Dr. Ellen Langer
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But people could be asked at any stage, why is somebody dressed this way? Why is somebody doing what they're doing? And when asked now, you're only given a single answer, right? When you're given multiple answers, you see the three levels. You know, they're doing it for this wonderful reason, for this awful reason. It has this meaning, that meaning. And that's what you want, things to be obscured.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You don't want to be pigeonholed. Because if you think you know what I'm going to say because of this belief of who I am, you're not going to listen to me. And then we're not going to have a conversation that's going to be interesting. And that's a waste. I know that you're...
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So I have these lyrics in the books. A friend of mine, Zoe Lewis, wonderful entertainer, and she sings a song that I just love. You're never too old to be young. And, sure, I think that one should be playful to be playful. Now, a side effect of that is I think you'll be happier and healthier. And if you're happier and healthier, I think you'll live longer.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But the reason to do it – the problem with most people now is that everything they're doing is for some other reason. I'm taking this medication so that eventually. I'm going to the gym so that eventually. I think who knows what's going to happen eventually. I feel lucky that I enjoy exercise and always have. But if I didn't, I don't know. You get yourself. Yeah. I don't like exercise.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That's exercise. I was telling somebody the story actually just yesterday. So I was visiting friends many, many years ago in Vero Beach. And they said in the morning, let's go to Captain Jack's. I'm thinking, Captain Jack's, it's going to be breakfast. And I'm thinking, I'm going to have a big breakfast. Why not? We're going to take a long walk to get there. And, you know, I'm very excited.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So we get down to the beach and we're walking to Captain Jack's. And then there's this stick in the sand that says on it, Captain Jack's. All it is was the end point to our walk, you know. Well, for me, if I had known the walk was just for the walk, I probably would have enjoyed it much less.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
All right. So we do this. We come back. I think it was three weeks later. Actually, I don't remember. It's been so long. Eighteen months later, first we took initial measures. Come back 18 months later, those people who were given these choices lived longer. And that was the beginning of all of my work on health in some sense. How could it be that making choices results in a longer life?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, that if I'm in Paris and shopping or window shopping, I walk, you know, 10 miles a day and enjoy myself thoroughly. But if you said, let's go for a walk of even five miles and it's just to walk. Now, this is mindless. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing. But, you know. uh, activities that are meant to be fun and that are easy to engage and are fun, um, are, uh, will be good for you.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if you see it as exercise, if you're doing it for some other reason, um, it's a shame because even the exercise for exercise sake should, you know, I won't do it if it isn't fun. I Now, that's not that, you know, I say I won't do it if it isn't fun. I think that this is something that I do well is to make almost anything be fun.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Why can't they be like we were?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, well, I don't think they're very different from what you've already covered. In that fire, I lost all the photos. And it didn't occur to me that I had lost all of them for years because I didn't look at them. So I could have a lot of that. That's very true. I think, you know, when I was young, some of my friends were keeping a diary. And I never kept a diary.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so then my feeling was I'd rather just be living than recording. But it depends on how you record it. If you're reliving it while you're recording it, then you're living. It's the same thing. You know, one activity is really no better than another if you're doing it mindfully. Now, this is hard for people to accept. If I say to you that if you're cleaning a toilet,
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
that the distinctions you're drawing are no better or worse than if you're trying to come up with a theory of relativity or understand Einstein's theory of relativity. A distinction is a distinction is a distinction.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so that's why these little things that you're noticing, your mother's weed, is no less important, although she thought you might see it as less important, than you're having just, you know... interviewed somebody that she thought was phenomenal. Once you notice, you notice, and that's the whole ballgame, and there's always something to notice.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if you're noticing it without the stress overlay that some people add to their lives, which I can't understand, it's no different from a game. I use this example, and I think that my students must think I'm crazy. So if I believe that, I should come up with a different example. But you're flossing your teeth. Now, you can floss your teeth mindlessly. in which case you resent being there.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You're spending the time because you're thinking that it's good for you, but you'd rather be doing something else. You're not there. You're flossing, but your mind is thinking about a party you're going to go to, for example. To me, make it fun. It's so easy. I mean, you play little games. Can I predict how much junk is going to come out? And which teeth, which part?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Everything can be made into a game. I had this... You can maybe figure out how to bring this product to market. But it was called – I have so many of these. It's called WeGo, a way of training your child to use the toilet. And so it's not very hard. We'd sell – you could sell these little vials of chemicals that when you add it a few drops to urine, it changes color.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
All right, so what is there about choice making? And then the choices were Mickey Mouse choices, you know. And you always have choice available to you. You can turn on a light switch. You can do it with your right hand. Your right hand, your left hand, one finger, three fingers, lift your foot. So many choices that you can bring to the table.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But so each of these vials will change the color to a different color. I think adults would buy that. Yeah. And the kid, you know, has to guess either to the parent or just for themselves, you know, is this going to be yellow, green, blue? You know, it becomes fun.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah. No, I think that one of the worst things that the world teaches us is that we have work and we have play, as if these are two distinct categories. In fact, I think if you were to ask somebody just one question to determine how mindful they are, it might be, how much do you need a vacation? I mean, I've never taken one. No, but need and want are two different things.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if I really need a vacation, that means my working is being done mindlessly. And that's a shame. If you can't find a way to do it so you enjoy it, go someplace else. It's not worth the price you're paying.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, then learn how to make it fun. You know, that anything can be made fun. Just make it a game. You try to figure out, guess what's going to happen. Can you do it differently from the last time? Can you do it with your eyes closed? I mean, you know, it's fun. You know, get down on, not related to your work, but you get down on all fours and see the world that your cat or your dog sees.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Close the lights and see what it's like being blind. Try to get through the day without hearing. I wanted to do this thing 50 years ago, which was to create a building that simulated old age.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so if you took the 50-year-old and they spent even a short time in that building where it's colder than usual because there's less oxygen in your blood, your field of vision narrows, that they would expand each of their abilities at a time that it's easy. But the problem with that was a 50-year-old doesn't want to imagine being 80 years old.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I love this experiment so much. Peter Ungle and I did this when a graduate student. We inflict a wound. Now, it would have been more dramatic if we could really cut you up, but we're not sadists, and even if we were, the review committees wouldn't let us do it. So it's a minor wound, but it's still a wound. And we have people individually sitting in front of a clock,
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
unbeknownst to them, for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For another third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. And for the last third, it's going real time. And the question is, most people would assume that one's going to heal. How that one heals has nothing to do with the perception of time.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If choice-making is good for you, why don't people do this? And that got me more into the mindlessness and mindfulness work. So we have people living longer. How can it be that you're making choices, your mind is active, and your body complies? And so then I thought about it, not in one fell swoop, but realized that this whole notion of mind and body complies. These are just words.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But it turns out that it healed based on clock time. Now, when you add that to some of the things that we've already said, you end up with a very different picture. You broke your arm and you ask the doctor, how long is it going to take to heal? How does he know or she know? I mean, it's a ridiculous question. Lots of people have broken arms.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, even if this were somebody who studied broken arms and he stopped studying yesterday, today there are new people with broken arms that might have different rates of healing. But people give an answer. And depending on the way the doctor gives that answer, I think it's important. The doctor says it's going to take you, and I'm making this, I don't know how long it'll take.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's going to take you a month. You organize yourself in such a way that it's going to take a month. But I think if the doctor instead, which is what I would recommend, said, we really don't know. Some people heal faster than others. The fastest healing time that I personally know of is, let's say, two weeks. And if you can heal faster than that, then good for you. And if not, it's fine also.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Because there are advantages to not healing that people don't realize. If you've broken your right arm and it's taking a long time to heal, that means you're using your left arm. And if you're using your left arm, you're exercising the right side of your brain, which is going to be good for many tests. I don't know how we ended up right-handed or left-handed. Are you ambidextrous?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'm right-handed.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Oh, interesting, because I'm sort of ambidextrous, mostly right-handed. But people don't realize that if you're using your right hand, it's controlled by the left part of your brain, your left hand, the right part of your brain. And wouldn't it be nice to exercise both parts of our brain? And so we're doing research where we get people – this is really interesting because it's not just using –
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So this work was begun, gosh, I can't tell you how many years ago, and for one reason or another never got finished. Initially, it was just getting people to use their right or their left hand. Now it's more sophisticated where it's using your left hand with an awareness that you're using it or not. And I think that the effect on the brain will only obtain if you're aware.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't see how it could be otherwise, actually. But to go back to the doctor telling you how long it's going to heal, it tends to be now a self-fulfilling prophecy. So given that doctors have this influence over us, they need to be more responsible in the information they're given. And we can't know how long it's going to take to heal. People today are different from people 20 years ago.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
They ate different things. The activities were different. The air was different and so on. And so from where are these norms derived? In fact, whenever I speak to anybody, I get lots of calls from people who were given these dread diagnoses. And the first thing I tell them is it takes so long to do these studies. And then it takes forever to analyze the data.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We come together, here I am, all of me, my fingers, my shoulders, my thoughts as one thing. And if we put the mind and body back together, then the amount of control we have is enormous, right? Wherever I put my mind, I'm also putting my body. So in The Mindful Body, which started off as a memoir, I have lots of stories that show leading up to this idea. Let me just tell you two very quickly.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then it takes another forever to publish it. And then eventually when you're going to hear about it, it's already old news. So the information you're reading now was true for people who lived 10 years ago. Ten years is a lot. A lot of things happening.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And always with the intention of getting people to be less absolute in their understanding of any of this so that they can imagine all sorts of possibilities. But even the thing that I just said a moment before, that it's important for people to realize the advantage in using their left hand if they're right-handed or their right hand if they're left-handed.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then at the same time recognizing that when they break a leg, when somebody breaks a leg, that forces you to do everything differently. And if you attend to that, that can be a wonderful thing. You know, I don't know how I got to see these things. It's very strange to me when I think of what things have influenced me.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't know how old I was, Andrew, but I'm watching this thing on television, and there's this woman who has no arms, who's got a knife between her toes, who's slicing a tomato. And, you know, it's a lot of years, you know, I've seen and done a lot of things, but for me to remember that and that, um, you know, even when we're taught to do something, we're taught a single way.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's so much more fun to be taught multiple ways. I mean, when I, you know, hurt my right arm, I'm playing tennis poorly, but I'm still playing with my left hand. Um,
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I have so much trouble keeping track of what's the loss and what's the gain because I don't see the world that way.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Whether I've transcended or not, I just think differently. But everybody accepts that. And to see the gain in the so-called loss of a loss in the so-called gain – You just end up with a very different world.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, but another way, you know, when I say put people back in the equation, that's what you need to teach them, which is the responses you're getting. These reviews are not from a bunch of sages in the sky. Certainly not. They're just a group of people, a group of people with different biases and so on. And, you know, it doesn't mean you were wrong.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You can be that Faberge egg on day one, but now you've got to maintain that. I mean, the first paper that I published came back without a comment. Without a comment, not a correction, not a typo. What a dangerous thing to happen. Exactly. It was awful. Yeah, that was not my experience. Well, it set me up for expectations. What do you mean? For the next one.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
