How to Rewire Your Mind and Heal Stress from the Inside Out with Dr. Ellen Langer

Summary

Podcast Summary: The School of Greatness

Episode: How to Rewire Your Mind and Heal Stress from the Inside Out
Host: Lewis Howes
Guest: Dr. Ellen Langer
Air Date: November 14, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

Lewis Howes interviews Dr. Ellen Langer, renowned Harvard psychologist, widely regarded as the "mother of mindfulness" and a pioneer in positive psychology. The episode centers on the transformative power of the mind-body connection, discussing how our thoughts, perceptions, and levels of mindful awareness can directly influence physical health, aging, stress, and well-being. Dr. Langer shares decades of research and practical advice to help listeners shift from a mindset of limitation and certainty to one of curiosity and potential.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. The Myth of Mind-Body Separation

[02:53]

• Dr. Langer debunks the outdated belief that mind and body are separate:

  "There's no reason to have a mind and body as separate. ... If you have a mind and body and they're one thing, wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body."

• Everyday experiences, like feeling nauseous at the sight of someone vomiting or being startled by a leaf, reveal how thoughts and perceptions instantly impact the body.

2. The Counterclockwise Study: Turning Back Biological Age

[06:39–09:33]

• Dr. Langer recounts her famous study where elderly men lived for a week as their younger selves in a retrofitted environment from their youth.
• Results: Significant improvements in vision, hearing, memory, strength, and youthful appearance, all without medical intervention.

  "Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger." ([08:25])

3. Changing the Narrative on Aging and Health

[10:09–17:53]

• The medical model increasingly recognizes psychological factors in health, but Langer argues psychology is even more vital than currently acknowledged.

• She distinguishes between mindfulness and meditation:

  "Mindfulness as I study it has nothing to do with meditation. ... It's a way of being. You actively notice new things about the things you thought you knew." ([10:11])

• Embracing uncertainty and a "beginner's mind" allows people to live longer, healthier, and more fulfilled lives.

4. The Power and Pitfall of Certainty

[12:53–14:11]

• Dr. Langer illustrates the dangers of certainty with the example that even simple math, like "one plus one," is context-dependent.
• Noticing variabilities and shifting perspective prevents the stagnation of mindless repetition.

5. Reinterpreting Stress, Worry, and Life Events

[20:25–32:33]

• Root cause of illness:

  "Mindlessness. I would say virtually all—probably even mean all—of our problems are the direct or indirect consequence of mindlessness." ([20:28])

• Stress results from two flawed assumptions:

  1. Something bad will happen;
  2. If it happens, it will be terrible.

• Most worries are about inconveniences, not true tragedies.

• Action is the antidote to worry—either addressing the issue or letting go.

6. Mindfulness as Noticing Change

[23:38–26:06]

• Mindlessness is "responding to the world based on these absolutes where you think you know, you're like an automaton."
• She urges using mindful awareness to adapt to change (e.g., braking techniques for new car technologies).

7. Healing the Body from the Inside Out

[35:39–41:28]

• Physical changes are possible through changing perception (The Chambermaid Study: reframing cleaning as exercise led to weight loss and improved health metrics).

• New research: The perceived passage of time affects wound healing.

  "Does that bruise heal based on perceived time ... or real time? And it turns out it's perceived time." ([37:49])

• Placebo effect as strong medicine — it's not "fake" if your belief and expectation directly change physiology.

8. Turning the Tables on Chronic Illness

[54:21–55:57]

• Weight loss and chronic illness are directly connected to mindfulness; being attentive to reasons for behaviors, not just outcomes, supports change.

9. The Importance of Language, Labels, and Identity

[66:57–69:16]

• Language shapes experience and identity. Saying "I have a cold" vs. "I'm experiencing a cold" has profound psychological implications.
• Chronic illness is only "chronic" because medical science can't fix it—doesn't mean you can't help yourself.

10. Life Lessons & Tools for Mindful Living

[76:50–94:29]

• Teach children—and ourselves—an "appreciation of uncertainty."
• Focus on enjoying and engaging fully in the present moment, rather than chasing achievement or avoiding risk.
• Every aspect of life offers the opportunity for mindful engagement—make even mundane tasks (like flossing) interesting.
• Let go of trying to make the "right" decision; instead, make the decision right by embracing and learning from outcomes.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps and Attribution)

• On Mind-Body Unity:

  "If you have a mind and body and they're one thing, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([02:53])

• On the Power of Perception:

  "I was thinking myself ill."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([05:12]) (referring to her experience with 'pancreas' in Paris)

• On the Counterclockwise Study:

  "So they lived as their younger selves for a week, without any medical intervention... and they looked noticeably younger."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([08:25])

• On Uncertainty:

  "Uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. ... Then you tune in."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([11:44])

• On Mindlessness:

  "Virtually all—probably even mean all—of our problems are the direct or indirect consequence of mindlessness."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([20:28])

• On Stress:

  "Stress is the major source of our illness. ... Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([27:02])

• On Mindful Change:

  "Attention to variability... is just a fancy way of saying being mindful, noticing change."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([41:28])

• On Identity and Growth:

  "The way we define ourselves will determine the life we're going to live."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([69:22])

• On Making Decisions:

  "Don’t try to make the right decision. Make the decision right."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([81:23])

• Three Truths for a Better Life:

  "One is to recognize that behavior makes sense or else people wouldn’t do it. ... The second is that people have to appreciate, enjoy, exploit the power of uncertainty. ... I use in teaching at the end of my classes—it’s called GLADO: Generous, Loving, Authentic, Direct, and Open."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([91:55])

• On Greatness:

  "Being awake, being present, being there ... Not knowing is exciting rather than scary."
  — Dr. Ellen Langer ([93:52])

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Important Timestamps

• [02:53] — Mind-body unity and perception
• [06:39] — Start of Counterclockwise study story
• [08:25] — Results from retreat study
• [14:11] — Thinking our way to chronic health
• [20:28] — Link between mindlessness & illness
• [27:02] — Stress as psychological, not situational
• [35:39] — The Chambermaid study: Mindset & physical change
• [37:49] — New research on wound healing and time perception
• [41:28] — Noticing variability and the placebo explanation
• [54:21] — Mindful weight management
• [66:57] — Importance of language and self-identity
• [76:50] — Teaching children appreciation of uncertainty
• [81:23] — Decision-making reframe
• [91:55] — Dr. Langer’s “Three Truths” for life
• [93:52] — Dr. Langer's definition of greatness

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Memorable Moments

• Dr. Langer's story of thinking herself sick in Paris after believing she was eating pancreas ([05:12]).
• The transformation witnessed in elderly men after the Counterclockwise retreat, including physical rejuvenation and self-reliance ([08:25]).
• The chambermaids’ health improving purely from shifting their mindset about exercise ([35:39]).
• Discovering that a wound can heal faster based on the clock people watch, highlighting the malleability of bodily processes ([37:49]).
• Dr. Langer’s story of losing her home in a fire and focusing on the benefits and new relationships it created ([31:31–33:33]).
• Her remarks on how not everything labeled as “bad” really is, and how every life event can be reinterpreted in empowering ways ([88:15–89:35]).

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Practical Takeaways

• Adopt Uncertainty: View not knowing as a source of excitement and creativity, not threat.
• Notice Change: Attend to the variability in your experiences—see where you feel better, worse, and why.
• Reframe the Past: Don't repress negative memories—reinterpret them, and look for alternative meanings.
• Mindfulness as Engagement: Engage deeply and curiously with whatever you do; joy comes from presence, not outcome.
• Role of Language: Be mindful of how you label your experiences. Avoid identifying with illness or limitation.
• Empower Decision-Making: Focus on learning from each outcome rather than ruminating over “perfect” choices.
• Integrate Work & Play: Blur the line between work and play for a more fulfilling existence.

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Conclusion

Dr. Langer offers a research-backed paradigm shift: our minds are not only connected to our bodies—they are inseparable, and our mindset can catalyze tangible, profound changes in health, stress, aging, and happiness. Her advice: Embrace uncertainty, notice more, rethink your labels, and approach life as a series of fresh, exciting opportunities to engage with the world and yourself.

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For Further Insight:
Check out Dr. Langer's latest book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, and follow her GLADO recipe for happiness: Generous, Loving, Authentic, Direct, and Open ([92:56]).

