Podcast Episode # 22
Dr. Ellen Langer PhD is a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Her numerous academic honors include four Distinguished Scientist Awards and The Liberty Science Genius Award. Her books written for academic and popular readers include:
Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and The Power of Possibility
On Becoming An Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity
The citation for the APA distinguished contributions award reads, in part, “…her pioneering work revealed the profound effects of increasing mindful behavior…and offers new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Ellen Langer has demonstrated repeatedly how our limits are of our own making.”
Welcome Dr. Langer. Thank you for being with us here today. Your work changed my life at at time in my sixties, when I needed it most. I based my book and workbook, Take Back Your Outside Mindset on your mindfulness and mindset studies. I hear from readers and listeners that your work helps them to see things differently.
Dr Ellen Langer, what is your definition of Mindfulness?
Mindfulness as we study it, is the simple process of actively noticing new things. That’s all it is. It is amazingly simple, but the consequences of this are enormous. So when you are noticing new things, that puts you in the present, makes you aware of context, and that active noticing is the essence of engagement. So we find that when people are actively noticing, they become more energized, and this active noticing is literally and figuratively enlivening.
Many people think when they hear the word mindfulness, that it is meditation. Meditation, while fine, is not mindfulness. Meditation is a process that you go through to achieve post meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness as we study it is much more direct – not better or worse – just more direct.
We have done research on this active noticing for over forty years and we find that it is, as I said literally and figuratively enlivening, that when you are actively noticing and being mindful, people find you more attractive, see you as charismatic, see you as trust worthy, the products that you produce bear this imprint of mindfulness ….so it’s good for your health and your relationships. Forty years is a long time, so there are very few outcomes that we haven’t assessed. It is amazing because it is so simple.
And another way of understanding it is that people think they know and when you think you know you don’t pay any attention. But we can’t know, because everything is always changing, and everything looks different from different perspectives. So when you start noticing things about things you thought you knew, you come to realize that Gee.. you didn’t know it as well as you thought you did….and then your attention naturally goes there.
Again, in this act of noticing, you are engaged in what you are doing. It feels good and couldn’t be better for you.
And another way of understanding it is that people think they know and when you think you know you don’t pay any attention. But we can’t know, because everything is always changing, and everything looks different from different perspectives. So when you start noticing things about things you thought you knew, you come to realize that Gee.. you didn’t know it as well as you thought you did….and then your attention naturally goes there.
Again, in this act of noticing, you are engaged in what you are doing. It feels good and couldn’t be better for you.
Dr Ellen Langer, would you please tell us about your study in a nursing home with plants.
Sure, this was a study that started a lot of the research that I am still engaged in. I had gone to different nursing homes and I was visiting somebody in a nursing home and people were just staring blankly at walls. There wasn’t anything going on and it was very sad. So I went with Judith Rodin, to a nursing home to run the study that I will describe in a moment. I was speaking to the director of the nursing home and he said — no, no the people in his nursing home are very active, they run a store, they have a cocktail party…he went on and on…and I thought well Gee, I guess my impression about what goes on in nursing homes is simply wrong. Then we went and explored the nursing home and no, the people he was talking about was maybe two or three of the residents, and the other sixty or seventy were not engaged.
What we did was divide the people in the nursing home into two groups. One comparison group was given the tender loving care that they were used to, and the other group – the group to whom we were going to give a sense of control – which turned out to be mindful control over their environment, were given choices to make.
You can’t just go into an establishment and change the balance of power, no one is going to let you do that. So the choices we were able to give people were very small. If they wanted to see a movie, on which night they wanted to see it. We gave them a plant. Chose which plant you want. We told them it was their responsibility to take care of the plant. Then we gave them as pep talk and said, they were capable of, and should be making all of the decisions that they used to make. So if they wanted to visit people inside the nursing home or outside….it was hard to construct these choices because they didn’t have that many. But nevertheless, they seemed to be responsive to that. The other group was given the plant and the movie, but they were told when to see the movie and that the nurses would water the plants for them.
