Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with oneself is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
Outworker
#063 - Dr. Ellen Langer - The Science That Proves Your Mind Can Heal Your Body
Dr. Ellen Langer reveals how our thoughts can directly shape our health, aging, and resilience. Backed by decades of research, she shares how reframing stress, tracking symptom variability, and challenging medical assumptions can lead to real physical transformation—from faster healing to improved longevity. Through powerful research, personal stories, and everyday mindfulness, this conversation redefines what’s possible when we realize: perception isn’t just reality—it’s biology.
Timestamps:
00:00 Shifting From Medicine To Psychology
01:10 Life Is Perception
02:02 The Spark For Dr. Langer's Work
9:29 Introduction To Mindfulness & Mindlessness
17:01 Dr. Langer's Relationship With Stress
21:57 The Real Root Of Sickness & Disease
28:42 Symptom Variability
37:42 Medical Imaging & Interpretation
44:22 Understanding Mindbody Unity Through Experience
53:06 When Will Mindbody Unity Be Widely Accepted?
56:57 Questions That Drive Dr. Langer
58:17 Mindfilledness
59:51 Being An Artist
1:02:42 Leading With Ideas, Not Identity
1:05:08 Connect With Dr. Ellen Langer
Thank you so much for listening. I truly appreciate your time and support. Let me know what you thought of the episode and what you would like to see in the future. Any feedback would be awesome. Don't forget to subscribe for more exciting content on YouTube, and leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever platform you are listening on.
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Dr. Ellen Langer reveals how our thoughts can directly shape our health, aging, and resilience. Backed by decades of research, she shares how reframing stress, tracking symptom variability, and challenging medical assumptions can lead to real physical transformation—from faster healing to improved longevity. Through powerful research, personal stories, and everyday mindfulness, this conversation redefines what’s possible when we realize: perception isn’t just reality—it’s biology.
Also, before we jump in - you might hear a few email dings and some dog barks. That’s just part of the vibe today. Enjoy.
Tim Doyle (00:06.968)
For someone who is deep in the world of psychology, you initially pursued a pre-med track and were a chemistry major in college. What drew you to medicine at first and what was it about psychology that sparked the shift in your passion?
Ellen Langer (00:15.406)
That's right.
Ellen Langer (00:21.834)
Okay, well, I think most young people probably can generate about six professions, medicine being one of them. you know, and I've, I assume all my life I've been interested in helping people. I'm so old now I can't remember exactly the motivation, but I do know what led me into psychology. First, as a chem major, I found that
I leave the lab a different color every day. I was practicing Jewish chemistry, which is a little is good, a little more is better, which was not appropriate. Anyway, I enjoyed it, but then decided I was getting married. I was very young and I didn't know if I was going to end up finishing med school. So I thought I should broaden my base and take some other courses.
And then I took a course with Phil Zimbardo in psychology and that changed everything. He was spectacular. So there you go.
Tim Doyle (01:21.614)
Much of your work in psychology, the way that I see it, it explores how perception shapes reality. Simply speaking, how much of life is perception?
Ellen Langer (01:29.581)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (01:33.632)
Well, virtually all of it. You know, that when you're seeing something, the way you're seeing it can be one of several different ways, but that particular view tends to guide what you're thinking, doing, wanting, and so on. So it's the major player, I think. My work was always focused on finding very small factors that seem to have very large effects. So one of the early studies in nursing homes where we
simply gave elderly people choices to make and then found 18 months later that those given these mindful choices live longer.
Tim Doyle (02:16.27)
I'm a big believer that we all have personal experiences that really spark our curiosities or what are the launching pad for the work that we do. And there's two personal experiences in your life that I find really interesting. So the first one is, and they both relate to the women in your life. So your mother had breast cancer, which spread to her pancreas and then it unexpectedly
Ellen Langer (02:42.956)
Right.
Tim Doyle (02:45.026)
disappeared in a way that the medical world couldn't explain. And then when you were in grad school, your grandmother was dealing with symptoms in her head that ultimately went misdiagnosed. And then when she had an autopsy, they found that she had a brain tumor. How do you think those intimate and personal experiences shaped the trajectory of your work and the energy behind your work?
Ellen Langer (03:03.266)
Right, yeah.
Ellen Langer (03:11.182)
Yeah, I think for most people, you can only think about things that occur to you and what occurs to you is likely to be what you're experiencing. And I think that there was a set of circumstances prior to my mother's, which was important to me and a fun story. So in the mindful body, as you know, it was first written as a memoir. So there are lots of personal stories and then became what it is. Okay.
One of these stories was about, as I said before, I was married when I was obscenely young. We went to Paris on our honeymoon. We're in a restaurant and I ordered a mixed grill. On the mixed grill was pancreas. And I asked my then husband, which of these things was pancreas? He pointed to something. I ate everything else and now came the moment of truth. Could I get myself to eat the pancreas?
which for some bizarre reason I thought I had to because now after all I was a married woman. And I start eating it and I literally get sick. He then starts to laugh and I say, why are you laughing? Inappropriate, right on our honeymoon, if ever, anytime. And he said, because that's chicken, you ate the pancreas a long time ago. So I had made myself sick. The instance with my mother, she had made herself well.
There was more going on than I was being taught by the books I was reading, the courses I was taking, and I was interested in finding out. Eventually, what I did was come up with the mind-body unity theory, which drew from these early experiences, but without me knowing it. I didn't eat the pancreas. I mean, I ate the pancreas, nothing happened, and that was the end until I developed this theory, which essentially says,
You know, we have a notion mind and body. And as long as we have a mind and a body in our minds, the question is how do they talk to each other? How do you get from a fuzzy thing, a thought, to something material called the body? And everybody knows that your thoughts affect your body. In an example I'm fond of using, you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face and before you know it's a leaf, you get scared, your blood pressure increases, your pulse and so on.