Transcript

[Lewis Howes]

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[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Thank you.

[Lewis Howes]

Your bio is really impressive. You are a pioneer in the world of psychology and you made history as the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. You've got three different awards, science scientific awards around your studies and 13 different books. And you've got so much information backed by research and science talking about how to heal our bodies, how to heal our minds, how to reverse our aging. All these different things that I'm fascinated to go into because I think a lot of people don't believe that you can change your body and the pain within your body with your mind and your thoughts. And you are talking about specifically in this book that you can. And I'm curious if someone is saying this is just a bunch of crap. You know, I don't believe any of this. I only believe that, you know, I have to take a pill or medicate myself to heal my body. What would you say to that?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I'd say I feel sorry for you because you're missing out on a great opportunity to take care of yourself. It's interesting that we have a notion of mind and body as separate, and that's ruled for so long. That's why people think the only way you can heal yourself is by taking some medication. There's no reason to have a mind and body as separate. They're just words. And lots of this book is based on the idea of putting them back together, even just for useful purposes. All right? And if you have a mind and body and they're one thing, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And so now I have decades worth of research showing that we can put the mind in very unusual places, take the measurements from the body, and indeed the effects are clear. Wow. I think that for this person, the non believer, you might ask them if they've ever seen this, maybe a of color or whatever, somebody regurgitating on the side of the road, and how did they end up feeling? Because many people need to vomit just by watching somebody else. Nothing is happening to them. Maybe a less colorful example, better is you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face. You're startled by it, just a leaf, but you can feel the changes in your body. You know, my first experience with this mind body unity was many, many years ago. So I was married when I was very young and we went to Paris on a honeymoon. And I was now 18, 19, going on 30, so had to be very sophisticated. And we're in this restaurant and on the menu was this mixed grill that I ordered, and on the plate came pancreas. So I said to my then husband, which of these is the pancreas? He points, that one. So I meet everything else, and now comes the moment of truth. I have to eat it because after all, I'm married.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I don't know how that followed, but it seemed to at the time. So I start eating and I'm literally getting sick. He starts laughing. I say, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas a long time ago.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, man.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

All right. So I was thinking myself ill.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And all of the research supports that. You know, it's interesting again, I thought of this just the other day. I might have it in the book and have forgotten it, but I was in Missouri several decades ago and a friend dragged me to an iridologist and, you know, I'm up for anything. I Mean, I'll go to, you know, I went to see this iridologist who looked in my eyes and she says I have problems with my gallbladder. Okay, fine.

[Lewis Howes]

Just by looking in your eyes.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Okay. So the game is over. And then eventually I go to the doctor and lo and behold, I. I had a gallstone. Really? Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Now, do you think you thought that to occur or did you actually.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

No, no, no, that's a good question. I'm going to go there. I don't know how it happened here. The point for me was by looking in my eye, she knew there was something in other parts of my body that were not right. And you know, what people don't realize is that every thought, if I lift my arm, my whole body is different. Different in tiny ways that we haven't been able to measure. But it's all connected, which in some sense lends more credence to this whole idea of mind body unity. And the first study we did was a study where we took old men to a retreat that we had retrofitted to 20 years earlier.

[Lewis Howes]

Right. What was this called again, though?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

We called it the counterclockwise study.

[Lewis Howes]

Yes.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

So they were going to live for a week as if they were their younger selves and they were in their.

[Lewis Howes]

Late 70s, 80s, ye, even older 80s.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Now remember, that was quite a while ago.

[Lewis Howes]

Okay.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

You know, that was when seven day was the. In the new 90 or even 100 or whatever. I mean, they were really old. Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

In like walker.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

They get younger as I get older, but as I recall.

[Lewis Howes]

So they're in walkers, they're in canes, they're immobile, they're very slow.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, actually, you know that when I was interviewing people to do the study, so their adult daughter would typically go and bring them to the lab and I see them tottering down the hall and at one point I said to myself, why am I doing this? I don't know if they're going to live through the day, no less be able to live for the week. I took on something that only the younger of me would have considered taking on. I was in charge of their entire lives, these several, you know, seven men, old men, every aspect of their lives for a week at any rate. You could, you know, you looked at them and didn't matter what number you attached to them, they were old. Now they were going to live for a week as if they're their younger selves. So they'll be talking about current events, things from the past, as if they're just unfolding and Other things as well.

[Lewis Howes]

Like they would have newspapers from everything 30 years prior to.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And they were making their own meals, and they would correct each other. So if you would say was, somebody would tell you is because the past was now the present for them.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow. And they were listening to older music and watching older movies and everything.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I could spend the whole time with you just talking about that study. So you want me to give more details? Just tell me. But let me tell you the results. Those were amazing. So they lived as their younger selves for a week without any medical intervention. Their vision improved their hearing, improved their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger. And I must tell you that almost from the beginning, the changes were palpable. Most people accepted the findings. There were a couple of people said, you can't make people younger. I'm not saying that chronologically we're changing your age, but it is the case that we associate certain ways of being with certain times in our lives and that these men had. Were living their lives now very dependent on their adult daughter, presuming that they can't do many of the things that they used to do. And they were wrong. And so that set the stage for a host of studies, most of which, well, all of them actually, to date, are in the mindful body.

[Lewis Howes]

That's fascinating. What would you say are. You know that study was a while ago, right?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. Now, that was. Let's see. We designed it in 1979.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. Long time before you were born.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. Wow. So what would you say in the last 44 years? I guess what is the new.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Has the world changed?

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah, I mean. Or what are the. What are the. What are the new studies or research that you've done to show how to either reverse aging or to, I guess, create longer aging in the biological sense?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Remember, it's all one.

[Lewis Howes]

Okay.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Mind and body. So we don't have a psychological, as opposed interesting, biological.

[Lewis Howes]

So it's both. It's the mind and the body.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

But I thought you were asking me, so I'm going to answer the question. I thought you were going to go ahead. Not the one that you did. All right. Which was how has the world changed? Is that a lot of years? And way back at the beginning, the medical model believed that psychology was more or less irrelevant. All right. Now, I'm sure everybody thought it was nice to be happy, but that wasn't going to affect your physical health. Now that's changed. And now what most people believe is a biosocial model. So these things like stress and so on matter, but they don't go nearly as far. And I'm saying down the road, psychology will be the most important aspect of your well being. So that's a change that's come about slowly now for me personally. Once we had those data, I did several studies where we simply make elderly people. Every time I say the word elderly, I stopped that being older myself. But we make seniors more mindful and they live longer. So it's important for you to know that mindfulness as I study, it has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is fine, it's just different. Okay? When you meditate, you take yourself out of the world and you say your mantra to yourself over and over. Mindfulness, as I study, it couldn't be more in the world. That what you're doing is not a practice, it's a way of being. You actively notice new things about the things you thought you knew. You come to see you didn't know them at all. And then your mind naturally goes to them. Now, if we start off with the realization that everything is changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, the idea of being certain of anything becomes silly because you can't know it's not what it was the last time you looked. And if you could adopt just one mindset, it's the only one I believe is good for you. That uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. Then you don't, you don't know. So then you tune in. The problem is our parents, our schools, the media, virtually everything is trying to teach us absolutes. And when you think you know something, you don't pay any attention. So I'll do what I do probably too frequently. Now, let me ask you a simple question. This is the one that everybody knows. How much is one plus one? Two. Okay. And that's what everybody says.

