Noticing as a Pathway to Possibility | OuterLimits of InnerScience Ep 5

speaker-0: Hello and welcome to Outer Limits of Inner Science, where we explore human transformation, consciousness, and the science of meditation in order to empower people to heal and thrive. My name is Andrew Wright, and with me today, as always, the amazing Dr. Hillary Hamilton.
speaker-1: Hi Andrew and I'm so excited about this episode. We have someone with us that is known as the mother of mindfulness.
speaker-0: Yep. I am so I I owe so much debt of gratitude to this person. You know how you just have these core beliefs that are foundational to your beliefs and and I've been in this work for a long time and I have some very foundational things that I go back to to remind me and they're little nuggets that I hold on to. Yeah. But I I forgot that so many of those things that I have actually came from this person. Those core beliefs and understanding about meditation, about transformation, about consciousness, and they all came from this one person.
speaker-1: Which makes sense because she's been around doing this for over fifty years at Harvard and she's one of the most sought after professors to attend some of her classes. And so what are some of the things that you get that you got from her that you didn't know was from her?
speaker-0: Well, I mean, mindfulness in general. As you said, she's like she's known as the ⁓ mother of mindfulness. And not the kind of mindfulness that we talk about normally when you think about meditation. or even the mindfulness with Dr. Joe Dispenza and and what the researchers called nothingfulness or WTFfulness. These are the scientists that are trying to figure out what to call as meditations, right? So this is all different.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: What she talks about is more like the opposite. ⁓ stop doing the lack of mindfulness. Stop being thoughtless. So r one of those examples that that I apply in my life is that rather than trying to make a decision, which for me can be really difficult, I'm thinking about is it right? Is it wrong? Which one is the right decision to make? And she says, rather than trying to make the right decision, make the decision right. And this is so foundational for me. How do you make the decision right? You make the decision right by once you make that commitment, now support it with all of your beliefs that you can. And I I love that. And that comes from our next guest.
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-2: Yeah.
speaker-1: So cool. Yeah. I mean, a lot of our community, we know how to set intentions, but a lot of us don't know what intention we really want. And so we don't make a decision. We get stuck in that confusion and never move forward. So it's like there's no movement until you make the decision right. You know? Right.
speaker-0: Right, right. And that allows for so much more possibility.
speaker-2: Yeah.
speaker-1: ⁓ and that's you also called her the mother of possibility too.
speaker-0: I think that'd be a great title for her. Yeah. And it's sort of like the you know, the stories of transformation. Those people always say it wasn't it wasn't one particular meditation. There wasn't the one meditation, ⁓ which meditation should I do? No, it was about the transformation, the the surrendering and letting go and and believing in possibility. I think all of those encapsulate really well to this idea of being mindful. versus being mindless and judge judging something as good or bad. That's judgmental and it's being mindless. Yeah. Where the event, the thing, the decision just is. It the the temperature is just what it is outside. Whether or not it's hot or cold is up to me and how I'm going to perceive it.
speaker-1: Yeah, it it's gonna be so great to have her on the show and she's done so much research. I'm sure she's gonna present a lot of research to us and what she's found through the years of making that happen, and it's gonna be a wonderful call. And she was just with us at an event not too long ago in one of our 10-day events. Dr. Joe invited her on because he talks about some of her research, and so I'm excited to see and hear her share that with us.
speaker-0: She's been doing research in psychology and conducting research for more than 50 years. She's a world-renowned scientist whose groundbreaking work has spanned five decades. She's been honored with four distinguished scientists award and the Liberty Science Genius Award. She's been widely recognized as the mother of mindfulness, the mother of positive psychology, the mother of the mind-body medicine. And so it is our great pleasure to welcome Dr. Ellen Langer.
speaker-1: Welcome to the call, Ellen.
speaker-0: Thanks so much for joining us today. I would love it. ⁓ we don't have a prepared introduction for you, although we can do that. I would love to hear you introduce yourself.
speaker-2: ⁓ no, I can't. I I want to seem to be immodest. And I the introduction I would want would be to lay out all that I've done over the last fifty years. We can leave it to say that I've been ⁓ at Harvard teaching for the last fifty years. I'm considered the mother of mindfulness, the mother of positive psychology, and arguably ⁓ the mother of ⁓ mind body medicine. So with all those children, I guess I don't need to say more.
speaker-0: I have a question about the the title Mother of Mindfulness. That mindfulness as you write about and speak about is very different than most people think about mindfulness. And I just wonder, like it's almost like the meditation ⁓ world co-opted that word, but can you tell us what you mean by mindfulness?
speaker-2: Yeah, it's a very good place to start. All right. So ⁓ mindfulness is the very simple process of noticing. Right. Noticing new things. Now, everybody, if I left it at that, everybody would think they were mindful. But what people don't realize is the fifty years of research has made clear that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. So why aren't we noticing? We're not noticing because we think we know. If you knew what I was going to say next, why pay any attention? And so, ⁓ and how do we come to this illusion of certainty thinking we know our parents tell us this is the way to do it, this is how it is, our schools teach us all of these facts as absolutes. And again, when you know something is absolute, you there's nothing to think about. So, what I'm fond of doing is taking the one fact that people around the world think is true. So Andrew, how much is one plus one? ⁓ okay, and nothing to think about, right? But it turns out it's not always two. If you were to add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. You add one watt of chewing gum plus one watt, and I could go on like this. Okay, so in the real world, one plus one ⁓ doesn't equal two as a more often than it does. Now people want to get sophisticated. One plus one is two if you're using a base ten number system. If you're using a base two number system, one plus one is written as ten. Okay, so what does that mean? So somebody comes up to you now and says, Andrew, how much is one plus one? All of a sudden you have a choice. You have some agency. You can say one, two, or ten. Right. And by having that choice, noticing that things differ depending on the context you're in, all of a sudden. ⁓ the conversation has some meaning to you. So ⁓ and before this, when you were answering, you were really no different from a robot. And that's the way we are with all of our certainties. And you know, robots get a lot right, but robots can't fall in love, robots aren't happy. You don't want to be a robot. And the only way not to be a robot is to know you don't know. Because when you know you don't know, then you pay some attention. Now Most of us know we don't know, but we think we're supposed to know, and that somebody else knows. So what we we do is pretend or we absent ourselves from the conversation in the first place. ⁓ I'm here to free everybody since everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, nobody knows. So you have to go from making a personal attribution for not knowing, I don't know, but you may know, to a universal attribution. Nobody knows.
