reveals itself. You sort imagine you took a test in the school and you got an 89, well make me the hero now and I got an 90 ha ha, I get the A. You get a B. You know, I mean

Shay A very subtle difference.

Ellen Yeah, if that continues, I’m going to Harvard and you’re probably not, but we were the same. It’s not fair in some sense. So the point of it here is just for people to realize that even a diagnosis doesn’t come with the certainty that the Dr. may use when telling you you have it or the certainty we deduce from whatever the medical world is feeding us.

Shay Right? Exactly. Yeah. That perception is such an important part of this whole dance. I think the other piece I want to tie into this is something that you discuss in the book is this idea of mindful contagion. I think I want you first to explain what that is and what that means because I think there’s also implications in other areas.

Ellen Sure, for sure. But it’s funny because I have the whole book has very into my mind, very important, immediately applicable research in it. And then I have this chapter, it used to be called the Woo chapter before I published it, which was these things are, they seem strange and crazy. I found them to be true. I’m not going to bet my career on them, but still I thought it was important to add them.

So this mindful contagion is one of those. So the idea is if I’m mindful and we’re together, it’s going to in some sense rub off on you. Now we have lots of research and there are many ways of explaining this, but if you take, we take on kids who are autistic and we have them interviewed by somebody who’s either mindful or mindless when the child is interviewed by somebody mindful the child behaves more in a more normal fashion, people who are heavy drinkers and lots of people who drink drink because of other people’s mindlessness.

I mean there’s something that doesn’t feel good or they’re stressed and the drink relieves them of that. So we have them in a wine testing tasting experiment and they’re told, you can drink as much as you want. We just want you to know your opinion about each of these different wines. And the experimenter is either mindful or mindless. Well, it turns out when the experimenter is mindless, people drink more. Okay? So those are some direct effects. The ones that were really bizarre that we found is just being in the presence of somebody who is mindful has a positive effect on us. And so one of the advantages of this is that we don’t have to make a whole organization, a whole school, a whole community mindful we get a certain number and it will spread. And just sort of think when you’re talking to somebody who’s mindful and they’re being mindful means they’re not going to be evaluative because they understand everything from so many different perspectives and they’re likely to be kind and all the other things we want from people.

So then we relax and we then ourselves become more mindful. People need to understand why it is that if you’re mindful, you become non-evaluative. It’s not the same thing as with meditation, because I still don’t understand how that leads you to be less evaluative here it’s a very simple thing. Behavior makes sense from the actor’s perspective or else the actor wouldn’t do it. So if you ask yourself, why is he doing this or that, if you’re mindful, you’re going to come up with positive answers. So just for example, I am very, very gullible and you, Shea, you are so inconsistent. It’s crazy making. Now, if you wanted me to be less gullible, telling me to stop being gullible is not going to change my behavior because from my perspective, I’m being trusting. If I want you to stop being so inconsistent and I tell you, don’t be inconsistent, it’s not going to affect your behavior because what you are being is flexible.

Alright? So if you want to change your own behavior or anybody else’s behavior, you have to change it from the perspective in which it’s engaged. Get me to stop valuing, being trusting. And if you can do that, I will magically become less gullible. And if I want you to stop being so inconsistent, I have to get you to stop valuing, being flexible. And so first thing your listeners will hear is, Hey, I like you to be flexible, and Ellen, it’s good for you to be trusting. So our relationships would necessarily improve. The larger point is that for every single negative characterization we have for people’s behavior, there’s an equally strong but positive alternative understanding. And the more mindful you are, the more ways you have available to see everything.

Shay I think it would be interesting to talk a little bit about in your own life what you’ve learned from healing. And you had an accident that was pretty significant where it sounds like your ankle was really crushed and smashed. Yeah, very interesting story.

Ellen The thing about this that was so funny is as mindful as I try to be, I don’t always pay attention to what the medical people are telling me. And so I was told, but I only had a vague memory of this that I would never walk without a limp. So not realizing I’m supposed to wimp, I don’t limp, I’m a regular tennis player and so on. Also that when the medical world tells us, usually if you smash your ankle, you’d probably ask the physician, how long will it take for this to heal? Now what they give you tends to be the far end, okay? And what they’re doing is setting up expectations for your healing. So the wound study that it’s the most recent of the mind body studies we’ve done says this is the one

Shay This is the one published in nature?

