#1 Harvard Psychologist: Use Your Mind to Heal Your Body

Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm going to say something that might sound too good to be true, but I want you to stick with me. What if the way that you think could change your physical health and improve how you feel, how you deal with stress? What if a simple shift in your mindset would boost your energy, enhance recovery, charge your immune system, make you heal faster, even slow down the aging process?

Mel Robbins: Well, Dr. Ellen Langer is here, and holy cow, she says, you better believe it can. She's the pioneering Harvard professor who says, after 50 years of research, it is very clear: your body follows what your mind believes. And look, feel free to bring all the skepticism you want. Dr. Langer is unshakable. She's going to convince you that this is true because she has the science. Your mind isn't just along for the ride, it's driving the car.

Mel Robbins: And look, this research isn't just sitting around in some journal collecting dust. It's having a profound effect on people around the world just like you. You are so much more powerful than you know. And today, Dr. Langer is going to teach you how to use your mind to heal your body and give yourself the gift of a happier, healthy life from the inside out.

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Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It's always such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just want to take a second and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.

Mel Robbins: Today, you're going to learn how to use your mind to heal your body based on 50 years of groundbreaking research done by a legendary professor at Harvard. Dr. Ellen Langer is one of the most respected psychology professors in the world. She earned her PhD from Yale, and she was the first female professor ever tenured in the psychology department at Harvard.

Mel Robbins: Dr. Langer is the author of 12 books, including her latest bestseller, *The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health*. Dr. Langer's groundbreaking work has also earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Distinguished Scientist Awards, the Liberty Science Genius Award, and some of the highest honors in psychology. She'll tell you that mindfulness is medicine, and she's here today to teach you how to unlock the power of your thoughts to heal your body. The legend, Dr. Ellen Langer. Welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Thanks for having me.

Mel Robbins: I am so thrilled you're here. I just can't wait to get into this. And I guess where I want to start is the person who is with us right now has made time. They have no time, but they've made time to be here with you, Dr. Langer, to learn from you. What might change about their life?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Once you understand what I mean by mindfulness and how easy it is—it has nothing to do with meditation—no matter what you're doing, whether you're doing a podcast, reading, eating, taking care of a child, playing tennis, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. Everything changes.

Dr. Ellen Langer: I had this slide when I used to give these lectures, as I still do. And I say on the slide, virtually all of our problems, whether personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect consequences of our mindlessness. Now, it's interesting because then I tell them, just among us and the other 10 million people I've said this to, I really mean all. So that's enormous, right? I'm saying all of our problems are a result of our mindlessness. So if we're able to get people to understand how easy it is to change their mind, to become more mindful, whatever ails them should dissipate.

Mel Robbins: So what made you want to study the mind-body connection in the first place?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Let me tell you three stories. [Mel laughs] Okay. So I got married when I was obscenely young. Don't tell anybody. And we go to Paris on our honeymoon. We're in this restaurant and I order a mixed grill. On the plate was pancreas. So I asked my then husband, which of these is the pancreas? He was more sophisticated than I. He points to that. I eat everything. I'm a big eater. Now comes the moment of truth. I still don't understand why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas. But somehow I felt as a young person, a sophisticated woman of the world, because I was now married, should eat it. I start eating it and I literally get sick. He starts laughing. I said, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas earlier.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Okay, so I had made myself sick. Now, we go to my mother who had breast cancer, and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the end game. The medical world was no longer treating her. She became crippled because they weren't going to exercise her limbs, which made sense if you assumed she was going to die. And then magically, the cancer was totally gone. So somehow I made myself sick. She made herself well. And of course, during those times, I hadn't yet conceived of mind-body unity.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But I had another story that was kind of fun. I think I tell it in *The Mindful Body*, but I haven't told it on a podcast before. So when I was about 14, I had a friend and I lived in Westchester and I had a friend who lived in the Bronx, and she was 15 or 16. So she was in charge because she was the older woman. And I would go visit her every Saturday. And every Saturday, for whatever reason, we'd go and have, she would have a hot fudge sundae or a banana split. Now, I was always on a diet, so I never had it. Nevertheless, while she was eating, I was eating it with her in my mind. And I swear to you, Mel, that when she was finished, I was full.