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-2: And then everything becomes new and interesting. Right. So let me tell you a little story. ⁓ I've said this so many times, but to me it was so poignant. I was at ⁓ a horse event. I used to have horses. And ⁓ this man asked me, could I watch his horse for him? Because he wanted to get his horse a hot dog. Well, you know, I was a straight A student. I mean, yeah, nobody knows better than I, as well, but not better. Horses don't eat meat, right? But to be nice, I say, Of course I'll watch your horse. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Now a normal person would be worried about that. To me it was very exciting because it meant all these things that people say can't be, maybe they can be. And it opened up, you know, a a a world of possibilities. ⁓ so now why why do we say horses don't eat meat? when in fact some horses eat meat, because science, which is gives us so many of our facts, only gives us probabilities. So if you're gonna do an experiment, you'd have to take a certain kind of horse, certain number of these horses, of a certain weight, you'd have to feed them at a certain time a certain amount of meat mixed with a certain amount of grain, and then assess how many don't eat meat. And then you'd find most of the horses under these conditions don't eat meat. And that's a mouthful. So it's just easier to say horses don't eat meat. But they do on occasion. And you can't predict which ones will and which ones won't. So if we just accept this very simple idea that we don't know, you don't feel bad about it because nobody knows, then everything is kind of fun. So there are two ways to become mindful on the way I use the word. One is, as I've just said, top down, which is accept not knowing. Then everything is new. The other is a bottom up, which is
speaker-1: But Yeah.
speaker-2: You think, you know, attend to things that you think you know and find three new things about it. So three new things about your best friend next time you see the person, three new things about a spouse. Walk outside, notice three new things. Each time you do this, it's hey, look at that. You know, but things you thought you knew, you see you didn't know, and eventually you'll develop the same top-down rule.
speaker-1: And that just opens up your awareness to see other things that are right in front of you. Cause we feel the same things because it's like hardwired in our brain, right? But
speaker-2: Okay. Hillary, yes, that's really interesting because everybody has had the experience, or or I may be bizarre since I have this all the time, where you're looking for something and it's right in front of you, but you don't see it. And the reason you don't see it is because you expect it, you know, let's say you're looking for something that looked just like a finger, an artificial finger. And so you're looking for this, but now it's like this. And so it's not this, it's this, and so you miss it. Yeah. ⁓ And if we didn't ⁓ assume that we knew with such certainty that everything was conditional, it's sort of like this, it may be, and so on. Life becomes very different, you know. And there are ways that certain groups of people are very hurt by this, and we're all hurt because the more mindless we are, ⁓ you know, when you're mindless, you can't be happy, you can't, the neurons are on firing and you're leading to illness and premature death. The more Similar you are to the person who wrote the rule, the instruction, the way to do whatever it is, the easier it is for you to do well doing it just that way. So the more different you are, the more your mindlessness is going to hurt you. So when I'm lecturing, I'll often ask, is there somebody out there, you know, over six feet? And there almost always is, always a man. And I invite him to the stage, and here we are, we look like this. I'm five three, he's six three. And all I do is raise the question, should we do anything physical the same way? It looks ridiculous. Of course not. So for women who are ⁓ trying to do things where the way of doing it was determined by these tall men, ⁓ they're never going to be as good. But so if we learned everything in the first place as you sort of do it this way, consider doing it, you know, in this manner, ⁓ rather than this is the way.
speaker-0: Wh which isn't at all how research and medicine works, right? It's fitting fitting in a category that was established by norms, and the norms were usually males and usually white males, and and that's how we came up with a standard which is fairly arbitrary.
speaker-2: Right? ⁓ yeah. You know, ⁓ the most striking of this was years ago when they just used male medical students, so those young men, and ⁓ then they the medicine that had just been tested based on these young men would be given to elderly people. And elderly people don't process the ⁓ medicine the same way. So it's actually staying in the body too long and killing them. ⁓ and so even though
speaker-1: Mm-hmm.
speaker-2: If we took old men, young men, black men, white men, you know, and so on, ⁓ none of us is us. You know, that let's say we took our ⁓ income and let's say you and ⁓ Hillary made, I don't know, two million dollars a year and I was unemployed. Well, let's say three million, you know, three million well, do the arithmetic. I'll take a look at it because we take an average of all of these and it wouldn't represent any of us.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-2: Right. So none of us is the norm. All of us have to pay attention to the ways we're different from whatever population has been used to garner the information. And you know, so for me, because I've had the luxury of ⁓ living a virtually stress-free life, and I eat healthy food, I also eat a lot of junk food, but I'm not surrounded by fumes and by whatever, and there are so many ways. I can say I'm not the person on whom ⁓ these statistics were based. And everybody can really do that. And when you do that, then you use the numbers as maybes, you know, best guesses, but you don't get wedded to it. So if a physician were to tell you, give you a prognosis and ⁓ a diagnosis first, the diagnosis is a maybe, but it's taken as absolute. And then given that diagnosis, your prognosis is, and they can't know this. And there are still some, most physicians now, I'm very pleased. You know, when I started all of this work ⁓ 50 years ago, the medical world basically wrote me off and thought I was whatever they felt, you know. ⁓ and now ⁓ it's not infrequently that I get emails from physicians of all different stripes asking for advice and and so on. So they've come around. But ⁓ there may be still people out there who might say to you, you only have three months to live, for example. And there's no way to know that and then it you know can easily become a self fulfilling prophecy.
speaker-0: Sure. And didn't you do some research on that with with diabetes and and perception and
speaker-2: Yeah. So the the diabetes where well there are a couple of diabetes studies, but the the one that I think that ⁓ you're talking about is the borderline effect. So the best way for people to understand this is sort of imagine ⁓ all of us are taking an IQ test and some of us get most of us will score 70 and above, and that's normal. ⁓ but imagine that somebody scores 69. Now, you don't have to know anything about numbers. You don't have to know anything about intelligence. But to know, is there a difference between 69 and 70? How could there be? You know, you could have misread the question, you could have just sneezed the person who got the 70 could have guessed on that extra. So the numbers 69 and 70 are not statistically different. It's basically the same thing. However, if you're in the 69,
speaker-1: So
speaker-2: You would be told you're cognitively deficient, what we used to call mentally retarded, and 70 would be normal. And because of the label, from that point forward, everything is different, right? The person who is cognitively deficient is not going to pick up books. People are going to not invite them to do things that require a certain ⁓ intellectual ability and so on. And over a short period of time, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it's the same thing with disease. It's the same thing with anything that we're measuring, where there are people who are just above it and being compared to people just below it, you draw the distinction to let's say the expiration date on food. So let's say the expiration date is tomorrow. So ⁓ you know, ⁓ let's say it was yesterday. Okay, it's it's gonna be in an hour. So who would believe that?
speaker-1: Yeah. Okay.
speaker-2: The two minutes before that hour, the food is fine to eat, but two minutes after. ⁓ You know. And ⁓ so we did this with diabetes. We did it ⁓ I think we also did cancer. It's it's not an easy study to do, but we found that the people who were right below the borderline, who are told you're fine, basically, in this instance, ⁓ were significantly different over time from those who are immediately above it.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: who were now told that they had the disease, that they were cognitively deficient, that the food had expired, and so on. So people need to realize that numbers, you know, numbers hide a lot of ambiguity. And that's fine much of the time. Who cares? But when it's about your own health, you don't want to buy those numbers hook, line and sacred.
speaker-1: Yeah. I it's curious that you said ⁓ like an IQ test and you're above one number and below one number. What if you told someone that you scored 144, but you didn't? You scored seventy.
speaker-2: Sure. Well, so that's not so dissimilar from ⁓ the Pygmalion study that ⁓ Rosenthal and Jacobson did forever ago. So they go into a school, an elementary school, and they randomly choose a bunch of kids. And they first they give everybody tests. All right, but the tests are nonsense. And then they greed the tests supposedly, they randomly choose a bunch of them and they tell the teachers, these are diamonds in the rough. These are your little geniuses. And Then what happens at the end of the school year? They blossom. Because, you know, so let's say ⁓ Andrew says something, and if I started off thinking Andrew was ⁓ not so smart, I say no and I go on to you know to somebody else. But now that I know Andrew is a late bloomer, I'd say, Well, do you mean this, Andrew? And he'd say yes, and you know, and I'd work him through it, and at the end we'd both think he knew the answer. or ⁓
speaker-1: Wow.