[Lewis Howes]

I feel like this is a tricked question.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, it is though, because one plus one isn't always two. That if you are adding one watt of chewing gum plus one watt of chewing gum, one plus one is one. If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You had one cloud plus one cloud. One plus one is one. In the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal two as or more often as it does. So now look at the difference. Somebody. It's unlikely, but after we finish, somebody comes over to you and says, how much is one plus one? You're not going to mindlessly say two. You're going to pay some attention to the context and then you're going to answer more Mindfully and say it could be. And then you're going to say, it could be one, it could be two.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting. It's all context.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Exactly. Exactly. Everything changes. And our minds tend to hold things still. We think we know. We want to know because we think that gives us control. But since things are changing, you don't want your mind to hold it still while in fact it's changing, because then you're giving up control that you otherwise would have.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow, this is fascinating stuff. Now, I'm curious about chronic health. Thinking our way to chronic health. This is the subtitle of your book, the Mindful Body. You say we can think our way to chronic health.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah, well, you know the reason I want to use the term chronic, Just because it's a little startling, because we only think of chronic illness, people tend to assume that as you get older, you're going to fall apart, you're going to get sick. And sickness and aging are not the same thing. One can live their entire life without illness. And the way to live one's life is essentially the same when you're 10 years old or when you're 80 years old just by knowing you don't know. And tuning in. Now, people don't like not knowing because they think you can know. And what I'm here to tell everybody is you can't know. So what you need to do to. To live the kind of life that I'm suggesting is be confident and uncertain. All right? If you think you should know, then you pretend, but you can't know. Now, that makes everything possible. Now, I was at this horse event many years ago. After this, I'm going to use only news stories. And this man asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to get his horse up a hot dog. Well, as you might know from the credentials you read, I was an A plus student. So I knew as well as anyone in this world as ridiculous horses are herbivorous. They don't eat meat. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And at that moment, I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Now, for me, that was actually exciting because that meant that. That everything was possible. All of those things that we were taught are impossible not to strive for actually became available in a whole different way. The next step in the reasoning for me was to say that recognize that experiments, science, science give us our facts mostly right, but that science only gives us probabilities. There's no experiment that gives you anything absolute. So it's Sort of. Most horses under the conditions that were tested didn't eat the meat, which is very different from all horses. Never eat meat.

[Lewis Howes]

Right.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And it's very important for one's health because you have to realize that any information you're given is a best guess. Now, it's an educated guess, but it's still not an absolute.

[Lewis Howes]

This is fascinating because what I heard you say a moment ago is that if you want to live till you're 80 or 90 or 100 without illness or disease, think like a 10 year old is kind of what I heard you say.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, what I'm saying is the way of thinking should be no different, which is life is exciting when you address it as brand new. When you're not afraid of trying new things, when you recognize that all of the stops you've put on yourself were just decisions that some other people made. And there's no reason not to do whatever it is you want to do. You know, you don't want to hurt anybody. You know, for people to say you're too old to play tennis or you're too old to. I don't know what are people to. I don't pay any attention to it. So I can't generate the essences. But, you know, one of the earlier titles of the book was who says so? And I think that that's a refrain that people should. And that's where they're similar. Not to 10 year olds, but I think 2 or 3 year olds. Who says so?

[Lewis Howes]

So it's almost always like having a beginner's mindset.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Dad, what is the thing that you've learned in the last few years that maybe you thought you knew that completely rocked your world?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

People have asked me that. It, you know, I don't know if it's my being dense or what it is that it's hard for me to answer. I know there was something that I came to many years ago that I think was far more important to me than most people who read about what I say in this regard. But it's still, let me share that with you, which is the simple idea that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else the actor wouldn't do it. Now, what that means is when you see me, let's say, as gullible. I'm not intending to be gullible. What is it I'm intending? Well, I'm trusting when I see you as inconsistent. You don't intend to be inconsistent. What you're being is flexible. And turns out for every single Negative description. There's an equally strong but oppositely valence. Every positive, there's a negative. Every negative. Now, what that means is, you know, to make it a little more sensible, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today I'm going to be gullible, obnoxious, sloppy, whatever we call people. So what is it that they're intending? Now, people don't realize that it made sense to them because they often engage in the action mindlessly, so they don't know why they're doing what they're doing. So if you say to me, alan, you are so gullible, which I am, and now I look back at my behavior the way you were looking, my God, I can't believe that. And I said, I'm not going to be gullible anymore. Of course it's going to fail. Because going forward, I'm not being gullible. I'm being trusting. So the point is, if you want to get someone to change, you have to address the behavior from the perspective in which they're engaging in. You want me to stop being gullible, you have to teach me to stop being trusting. And my guess is then you wouldn't want to. So you can see how life would unfold very differently. Because as far as I can see, people are constantly evaluating each other, judging themselves, foregoing pleasures for fear of what somebody else might say and so on.

[Lewis Howes]

What do you think is the root of sickness and illness and disease in your mind?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Mindlessness.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Oh, yes. I think that I would say virtually all. I probably even mean all. But be a little safer. All of our problems are the direct or indirect consequence of mindlessness, whether it's personal, interpersonal, global.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Mindlessness is that responding to the world based on these absolutes where you think, you know, you're like an automaton, you know. And so what happens is when you learn something, then you keep doing it. Okay, so when you first learn it, you can be doing it mindfully, but you know now you know how to do it. You do it the same way over and over again. But the world is changing and very often you come up short. And an example ASD is a lot is and this isn't good for California. And the last time I used it and was going to not use it again was in India where it's also not good. It depends on snow. Okay, put that aside that if you're driving in snow and this car starts to skid and you ask somebody older than you, unless you were taught by that older person. What do you do when you're driving on ice? And most people will say you slowly pump the brake and turn into the skid. That made sense when you first learned it, however, and you keep doing that. But now there are anti lock brakes. And the way you stop a car on ice is you firmly hit the brake. Okay? So what you learn for safety's sake is now unsafe. The point is, once you think, you know, you freeze everything while things are actually changing, so you're not able to avoid the danger that hasn't yet arisen. You can't take advantage of the benefits that are right in front of you because you just don't see it. Most of us are using yesterday's solutions to solve today's problems. Now people are afraid, you know, to, to just let things be because they think there are good things and bad things and I have to jump over, you know, fences or kill people, do whatever I have to do to get those good things and to avoid the bad. But things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. And when you fully recognize that, then you know, if this interview goes well, wonderful. If this interview does, wonderful. It doesn't matter. There'll be other reasons, you know, if it doesn't go well, then that will free up some time in some, in some fashion, I'll have learned something that'll make the other one, the next one, you know, even bigger and what have you. You see what I'm saying? You know, the idea people, by believing there are things that are good and things that are bad, set themselves up for all sorts of stress.

[Lewis Howes]

So when there's things happening in the world in the last four years with terrible, horrible things happening, wars and Covid all these different things, how do you interpret these events? You know, so you don't stress yourself into sickness and disease.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

No, it's a very important question and I don't know that I have the right answer. I would say though, that telling yourself that the world is falling apart, that we're on our way to a dictatorship, whatever things that are going to keep you up at night is not serving any purpose. So do something about it. Whether that means finding places to donate money to do some work, to elect the officials that have the same views as you and so on, but if you're doing nothing but worrying, worrying is a waste of time. You know that. I have a few one liners about worrying. The first one is you should ask yourself, which is not the case here? Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Now you're talking about potential tragedies, but most of the things we worry about are just inconveniences. Inconveniences, right. And most of the things you worry about never happen. And if you reflect on the last time you worried and how you dealt with and you saw it didn't even happen, you'd be more persuaded of that. The way to deal with stress, I think, is stress relies on two things. It relies on an assumption that something is going to happen and that when it happens, it's going to be awful. Well, the first, you can't predict, and this is very hard for people to accept that predictability is an illusion. You can post it, you can look back. You know, let me make this. Use an example. Let's say you're at a party and we see Tom and Susie fighting. And I said to you, are they going to get divorced? You say, how do I know? Right. Sometimes people fight. Well, let's say we don't have that conversation. So you see Tom and Susie fighting. Two weeks later you're told, you know, Tom and Susie are getting a divorce. I knew it. You should have seen the way they went at each other at the party. All right, you can't predict. You can't predict. You can predict for a group that if you were to start 100 Mercedes and you turn the key, most of them will start, not necessarily all of them. And that would be more than if you were in some used car lot. Sure, but you can't predict the individual case. And we're all individuals. And when it comes to our health, we really care more about how the medicine is going to go down for us personally. Now, I believe that stress is the major source of our illness, really. Over and above diet, genetics, even treatment. That's a very big statement. And that stress, though, is psychological, Right? Events don't cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event. So if you open it up and you're more mindful, and if you said to yourself, rather than this thing is going to be awful, give yourself five reasons why it might actually be an advantage. So now it could be awful, could be advantageous, you're immediately somewhat relaxed. But I say go the next step, let's assume it does happen, what are the advantages, the worst case scenario, and what are the advantages? And so then when you say, you know you'll be able to deal with whatever happens, then you're, you're less worried about them and, you know, you don't have to spend so Much time trying to control the outcome. But for the big things that are happening in this world right now, I think that it's a super test of all that I'm saying.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah, yeah. How do you, how do you manage stress, though?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I don't experience that most of the time, really. You know, I was.

