Harvard Psychologist: The #1 Hack To REVERSE Aging & Heal Your Body!

0:00There are two ways to being mindful. One is bottom up, which means actively notice new things. Going to walk out the door and notice five new things. Or top down, which is just to accept that we don't know.

0:17What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:54Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal, and today I'm just, I don't know, I always say I'm excited for my guest, but I'm really excited about this guest. And I'm going to introduce her, but I was just telling her how much I love her voice. She's an amazing voice, and I can't wait for you guys to hear it. But today's guest, she's often called the mother of mindfulness. She's a Harvard psychologist whose groundbreaking research shows how our mindset can shape our health, our decisions, and even our aging, which I really want to talk about because I don't want to age any more than I already have.

1:34But you know, her work, that story where we're going to dig into this from, it's a very famous study called Counterclockwise. And she has many, many books. She has a new one out that everybody needs to buy. She's going to tell you all about it in just a second. Today I have Ellen Langer. Thank you so much for coming. I am so excited to talk to you. I don't know. I have like butterflies in my stomach. I'm a little nervous, but I hear your wonderful voice. Welcome to the show, Ellen. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much, Jessica. Yes. So tell everybody. You know, Jessica, many people have commented on the comments, the content of what I have to say.

2:09You're the first person who's introduced me based on the sound of my voice. The content is very good, I will say, but your voice is just, it's just one of those, I don't know, you hear it, you notice it. And just like you said a minute ago, somebody recognized you in the store the other day, they heard your voice and they're like, are you Ellen Langer? And you're like, yes. So I don't know. It's a beautiful voice and people need to listen to you all the time and they need to buy your book, but we're going to tell them all about why they should hear right now. So how did, tell us a little bit about your story, because I think a lot of people know your books, maybe know some of your research, but they don't maybe know how you got started in all this.

2:49Like, how did you become the mother of mindfulness? I'm not quite sure. You know, it's not like giving birth to a child. You know, I've been doing research in the area for 45 years, which I think is all that it takes to qualify you. Yeah. that I think that it started when I was leaving New York to move up to take the job at Harvard and my feeling was that oh Harvard Cambridge all of these super smart people I couldn't wait and then when I got there I saw the same kinds of things surprised me in New York but a little different because New York is also smart but New York is a street smart and I didn't find the canterbridgeans to be so so for example at that time banks closed at three o 'clock in new york if there was a bank that had parking spaces at 301 there'd be a car parked there not so in cambridge another bank one was that in new york you'd um you know there'd be people waiting online to see tellers i know this is not the experience most people have to think with banks but um and they'd make sure that if there were five people on this line, three on this, they'd run to the other line.

4:05None of that took place in Cambridge. And so I started to think about how this concept, not being there, this mindlessness, was very different from intelligence. You know, IQ tests basically ask you facts. And one can know a lot of facts, but still be quite mindless. and so that i think um i did lots of early research i mean one was uh before i got up here we sent people a memo in an office building saying please return this immediately to room 232 and everybody returned it i mean if the person who wanted it you know but who sent it wanted it why would they send it right so there were fun studies like that and then then there were the important studies that I did very early on.

4:53The first nursing home study where we gave people mindful choices to make decisions and a plan to take care of, but very simple kinds of decisions just to keep their minds active. And we found all sorts of changes. And then we went back a year and a half later, and twice as many people in the group given the mindful choices were still alive. Half as many who died, in other words. And so that led to what eventually became a very important part of my work that consumes a lot, but maybe a third of the mindful body book that you referred to, which is you have to answer the question, how could it be that you make choices and you live longer?