speaker-2: Much of life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look for doom and gloom, you're gonna find doom and gloom. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because people ⁓ I just wrote a little song about this. I'm not gonna sing it for you. Don't ask. Yeah, I'll sing one of my songs, sorry, but not this one. ⁓ anyway, ⁓ but half full is not the same thing as half empty. If you think of something as half full, you get on with your business.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-2: Right. Living. If you see it as half empty, then all you're doing is becoming thirsty and w you know, worrying about when you're not going to have enough to drink. And so our beliefs determine more of ⁓ our lives than most people realize. We have far more control over almost every aspect of our lives than most people realize. We could take that in the direction.
speaker-0: It's so important to recognize that we that that's in really empowering, that those beliefs came from our parents oftentimes and the programs that we just automatically run. We had no idea that we were running them. So just having awareness that we have programs, beliefs are disbeliefs.
speaker-2: Yeah, so I Yeah, I had a ⁓ a thought many years ago breath before I did the research on premature cognitive commitments, which is just mindsets, but this is back in the seventies. And ⁓ I was in China or something that no, no. I was at a friend's house who made me dinner. Now I remember it. And which was very sweet, right? ⁓ but she had put the fork on the left side of the plate. I mean on the right side of the plate. The fork goes on the left side of the plate. It was very hard for me not to move the fork, but I thought that would be insulting. But it was it really made me uncomfortable. And then I thought about why does the fork go on the right side of the plate? And why do I believe this? You know, so it wasn't as my mother once said the fork goes over here. That was it. We didn't have a sophisticated philosophical discussion about fork placement. ⁓ and then I was weighted to that for the rest of my life. And that's the way we we know almost everything we know, and we become intolerant of anybody that's different. And ⁓ you know, because we do what we do because we think it's right. Because if we didn't think it was right, we wouldn't do it. Ergo, if you do the opposite, that means you're wrong. Because we we forget that there can be many rights, many different smart ways of doing things.
speaker-1: Yeah, it makes me think of what you said, fork on the left or fork on the right. And both Andrew and I are left handed. Uhhuh. And I know back in the day, you know, it was so wrong to be left handed. Yeah. And now it's like it's more acceptable. It's
speaker-2: He left. That's why well, not only that, that you know the left-handed people tend to be more mindful. And the question they're more mindful is not biological, but it's because the world is built for those with right you know who are right-handed. So things that they're doing mindlessly, you have to actually stop and think about. That's interesting.
speaker-0: Which was a program that I was given as a child was I was told that we're gonna be more accident prone, shorter lifespan because of the accident prone, those kinds of things. So it's that was another belief that I then had that I wanted to overcome. Like, no, I'm just being more aware of those risks.
speaker-2: Right. Yeah. Well, you know, that if you were to do mindlessly something that was built for somebody with a right hand and you're using your left hand, you probably are more likely to have an accident. But why would you do it that way? You know, 'cause you know that ⁓ the world isn't making life easy for you. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.
speaker-1: Fascinating.
speaker-0: One of the things that meditation does, and a lot of ⁓ people in our audience are are meditators. I would say a lot of them are advanced meditators. And one of the effects of meditation sometimes is dial ⁓ time dilation or the effects of time where you come out and you've either been under for hours or you feel like you were under for hours and it's just only been a few minutes. I know you've done some research on time and the perception of time. Can you talk about that?
speaker-2: Sure. ⁓ but also I've done research on meditation. And people need to understand that this is this is different. You know, ⁓ it's too bad in some ways that it bears the same name. ⁓ but ⁓ at any rate, ⁓ so time perception. We ⁓ w many of us are wedded to the clock. ⁓ you know, and I find myself at times it says it's 12 o'clock, therefore I'm hungry. Exactly. So ⁓
speaker-1: No we're
speaker-2: The the first study we did with this was with diabetes. ⁓ we had we took all sorts of measures of people who ⁓ in the lab who had type two diabetes. And ⁓ then what we did was put we're going to have them play computer games. And the reason for all this will become clear at the end. Doesn't seem logical at the moment. ⁓ but they're playing computer games with the instruction to change the game they're playing every 15 minutes or so. And that would ensure that they looked at the clock next to the computer. So for a third of the people, the clock was going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it was half as fast as real time. And for a third of the people, it was real time. And what we found was that blood sugar level followed perceived time, clock time, rather than real time. We have several studies like this. We had another study where we had people in a sleep lab. And they ⁓ when they're asleep, we play around with the clock. So they wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep than they got, or two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they got. And those who think they got two hours more sleep than they than they actually got perform better both biologically and on all the cognitive and psychology tests we go on. And in ⁓ the most recent of these time studies, what we did was ⁓ inflict a womb, a minor. 'Cause I'm not a say this, and even if I were, somebody would stop me from doing it. It's a minor wound, but a wound. And ⁓ people now are in front of a clock again, or see a clock that is going twice as fast, half as fast, or real time. And most people would assume that the wound is gonna heal when the wound heals, right? Who cares what the clock says? But that's not what we found. The wound heals based on clock time. And ⁓
speaker-1: Right.
speaker-2: You know, and th this is all part of a larger ⁓ set of studies that I've done on mind-body unity. Maybe we could talk about that for just a minute. Most people believe in mind-body dualism, but they don't know, you know, your parent, my parents at least never said to me, you know, let me tell you about mind-body dualism. They don't even teach that in school unless you're taking a philosophy course. But still, ⁓ you know, people believe you have a mind but separate from the body. And then the question is. How do you get from this fuzzy thought to the body? Something and everybody has had experience where okay, so let me say, for example, you see somebody regurgitating ⁓ and all of a sudden you feel like you yourself are going to vomit. A leaf blows in your face. So nothing happened, but except visualizing that. A leaf blows in your face and you're startled, you pulse and blood pressure, you know, increase until you say, ⁓ it's just a leaf. All right. So we've all had the experience. Of our bodies affecting our mind. And I've been doing this for I guess now it's close to 50 years. And you know, it's exciting when you know you've made some had some effect on the world. But this one drove me crazy because it went from mind body dualism to everybody talking about mind body connection. They're not connected. If they're connected, you have the very same problem. How are they connected? And so for me, it's a very simple thing. I say, mind, body, these are really just words. Let's put them back together. And if you see it as one thing, wherever we're putting the mind, we're necessarily putting the body. And those time studies all ⁓ demonstrate the mind body unity. The first of these studies was probably the most famous. And you know, it's not obnoxious of me to call one of my studies famous. That's because if you tune in to The Simpsons, go to Havana. They actually talk about the study. So you're not the same. We're talking about what we did was to retrofit a retreat to 20 years earlier. And we had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So they would be talking about past events in the present tense, for example. And in all ways, you know, they were surrounded. It wasn't, I couldn't afford Hollywood set, but as well as we could, ⁓ everything that they saw was of that earlier time. So they're there for five days as a result of putting their minds back in time, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they look noticeably younger. And to this date, that was done in 1979, written up in 1981. ⁓ but to this day, I still have not seen even a medical intervention being able to improve people's hearing. Wow. The way you improve hearing is you get a hearing aid. Here there were no hearing aids. And ⁓ so that was the most dramatic and the first test of the mind-body unity. The next one is perhaps the most fun study for people. Here we took chambermaids. Now, as you know, chambermaids are the women who clean hotel and motel rooms. Oddly, if you ask them how much exercise are you getting, they say they're not getting any exercise. Why? Because according to the Surgeon General who sits behind a desk all day. Exercise is what you do after work. After work, they're too tired. Okay, so now if we ask the first question, if exercise is good for your health, and all of these women are doing 40 hours a week of exercise, shouldn't they be healthier than socioeconomic equivalent others who are not doing this exercise? And the answer is they're not. Okay, so now we take these women. We this very simple study. This was ⁓ Ali Crumb did this with me. We divide them randomly into two groups, and we simply teach one group that their work is exercise. Breaking a bed is like working at this machine at the gym. So now at the end of this, we have two groups. One that knows their work is exercise, and one that doesn't realize their work is exercise. We assess their eating, they're not eating any differently. We see how hard they're working, they're not working any differently. Nevertheless, the group that has changed their mind. Lost weight, there was a change in body mass index, waist to hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down. Now, the interesting thing about this study is that this is really a test of the nocebo. Placebos, most people know what placebos are. You take a nothing, the sugar pill, you think it's something, and you heal. Placebos are probably our strongest medicine. People don't understand how could placebos work. This mind body unity tells you how it works. But a nocebo is that there's something that actually works that you then believe doesn't work and it stops working, as with the exercises. And both of them speak to ⁓ the strength of this mind-body unity idea.