[Lewis Howes]

You're a professor at Harvard. You've got books, you've got people that rely on you. You see, you know, people coming to you with their problems. How do you navigate all that?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah, I surely at this age have had real things happen. I had a fire that destroyed 80% of what I owned way back when. You know, my mother died when she was a young woman. I'd been, you know, divorced. And so none of those things sound so big anymore, but nevertheless, in the moment. Yeah, so. And when those things happen, I don't think that my response is, oh, well, you know, I'm of this earth, but it doesn't stay with me. So let's say the. Then I wrote about this in the mindful Body when the house went up in smoke, that I called the insurance adjuster. He came over the next day and he said it was the first time in his 25 years of the job where the call was less bad than the damage. Most people go, oh, my God, oh my God. And he gets there, one little room.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And he had. But, you know, to my mind, it was already gone. What was the point in getting crazy over it? And I immediately felt that what had been burnt were things of my past. So if I were to redo it today, that day, how many of those things would I have bought again or what have you? But it was still a little scary.

[Lewis Howes]

Sure.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

But I might as well tell the whole story now because this turned out to be wonderful. Really? How could it have been wonderful? Tell me. So I go to the Charles Hotel to live now because I don't have a house and I have my two dogs. And so I'm a sight to be seen. Right. You know, marching. Okay. It's Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I go out, I come back and my room is full of gifts. Not from the hotel management, not from the hotel owner, but from the so called little people, the people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitress. It was years that when telling the story, I would cry. Now I've told it so many times and I don't remember except for one thing, anything that I lost in the fire. But every Christmas I'm reminded of what I think is the basic goodness of People.

[Lewis Howes]

So why did they give you all those gifts?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Just to be nice. Because it was Christmas.

[Lewis Howes]

Wow.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. And they knew it had happened.

[Lewis Howes]

And if you would have lived in the home, you wouldn't have had that experience.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

That's true, too. I hadn't realized that. But the funny thing is one thing that I miss, and I set that up for you to say, well, what was that one thing? I was teaching a large course in a few weeks. All of my notes were burnt. What was I going to do? So I called the student from the year before who got an A, and I borrowed her notes. It was like a game of telephone.

[Lewis Howes]

That's great.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And I apologized to the class before telling them that I don't know how this is going to go, following reason. And I think it was the best class that I taught, really, because it was happening right then, that all of the information I was giving them was a new version or a version that I believed. Right at this moment, you present PowerPoints. It's just too easy not to use the same PowerPoint and to, you know, you don't want to think things through.

[Lewis Howes]

You're innovating things, you're. You're adding.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And so I enjoyed it more than any other class I taught.

[Lewis Howes]

This is fascinating. Now you're speaking about kind of lost things from the past. A lot of people hold on to the traumatic memories, and it keeps them stuck in a mindset of resentment, fear, anxiety, frustration, guilt, whatever it might be from these traumatic experiences that either happened to them, that they interpreted or that they were a part of or did to other people. And they hold on to these memories and put a lot of meaning on those memories, and it causes them to feel stuck or gain weight or get sick and have anxiety. How powerful is our thoughts around the past?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, I think that what we need to do. There's data, not mine, that shows trying not to think about something is totally ineffective. It always comes back. But so what you want to do is not try not to think about it, but to think about it differently, interpret it differently, and your feelings will be based on your interpretations. So that for me, the fire was not the scary thing. So I lost some things, so who cares? And then I got all of this attention, this feeling of the goodness of stranger, community, love, support.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And so it's not a scary thing for me. So if we open up our minds and see that no matter what we're experiencing, there are multiple ways of understanding it, there is no one way of looking at it. And that's what we do when we're being mindless. And then it lends itself to again, all sorts of possibilities. And it occurs to me that we only talked about the counterclockwise study. I probably. With your permission, go ahead. Yeah. Sure enough. Because there are many in the book. But to be more persuaded of this mind body unity. Let's see. The next study in that series was chambermaids, which is.

[Lewis Howes]

This is awesome.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah, the chambermaids. I didn't realize this until we did the study. Don't see their work as exercise because the surgeon General says exercise is what you do after work. You sit in a chair all day. That's when you get your exercise. And they're just too tired after work. Study was so simple, as many of these are my studies. We just taught them that their work is exercise. So making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym, sweeping. Now we have two groups. One group that doesn't realize their work is exercise. One group that now sees that their work is exercise. We take many measures. Turns out they're not working any differently with these two different views. They're not eating any differently. All that's changed is their mindset. Now work is exercise. As a result of that change, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure king. Wow. So our thoughts matter. Let's go. I'll go to the very present because there's so many things for us to talk about. I did this study recently with my graduate student Peter Ungle, and it's a study on wound healing. Now, so in order to test the one's mind, the degree to which your mind affects healing of the physical body, we had to inflict a wound. I'm not sadistic. And even if I were, the human subjects committee is not going to let me. So it's a minor wound.

[Lewis Howes]

Sure. But it's a little cut, a little paper cutter.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

No, we used the Chinese cupping.

[Lewis Howes]

Okay.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

So creates it. Okay. And all we have are people in front of a clock.

[Lewis Howes]

It's like a bruise almost. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Like exactly unbeknownst to them. So the clock is going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time or real time. The question we're asking is, does that bruise heal based on perceived time, which is the time the clock tells you, or real time and it turns out it's perceived time.

[Lewis Howes]

Come on.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. And we're doing this now with people who have had hernia operations, cataract surgery. I want to do with broken bones as well, where we tell people right now, you know, the doctor probably tell you, say, how long is it going to take for me to heal?

[Lewis Howes]

Three to six months.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And I think they use the outer limit. I want to tell people, you know, some people have healed as quickly as. And give the quicking healing time and see what happens.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting. So if a doctor who is a credible expert and it's telling you this is going to take three to six.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Months of recovery, you're not going to do anything until 3 or 6 exactly of recovery.

[Lewis Howes]

You're just going to wait until that end time and then start feeling better. So you're saying if, what if a doctor said, you know, it's possible you could heal in two to four weeks and start seeing incredible healing fast. If you do these certain things, do you think the body could connect to our thinking and our belief?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I think it's one. It's one. So we'll necessarily be connected, you know. So in the back of. After I talked about, in the book about all these mind body unity studies, I give a treatment that we've come up with that essentially, you know, But I want to. Let me backtrack a little bit. Most people know about placebos. Placebos may be our strongest medicine. Just think about it. You take a sugar pill, you take a nothing and then get better. So it's not the pill. You're doing it yourself. So my life's work has been to try to find out how to do this more directly. And what I'm just going to tell you is a procedure that seems to work and that could explain placebos and other things as well. But it's the answer to your question. Okay, so if you have three weeks to heal and now you're approaching the second week has passed, what are you doing? And this is what you might be doing. When people are given a diagnosis of a chronic disease, they tend to think that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves in only one direction. There are always little blips, sort of like the stock market. If it's going up, it doesn't go straight up. Goes up, goes down a little up. Okay. Or down to betting up.

