BITESIZE | The Power of Mindset: How Your Thoughts Transform Your Physical Health | Dr Ellen Langer #587

0:00Today's Bite Size episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. So, why might you consider bringing AG1 into your life? Well, there are many reasons, such as enhanced gut health and support for your immune system. But one of the main reasons, I would say, is to help you with your energy levels. Now AG1 contains a blend of different nutrients including B vitamins, vitamin C and magnesium which can help reduce tiredness and fatigue and give you a boost in energy. And unlike caffeine, these nutrients actually work with your body's natural energy systems and don't have a negative impact on your sleep.

0:47Right now, during the month of May, AG1 is offering my listeners a brilliant deal. Your first month's subscription will be only£59, saving you£20 off the regular price. On top of that, you'll get a free welcome kit, a shaker bottle, a scoop, five travel packs and a bottle of vitamin D3 and K2 drops. You can see all details at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 537 of the podcast with professor of psychology at Harvard University, Dr. Ellen Langer.

1:40Ellen has spent decades studying how our beliefs and perceptions can directly influence our physical health From how we age to how we heal and even how our immune system functions In this clip we explore some of her landmark research The implications of your work and what you're talking about are so so profound for people when they really understand how much our mindset influences every single aspect of our lives. Some of your studies, the Counterclockwise study, the Chambermaid study, the Nursing Home study, these are legendary. In fact, a lot of listeners I'm sure will have heard about them without necessarily knowing that you were the creator and the author of these studies.

2:32So could you just go through some of these top line studies to explain some of your work to my audience, please. Okay, well, so I got into all this in the first place with a nursing home study, where we took people in nursing homes, and we either gave them tender loving care is the comparison group, or we gave them choices to make on and a plan to take care of. And we went back 18 months later and twice as many people in the group that we gave these active choices to were still alive. All right. So then the first thing that came to me was, well, wait a second, how is it that making a choice translates into longevity?

3:18And that led me to the mindfulness work. But the mindfulness work here, you know, how is it your thoughts have all these powerful physical effects on you. And I started to think that, well, it was clear to me that it had this effect on us. This was before people were talking about mind-body connection. We had a mind and a body. And the big question was, well, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body? And these are just words. So I argued, let's put the two together, even if it's just for useful purposes, heuristic purposes. Although now I think it's literally true.

3:59Put the mind and body back together, then wherever you're putting one, you're necessarily putting the other. Wherever you're putting the mind, you're putting the body. And the question is how you get from one to the other goes away. Now, I've been talking about this. I published the Counterclockwise study in 1981, a long time ago. Takes so long for things to change. And people finally start talking about mind-body connection. That's wrong. You have the same problems. How are they connected? See it as one thing. Yeah. So the first study that we did, and the BBC did a replication of this called The Young Ones, but to go back to the study itself.

4:43What we did was to take a retreat and retrofit it to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they discussed past events as if they were just unfolding, for example. In a period of time as short as one week, we found their vision improved. When have you ever heard an old person's vision improving without medical intervention? Their hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they look noticeably younger. That was the first test of mind-body music. The second test, which was a few decades later, was we take these chambermaids. This is the work I did with Allie Crum.

5:25and very simply first asked them how much exercise are they getting. These are women who are exercising all day long, right? Cleaning the hotel and motel. Still, they thought they're not getting any exercise because exercise, they believed, according to the surgeon general who sits at a desk all day, is what you're doing after work. And after work, they were just too tired. Very simple study, divide them into two groups. And we're going to teach one group that their work is exercise. They were changing their minds. they're taught working on this machine at the gym is like making a bed and so on.

6:01We teach them, they are getting lots of exercise. So you have two groups now, one who doesn't think they get any exercise, one that does. They're not eating any differently from each other. They're not working any harder. Nevertheless, simply changing their minds to see their work as exercise resulted in a loss of weight, a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure kingdom. An example of another, we take people who have type 2 diabetes. We take many measurements. We're going to have them play computer games. And there's a clock there. And they're told, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so.

6:46That ensures that they'll look at the clock. unbeknownst to them the clock is rigged so it's going twice as fast as real time half as fast as real time or real time and the question we're asking is will blood sugar level vary based on clock time perceived time or real time and it turns out perceived time yeah this stuff ellen is just so fascinating because it also highlights arguably one of the biggest holes in all of medicine and the way we practice, which is we just don't take into account our mindset or our thoughts or our beliefs. Well, everybody knows that, you know, placebo is something inert.

7:29You believe it's going to be effective and hence it's effective. So the chambermaid study, this was actually a nocebo study, which is important in its own right. Now, people know placebos, you take something that's nothing to lead to a positive response. A nocebo SIBO, you take real medication and you believe it's not effective and it wipes out the effect. So explain that in the context of the chambermaid study. They're not taking a medication. No, no, no, no. Because people are exercising, but they're not getting any of the benefits of exercise because they don't realize they're exercising. So we say all of these things that are good for you, you know, many, if not all are good for you if you believe they're good for you.