Dr. Ellen Langer: These things together suggest in each case that here I'm thinking that I'm eating, but I'm not eating, and my body is feeling satisfied. I think I'm eating this pancreas, and it's chicken, which I love, and then I get sick. Or my mother, however she did it, where the pancreatic cancer goes away.

Mel Robbins: So do you believe your mom healed herself based on her thoughts?

Dr. Ellen Langer: It wasn't based on anything the medical world could explain. So what else is left? So those are examples of things that happened before you could articulate this theory about mind-body unity.

Mel Robbins: So how do you articulate the theory now?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes. Your mind. People have no idea, I think, in general about what we're capable of. The power is enormous. And so the way I encapsulate this to make clear it's our physical well-being as well as our emotional, mental way of being is to question what people mindlessly accept without knowing they're accepting it, which is mind-body dualism.

Mel Robbins: Mind-body dualism?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Dualism.

Mel Robbins: What does that mean?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Exactly. Nobody knows what it means, but everybody acts. That's why you're here. [Mel laughs] Exactly. Everybody acts as if this is true. You have a mind and you have a body, as if these are separate. All right. And so if they're separate, you run into the problem of how do they speak to each other. Now, everybody knows that the mind is affecting the body in some way. Well, we know that because if you're stressed out, if you're ruminating, if you get really negative, you know that it makes your body feel bad.

Mel Robbins: Yeah.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But, you know, you see somebody vomiting, and all of a sudden you feel like you're going to regurgitate, and there's no reason except that person has stimulated this. So you're walking down the street in the fall, a leaf blows in your face, and all of a sudden you're startled. Your blood pressure and pulse increase until you say, oh, it was just a leaf. So we have lots of experiences like this.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But way back when, the medical world believed that psychology was independent of health. And I'm sure doctors in the past still wanted you to be happy. But I think that they believed it was totally separate from the disease process. In the medical model, the belief was to get a disease, you have to have the introduction of an antigen. Now, people, and I think that I might have had some part in bringing it about, although people still get it wrong, when they talk now about the mind-body connection.

Mel Robbins: What do they get wrong?

Dr. Ellen Langer: We have two separate things. Now they're connected. Well, the reason it's wrong, how are they connected? How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called a body? And you can't explain it. I say, wait, these are just words. This is going to sound silly, but you could have had mind, body, and elbows. And then we consider people in a different way. Let's just put mind and body back together. You're one person. It's one thing. Now think of it, if it's one thing, wherever you're putting one, mind and body, you're putting the other. What that means is that our minds have enormous control over our bodies. And once we recognize that, then we can harness some of our own power and cure many of the disorders or certainly help along many of the problems that afflict too many of us.

Mel Robbins: So when you use the word mindful, though, you're not talking about meditation. You've got a very different definition for what mindfulness is when you're talking about the power of your mindset and its ability to influence your body. Dr. Langer, what does mindfulness mean to you?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Okay, yes, very important. So when people hear the word mindfulness, in spite of the fact that I've been doing this for over 50 years, people still think of meditation. Meditation is fine, it's just different. To meditate, you take yourself out of the world and you sit still for 20 minutes twice a day. It's a practice. And what it's supposed to do, it's not mindfulness, it's supposed to lead you to become more mindful. Mindfulness, as I study it, is not a practice, it's just a way of being. And it results from a deep, deep, but easy, appreciation of the power of uncertainty.

Dr. Ellen Langer: We're taught by our parents, by schools, everything you read, they're giving us these absolutes, these rules, as if we know that this thing is true right now is going to be true forever. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So we can't know. Now, this came to mind to me years ago, but it's really, for me, was a very important incident. I'm at this horse event. Remember that I'm a straight A student, obnoxiously so, right? And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog? Wait a minute. Horses don't eat hot dogs. They eat carrots, they eat grains. They don't eat meat. But I say yes because I say yes to virtually everything. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that's when I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Now, a normal person would be scared about that. For me, I was thrilled because that opened up a world of possibilities. And then I thought about it. And people don't know a lot about science, but what's very important for people to understand is science only gives us probabilities. All right, so if you were to do this experiment with horses, you'd have most horses of this kind weighing this amount on this particular day who've been not eaten for this number of hours, given this amount of grain mixed with this amount of meat, when you do all of that, most of them don't eat meat. It's a mouthful. So it's shortened. Horses don't eat meat. Correct. And that's the way we live our lives.