What we found initially is that the people were more active and alert and that was good. The important thing was that we went back 18 months later and found that those who were given those mindful choices, actually live longer.
Twice as many people in the tender loving care group had died, as compared to the mindful choice group.
So that was the beginning of a lot of my research on health. It was sort of amazing – making all these simple little choices — how could they have such dramatic findings. We are still trying to answer that question.
I think that study also ushered in a lot of the mind-body medicine that people take for granted now. There was a time that the medical world paid no attention to one’s psychology. And now most realize it’s importance.
What is mindset?
Mindset is what keeps you from being mindful. You think you know something. For example one of my favourites is, I was taught that horses don’t eat meat. And so I had a mindset: horses don’t eat meat. I was at this horse event, and this man asked me: could I watch his horse for him because he was going to get his horse a hotdog? I know horses don’t eat these and that is ridiculous but I said: sure. He came back with the hotdog and the horse ate it. It was at that moment, as I recall, everything changed for me — realizing that all the things I knew could be wrong in some context. So that you can’t take anything for granted you need to tune in. So the mindset is when we think we know. And when we think we know, we don’t pay any attention. And things are constantly changing. So for example, most of what you are taught, you are taught in a way that leads you to believe you know and to have some absolute understanding of things. If you ask people, older people especially, you are driving a car on ice and the car starts to skid, what do you do? And most of them will say, you gently pump the brakes. Well that made sense before there were antilock brakes. Now that we have antilock brakes, what you need to do is firmly hit the brakes. So what was good for safety at time one, at time two, is actually dangerous. So we don’t want to let our mindsets rule our behavior. We want to be there. If we are going to it, we should be there while we are doing it.
5) When something happens that you don’t like.
I have lots of one liners. Maybe what you are referring to is to say to yourself
“No worry before it’s time.” Another one to ask yourself :
“is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?” Because most of what we deal with so what – not difficult to cope with. We let little things irritate us, and then what happens is – whatever the thing was that caused us dismay, we still have that and then we have a set of feelings that are not positive. So we are doubling our misery by worrying.
There are another set of your questions: “is it true? what is the worse that can happen? And if the worst does happen, are there opportunities? People are brought up in a world to believe that things in and of themselves are good or bad. Things, consequences, behavior ….nothing has a valence attached to it — nothing is good, nothing is bad, nothing is anything – until we make it so.
And people will say yeah, there are always good and bad aspects to everything. But what they mean by that is, let’s say there are 10 things – say 6 of them are bad and 4 of them are good – so on balance it’s bad. But the fact of the matter is that each and everything itself is simultaneously good and bad. So when you recognize that any bad can be seen as good and any good can be seen as bad – you can sit back and let things be. You know if you and I go out to lunch and the food is delicious, wonderful. If you and I go out to lunch and the food is awful, wonderful – I won’t eat as much and I won’t gain weight.
People right now, chase the good and run from the bad. So they are controlled by these mindsets of consequences. When you recognize that the consequences are only what you make of it, then you don’t need to be reactive anymore. And life just becomes simpler.
Please explain your concept of Universal Uncertainty
So when I talk about my concept of Universal Uncertainty, we can’t know what is going to happen because everything is always changing. And everything looks different from different perspectives. Uncertainty is the rule. It is not the exception. Now when people recognize uncertainty, they tend to be stressed by it. So it you ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, I can pretend that I know the answer because I am afraid to look like I don’t know. So I make personal connection with uncertainty of “I don’t know, maybe you know.” And now I have to feel less than you in some way. But because everything is changing, nobody really knows. When you recognize that and you make a universal attribution to uncertainty, not knowing is fine. In fact, not knowing is good, because it motivates trying to know. And becoming more mindful with all of the benefits that we already talked about.
If I have a pain in my hip, because of your work, I notice it, and then say I am going to notice it again in 5 minutes. This works.