One was I got married. Andrew, you won't believe it. I was obscenely young. And you'll find that if you read the book, I was even younger than admitted because I was secretly married years before that. Okay, so I go, I'm 19 years old, I think. I go to Paris on my honeymoon. We go into this restaurant. I order a mixed grill. One of the foods there was a pancreas.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But I think also that it's once you recognize that this is an opinion. rather than a statement of fact. And then when you, what I tell my students is that when you get a comment, it doesn't mean that the comment is right. It means that whatever you wrote wasn't appreciated in the way you wanted it to be appreciated. And they're guessing at, well, if you did it this way rather than that way.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, papers that are not accepted today may be accepted tomorrow, the same paper. I mean, you know, I can't tell you how many times people say, can't be, and then it becomes the standard, you know.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No, I'm very flattered. You know, I think that when you're walking around and you don't see and all of a sudden you see, you can say that you're enlightened. I guess in a not so... grandiose way that that simple thing that I keep saying, recognizing that behavior makes sense, leads you to such a different view of people.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You don't have people who are good and bad, people who are addicted and not addicted. You don't have A students and failing students. Everything just organizes itself differently, and you come to appreciate the individual talents that people have. And when you can do that, I don't know if you want to call the person enlightened, but life just is easier and nicer.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, it's nicer to walk outside and be trusting of people and – Not to be afraid of this bastard or that one who's going to come and get you. I mean, I went with a friend, this was so many years ago, to an AA meeting to see what it was like. And I had left my pocketbook over here, wherever that is, which you can see. And we walked over here for whatever reason.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
My then husband, who was more sophisticated than I, more worldly, I said, which of these is the pancreas? He says, that. So I eat everything. I'm a big eater. Now comes the moment of truth. Can I eat the pancreas? Why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas, I still haven't figured out. But anyway, I start eating it and he starts laughing. Not good for newlyweds.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I said, I left my pocketbook over there. And then I thought, you know, so what? If somebody takes it, they probably need it more than I do. And it was so freeing, you know, just not to care about all these things that somehow we're implicitly, sometimes explicitly taught to care about and always evaluating ourselves. You know, that little song, feeling that, let me sing. I enjoy singing.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I can't carry a tune, so what? Why should somebody make me feel bad about singing? And maybe I'll become a better singer. Or maybe I'll sing in some way that'll teach somebody some new trick that they hadn't thought about before because of my inadequacy. Why are people evaluating themselves at every moment rather than feeling good about the things they know that they can do?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And who decides what's important to be able to do? I don't know how to most articulately share it, but it's just a very different life. You know, a life where you don't, I just don't believe that stress is necessary. I don't believe that there's anybody in this world that's better than I am. But I also don't believe I'm better than anybody else.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's very different where everything, especially among those of us who are academics, where every minute you're given a grade and even the number of papers you got accepted determines your pecking order and so on. It's all so silly. And then you have the money people and I have $20 billion, so I'm better off than people. I'm a better person than people who have $10 billion.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's sad to me when in fact I think all of it is engaged in order to feel good about yourself. That's all. You know, why do I need that money? Why do I need those A's? Why do I need those successes? So that I'll like myself. Just like yourself. Recognize that you're likable. Why not? That may seem simple-minded, but it's gotten me to wherever I am.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's been my pleasure.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
The first one is, would you- Doesn't matter how long the question is, it's the answer that matters, right? So you asked me the brief question for a long answer.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I ask him, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago. So I made myself sick. Okay. The other side of that, my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas, and then magically it was gone. Somehow she had made herself well.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Oh, Andrew. All right. Yes, I'm going to sing this. Now, you have to remember, though, that I'm singing this because I think singing is fun and it shouldn't matter how good a voice you have. Okay, so here we go. This is to the old Sarah Lee commercial. And everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee. All right.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Everybody doesn't know something, but everyone knows something else. Everyone can't do something, but everyone can do something else. So what have I lost by singing that? I know I can't sing. Now you know I can't sing. But do you think my not being able to sing means I can't write, think, or do whatever it is that I do better than singing? No, of course not.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So I had many of these sorts of experiences, and talk about, you know, mind, I've been talking about this since, gosh, when did we first, since 79. So now people are talking about mind-body connection. It's not a connection. If you're talking about a connection between two things, it says they're separate, and you still have to deal with what's connecting them.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
When you put them back together, it's one thing. You don't have to deal with that mediator. And so the study you're asking me about, which I'm surprised, I'm having a junior moment, but I actually remembered the question you asked rather than a senior moment, that before I tell you about the study with Ali, the first study we did testing this mind-body unity was a counterclockwise study.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So here what we did was we took elderly men, we were going to have them live in a retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier and had them live there as if they were their younger selves. So they talked about things from the past as if they were just unfolding. The results were incredible.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. So that was very exciting and began all this mind-body unity work. Now comes the study that you're talking about with Allie.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
where in a conversation that she and I had, she was my student, and she made proclamations about exercise and any proclamation, this is the short answer to your question, anybody proclaims anything, my mind immediately goes, so when might not that be true? I'm starting to pick up on that. It's a gimmick, I guess. It's a gift is what it is.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so the question was that how important was the understanding of exercise to the effects of exercise? So we take chambermaids. And interestingly, the first question we asked is how much exercise do you get? And they say they don't get very much exercise because to them exercise is what you do after work. That's what the Surgeon General who sits behind a desk all day says.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So you would imagine whether they realized they were getting exercise or not, since they're getting so much exercise, that they're going to be healthier than other people who are not getting them. And they weren't. That's interesting. So now we divide them into two groups. Very simple study. Randomly divide them into two groups. In one group, we simply teach them their work is exercise.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym. doing the windows, whatever. So you have two groups, one who thinks they work as exercise, one who doesn't realize. We take many, many measures and they're not eating any differently, one group from the other. They're not working any harder. Nevertheless, the group that changed their mind and now saw their work as exercise lost weight.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Remarkable. Yeah, yeah. And what I don't usually talk about when I start talking about this is that this was a test of the nocebo effect. Most people know what a placebo is. You take something that's nothing and it has the effect as if it's something. You take a sugar pill.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
thinking it's strong medication, and it plays out as if it was. A nocebo is the reverse. You're taking something, so here you're doing the exercise, but you don't realize it, and it gets rid of the effect. An early study on this was, I don't remember who did it, and that was a senior moment.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
People were given Ipecac, and Ipecac is supposed to make you vomit, so if you accidentally had poison or whatever, you'd take Ipecac and vomit. So people are given Ipecac, people who have a problem vomiting, and they're told the Ipecac will stop their vomiting. and it stops their vomiting. So many placebo studies where you take people, they rub with a leaf that they think is poison ivy.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So it either is poison ivy or it's not poison ivy. You think it's poison ivy or you don't think it's poison ivy, and your body reacts to your thoughts. If you think it's not poison ivy, You don't get the rash. If you think it is poison ivy, you do. Spectacular. Yeah. And so we've been studying this for forever. I think that placebos are probably our very strongest medicine.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Although it's interesting that when people think that they were given a placebo, they get very upset. You know, they should be excited because if the placebo didn't cure you, who cured you? You did it yourself. But placebos have gotten a bad rap, I think primarily because of the pharmaceutical companies, right? You want to bring a drug to market.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
The way you do that is you have to run an experiment where the drug outperforms the placebo. And when it doesn't, damn it, I can't make all those billions of dollars without saying, wow, this sugar pill is mighty, mighty strong.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's all because of Descartes. You know, Descartes was out to dinner and the waitress asked him if he wanted a salad. And he said, I think not. And he disappeared. I think I, therefore, I was about to ask, how was it? And after that, Andrew, I say, this is not my day job. So I don't have to be funny. I love it.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't know why that's a problem. I am who I am, period. How does that change whether we want to see me as having a mind, body, and elbows? So explain to me and then I will explain to you.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Why is that true? I mean, if, you know, let's say you're an athlete and you lose two of your fingers. You're not going to be performing in the same way that you performed in the past, and surely you'd end up different.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I think some of the, even the work with the brain, where to assess this neuroscience now is crazy with fMRIs. And we want, no matter what happens, you want to see what's going on in the brain. And I think that implicitly in a backwards way that leads people away from realizing that whatever you're looking for is probably manifested every place. You know, I had this experience.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I like doing strange things and I was out in Kansas City. And so somebody said there's an iridologist. What is an iridologist? Sure, for fun, we'll go to the iridologist. So this person is looking in my eye, my iris, that's the iridologist part. And she said, you have a problem with your gallbladder. I thought, okay, that's great. We leave and have my time.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I go back home and I had a problem with my gallbladder. Really? Everything is everywhere. The problem is we don't have the technology to notice it. You know, so when you're happy, your skin is different from when you're not happy. But who can see such small distinctions? But it's there. All we do is look to see where the brain is different. It's all one.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Anything, I believe, anything that's happening on any level is simultaneously, simultaneously, not sequentially, more or less happening on every level. So a teardrop of sadness biochemically is different from a teardrop of joy. And so it's all there. We just have to notice. I have no memory now of what it was you said that led to that on my part, but I'm glad I said it anyway.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I hadn't even considered the former, which is strange to me. No, I just assumed that she was seeing something. And... But your idea, but either way is fascinating, right? By somebody suggesting you have a gallbladder problem to have a gallbladder problem. That's wild.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I think everything is everywhere, although there's, you know, I teach health psych at Harvard and there's some data on it being mostly placebo. But, you know, and that sounds like a downer, but most of everything is placebo. What does that mean? That virtually everything is controlled by our thoughts. And we need to embrace that to make the changes that most of us desire.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So in other words, so going to an acupuncturist itself means I want to find the answers and seek and you are more likely to find. And then you're in a position to improve.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
happened with your mom's mindset or life or psychological life that you think led to the um you know it's a an n of one you know uh it's very hard to know i knew that when she got sick i believed at that point that um being anything negative was going to um work in the opposite direction And so I wouldn't let anybody in to see her. It wasn't uplifting.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'll make it very simple. When most people hear the word mindful, sadly, they think of meditation. Meditation is great, but it's not mindful. You meditate in order to result in post-meditative mindfulness, okay? So it's a practice. Mindfulness, as I study it, is a way of being. It's not a practice. It's the simple process of noticing. Now, you can get there in one of two ways.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
There's no way of knowing if any of that mattered or not. I went and got her a very expensive set of golf clubs. She wasn't a big golfer, but my reasoning was that I must believe she's going to be better or why would I have spent the money? Her reasoning was, my reasoning must be that if I get these, she'll think that, you So it didn't work, but we had these golf clubs that were never used.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, I don't know. I believe that we have more control. At that point, I hadn't done all of these experiments that might have led me to push even harder. It was kind of funny, though, because the way I had cognized everything back then was the importance of perceived control. And so I had these data people living longer and so on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And yet, mindlessly, I virtually took over her life, deciding who can see or what she can do. But I don't know, and I don't think there would have been, with just one person, any way of knowing what led to the disease going away. But the fact that it went away was crucial to me. You know, I think...
