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Fact of the matter is nobody knows. You can't know because everything is changing.
Hey everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to Radio Headspace.
Today, I'm joined by Dr. Ellen Langer. a Harvard psychologist who spent decades studying the mind-body connection It's an incredibly fascinating theory that thoughts don't just influence your body, They are your body.
And trust me, I had many questions and she answered. all of them.
We talk about why healing isn't just physical, how shifting your perspective can lead to real change in your mind and body, and why embracing uncertainty might be one of the healthiest things you can do.
This was a very eye-opening conversation for me, and I hope you enjoy it.
So one of the things that I wanted to discuss with you today, you've said that changing your perspective is teachable, right? being uncomfortable with uncertainty is definitely easier said than done.
So how do you encourage people to follow?
This idea of like questioning everything.
OK, well, first of all, people want to be happy.
And if you ask yourself, can a robot be happy?
The question is silly, right? Now, when we're being mindless, we're no different from robots.
So if we seek happiness, health, satisfaction, all of the good things, we have no choice but to be mindful.
And when you're mindful, you're aware that everything is always changing.
Everything looks different from different perspectives.
So we can't know. Now, the reason people are so uncomfortable with uncertainty is because they've been taught that they can know.
And so if you're talking to somebody and you think you're supposed to know and you think they think you're supposed to know, then you're scared. you know, and stressed and want to avoid those situations.
But the fact of the matter is nobody knows.
You can't know. Because everything is changing.
I try to teach people this by starting with a very simple thing.
And I've done so many of these podcasts.
There are some people who are going to know the answer, but if they know the answer now and they think they know, they're as mindless as if they didn't know.
The one thing everybody thinks they know is how much is one plus one.
So Rosie, how much is one plus one? Well, Of course, because I'm asking and you were afraid to be wrong.
Yeah, I would say two. Yeah, most people would say two.
And if you're using a base 10 number system, 1 plus 1 is 2.
But if you're using a base 2 number system, 1 plus 1 is written as 10.
Who cares about number systems? Most people are not interested.
If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one.
If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one.
If you add one watt of chewing gum plus one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one.
Then it goes on and on. In the real world, 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2. as or more often as it does.
Now, if you think about that and somebody like me comes over, you say, hey, Rosie, very unlikely, how much is one plus one?
All of a sudden you have a choice. You can say 1, 2, or 10.
When we're mindless, we don't have any choice.
When you're mindless, you're no different from the robot.
And because everything is changing all the time, the answer may change depending on if a mathematician asked you that. all of a sudden 10 would be probably the better answer for you than 1.
Every day I get other examples of this. Okay, so if the thing we knew best we don't know, then sort of that suggests that most of the rest of what we don't know.
And it's easy not to know. When you don't know, you sit up and you pay attention.
So not knowing allows you to be mindful.
And when you're mindful, you're actively noticing neurons are firing and 45, closer to 50 years of research now. says that it's literally and figuratively enlivening.
So many years of doing research where we make people more mindful and we plug in different measures.
So what did this mindfulness affect? virtually everything, you know, that you're happier, you're healthier, your relationships are better, your performance is better, everything.
You know how there are some people who seem to light up a room You can only do that if you're mindful.
Now, the reason most people aren't lighting up the room, the room is typically dark. is because mindfulness, mindlessness is ubiquitous.
And so the question you ask, how do you change from this mindlessness to mindfulness?
Well, since you're not there when you're mindless, you're not there to know you're not there.
You can't just change. What you need to do is one of two things to start.
First is the top down, which is what I already explained, that uncertainty, you know, if uncertainty scares you, well, so be it.
So when you fully understand the power in uncertainty and that you can't know, you'll naturally approach everything differently. in a new way.
The other is bottom up. So I don't know.
You're sitting next to this person, Barry.
You probably know Barry for years. Notice three new things about him.
Notice three new things about the room you're in.
When you step outside, notice, and three isn't a magic number.
It can be four, six, it doesn't matter. But as you notice new things, about the things you think you knew, you come to see you didn't know them.
And then your attention naturally goes, let me do that over and over.
You have to watch it. Yeah, I don't know anything.
And it's freeing. So it is this idea of beginner's mind, I mean, essentially.
Yes. Yeah, but with an understanding of – a different understanding of why most people don't have a beginner's mind and how to get – the beginner's mind.
Meditation is fine. It's just different.
Meditation is a practice that you engage in, hopefully to result in post-meditative mindfulness.
So meditation isn't mindfulness. This is a very different approach to arrive essentially at the same place where you're present.
And lots of people say be in the moment, be in the –
That's sweet, but it's empty because, again, when you're not there, you don't know you're not there, so you can't tell yourself to be there.
I know. My mind is just like, I mean, it really is.