speaker-1: Yeah. It's amazing. Just those two studies alone should change so many things. I mean, just how we think and feel about ourselves, it's all perception. Yeah. You know?
speaker-2: But you know, people have lived with themselves for however long. You know, you grow up sadly by a mother who's led you to believe you're incompetent or you're unattractive or, you know, whatever, ⁓ for fifteen, twenty, forty years beyond that. ⁓ and then you hear something and it gives them hope. ⁓ but most people can't change immediately because, you know, ⁓ trying something that was a little scary, they they've gotten used to being less than they can be. Right. But it's sad because yes, I think ⁓ all of us ⁓ are well not all of us, but most of us are sealed in unlived lives. And that's what all of my work has been about to try to break that seal. Because again, when you're mindless, you're no different from a robot and you're not having any fun. And the way to have fun, you can't have fun mindlessly. And so what people, you know, just the act of noticing. The neurons are firing and all of these years of research has shown it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So it's good for you. Not only is it good for you, not only does it feel good, but when you're mindful, people see you as more charismatic. Not only that, when you're mindful, the things that you do bear the imprint of your mindfulness. So the things you produce are better, you feel better, people like you more. It's a win-win-win. And it's all so easy. ⁓ and sometimes I think that maybe I should have when I started doing all of this, make it sound more difficult. Because people, it's hard for people to believe that doing something simple, you know, simple can solve simple things. Hard, you know, you know, if you have some real major medical thing, you need surgery, right? Yeah. ⁓ and ⁓ but it is really just that simple.
speaker-1: Wow. So cool.
speaker-0: Do you do you have a recommendation? I mean, it sounds like your your answer is stop being mindless. Start being mindful.
speaker-2: No, I well, that's the higher order one, but when you're mindless, you're not there to know you're not there. So you can't tell yourself not to be there because you think you're there anyway. So the the way to do it, ⁓ well there are a a few ⁓ things that we need to do. The first is when you're learning anything new, and this echoes back to what I had said before about, you know, rules being written by men, followed by women who it doesn't quite fit and you're you know, just not doing what's best for you. ⁓ but when you ⁓ are learning anything new, rather than learn it as absolute, this is the way. You should learn that no matter what you're told. This could be, yeah, sort of like this. Maybe, probably. It could be rather than is. That's for the new learning. But how do you ⁓ address the old learning? That's much harder. So the the second piece of advice is well When you're unhappy, because there we're thrown into a state of what's wrong with me? How can I get over this? And stress, regret, all unhappiness is mindless, all of it. So the moment you're experiencing any of those emotions, you can ask yourself a series of questions. And people don't realize that emotions are choices. You know, so if I said, Hilary, you made me angry. Hillary's not making me anything. So imagine That Hillary, instead of being ⁓ an attractive, competent woman, were a three-year-old kid who said the same thing to me. Whatever it was that her, it wouldn't make me angry. Right. So it's not the words that are doing it. It's the way I'm understanding. I'm feeling somebody took control away from me, you know, or or what have you. ⁓ stress.
speaker-1: Yeah. Right.
speaker-2: Stress is to me really interesting. And I've been writing about stress since the late 70s, ⁓ mid-70s. It's as you know, stress, ⁓ events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views we take of events. Yeah. So the more mindless you are, the more you're buying into that this thing is terrible. ⁓ the more mindful, the more opportunity you have to see it in many different ways. ⁓ Which brings up a separate part. Okay, so stress requires two things. It requires a belief that something's gonna happen and that when it happens, it's going to be awful. So deal with both of those. The first, something's going to happen. Ask yourself three reasons why it might not happen. You can always come up with three reasons. You want to play it, you know, be really smart, come up with five reasons. And the more reasons you generate for why it might not happen. The more you realize it, maybe it won't happen, and you immediately become less stressed. Second part is harder because of the way we've all been mindlessly taught. Nothing in and of itself is positive or negative. Those are the views we take of events. Now, let's assume this event is going to happen. Okay. Now the question is: how is that actually a good thing?
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-2: How is it a good thing if your spouse leaves you? ⁓ my God, I'm gonna feel well, you know, if you're worried that your spouse is gonna leave you, you are not in a good relationship. Relationships require two people. And in some way, ⁓ if your spouse left over ⁓ some time, that would actually be a great ⁓ a gift to you because who wants to live their lives in a second, fifth rate relationship? No matter what it is. So this is funny. ⁓ I thought it's funny. I I've said it so many times maybe it's not even funny anymore. So I was describing this on some podcast. And I said, look, let's say if right now my internet went out. So ⁓ my God. Wouldn't be ⁓ my God. I'd go have lunch. That made it funny is that then my internet went out. And I did have lunch. I said, So here's I have, you know, I've called ⁓ Created one-liners to represent a lot of the ⁓ research we've done over all these years. And this is one one-liner that a lot of my friends write out and put on their refrigerator. Ask yourself: is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy. Like I dropped the, I dropped the turkey, ⁓ I missed the bus, I banged the car, ⁓ I missed the appointment, the deadline, you know, so what? And
speaker-1: Isn't that interesting? That's
speaker-2: So as soon as you ask that and you say, Yeah, it's not such a tragedy, you breathe again and you get back in the game. ⁓ but it's the you know, running around like a chicken without a head. You have people who who spend, you know, lie awake at night stressed ⁓ because of something that ⁓ is being overblown and that stress requires predictability. You know, predicting
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: That this thing is going to happen and we can't predict. No. And ⁓ so much of what we do is based on this illusion of being able to predict. And I think science and the misreading of science contributes to this because science is based on predictions. But what we are predicting there is the group. What happens to most people most of the time. Most horses don't eat meat. But we cannot predict whether this particular horse won't eat meat. Most people given this diagnosis and follow this path. That doesn't mean you will. you know, we can't predict the individual case. And I the way I try to persuade people of that, I I made you a wager and I said, okay, we're going to go to a ⁓ Mercedes parking lot, and we're going to randomly, and you can randomly choose any one car. And then you'll be given the key and you get to start the car. And if the car starts right away, I'll give you a million dollars.