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
that we have to talk about the myths in medicine, that what people need to understand is that all science are probabilities. An experiment doesn't give you absolute facts. And we teach these probabilities as if they're absolute and give up a great deal of control by doing so. Now, you asked me before about how I came to certain things. Let me go back to an answer I should have given you.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Many years ago, I was at a horse event, and this man asked me would I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog. Hot dog? I'm a straight-A student. What is it, crazy? Horses don't eat meat. Sure, I'll watch your horse. He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I thought, what does it mean, horses don't eat meat? How many horses were tested? And what were they tested with? How much meat mixed with how much grain? And what kind of grain? And how big are these horses? And when was the last, you know, and so on. And it all opened up. And I said, how could we make such a statement, horses don't eat meat? But when you think about science...
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That imagine if you did the experiment and you're trying to teach somebody what you found. You say, these particular horses who hadn't eaten for three days were given this grain. And under those circumstances, 80% of them didn't eat meat. That's a mouthful. You can't communicate that way, so you abbreviate it. Horses don't eat meat. So it's not in the telling that's the problem.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's in the receiving of the information. We have to know that these things are just not true to the one. But it's very important because every time you're given a diagnosis— You take the diagnosis as real. Well, it's not the case that they can be sure that all of these symptoms mean you have this disease.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if you have, quote, this disease, we don't know that all of the people who have it are going to follow. And it becomes very unlikely when you turn it all inside out that way. And so another part of this that we can get into or not is people's understanding probabilities in general and that you can't predict. Now, people ask for answers all the time, even the how much is one in one.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Bottom-up, actively notice three new things about the person you live with. Walk outside, notice three new things. Each time you do this, you see that you didn't know the thing you thought you knew as well as you thought you knew it. But you can also do it top-down. Top down is recognize that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Should I have the surgery? What is the disease that I have? And by recognizing that all information that's given is for the group, not for the individual. A few examples of this is kind of funny. I say, so Michael Jordan and I are going to have a foul shooting contest. We each get to shoot one basket. Who's going to win? Well, most people are just going to quickly say Michael Jordan.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
How much money are you willing to bet on this? One shot each. Million dollars. I'll give you a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins. You give me or I'll give you a million dollars if Michael Jordan wins. You give me half a million dollars if Ellen Langer wins. First, you think you'll take the bet. But when you think about it, no, he sometimes misses. She sometimes makes the basket.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Maybe he had a fight with his wife, didn't sleep well. You know, maybe she is in top form and this is now the moment she's going to make that basket. Or make it simple. He said to himself, let the older woman win. Why not? Really? You know, and when you think of all the reasons why it could be the case that I could win, all of a sudden you become less certain.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now, certainly if we were shooting 100 baskets, he would win. Let me give you another example I use too often because I don't know which of these will feel right. You go to a Mercedes parking lot or pick your favorite car. And let's say there are 100 cars there. You choose one. And if it starts, I will give you a million dollars.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If it doesn't start, you give me your full life savings, assuming it's under a million, capped at a million. Now, Mercedes are wonderful cars. Nobody is going to take that bet. Everybody knows, you know, sometimes it doesn't work. You know, sometimes the genius gets something wrong. Sometimes a car is a lemon and so on.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So what we mean when we say, you know, if you were going to start 100 cars, most of them are going to start. But you can't predict which one isn't going to. Well, in life, I'm happy if an operation is good for most people. I want to know, is it going to work for me? And there's no way to know that. You can never predict the individual case.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But, Andrew, we don't have to worry about that because you can always predict or control your reaction to whatever is happening. So it doesn't matter as much. You see, if I can be happy, whether this occurs or the opposite occurs, I care less about which way it turns out. But right now we're all brought up in a world where we have these good things, we have these bad things.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You've got to kill yourself to get the good things. Step over whoever you can to avoid the bad things. Once you recognize that's all in your head, then just be still. My favorite example, this is so, for me, was so funny. I'm doing one of these podcasts over Zoom, and I'm trying to explain that evaluation is in your head, not in the things you're evaluating.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I say, as an example, so if the internet went out right now, wouldn't be terrible, I'd go have lunch. The internet went out just at that moment. And I did have lunch because I had put the suggestion in my mind. You know, most things don't matter. We don't recognize that. And I think I have a few one-liners that if people understand or care about nothing else that I've said, take this to heart.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy. And so when you breathe, you know, I failed the test, I got, you know, dented the car, I missed the bus, whatever it is, so what? And so, you know, you take a deep breath and come back to yourself and realize that most of the things that make us crazed are unnecessary.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Uncertainty is the rule. It's not the exception. So when you know you don't know, then you naturally tune in. So one of the things, I've said this so many times, maybe this will be the last. One of the things we think we know best is how much is one plus one, Andrew? I'm going to assume it's still two. Two. Not always.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You get a lot of this as you get older, but... I teach my students this early on. Why wait? Why wait to recognize that you're the one who's almost always your worst enemy?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Sadly, though, then they believe the ball is still there when, in fact, the ball may be gone.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If you add one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. You add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one is one. This is interesting. Somebody sent this to me the other day. You take one pizza and you add one pizza, one plus one is two. You take one lasagna and you add one lasagna, one plus one is one. It's just a bigger lasagna.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, it's interesting because our mindlessness, which results, I think, in part to hold on to things, to have control, is the very thing that deprives us of control. Because, again, things are changing. You're holding it still in your mind. And, you know, so you're living with somebody or you meet somebody and, you know, right away you decide what, you know.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
size that person up, so now you can control your interactions with them. But what you're doing is ignoring all the times the person is not like that and all the ways that the relationship could have otherwise grown. That we, in general, and this is, I have a psychological treatment for chronic illness. It's all based on the same idea of change. Things are changing. We're always holding it still.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so you have the illusion that you're controlling things. But in fact, you're giving up control by not recognizing for yourself or somebody else. All of our statements of we can't do or we can do. You can't know whether you can or you can't. The fact that you did it doesn't mean that you can do it again. The fact that you couldn't do it doesn't mean you couldn't do it in the future.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Oh, these resolutions are so mindless. But they're more than just mindless. They deny that what we did made sense or else we wouldn't have done it. That one thing that I told you is more important to me than anything else that I came to over all these years of studying.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, so you're going to resolve that you're going to, I don't know, stop drinking, you're going to go to the gym, whatever these New Year's resolutions are, suggests that what you were doing instead of that thing you think you should be doing was not something you should have been doing. And I think that's never the case.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You take one puddle and you add, let's say I have two puddles there, and you add some water in between, and then you have 1 plus 1 plus 1 is 1. Okay, so the point of it is that in the real world, 1 plus 1 probably doesn't equal 2 as amorphine as it does. And since you're an educated individual, you might know that that 1 plus 1 equals 2 if you're using the base 10 number system.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Let's go back a step because we both said it was sad. Why is it sad? I'm reconsidering that to be able to think of five different things instead of one could be an asset.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Wait, so let me be clear. You get out of bed or start to get out of bed and you have several thoughts. Yep. And those thoughts bother you? Do they prevent you from getting out of bed?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't even understand the one thing idea, you know, that... People talk about multitasking, which is what you're saying, and you're better not to multitask, but you're always multitasking, right? I mean, I'm moving my hands while I'm talking to you, and I'm sort of thinking and, you know, fixing my back. There are always lots of things going on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I think that also tasks, you know, so let's say you're a kid and you're doing your social studies homework. And then you're doing your math homework. And so – and you go back and forth. So are you multitasking? It depends. If you see yourself as multitasking, then you're drawing boundaries between your math and your social studies.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If you see yourself as doing homework, it's all part of the same thing. Yeah. And so there's always a way that the task can be grouped as a single unit or you can see anything as multitasking. When you see it as multitasking, you're suggesting to yourself that there's going to be some conflict. There's some reason I'm leaving this to go to this.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No, no, but when you're texting while you're on the beach, probably... It's some kind of work text, right? There's something about it. And why are you doing it when you're on the beach? Because I can easily imagine, oh, I'm on the beach. It's wonderful. Let me text Andrew and say, Andrew, you're right. This time on the beach is wonderful. And texting wouldn't take away from it.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, my life is much simpler. To me, all you have are moments. That's it. And if you make the moment matter, then the moment matters. And you can't make it matter more. It matters or it doesn't matter. And so the question, you know, when you're lost doing or found, really, I don't want to say lost when we're writing. I find myself when I'm writing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If you're using the base 2 number system, 1 plus 1 is written as 10. Oh, my goodness. Somebody asks you, how much is 1 plus 1? Should you say 1, 2, 10? And the point is that when you know you don't know, then you pay attention. In this context, let me see. I'll be a smartass and I'll say 1. Or in this context, I know the person wants me to be obedient and I'll say two, so on and so forth.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But when you're engaged in an activity, you know, you're making each of those moments matter. But, you know, they should matter as much. I had this thought that I would tell people who were stressed and I would say to them, okay, so assuming that their vision is reasonable, just thread a needle. Threading the needle. And then I'd ask them how they felt. And everybody's going to feel fine.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
because you're actively engaged and doing something. You're not engaged in what people call monkey brain or whatever, worrying about tomorrow, worrying about so on. So to go back to your three things, it's like the text on the beach is not an I love you text, because I don't see why that would distract you.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I can imagine being anywhere doing multiple things where I'm sharing what I'm doing, but I'm not seeing them, you know, oh, I have to do this work thing. And then the question is why see the work thing that way, and especially someone like you where you don't need any of this anymore anyway, you know. Well, yeah, that's a discussion unto itself. No, no, no, but it's important.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so if it's all fun, it doesn't matter. I was on this panel in Australia. Well, first, each of us gave a talk, some big shots. And then, unbeknownst to us, they brought us all out. And so we're sitting there, and I'm the last one to be asked. And the question was, what's on your bucket list? And so the first person answers what's on the next person and we get five. Now it's my turn.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So I've had some time to think about this. My first thought, I don't have a bucket list. But of course, you know that I'm going to say, well, it's good not to have a bucket list or else I'd have a bucket list. So then I'm able to say why I don't have a bucket list. If you imagine you're like a glass and the water is full or whatever, vodka in this case. That it's full, it's full.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You can't do more than that. And so if the moment is meaningful, you don't have to be writing that book, being in love, on a vacation in Paris. And so I think we have all these crazy notions. Even the idea of, I've talked about this before, work-life balance. Ooh, that's scary to me. What that says, you know, what life really means is some, you know, joy, right?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Other than just being, you know, doing work 24-7 or however long people work, not 24-7. What is it? Three and a half hours. Anyway, that it suggests that the work that we're doing has to be aversive. And because it's aversive, the only way to have a good life is to add this fun time. And I think that's sad.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I think it's sad that people think life has to be stressful, that work has to be unpleasant, that no matter what you're doing— I believe there's a way of doing it so that it's fun.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, clear. You wouldn't be having the experience now.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Exactly.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So when you don't know, you pay attention. When you pay attention, you have choices that otherwise you're blind to. It makes a very big difference. So when you're mindful, you don't know, you actively notice. As you're noticing, the neurons are firing and 50 years of research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlightening. And if you're going to do something, show up for it.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Not only that, but even the discussion about, let's say, something like sleep, I find it outrageous. We might even disagree on this here. But when people say, how much sleep do you need? Now, to me, if I just ran a marathon, that night I probably need a different amount of sleep than if I stayed in bed eating candy, watching movies all day. And my age, everything should play a part in this.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So to go back to the mind-body unity studies, we have a study where we have people in a sleep lab. They wake up and the clock tells them they got two hours more sleep than they actually got, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they got. biological and cognitive functioning follow perceived amount of sleep.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