Dr. Ellen Langer: And the hard part is that everything you mindlessly took in when you were younger is firmly there guiding your behavior when you're older. And just think about it. Do you want your 30-year-old self, what you're doing, to be dictated by your 15-year-old self? Or your 30-year-old self to dictate what's coming when you're 40 and 50 and 60? And we're oblivious to all of this. So years of research, close to 50 years of research, has shown me virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. And when you're mindless, you're not aware that you're not there. So you're not there, but you don't know that you're not there. And so if you were to say, do horses eat meat? You'd say, no, horses don't eat meat. It would just be a natural response, but it would be wrong, at least in some context.

Mel Robbins: Dr. Langer, when you become more mindful, what benefits do you see in your life?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, the first thing is that you're engaged. You're awake. You're no longer responding like a robot. So you are. And I wrote a book a while ago on becoming an artist and shared the journey. And as you start to paint or do some new activity, if you let yourself become totally engaged, it's exhilarating. And then let's say the phone rings and all of a sudden your mood changes. And so you realize, wow, how you are. More typically, people take as a baseline being mindless. When you're not feeling energetic, excited, or at least peaceful, you're not being mindful. So to feel any of those things when you're happy, a robot isn't happy, a robot isn't relaxed, a robot isn't serene. So anytime you're feeling not like a robot, you're experiencing the joys of being mindful. And again, it's so easy. All you need to do is be there and recognize that the world we've been brought up in has taught us how not to be there. Not be there, I think, in some ways to turn control of our lives over to other people.

Mel Robbins: For somebody that may be listening somewhere around the world, and they've never even considered that what they're experiencing in terms of their day-to-day life is that sort of robot mindlessness that hasn't even entertained the thought that there's an entirely different way to experience your life starting today.

Dr. Ellen Langer: When people rush someplace, just slow down, not as a rule, just to see that everything is still going to work. You still have the same eight hours at work or 24 hours to be alive in a day, and your mood, your racing is not going to make it happen any better, any faster. Just to recognize you have options. Every time you call something by some name, call it by a different name. Take every taste that doesn't appeal to you and make it tasty for yourself. I don't know. It seems to me so sad that people just go about their business oblivious, oblivious to all of the joys that are right before them.

Dr. Ellen Langer: This is a nice takeaway that people often seem to get lost not realizing. Life only consists of moments. That's all it is, moments. And so what am I going to do for the next 20 years now that the kids are out of the house? Or what am I going to do now that I'm retired? Just take care of the moment. And then the next moment, and before you know it, you've had a life lived well.

Mel Robbins: Wow.

Dr. Ellen Langer: When we're mindless, we just think we know. And so we're oblivious to all the ways things could be different from what we know. So if you're playing a sport and you're taught, this is the way you hold the tennis racket. For many people, they think that is the way, but who decided? When I give lectures, sometimes I'll ask, is there a tall man in the audience? For reasons I don't understand, Mel, there always is. A six foot five guy. I ask him to come to the stage. So here I am at 5'3", here he is at 6'5". We look ridiculous together, right? I ask him to put his hand up. He puts his hand up. His hand is three inches longer than mine. Then I just raise the question, should we do anything similar, anything the same way, anything physical the same way? And I don't think so.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Now's the important point, especially for your female listeners. If he created the rules for how to do this, the more different I am from him, the more important it is for me not to do it exactly that way. For me to change it ever so slightly so that it more meets my own needs, physical being and so on. And yet we just go through the world. This is the way you do it. This is the way.