Ellen Langer (05:34.67)
All right, but they couldn't explain it because again, we have these two. And I said, well, wait a second. These are just words. Let's put the mind and body back together as one thing. And if the mind and body are one thing, then wherever we're putting one, we're necessarily putting the other. Now, placebos are probably our best medicine on the early example of all of this, right? You take something, it's nothing, it's inert.
right, sugar pill or whatever, you think it's something and then you heal. And so I went ahead to study this mind-body unity in lots of different settings and the results I think are very persuasive. But the first of these was the fun counterclockwise study. Now this is a study, if you don't know, you can watch the Simpsons go to Havana because they talk about it. But let me give you a brief description.
So what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and then had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves. So they were talking about past things as if they were just unfolding. And decorating the place was not on Hollywood scale. I didn't have the budget for that, but there was nothing to remind them that now is now. Anyway, in a brief time, a week,
living as if they were their younger selves resulted in their vision improving, their hearing, their strength, memory, and they looked noticeably younger. So that was pretty compelling, what's going on here. Then fast forward, we do several other studies. People can read the book, you know, The Mindful Body to see all of them, but let me just, the next one I'll say is the Chambermaid study that I did with Ali Crum when she was at Harvard. Okay, so.
You ask chambermaids how much exercise do they get? And surprisingly, since they're working all day long, they say they're not getting any exercise. Because they think exercise is what you do after work, and after work they're too tired. Okay, so they don't realize they're getting exercise. We divide them into two groups. Very simply, we teach one of the two groups that their work is exercise. Making a bed is like working at this machine at the gym, and so on. So now we have two groups. One group...
Ellen Langer (07:57.536)
C is their work as exercise, the other doesn't. We take many, many measures. One group isn't working any harder than the other. As far as we could tell, they're not eating more or less than the other group. Nevertheless, by simply changing their minds, they lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. Remarkable, right? Now, let's go to the last study with many fun studies in between.
This I more recently did with Peter Ungle, my graduate student, where what we did was inflict a wound, a minor wound, but a wound nonetheless. And individually, a person who's just been wounded is in front of a clock. And unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged. So for a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's real time. Now, so what?
Most people would assume the wound is going to heal when the wound heals, but when the mind sees the amount of time that's passed, that turns out to be the deciding factor. So the wound healed based on clock or perceived time rather than real time. There are so many of these studies and the bottom line to many of them is that the amount of control we have over our health is enormous, far more than most people realize.
Tim Doyle (09:27.99)
And to a sense, do you think we've been taught that we don't have control?
Ellen Langer (09:32.206)
Yeah, I do think that. I don't think it was intentional. I don't think somebody said, ah, you know, have a lot of control, but I'm going to fool you into thinking you don't. Can you hear my dog? Okay, let's see. There's somebody outside. Do want me to attend to that? Can you cut this? What would you?
Tim Doyle (09:46.732)
All good, it makes it more natural.
Tim Doyle (09:55.022)
Whatever is easiest for you.
Ellen Langer (09:58.828)
Alright, let me get rid of her.
Tim Doyle (10:01.442)
That's good.
Ellen Langer (10:27.305)
Okay, sorry about that.
Tim Doyle (10:29.11)
No worries at all. happens all the time with other people. So all good.
Ellen Langer (10:31.518)
So what was the question you asked me?
Tim Doyle (10:34.862)
I can pick it up with another question now. So you're known today as the mother of mindfulness, but when did you first get introduced to this concept of mindfulness?
Ellen Langer (10:49.166)
You know, again, it's always hard to know exactly what occurred in the past, but my original interest, Tim, was in mindlessness. And it was all around me. My father would constantly leave the house and come back because he forgot his keys. Very ordinary things. I walked into a store and bumped into a mannequin and apologized. What's going on here?
Tim Doyle (11:01.464)
Mm.
Ellen Langer (11:17.44)
And then I was going to, I took the job at Harvard. So now I'm going to come to Cambridge where the naive belief was everybody here in Cambridge was really smart. Okay. I was coming from New York where people were a different kind of smart. Now what happened was I saw things that just wouldn't happen in New York. For instance, at that time banks closed at three in the afternoon.
Tim Doyle (11:34.414)
Ellen Langer (11:46.774)
That meant that it was okay to park at the bank without getting a ticket, right? Nobody ever did that here. Another bank story, you'd walk into a bank in New York and people would quickly make sure they're as close to a teller as possible. You know, if their line had six people in it and the line next to them had two, quickly, it didn't happen in Cambridge. And so it seemed that there was something different going on from just IQ points.
Then, and I don't remember, I've been asked this before, I don't remember who it was, not a very nice person, which I guess is good that I don't remember who it was, said to me, because I was studying mindlessness, you are what you study. I said, okay. So I started studying mindlessness, I just switched to a new one. And then I learned about Eastern philosophy and Buddhism and so on. And was very pleased that the conclusions I was coming to from a Western scientific perspective,
Tim Doyle (12:28.461)
Hahaha
Ellen Langer (12:44.088)
We're very consistent with all of that traditional wisdom, but it's very different. When I talk about mindfulness, sometimes people think of meditation and meditation we'll find is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you undergo to result hopefully in post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness as I study it is more immediate. It's good that at this point I tell people, what do I mean by being mindful?
And it's the very simple process of noticing. Now, when you think you know, you don't notice, right? It's only when you're in a situation that feels new that you sit up. And the problem of sorts is that since when you're not there, because you're mindless, you're not there to know you're not there.
So you can't so easily correct it. know, people say stop and smell the roses or be in the moment. That's sweet, but totally ineffective because if you're not there and you don't know you're not there, you're not gonna make any change. There are two ways to be mindful. Top down, bottom up. Bottom up is what I was just telling you, that if you notice new things about the things you think you know, you come to see you didn't know them at all. Anyway.
and then your mind naturally goes to that place. You do that often enough. If you, the person, if you live with somebody, if you have a close friend, just notice three new things about them. When you walk outside, notice three new things. And, gee, it's brand new, even though it's the same old, same old. The other way is top down, leads you to the same place, which is to recognize.
that you don't know, nobody knows. Uncertainty is the rule, it's not the exception. Everything keeps changing, everything looks different from different perspectives. So when we think we know, we're confusing the stability of our mindsets in a sense with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. You can hold it still if you want, but it's not staying still. And so I try to persuade people of this by asking whoever's interviewing me a very simple question. Right, so Tim, how much is one plus one?