The funniest thing is that if you have to wake up early in the morning to make a flight, okay, so you have to get up at 4.30 in the morning to make a flight, what most people will do is go to sleep early the night before so they can wake up early. but they're not going to be able to fall asleep because the amount of sleep they need is dictated by the day before, not the day to come.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah. No, but it's also that... If you're not sleeping, what is the reason for that? And if you're stressed, you know, obviously it's the stress that's the problem, not the number of hours of sleep you're getting.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No, no, no, no, no. Counterclockwise? No, these were people who were 80. Oh, 80. Okay, excuse me. But also that was when 80 was 80, not the new 60. Right. They were old. In fact, I remember when we were interviewing, I was interviewing people to see if they could be in the study. So they're down the hall, I'm in my office, and I see them.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now, the problem is that most people are mindless almost all the time, and they're totally oblivious to it. When you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And most people are just not there. Now you want to ask me, how does that happen? Well, we're taught that. Schools, I think, are the biggest culprits. Schools are teaching us absolute answers. One plus one is two.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
They look like they're not going to make it down the hall to the office. And I'm saying to myself, why am I doing this? You know, that I'm taking on too much. You know, in fact, had I realized all the responsibility at that point that I was actually assuming, I probably wouldn't have done it.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I mean, I was in charge of these people's lives, everything about them for, you know, for this five days without knowing these people, without a full medical, you know, support system or whatever. Yeah, one or two of them had died. You could end up in a mess. Yeah. Yes, I was fortunate that none of that happened. But, no, so they were old.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And it was interesting because, you know, they show up and they look really... Now it would probably be somebody 105. That's the way they, you know, present it. And you'd speak to the person and usually the adult daughter would do the answering rather than, you know. So they were coddled. They were presumed to have all sorts of problems and so on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Almost instantly when they got there, they changed. The feeling was almost palpable. Now, I did this thing. It wasn't good science, but so the first group that we took there was the reminiscent group. This was a group where they were going to reminisce for that week. So they always knew now was now and then was then, right? That was a control group. We get to the retreat and I'm in this van.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
People need to understand the study was back before Google, before we had the internet. So when I am... playing music in the van going to the event, music from the past. This was a major thing to find this. Now it takes two minutes. You ask Chad lately, give me the 10 best songs back 20 years ago. At any rate, so I'm on the bus with them, music from the past playing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We get very close to the retreat, and all of a sudden I realize that I was sexist at the time, oblivious, that none of my male graduate students were with me. That meant I had seven old men and at least seven heavy suitcases. there was no way that I was going to carry their suitcases upstairs. So, unplanned for, we get off the bus, and I say, you're in charge of your own suitcase.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't care if you move it an inch at a time to get it to your room, or you unpack it here a shirt at a time, however you want to do it. Now, imagine, nothing else, the difference between somebody who's coddled, who's not even thought to be able to respond to a question, where the daughter or son would answer for them, to now, they're in charge of their whole lives.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And that meant that even the comparison group was going to do well, which they did, just not quite as well as the other group. And for me, that was fine because, as you mentioned before, my work is all about possibility. I'm not interested in describing what is. I'm interested in seeing what may be. So if I got one monkey to say, hey, Ellen, that's nonsense,
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That would be fine if we couldn't train the rest of them. But it would lead us to different views of language.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Virtually everything that we're taught is as if the world is constant and going to stay that way. And the answer today is going to be the same answer as tomorrow. And so that certainty leads us not to notice.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah. I would use the methods of the field. It was just the questions that were different. So they weren't seen to be quite as different as you're suggesting. Did any of your colleagues think like – No.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No, even to me. I mean perhaps behind my back.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Like, well, maybe cookies are the nutritious stuff. No, I understand. So I seem to be, you know. Come hell or high water, I'm going to do it. I'm not like that at all. Interesting. More now that I'm older. But I tell a story. I don't remember what the point of it, the exact point was in The Mindful Body where I'm at the dentist. I'm a little kid. I don't remember how old.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I remember my mother came in and the dentist told my mother what a good patient I was. And all I remember was my saying, what were the other kids doing? So it wasn't as if I made a choice. I could do this or I could do – it never occurred to me. And so lots of these ideas are not against or – I don't know where they come from. I know Lee Ross when – so Lee was a professor at Stanford.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I remember having a conversation where he said, Ellen, you're from Mars. And I said, I'm not so different. He says, OK, so you're a normal, not an exceptional Martian, but you're still a Martian.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then a colleague had a conversation with – and I was flattered by this, but I think it wasn't meant to be flattering because they were worried what my reaction was, was that I'm from a different time. And so that plays differently if you're aware, right? So when I started painting, I was breaking the rules to some people's minds. But no, I didn't know the rule.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so I was just doing what felt natural.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So one of the earlier titles of The Mindful Body was Who Says So? And realizing that everything that is was at one point a decision made by people with different motives, different histories, different needs. And when you put people, as I say, back in the equation, everything becomes mutable. Everything.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so here's where I am different from many other people, better or worse, I think in this case for better, that everything can be changed. You tell me you meet this woman and she's too heavy, weight can be lost, hair can be grown. Everything can be changed. So I give a talk when I was very young and I'm here on the stage and the audience is all the way back here.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Let me answer you. Okay, so it's very funny. I'm glad in some ways I don't remember who this person was, but I started studying mindlessness. And I found myself, I'd walk into a mannequin, I'd apologize, you know, all sorts of things like that. And I'd say, well, this is kind of interesting to me.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I knew that was going to make me nervous. So what I did was move all the chairs to be closer to me. Now, if you said to anybody, can you move the chairs? Everybody would say, of course. But mindlessly, it doesn't occur to you. It doesn't occur to you that what is doesn't have to be as it is. And the older I get, the— the more malleable everything seems to be.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Even a thing, you know, to go back, I don't know why this comes to mind, but it does. If an insurance company is making a decision about what drugs to insure, Now, who said that this disorder is better or more worthy than that disorder? I say, so these are people making this decision.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So imagine that you have a group of nuns, they're the committee making the decision, versus a group of lusty 50-year-old men. And they're deciding whether people should be reimbursed for Viagra, for example. And that's what it's all about, you know, that when you recognize that whatever is could be different as meetings. And I deal with this when I give lectures.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, at some point I might say, look in the audience and see if there's usually a man. Is there a man here? It's about 6'5". Somebody always there. I don't know why. 6'5 men find me attractive. I don't know why. Anyway, I invite him to the stage and then we look ridiculous. I'm 5'3". He's 6'5". And I asked him to put his hand. He puts his hand up. His hand is three inches larger than mine.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then I just raised the question, should we do anything physical the same? And it's ridiculous. But one of us is teaching how to do it. So the more different you are from the person who wrote the rule, the more important it is for you not to mindlessly follow the rule.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So you don't hold the tennis racket like this if your hand is half the size of the person who – or twice the size or anything else. And people don't realize it, that everything that is was a decision. For something to be a decision means there was uncertainty. As soon as the decision is made, we forget all that uncertainty and act as if this is the way it's supposed to be.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
An example I often use, you know, tennis. So you have—and everybody, when you think about this, and nobody's going to argue that, of course, the rules to tennis weren't handed down from the heavens. Somebody decided it should be two serves, and that's fine. But for me, three serves would be better. The first time, I kill it. It doesn't go in.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now I'm afraid to try to kill it again and learn from that because I don't want to double fold. So I have a little wuss second serve. I had three serves. I kill it. It doesn't go in. Now I learn from that. I kill it again, but I'm getting a little better. And I still have my backup third serve. All right. So what is the point of that?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'm speaking to somebody, we don't know who it was anymore, who said to me, you know, you are what you study. I said, okay. So then I switched it around from being mindless to being mindful. At that point, then I found out about, I mean, meditation and Buddhism and all of this and started to learn about it. Another way of being.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That if I wrote the rules to the game, I would be a better tennis player. you would be better at whatever you're writing the rules to. So you think differently about yourself. You don't feel bad about it. In fact, you know, when people play tennis with me, we often play three serves. Why not? everything about it is up for grabs.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so what happens is the lower down you are on the totem pole, the fewer of these things, games, ways of being that you yourself have created, the more you're trying to fit yourself into some form that isn't so comfortable. So we need to appreciate that rules laws. Everything was just somebody's decision about how things should be. And, you know, don't violate them purposely.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But if they don't fit, you know, legality is not the same thing as morality. You know, by law, one was not allowed interracial marriage. By law, one was not allowed to be gay. By law, you know, so on and so forth. One wasn't allowed to drink at one point and so on. These are not moral issues. These are a group of people who are making a decision for the rest of us. If it doesn't hurt, fine.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But, you know, if it does, fight it. Deviate. At least live the life you want to live.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
What was exciting to me was that I had gotten through this Western scientific mode, so to speak, to many of the same consequences as the Buddhists had talked about for thousands of years.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It gets tricky because- They're all real, but it's our understanding of them. That varies. So we haven't worked out all of physics yet. Sure. You know, or biology or any of these other things. So I don't think that we should set these aside and say those rules we should follow come hell or high water.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We give up some... See, that's... Okay, so that's perfect, Andrew, because we think we know, but are oblivious to the fact that every single... It's a big statement... behavior can be understood in equal dimensions, equal potency as good or bad. Now, so that I can control what you're thinking. So you think that I'm gullible. You could persuade me that I'm gullible.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I can try my hardest not to be gullible, but I'm going to eventually be gullible. The reason for that is that I value being trusting. And as long as I value being trusting, I'm going to be seen as gullible. As long as you value being flexible, you're going to be inconsistent. As long as you value being stable, you're going to be seen as boring and so on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so this is what I said to you before in different terms, that with all that I've – studied, found, found interesting over all these decades, the thing that meant the most to me was the realization that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or the actor wouldn't do it.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now, if you think about that, that means every single time you're demeaning somebody or yourself or you're coming up with a New Year's resolution, what you're doing is denying the sense of what you were doing. and saying, oh, you should have done something different. Okay.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Once you realize that your behavior makes sense, you like yourself more when you're realizing that, you know, in any relationship, anything that's difficult is difficult because one of you thinks there's a right way and is denying the other person's perspective. We did this thing so many years ago. I gave people a list of, I don't remember, it was 200 or 300 behavior descriptions.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It said, circle those things about yourself that you keep trying to change but you keep failing at. So for me, I'd circle impulsive, gullible. I won't tell you the rest. Okay. Then you turn the page over and in a mixed up random order are the positive versions of each of these. Now people are asked, circle those things you really value about yourself, my spontaneity and my being trusting.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And as long as I value being spontaneous, I'm going to appear impulsive and so on. And so now that I have more respect for myself because what I did made sense, I carry myself differently. I'm not doing what you were just suggesting before where I'm tormenting myself and so on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And the people I'm with, you know, there's a lot in the mindful body that deals with language and only a fraction of the sensitivity I seem to have to language in a different way from the way linguists would study it. But you have things, you know, let's say forgiveness. We have all these terms that seem good.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, and a focus is actually mindless. So it's interesting. Focus on your finger. Now, if you're concentrating, focusing, what you're going to notice is that your fingers, the image is moving around. And so when we try to hold something still, that's the wrong thing. You shouldn't tell people to focus. Now, instead of focus, look at your finger mindfully.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And you know, because you figured me out now that if you say it's good, I'm going to find a way it's bad. If you say it's bad, I'm going to, good. Okay, so this is one of those. I don't want anybody, certainly not the person closest to me, to ever forgive me. I want to be understood.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if you understand, there's no reason to forgive me because my behavior will make sense or else I wouldn't do it. Okay. So how did this come about? I was asked to give a sermon. Sermon, I'm Jewish. I have to go to this church because I say yes to everything. And I'm going to give a sermon. What am I going to talk about? I know nothing about religion. Forgiveness.