8:15that element of belief is not inconsequential in any of these circumstances. You know, so there was a study with Ipecac. So I don't remember who did this, but, you know, so Ipecac is what you take to make you vomit in case you have accidentally or on purpose ingested poison, right? So whoever this was took Ipecac with people who are having trouble doing too much vomiting. And they're given the Ipecac and they're told it'll stop the vomiting. And you know what happens? It stops the vomiting. People who are rubbed with poison ivy, who believe it's not poison ivy, or rubbed with another leaf that they believe is poison ivy, that isn't poison ivy, get the rash when they believe it's poison.

9:01I spoke with Camilla Nord, this neuroscientist from Cambridge University, and Camilla basically shares some research showing that in psychedelic trials, some of them, when you're given a placebo, and you think you're taking a psychedelic, but you're not, you still hallucinate. You know, in medicine, and I think with the public, we've used the term before, oh, it's just a placebo effect, right? You just gotta change. Exactly, as in underplaying the value. And then there's another study, I'm pretty sure it's in your new book, about diabetics. There's a belief that giving people more information is a good thing, right?

9:47That would be the conventional belief. And I think much of me subscribes to that belief, but... But it doesn't matter whether you give them more or less. It depends on how the information is received. So if more information leads people to be more certain, and more certain leads them to be more mindless, then that's how the problem arrives. Well, maybe you could explain that through the lens of this diabetes, pre-diabetes study, they were told they were on the borderline of pre-diabetes, right? Could you explain that study? Sure. So I call this the borderline effect. It's not just in medicine, no matter what you're doing, there's always a point where people above this borderline respond one way, people below it respond a different way, where there's no meaningful difference above and below.

10:40So for example, let's say you're grading papers and you give one student an 89 or they take a test and they get an 89. That makes it a B. Another student gets a 90. That makes it an A. Nobody's going to think there's any meaningful difference between 89 and 90, but there's a real difference over time between a B student and an A student. In terms of their perception of themselves, you mean? Not just them, but the world's perception of them as well, right? You know, you take a typical example, you take an IQ test. And if you get 69, then you're cognitively deficient. You get 70, you're in the normal range.

11:24But again, one could have sneezed, misread the question. But once you're labeled, you've got this cognitive problem, or you're normal, over time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's the point to a lot of this, that once we get these labels, we then behave according to those labels and they become true, even if they work. Well, you write about the effects of our beliefs on our immune system. I think it's at Asterole's, you talk about this idea that the immune response begins in the brain and positive expectations boost antibacterial and anti-tumor activity. I mean, that was incredible, those studies.

12:08And just going back to that borderline effect for a minute, Ellen. What's that study? Am I remembering correctly? The patients who were told that they were at risk of diabetes, they were more likely to get it? Yes. We looked at the people who fell right below the diagnosis, compared them to those right above. So one is told they have the disease, one is told they don't. And that label became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. What about the relationship between our thoughts, our beliefs, our expectations, and our immune system? Well, if we go back to what I'm saying about the mind and the body, it's one.

12:55If you recognize that it really is one thing, then every thought is simultaneously affecting every part of our body. Now, it's interesting because the coin of the realm for neuroscience now would be something like MRIs and fMRI, right? They're going to look at the brain and see how the brain changes under these circumstances or those circumstances. And of course, the brain is changing. However, my belief is every part of the body is changing. Every part, and it's happening more or less simultaneously. That your eyes, your skin, you know, that in the book I talk about how a teardrop of happiness is biochemically different from a teardrop of sadness.

13:37I had this strange experience because I, you know, have always been up for anything, almost anything. And I'm with a friend in Kansas City and we go to an iridologist. Somebody looks at the iris of the eye. Now, I don't believe any of these things, but I also am always, you know, who knows, right? So I go, she looks at my eye and she tells me I have a gallbladder problem. So at the time I thought, this is ridiculous, right? You know, what nonsense. Anyway, I came home and I did have a gold-bladder problem. Then I start writing about MindBodyUnity and realize, yes, it's all right there. We don't have the machinery, the technology to notice the subtle differences.

14:22But if we developed it, I think we'd have support for this. So when you say the immune system, every system, I go like this, my brain is different, every part of my body is different. Yeah, it's ridiculous if you have the fixed belief that actually, I've never been taught that there's a relationship between what you can see in the eye and my gallbladder, therefore this must be rubbish, right? Because what are we seeing now, right? We're seeing so many things that traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda medicine has been saying for years, not everything, but many of the things we're now going, And, oh, wow, now we've got modern science to support the fact that, oh, different organs have different rates of genetic expression at different parts of the day.

15:07Well, these guys have been saying this for thousands of years. We've poo-pooed it in Western medicine for many years until recently when we're now, oh, yeah, there's this thing called circadian biology. And each cell in the body has got its own circadian clock. And I'm like, yeah, but... I think a lot of this results from our teaching absolutes rather than politolities. Exactly. That would be open to all sorts of, I mean, there are so many things, you know, I teach some of this stuff. It's mind boggling to me that people think they need eight hours of sleep. I mean, how big are you? How small are you?