speaker-1: No. If
speaker-2: The car doesn't start right away, you have to give me every cent you own and every cent you're likely to make over the next 20 years. It's a very good bet. Yeah. People will not take it. Because they know sometimes there's a lemon. Another example I overuse is so let's say I'm having a foul shooting contest with, I don't say, Michael Jordan. We each get to shoot one basket. You can wager as much as you want on one of us or the other. You'd have to be foolish to put all your money on Michael Jordan. Now he's clearly the better basketball player, but I sometimes make the basket, and he sometimes misses. Not only that, imagine in Michael's head him saying, What is it going to cost him to let the older woman win? And you create stories like this, and all of a sudden you see, yeah. You know, for the single event we cannot predict. Now, in life, that's really all we care about. I'm very glad that this medication works for most people, but I want to know, will it work for me? And so on with everything everything that we do.
speaker-0: Love, I I wanna add a new title to your list of titles. I think you're the also the mother of possibility. I love the way you turn everything into a potential, a possibility, because we have to understand that it that that's all set up however it's set up, but how we as that one person, an N of one in science, I don't care about we could throw out the rest of research. I'm just an N of one. What's gonna happen to me? And so allowing that possibility.
speaker-2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's fine to to cheat a little bit if the ⁓ information about you is good, accept it. You know, it's when it's problematic, leads you to feel stressed or ⁓ unhappy, scared that you need to open it up and look more closely at it. And while we're on the subject of medical data, people don't realize that it's not easy doing these studies. So, year one, you get the idea for the study, you start designing it. Now you have to apply for funds. Okay, and that can be another year. Now, let's say you get the funds, then you run the study. That can be a year. Then you write it up for publication. That'll take as long as it takes. You submit it. Now it's reviewed. It's probably going to be sent back to you for revision. And what's the point of all of this? Is that The data you're reading of that is four or five years old by the time you're reading it. Wow. And you know, four or five years is a a big difference in ⁓ in what we know about people and how we might, you know, the different influences on our lives. So again, I'm not suggesting that data are not important. I'm suggesting that they shouldn't be treated. Nothing should be treated as absolutely true. And here's a little thing. ⁓ That ⁓ I I think is very important that people don't realize that there are people behind all of this. Let me use a little example. So you're walking down the in the ⁓ in the suburb and you see a sign that says keep off the grass. Unless you're from New York, you're just gonna keep off the grass. Okay, even if it's important to take the shortcut because you have to get to where you're going with some big important thing happening. Now, if the sign said, Ellen said, keep off the grass, all of a sudden you'd say, Who is Ellen? Maybe she doesn't live here anymore. Maybe she doesn't feel this way now. Maybe I can negotiate. You know, so the absolute becomes negotiable. So the point is when you put people back in the equation, people recognize that maybe it isn't quite so. So you want to be persuasive, you take people out of the equation.
speaker-1: Interesting. Yeah.
speaker-2: And most of the facts that we're given are given without saying who said that? I mean I think we should all become our three year old selves ⁓ and keep asking who said so? Who said so?
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. It opens the door for more possibility and evolution. And I know you wrote a book called Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, which I think is really cool. And Andrew and I, because we're with Inner Science, we support research that is actually evolving where healthcare is going. So I things have changed a lot since you started this path. Where do you think we're going to end up with healthcare?
speaker-2: yeah, it's a good question. I think ⁓ for one thing, people will be in less need, right, because they're paying more attention to themselves. There are more options. ⁓ if I'm successful at all, and people who believe similarly, there'll be less stress. And I started to say this before that I think stress is the major killer out there. And ⁓ stress is psychological and we can control our psychology. ergo we can control ⁓ our most of these diseases. So if people were more mindful, they would be ⁓ healthier and less need ⁓ for ⁓ medical care. Now ⁓ it's very funny. So I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago receiving this big award. And so I'm ⁓ my basic ⁓ Spiel is is pretty much the same, you know, always about possibility. And I'm talking to a room full of doctors, and ⁓ you know, and some because I have so much data, so many examples, it's it's pretty persuasive. So then I had many years ago, this was all connected, but many years ago, I had smashed, not ⁓ broken, smashed my ankle. And so I have all this ⁓ metal in my ankle. And ⁓ okay, so I give the talk the next day. The whole thing is built around me to go and get this big award. And all of a sudden, I can't walk. and ⁓ you know, which is kind of embarrassing and whatever. And ⁓ so they take me to the emergency room on to the hospital. And I felt so bad. They had built this thing around me. And so what I did was I zoomed from the emergency room. and my first, you know, statement was well, There's still room for doctors. so ⁓ so where is it all headed? ⁓ I think there are gonna be a lot of advances with AI. I think that more and more people will come to appreciate the sorts of things that I'm saying. So we will ⁓ have less and less illness, but we're living longer and longer. And so the end state probably, you know, it's it's going to ever game. And ⁓ there'll always be a place for the medical world. Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-0: What about a lot of our our ⁓ audience are have been to Dr. Joe Dispens's events or practice meditation? There a lot of them are donors of Inner Science Research Fund. what is a lot of them are dealing with pain or health issues or healing. And I know you've talked about just becoming more aware and mindful. ⁓ you also talked about like active noticing. Yeah.
speaker-2: Yeah, okay. So before I give you our psychological treatment for pain or for ⁓ any ⁓ chronic illness, ⁓ I did a study on ⁓ pre-surgery. ⁓ hosp you know, you're in the hospital, you're gonna be operating on the the stress that ensues. And I told people a story, but ⁓ we don't need to hear the whole study. ⁓ just one piece that you're out there and this was a sexist study. So we're gonna have you, Andrea. You're playing football and you're getting beaten up wildly, like you don't even feel it, because you got to get that ball to wherever we, you know, to over the goal line. And, you know, Hillary, because again, I was sexist way back when. And you're making a dinner for 15 people, and you know, you cut your finger while, but you you can't pay attention to it because soon all these people are gonna be there and you have to show them what a remarkable hostess you are and cook and so on. So pain requires attention in order to experience it. Okay. That's over there. Now, ⁓ to me, as I said a moment before, that placebos, I believe, are our strongest medication. ⁓ you can't give yourself a placebo. Because you can't tell yourself that it's something that it's not and believe it, right? So I was trying to figure out how because if we can do it ourselves, I mean, you know, if I'm sick. And if a placebo would make me well, well, the sugar pill isn't making me well. What's making me well is I'm making myself well. So what do I need? The doctor, the make-believe pill. Why don't I just make myself well? And so we came up with ⁓ what I call attention to symptom variability. And we've done this with all sorts of chronic illnesses. So when you have a chronic illness, most people believe the symptoms are going to either stay the same or get worse. ⁓ nothing moves in only one direction. You know, when the stock market is on fire going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line, it goes up down a little up, and you know, it just the regression line is ⁓ upward rather than downward. Okay. So it's the same thing with our symptoms that you know, you're in pain, you think you're in pain all the time, nobody is in pain all the time, but you only notice the time you're in pain. So what we do. Is call you periodically. I'm going to tell you eventually how you can do this for yourself. They call you periodically and say, Hillary, how is it now? Whatever the symptoms of the pain. And is it better or worse than the last time we spoke? And why? That's the important question. And why? Well, this whole procedure leads to four things. The first is that when you have a chronic illness, you feel helpless, right? While you wait for the medical world to tell you what you can do. Second, Is chronic does not mean ⁓ there is no cure for it. All it means is the medical world does not have a cure for it. Right. Help me remember where I'm going with this because I want to give parentheses to my parentheses. So if you have an Olympic athlete and you have a couch potato, and I like being a couch potato at times, I'm not demeaning them, but an Olympic athlete and somebody is watching television eating chocolate and popcorn and everything all day long.