5:36All right. Now, put that aside for a moment that I had this theory of mind-body unity that was growing since I was a little kid. I got married when I was obscenely young, right? And we went to Paris on our honeymoon. I was 19 going on 40. And we go to this restaurant and I order a mixed grill and on the mixed grill is pancreas. And I asked my then husband, which of these is a pancreas? He points. I eat everything else. I'm a big eater. Now comes the moment of truth can i eat the pancreas i start eating it and i literally get sick he starts to laugh which is not a good thing to do for a newlywed or even a long married and yeah and i say why are you laughing he said because that's chicken you ate the pancreas a while ago so it made myself sick um just because your mind your mind did yeah that that's where we're getting to that yeah somehow by my and I also to this day don't understand why I believe that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas but nevertheless that's the way do you eat chicken now are you yeah no I don't eat chicken thinking it's pancreas I couldn't eat pancreas thinking it's chicken which I already did yeah no so um and the next um uh part of that was several years later when my mother had breast cancer and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas which is the end game and then magically it was gone so here we had i made myself sick somehow she made herself well and that was going to sow the seeds for my mind body unity theory which i've been studying for the last 40 years so the idea you know the main question is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body nobody knows but everybody has had the experience now you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face and you get startled your blood pressure increases your pulse and um until you say oh it was just a leaf right and everybody also knows about how effective placebos are or everybody should know which it's probably the strongest drug out there you take this nothing you think it's something and then you heal and nobody could explain the placebo or a belief leading to your pulse increasing or my mother curing her breast cancer or me getting sick thinking that i was eating the pancreas um what when i developed was very simple idea um mind and body that everybody saw as separate and if they're separate then again how do you get from the mind to the body?

8:23That's the major problem. I said, these are just words. Let's put the mind and the body back together. And it's one thing. Then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And that would then explain how we got the longevity findings on the initial nursing home study and all of the things that I just referred to. So then I do a series of studies, many of them, fun studies, to test the idea that the mind and body are, if understood as a single unit, the amount of control we have over our health is enormous. And the first study in that series was the one to which you already alluded, what's been called the counterclockwise study.

9:04So here what I did was retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they'd be talking about past events as if they were just unfolding, for example. And I didn't have the funds to make it a full Hollywood set, but it was persuasive enough to end up with findings that are a little startling, where these men, now these men were in their late 70s, early 80s, but people need to realize the study was done in 1979. That's when 70 was old. It wasn't the new 50. So by living, by putting their minds back in time for as short as a week, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they looked noticeably younger.

9:54So that was the first of these. The next one was equally as surprising, not to me because that's why we ran it, but But, you know, I couldn't ensure it would work. Allie Crum, who's now at Stanford, and she was my student at Harvard, and I did this study, where we took chambermaids. And the first thing we simply asked them is, how much exercise do you get? Now, these women are exercising all day long. So we were shocked that they said they're not getting any exercise. Yeah, because they're walking around doing stuff. Well, the cleaning bedrooms, cleaning rooms. but that was because they thought exercise is what you do after work and and they're just too tired okay so now first thing to think about jessica is if exercise is good for you then and these women who are exercising all day long every day of the week every week of the month they should be healthier than women who are socio-economically similar turns out they're not okay so now this study we simply divide them into two groups and we teach one group that they work you work as exercise we say making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym you know dusting the blinds is like okay and so very simple we have one group that's oblivious to the fact that they work as exercise another group who's now changed their mind and see they work as exercise we take many many measures the groups are not eating any differently they're not working any harder all All that is, as far as we could tell, that's different is one group now sees their work as exercise.

11:29They change their mindset. As a result of that, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Just by changing their minds. And so, and we have many, many of these studies. Let me skip to the most recent. Okay, yeah. Then I'll let you talk, and I have many more in between. I love this story. This is amazing. So this is a study I've done with my graduate student, Peter Ungle, where what we do is inflict a wound, minor wound, but a wound nonetheless. And the person is in front of a clock and unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged.

12:08So for one group, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For one group, it's going half as fast as real time. And for the last group, it's real time. Now, most people would assume the wound is going to heal when the wound heals, right? That's your body. It just does what it wants to do. But what we found was that the healing was controlled by perceived time, the time they sleep on their clock. And we have lots of studies like that. I mean, we have people, they wake up in a sleep lab. We screwed around with the clock again. So they think they got two hours more sleep than they got, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they got.