Dr. Ellen Langer: One of the titles of the book that you have there that I'm very excited about, *The Mindful Body*. When you write a book, then you have to think, what should you call it? And one of the names for the book early on was *Who Says So?* And that's what one of my pieces of advice to all of the adults listening. At some point, become your three-year-old self again. Who says so? Who decided this? Because it turns out that everything that is, everything, was at one point a decision. That means somebody said it should be like this. And as I'm saying now, the more different you are from that person, the more important it is for you not to mindlessly fall in line. Just accept that everything is uncertain.

Mel Robbins: So for the person who's just starting to have their mind open up—wait a minute, all these absolutes, I believe I could think something different. Could you give a couple examples of what this might look like day to day in someone's life? You've already said, well, who said that? Who says as an example, to challenge your own thinking?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, when you're about to do anything new, somebody says, this is how you do it. You have to recognize, well, that may be how you do it, but not necessarily the best way for me to do it. When people say virtually everything, lots of people buy into the notion that as you get older, it all falls apart. To me, it just gets better and better. When you think about it, Mel, so you're two years old, you scrape your knee and you're crying bloody murder. You're five or six, Johnny or Jane doesn't send you a Valentine's, you're going to be rejected for life. You're 13, you have a pimple. Life is over. The belief, as you get older, it falls apart. Believing that mindlessly often leads to it falling apart.

Dr. Ellen Langer: I'm at the age, I'm 78, and lots of my friends now talk about senior moments, which is cute that we have a name for it. You can't remember something. Part of the reason you can't remember is because you know so much. If you only know one thing, it's probably easy to remember it. But at any rate, they see themselves forget and then they worry, are they going to get dementia? And so that worrying helps facilitate more forgetting because now you're not taking in the information, you're worried about whether you're going to be able to retain it, and so on. And then you withdraw a little from other people because you don't want to be seen this way. And it just snowballs rather than recognize that when you were young, you probably weren't infrequently forgetful either.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So I teach a health course at Harvard, a big lecture class. And I teach it on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings. And on Thursday, before I'm going to do the health lecture, I ask the students, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday? Nobody knows. The thing is, the difference is when you're 20, you don't care that you don't remember. When you're 70, oh my goodness, is this the beginning of the end?

Mel Robbins: Could you offer some examples that you've seen in your research?

Dr. Ellen Langer: So let's take the word try. Well, try sounds good, right? It's certainly better than giving up. I'm going to try. But you wouldn't try to eat an ice cream cone. You just eat it, right? So trying has built into it an expectation for failure. So we did a study where we have one group try whatever it is, many different tasks. Another group, they're told to just do it. The doing group always outperforms it. And then somebody told me, that's the Yoda study. I said, oh, yes, okay, great. I don't have to be the first for any of these things. It's always nice when other people have the same ideas. But the point of it is to recognize how often we underestimate ourselves. When you're trying, how often we think we can't do it.

Dr. Ellen Langer: And people have it all wrong. People think they want to be expert. Now, if being expert means you're 100% successful, consider this. You're a little kid. You're in the elevator. You're trying to press the button. You can't reach it. So the adult with you picks you up. You press the button. And this keeps going. You get taller and even closer and closer to it. Great fun. Now, when was the last time, Mel, you walked in an elevator and were excited about pressing the button?

Mel Robbins: Never. Unless I'm going to bed after a long day of work at the hotel.

Dr. Ellen Langer: The point is we can either do things imperfectly mindfully or perfectly mindlessly. We don't want to be able to do—we think we want to. You're playing golf. You think you want to be able to get a hole in one every time you swing the club. And the first two games might be fun. But after that, there's no there there. If you want to win at tic-tac-toe, play it against a four-year-old. We gravitate towards things that are going to be challenging. And the problem is that I think we've confused what we call work and play.