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's not religion, but it sounds religious-y. All right, I'll think about forgiveness. I think about forgiveness, and what I came up with was sacrilegious, some would think. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad, what are they going to tell you? They're going to tell you it's good. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad, what are they going to say? It's bad.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But you know, you can't forgive unless you first blame. So our forgivers are our blamers. That's interesting. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves aren't good or bad. So what happens is the people who see the world negatively, who blame, then forgive. Hardly divine.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now if you blame, it's better to forgive than not forgive. But if you understand why the person did what they did, it obviates the necessity for blame, which then obviates the necessity for forgiveness. I'd love to bypass blame. Yeah, well, I think that's the way to do it is to recognize in a more open-minded way the motivations that people have vary, the consequences.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No matter what you do, whatever negative thing it seems, positive things will follow if you allow them and you look at it that way.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Oh, that's right. It's your podcast. Yes, you can. It's definitely not my podcast.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That means you're going to notice new things. That's an ugly little finger. And what is that line there? Why is this red? And when you're doing that, when you're actively noticing, the image stays still. So when we give people instructions in school, in focus, they think as a camera, hold it still.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't think there is a compulsion to develop anything in particular. I think there's a compulsion to develop. There's a compulsion. I wouldn't call it compulsion because that sounds negative. But I think that... A drive. Yeah. Are you... No. All mindfulness is is noticing new things, creating new things. With that creation, we're maximally alive.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so if we happen to be on the technology train, then it's technology that's going to get our attention. The people who are in other areas, whether it's creating music, doing what you and I do, it doesn't seem to me any different in principle.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But I don't think that it's durability is what matters. I think then that becomes a social construction. You know, what is the group, the Asians, you know, monks who are going to create art. And, you know, as soon as it's finished, then you bring it down to the water and, you know, to show that nothing lasts.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Sandcastle no selfie, I call it.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, so for my mindfulness book, which I wrote way back when, the secretary I had then was a wonderful guy but didn't know anything about computers and I knew less. And so I would give him something and I'd say, you know, insert this, page 20, whatever. And he would just sort of randomly – because he didn't know what he was doing either. And then at some point he lost an entire draft of the book.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
to sort of imagine, you know. And my first thought was probably more typical than my second thought, which is to go crazy, oh my God, you know. And then I said to myself, what makes me think that that draft was better than the next draft that I can come up with? You know, in some sense, a version of your who cares. And then I just started working on it again.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, at some point when you're writing these research papers, I think most people come to the point where first numbers count, right? How many publications? Then at some point the game changes and you don't care about the number and that's freeing. And so it seems a little similar.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I think that for people to recognize that that excitement can be gotten, the threading of the needle, as I said before. would make much of life feel differently. So we did, this is gonna seem strange kind of answer here, but we took people who didn't like rap music, people who didn't like football, people who didn't like art, okay, so a lot of haters, people who don't like anything.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And whenever we're trying to hold ourselves, the image, anything still, we're going to be performing suboptimally. We need to let things vary. Things are always changing. So what happens is we confuse the stability of our mindsets, we're holding something still in our heads, with the stability of the underlying phenomena.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
One group is just given the activity. The next group is asked to notice one new thing about it. The next group, three new things about it. They're doing it or observing it? Well, if it's football, they're observing. Okay. It doesn't matter if you're observing the rear ends of the football players. Just noticing new things. And the more you notice, the more you like what you're noticing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And to recognize that that's how simple it is. Now, most people, especially when you're younger, you're waiting for something to pull you. Something to grab me and get me all excited. And how freeing if people were taught that you could grab it, whatever the it is, just by noticing. You don't have to hold on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
to the thing you're holding onto when you're recognizing that you could hold onto the next thing. And I saw this Seinfeld, this was so funny, I thought, must've been old Seinfeld. After the show, he does a five-minute standup and I'm gonna not do it as well as he, but nor should I. And he says, what is this thing with appetites?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You go out to dinner and people say, don't eat the bread, you're gonna spoil your appetite. There's so many appetites. You spoil this one, there's another one right behind it. And if you realize that that high, that total engagement, the passion you were feeling was not a result of anything particular about the person, the context, how freeing it would be.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It would be easy to let things go knowing that you can have that a moment later.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, the art is kind of interesting, you know, that I started painting when I was about 50. And I was one of those kids who couldn't draw. And I'm going to have someone think of education. What mark might I have made on a page that would have led an elementary school teacher? to lead me to believe that I had no artistic ability.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
When you think of a difference between a Mondrian or Rembrandt, you know, I mean, people so different that it's sinful for people to think they know how things should be so they know who can do it and who can't, as if there's only one way to do whatever it is. And I had this experience, and it was very clear in my mind. So I had this painting, And I have this friend who is an art collector.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
She drinks a little too much. She came over for a visit, and she saw the painting, a very early painting of mine. And she looks at it and says, Ellen. There's something there. This is the important part. Now, don't go thinking you're Rembrandt, which wasn't nice, but you had a little too much, but it didn't matter.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But my response was so important to me, I didn't say it because I didn't think it would go over well, but I said, and Rembrandt isn't me. I would rather be the very best Ellen Langer than the 500,000th, 5 millionth, whatever, Rembrandt. And when you recognize that quality is a decision people are making, there is no absolute standard.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, if you know anything about art, I mean, you know, let's take even the Impressionists, where people pay so much money today, they were all rejected in their day. You know, when you realize that in some ways, and my work has suggested this to me, that if you're present when you're doing it, you're mindful when you're doing it, somehow that reveals itself in what you're doing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And whether or not it does, you're putting yourself on that canvas, and it's great fun. It's exhilarating. And when somebody's, you know, belittles it, it's strange to me. Where are those criteria coming from? No different from in schools.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'm very much in favor of trying to create mindful education because, as I said before, I think that it's our system of education that has caused most of the mindlessness. And a slide that I put on when I give some of these talks in my view, that virtually, I don't really mean virtually, I have to say it because I'm an academic, right?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, but it's not a practice. You see, once you accept that everything is uncertain, then you just tune in. You only don't tune in when you think you know. So if you were going to come visit me in Cambridge, you've never been to my house. You don't have to practice anything. You walk in, you'll notice things. Did she do that painting? What is that? Oh, look what she's reading.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
All, I believe all of our ills, all of them, Andrew, personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the indirect or direct effect of our mindlessness, right?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So here we have schools all over the country teaching these absolutes, propagated in magazines, newspapers, taught by our parents, taught to each other, all that are limiting us and causing the problems that we keep trying to solve and how easy it would be.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
if we just acknowledge everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else, everybody can't do something, everyone can do something else. So when you're grading that paper and you're so sure that this paper just doesn't make it, to presume that every smart person in the world would evaluate that the same way, I find distasteful.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So, Constance, you know, you give tests in school to find out what people don't know. Give tests to find out what they do know.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I think all of us, at least in this country- Well, what I'm saying is something a little different, is you're saying how to remember, which I agree with that completely. But I'm saying that when we're testing people, We, whoever the we is, decided what is important to know to see does that student know that, ignoring all the other things that student must know.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, I said this before that when I was lecturing in South Africa and they put me up in this very fancy hotel and I had taken a few hours off and I was down by the pool. And, you know, there was this enormous amount of the hotel space, real estate, that was totally unused. The only person who knew that was the lowly cabana boy. who nobody is going to ask what his opinion is.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, everybody has a perspective that can add to the, you know, the larger piece. And by having this idea of there are those of us on top, we really know, you know, people expect, and I'm given this genius award. And, you know, shortly afterwards, every time I say, and you're supposed to be a genius, I never claimed genius.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Labels hide all the ambiguity. We can use grades. When I give a student an A versus a B, it sounds like they're very different. But imagine, and I've studied this with respect to health,
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
There's two dogs here. Exactly, exactly. You'll notice. Mm-hmm. without having to do any work. And that's the important thing because in the way I keep differentiating mindfulness as I study it with meditation, meditation is a practice. For some people to sit still 20 minutes twice a day is work. Mindfulness as I study it is what you're doing when you're having fun.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
that the person who gets an 89, so you go from an 80 to an 89, you get a B, a 90 to 100, you get an A, nobody in their right mind would think there's a real difference between the person who's gotten the 89 and the person who's gotten the 90. But their worlds become very different. You know, all the ambiguity is hidden. We studied this. It's the borderline effect, as we call it.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So imagine, let's say you and I take an IQ test for argument's sake, that you get a 70, so you're normal. I get a 69, so I'm cognitively deprived. I could have sneezed and read the question wrong. I could have come up with multiple answers that could have been better than the one that got the question and the person who wrote the question and so on. But now we're put into two different categories.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And because I'm cognitively deficient, I'm not given the training that I should be given. I no longer think well of myself. And so if you asked me to read certain things, I'd probably opt out and so on. And in a very short time, the difference between us becomes very real. Well, it's the same thing with a medical diagnosis.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
There is always somebody who's right below the border who has it, or we'll say who doesn't have it, below, and the person right above or at that has it, where the two scores are not meaningfully different. But where one then is told they have the disease and the other not, and the difference becomes real over time.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so we have data supporting that, and it's almost just a Gedanken experiment, a thought experiment. At some point, you have to put a limit, but you need to always know that it's made up. What is the expiration date for this can of food? There are people who actually go through their shelves and throw these things out because it's two weeks old.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
not realizing how did they come up with that date in the first place? Anyway, to go back to what you were saying, let me remind you now because I'm having the junior moment, that labels, names of things, these categories help us organize things, but more often or as often hold things still and cause problems. I did that first study way back when called A Patient by Any Other Name.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And we made a videotape of a person being interviewed and showed it to therapists who were either behavior therapists or Freudian types. And the person on the tape was called either a patient or a job applicant. So the exact same tape. When we called the person a patient, they were seen as having hidden this and problems in that and so on.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
When the person was called a job applicant, they were seen as well-adjusted.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You can't have fun unless you're actively noticing. So, in fact, this act of noticing is energy begetting, not consuming. So it feels good. It's the essence of what you're doing when you're having the most fun. It's good for you. And it's so easy that, you know, I can't see any reason why anybody wouldn't embrace it. You know, that it's good for you.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, I think that, um, as soon as you're learning something and if you have your sense of, um, is if you're going to be the same person over the next 70 years, for example. We don't actually cognize that, but without literally realizing that you're not going to be the same person, you take in whatever you've just learned and Continue doing it the exact same way. You know, we go back to tennis.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You learn the game of tennis when you're 15. And now you're 40. You shouldn't be doing any of it the same way. And now you're 80. Again, and so what happens is your performance is not going to be as good as it could be because the 80-year-old body is trying to do it as if it's a 15-year-old body. Rather than taking advantage of – there are positive things that happen as you get older.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
They're not all negative. You know, that – I mean, if I'm playing tennis with, I don't know, a 15-year-old kid, I'm going to win without having to move very much because they don't know what they're doing. You know, so that you don't need the same skills the more experience you have with the task necessarily at least. You see what I'm saying is that we freeze our own behavior.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Every time you learn something, the way we learn everything, it just ogles the mind. You learn how to drive, and then you freeze the way you're learning how to drive when you know the least about how to drive. And that's the way you're going to do it for the rest of your life. A driving thing, just as a...