12:47biological and cognitive functions seem to follow perceived sleep it's it's so so so fascinating i mean okay so if if i'm a person and i'm yes and you are i am but i'm listening to all of this research and i'm thinking about you know my body aging having more energy is is your advice just to set your mind to what you want okay like yeah you know yes but it takes a little bit to get there so we probably should have started by telling people what i mean by mindfulness okay describe the child that i'm supposed to be the mother yeah your your birth your birth child yes when i talk about mindfulness it has nothing to do with meditation and it's not a practice okay that mindfulness is just actively noticing new things now the problem is we think we know so when you think you know you don't pay any attention why pay attention because you already know but it turns out that everything is always changing everything looks different from different perspectives so we can't know nobody knows now when you know you don't know then you pay attention So if you were going to come visit me, I'm in my house in Dartmouth, Mass right now.

14:07You'd walk in and you'd look at the painting. Did she paint that? What is this thing over here? What are those books she's reading? You would notice. Right. Because it's all brand new. But essentially everything is brand new. All right. Now, so there are two ways to get to this, to being mindful. One is bottom up, which means actively notice new things. You're going to walk out the door and notice five new things. When the person you live with, if you live with anybody, notice five new things about them. If you're at work, notice three new things about the people around you. And the more you do this, the more you realize, hey, you know, they're new.

14:43They're not all that I thought. I didn't know all about them. All right. So you get that. But your mind told you you did. Yeah. Or top down, which is just to accept that we don't know. All right. So the way I try to persuade people that they don't know is I take the thing that everybody thinks they know. So, Jessica, forgive me for putting you in the hot seat. But how much is one plus one? Yeah, but no. One plus one is two if you're using a base 10 number system. If you're using a base two number system, one plus one is written as two. Who cares about number systems? Jessica, if you take one pile of laundry, add one pile of laundry, one plus one is one.

15:23You take one watt of chewing gum, you add one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one. You take one cloud, add one cloud. In the real world, one plus one doesn't equal two, as or more often as it does. Now, the reason this is important is when I first asked, first you were thinking, oh, God, you were belittling me in some way. You were bored. Second is that there were all sorts of choices you could have made to which you were oblivious. You know, next time somebody, I'm sure it's never going to happen, but anybody as an adult asks you how much is one plus one, now you know you can say one, two, or ten.

16:02All right. Now, when you're mindless, you don't have any choices. And what people don't realize, all of the absolutes, all of the things they think they know for sure, are leading them to be mindless because those things can't be known for sure. Right. And as soon as you live your life, and the research over all these years has shown me that virtually everyone, almost all the time, is mindless. They're not there. They're no different from robots. And robots don't have emotions. Robots can't make choices. It's not the way one should want to live. So I don't think your audience is completely persuaded, or you are, Jessica.

16:42So let me ask. I'm persuaded. Okay, great. So I was at this horse event. I've told the story so many times, but it never ceases to amuse me. I'm at this horse event, and this man asks, will I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog? Well, Jessica, no one knows better than I. They can know his will, but not better than I. That's absurd. Horses are herbivorous. They don't eat meat. But being nice, I say, 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. You see, all of the absolutes we have are based on science, but science only gives us probabilities.

17:27So for science to tell us horses don't eat meat, what they would do is take a group of horses, particular horses, not all kinds of horses, and they'd have to decide how much meat to feed them, mix with how much grain, when in the day to feed them, how heavy the horses should be to start, lots of these factors, and then they give the horses the meat, and a certain number of them won't eat it. All right, most of them. It's too much of a mouthful, so that's reported as horses don't eat meat. But some horses do eat meat. You know, even at the worst, when cancer was considered a killer, it wasn't killing everybody.