Thank you for bringing that up Verla. We have a lot of work — many many studies now that are called “attention to symptom variability.” That is just a fancy way of saying, be mindful and notice change. What happens is that someone has a dreaded diagnosis, or even small ailments, they tend to only notice when they have the symptom. So let’s say pain, you notice when you are in pain. When you are not in pain, you just go about being. Then you are in pain again, and you know notice it and think that you are always in pain. Nobody is always in anything — and certainly not to equal measure.
So what we do across many studies, many diseases, is to contact people at random times throughout the day and simply ask them: “how do you feel now? Is it better or worse than before? And why?” The first thing is, yes you are not in pain all of the time , so you immediately feel better. When you start thinking about why now am I in more or less pain, than I was the moment before, that search is mindful, and as we already said, that is good for your health. And if you are looking for a solution, you are more likely to find it. This is true for depression, stress, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Parkinsons, Stroke — lots of big disorders – and for the ones we have already studied, it seems to work. And it is very nice because it doesn’t require medical intervention and there are no negative side effects. So the takeaway is that health requires recognizing when things are better.
If you thought well you are stressed all the time. And then you find that no you are not really stressed all the time, then you start looking for when you are stressed. And then you say oh, when I am interviewing Ellen Langer, I am stressed. Well then, the solution is simple then don’t interview me. Sometimes the solution is easy.
Sometimes it’s hard. Let’s take vision. Say it is 3 pm in the afternoon, and I don’t think people should reach for their eye glasses. They go to their doctor to get an eye test, which is a ridiculous thing to look at letters out of any meaningful context and then to conclude that
Is the way you see all day long. When you pay attention to symptom variability, when is it that have difficulty seeing, you might notice that it is at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And instead of putting your glasses on, maybe the thing to do is to take a nap, or go outside or a walk. To find out that it is 3 o’clock in the afternoon is a little more work, than just knowing that Ellen Langer makes you stress.
Would you please talk to us about a mindset on aging please?
Most people believe that as you get old you fall apart. And that is grossly overstated. And so what happens is because you think you are going to fall apart, that when something goes wrong, you jump to the conclusion, that that is the end game.
If you were twenty years old and you hurt your wrist, you would fix your wrist. If you are eighty years old and you say well what do you expect? So when you don’t take the steps to fix your wrists, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People have mindsets that when you are old you are forgetful. The amount of forgetting is grossly overstated except in very rare cases. And people forget that they were forgetful when they were young. You know I teach Harvard undergraduates, so these are the best students in the world, I give an exam and believe me everyone does not get an A on the exam, but why don’t they remember that? Because they forgot and that doesn’t scare them “Ok so I forgot. ..so next time, I will do something different to try to remember.” You are seventy five years old and you forget and you start worrying… “Oh my goodness, is dementia setting in?” And then you organize yourself differently which makes life less meaningful. So we have many views of old that work against us.
There are many examples of this. Take myself as an academic. When you are young you are publishing like crazy, and then you get to a certain point. You have tenure, you are famous or you are not famous whatever the case may be, and one more paper is not likely to change your life. So you are not publishing quite as much, but for good reason — because you don’t want to, not because you are not able to. Then you go to a conference with all these able upstarts, and if you forget that you made the decision to that you wanted to wait for more gems before you rushed to press, you’d end up feeling bad about yourself.
We change our values frequently. And if you don’t recognize that you are behaving differently because your values have changed, and then you compare yourself to those that have different values, you can come up with the wrong conclusion.
Another thing is that behavior that looks reasonably evolved, can look like behavior that is not evolved at all. So for example you have young children who are uninhibited, and then as adults become socialized, so they are inhibited, and then hopefully at some point in your life,you become disinhibited – where you say “why do I care if I have a little a spaghetti sauce on my shirt? You don’t have to hide and feel insecure all day. But what happens is that the people who are inhibited, misunderstand you, and they think you are behaving like a child, when you are more sophisticated. It is not that you don’t know the rule, it’s that you chose not to use the rule – to behave according to the rule at this particular time. Your behavior becomes more context dependent. There are lots of people who behave the way they assumed things to be true when they were young. When you are young and told that old people become forgetful, you are not old, you don’t care, so that when you do become old, it doesn’t occur to you to question it. Those are the mindsets – the “premature cognitive commitments” as I wrote about in the seventies, that we need to be careful of.