Tim Doyle (15:03.072)
In some cases it's two, in some cases it's still one.
Ellen Langer (15:03.406)
Okay, yes, because you've heard me say this or you've read it. But this is the one fact that everybody thinks they know. And in fact, if you ask somebody who hasn't heard me talk, how much is one, they're look at you like you're crazy, not take you seriously, possibly ignore you and walk away. But it turns out that, you because we were mindlessly taught
an absolute. Everything we're taught as absolutes, we then deal with mindlessly. One plus one is two. All right. But as you revealed, one plus one can also be one. If you 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. In the real world, it doesn't equal two as a more often as it does. Now, the beauty of this is that
Now that you know there are multiple answers to that simple question, all of a sudden you have choices. You didn't have the choice before when you thought it was clearly just two. Now everything we're taught by our parents, by teachers, by the books we read and so on, are teaching us absolutes. They're teaching us things like one and one is two. So I was at this horse event.
And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog. Okay, I'm a straight A student. This is ridiculous, but I'm trying to be nice. So I say, sure. Horses are habibrous. They do not eat meat. Period. I learned that absolute fact as well as I learned one plus one is two. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I knew everything I think I know could be wrong.
which is actually exciting because that opens a world of possibility. All the things people say can't happen, that you can't do it, it can't be done. Well, how can they possibly know this? Just as they think horses don't eat meat, maybe you can do that thing that somebody has persuaded you you can't do.
Tim Doyle (17:14.624)
and tying things back into mind body unity. I see mindfulness and mind body unity having a real symbiotic relationship. How do you think mindfulness helps us understand
Ellen Langer (17:27.086)
When you're mindful, when you're doing anything, all of you is doing it. Your whole body is doing it. And so when you're actively noticing new things, the neurons are firing and 40 years of research now, close to 50, says that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. Everything you're going to do, you're going to do better if you're mindful. Because when you're mindful, you're noticing the change, right?
and you're a batter and you know, the ball is pitched. And if you just mindlessly hit that ball, it'll go wherever it goes. But if you're present, because you know you don't know, you notice that the left fielder just sneezed. That's a good place to hit the
Tim Doyle (18:14.862)
You've said that you've virtually never experienced stress. I wish I could say the same about myself.
Ellen Langer (18:21.838)
Virtually. Virtually. me tell you a story about that, which is I just told this once. Some of these, I keep trying to change the stories, but then the old ones come back and I try to change them at least slightly. This is kind of interesting and it speaks to everything we're saying. So, and stress, because it was a situation where in fact I was stressed. So,
Somebody who's very close to me is, this is at night, is going to stand on the first shelf of this giant armoire to see if there's anything on the top. When she does this, the armoire falls on her. As it falls on her, it forces her to the ground and she cracks her head on concrete. She's bleeding, heading up in there. She probably would be dead. She can't get out from under.
I was able, the armoire weighed easily on twice what I weigh. Not easily, let's say it's 150 % of what I weigh. It was a heavy thing. And I was able to lift it enough for her to get out. Now, what's interesting to me about this, when I told this story, because this happened just the end of March, people say, oh, it was the adrenaline. And I go crazy.
What do you mean it was the adrenaline? Adrenaline has a mind of its own, right? But the mind of the unity, well, you I lifted that thing. And when I lifted it, because I needed to, every part of me was organized to help in that event. Now the difference is I own it. So now I know I'm capable of much more than I would have thought, even with respect to simple weightlifting.
and so on. If I say it was the adrenaline, you know, how do you know when Mr. Adrenaline is going to come help you again? So what do you ask? I don't know if it answers. It's a fun story because it has a happy ending, so she's fine.
Tim Doyle (20:27.66)
really interesting.
Tim Doyle (20:33.674)
No, that was just really interesting, but I was also just marveling at the fact and it just seems like you just give off the energy of a person who, and it's clearly stemmed from the work that you've done as well, just somebody who doesn't necessarily get as stressed out as much as other people.
Ellen Langer (20:47.438)
Well, we're talking about stress. Well, it's interesting though, because I don't do the work and then change my life. It's noticing things about me or my response to things or other people's responses that differ, that lead to the studies in the first place. But stress, what people don't realize is, even though Epictetus said at first a long time ago, events don't cause stress.
What causes stress are the views you take of the event. Now, if you take a mindless view, this is going to be awful. How could you not be stressed? If you recognize their advantages, it all depends on the way you frame the information, you don't experience the same kind of stress. But a few things that your listeners might find helpful. One is the simple one-liner. Next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?
You know, this thing with the arm war was close to a tragedy, didn't it? But most of the things, I missed the appointment, you know, banged the car, I forgot I was supposed to go to your house, whatever, these are just not biggies. And so as soon as you ask that question, then you breathe a sigh of relief. But here's another little thing for people to do. In order to experience stress, two things have to happen. One is,
You're making a prediction that something will happen and two, that when it happens, it'll be awful. So next time you're stressed, ask yourself, give yourself three reasons why this thing you're fearing might not even happen. Cause you went from, my God, to maybe it won't happen and you tend to feel better right away. The next part is the more fun part, which is let's assume it's going to happen. How might that actually be an advantage?
Tim Doyle (22:43.139)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (22:43.338)
and frame it differently. then, you so you come after living a life like this to, you know, if it happens, it'll be good. If it doesn't happen, it'll be good. A funny story, I was telling another podcaster this, and I use as an example that, you know, so if my internet went out right now, all right, I'd go have lunch. Okay, so in this case, I'd go have breakfast because it's earlier. And then my internet went out.
Tim Doyle (23:12.664)
You
Ellen Langer (23:13.294)
You know, I think I have these powers that I'm still trying to harness.