speaker-1: There you go.
speaker-2: ⁓ and they both get COVID. Who's going to heal faster? I mean, it would be inconceivable that the athlete doesn't heal faster. And so, to the extent that that's true, it means whatever is ailing you, make the rest of you stronger. If you have stomach cancer, make the rest of your body as strong as it can be. It's interesting when I talk about, and help me remember to get back to where I was going with attention to variability. That ⁓ people okay, so people need to understand how empowering it is to believe that the mind and body are one unit, people don't even recognize body-body unity. If you take your whole body's connected, so if you take an aspirin for a headache, it's going to affect your feet. It's going to affect everything. All right. And so if you realize that the whole body is connected is one, then
speaker-1: Yeah. Right.
speaker-2: Strengthening any part of it, you know, by implication, is in some ways strengthening the whole. Right? Okay, now back to attention to variability. Okay, so all of a sudden you're noticing that sometimes it's a little better. Well, that feels good. So now you have some control, you notice it's a little better. The next part, when you ask the question, why is it better now than it was before? That instigates a mindful search.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: Mindfulness itself is good for your health. So just generating all those novel thoughts, noticing all those novel distinctions is going to help the neurons fire and ⁓ improve. And finally, I believe you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. Okay, so you put all this together. ⁓ we did this with people who are depressed, had a stroke, MS, Parkinson's, chronic pain.
speaker-1: Yeah. Okay.
speaker-2: And I may be missing one or two others. It should be true for everything. And in each case, we find a significant amelioration of symptoms. Now, how does this work like a placebo? I don't have to call you to ask you, Miss Hillary, you have a smartphone. If you don't, I'll I'll buy you one. Or, you know, steal Andrews, get a smartphone. Set the smartphone to ring in 20 minutes. And then ask yourself. How is the symptom now? Is it better or worse? Let me then set it to ring in 45. Just keep changing the times. And over time, and you'll see, hey, now it hurts, now it doesn't. So imagine stress. People who are stressed think they're distressed, they're stressed all the time. Again, nobody is anything all the time. So if I did this, Andrew, you're stressed all the time. And I'm calling you to see how stressed you are. Is it better or worse? I'm Alaska. And then in your trying to understand when are you stressed? You say, You're stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Ha, then it's easy. Don't talk to me. Or find a different way of talking to me. You know, if it only hurts when I do this, then don't do this. Or do this slowly. And so on. ⁓ so the feeling of having some control over the illness goes its own long way ⁓ to improving matters. and ⁓ by isolating, you know, what is actually going on. ⁓ takes care of most of the rest.
speaker-1: And at the beginning, before we even jumped on the Zoom, Ellen, we were talking about, you know, we all showed up early. Yeah. And that's because we wanna have we enjoy being on time because we're not stressed. What about people that are always late? Are they addicted to stress?
speaker-2: Okay, so no, no, I don't think so. Okay. So ⁓ I'm married to I'm an anticrastinator. I do everything early. I'm married to a procrastinator. Now remember that I have this higher order belief and have written about this for I just wrote another book about it. ⁓ behavior makes sense for the person who's doing it or else they wouldn't do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm gonna be an idiot, clumsy. You know, whatever. So why are they behaving as they are? Excuse me. And it turns out that each and every negative description has an equally strong but oppositely valenced alternative. Said simply, for every good, there's a bad. For every bad, there's a good. So I may get on your nerves because I'm so impulsive, which I am, but that's because my intention is to be spontaneous. You also may not like me because I'm so gullible, which I am. Now, you know, why am I gullible? There has to be some good reason. Turns out that's because I'm trusting. Now, so if you try to get me to stop being gullible or impulsive, ⁓ no matter how much I dislike being gullible and impulsive, it's always gonna fail. Because that's not why I'm doing what I'm doing. So now you want me to be less gullible. The only thing to do. Once we recognize gullible as the, you know, negative side of trusting, is to make me value trusting less, which I'm not gonna do. Because I enjoy being trusting, even if it leaves me to be taken advantage of by people. All right. And, you know, so, and that's for every behavior. No matter, you know, so if you looked in your relationship and you say, ⁓ why does he or she always do this thing that gets you crazy? ⁓ there's a positive reason and then relationships improve. So, okay, so in this relationship, I'm a procrastinator. My spouse is an I mean I'm an anti procrastinator, always early. My spouse is always late. So I try to watch over time because, you know, I I have to walk the walk, right? If I try to teach everybody these things. And then I saw, you know, there I am never not going to be able to get a ticket for an event because I do it so early. They're not selling out their seats on the plane, everything.
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-2: But it's also the case that I'm usually not getting the very best price. If I were a procrastinator, I would get the pro and that some of these events are canceled. Well, if you didn't get the ticket in the first place, you don't have to be bothered with the whole thing. You know, but to have gotten okay. So, you know, you you pay enough attention and you can see even this thing that would drive you crazy makes sense. Now, what I find about procrastinators.
speaker-1: Uh-huh, because it's Yeah.
speaker-2: Is that they don't take responsibility for as much as they should for what they do. Most people, when we're talking about people over 40, probably a lot earlier than that. I mean, I have a friend who is ⁓ just turned eighty-four. And her whole life she's late. And, you know, ⁓ even somebody who is cognitively deficient can figure out how to get there on time if you wanted to, right? You just Or you you know, okay. but it's so what happens for her is that she gets so engaged in what she's doing, she doesn't want to leave. Now that's a good thing. And all she needs to do rather than bemoan the fact that she always shows up late is to say, I don't know when I'll get there. Rather, you know, and then you're not late. You know. and ⁓ to appreciate, you know, what they're doing.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah.
speaker-2: ⁓ it another story about the same friend where, so I'm not, you know, a bird. Well, I like birds, but it's you know, not my pastime. And ⁓ I there was this special bird, a birding event across the street from where I used to live. So I called her because I knew this is her thing. ⁓ do you want to go to this? And she said she can't because she had to complete, she was doing this thing, her husband was ill, and it was a grand to help pay for some of the bills. And but I knew she was gonna go. So what did she do? She got herself crazed, then called me up and said, she can't do the grant. So she might as well go to the. And I said to her afterwards, I said, all you needed to do was give yourself permission. And it's not the same thing. It's not like in both cases you went on the bird event. But afterwards, now, if you did it the way I'm suggesting, own it.
speaker-1: And you know it.