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
not really apropos of anything except in the car, that if you're driving on ice, what do you do? The car starts to skid. You're driving on ice. In California, you don't pay.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
That's exactly wrong, Andrew. That used to be the case. This is the way we learn everything. You start the way things are right now, that when you skid, we were told that what you're supposed to do is gently hit the brake and turn into the... Now that there are anti-lock brakes, the only way, the safest way to stop that car is to jam on those brakes.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But just think about it because this is the way we learn everything. In this case, you're learning how to drive for safety's sake. And then you mindlessly continue that and it becomes very unsafe. I didn't get the memo. No, most people don't. That's why I brought it up now seeming apropos of almost nothing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But we need to understand that things are changing and pay attention to the way that they're changing and change with it. And the more you hold yourself – you're talking about identity – the more you hold yourself still – the harder that's going to be. I'm much older, as most people are, than I used to be, but I don't have any sense of age. I really don't.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
In fact, the other day, and the other day now means years ago, I was helping this woman with something, and somebody dear to me said, you're probably 20 years older than she is. I had no sense. I thought I was helping this old person. age is just not a relevant factor for me. Sometimes you want to be aware of age.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We did some research where we had people who, you know, they're accused in the environment that often tell us how old we are, and those are not always so good. So for example, if I, at my age, I'm in a fancy store and I go to buy, let's say, a dress, a skirt, okay? It would be inappropriate for me to buy a miniskirt. I'm too old to be wearing almost nothing there, right?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
When you're mindful, people find you more appealing, charismatic. When you're mindful, the products you produce are enhanced and it's healthier.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So clothing tells you how old the person is. Now, we did research, just archival research, with people who wore uniforms, right? Now, if you're wearing a uniform from the first day you start working, you're there 30 years, there's no difference. Okay. There's no age-relevant cue. And in those situations are healthier. Really? Yeah. Because they're not getting the cue that they're old.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, I do actually. I think that when we start entertaining these negative thoughts and evaluating ourselves, we're always going to find evidence. As you get older, you start, oh, my God, am I forgetful? So you pay attention each time you forget, and that makes it even worse. When I said to my students in this health class, smart kids at Harvard, this is on Thursday. I teach Tuesday and Thursday.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I said, what was the last thing I said in class on Tuesday? Nobody remembers. I said, you must be getting dementia. All right. So that when a young person forgets, it's okay. They don't pay any attention to the forgetting. As you get older and you forget, you get less involved in what you're doing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If you're trying to learn something, you have the competing part of you saying that you're not going to remember this and so on. And independent of all of this, I think a lot of the loss in memory has nothing to do with memory. You know, when I was young and you're introducing me to people, I thought it was important for me to remember their names. Andrew, I know, doesn't speak well of me.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I don't really care. You're going to introduce me to five of your—what do I care? If I'm going to need their names, chances are I will meet them again, right? So afterwards, if you say to me, remember Jim, and I say to you, which one was Jim? It wasn't that I forgot, right? To forget means I had to have learned it in the first place.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so if you don't learn it in the first place because you don't care, because your values change as you get older, then it's not a matter of forgetting when you don't know it in the second place. And I think that if we turn it around, because now I'm doing this because I know you expect it of me, and we say, what if you remembered everything? Everything. That would be terrible.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
How would you get through? You wouldn't get to experience anything new. So forgetting, you know, serves a purpose. And I used to think, I never tested this, and now we came up with this years ago, and I think it's probably wrong, but it's kind of fun, that people, as they get older, they become hard of hearing.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But it also happens that the older you get, the more you realize nobody is really saying anything. And so being hard of hearing protects you from a lot of that noise. Yeah, my grandfather used to turn off his hearing.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Or should I have the book further away?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, do you know our vision study? This is kind of fun. So I'm in the doctor's office, and like everybody else, I'm given the Snellen eye chart.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But I'm different from most people. And I resent that the letters are getting smaller and smaller because it's creating an expectation that soon I won't be able to see. So I ask, what would happen if the letters got larger and larger? Which would be to change the expectation that soon I will be able to see. So when we do that, people are able to see what they weren't able to see before.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now, most of us have trouble around two-thirds of the way down the chart. So what we did was start the chart a third of the way down. So the letters are smaller than on top. So now two-thirds of the way down, that starting point, the letters are really small. And what happens is, again, people can see what they couldn't see before. Awesome. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So the idea that your vision has to get worse, I think there are many, many instances where that's not the case. But also, the whole test of vision is bizarre. How often in your life are you looking at letters that make no sense? If I don't want to see you, I'm going to see you a lot sooner and be able to run away from you.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign much quicker than if I'm not hungry. I see things in color that are different in black and white, so on and so forth. And to lose all of that with a two-dimensional eye test seems to me – And again, we haven't touched on this, but it's probably important with respect to vision. It's true with everything. In fact, I tell people, you're wearing glasses.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Try it without glasses. You want to see when you can see and when you can't see. With almost everything, we again – Hold things still when they're varying. Now, what I mean by this is that, let's say with vision. My guess is that 11 o'clock in the morning, my vision is better than at 7 o'clock at night. The data, yes. Okay. I mean, it'd be hard for it. So what does this say?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
This says maybe I should either have a nap or... I don't nap, so I should have an energy bar. And even an energy bar is cute. It's just a candy bar. But you call it an energy bar, you're allowed to eat it. It's like you take a piece of cake, put it in a muffin tin. It's called a muffin. It's healthier than the piece of cake. Anyway, be that as it may.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
that a great amount of control over our physical well-being comes about by attention to variability, which is just a fancy way of talking about mindfulness. Mindfulness is noticing change. That's what it means to be variable. All right. So if you took your glasses off and you saw for yourself, what are the times, what are the moments that you're having?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'm not talking about people who are almost blind, where I can see and when I can see. And then you ask yourself why. And then it may be the case that it's a particular font or more likely that you're tired and then you have other options. But once you start wearing them, it's like taking a laxative. You know, take a laxative once, it's fine.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If you're taking a laxative all the time, you're teaching your body to depend on the laxative. You teach ourselves by some of these... things that are supposed to be helpful, then we teach ourselves to need them in ways we otherwise wouldn't. And so he did this attention to symptom variability with big diseases.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So when you have a chronic illness, the way most people understand chronic illness is that there's nothing that can be done about it. Yeah, the word chronic implies that. But all it means is the medical world doesn't have a fix. It doesn't mean there's nothing can be done. Now, you have your symptoms of the chronic illness.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
The presumption most of the time, I would think, is that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing only moves in one direction. Sometimes it's a little better, sometimes a little – the stock market, it's going up. It doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up, down a little, you know, and so on. All right. So when it's better, why is it better? So we do this.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We call people periodically. And we simply ask them, how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called? And why? Several things happen. The first, by engaging in the whole process, people feel less helpless. And that turns out to be good for your health.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Second, once you start noticing that now it's a little better, or it can even be a little worse, you feel better because you thought that it was always maximally, I'm always in pain, I'm always stressed, whatever it is. third or whatever I'm up to, by asking the question, why now is it better or worse than before, you engage in a mindful search.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I have decades of evidence that that mindfulness itself, the neurons are firing, that itself is good for your health. And then finally, I believe you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. So we've done this with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, Parkinson's, stroke, biggies, and in each case have very positive results.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And the good thing about these sorts of things is that there are no negative side effects. And it doesn't mean that you have to stop doing any medical procedures you may be doing. But, you know, you're asking, you're back in charge of your own health care. Why does this hurt now? You know, stress. There are some people who think they're stressed all the time. Nobody is anything all the time.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So I call you, Andrew, and I say, how stressed are you now and why? And we go through this over time. And then you find out, you know, you're stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Well, then the solution is easy. Don't talk to me. I've.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I think that the first part is what guides most of us is what's been done before. And the fact that nobody has done it to me means nothing but to a lot of people. People create theories working backwards, you know, which is they often take what is and then derive rules to explain why it has to be like that.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Once you believe it has to be like that, then it doesn't occur to you to do anything other than that. But if we start off with the notions of science that I was talking about before, that it's all just probability, no absolutes, then it wouldn't occur to you to stay within the rigid boundaries. Not the best answer, but the only one that came to mind.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, that's the key. That, to me, it's a means of speaking to certain people. And it carries with it a certain gravitas. But I by no means feel that it's giving answers that are any more absolute. Well, as I said before, that all of the answers are probabilities. So it's just a language to use. You know, the counterclockwise study...