Tim Doyle (23:17.536)
Yeah, you, you manifest that you manifested that into reality. And the thing that I find really interesting about the conversation is stress and bringing this into that mind body unity and really speaking about the body as well here. What I love most about your work, talk to me about how you think the root of sickness, illness and disease is mindlessness and stress.
Ellen Langer (23:39.118)
Yeah, no, I think stress is the major killer. Now, years ago, you know, people followed the hanging crepe philosophy, which was if somebody was dying, they would hang black crepe. so the translation of that was the medical world would give you the worst possible scenario. So, you know,
somebody you care about and say they're likely to die. Now, because if the person does die, you called it, if the person lives, that's wonderful. But if on the other hand, you say the person is going to live and the person dies, you're facing lawsuits. So much of the medical advice many, years ago was based on preventing lawsuits, save and face.
Okay, once we know that those expectations tend to be fulfilled and stressful, they can't and typically don't do that anymore. Everybody at this point knows that stress isn't good for you. I believe it's even more not good for you than most people believe. And I was going to do this work right before COVID with...
scholars in China, we didn't get around to doing it. And now, I don't know, we're talking to the Chinese these days or not, who knows, it always changes. But we were going to take people who were just diagnosed, it was very difficult study to do, and we wanted to get hundreds of people who were just diagnosed with cancer, different kinds of cancer. Now, if you ask, tell anybody, you know, tell me tomorrow that I have cancer, I'm not going to say, well, who cares, you know.
Clearly it's going to be a little stressful. However, some people deal with stress differently and some are able to handle it and understand it and do the sorts of things that I've been suggesting. My belief was that if we measure your stress level after, let's say, three weeks after the diagnosis, and we measure it once a month or once every two or three weeks, that that degree of stress will predict
Ellen Langer (26:05.42)
the course of the disease over and above nutrition, genetics, and even treatment. That's how important I think stress is. And every time I open a medical journal, which truth be told is not very often, but there's, you I always see a new study that implicates stress in some disease. we've gone from your thoughts are irrelevant to your health way back when.
to, yeah, there's some relationship to where I think it's the biggest part of the relationship. And the bottom line to that, Tim, is that if stress is a function of your views, not of events, that means we have complete control. You know, it's so much more control over our health. Now we went, you know, some of the earliest studies I did, I think I mentioned it, you we take elderly people, not that word,
ruffles now that I'm 78 years old myself. But okay, we take older folks and we teach them to be mindful. And it turns out they live longer. And we have so much evidence that even if you weren't living longer, you're living better. That when you're mindful, our data show you're charismatic, your relationships are better, your memory, you're more productive, everything.
Tim Doyle (27:05.518)
You
Ellen Langer (27:33.006)
50 years is a lot of time to do these studies. And the main thing is it's so simple. All you need to do is know you don't know. And you don't have to feel bad about knowing because nobody knows. That's the important thing. Because right now, you know when you don't know, but you think you're supposed to know. So you hide, you pretend, you get stressed. Nobody knows. Then everything is new again. And...
There's a way that I think in my life, this was before we had gamification, but that I always made everything more or less a game. And it was fun. Let give you a funny example that comes to mind. I was on the stage at graduation with all my colleagues, large number. And we didn't realize that they were going to be giving out the degrees to every single
discipline and sub-discipline at Harvard. And this was gonna be a long drawn out affair. everybody, so I just made it a game. said, Eastern studies, I said, five PhDs. Someone said six, someone says two. And the time went by very quickly. Everything can be enjoyed, but you don't enjoy it when you think,
my God, if I do it wrong, all hell is gonna break loose and I'm gonna, someone's gonna think I'm a moron or I'm going to lose out in some important way. The point is if you recognize that our emotions are choices and when we're mindful, we have many choices to make. Not just one in one is one or two, as you said, but one in one can also be 10.
If you're using a two-number system, one plus one is written as 10. So there are always choices, and you can always control your response to whatever is happening.
Tim Doyle (29:27.598)
Mm.
Tim Doyle (29:40.696)
The conversation on how stress manifests physically in the body is something that resonates with me on a deep, deep level. And some, and it was a vicious cycle that I was in for a long time where the stress was manifesting into really bad physical pain and a key part of how people can get out of that loop. And it's a phrase that I hadn't heard of.
Ellen Langer (29:59.278)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (30:09.612)
until I found your work, looking at mindfulness deeper from a physical health perspective, can you talk to me about the importance of symptom variability and how that can help people?
Ellen Langer (30:22.19)
Yeah, so it's very interesting that, you know, so when I talked about mind, body, unity in the book, it occurred to me, and I mentioned already that placebos are basically our strongest medicine. How can we give ourselves a placebo? But you can't because you can't fool yourself, give it and say, I'm going to make believe this is effective for you. So that's what I was trying to do because
if you recognize that when you take a placebo, the placebo isn't curing you, you're curing yourself. So how do you guess you can do this yourself and without somebody making believe that this pill is something that it's not and so on. And so we came up with, I came up with this attention to symptom variability. Now that sounds like a mouthful. All that means is noticing change. It's just being mindful. Mindfulness is noticing change.
Tim Doyle (30:58.542)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (31:21.838)
noticing differences. Okay. So now when you're diagnosed with some chronic illness, what people tend, I think, to believe is that their symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Nothing stays the same. There's always slight variation. Okay. So, you know, the stock market, if the stock market is going up, it doesn't go up in a straight line. It goes up, down, a little, up, know, and so on. Or down. It doesn't go down in a straight line, hopefully. At any rate.
It's the same thing with our symptoms. So what we did was call people who met with various diseases, one disease at a time, and we'd say to them, how is your symptom now? And is it better or worse than the last time we called? And why? Now several things happen with this. The first, when people have a chronic illness, they feel helpless. So now that they're engaged in this potential treatment,
Right away, you don't need to wait to have the final diagnosis or anything to do with the medical world. You stand to feel better. Second, as soon as you see that the symptom has changed, and it's not always terrible, you immediately feel better. Third, that when you ask the question, why is it better? You can even ask, why is it worse now? Why is it better? That engages you in a mindful search.
you know, what's different today? Was it the banana I ate, the fact that I slept an extra 20 minutes? And that itself is good for your health. And finally, I believe that you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. And we did this with serious disorders, Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and others, and in each case found significant reduction in symptoms.