[Lewis Howes]

Sure, sure.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And it's the same thing with any measure you're going to take over time. There are fluctuations. Now what happens is there are times you're feeling better, but you're not paying any attention to those times. All right? Because your expectation is it's only going to get worse. What happens if you pay attention? So what we do, we start by calling people every day, twice a day, sometimes three times a day at various times. And we say, how? Let's say you have chronic pain, for example. Nobody needs stress. It doesn't matter what it is. People in chronic pain think they're in pain all the time. People who are stressed think they're stress. Nobody has anything all the time. So they call and say, how is it right now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? The why is the crucial question. All right, so what happens is now, during many times, it's going to be better. So you're going to feel, gee, it's not as bad as I thought it was. There are moments of relief. Why initiates a mindful search. Why now? Is it better than before? And by doing this. And the process now gives you some control over the disease. So control itself is important to your health.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

When you're in control, you're looking for ways to be better, to improve. Yeah, right. So we use the stress. So you're stressed all the time. I call you history. Okay? Then all of a sudden you realize, you know, when you're talking to Ellen Langer, then you're maximally stressed. So then it's easy. Right? Don't talk to me as a way of improving. All right, so three things happen when you do this. Attention to variability, which is just a fancy way of saying being mindful, noticing change. The first is that you see, hey, it's not that you're maximally awful all the time. Second, by asking why you're being mindful, that's good for your health. And third, that you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. Now, we've done this with Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, a host of real disorders. And in each case, we get very positive results. And so, you know, now we're looking at how this might actually explain the placebo. And the way is that you take a pill now you're expecting yourself to get better. So you're looking, am I better? Oh, now I'm not as better as I was a moment before. Why? And the process unfolds naturally now. So when I was trying to arrange it so people could take care of themselves rather than rely on a doctor to give them a nothing so that they take care of themselves. It doesn't seem that way because we're calling them, but most people now have smartphones. It's very easy. You set your smartphone to ring in an hour. You ask yourself, how is it now better or worse than before. Set it now for 2 hours and 10 minutes. Just vary the times and you will be better, even if it doesn't completely go away. Although we have very positive and very positive findings, this is powerful. You know, and the thing about a placebo, that's kind of interesting because when we, the BBC did a version of a replication of the counterclockwise study, and I remember there was this actress who was one of the participants, and she got better and she couldn't understand it, and she said, you know, you say it's placebo, but, you know, and arguing because placebos are bad. Now, placebos to people are bad only because the people who started talking about them were pharmaceutical companies. And for a pharmaceutical, I want to bring this drug to market to make a fortune. And this damn thing, you know, this placebo is just as good. So then I can't bring it to market. But if you think about it, and then people say it's only psychological, as if, wait a second, you know, physical is real, you know, psychological not. And I'm saying they're both the same.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Dr. Ellen Langer]

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[Lewis Howes]

So what influences the other do our thoughts influence.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

It's all happening simultaneously. More or less simultaneously, yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

So if we feel pain somewhere, we feel overwhelmed, or stress, or we feel sharpness of pain somewhere, is our thoughts influencing that pain or is our. The feeling of it influencing our thoughts?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

It's one thing interesting. You know, I raised my arm. That's affecting my wrist, my forearm. It's all happening essentially at the same time. You know, there was somebody, I can't believe that I couldn't remember. I couldn't find who did this study where they did the biochemistry of a teardrop and that a teardrop of sadness is biochemically different from a teardrop of happiness.

[Lewis Howes]

Really?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And remembered the iridologist. Iridologist who was able to look in my eye and know there was something wrong with my golf lift. It's all the same. I go like this. My mind, my brain is different. We don't have the sophisticated machinery, technology to pick up the difference. But if I took a few cells of your skin and you were mindful versus mindless, the difference is there, really. But we can see that now.

[Lewis Howes]

Holy cow, this is fascinating. What, I mean, what would you say then? If people want to live pain free, if they want to live pain free, stress free, and they want to feel like they're aging gracefully all in one minute, what can they be? What is the cocktail of ingredients that you should be doing on a daily basis to create that?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah, you should accept that everything is uncertain. And so then you can't know those things. You know, if you forget something, doesn't mean now you're becoming sick, getting dementia, you know, you forgot something. And it's interesting because I'm a teacher, I'm professor of these wonderful students at Harvard, and I give an exam and they get a lot of it wrong. They studied it, they just didn't remember. So young people are not infrequently forgetful. They just don't worry so much about being forgetful if you fall. Some people then take themselves out of the world because they're afraid of falling again. And I remember I was consulting in this nursing home many years ago, and this woman who I was in the director's office and this woman who was about. I'd say she was about 85 or whatever, visiting her sister who was 90, and she was bragging, she said, you know, my sister wanted me to bring tongues to help her put on her underwear by herself, but I wasn't going to do it because she could fall. And I thought, okay. And then I chimed in, which I Probably shouldn't. And I said, you know, we can prevent her from falling and burning herself or anything else that happens to people in the course of a lifetime. We can induce a somi, a semi comatose state and then she'll be perfectly accident free and so on, you know. So in some sense, I mean, it may seem silly, but some part of being human is the possibility of some of these things happening. Falling. Yeah, yeah. And recognizing that you can get yourself through it in some of the ways we've already discussed. I'm not suggesting that we all just throw caution to the wind, but I think a life that provides no opportunity for any of these things to happen, it wouldn't be one that I would choose for myself.

[Lewis Howes]

This is all fascinating because I think a lot of people want to live longer and they want to live longer, healthier. They don't want to live in pain and on medications and stressed about it. They want to feel better.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And so let me tell you, what people want to do should be doing is making the moment matter. And that whatever they're doing, they should enjoy doing it rather than doing it for some end. You know, so that I hate exercising, but I'm going to exercise so I live longer. No. And there are people who exercise and then end up having heart attacks because of the exercise. You can't.

[Lewis Howes]

Because they're stressed about it.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. What you want to do is if you do it, show up for it. If you show up for it, it'll be enjoyable. If it's enjoyable, you can't ask for more than that. So many people are trying to add more years to their lives. And I think that what we should be doing is adding more life to our years. And that will end up, I think in the long run for most people, have us living longer. But whatever you're going to do, it should be fun. Now, how could it be fun? It depends on the way you do it. Doing it, mindfully, actively noticing it sounds so simple. But that's the essence of engagement. That's the, that's what you're doing when you're having fun and it's no work. That's why I say it's very important to understand mindfulness as we study. It has nothing to do with meditation. If you were to leave California and come back to the east coast and come visit me at my house, you wouldn't have to practice being mindful. You'd walk into my house, you'd be curious, oh, look at. Did she do that painting? This is a book she's Reading whatever it is you saw, you would notice because you knew, you didn't know, and you'd be curious. And once you're noticing, the neurons are firing, and that's figuratively and literally enlivening. So that's all you have to do. Now the problem is the world has taught us to divide work and play, for instance, and that work has to be bad. So for students it can be play and study, work and life. And again, I object strenuously. That bring play into your work. Exactly. And people talk about work life balance. I have so many of these in the book. Where here is bad, then the experts help us to get here. It's better, but not as nearly as good as it could be. So work life balance is better than work life imbalance. But better still is work life integration. Make it one thing, don't be a different person at work. That there should be a certain seriousness to even play and playfulness to our work. We have studies where we just have people notice things about whatever they're doing and it ends up fun. We had people, this is a study. So what did we do? We gave people index cards that had on them jokes, jokes. And their job was to evaluate how funny the joke was. Okay, so for half of the people it was a job. For half of the people it was just an activity.

[Lewis Howes]

It was fun, it was interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Right, exactly. And when it was a job, their minds wandered, they resented doing it, even though the thing they were doing was. Would seem to be almost inherently fun. Right. So, you know, I don't know that if you were doing brains or any kind of surgery at the moment you're doing it, you want to be light hearted and. But it should at the least be interesting. You know, the doctors make a lot of errors, no different from the rest of us, except medical errors are very costly, cost people their lives, and those all results. To go back to your original question, how do we fix everything? By making people more mindful. When you're more mindful, you see what's going on and you know that you were leaving that sponge inside the, the person's body before you sewed them up. Wow. So no matter what you're doing, if you're doing it mindfully, you're going to be enjoying it. And if you're enjoying it, that's going to be its own reward, which will probably lead to the longer life. I'm trying to.

[Lewis Howes]

Ask. You know, I feel like a lot of what I've noticed in the world lately is that a lot of chronic illness is linked to people being obese. Obesity is up in this country and around the world. And you talked about the chambermaid's study. But I'm curious, can people just think themselves thinner? Is it possible to lose weight by your thinking alone?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, that's what seemed to be the case with the chambermaid study. But I think that again, if you want to stop doing something that you're doing, the best way to do it is not to look at the result of what you've done, but to look at why you're doing it in the first place.

[Lewis Howes]

Can you give an example?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, sure. You know that I've gained 20 pounds, therefore I want to take off the 20 pounds. Why did you gain the 20 pounds? You know, were you eating because you are anxious? Well, then, you know, we have to find a way of not being so anxious. I think that for many people who are trying to lose weight, they are not paying attention to why they gained it in the first place. If you are mindful, you would notice that you gained three pounds. Taking off three pounds is not very hard for most people. If you don't notice until you go up two sizes, then you're not being mindful. Exactly. It's going.