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
was criticized because I didn't publish it in a standard journal because my assumption of the – it's very hard if you're doing something over a week's time to control every possibility.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And what I was trying to do in that study was to show that vision, for example, can be improved, that lots of the things that people presume are wired in as you get older, it gets worse and worse, that it just doesn't have to be that way. But I'm having trouble remembering now because I know that I was going to write a paper about taking the whole science of science apart and never did.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if I had written the paper, I'd probably remember what I was going to say and answer your question. But it's a good one. But I don't think that there's anything that is described as absolute that's going to be right, whether it's physics, even physics, biology, psychology, anything. that our methods can only take us so far.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And the people who get beyond that are the people who don't presume that that's as far as you can go. You know, if you can go this way, you can go a little further. I was a chemistry major when I was an undergraduate, and the problem was I practiced Jewish chemistry, which was a little is good, a little more is better, which is not the way to do chemistry.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But I don't know what it is that leads some people to be rigid. and to take everything that is told to them as if it must be and what it is that led me to a different way of being and testing it or just thinking that some of the things that people say just made no sense to me.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah. And I think those are beautiful examples because, you know, one can make an argument that you should wear a mask, but the other side also makes sense. The way masks were preventing, you know, even nonverbal communication, which is very important and important to people's health, right? Your relationships are not an inconsequential part of your well-being. And, you
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
vaccines, you know, there is no treatment that's going to be good for everybody. Somebody very close to me, if given dexedrine, puts her to sleep.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so when we recognize the uncertainty inherent in all of these things, I think we don't mandate things in quite the same way. Now, you can mandate that people wear masks, but it shouldn't be that people wear masks because we're absolutely certain that masks should be worn. There are other arguments to be made why people should wear masks. Or not wear masks. Or not wear masks.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, whatever the case is going to be. And, you know, I think it's important that in the medical world, you know, that I think. I gave this talk at one point, and I thought I was talking to 5,000 women with breast cancer. And it turned out there were lots and lots of physicians there. If I had known that, I might have spoken a little differently. And I was scared afterwards.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I said, you know, oh, my goodness, because I was not flattering. You know, I have great respect for most of these people. But then I found out afterwards that they were thrilled because they know they don't know.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And, you know, operating on the world with an awareness that you can't be sure leads to a different humility, a different way of appreciating other people when they disagree with you and so on. And I don't know how you do that at the higher level, you know, government and so on. But, you know, this is maybe a silly example but meaningful to me. So I spend a lot of time in Mexico.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And there's this very busy intersection. And there are no stop signs. There are no traffic lights. And there are no accidents. Because everybody knows there's no traffic light. There's no stop sign. You have to pay attention to what's going on. You know, so lots of these rules and laws divert attention to as if there's only one thing that matters.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, so when you're told to drive 60 miles an hour, what does that mean? You know, yeah. And, you know, that if you drive 70, you're going to get a ticket. Okay, so if you're not afraid of getting the ticket. But there are other considerations to how fast you might go. You know, the quality of your car, the quality of the roads. Is it raining at the moment?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
How uncomfortable or comfortable the passengers are. And all of this gets – and much more – gets lost by having the rule, 60, as if that somehow is an absolute truth.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then what ends up happening- But it didn't have to be that way. You know, that we go back to the beginning and in school, you're asked a question and expected to give a single answer. Life would be so different for us as we grow up if you gave multiple answers to whatever the question was. That immediately would make clear that there are alternative perspectives.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Just a very simple change in schools.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
One of my ideas, no. No, not one of your ideas.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I feel better now. Me too.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, I think that... The older you are, let's say you've tried different ways of doing something, and there's a particular way that works for you. And it doesn't matter if the other way is faster, is prettier, is whatever. This works. And so you can be seen as set in your way because you know it doesn't really matter. I could do it that way, that way, or this way.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'm going to continue to do it this way. I think as you get older, presumably you've had more mindful experience because if you're a robot, you're not going to be learning anything. And getting more said or less said is an irrelevant question. I remember – this goes back to the pancreas problem. Am I not eating the pancreas?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I really believed I had to eat that pancreas to show that I was all grown up. So you get a little older and you realize. I wrote this blog once a long time ago where you're two years old and you fall and you're screaming bloody murder because you scraped your leg. And then you're seven years old and Johnny or Janie didn't send you a valentine and you're distraught, you know, distraught.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then you're 13 years old and you have a pimple and, oh, my God, you know, no one's ever going to find me attractive. And it goes on and on. And at some point, this was all kind of silly. And, you know, and with that, you become easier. But sometimes that easier can be misunderstood by others. So let me give you an example.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I talk about this in the book when I talk about three levels, you know, that in the example I use, The New Yorker is a wonderful magazine, but let's say we have three levels. Level one, people who don't read The New Yorker. Level two, people who read The New Yorker. Level three, people who don't read The New Yorker anymore. We could have them read it again, but let's just skip first, okay?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Level one, not reading, and those not reading it anymore are very different. but they're seen as the same by the level twos. Level two people are the bane of my existence. All right. So let's say you have, you're young, you're uninhibited, level one. Then you're like most people, you become very inhibited. Then hopefully you get to a certain point in life, you say, who cares? And you become
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Not uninhibited because you know the rule. You're just choosing not to follow it. But those at the level two will see the level three and think they're level ones because you can't see beyond your own level of development.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
When I was young, especially if I'm on an important show like yours, Andrew, and we just took a break for a minute and if I had eaten something and I got a spot on my sweater, I'd sit like this. Not even realizing how stupid does this look, right? But that no one should see that I got, you know.
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Who cares? So I do this thing with my students and it's very simple, but it has a very big effect on them. Where I tell them, you can't come to class next week unless you're wearing two different shoes, right? Very hard. Some won't come to class. Most come. Then a large majority wear two different shoes that look the same, two different black sneakers.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And then you have the bold where you're red and a black sneaker. That's cool. And we talk about nobody even notice. And if they notice, what are they noticing? Somebody who knows you is not going to judge you differently because you're wearing two different – they can assume there's some reason for it. And those who don't know you don't know you, so what do you care? Sorry.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
This wonderful young woman, I did this in my seminar as well. That was in the lecture class. She comes in, she says, Professor Langer, you won't believe what happened. I said, what happened? She said, I'm in the elevator. There's this guy. He looks at my feet. He looks at my face. He looks at my feet. He looks at my face. He looks at my feet and he points and he says, was that intentional?
Huberman Lab
Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know what I did? I said, no, what did you do? She said, I looked at his feet. I looked at his face. I looked at his feet. I pointed to his feet and said to him, was that? So good. And when people recognize that everything is sort of in some sense up for grabs, that none of it really matters. It's so freeing. And there's so many ways that we constrict ourselves.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And to make an answer to your question, Hopefully, you get older and you realize that most of this, it just doesn't matter. You can learn that when you're younger. All you need to do is recognize that those people who you think are thinking you're X, there are other people who are going to go, yay, you're X. That you may love me because I'm trusting. You may dislike me because I'm gullible.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So you can't please everybody, not because your behavior is unpleasant, but because all of it is up for their own definition, and you can't control the way they're going to see it.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's one way, and I'm not demeaning it. I did some research in the 80s on meditation. It's wonderful. It's just different. And they're not mutually exclusive. You can do both. And part of the advantage of meditating... possibly has nothing to do with the meditation. You know, why are you going to meditate? You say you want to be a kinder, nicer person.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Oh, my goodness.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Oh, wow.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But what difference does it make? That's kind of funny.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But it doesn't matter.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It doesn't have to be made up or not. If you ask yourself what difference does it make? The wrestling? No, any of it. So it's your house, it's somebody else's house. Exactly.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
They chose to lie. If you say there's something to be learned regardless of whether it's true or not. I thought you were going someplace else with this. I thought you were talking about the tragedy of the fire, which as an example I use in The Mindful Body to show that events are not good, bad. Rather, our view of the event is what makes it good or bad. And so I had this experience.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You could just be kinder or nicer, but now if you're going to go to this trouble 20 minutes twice a day, you're going to sit up and take notice and be a kinder, nicer person.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I was at a friend's house for dinner. I come back late, which never happens. And all of my neighbors were outside because my house had burned down. And, you know, just pretty scary. Okay. A couple of funny things happened. They said they were able to save my dogs, which that wasn't funny. That was wonderful. But they couldn't save the parrot. I didn't have a parrot.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Well, Roger Brown, when he was alive, gave me this stuffed parrot that was in a cage. Oh, my. Okay. As a kid who owned parrots, I was like frightened for a moment. Couldn't save the parrot. Okay. So now I stay at a friend's house. And the next day I call the insurance company. And the person comes over.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And he said this was the first time in his 20-year career that the damage was worse than the call. Most people, oh my God, oh my God, it's not so bad. Here, I had already lost everything, so it didn't make sense to throw my sanity away after it. Okay, so that was the first thing. I move into the Charles Hotel, and I'm a sight to be seen with my two little dogs.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And it's Christmas, all the presents coming in, you know, we're burned, all the ones going out. It's now Christmas Eve and I go out for dinner and I come back to the hotel room and it's full of gifts. Not from the owner of the hotel, not from the management, but from the so-called little people. the chambermaids, the people who parked my car, the waiters and waitresses.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Andrew, I tell you, I could not tell that story for months, maybe years, without it bringing tears to my eyes. It was beautiful. Every Christmas I'm reminded about what feels to me the basic goodness of people. And I couldn't tell you except for one thing what I lost in that fire. So, you know. One stuffed parrot. No, no, that I don't remember that until right now. No, it was kind of fun.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I was teaching, going to be teaching, you know, as soon as school began again, a large lecture class and all my notes were burned. And so, oh, my God, what am I going to do? And so what I did was I called a student who got an A in the course the year before, borrowed her notes and omitted those and taught the course.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And it was the best course I ever taught because I was not relying on anything that I would then repeat in any absolute – I was totally there.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No, no. I don't think that they necessarily are. I think that if something happens – You should take advantage of it and learn something from it. And, you know, so there's data, not from my lab or yours, but that people who have heart attacks and you live through a heart attack or a stroke, all of a sudden you realize, gee, this is not going to go on forever. I've got to start living.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But they're not mutually exclusive. So I'm not denying some of the more inherent properties, let's say. But there's this other piece to it.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And it's a shame. I mean, I think most people are sealed in unlived lives and, you know, that you need a heart attack to wake you up or somebody else's death, you know.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yeah, I don't think people – when people are afraid of death, I don't think it's really death that they're afraid of. They're afraid of pain and having no control at that moment. The old people I know, studying this for so long, I know lots of – Very old people. None of them seem to be afraid of death.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