And you can do this while you're taking medicine. There are no negative side effects of this, at least none that I can say. It's also the case for stress. There are some people who think they're always stressed. Nobody is always anything. So now how do you do this for yourself? Because I said I wanted to find something as if you're taking a placebo to help yourself. You don't have to have somebody else call you. Everybody has a smartphone.
Ellen Langer (33:46.35)
or borrow one or buy one, get it used when it doesn't matter, and set it to ring in a half hour. And when it rings, ask yourself, so how is the symptom now? Is it better or worse than the last time and why? Then set it to ring in an hour and 50 minutes. It doesn't matter, just keep varying the time. And you do this a week, two weeks, and it's amazing. So with the stress, you might say,
You think you're stressed all the time. Now your phone rings. Hey, well right now I'm not stressed. Why is that? Hmm, I'm not sure. You make some guesses. Then you said it rings again. And this time, Tim, you say you're really stressed and you realize you're talking to Ellen Liger. Okay, so we keep doing this and you say, you know, I'm maximally stressed when I'm talking to, the solution is easy. Don't talk to me. Right? Or talk to me differently.
And again, you're helping yourself because you don't feel helpless, because you're being mindful while you're doing it. So even if you don't come up with the ultimate answer, you're still going to be better off for having gone through the process.
Tim Doyle (35:01.506)
And I think what's really helpful there is that you become an observer of these sensations and curious about the sensations rather than identifying with it and being like, this is a part of who I am.
Ellen Langer (35:12.354)
Right, and also good, that's very good because in part what you also know, it's just a sensation. And what makes a sensation so scary is the assumption is that it's not going to go away by calling it pain, you know, and so on. Yeah, good for you.
Tim Doyle (35:30.56)
Yeah, and I'm speaking from personal experience here again. It's like, yeah, pain or these different things that we feel in our body, it's simply a sensation. But then it's our mind that creates the entire narrative and story behind that sensation, which exacerbates the feeling of that sensation.
Ellen Langer (35:49.496)
Yeah, we're constantly telling ourselves stories without the realization that there are 10, 20 other stories that would just as easily not fit the data.
Tim Doyle (35:59.214)
Yeah.
You've said that if you were to get sick you would go through the medical world but you wouldn't just
Ellen Langer (36:06.67)
Well, I wanted to make clear that, I have a great deal of respect for physicians. I teach these kids before they go to medical school and, you know, they're caring, smart people. And so I didn't want anything I was saying to diminish these people as a group, but nevertheless to offer an alternative to some of the medical care.
Tim Doyle (36:17.058)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (36:36.694)
And so yes, of course, if there were something the matter, I would go, but I wouldn't go the same way most people would go. I would not just turn myself over to people. I smashed my ankle many years ago and I was told that I'd never walk without a limp, but I don't listen well. And I forgot that I wasn't supposed to walk without a limp and I don't have a
it hasn't affected my tennis in any way and so on. You the main thing, and we go back to the horses don't eat meat, recognizing that all science gives us, which can be a lot, but it's not everything, is probabilities. So you run a study with a certain number of horses that are a certain degree of hungry, and you give them certain kinds of meat mixed with certain kinds of grain.
And you might find that most of those horses didn't eat it. Now that's a mouthful. So the only way you report that is say horses don't eat meat. But it's not true. It occurred to me earlier today, because I have an old dog, and they tell you small dogs maybe live to 18, 19. And so most people think, well, maybe 20.
How do they get these numbers? It's hard to imagine that if I were fabulously wealthy or even now fabulously busy or fabulously poor, that my dog died at 30, it would occur to me to let somebody know. In other words, we don't know the outliers. so whatever they would tell me,
Tim Doyle (38:07.074)
Yeah.
Tim Doyle (38:31.02)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (38:35.32)
would be likely I wouldn't take as this will happen. It wouldn't become a self-fulfilling prophecy. All right, that's one of the important differences. And I would be doing the attention to symptom variability. And I would be questioning and giving information about myself to know that every piece of medical information are based on norms.
what most people that they looked at in certain situations do feel experience. And in some ways, none of us is us. So I would let them know the way my life was not normative. know, yeah, period. I forget that period a lot.
Tim Doyle (39:21.454)
What are your thoughts on medical imaging and how that is perception based rather than or like MRI imaging and how we create these stories and narratives about them. But what we like to be told is this is what is.
Ellen Langer (39:30.882)
What do you mean by medical imaging?
Ellen Langer (39:40.494)
Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's like everything else that it's true sometimes for some people in some ways and it shouldn't be given to us as if we know just what this means because then people give up when in fact they might find solutions that the medical world is not aware of. know that had I been believed that I would have to walk with a limp I probably
it probably would have affected the way I walk. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, that there's some interesting data. People, turns out, can live longer when they're waiting for something, you know, their grandchild to get married or whatever. And yeah, there's some very real way we control an
Tim Doyle (40:30.414)
Interesting.
Ellen Langer (40:37.518)
you know, ourselves, our health, that it's just surprising we don't take advantage of it. And even with placebos, I was thinking about this again the other day, you know, that if you have some injury and you take a placebo and you heal, if you were told it was a placebo, you'd probably argue. You say, no, no, no, the pain was real because placebos have gotten a bad name. And placebos...
And they've gotten a bad name, I think, because of pharmaceutical companies. Because in order to bring a drug to market to make billions of dollars, that drug has to outperform a placebo. So you put the two on an experiment, damn it, that placebo was really good. But for the rest of us who aren't gonna make any money off these pills, I think we need to reorganize our thoughts to realize
just what we're able to do. And it's no different in some very maybe silly way. You know, you're a little kid and your father or mother is holding the back of the bicycle while you're pedaling along and you think they're there and they stop, you know, and then, but that child is taught to see, look, you can do it yourself. And that's the part of this that we haven't been taught that I'm trying to make people aware of.