18:09You know, that no matter what you hold on to, When a one and one is two, that's absolute. Horses don't know. There are no absolutes. And when you deeply understand this, everything becomes interesting again. Because when you think you know it, you don't pay any attention. And you're missing out because when you're actively noticing, the neurons are firing. And all of these decades of research that we've done shows that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. When you're having fun, you can't have fun as a robot. you can only have fun if you're there so when you're playing games when you're passionately eating pancreas or whatever you're doing at those moments you're fully engaged and that engagement means you're being mindful and that's the way we want to be you know people envy people who are passionate people often feel stressed and bored and these are the things that result from mindlessness events are not exciting events aren't boring events are just events so if you you know look at the event as the same old same old you're going to be bored if you look at it as totally brand new that's going to scare you because you're not going to know what to do with it so then you're going to be stressed and when all the while all you need to do is recognize that events are neither good nor bad.

19:38It's the way we frame them, understand them, that make them so. You know, I picked up, this was years and years ago, before the world was so dangerous, and I was in Italy, and we're driving along, and I see these kids, young guys, with t-shirts that said New York that wanted a ride. Now, you know nobody from New York is going to be wearing a t-shirt from New York, So we picked them up. And I asked them, so how did you like New York? And I was floored. The young man said it was boring. Now, New York is many things, but... Not boring. Exactly. But you can make the most exciting thing boring by not noticing.

20:19You can take, you know, that if a farmer is looking at lots of fields of wheat, he's going to notice all sorts of things that I'm not going to notice. so nothing in and of itself is boring or exciting we make it so and when you realize we can control our response to anything whether we enjoy it we don't enjoy it whether it's energizing or innervating is all a function of the way we think about i i 100 believe you and i want to i want to be this i want to be mindful but i feel like society makes it really hard right and Yeah, you're taught in school. Horses don't eat meat. One and one is two. No, no.

21:05My companies do this. All institutions and your parents have learned this way. So that's the way they teach you. They teach you absolutes. Don't do this. Do that. Rather than much of the time, you shouldn't do this or you could do it that way and so on. You know, when I'm lecturing in person, I'll often ask if there's somebody very tall in the audience, because I'm 5 '3". And always there is somebody. And I invite them to the stage. So the other day I gave a lecture, and this guy comes up, and he's 6 '9". So I'm 5 '3". He's 6 '9". We look totally ridiculous. And we just stand there. And then I asked him to put his hand up.

21:49I put my hand next to his. His hand is like three inches large. and then i said should we do anything physical the same way and to my mind no now the moral of that story is the more different you are from the person who wrote the rule the more important it is for you to deviate from the rule do you see what i can't hold a tennis racket the way he was taught to hold a tennis racket my hand is missing those extra three inches you know the world the The world is built to be stable, although it's constantly changing. So he, this guy of 6 '9", is sitting on a toilet seat the same height as I am at 5 '3".

22:33One of us is not getting our biological needs met. Yeah. So we believe that things should be stable, can be known, that there are absolutes. And I think in part that that justifies the status quo. Right. Right. Because if we all believe that the person in charge is smarter than we all are, then we all do it. Than they are. Right. Yeah. So, listen, I'm a parent. I've been, you know, I'm an executive. I'm a leader. And I'm just thinking about all the absolutes that I have demanded to my 60s, like, don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way all of us have been. And that's why I say virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time.

23:20Right. Because as soon as you're doing what's been commanded, demanded, mindlessly learned, you're no different from the robot. Right. I don't want to create a robot. Well, but that's what we do. I mean, unintentionally. I'm sure you give a lot of kisses and hugs. and that that offsets some of the robot-like behavior okay but it's not the best thing for the child or the adults thinking because when you know you don't pay any attention it's just that simple or just right i i am gonna have this in the back of my mind when i am teaching him things and saying things that are absolutes now i'm questioning every no another thing parent choice I've made great what you want to do is whenever you ask a question ask for multiple reasons rather than for single reasons right and then the mind naturally will find it more interesting yeah no so I have a question so if I want to talk a little bit about how I can get out of these absolutes as a person right because I'm I'm sitting on my phone with all the absolutes from whatever media or entertainment or social feed that I'm ingesting.