[Lewis Howes]

You're not paying attention to what you're doing. Consuming. You're just eating throughout the day, or you're not. Whatever. You're not moving your body enough. Something, Right?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

You're not paying attention.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

You're. You're not paying attention. Well, it. Paying attention sounds big. You're just noticing little things and then it becomes much more doable. But. And people have written now about mindful eating. In fact, the word is so out there that I think that it's good. Its importance may get lost with that, but I'm glad it's having an influence. Sure. In so many ways. Yes. Because you're gaining weight out of nervous eating. The more mindful you are, the less stress. So let's say I came to you. We don't know how many people are going to be watching us. I could have said to myself this morning, oh, my gosh, how is it going to go? So many people are going to see me and then just stuff my face. But I didn't bother doing that. It didn't make me the slightest bit anxious, you know, because I've done, you know, things. I'm not 12 years, you know, 20 years old. It's not the beginning of my career. But I think that lots of the things we learn when we're older, the wisdom that comes with Age. People should learn when they're young, you know, to realize. I wrote a paper, a little blog at one point about, you know, you're three years old and you're full and you scrape and you cry bloody. Then you're six years old. I don't know you in elementary school at six years old. Yeah, you're okay first, first grade and Johnny or Janie doesn't send you a valentine and you know the world's going to end. And then you get a little older and now you've got some pimples and oh my God, I'm never going to be attractive. And then you get. And you get your first job and am I ever going. It just goes on and on until at some point you say it was all so silly. And we can be taught the ways. It's silly right from the beginning to realize there are many ways of doing everything. And by thinking that there's one right way, then that makes so many of us wrong. And there are things we put in place to keep us down. And I'm here to say, you want to do it differently. Do it differently. We should all be doing it differently in a whole different way. When I lecture sometimes I look in the audience, I say, is there anybody here who's six, five? Surprisingly, there almost always is. I ask them to come on stage. I'm five, three. We look ridiculous, right? I asked him to put his hand up. I put my hand next to it. His hand is 3 inches bigger than mine. And then I asked a simple question. Should we be doing anything the same way? Anything physical? It seems silly, right? And so it is with everything else. You know, that people who are the people who decided these are the things we should know, these are the ways we should know it, you know, it got to the point, gets to the point where imagine you're in school and you're asked the question, how much is one plus one? And little Johnny says, one. What's going to happen in today's schools?

[Lewis Howes]

Teachers are saying, no, that's not right.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Exactly. And the child is going to be looked down on by all the other kids. Ha ha. You know, and then grows up feeling less than. And sometimes less than is because you actually know more than rather than less than.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

It's interesting that when we're putting people down, there's a way. And talk about three levels here. So let's imagine we have a little kid who's uninhibited, okay? Now then we have people like us, more you, your age that are inhibited what does inhibited mean? You know the rules. You're supposed to do this, you're not supposed to do that, and you comply. Then hopefully, hopefully, you get to a certain point where you say, who cares? Right now, that behavior of the who cares? The old person may resemble the young person, and it's a mistake to think of that person as behaving childishly. So they're not uninhibited the way the child is. They're disinhibited.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting. It's interesting. My grandfather, before he passed, he used to just say whatever was on his mind, and it was inappropriate for a lot of people, but for him, he was just like, I don't care. I'm gonna say what I want to say.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah, yeah. But the point here, the larger point that I'm making, is that when you see somebody behaving in a way where you're taking them to task, diminishing them, it may actually be that they're more evolved than you are.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Rather than less so. Another example, you see somebody drop a cane, and so the miserable person doesn't go over and help. Then the next level 2 person runs over and helps. But there's also a level three better, where that person watches and sees because the person who dropped their cane is going to feel better if he or she can pick it up by themselves. And you don't want to deny them that. And so you don't give help that's not really needed. So level one and three are not the same. They're both not helping, but they're very different people.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting. One's just kind of like, whatever the other one's saying, I don't want to rob them of the opportunity of empowering themselves.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Right? So, and this goes. There are so many things I spend a lot of time with language that is interesting to me because I think here in the world that we live in today, most people are not enjoying the lives that they could be enjoying, and they don't know what's available to them. So many years ago, I was asked to give a sermon in one of the Harvard churches. Okay. I say yes to everything. So I say yes. I'm not religious, and if I were to be religious, I'm Jewish. So what's an appropriate topic? Forgiveness. It sounds sort of religious. It's not, but I could get away with it. So I start to think about forgiveness, and I come up with something that's almost sacrilegious. If you ask 10 people, is forgiveness good or bad? What are they going to tell you good, that's good. If you ask 10 people, is blame good or bad, what are they going to tell you? It's bad. Gee, but you know, you have to blame before you can forgive. So our forgivers are our blamers. Now, do you blame people for good things or bad things? You blame people for bad things, but things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So what do we have here? We have people who see the world negatively, who blame. Then, you know, come to forgive. Hardly divine. Okay, so if you blame, it's better to forgive than not. However, you shouldn't be blaming them in the first place because their behavior made some sense or else they wouldn't have done it. So if you understand that their behavior was sensible, then there's no reason to blame them. Then there's no opportunity necessary for forgiveness. So we leave it at forgiveness rather than this whole better way of being. So we have trying. It's much better than giving up to try. Right? So we're always teaching kids to try. Well, I did this study. Well, then I was informed that this should be called the Yoda study, which I didn't realize, and it is the Yoda study. Don't try, just do it. Would you try to eat an ice cream cone?

[Lewis Howes]

No, you do it.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

You just do it. So trying has built into it the possibility of failing. So not doing it. Trying. When you're thinking of failing, not nearly as good as just the doing. So I go through lots of ways where in fact, there's a world that's so much better than the world most people experience. I went to visit a friend many years ago, had a very bad case of cancer. And I said, eva, how are you? She said, they told me my cancer is in remission. At that moment I thought, well, wait a second. If I had the very same test, they probably tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it I don't have it, but she has it in remission? Okay. Now if you think it's in remission, you're still stressed. Hopefully it doesn't come back, right?

[Lewis Howes]

Exactly.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

If you're cured, you don't have that stress.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Interesting. Yeah. And so again, remission is better than it being active, but not nearly as good as it being cured. Now, when you have a cold and the cold goes away, you don't see yourself as in remission.

[Lewis Howes]

See, it's gone.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And then if you get a scene as a brand new cold, and it can be the same thing for cancer in some way. The cancer is all. Cancer bears something in relationship to each other, or else you wouldn't call it by the same name. But each cancer, each moment is different.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Dr. Ellen Langer]

It's crucial because the way we use language, once we name something, we think we know it. Once we think we know it, we don't pay attention to it anymore. While it's changing, it's interesting.

[Lewis Howes]

My fiance, she's from Mexico and I don't know the exact language on how they say certain things, but when they have for example, when they have a cold, they don't say I have a cold, they say something that's like it's I'm experiencing a cold or something like that. They don't own the sickness. They don't own the disease. The illness, the anxiety, the stress. They don't say, I have stress, I'm experiencing it.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah, no, we do here with. If you have some disease, you almost become the disease you identify. And it's very. So I had a student, a wonderful young woman who had ms, and I heard somebody comes over and asked her how she is, and she was great. Rather than, oh, my goodness, for every question, the Ms. Is with her. And then she explained to the person how her mind is working her arm and went through all the parts of her that are just fine. And that gave me a different idea, that when you have a chronic illness, all the word chronic means is that the medical world doesn't yet know how to help you. It doesn't mean that there is no way to help yourself. And so I don't have data to support this, but it seems to me a thought experiment that if you built up the rest of your body, made yourself strong, I can't imagine that wouldn't help the healing. So I show a slide. I remember what I was talking about during COVID but, you know, and you imagine Olympic runners versus a couch potato. And let's assume both of them were exposed to Covid and both of them got Covid. It seems to me the Olympic athlete would probably have an easier time with it. And, you know, and so you can build up the rest of your body that feels good, you're in control, you're being mindful. So that itself is helping, whatever the disease. And it may actually be enough to fully turn things around.