Tim Doyle (42:04.128)
Everything really is up to interpretation and the question becomes, okay, how do we take control of that interpretation and make it work for us rather than against us? And when it's getting into physical health, you have this great quote in your first book that says, if one can reinterpret a painful stimulus and may cease to be painful, once the stimulus is reinterpreted, the mind is unlikely to return to that original interpretation. And that's exactly the process that I went through.
Not like knowingly, but looking back in it in hindsight. So like I said, I dealt with a lot of bad chronic back pain and I was told because of herniated discs, was shown this MRI image of like you have two badly herniated disc. That is what is causing your pain. And so I took that interpretation and it's not so much because I, you know, naturally created that interpretation, but that's just what I was told. And
Ellen Langer (42:36.686)
What happened to you?
Ellen Langer (42:45.678)
you
Tim Doyle (43:02.69)
So I thought my body's broken, know, I'm damaged. When I would feel pain would go into fighter flight mode, which would cause a lot of stress. And then as we've been talking about here, that stress manifested into more physical pain and it just created this vicious cycle.
Ellen Langer (43:11.373)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (43:24.13)
Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned the MRI, because you had asked me this and I had thought about doing a study. It'd be difficult to do and it may be unethical. I'm not doing it. if you were shown, let's say you have cancer and you see the tumor and let's say the tumor is, I don't know, two inches in diameter. And then a week later, you were shown another picture of your tumor.
but this one was doctored and you didn't know it. And the tumor was now half of that size. I think that people would then organize themselves and next time at the doctor, if it existed at all, it'd be even smaller.
Tim Doyle (44:08.718)
Well, the thing for me as well, so I was dealing with pain, but then didn't get the MRI image until like two months into feeling pain. And then when I got that image, the pain went through the roof. It skyrocketed because I had this confirmation now of like, there's this massive problem. But the fascinating thing is, it's a hypothesis, but I think if I got another MRI image today,
Ellen Langer (44:16.973)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Langer (44:22.156)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Doyle (44:38.934)
it would still look the same or even worse potentially. But mind body work and understanding mind body unity is what got me out of pain. And that's where that reinterpretation happened for me because I shifted from this pain is a problem. This pain means I'm broken to, okay, this pain is a message that I need to unpack and understand and observe rather than identify with and creating that.
detachment. And that's how I healed and the reason why is
Ellen Langer (45:13.294)
I would argue that if all that you're saying is totally authentic, that if you got that new MRI, you'd be pleased with what they saw. It would not be the same as the past. Because what you're doing with that is saying, you know, my mind is okay, my body is still pretty sick. And if we make it one thing, that as you're curing your mind, your body is healing.
Tim Doyle (45:41.678)
So you think that my MRI imaging would look better compared to the first time? Interesting. I would have to disagree, but.
Ellen Langer (45:45.07)
Yes, Well, me see. If you disagree, then you're going to win because what you're doing is controlling what it will look like. It's all one thing.
Tim Doyle (46:00.716)
Interesting.
Tim Doyle (46:04.514)
Yeah, interesting. Do you think when understanding mind, body, unity, it can only be truly appreciated through experience and more dire that experience, the better the understanding because like for me personally, I wouldn't have such a great appreciation for your work or I don't think I would understand these concepts as deeply if it wasn't just me like really.
Ellen Langer (46:06.057)
I'm glad you're feeling well.
Tim Doyle (46:33.354)
experiencing it on a deep level for myself.
Ellen Langer (46:36.846)
Well, you know, I've gotten so much feedback from so many people and I don't think that all of them or even half of them have had the kind of experience, physical experience you had. So that would argue against that. I think that we all have experiences in our own life. mean, the simple thing, you see somebody vomiting.
Nothing's happening to you. And all of a sudden you feel that you yourself are gonna regurgitate. How could that be? It's just a thought. And there are probably times where you just couldn't afford to get sick. You feel a cold coming on and you can't afford it right now. I mean, you're going out with this person for the first time, you've been looking forward to it for three years, or you've got this project, whatever it is. And then you just don't let yourself get sick.
And so there was this study I write about, not by me, or it was more a demonstration, but there were these people, there was this hospital where there was a ward that was called the Hopeless Ward. People were beyond hope. And what they were going to do was renovate the floor. And so to renovate it, they had to move all of the people. So now you're in the hopeless and now all of a sudden you're in the hopeless.
Right? But then the renovation was finished and they moved them back and then people died in some ways inexplicably. know, the power is real and everybody has examples of it. You know, we've all heard of people who were told they have six months to live and five years later, you know, they're still having a fine time with life.
So I think that if you were to read the mindful body, whether or not you've had any particular serious illness yourself, now also we all know people who've had these illnesses, but let's say you don't know any of those, that you then start looking for confirmation. That's a nice story. You want to get the confirmation, you're going to find it. It's all around.
Ellen Langer (49:02.446)
you know, how our expectations mislead us, how we thought we couldn't do something. Doesn't have to be a health related thing. And then all of a sudden we were able to do it. And you're just saying to yourself, why do I believe this? You know, when I was younger, there was a certain weight that I was and I believed, and I would, from that point gain 15 pounds and then lose 15. Okay. But, and I always felt I could never get thinner than that point. And then, you know, this would happen if I were listening to me now.
Okay. I'm just, why? Where does this come from? And, you know, and after that, I was able to lose more than that, 15 pounds, you know? So we just have to start asking the sort of questions. Where do we get this information from? Why are we so sure? Medical information are only probabilities. They're only maybes. Sometimes they're not absolutes. It's not the case for everybody. So why do I think it'll necessarily be the case for me?
And the main thing is when you think you can do something health-wise or just any other part of your life, and you go ahead and you try, the trying is the fun. You know, once you succeed, then it goes away. I mean, in an example I use too frequently, but I'll use it now one more time, that you're a little kid, you're in an elevator, you try to press that button, you can't reach it. An adult picks you up, you press it.