24:39And then, you know, there's all the absolutes maybe that I'm being given at work, right? So how do I, I guess, quiet those? No, it's not easy. First of all, going forward, and this is more important for people the younger they are, is to stop learning mindlessly. So that means every time you're learning something, you change the is, for example, to could be. This is how you hold a tennis racket. This could be how you hold a tennis racket. This is the answer. This is one of several possible answers and so on. But changing it is very hard because essentially when you're mindless, you're not there.

25:22To know you're not there. Right. So you can't change it. You just don't know. Yeah. Exactly. But the times we can change it. You know, people these days are massively stressed. I mean, it's mind-boggling because stress is a function of our thoughts and stress is mindless. And next time we suffer from, you know, we're feeling stressed or bored or any of those negative emotions, at that moment, we're aware. And then we can call to mind some of the things that I'm suggesting. Let me give you a couple of simple one-liners for stress, and then we'll talk more deeply about it. Yeah, and I've heard you talk about this, and I've been thinking about it a lot, so I'm excited for the listeners to hear.

26:07Okay, so the first one-liner is, next time you're stressed, simply ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy. I missed the bus, I forgot to make the phone call, I said the stupid thing at a meeting, you know, whatever it is. and then you breathe and you can relax some. But stress requires two things. It requires a belief that something is going to happen. And when it happens, it's going to be awful. So let's deal with those separately. So the belief that something's going to happen, people don't realize that prediction is an illusion. You cannot predict the individual event.

26:50So the example I'm fond of using, I said, okay, Jessica, I'm in a foul shooting contest with Michael Jordan. We are each going to throw one ball. Who's going to win? Well, let me tell you, you'd be foolish to put all your money on Michael Jordan because he on occasion misses and I on more than random occasions make the foul shot. He could then say to himself, let the older woman win. What does it matter? He could have had a fight with somebody right before he got there he could have a cold there are so many things that could change the nature of the single event but of course over time if we were shooting 50 baskets you know chance is less likely to operate you know right well i've also heard you say like you know a doctor will give you six months to live and it's like how do they know they can't know no that that goes back to what i said okay i have so much to tell you like let me stick with stress for a second So the first thing is you cannot predict the individual event.

27:53Now, all of us really care about. You know, we can talk about that surgery and they tell you nine out of ten people do well with the surgery. It doesn't mean you're going to do well. Okay, so now... If you feel good because you're like, well, you know, there's nine out of ten that... If you ask yourself what are five reasons this thing you're dreading won't happen. Yeah. So you immediately feel better because before you just, it's going to happen. And now you see maybe it won't. Now comes the hard part. Let's assume it does happen. How might that be a good thing? You see, what people don't realize is whether something, consequences are in our heads.

28:16they're not in events. Events are not good, they're not bad, they're just events. And as soon as you recognize the advantage of whatever that thing is that you're dreading, you end up in a very different space. So for me, I'm rarely ever. I've lived almost an entire life that's stress-free, although things have happened and, you know, of course I know what stress is. Because, you know, see, what first happens is, oh no, people are scared. Then I'm telling you to tell yourself, ask yourself how that can be an advantage. Now you do that often enough, so for me, I never have to reframe anything. I don't frame it as terrible in the first place.

28:36So, you know, you and I are going, and you go to this event, I'm excited about the event, and then you call me and tell you the event is canceled. I say, okay, that's all right, and now I think of all the things I can do instead. I know that. I've done that well because you call me back and say, you know, the event is back on, and I say, well, wait a second, I don't want to go now. Right, because I have these other things on everything. Yeah, that's right. But, you know, so I was talking and I'm doing one of these podcasts and I was trying to explain this to people. I said, okay, so let's say that my internet goes out right now.

28:53My gosh, no. For me, it would simply mean I could go have lunch. The funny thing about that was then my internet went out. Well, I hope it doesn't ring out. I know. But it's just so true. It's the reframing, but you just have to really get in the habit of doing that. Yeah, but you say, you know, it's not. If you can see something in a way that makes you bored, scared, stressed, unhappy, or you could see that same thing in a way that leaves you feeling just fine, relaxed, maybe even energized, why would you choose the former? So what we have to realize, the hard part, because the world tells you, this is bad, whatever this is.