Ellen Yeah, yeah. That doctors should be giving us very different information about healing from what they give. So what we did in this study is we create a wound and it’s not a gigantic wound because we’re not sadist and whatever, but it’s a wound and people are in front of a clock. Unbeknownst to them the clock is going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time or if a clock is set at real time. So then the question is how long does it take to heal?

Now most people think it takes as long as it takes, so whatever the real clock is. However, healing varied with perceived time. So when the clock was going fast and they thought that’s how long it’s actually taking, it healed faster. And we have several, so-called clock studies. We have people who have type two diabetes, they come into the lab, we give them all sorts of tests.

Then for reasons that’ll become clear in a moment, we have them sit down at a computer and they’re going to play computer games and we tell them, we want you to change the game you’re playing every 15 minutes or so. And that will ensure that they look at the clock. And again, for a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast, a third, twice as fast, a third real time. And here the question we were asking was, would blood sugar level follow real or perceived?

And again, the answer is perceived time. And the study you were talking about, we have people, and this is the last of the clock studies, we have people in a sleep lab, they go to sleep, they wake up, they see a clock unbeknownst to them, we fooled around with that clock. So for a third of the people, they think they got two hours fewer sleep than they got two hours more sleep than they got or the amount that they actually got.

Biological and cognitive functions follow perceived sleep. Another important test of this mind body unity theory comes from fatigue. People again think the body can only take so much and when he gets tired, it gets tired. And the little thought experiment might be, imagine somebody who’s he is word processing the computer all day long, his shoulders hurt, his arms hurt, and he’s exhausted. He goes home and now he plays the piano. All right? And the point is when you change the context, all of a sudden you have renewed energy. So there was a wonderful study that I’ve been talking about lately that Frank Beach did in the fifties. So he takes a little boy rat and introduces a little girl rep. So they copulate. Then the little boy rat can’t take anymore. He’s fatigued, he needs a refractory period. Unless you immediately interchange the context and introduce a new little girl rep, then he doesn’t need that refractory period.

I don’t know if what I’m saying is clear. We have people doing jumping jacks, this is the simplest, and we say they’re going to do a hundred. Tell us when you’re tired. They get tired at around 70. And we take another group of people, we say, do 200 jumping jacks tell us when you’re tired. They get tired at 140. All right? We are controlling the degree of fatigue that we experience as every time you change the context, you have renewed energy. And I say to my Harvard class, A health class, I teach, how far is it humanly possible to run before fatigue just becomes overwhelming. So these are Harvard kids, they know it has to be more than 26 miles a marathon, and it becomes like an auction 30, 35. They never get past 50. And when the person who’s yells at 50, everybody groans, right? You can run 50 miles. Then I play them a video of the ura who are a tribe in Copper Canyon in Mexico. And without stopping, these people are able to run more than 200 miles. And the reason I mention it here is that the difference between 26 50 make it whatever you want and 200 is enormous. And that’s the same difference metaphorically between where we are and where I believe we can be with almost everything that we do.

I spend a lot of time in the book as I’m sure talking about language in fun ways. So you have, let’s say somebody can’t do something and the mother or teacher, I’ll say, oh yeah, try it, try it. And sometimes the person does a little better, but trying has built into it the possibility of failing. You wouldn’t give somebody an ice cream cone and say, try to eat it. I was told later, but this is the Yodas study that, so we have people try versus do it. And when they do it where they’re bypassing all the possibility, all the ways it can go wrong, they almost always outperform. So and if you think you can’t do something, it’s good that psychologists professionals have gotten you to the point of thinking, well, I can do it a little.

And what I’m here to say is no, you can do far more.

Shay Right and I think obviously a good illustration, which you’ve also raised in conversation is the placebo effect, right?  Yeah. It’s a good example of how much mental capacity we

Ellen Yeah, and it’s so funny Shay, that everybody, because it’s been around for so long, everybody accepts the placebo effect. But yet when I talk about mind body unity, well this is new, but all the placebo effect says is that your beliefs matter and they matter with respect to everything and chronic illnesses included. So you take a pill, if it’s a placebo, it’s by definition inert. It’s a sugar pill, it’s not going to do anything. But if you think it’s going to
do something, typically it does something. So then if you said to yourself, if you knew it was a placebo, if I got better and it wasn’t the pill who made me better, I made myself better. And that’s what all of my work over all these many decades has been about how to get people to exert the control that we have over our health and wellbeing.

Shay Right, and I think what you’ve started to identify in your book and in your work is that there’s a number of ways we can do that. First, it’s understanding that we have that power and capacity, but then there’s actually tools that you can utilize. So some of it is you’ve already identified in our conversation the language that you use. Don’t use the word try or remission

Ellen Or remission definition.