speaker-2: It'd be easy to sit down and start working on the grant. But for her, she had to persuade herself she couldn't do it. So now she has to per you know, re-persuade herself that maybe she can and it, you know. And so, ⁓ if we said that whatever we're doing, we're doing because it buys us something and own that, ⁓ then we don't have to make excuses for why we're doing it. ⁓ you know, ⁓ yeah, I mean it. People are mindlessly live in the world of good and bad things and they don't realize that that's all a function of the way they understand things. And you kill yourself to get the good things. You run as fast as you w can from the b and when you realize they're not good, they're not bad, you can just be still. ⁓ It makes life, you know, ⁓ very so Exact. So how many people do you know who suffer with regrets?
speaker-1: Interesting. It makes it interesting. Because it's putting it in one camp or the other.
speaker-2: Regrets are mindless. The first thing is that the mindless belief that if you had chosen an other alternative, the outcome would have been better. Could have been worse, could have been the same, right? But more than that, that the outcome is nothing until you understand it in ⁓ in some way. Now ⁓ I wrote about this in the mindful body because I know that when I Go on and talk about some of these things. It's very easy to say, what does she know in her ivory tower? And there's some truth to that. But so then I break down, let me tell you all the expertise. Because there have been you you can't get to my age, you know, without you know, the divorces and the surgeries and the death of pay people and so on. I went out to dinner. It was ⁓ around Christmas to a friend's house. And I got back and the ⁓ all of my neighbors were outside because my house had gone up in smoke. And ⁓ so that was very scary. So then I stay at a friend's house and I called the insurance agent the next day. And this is not bragging, I'm just describing. It sounds like bragging, maybe it is, I don't know. And ⁓ when he comes to see the damage, he said in the 25 years he's been at the job, this is the first time that the damage was worse than the call. It's usually the ⁓ my god, ⁓ my god, and it's not so terrible. Here, you know, here's what happened. And it was, ⁓ my god, it was terrible. But you see, to me, I had already lost everything. Yeah. Getting myself crazy wasn't gonna buy me anything. All right. So that's the beginning of the story. Now I have to live in a hotel because I don't have my house, right? And I'm a sight to be seen with my two little dogs. So everybody there knows me. And I go out on Christmas Eve. with friends, I come back to the hotel room and it's full of gifts. Not from the owners of the hotel, from the so-called little people, the people who parked my car, the waiters and waitresses, the chambermaids. I'm telling you, Hillary, I could not tell this story for months and months without crying. It was so special. And now every Christmas, every single Christmas, and this happened, I don't know, at least fifteen years ago,
speaker-1: Mm.
speaker-2: That every Christmas I'm reminded of the basic goodness of people and it brings joy. And, you know, so, and I don't remember anything except one thing that I lost in that fire. And I'm not telling people they should have fires. What I'm saying is that even in situations that seem more tragic than just inconvenient, ⁓ there, you know, there's a way of appreciating it so ⁓ you don't suffer less than you might otherwise.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. You said your emotional you're no your emotional state of being is a choice.
speaker-2: That's right. That's right. You can see it as something crazy making, or you can see it as okay. ⁓ or you can even see it as an advantage. And that's the that's the piece that people should practice because it's so freeing, you know, that you break your favorite cup. All right, well, it's just a cup, first of all. So that's an inconvenience, not a but then also now you get to buy a new favorite cup. Sure. Because all these years you were stuck with that, you know. Hey, it's a bad example.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-2: But anyway.
speaker-0: Would you call it would you say that mindfulness is also can you could say it's it's attention, it's your awareness that moment by moment?
speaker-2: Well it's not just it's not just awareness. You have to do something with that ⁓ which you become aware. So you're not just, you know, so let's say I used to do this with an attention deficit disorder. And I would say to people, can you do it with me? ⁓ I want you to concentrate on your finger. Don't put your fingers up. Concentrate on your finger. And what you're gonna find is your finger moves around. Right, it doesn't stay still. Now, if you were to mindfully attend to your finger, so at least with my finger, too, that's a shot little finger. And ⁓ my goodness, look at that cute gone. What is that little mark? Okay. And so as you notice, you're able to stay attentive. First, it's just there's that finger. You're mistakenly taught when you want to concentrate and focus on something, you should hold the image still, as if you're looking at it through a camera. when in fact the more natural thing is for it to vary. So you way to stay attention attentive is actively noticing new things about it. Yeah if if you do this, you know, ⁓ the more you notice oddly, the more you like the thing you're noticing. So we had people, women who hate football, we had people who hated classical music, a lot of haters, people who hated Roth music,
speaker-1: Interesting.
speaker-2: And several conditions. The first just do or see whatever it is. The second, notice one new thing about it. The next notice three new things. The next notice six new things. And it turned out that the more you notice, the more you like the thing you notice. Interesting. And it doesn't matter, let's say for the women watching football, you know, they could be noticing the rear ends of the football players. You know, the process of noticing brings whatever you're noticing closer to you.
speaker-1: Yeah, it's kind of like taking off the the projection from your past onto that item. Like you're opening up your awareness right now of your possibilities. And that's why you like
speaker-2: Yeah, to see it as an issue. Yeah, that's so good, Hillary, because people don't realize that what you saw when you were twenty and froze is no longer what you're gonna see now that you're forty, fifty, sixty, you know, what have you. And ⁓ yeah. And that
speaker-1: Yeah. That that probably keeps you young too, right? Because you're just you're you're in a state of letting go of all those habits and you're creating new possibilities for a new future.
speaker-2: future. Yeah, I think so. I mean, there there are lots of ways that ⁓ mindfulness keeps you young, ⁓ younger. ⁓ part of it is that you're less likely to buy into all the negative stereotypes of getting old. And some of these, you know, there are involved explanations, but some are just so right in your face. So if you're 20 years old and you hurt your wrist, your wrist isn't supposed to hurt at 20. So you do something about it. At my age, if I bought into these myths or or you know stereotypes, if I hurt my wrist, I could easily say, What do you expect? You're you're old. So of course your body is, you know, and then you don't do anything to make it okay. You know, one of the things that people of my age worry enormously about is getting dementia. And ⁓ so when I'm teaching, ⁓ I teach a health class at Harvard. And so these students were in 1920, 21, however old they are. And ⁓ first of all, there's data that a student I had in the past, Becca Levy had, ⁓ came ⁓ found that what you believe, if you stop thinking about it, so the 20 year old beliefs about aging will determine their own aging. But so in teaching them about before I go on about some of the data on forgetting, I start the class, I teach the class on Tuesday and Thursday. So ⁓ let's say this is Thursday, we're gonna do a lecture on aging. And I asked them, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday? Nobody knows. I said, ⁓ you're becoming demented. You know, so everybody, you know, forgets. And it's just that when you start worrying about the forgetting, ⁓ things get worse. And and it may, you know, then I find ⁓ sometimes I can't come up with people's first names, but who cares? You know, ⁓ that it's not nearly as incapacitating as many people fear. Which is not to say getting dementia wouldn't be incapacitating, but ⁓ most of us are not gonna end up with dementia.
speaker-0: Right. Wow. This has been amazing. Thank you, Dr. Ellen Langer. We so appreciate you being here. I wanna know if people wanna learn more about you, w where should they go? What do you what would you like to promote and talk about and tell them about?