I mean, it's so fascinating to me. I'm curious, and just to share with the to talk a little bit about the mind body connection.
And I know that you've shared the story of, uh, the, your firsthand experience with your mother having a diagnosis.
Okay. So I'd love for you to share that if you don't mind.
Sure. I'll start with one. Uh, That's humorous, right?
So I was married when I was obscenely young.
Don't tell anybody. And we went to Paris on a honeymoon.
And in a restaurant there, I ordered a mixed grill.
And on the mixed grill was a pancreas. So I said to my then husband, which of these is the pancreas?
He points to something. I eat everything else.
Now it's the moment of truth. I start eating the pancreas and I literally get sick.
He starts laughing. You know, at any point in life, that's probably not a good thing.
But on your honeymoon. OK, so I say, why are you laughing?
And he said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago.
So I had made myself sick. Now, go forward many years, My mother had breast cancer and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas.
That's the end game. So the doctors wrote her off.
Nobody was exercising her limbs. Essentially, we're just waiting for her to die.
And then magically, it disappeared. It was totally gone and the medical world couldn't explain it.
So somehow I had made myself sick. Somehow she had made herself well.
And that was the beginning of the mind-body unity.
Now, when I started this work, which was through the first...
Mind-Body-Unity study, the counterclockwise study was designed and conducted in 1979.
So that's a long time ago. And at that point, Nobody was speaking about mind and body.
I'm writing and writing and nobody's reading or listening, but I'm trying to change the dialogue.
Then the next phase, people are talking about mind-body connection.
Now, mind-body connection has the same problem as mind-body dualism.
How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body?
How did I get from this is pancreas to getting sick, right?
And there was no way to explain that. When you talk about mind-body connection, you have the same problem.
How are they connected? And so, you know, I'm saying these are just words.
Let's put the mind and body back together.
If it's one thing, wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body.
And then we do many, many studies that, um, suggests this is a useful way of understanding the human being.
Yeah, I think it's so interesting, right?
This idea that your body follows what your mind believes.
Yeah, that is one thing. Yeah, so can you walk?
That's very hard for people to understand.
It is. There was an article that the New York Times was doing on me in the magazine section many years ago.
The person who wrote the article told me you would not believe how hard it was for them.
To understand. It's very simple. It's one thing.
It's not two things. It's one thing. And, you know, I'm not saying that there's nothing going on internally.
There's a lot going on, but it's not happening sequentially.
It's more or less happening all at once.
I raise my arm. My brain is different. My toes are different.
Every part of my body is going to be different because it's all one thing.
And the problem is that I think we don't realize that the whole body is connected, forgetting about the mind and body as one.
You know, that anything that happens to any part of your body is simultaneously happening to every part.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you're saying that because earlier you talked about the one pile of laundry with another pile of laundry.
It's the same with with the body and our brain is inside our body.
It's one unit. Yeah. I think it's really...
Interesting to the sort of, you know, the limitations that we put on ourselves sometimes can become these. self-fulfilling prophecies when we're in a panic or stress.
Can you talk about that? Beyond what you think.
Let me tell you a story from a couple of weeks ago.
So this is brand new. All right. My closest person to me, we're in Mexico, and we had this very large armed war.
She thinks she hid something on the top of it.
And we're about to leave in a couple of days.
So she stands on the shelf, first shelf to reach it. the giant thing falls on her.
Now she's trapped under this thing. This armoire weighs maybe twice what I weigh. at least as much as I weigh.
I pick it up enough for her to get out from under.
When I tell this story to people, they say, oh, yeah, that's the adrenaline.
What do you mean that's the adrenaline? The adrenaline has a brain.
That was me. And when I was doing it, because I had to do it, all of me was able.
It's very different, you see. If I say I did it, then I own it, and then I know in future situations. that I'm a lot stronger than I might have thought that I was.
I don't remember the question anymore. No, no, no.
But that's sort of the limitations and our own self-fulfilling prophecies sometimes.
And you're giving a... physiological example of how our limitations.
First of all, I don't know how we could ever assess the limitations. you could do you probably could do a little more yeah what about like the self-limiting beliefs that people say yeah well it's mindless that's what i you know all of this is mindless you can't know And an interesting part of that is that people mistakenly think they want complete success.
But you can either do something completely successfully mindlessly or.
Not knowing how successful you'll be and doing it mindfully.
Once you know it, so an example I've used too often, remember you're a little kid and you're in the elevator and you're trying to press the button and you can't reach it.
And the adult you're with picks you up, and you press the button, and it's great.
Next time, you're a little closer to it, but you still can't reach it.
Okay, and all of this is great fun. Then comes the day you press the button.
And after that, the game is over. Rosie, when was the last time you were excited about pressing a button in an elevator?