[Lewis Howes]

So how we think and identify ourselves also is determined based on the life we're going to live as well.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

It sounds like, well, the way we define ourselves will determine the life we're going to live. And that's also important because too often people say they can't. Whatever it is, they can't. And you can't. You can never prove that you can't. There's no experiment that can prove that you can't. All an experiment can prove is that if you do this, this may happen. It doesn't tell you that there's no way for anything else to happen. And then if you think about all of the advances the culture makes, that the big ones are always things where everybody said it was impossible. It's impossible until somebody does it. And then it becomes possible. Then people don't learn from it because they think they always knew it, and so they go on to the next thing. That can't be and that when you realize that it's the doing of it, the trying, that's the fun, not the end. You know, you organize yourself differently around an activity. I mean, let's just take two instances come to mind. I'm trying to think now. They're blocking new thoughts. So these are old thoughts. But you're a little kid and you're in the elevator trying to press the button and you can't reach it. And so your parent picks you up and you get. And then eventually you're able to hit. And at that point, it's no longer fun. I mean, when was the last time you got excited that you could hit the elevator? Okay. Or if you were playing golf and you got a hole in one each time you swung the club, there's no game there anymore. It's the not knowing that makes it exciting. The mastering, not having mastered. And so when you get something wrong, I think we should all be more like the computer programmers, where when they get it wrong, they don't say they got it wrong. It's a bug. It's in the system, and I'm going to figure it out. You know, if you think of. I like crossword puzzles. So in doing a crossword puzzle, it's great fun for me, or Words with Friends or whatever, word games. After I finish it, it wouldn't be fun for me to do it again because I know all the answers. So you have to recognize that not knowing is what makes it interesting. What makes it impossible for some of us under so many circumstances, is somebody else standing over you. Whether it's a teacher, a spouse, making you feel stupid for not being able to answer the question right away, judging you, shaming, you know, that we need to realize. So my goal this is, I'll write my next book about this. Right now, the world is vertical. You have those of us on top comfortably. And you have, you know, we make it as if we really know how we stack up, right? As if the measures we're using are always reliable. And I want to take that vertical and make it horizontal with the realization that everybody has special skills. So let me tell you where this came from. We are having lots of furniture coming to be stored in a basement. I see the amount of furniture, I know the size of the basement. And I say to myself, there is no way, no way that all of that is going to fit this man who does some work for us, who has no sense of himself. He is uneducated, everything negative right in his mind. He takes the furniture, fits it all in where it's all accessible. And when I saw that, the first thing that occurred. It's not fair.

[Lewis Howes]

Right.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

You're this genius.

[Lewis Howes]

You have a genius award.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And he couldn't do it. And I thought maybe some things would change during COVID when you saw how important somebody who's delivering toilet paper, you know, is relevant to, you know, more important than the architect at that moment. But to recognize that everybody doesn't know something, Everybody knows something else. Everybody can do something. Everyone can do something else. And to question when I talk about talent and things like that in the book here, who chose the criteria to say you're good, you're not as good, and so on, you change the way I said before about the 6 foot 5 guy and I doing things differently. He wrote the rules. Now, the more similar you are to him, the white, tall male, the better you'll be at whatever you're doing. More important to understand the more different you are from the person who wrote the rules, the more important it is for you to find your own way of doing it. And everything we teach is, this is the way. No, this isn't the way. This is the way for that person who determined the rules of the game. It's very important. I mean, you know, I use this example a lot also, and I'll stop saying that. I'm a tennis player and, you know, I throw the ball up, I kill it. It doesn't go in, I throw it up. Now I have a wuss, very weak second serve because I'm playing doubles, and I don't want to get everybody angry. Okay. If I had created the game of tennis, you'd have three serves. The first one, I kill it. Second one, now I'm going to learn from that first one, I kill it again more often. It's going to go in, and I still have my backup third serve.

[Lewis Howes]

Interesting.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Nobody would think that two serves somehow comes from the heavens. Right. This is the way it has to be. All right, so who decided? Now, it doesn't mean we have to change the rules for each of us. It does mean that when you don't do it as well as somebody else, you recognize it's only because of the way the rules were written. At my 5. 3, I'm going to break more dishes than you are. Right. Who decided that the cabinet should be all the way up there?

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. So as opposed to down here.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. You know, I mean, everything could be, you know, it's. Mechanically, it's not very difficult to have the shelves change height. True.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

But we don't think about that. Because we hold everything still and we think that everything that is had some good reason for it being that way. And the reason is just that a group of people made the decision for it to be that way. Then we freeze it. As I was saying, with how do you stop on ice in a car? Everybody learns. You gently pump the brakes. And they're doing that even though now.

[Lewis Howes]

Until they innovate new technology.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Right. And now it's actually counterproductive, dangerous.

[Lewis Howes]

You've learned. I mean, how many years have you been teaching forever teaching at Harvard now?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

45.

[Lewis Howes]

45 years. You've been.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I started when I was 10.

[Lewis Howes]

Exactly. Yeah. 45 years of teaching at Harvard. You've seen a lot, you've experienced a lot, you've done a lot. If you could only, if you could have parents watching today teach their kids only one scale set, it would be the live a better life.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Appreciation of uncertainty.

[Lewis Howes]

Appreciation of uncertainty.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And I guess, well, it would be recognizing that everything that is could be different. Everything that is was a decision so that people don't give up their own way. Because the rule says.

[Lewis Howes]

Because that's all.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

It's all part of just being mindful. When you notice, if you're going to actively notice, you're going to see that things depend on context. You're going to see that, well, this person, you're right handed. But I'm looking at you writing now, assuming you were left handed and we had a culture in the past that tried to make you right handed. Why there's an advantage to being left handed. There's an advantage to being right handed. We don't want to homogenize every dimension. Right.

[Lewis Howes]

I'm fascinated by this stuff. You have a chapter in your book the Mindful Body that is called A World of Plenty. And my audience really loves this idea of abundance, creating more abundance in their life. I'm curious, how can we align our thoughts with abundance even when everything around us seems to be like we're lacking?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Well, first of all, you have to be more specific about what you think you're lacking. You know that if it's anything material, it's in order to get people's approval. And why do you want people's approval? Because then you will have better sense of your own self. Well, we don't need any of that. You know, that you can make yourself. If we just go back to what I just said about realizing that everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else. So what do you know? What can you do and if you spend your moments doing those things so that you're happy, the problems all go away. Now, I was on this, gave a lecture down in Australia many years ago, and unexpectedly, she called all. The person in charge, called all the speakers. So we're all sitting on stage, and then she asked each of them what was their bucket list? Okay. So now she comes to me and I. I don't have a bucket list. You don't have a bucket list? I said, no, that if you make the moment matter, you can't do more of that. And so, you know, if you're happy, you're happy. Yes. And you don't have to then wait for a vacation to be happy. You know, it's nice you do certain.

[Lewis Howes]

Things to create that joy.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Exactly.

[Lewis Howes]

You just are joy.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Whatever you're doing should be fun. And, you know, I tell my students, I mean, I'm sure that they think I'm very strange, you know, that if you're flossing your teeth, make it a game. For me, everything is virtually a game. There's this wonderful video out there. I don't know if you've seen. It's called Piano Stairs.

[Lewis Howes]

Yes. Of the person climbing and falling.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

No, no, no, no, no, no. And these. I think it was in some place in Scandinavia. That was where it started. They go to the subway, and the subway station seem to be the same all over the world. And they see everybody is taking the escalator, and there are stairs and the escalator. So everybody's taking the escalator. Then they lay down piano keys. Keys on the stairs. So as you go upstairs, it goes. Okay, Right. And in almost no time, everyone. Everybody's now taking the stairs. And so what I tell my students, why wait for someone to put, you know, to put. The piano key is down there. You can do, you know, sing yourself as you go up the stairs. Everything can be made fun. But in this world, we've decided these. These things are work. And work is supposed to be stressful. These things are fun. As a result, when you're not working, you're not having fun, you're stressed, because why aren't having fun? And I think it doesn't take much to change some of this. Most of it just comes from realizing that it was put in place at one time to serve the needs of certain people, and that if it needs, it doesn't serve your needs. Change it.

[Lewis Howes]

Change it. I love this. One of the quotes you have in your book, you say, don't try to make the right decision.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. This is a hard one.