And this goes on and on, you still can't. Then eventually, now you're in that elevator and you can reach it. That's the end, right? When was the last time Tim Doyle, you were excited about pressing that elevator button, you know? So when we recognize that the end result is just not what we're after. What we're after is the experience of the challenges in life.
Tim Doyle (50:46.359)
time ago.
Ellen Langer (51:01.472)
challenges sound like, my God, if I miss bad things will happen. But again, we go back to no. Our experience is solely a function of the views we take. The more mindful, the more possible views you have available to yourself. And so there's everything to be gained by being mindful, nothing to be lost. And it's so easy. And it's what you're doing when you're having fun. You're not having fun.
when you're doing a crossword puzzle where you already know the answers, you know, or when you walk into an elevator for most people, pressing that button. For me, it's fun because I'll, you know, press it when no one is there without looking to see, figure out about where to make everything again. But mindfulness is energy we get in. It's fun. It's easy. And it's literally and figuratively.
Tim Doyle (52:00.31)
I love how you say that it's fun and easy to be mindful and having that perception on things because I think a lot of the time, this is something that I struggled with unknowingly and unconsciously for a while, like we think that the things that can have real benefits in our life or really help us like, this is going to be hard to do, or like, it's going to take a lot of work. And it's like, no, that's not the reality of it. I'm just putting that lens onto this.
Ellen Langer (52:28.216)
Well, if something is, takes a lot of effort, the feeling is it better pay off. But no, I agree with you that, what is the expression?
Tim Doyle (52:36.547)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (52:46.478)
I can't remember, but basically that if it's hard, it's worth doing. it's, it'll be my game for today and I'll call you and we'll go back in and put me back on air. At any rate, people have to understand that all sorts of wonderful things are happening to them when they're having fun.
And that, you know, we have these notions that I argue against about work-life. You know, people, some people say you should have work-life balance. What does that mean, Tim? That means that work has to be bad. So you have to balance it with some good things. Well, I couldn't imagine having a job where I'm doing that work 40 hours a week and hating it. I mean, life is too short.
And anything can be made fun. And if you can't find a way to make it fun, get out. And that, I'm still trying to find that phrase. It's so simple. At any rate. Yeah, that if we believe that work has to be bad. So you can believe work has to be bad.
but there's nothing you can do about it. Then the next level is, okay, if I add some fun time to my life, and that's better. But as I write in the mindful body, there's always a better than better solution. And what you want instead of work-life balance, I believe, is work-life integration. You want to be essentially the same happy person no matter what you're doing. And that doesn't mean, you know, that if you're doing some very serious thing, that you have to be laughing while you're doing it. But...
but you're not taking yourself to task when you're doing it. You're not worrying about whether or not you'll complete it. You're just totally engaged. And when you do that, again, the neurons are firing and everything in your life will improve.
Tim Doyle (54:56.984)
And I think that's one of the hidden benefits of going through physical ailments, because when you come to the realization of like, there's a lot of variability and interpretation here with what I'm feeling physically. And then you're able to use that framing as well. Like, where else in my life is that happening where I have an interpretation that really isn't working in my favor?
Ellen Langer (55:19.406)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (55:24.834)
Yeah, no, that's great. I wish people did more of that, but I tend to think they don't. But maybe after listening to you, they would.
Tim Doyle (55:35.15)
To take a step out of the conversation and understanding the trajectory of mind body unity in this space on a macro level and to use Schopenhauer's three stages of truth philosophy. So ridicule, violent opposition and accepted as self evident. I don't think we're in the accepted as self evident when it comes to mind body unity, but where do you see with this space and mind body unity like within that?
Timeline
Ellen Langer (56:05.422)
Well, I wouldn't dare try to make such a prediction, but I do believe we're getting closer to acceptance. I haven't gotten much pushback. I gave a talk, I guess, gee, it must have been 10 years ago already. And I thought it was just to these people who had cancer. And it turned out that about 20 % of the audience were physicians.
And when I found that out afterwards, went, no. But they applauded it, because they know they don't know. And so all I'm saying is, fess up. None of us know. Finding out is fun. Involve the people in their own health care. They should be making these decisions. And so I think we're moving further and further in that direction. I know when I started this, people weren't talking about
mind-body connection. And every time I hear it, go, okay, well, it's good. We're making some movement. know, because if you have mind and body that are unconnected, okay, how do they deal with each other? If they're connected, how are they connected? It's the same problem. But if at least everybody acknowledges mind-body connection, then it's a smaller step to mind-body unity. So I...
Tim Doyle (57:30.634)
That's really interesting because I'm still in the framework of mind-body connection and that's how I understand it. I'm just now taking those first steps to understanding it as mind-body unity.
Ellen Langer (57:44.206)
And when you understand it fully, then the degree of control you have explodes. So it's very exciting. And it's the kind of thing that once you get a taste of some of this, you want more. So it's not like it's going to last for, somebody called me, they were doing some thesis and they said, Dr. Langer, is mindfulness just a fad? I said, what, like the hula hoop?
I said, look, if every day you make toast and you burn the toast and someone shows you all you need to do is turn that dial a slight bit and you no longer burn the toast, is that going to go away unless you prefer burnt toast? No. You know, that it's all a matter of learning a different way of being that doesn't require any major shifts. It just requires accepting you don't know
Nobody knows that's kind of exciting and that you have choices that you haven't even explored. And there's so much more on the happy level that I talk about in the mindful body. We focus just on physical health, but there's a lot in the book about happiness, which itself now, if you're happy, that's going to affect your whole body.
You know, people drink to your health and happiness. And I don't know, you could argue maybe it should be to your happiness and health. But it's one thing.
Tim Doyle (59:24.386)
I like that notion of nobody knows, so let's collaborate over that unknowingness. Is there a question that you have that really energizes you or still drives your work forward?