Shay Right? Yeah, exactly. So the way that we speak to ourselves is hugely important. That’s a very big part of this. And then challenging limits, challenging beliefs, challenging when other humans impose ideas upon you regarding your own limitations in your health and wellbeing.

Ellen They can’t know.

Shay That. They can’t know.

Ellen There’s no experiment that can prove that you can’t. All an experiment can prove is what you tried didn’t work. That doesn’t mean something else won’t work. And the doing these different things is actually the whole ball game. People think what they want is complete success, and if you are completely successful, they’d probably make you mindful and mindless again. So an example I often use is you’re a little kid, you’re in that elevator and you try to press the button and you can’t reach it. And so a parent will pick you up and you press the button, then you get a little bigger and you’re still, and you can’t reach it. Then finally comes a day, you can reach it and you press that button. How many adults do you know get excited about pressing an elevator button? So once you master it, it doesn’t give us that excitement. We don’t want to engage in it anymore.

Shay So one of the other things I wanted to touch on, because you mentioned it in the book, and I think it’s a nice concept for our listeners to hear about, is that it’s very common today to hear references to work life balance, but your focus is actually on something that you call work life integration.

Ellen Yeah, so people mindlessly believe that work has to be stressful and by believing work has to be stressful. People don’t do anything at work to make it not stressful. And it’s important to do so because as far as I’m concerned, the worst thing in the world for our health is stress. I think that if you took people, and let’s say everybody was just diagnosed with some dread disorder and then we tested them a few weeks later because no one’s going to be happy
about that. And then every few weeks I believe that the amount of stress they’re experiencing would predict the course of the disease over and above nutrition, genetics, even treatment. Yet we set ourselves up and just say, well that’s life can be stressful. And what people don’t understand is that stress is not a function of events. Stress is a function of the view you take of an event. So what happens is people say, oh my God, this thing is going to happen and
when it happens, it’s going to be awful. And we can’t really predict. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but if you think it’s going to be awful, you’re going to make it awful. But everything has an equally strong opposite side.

And if you can’t find a way to do your work without stress, if you can afford it, I would say leave, life is too short. And that if we approached our lives where everything is sort of a game, it doesn’t mean it can’t be serious, but we bring that joy in doing it and discovery to everything we do. Stress becomes a thing of the past. As you’re playing this game of life, the neurons are firing. And all of my work shows that that’s literally and figuratively enliven me. When I talk about work life integration. I’m saying be who you are. I’m who I am. Whether, and some people will say, oh my gosh, but that’s who I am. Whether I’m doing a podcast with you, whether I’m going to be at a restaurant, whether I’m playing tennis, whether I am consulting to some big important company that I’m always basically the same. I think that we need to learn how to take what we do seriously, but not take ourselves so seriously. So the first thing people need to do is just not accept that work has to be stressful.

Shay Or even you designed another very interesting study which you can speak about if you’d like, where you had people that were doing cleaning work rather than look at it as work that they’re cleaning, but actually instead reframing it in terms of exercise that they were exercising.

Ellen Right? And of course that would, to do that would depend on whether exercise is something you look forward to or please, I don’t want to work, I don’t want to exercise. Alright, yeah, this was this second test. We didn’t talk about the first one yet, but of the mind body unity idea. So we go to these chambermaids and to my surprise, when we ask them how much exercise they’re getting, they say they’re not getting any exercise because they think, and it’s according to the surgeon, general exercise is what you do after work and after work they’re just too tired. All right? So all we did was to take these chamber maids, divide into two groups, and we taught one of the groups that they work was exercise that making a bed was working on this machine at the gym, sweeping, like working on this other machine and so on.

So at the end of this, we had one group that didn’t realize their work was exercise one that did, we took a host of measures and we made sure at the end, are they working any differently? Is one working harder? No difference. Are they eating any differently? No differences except now that they change their mindset to see their work as exercise. So you change your mind, your body changes, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down just from a change in the way they saw what they were doing.

Shay Exception. Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, I think what’s so interesting is you did control for all the other variables, and it’s literally just that shift in thinking. It created all those physiological changes, which is extraordinary. Obviously your counterclockwise study is another, that

Ellen Was the first.

Shay That’s the first, which is such a classic study, but I think it’s important for you to share a little bit about that.