15:48What is your life like? Like if you just ran a marathon and I stayed home in bed eating chocolate, watching movies all day, that night would we both need eight hours sleep? You know, so it's not just that there are individual differences, but within the individual, you know, it's people buy these facts. They talk about them. They teach them. And, you know, when you see something happen, I think the nature of science is you see it, you then develop a theory to explain it. So now it seems like it can be no other way. And so then somebody has some other experience and, you know, the response to them as well, you know, you're simply wrong, crazy, what have you.

16:32Have a beginner's mind, right? That old concept, have a beginner's mind. this whole idea of stress, our beliefs, the immune system, and there are many studies in your book talking about this, right? So if people want to dive deeper, please do check out The Mindful Body. It's such a fantastic read. It really is. You mentioned vision before. People think of, you know, vision static. It is what it is, right? No, just thinking about it, how mindless it is that you go to the doctor, you're shown this Snelling eye chart with letters out of context, in black and white, and then you're given a number to tell you how well you see.

17:11I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I see that restaurant sign much further away than if I'm hungry. I see things in color different from black and white. I see things that are meaningful differently from things that are meaningless. And so for me, I know I'm bizarre when I, you know, before I did that study, I'm being, my eyes are being examined. I'm looking at the child. I say, wait a second. You know, you're creating in me the expectation that soon I'm not going to be able to see, because these letters keep getting smaller and smaller. So you start with something you can do, and then you go, oh, we're about to catch you where you can't see.

17:47Exactly. So what we did is a study where we reversed it. It starts with small letters, gets larger and larger, creating the expectation that soon you would be able to see, and people can see what they couldn't see before. Yeah, yeah, I love it. Before we finish, I want to bring up something you said before that surprised me in the context of your work. Okay, so there was a moment where you lost your train of thought and you said, excuse me, I'm having a senior moment. Right. I was joking. Yeah, I know you were joking. But now the reason I said that was only because the other day I thought I was so clever when I had said to somebody, I'm having a junior moment.

18:26No, the reason I'm bringing it up to illustrate a really important point from your work is this whole idea that I've also had mind blanks when I'm doing this podcast before, right? But because I'm at a different age to you, I'm not going to call it a senior moment, right? Okay, so that's cute. But let me tell you what, before I lecture in my health class about aging, I ask them a question. I say, okay, what was the last, these are Harvard students, this is the best of the best, right? I say, what was the last thing I said on Thursday? So the class meets Tuesday and Thursday. So this is Tuesday.

19:04What was the last thing I said on Thursday? Nobody remembers. and I go ah you know you all better check to see whether you're suffering from dementia you know that young people are not infrequently forgetful the difference is they're fine with that they don't see it as the beginning of some impending terrible diagnosis yeah and I think it's so important that this idea that if our expectation starts to impact our physiology we've got to be very careful about what we think as we get older. We have to change this perception that old people are frail and they can't do much and they need help, right?

19:43We need to change that. And there's, again, there's quite a provocative section in that section in your book where you talk about this idea that someone of your age, and I certainly won't ask you how old you are. I'm 77. You're 77. Okay. So someone of your age wouldn't typically be seen in miniskirts or have miniskirts marketed to them, right? And I really liked the way you put that because it basically, the cultural norm is a 77-year-old lady probably shouldn't be in a miniskirt. It's not appropriate for a woman of that age, but maybe it is. Maybe if you don't subscribe to that and you go, no, I'm going to dress like I was in my 20s or 30s, well, maybe that's going to actually keep you younger.

20:27Yeah, the point of that particular research was to show that there are age-related cues all around us that unbeknownst to us are determining our longevity, our health, and so on. So there what we did was compare people whose jobs require that they be in uniform. So if you're in a uniform at 25 and you're wearing the same basic uniform, it's a different version of it, but for the next 40 years, you're missing an age-related cue. And those people do better because they don't have that age-related cue. And we see here, and I'm sure it's the same in the US, we have near residential homes, there are signs on the roads with an elderly couple hunched over with a walking stick saying, be careful.

21:22And again, that's an age-related cue that on the face of it is there for a reason so people can pay attention and be considerate, right? But there's also a negative consequence of that or a potentially negative consequence. Although there's one thing that older people do, which is for all other groups, there's an in-group bias. Everybody prefers their own to people who are different, except the elderly. I hate that word now that I'm so old. So let me give you an example. When my father was alive, I'm picking him up at the airport. He is now, at that point, I think he was 88. And I said, Dad, how was the flight?

22:06And he said, it was okay, but there were too many old people on the plane distancing himself from the group. And, you know, which is a good thing in this context because we have the view of old as only representing decrement. Which is sad because, you know, you live your life the right way. It just keeps getting better and better. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email.

22:47It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday Five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.