Ellen Langer (59:37.726)
gosh, on every day, there are three or four things that happen that become interesting to me. You know, the other day there was a moth and I go to catch the moth and I didn't catch him. And then I thought, I'm smarter than that moth. Shouldn't I be able to catch him? And what's going on here? So I don't think I'm going to start studying moths, but I could imagine
that that simple little thing would say that what I'm doing is attending to where the moth is rather than where the moth is going. And perhaps in life, that's what we do too often. We respond without realizing we're gonna need another response. You say something bad, I hang up on you. And that's that. But if I thought that if I hang up on you, what's gonna happen next? Is that the end of our relationship? I don't want it.
and so on that maybe I would choose a different response. So they start with whatever is happening and then they grow and sometimes they die just as quickly. Some other thought comes to mind.
Tim Doyle (01:00:50.786)
bring another to bring another component into it because so we've been looking at things in terms of this dual relationship between mindlessness and mindfulness.
Tim Doyle (01:01:05.624)
To hypothesize here, I came up with like another term called mind-filledness, where it's like you're going past mindfulness in a way where it's like, okay, I'm just constantly focused on awareness to the point of just living in my head.
Ellen Langer (01:01:21.014)
Yeah, sure, sure. mean, you know, that when I generate dichotomy, you know, we could put in 12 different stages and, 14 different kinds of mindfulness, you know, and so on. It was hard to get enough to get people to just accept that most of the time they're mindless. certainly each time we do this, we learn something as long as we don't buy into these categories as existing independent.
Tim Doyle (01:01:40.586)
Yeah.
Ellen Langer (01:01:50.702)
But sure, I had thought that you can be mindful, you can be mindful about what you're being mindful. And perhaps there's a point where, I mean, I don't walk around noticing new things about things. I don't need to, because I don't think I know them. And I think, actually, the better lesson for people
is it's never to your advantage to be mindless. So you should always either, at every moment, either be mindful or potentially mindful. But as soon as you think you know, that's when you're in trouble.
Tim Doyle (01:02:33.046)
Most people know you as a professor of psychology. You have the title Mother of Mindfulness, but there's another title that I know you hold with great pride, which is that you've been considered an artist as well. How have creativity and painting played into your work?
Ellen Langer (01:02:52.268)
Okay, well, we don't have time to really go into that, but I wrote a book called I'm Becoming an Artist, which tells of my journey. And it's really a book about interpersonal mindfulness, which I think people would enjoy, although it has 20 of my paintings in there. And it was fun because when I gave the book to Random House, the title I had was Mindful Creativity.
they came back with on becoming an artist. And I, wow. Yeah. I loved it. I think the book would have done better had it been called mindful creativity because more people would have known what was actually about. But yeah, no, it's been fun. And what I would do, I still do it, but at the beginning I would paint and then I'd have some experience.
And then I wondered whether that experience was just me or was it more broadly true. And so then I'd run a study and so I'd be back and forth with all of it. That one piece of that that was important to me was about mistakes. That if you're mindful, you can't make a mistake because to make a mistake is to believe you're doing something different from what you were supposed to be doing and you can't know.
And so we do some research there with art where I was in the hospital with a smashed ankle and I'm painting and having a good time. And people need to understand that it was one of those kids who couldn't draw. So for me, this was at 50 years old, all of a sudden a brand new way of being. And the nurse kept watching and it's like she wanted in, but she didn't know how. I said, come paint with me. And then I said to her, know,
it doesn't become fun until you make a mistake. Because all of a sudden, if you make a mistake and you realize it makes no sense to go back to where you were, to try to make it work, because how do you know that that was a good place to be? But from that point, after you've made a mistake since it was unintentional, now you're in brand new territory. You don't have a plan and let it just unfold. And it's great fun. It's fun cooking.
Ellen Langer (01:05:15.414)
It's fun taking photographs. It's fun doing virtually anything as long as you don't follow a roadmap or a recipe to doing it.
Tim Doyle (01:05:25.538)
My last question for you is your book, Mindful Body was originally a memoir, but then it evolved into, as you say, an idea memoir. How much of your work is about having your ideas remembered rather than just yourself? And what do you hope people carry forward from those ideas?
Ellen Langer (01:05:43.022)
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, somebody else a while back asked me something similar, which surprised me. I'd never thought about that. I don't write anything for posterity. I don't think in terms of posterity. I think of right now, you know, that I said yes to your invitation in the hope that, you know, somebody will have some takeaway that'll be useful to them.
And so as far as me personally, as I've gotten older, my ego has come under control. I'm still not beyond, hey, I said that 20 years ago, which I hate myself when that happens, but so be it, it's not stripping. No, since I was a little girl, which you find if you read the book, it's all full of research and new ideas.
Tim Doyle (01:06:25.294)
Hahaha.
Ellen Langer (01:06:39.694)
But that I was lucky I had parents that were wonderfully supportive. I was a happy kid. I'm a happy adult. And as a little kid, I'm always, oh, why don't you look at it this way, you know, when somebody was unhappy. So I have a whole lifetime of this. And so in some sense, it feels with each book I write, it's a giving back. I think, you know, at this point, if people don't want to take it seriously, there's not much more I can do. You know, I'll come back.
spend more time painting. But I think that it feels good to think that somebody may take up on this information. it's very nice to live your life where I see myself as sharing, not selling. That I've told you, this is what I honestly feel. If you use it, wonderful. If you don't, that's up to you.
Tim Doyle (01:07:39.576)
is so beautiful about all your work too is that it's timeless and maybe not somebody there. There are people right now, but there might be somebody, you know, 30 or 40 years from now who comes across your work and it's like, wow, does that a profound impact on me? Ellen, it's been a real honor to be able to talk with you today. Where can people go to connect with you and see more of all the work that you're doing?
Ellen Langer (01:08:03.63)
Well, my website, Ellen Langer, I think it's .me, if you put .com, that'll also get you there. Or just Google my name and lots of stuff comes up. But I guess, you know, things are so sophisticated now, if you just ask Chad, what books have I written? Most of them will come up, not all of them. And yeah, so it's easy to find out about people and ideas these days. So that's...
helped me believe that we're in the midst of an evolution in consciousness and it's nice to play a part in moving that forward.
Tim Doyle (01:08:40.288)
Awesome, great talking with you today.
Ellen Langer (01:08:42.06)
Same here, thank you, Tim.