Ellen Sure, Sure. It’s fun for me to speak about. This was the first test about mind, body, unity, take the mind and body, put ’em back together. Wherever we put the mind, we’re putting the body. So we took these elderly men and we were going to put their minds back 20 years. So we retrofitted a retreat. So it was as if it was 20 years earlier, they were going to live for a week in this retreat as if they were their younger selves. So that means they’d be talking about past events in the present tense. All right. Now, in that short period of time, we found their vision improved. And tell me when you’ve ever heard an 80 year old’s vision improving, their hearing improved,
their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeably younger. Now, truth be told, they didn’t look 20 years younger, but still younger.

And so those findings were so exciting for several reasons, not the least of which is people assume once you can’t hear, you can’t hear, it doesn’t turn around. And a lot of people assume when you get, as you get older, that’s it. I mean, everything just deteriorates. So if you’re expecting deterioration, you’re facilitating deterioration. And in a simple way, imagine you hurt your wrist. Well, you’re young, you know your wrist isn’t supposed to hurt. You would do something to take care of it. I’m 76, I hurt my wrist. What do you expect when you get older, you fall apart. So even in this very simple way, I don’t do anything. So now a month from now, your wrist is going to be fine and mine is going to be even worse simply because you believed you were supposed to get better and I believed I was supposed to fall apart.

Shay I’m wondering in some of your studies, if you looked at the telomeres and any changes there?

Ellen Yeah, no, I believe that there certainly would be changes in, let’s say the counterclockwise study. I, all of my studies are low budget, and so I would’ve loved to take telomeres, but that would’ve required that I hold everything. I write a big grant, they reject it, I rewrite it, then they accept it. Then the people who are going to run this with me, my students have already graduated and I have to train. So I’m not suggesting that that’s the way science should proceed, but for me, I get an idea and I’m just too eager to see if it works.

Shay Yeah, I understand. I can appreciate that practical. There’s something that you wrote about in the book that I thought was interesting. You said, “Attention to variability and attention to small changes in our health or symptoms may be a key to controlling our health”. Can you?

Ellen Yeah, I’m so glad you asked me about this, Shay, because I think that this is one of the most important things that I’ve come up with a psychological cure for chronic disease. It starts off just with a thought. When people have a chronic disease, whatever your symptoms are, the assumption people make is that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. Alright? So now what we do is so simple is call people periodically and just ask them, how was it today? Let’s say your back pain, how was it today? And is it better or worse than it was the last time I spoke to you? Well, several things happen with this. The first, by you’re doing this procedure, you start to feel that you have some control over your health. So that’s good in and of itself.

The second, as soon as you see it’s not always at its worst, you feel better. The third, when you ask the important question, why is it better now? Or even why is it worse now than it was before? You engage in a mindful search. And as I didn’t say, I have years and years of research showing that is mindfulness is good for your health and you also live longer, so you’re becoming healthier just by trying to find out why it hurts and that. Then lastly, I believe if you look
for a solution which people don’t, for a chronic illness, chronic means to people uncontrollable, you don’t notice anything because you assume it’s going to just stay the same. But if you look for a solution, I think you’re more likely to find one. We’ve done these with real disorders, with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, arthritis, chronic pain, and so on.

In each case we find elimination certainly marked decrease in the negative symptoms. Now, when I started this, this was going to be a way for people to give themselves a placebo, take care of themselves. And so you might say, well, we were calling people, how are they taking care of themselves? It’s very easy. Most people have smartphones. I don’t know how smart the phone is, but smartphones. So you set your smartphone to ring in two hours and it rings, and then you ask yourself, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time? Now set it to ring 45 minutes later, just vary the times. So you’re doing this for yourself and as you’re doing it, you’re feeling in control as you’re looking for. Why is it better or worse? Right now you’re being more mindful, so you are improving your health and you’re engaged. Mindfulness is the essence of engagement. So you’re enjoying what you’re doing and it seems that people are able to heal even with stress. So let’s say Shay, you see yourself as always stressed. No one is always anything, but what happens is that the moments, you’re not stressed, you’re not thinking about stress, so you’re not aware of it and then you’re stressed again. And that in-between, okay, time gets lost. So let’s say I called you, how is your stress right now? She, is it better or worse than the last time and why? And we go through this over a week. Sometimes it takes much longer than that. And then you discover when you are talking to Ellen Langer, you are maximally stressed. Alright, well if that were the case, the solution is easy, right? Don’t talk to me or find a way to talk to me  differently.

Alright? So the nice thing about this procedure treatment as we’ll call it, is that even if you don’t solve the problem, you’re helping yourself. So rather than so many treatments that are out there, mostly medical where there are negative effects here, there are no side effects, only positive main effects.