The point being, when you're completely successful, the whole event goes away.
It used to be fun learning how to spell three-letter words.
At this point right now, probably not at all.
Yeah, I'll give you an example, and I want to tie this into my next question.
I went through. So at 36, I went through a fertility journey.
You know, I was trying to get pregnant for years and years.
It didn't end up. working out. I actually went into early menopause at 39 and now I'm 41.
I'm postmenopausal. But A lot of my thinking during that perimenopause stage was, you know, having all these tools and all of these books I've read and all this theory.
And I was like, Oh, my mind can heal my body.
I can, I can make it better. And then when it, when it didn't work, I'm going to do air quotes work. it kind of sent me on this tailspin where, you know, I just was in a in a dark place.
Right. Because I felt like. I am so devoted to this work and I know it works and I believe in this mind body.
Well, first of all, my guess is that. It was an almost-bullish.
Let me use an example. different from this, but I had given a talk and it was like 5,000 women with cancer.
And they were about I'd say about 20% of the people in the room were physicians, which I didn't realize at the time because sometimes I can sound anti-medical.
So I'm talking about some of the control that we have over our diseases and health.
And this man thought, you know, racist hand.
It wasn't all women. And I said, his woman, his wife fought the disease.
She was, you know, that's all she was going to do in the way you're speaking.
Fight the disease. Yeah. And aren't I blaming the victim?
Oh. surely I don't want to be blaming the victim.
I said, no, I'm blaming society, not the victim.
The society teaches we have no control, so if you believe we have no control and then try to persuade yourself you do have some control, it's hard to get there.
Now, then I thought further about it and realized The whole metaphor of fighting the cancer, which is a version of you were going to fight this, whatever it was that was keeping you from conceiving. is in some way a realization that you're going to lose or a belief that you're going to lose.
If a two-year-old were tugging at your pants, bottom of your pants, you wouldn't see yourself as fighting the kid, right?
It'd be an annoyance. Get away, you're bothering me.
But you wouldn't be fighting him. So the whole metaphor of fighting means that that enemy is very big.
And, you know, and I think the way we talk to ourselves, the way that the culture, I have a lot of this in the mindful body about language, health. language to me often reveals more than it does to the person using it.
We have people who are in a bad place and then they get themselves better. and act as if that's it.
And a lot of the book I talk about, there's a better than better.
And so for you to believe there was something you could do was certainly better than just giving up.
But my guess is no. You know, where do you come to be able to change all this medical information and so on that you didn't fully believe it? or fully want the child at that point or all sorts of things that you don't want to talk about.
But, you know, and, you know, and, To have a child is wonderful if you have a wonderful relationship and do wonderful mothering.
To not have a child is wonderful if you're living your life fully.
And so maybe part of you is enjoying your life without the child.
This is a deeper conversation, but I definitely I agree with you.
And I see sort of a bigger picture perspective.
And I do believe the. There's what better than better, right?
My life is so – It's good. Yeah. It's amazing.
You know, I'm happy. I'm happier now. Given this, I'm doing air quotes again, this diagnosis, I'm happier now.
Than I've ever been in my entire life. So there you go.
All right. So and some part of you. knew that that was possible.
And so it all worked out just as it should have.
Yeah. And I want to tie this back to what you said about the language.
Because I think it's important, this whole and in the book, you give the example of the remission of cancer or the cancer free.
Yeah. No, there's so many of these. I went to see my friend Eva. who had a very, very bad case of cancer.
And I said, Eva, how are you? I hadn't seen her in a while.
And she said she just got back from Mass General.
And they sell her her cancers in remission.
So she's happy. And I don't know, you know, I listen, I hear things differently from the rest of the world.
I think my response at that point should have been wonderful.
Something went off in my head that said, well, wait a second.
If I took the very same test, chances are they would tell me I don't have cancer.
Why is it I don't have it, but she has it in remission?
So it's always the three levels. You have a bad case of cancer.
The cancer is in remission. Remission is better than having the act of cancer.
But cure is even better than remission. And, you know, there is so there is a way that.
The medical world, especially with certain kinds of cancers, say you have to be cancer-free for five years before they'll say you're cured.
And I did a lot of research. Where does that five years come from?
And no place, really. And that would be OK.
So who came up with the five? I don't know.
But the point is that for five years, women are stressed about is it going to return?
And I think actually stress is the major killer out there.
So we don't want to add to people's stress now.
If the cancer is not there, the cancer is not there.
You're home free, at least for now. None of us know what's going to happen tomorrow to any of us.
And you go about living a full life and living that full life and living it happily and mindfully.
You're making yourself stronger. no matter what the future holds for you.