[Lewis Howes]

Make the decision right.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

This is so important that I don't know. Reading it, I think is easier than listening to me talk about it. But let me tell you, okay? So the most stressful thing in the world for people are making decisions. Now, remember I said stress is the major killer. Okay, so let's look at decision making. Okay? We go back and add up some of the things I've already said. The first is there's no such thing as good or bad. That's a frame you put on things. Things in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. So if you are making a decision and what you're going to do is a cost benefit analysis, if every cost is a benefit and every benefit is a. You can't add them up. They're not going to tell you what to do. Not only that, but if you were going to do a cost benefit analysis, there's nothing that tells you when to stop pulling in information. And each new piece of information could change the sense of the decision. Not only that, but I told you, prediction is an illusion. Decision making relies on being able to predict. Right. You know that if you have to decide you want a car or a boat, strange choice. I don't think anybody makes it, but let's just leave it that way. Okay, so we have a car and a boat that costs about the same money and you can't decide which one. That the decision you're making depends on your guess about how much you'll enjoy. Well, I enjoy the boat. I get seasick. So not appealing to me. But will I enjoy the boat as much as I have enjoyed it? You can't say things change. Okay, now help me get back to this. But I want people to understand when I say you can predict so that when I was married at the time with the pancreas, he was in the army, was a Vietnam sort of thing. And I was able to go to the commissary. So this is like Costco, but Costco didn't exist.

[Lewis Howes]

Sure.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

So I go and I buy as many stockings as they had because these were expensive. Right now they were like half price. A week after I got home, pantyhose had come out. Now, this is probably for a man. I don't. So the stockings were no longer useful.

[Lewis Howes]

Oh, man.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I'm skiing and I finally decide, okay, what I'm going to do is invest in ski boots that are comfortable, that are warm. I do that. And then I end up spending winters in Mexico so I never go skiing again. You don't know. You can't predict. You really can't predict. You think you can, but you can't if you can't predict. Making decisions makes no sense. If the way you make a decision is to do a cost benefit analysis, if the costs and benefits are only limited by the way you think about things, that's not going to get you anywhere. So then the point is, rather than try to make the right decision, which you can never make one more little piece. Do you want A or B? They're psychologically the same. Whenever you can't make a decision, it's because the alternatives are psychologically the same. Then you pull in information to make them different. So let's say you find out A is $100 and B is $1,000. There's no decision, right? It follows mechanically you're going to take the thousand dollars. Okay, so you're never really doing these cost benefit analysis. Sometimes you gather information so you can justify well, here's why I did this thing that you think is stupid. So anyway, you have to read it to fully appreciate it. But the bottom line is rather than waste your time trying to make the right decision, make the decision right.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Dr. Ellen Langer]

More tools.

[Lewis Howes]

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[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And so I had students live for a week. I said, from now until you come back for class next week, do not make any decisions. Flip a coin, use a rule. The rule to be the first thing that occurs to you is the option you're going to choose. But no decisions for the week. They come back and they had a.

[Lewis Howes]

Stress free wonderful week and you accept the decision you made as the right decision.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Exactly. Because you can't know. Now, sometimes people regret the decisions that they make and that's mindless for many reasons, but not the least of which change it again. Not only that, is that that other thing that you regret having chosen. This could have been worse, right? I couldn't know. Exactly. Exactly.

[Lewis Howes]

There's that whole story like the. The fable of I'm like the farmer and the horse or something.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And the horse is a nail.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. And it goes and goes. It's like, okay, the horse broke his leg. But then.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Right.

[Lewis Howes]

The other. Yeah. Something that's like. But that bad decision turned into a good decision.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Exactly.

[Lewis Howes]

And that good is. And then something bad happens.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And that's like it would always. It's like my house burning down.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah, exactly. It's like this horrible thing that.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

But you don't have to wait. You know, you can create the good of whatever happens.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. And you say there is no good or bad. It's all interpretation. Yeah, I agree with that.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I mean, if you, you know, you break your right arm, what will happen is that you'll be using your left arm more and that strengthens it. And so for many people, your left arm is not as strong as if you're right handed. So at the end of all of it, you're in a better position.

[Lewis Howes]

Yeah. And you just never know. I mean, I did break my right wrist playing football. And I remember being really sad for, I don't know, about a year and a half because I was no longer to play football anymore. I was in a cast, had a surgery, they took a bone from my hip that did a graft. I was in this position for six months. I was living on my sister's couch for a year and a half, rent free.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

That part's good.

[Lewis Howes]

And yeah, I mean, but I didn't have a good. I wasn't enjoying my Life. Because this identity I once had being an athlete. I was playing professional football, was no longer available to me. The thing I had worked so hard for so many years. So long. Dream gone.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And I remember feeling very sad. And I don't know if it's depressed, but just in a low state, low energy. Looking back, I'm so grateful that it happened. What if. What if I didn't get injured and I would have broken my neck the next year or something worse would have. And. And it set me to a path of doing what I'm doing now.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Which is impacting lives in a different way.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

And it brings me so much joy.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

So it's just learning to interpret it. Not as a bad experience.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And the same problem for people is they don't realize when they're in a transition. Transitions are almost necessarily discomforting because you're not where you were and you're not yet where you're going to be. Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

You're in the middle somewhere.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. And to look forward to where they're going rather than look back, because the looking back. You know. So let's say you're assuming that if you had stayed in football, you would have continued to enjoy it. Who does? Exactly. You know that if you're doing what you're doing now fully, everything you've done before has led you to it.

[Lewis Howes]

Exactly.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

And you can't do more than that.

[Lewis Howes]

I'm so excited about this that you wrote this book, the Mindful Body Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. I want everyone to get this copy. Make sure to share this with a friend. Get a copy for a friend as well.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah. I have a statement in the back that you can't read it twice. You have to buy another one.

[Lewis Howes]

There you go. Exactly.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Yeah.

[Lewis Howes]

Give it to a friend. I truly believe that our thoughts. Thoughts, the way we interpret ourselves, the world events, is so powerful for us. And so everything you're talking about, it's all backed by research and science. And when people have these tools and they apply them, they're going to live happier, healthier, longer, better lives. And so I'm so grateful that you're putting this out there. I have a couple final questions for you, but I'm just so grateful you're here sharing this. This question is a hypothetical scenario, so bear with me. It's a question I ask everyone towards the end called the Three Truths. So imagine in this hypothetical world, you get to live as long as you want to live, but it's eventually the last day on this earth for you. You've written 13 books, and I'm assuming you're going to write 20 more. And you're going to do so many other things to share with the world. But imagine in this hypothetical last day scenario, no one has access to your books. This interview is gone. No one has access to anything you've ever shared. For whatever reason, you have to take it all with you to the next place. But you get to leave behind three lessons, three things you know to be true from all your life experience. And this is all we would have to have access to your information, your content. What would you say are those three truths for you?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

I probably just repeat what I've said to you. One is to recognize that behavior makes sense or else people wouldn't do it. And that will improve our relationships and our relationships to ourselves. The second is that people have to appreciate, enjoy, exploit the power of uncertainty. And I mean, just be mindful. But that follows. Each of these leads to the other. Of course, you know, I have an acronym that I use in teaching at the end of my classes. It's called glado, G L A D O. So it's my recipe for happy life. Be generous, loving, authentic, direct and open. And each of these leads to the other. And all of them follow from being more mindful.

[Lewis Howes]

I love that. Glado. Generous, loving, authentic, direct and open. I want to acknowledge you, Ellen, for the contribution you continue to make on society, on humanity and the world through your research, through teaching students at Harvard and then taking that research, putting it into things that we can all understand, apply in our lives, through taking the time to craft these social experiments that you do and giving us more inspiration and more hope. So I'm just grateful that you're changing the paradigm for a lot of our thinking. And the things that we have thought are one way. You're shifting it to say, hey, there's another way. So I really acknowledge you for your contribution and the gifts that you bring to the world. I'm so glad that you're doing this. And again, the mindful body. The final question I have is, what is your definition of greatness?

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

Being awake, being present, being there. And you know, it's funny because people say sort of stop and smell the roses or you should be present. And that's sweet, but it's an empty instruction because when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. And so the way to be there is to notice new things about the things you think you know, you see you didn't know them. Your attention naturally goes there or top down to start off recognizing that you don't know, nobody knows, you can't know, and that not knowing is exciting rather than scary.

[Lewis Howes]

I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links and if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad free listening experience. Make sure to subscribe to our Greatness plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend. Leave us a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewishouse. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox [e-mail] newsletter and if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

[Dr. Ellen Langer]

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