Shay I wanted to ask with the mind body unity theory that you’ve posited. I know one of the areas that you’re challenged in is that people will say, okay, but what’s the biomechanical model? And sometimes I’m wondering if that’s the wrong question.

Ellen I believe it is.

Shay Yeah, I think it’s the wrong question

Ellen Because I’m not suggesting there’s nothing going on under the hood. I raise my arm, every part of my body is different, my brain is different, my blood flow is different, my temperature, everything. And when you don’t have a difference, it’s only because we don’t have the technology to measure the difference. But certainly, and so while I’m not in any way and never was denying the physiological and biological changes, what I’m saying is that things are occurring, not so much sequentially I do this and then my heart goes this way and then my brain goes and so on. But it’s more or less all simultaneous.

Shay Right? Which I think aligns more with quantum models too, which is very interesting. We still don’t see our body in that way. We see our body so biomechanical, but we know we’re quantum beings. We just don’t totally roll that into our current thinking. I don’t think about health.

Ellen Yeah, no, I think that if people thought about their own experience, they’d come up with so many examples showing this mind body unity. For me, this started, I was married when I was very young, don’t tell anyone. And we went to Paris on our honeymoon and I was, I don’t know, 18 or 19 going on 40. So I had to be very sophisticated. Now it was a married woman and I ordered this mixed grill, and on the mixed grill was pancreas. And so I asked my then husband, which of these is a pancreas? He was more sophisticated than I. He pointed to something, I eat everything, now comes the moment of truth. Can I eat the pancreas? Well, as a married woman, I feel I have to be able to eat it. I started eating it and I’m literally getting sick. Literally, he starts laughing. I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that’s chicken. You ate the pancreas a while ago. So from my very first trial as an adult, I had  experiences where I was making myself sick. And what this book and my life’s work is essentially about is how to make us better

Shay Instead of making ourselves sick and we make ourselves well. Right? And I think what you so eloquently discuss and describe, and it comes out in all of your research, is we have this power that largely is untapped in most of us because we’re just not realizing how powerful our minds are to affect us across so many areas of our life, including our health. So I think your work stands and speaks for itself, but it’s good for us all to be reminded of that. I do want to ask you, when you think about in what you’ve learned from your work, what you’ve learned in your personal life, when you think about what does it mean to heal, how would you define or describe what healing is?

Ellen I guess you’re in a particular state and you want to be in a different state, and so how are you going to get from one state to the other? If you look at it that way, then some of the times that we want to heal, maybe we should just relax and enjoy where we are. I think if we can heal our minds, the rest will basically take care of itself. And I think if when people are healing, sometimes for some people that’s the only time they really take care of themselves. And so the sickness in some ways is a good thing because you get a chance to sit back, turn off your devices, you don’t answer the phone. Maybe you’re watching a movie and eating a muffin in bed, whatever works for you. So you’re treating
yourself well, what people should I think take from that?

They should be aware of themselves doing that and then bring that into their normal day, not to be healing, just to be. That’s all I think we want to be, is to be fully alive. And when we recognize, and this sounds sort of hallmark, I don’t mean it to sound trivial because to me it’s very important. Life only consists of moments. And if we make the moment matter, then it all matters. And so we don’t have to get ourselves sick to buy ourselves some alone time to engage in that healing and so on. I think that there are ways for us to keep ourselves healthy, and in doing so we don’t need to talk about healing it.

Shay Great. I just want to give you an opportunity, if there’s anything else that we didn’t get a chance to discuss that you think would be nice into this conversation to share it now.

Ellen I think the only thing that’s really left for me to say is that the more mindful we become, the more we realize how mutable everything is. And when something isn’t working for us, we should change it. Now, it sounds simple, but most people, it doesn’t occur to most people. They sort of accept that when you’re given this diagnosis, you have to feel bad when don’t meet a deadline, you have to feel like a failure and so on and so forth. And again, the more
mindful we are, the more choices we have about ways of understanding ourselves and everything about the world. And once you have those choices, why select those that are depressing when there’s always a more positive view available to ourselves? Anyway.

Shay Great. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think that’s a nice place to end for our conversation today because it’s really about the inherent capacity within each one of us to live a happier, more present life and a more fulfilling life. So it’s a great reminder for all of us to be reminded of our power and inner capacity to do just that.

Ellen Perfectly said.

Shay Thank you so much, Ellen. It’s an honor to get the opportunity to interview you.

Ellen Thank you. And this was a lovely interview.

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