29:17And so everybody has their personal thises. For me, these things are terrible. For you, these other things. And just ask yourself, why is it so terrible? I mean, you probably were told that it was terrible 20 years ago, But you're all grown up now. Right. And it's still terrible. Right. I asked my, it turns out public speaking is one of the biggest stresses. For sure. Virtually everybody, not everybody, but large numbers. So I asked my students, stand up if you're afraid of speaking in public. The whole class, 200 kids stand up. Okay. And we started talking, you know, individually. I don't get to talk to each of them, but they're all standing.

29:53and, you know, why they're afraid of speaking in public. And then you've just spoken to the whole class. You know, so what happens in part is that our hypotheses almost always become fulfilled. What I mean by that, if you asked yourself, Jessica, how are you great? You're going to find evidence for how you're great. But if you asked yourself, how are you awful? you're also going to find evidence for that you say when are the times i have trouble speaking in public you're going to find evidence for that hypothesis ignoring all the other times when you've spoken in public you know so then i did something the other day which um apropos of nothing i don't know what led to it in the class and i asked the student to stand up these are harvard kids very smart lovely children you know young people and i asked i said okay i'm going to ask you three questions and they all involve adding single digits okay I said how much is four plus one is five how much is six and three nine how much is nine plus two eleven I said okay were you nervous when you did this she said no I said you weren't nervous because you knew what you were going to say so all of you people who are afraid of public speaking if somebody asks you a question and you don't know the answer you simply say i don't know if you know the answer then you're not going to be afraid to say it so the fear is you know the fear is thinking you're not going to know it's not a matter of verbalizing it to groups of people yeah none of them are afraid of speaking to young kids so this is something you'll enjoy which is when as you get older, most people in the world around you are younger.

31:48And young people are just not scared. So I had this experience. I was 20 years old. I'm driving too fast. I get a speeding ticket. The policeman is about 25 and I'm scared. Okay. Next time I'm driving too fast and I get a speeding ticket and I'm 35 years old, but he's still 25. My first thought was, oh, gee, well, I've grown. You know, I'm no longer scared. And then I said, no, no, no. I didn't grow necessarily. Before I was talking to somebody older than I. Now I'm talking to somebody younger than I am. Right. So no matter how afraid you are, the time will come where all of that will change naturally.

32:32Yes. Well, we talk about work and leadership a lot on this podcast. And so let's turn it to organizations, for example. There is, and I've heard you talk about this, but there's the sort of mindlessness that happens that organizations create, right? And they were once innovative now, and they've gotten bigger, and now they are stagnant, their business is declining. Yeah. So, you know, the reason to be mindful as an organization is to stop using yesterday's solutions to solve today's problem. you know um and and the individual this will be helpful to people for anybody who the winter is approaching who eventually will have to deal with snow and icy roads that i ask people how do you stop a car when it starts skidding on ice and everybody says you gently pump the brake now it turns out that's what you should have done way back in the past when they were anti uh before they were anti-lock brakes right so you learn gently pump the brakes to be safe right now the only way to be safe is to firmly hit the brake all right so the point is we learn things at time one we you know freeze our understanding and assume it's going to stay true forever things change and at time two that very thing that we were doing to be safe is now causing our problems that happens to individuals it happens to companies right but you see so many companies do this and it's so true and i i preach this all the time it's like they they go off and try to solve a problem and it's like okay well we have to have this process to solve this problem and then they continue that process for many many years but that is not the problem anymore yeah exactly yeah but then that process is slowing them down from unlocking all these other things or solving these other things that would actually be better to solve because everybody's doing this thing that doesn't even matter anymore right and you know that organizations are comprised of people and as we've said now a few times people overwhelmingly are on automatic pilot and so you know um so you You need some interesting mix in a company, new people who haven't seen it, done it for forever, old people who don't care anymore.