By worrying about tomorrow, what you're doing is wearing yourself down and making yourself more vulnerable.
We went to a breast cancer awareness walk and we interviewed people and we want to know, did they see their cancers in remission or cured?
And then we followed up six months later.
Those who saw themselves as cured were happier and healthier on all the measures that we took.
And this idea came to me a long time ago, and I sort of hesitated to put it out there, so I contacted Some of the leading oncologists to make sure I wasn't going to be unintentionally harming and they all agreed.
Yeah, I mean it's a little bit of the same premise as placebo effect.
Oh, yes. Yeah. Well, you know, a placebo is – evidence for mind-body unity.
You take a nothing, you think it's something and it acts like something.
If you take a placebo pill, it's usually very effective, but if you get a placebo injection, it's even more effective.
And if you have placebo surgery, it's maximally effective.
Because when you think, you know, Why would they do all of this to me if it weren't effective?
Well, what I'm hearing you say is that the mind body.
Unity can be probably our biggest source of healing.
It's not probably. I think it's definitely.
I don't see how it could be otherwise because.
We have so many of these mind-body findings.
I mean, the first one maybe is fun for people to know about. which is called the counterclockwise study.
But we take elderly men and they're going to live in a retreat that we retrofitted to 20 years ago.
So they're going to live as if they're their younger selves.
Talk about past events as if they're just unfolding everything around.
It wasn't quite a Hollywood set because they didn't have the Hollywood money for it.
But we took them back in time in a week. without any medical intervention, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. just by putting themselves back in time.
Now, you don't have to put yourself back in time.
The point of the study is to say, much more is possible than we believe.
I feel like all roads lead back to mindfulness.
Yes. And when you think about it. You know, because I've tried, I've been doing this for over 50 years that, you know, Periodically, I try to change the topic because no matter what you're doing, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly.
Right. You're running a podcast. You're taking a course.
You're playing golf. Doesn't matter. You're doing it either mindfully or mindlessly.
Right. And the consequence of being in one state or the other are enormous.
Yeah. I interrupt both our flows. I think, I think it ties into what I was going to ask.
Like, A specific question. What steps do we take on a daily basis to increase our mind body?
So we have to understand. or I think it would be to our advantage to understand, this isn't a practice.
This is a way of being. And that it's a way of being that has at the core an appreciation for uncertainty.
So what would be a good daily practice for people to do to start?
Don't practice. No, I do nothing. No, do something or do nothing, but do nothing.
Choose to do nothing if you're going to do nothing, because doing nothing can be fine, too.
You know. We have another show to pursue that one.
The what people can do first is. Recognize that they don't know.
So look more closely at the person you think you know best and find three new things about them.
And then all of a sudden they're going to come alive.
You know, we have so many experiences with this.
Even you're looking for something and you can't find the damn thing that's right in front of you.
And that's because of our mindlessness. I mean once you become aware of the sorts of things that I'm speaking to, you'll see it all around you.
The problem is most people see it with other people.
Boy, is Rosie mindless, you know, realize our own mindlessness, you know, when you're, um, ever hearing yourself being judgmental, recognize that you're being mindless, that that person's behavior can be understood differently.
When you're experiencing being stressed, recognize that you're being mindless because events themselves are not positive or negative.
It depends on how you understand them and so on.
And just, you know, play this podcast a few times, maybe read The Mindful Body.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dr. Langer.
This has been so incredible. I mean, even just reframing the way that we see behavior and recognizing that you're being mindless, being able to Or recognize that we don't know everything, I think, is a really great way.
We don't really want complete success because then that means we're doing it mindlessly and we're just going to start some other act.
You don't want, if you're a golfer, to get a hole in one every time you swing the club.
You think you do, but if you do, there's no game.
It's no different. You're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right. Thank you. So, Dr. Langer, you are...
The GOAT, the greatest of all time. How can people get in touch with your read more about you and your work?
Well, let's see, you can go to my website.
I think now, if you just Google me, more information becomes available than anyone should want.
And perhaps people would enjoy, I think, I enjoyed writing it. the mindful body because that started off as a memoir so there are lots of very personal stories my adventure with hell's angels and you know my getting married when i was teenager and all these things in it then became more like my other book so it's full of research um and um um Do you narrate it as well?
It's on. You know, I thought about that.
And then what happened was I realized that.
As I'm reading it, I probably want to change it a little bit.
Oh, yeah. You know, because nothing is ever perfect.
I should have said it this way. So it's just same.
And those things take a long time. Well, the name of the book is called The Mindful Body.
You can get it anywhere books are sold. Dr. Langer, thank you so much for joining us on Radio Headspace.
It's been such a honor, pleasure and joy to have this conversation with you.
Thank you, Rosie. I enjoyed it as well. Stay well.