Dr Langer would you please talk to us about your famous Counter clockwise Study?
Yes, this is a famous study. I can say that it is famous because it turns out that there is a an episode of the Simpson’s that actually describes it. It is “The Simpson’s Go To Havana.”
Anyway, I had this theory of mind-body unity which says mind, body – these are just words. Let’s put the two back together and then wherever we put the mind, we are necessarily putting the body. So we have done lots of research testing this. The very first one was the Counter Clockwise Study. We were going to take elderly men and see if we could put their minds back in time, and see how that affected their bodies. So what we did was we retrofitted a timeless monastery to twenty years earlier. We had the old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves – twenty years ago. So they would be talking about the past in the present tense. All of the icons, magazines, TV shows – everything was from twenty years earlier.
We had a comparison group that was going to spend the week in the same location, however for them, what they were doing was reminiscing. So they knew now is now and then is then. But they were going to spend a week in a novel environment, and as we said, novelty promotes mindfulness. So they were also going to improve.
But it turned out that they didn’t improve as much as those who were embodying their younger selves. What happened was, they became stronger, their memory improved, their hearing improved, their vision improved, and they looked noticeably younger. So it was very startling, and very exciting, because it suggests that by changing the way we think about things, we can exert an enormous control over our health and well-being.
Do you have any final tips for our listeners?
I have so many, but I would say that this concept of being mindful by active noticing, which relies on our realizing that we just don’t know.
And it you don’t know, you find out. And finding out is good for you.
Actively noticing new things – notice the trees outside – you walk outside, what is different from the day before? You are indoors, what is different about the person that you live with? Or the food that is in the fridge.
And this noticing feels good. It is energy begetting, not consuming. And leads us to be literally and figuratively enlivened. It is so simple that I can’t see any reason why people wouldn’t do it.
I think that the best tip is when people are stressed or being judgemental of themselves or other people, and they recognize that those negative thoughts – again events are neither positive or negative – it is a function of the views we take of them – events aren’t stressful, again it is the view – and views are under our control.
If we use a simple rule, for me this is one of the things that I came to that is so important, and I keep writing about it, is that behavior makes sense from the actors perspective or else the actor wouldn’t have done it.
And so every time you are annoyed with yourself or somebody else, if you say well “what is another way of understanding that?” So you may be annoyed at me because I am gullible. But that is because from my perspective I am being trusting. I might be annoyed at you because you are so inconsistent – but that is because you are being flexible. For every negative ascription, there is an equally opposite valanced alternative.
So by doing these two things: actively noticing new things and when something does happen, recognizing that you can turn it on its head so that you are not required to suffer from it – I think will lead people to be in a good place.
What is next for you Dr Langer?
Oh I just keep going. Everyday I get new ideas. I need an army of researchers to help me with all of this. We are still pursuing lots of the health work. I now have a program where we are trying to transform middle school. I have a new theory of mindful economics, and so that depends on my colleagues, my post docs, my students, as to which direction I get pulled. But life is good.
It is beautiful and unique work – that helps so many of us.
Thank you very much for this. Listeners,
Please check out my book and workbook: Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live longer, Prevent Dementia and Control Your Chronic Illness. In both is a chapter on Dr Langer’s work and that shows how you can use her beautiful questions to shift your mindset.
For a complete transcript of this episode please visit my website treesmendus.com
Listeners thank you for listening to the end. As Dr Langer says Chose to look at things in a new ways by actively noticing new things – things you thought you already knew. As Ellen Langer reminds us Things are subtly changing all the time. Ellen Langer says Noticing new things feels good. When we are noticing new things, we are more likely to find solutions. Easy and fun way to make life new and exciting for ourselves. As Dr. Langer says “when you are mindful. Others become mindful. It is contagious, it spreads……… And this is a good thing, because we all need a little more of Your Outside Mindset.