speaker-2: Well, I think probably they should take a look at, excuse me, my last book, ⁓ The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. I started writing that book as a memoir and then made it into ⁓ a book where it has all of its research and everything as well. So there are lots of sexy stories. ⁓ my adventure with Hell's Angels and being married when I was a teenager and you know, all sorts of things like so it's a fun read, but it also goes over on all of his many years of research. And
speaker-0: Great book. I I read it last year and I I loved it. I love the details that you went in on the experiments and all the stories. It's a great read.
speaker-2: Thank you so much. ⁓ and then that might motivate you to take a look at some of my other books. ⁓ I have a website. I don't know, do people use websites anymore? I mean, if you just Google Ellen Langer, too much information comes up. I'm not hard to find, so they shouldn't have it difficulty.
speaker-1: But Well, I wanna say thank you for being a pioneer in this genre and it's making a big impact in a lot of people's lives. And I'm really proud of you as far as a woman bringing all of this forward and staying on the path. And ⁓ there's being research done on it now, and I think we're we're gonna change healthcare with all of this information. So thank you for your hard work.
speaker-2: Thank you and thank you for the kind words. This was great fun. Stay well.
speaker-1: Wow, Andrew, that was so good. She's she just has so much information to share.
speaker-0: I would love to download everything that's inside of her head and I think the best way to do that is to read her book, I guess.
speaker-1: I guess so. ⁓ my gosh. I mean how many she's got a lot of books out. I can't wait to order one after today I'm gonna order one.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. And I love, I mean, it's so simple the way she started off where what is one plus one? That it's not always two. You don't have two clouds and two piles of laundry. That's so great.
speaker-1: It is, it's so fun and and ⁓ being in that uncertainty space or just not putting it's good, it's bad, it's right, it's wrong, there's freedom in that. You know, there's so much freedom in not knowing the perfect answer, that rigidity of it all, you know.
speaker-0: Yep. And yet we you know, science and and and ⁓ medicine likes to and needs to kind of have that rigidity. And I thought that was such a great example where she talks about, you know, intelligence. And if you're a sixty-nine or a seventies, there there's a line there and there's a label there. But yeah, those are the norms, those are the whatever, the standards, but we're all individuals.
speaker-1: I know and just think about the people that are identified at the sixty-nine percentile that are not considered intelligent, they can believe that for the rest of their lives and never know that they can be successful in something other than that particular test, you know?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. I loved when she talked about the borderline study ⁓ about numbers and that those numbers really hide a lot of ambiguity. And it's just so important for us to be aware that these are there's so many more possibilities when you peel away the label and you don't just stick with this kind of closed, narrow view of of belief, but actually open up to possibility. That's why I loved calling her like the mother of possibility. I think she is. She believes in those potentials. Of of what can happen.
speaker-1: Yeah, and there's so much freedom in possibility, right? You're not tied to one thing, which allows for big changes to happen in your life. And that's what Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches us. And I love how she talked about time. Isn't time so interesting and how many studies that she did on time alone?
speaker-0: Yeah. No, it it makes me think of the the research that ⁓ UC San Diego did with the breast milk and the healing, the healing of the wound from the plasma and the meditation. You know, that that's essentially Dr. Hamel made a wound and then it healed. But why did it heal faster? Well, because of the information that was in the plasma that was applied to it. But the speed at which something heals has to do with the perception of time. That's Crazy. It's it's so the speed at which something heals, there there's no set time. But if the doctor says it's gonna take four to six weeks, then you go, Well, it's gonna take four to six weeks 'cause that we what you were told. But what if the doctor said, ⁓ it's only gonna take you ten days, you should be fully healed in ten days? Yeah, those words are powerful. Yeah, exactly.
speaker-1: And then also with the study with time and diabetes and the blood sugar levels. If if you sh you know, if they think the time is a normal time, but it's sped up, then their blood sugar levels are different. I and I you just talked about the breast milk study and how much of that meditation in seven days do those ⁓ breastfeeding mothers are in no time. Do you heal quicker because you're in no time, you're not stressed about time, you're not in that contractive.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: State of being and survival, you know.
speaker-0: Yeah, that the perception of time, the perception really of everything is what Dr. Alan Langer talks about, is like your perception. So what can we change? And that's what Dr. Joe talks about too, is is change those beliefs that you want to change. Yeah. Figure out which ones that got laid there as a child that you never let go of. Yeah.
speaker-2: What
speaker-1: And I loved how she had us do that finger experiment when she had us looking at our finger and then actually looking at different parts of our finger and really observing it and being the observer effect of that changed our perception of what we were looking at. And when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And noticing what's different, noticing something. So it's not just looking at our finger. Now we're noticing things. We're noticing differences. ⁓ I thought the ⁓ the attention to variability, the symptom variability that you talked about. Yeah. Now that's crazy that it improves across all these different diseases, all these different tests that they did by just placing your awareness on it. And then the pain levels go down because you you choose to look at something a little bit differently. That's incredible.
speaker-1: Yeah, I liked how she talked about the football game and cooking and pain and how if you know if you don't like watching football, but then you focus on different things that you open your awareness to things that I might be interested in, you begin to take that stigma off that you don't like football, that okay, I actually can focus on things that I do like.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. I like that she thought that I might be a football player and that you'd be hurt
speaker-2: I thought I like
speaker-1: I I thought it was funny that she thought I was a cook.
speaker-0: But you do love to host parties, so I do that. Yeah. The other thing I loved that she said was ⁓ that we should be more like the three year old asking who said so. Like who who says who made up these rules anyway? And does it really have to apply to me?
speaker-1: Don't cook. Yeah. Yeah. And I really like when she talked about events don't cause stress. What causes the stress is you're predicting what that event is gonna h what's gonna happen with that event. And that's that's what causes the stress about the event. It's it's your predictability and your belief behind it.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. The event just is. It just the temperature is what the temperature is. This thing happened. Is it a big, huge, massive thing like a big tragedy, or is it an inconvenience? Then immediately slap it with judgment. But that judgment is a program and that's mindlessness.
speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ my gosh. That helped me out so much. Is it a tragedy or is it an inconvenience? Because inconvenience is like meh, whatever. A tragedy. And we're putting that attention and intention on that and making that real. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Back up a second. ⁓ it was such a great conversation. And you know, Inner Science funds a lot of research and we give grants. And I really hope that she applies for a grant with us because I know our community would love to support anything that she has to study.
speaker-0: That would be amazing. For those of you who don't know Inner Science, we are a nonprofit organization and we fund research, groundbreaking research on the science of meditation and transformation.
speaker-1: And as you just witnessed, we explore human transformation, consciousness, and the science of meditation in order to empower people to heal and thrive. We're a mission-driven community shifting paradigm of healthcare together. And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone you love or care about.
speaker-0: You could subscribe wherever you get your podcast. That would be really helpful to us. We'd also love it if you'd check out inner sciencesearch.org. That's our website. Of course, if you want to learn more about Ellen Langer, you can go to her website, ellenlanger.com or ellenlanger.me, and definitely check out her book. It's amazing, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health.
speaker-1: And if you'd like, please join us at a future Dr. Joe event. We're all over the world together. And also check out his website at drjoedespensa.com.
speaker-0: Thanks so much for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you in the field.