In fact, I ended my Counterclockwise book with a conversation I was having with a friend who was 90-something. And she said, you know, Ellen, I'm not afraid of dying, but living is such fun. And I think that that's the way most of us should be. Mm-hmm.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But there's something I wanted to say that we touched on before, and I don't think—it's not really relevant now, but you'll find a way to—I'll find a way to make it relevant—about spontaneous remissions. You know, I said that with my mother there was a spontaneous remission, and the medical world can't study spontaneous remissions or doesn't study—so they seem infrequent.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And I think, you know, that— How frequent does something have to be to give people a sense of hope that it's possible? You know, I don't think it has to be an everyday occurrence. Of course, the more frequent it is, the more likely. But when I think about spontaneous remissions, I personally think that they're much more common than the medical world. It's likely to believe.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Once you're in a hospital, life is very different from the way your health is once you're out of the hospital. I don't mean that you're sick in one case and not sick in the other. But the attention that's given to it, the degree to which things become self-fulfilling prophecies,
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I think that if you believe that cancer is a killer, which is what people used to believe, then I think there are many ways that the cancer becomes a death sentence. Even in a very mundane way, if you think you're going to die, you don't do those things that keep you alive. You're not going to go out and get exercise, for example, if you thought that was good for you. I'm going to die anyway.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
These super agers, the people that fall into that category. I hate that. No, I'm serious. Super memorizers, super tasters. As soon as we make a group of people the super group – That says that whatever they're able to do is not available to everybody else. And I don't think that there's any evidence for that. Yeah.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know that there was a story way back when. So there's this mental facility and people are on what's in their vernacular called the hopeless ward. And then they wanted to renovate the ward so they move all of the people. So you're in the hopeless ward. Now you're in a hopeful, you know, without it being called that.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Then the renovation is finished and people are returned to their old rooms and many unexpected deaths occurred.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Did you read The Mindful Body? I talk about a mindful hospital, which would be different from the ground up. I'm now trying to, in Mexico, Canada, and in the States, Minnesota, trying to put up at least start with a mindful emergency ward and then become a whole mindful hospital. It should be very different. For the reasons that I'm presuming you're getting at.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Do you know anybody who's ever walked through a hospital door that isn't stressed? I mean, no. Only walking out. Yeah, no. But and I believe that stress is by far the major killer. It's a very extreme position, Andrew. I believe I was going to do this work with people in China before COVID. We take, let's say, a few hundred people who are just diagnosed with cancer, very the cancer.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And we find out how stressed they are. And nobody's going to be happy being told they have cancer. So we give them a little while. It's going to be three weeks to adjust to it. Then we measure their stress level every three, four weeks. I believe the stress level will predict the course of the disease over and above nutrition, genetics, and treatment.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And stress is psychological, which takes me back to how all of this can be controlled by our minds. But anyway, so you go to a hospital, the first thing you are is stressed. You have the people working in the hospital who, especially during COVID, but it was always the case, suffering enormous amount of burnout. Well, what is burnout? You don't get burnout if you're mindful.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, if I'm seeing you every day and I'm presuming you're the same Andrew I've seen before, your symptoms are basically the same. How are you, Andrew? I take your temperature. Everything is pretty much the same. It can be exhausting because I'm not getting anything.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
There's so much there. I don't know where to go. I mean, we want to talk about that, the research. Yeah, let's talk about the study. Before we go to the study, though, let's go to the reason for the study, way back when. All right, so there's so many paths I can take here. Let's take them all. Okay, we'll start with one. So I did some research back in the 70s with people in nursing homes.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If, on the other hand, I'm noticing all the new things about you, then I'm being fed and my neurons are firing and I'm not going to burn out. We have lots of simple things. When I was talking to Atul Gawande, he did some wonderful work on checklists. In surgery, for instance, if they have a checklist, there are many fewer errors that are made.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But he had just sent the last draft to the publisher, so he wasn't going to be able to change it. I said, we need a mindful checklist. What is a mindful checklist? And you remember when we used to travel and you come back to the States and you had to fill out these forms and you're bringing any livestock. Now, do you have any fruits and vegetables?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You answer three of these and you don't answer any of the other. You just know it's no, no, no, all the way down the list. So a checklist and even the checklist in aviation, you know, the pilot, co-pilot flaps up. throttle open, anti-ice off, it becomes mindless.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
So remember the plane that was going from, the Air Florida flight, going from Florida to Washington, D.C., so that's one warm climate to another warm climate. And they go flaps up, throttle open, anti-ice off, but there was snow in D.C., an unusual event. The plane crashed because the de-icer was turned off and people were killed.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And the point of it is that a checklist, well, better than no checklist, there's a better than better way. We talk a lot about that in The Mindful Body, that the checklist needs to be a mindful checklist. So not is Andrew in bed? Yes. What position is Andrew in in the bed? Right. You know, does Andrew have two eyes? But, you know, how much liquid can you see? So not yes, no, going beyond yes, no.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Where you can only answer the question if you're actually looking at the person. So then you're noticing. Now, the wonderful thing about that is if I'm noticing you and being mindful about aspects of you, you feel noticed. And that's the way you feel cared for. And then the relationship grows.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Yes, but it all follows from recognizing you don't know. So how do we get people to actually look for the changes in people? When I was talking about attention to symptom variability, and I said before, imagine you're with somebody who is, you think they're losing it. They're forgetting.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Now, if you think they're forgetting, you become intolerant every time they forget something because you forgot that it's not willful. They really just don't remember, number one. Number two, the only time you're paying attention is when they're forgetting. So you've not attended to all the times they're remembering. So the problem seems worse.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But if you were in fact attending to when are they misremembering, what are the circumstances? And you catch it early. You say that the person doesn't forget everything. They forget, I don't know, questions about restaurants, for example. Well, then, you know, probably they don't care. I'm going to be happy. I'm an eater. I'm going to be happy wherever we go.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And so unless we're going to someplace that's phenomenally expensive or we have to travel, whether we went to restaurant A, B, or C, I might not remember. For you, since you're very discerning, you're going to know you had a wonderful meal here and a horrible meal in the other three places. So for you, it matters. The point is when somebody doesn't know, why don't they know?
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
And if you immediately assume it's because of dementia, you have a catch-all and are missing all of the subtleties that in fact would lead to different diagnoses. And so if the same thing in the nurse or doctor attending to the patient, if they're attending to the changes and asking themselves why, the smaller changes and the things that are not changing,
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Why did I do that? Because I had somebody in the family who was in a nursing home. It was very distressing to see people just sitting there doing nothing and barely existing. So we had the idea that if we gave people choices— that might get them more engaged in their living. And so we did that.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I had a student many years ago who had MS, and when somebody would ask her how she is, she's great. You know, and then one person then said, but how could you be gracious? My arms work, my head is working, you know, and went through all the parts of her that are not suffering, you know. So you can always attend to what's wrong. You can't attend to everything.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, playing tennis, you could attend to the wonderful shots you made. You can attend to the faults, you know, and that's going to lead to very different states, right? If I attend to... Every time I hit that ball in a way I didn't think I could hit, I'm going to learn something from it and be motivated to try it again. If I attend to every time I screwed up, I'm going to be embarrassed.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I'm going to be afraid to expand and experience new things. I feel like- I've just combined 12 different areas.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
If you don't believe there's a right answer, if you believe there's a right answer, you want someone to give me that answer. Which surgery should I have? Oh, my God, I'm supposed to have a house. The house burned. You know, life is over. But if you realize that any experience is only experience through you and provides opportunities.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
No, of course. So when Eric Fromm wrote, escape from freedom, it was that same idea that you can be paralyzed by so many choices. But I think that's wrong. I think you're only paralyzed by the choices if implicitly you believe there's a right and a wrong choice. And when you recognize that they're all equal, it just doesn't matter. It's easy to choose them. So it's choose your own adventure.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Exactly, yeah. Or make whatever you're doing an adventure. You know, if I can't be near the one I love, I should love the one I'm near.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Everything is – yeah.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We gave people encouragement to decide where to see people, whether to visit them in your room, in the lounge. You have to remember, you can't go into an establishment, a business, and turn the whole power structure around. So within reason, we came up with choices people could make. We gave them an opportunity to see a movie. You could see it on Tuesday or Thursday.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It reminds me of an argument back I guess when I was your age and the question was violence on TV. And we're kids being exposed to this violence, becoming more violent. And I never quite understood it because if you were my child and we were sitting there watching this violence, I go, oh. And you would see that my reaction to it was negative and you'd learn.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
not to engage in that or to recognize, you know, the effects on other people. What I'm saying is that, you know, rather than the medium being the message, the medium, you know, people say to me, is technology good? Technology isn't anything, the tools. And if they're used mindfully, they're good. If they're used mindlessly, you know, they're not good. And And so I think it's silly.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
You know, there's data showing that kids who are college kids, for example, who use a lot of social media have lower self-esteem and all of this. You know, and I present this to them and I say, this is silly. You're not now going to get off Facebook because of these data. But let's look at it. You're Harvard students, for God's sakes.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
Why is it that you're only going to post the picture where you look the prettiest, talk about the – have the nerve to turn it around. Hey, would you believe what I looked like last night when you're having that bad hair day or something didn't go well? Just have the guts to do that. So it's not the social media.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
It's the lying that – or the mistaken assumption when you see all of the successes that that's the more general truth. Everybody but you is having these successes.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
But if people learn the three levels that I was explaining before, then you'd see that what looks like is not very good, in fact, may be quite something. You know, you have people who are poor and they can't spend a lot of money on their appearance. And then you have everybody else who's spending a lot of money on their appearance. Then you have some of these very, very rich people.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
We gave him a plant to take care of, all right? The comparison group, the tender loving care group, we told them, you know, people will be visiting you and we'll set it up so you'll be visiting in the lounge. Everything was controlled that way. You can see a movie and we'll let you know if you're going to see it on Tuesday or Thursday. Here's a plant and the nurses will care for it for you.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I had this editor for mindfulness, wonderful woman. She's recently died. And the first time we went out, this is when I was young, and it was wonderful how they're going to send me all these free books, and they take me out all the time to get me to publish with this company as opposed to that company. And I'll never forget this. We go for this meal, and she looked poor. So I didn't eat anything.
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Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer
I chose the cheapest thing on the menu because I knew she was paying – I found out she was one of the richest people in New England.