Dr. Ellen Langer: I hear people, so it's the same thing. There's a bad, better, but there's a better than better way in my view. So we have work and we have life, whatever that means to people. And then somebody comes along and says, we should have work-life balance. You shouldn't be all work and no play. I said, no, what you want is to have work-life integration. You want it to be one thing. You want to be the same person you are at work and at play. Sometimes play, you got to take it seriously. And when you work, you have to learn not to take yourself so seriously. But we've been taught there are things that are hard, that are unpleasant, that we just have to get through it. And I disagree. I make everything a game.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Let me give you an example of this. It seems to be so silly. I don't know if my colleagues will appreciate it. But a few of us, a couple of years ago, graduation, we found ourselves on the stage. I don't remember why. And then didn't realize we had to sit there through the whole graduation. So that means Harvard is a big place. And every area was giving their awards. And they thought, oh my God, how are we going to endure this? So the next award was PhDs were given in East Asian Studies. I said, there'll be four PhDs. My friend says, there'll be six. There'll be two. And then there were, and we just kept, and it became fun. And it became easy to sit there.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But why is it important? Well, it's important because for many reasons, once you think you know, you don't pay any attention. And things are constantly changing. And when you're mindless, you can't take advantage of all of the wonderful things around you. And you can't avoid the pitfalls because you're essentially not there. To me, if you're going to be there for something, to do it, you should show up for it. And that only then can you reap the rewards of being part of the activity. But I'm making it sound too confusing. You want to be a machine or do you want to be a person? And when you're happy, you're a person. When you're playing games, when you're enjoying yourself, if you're listening to me and there's something I've said that's interesting to you, at these times you're being mindful.

Dr. Ellen Langer: When you're being mindful, the neurons are firing, you're engaged. Go walk outside. You've walked outside of your place every day for however long. Notice three new things. Three isn't magic. Six new things. Two new things. And all of a sudden, how come I pass this every day? Why didn't I see that? Next time you're with your best friend, your spouse, notice three new things about them. And you just keep noticing new things about the things you thought you knew. And at some point you come to see, hey, I didn't know it as well as I thought I did. And then your attention naturally goes to it.

Mel Robbins: Dr. Langer, this is wild, like in the best possible way, because you're flipping everything that we believe on its head. I thought I knew about the body, but the idea that your mind can help you heal your body, that the way that you think can change how you recover, how you react to stress, even how you experience illness, that is so cool. So here's what I want to do. Let's take a quick pause and don't go anywhere because we got so much more jaw-dropping research from Dr. Langer when we return. Stay with us.

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Mel Robbins: Welcome back. It's your friend Mel. And today you and I are learning from world-renowned psychologist, Professor Ellen Langer, who says you can heal your body with your mind. And when you do, you teach yourself how to feel better in your body, and you will see and experience the world differently. So Dr. Langer, you've done just remarkable landmark research on this. You mentioned 50 years of research. One of the most fascinating studies, at least for me, was involving elderly men.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So the idea was if we can take the mind and put the mind in a younger place, and take our measurements from our bodies, will we get any effect? So what we did was we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier, and we had elderly men live there as if they were the younger souls. Now, it's interesting because they're around 80, but that was not when 80 is now the new 60. They were really old. In fact, when they would show up to see if they could be in the study, they'd come in and I'd think, why am I doing this? Because I didn't know if they were going to be able to live through the day. And so I set them up at this retreat where I'm in charge of everything in their lives. I mean, if I realized then what I was taking on, but I'm glad that I did it because the results were very exciting.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So basically, we have old men living in this place. Not Hollywood, because I couldn't afford it. But as well as we could make it seem as if it was 20 years earlier.

Mel Robbins: Got it. So they're like living in a building where it looks like, oh, wow, I've gone back in time.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah. And so they would be speaking about the Cuban Missile Crisis and other events of the past as if it was just happening. And they'd be watching television shows and movies from the past as if they had just been produced. As well as we could, we took them back in time. In a period less than a week, what we found was their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked noticeably younger.

Mel Robbins: What? All without any medical intervention.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So it was very exciting. Now, this is a famous study, Mel, and as I'm fond of saying, isn't it obnoxious for me to call my own study famous?

Mel Robbins: No, because if you turn on *The Simpsons* Go to Havana, they talk about the study. So that study has been out there for a while now.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So what does that tell you? Like when you saw this and you're like, less than a week, I make somebody think and act and talk like they're younger. What it tells me is that our thoughts are preventing all sorts of very positive behaviors. What happens is, so you go to the doctor and you take the Snelling eye chart.

Mel Robbins: A who?

Dr. Ellen Langer: It doesn't matter. You look at the eye chart.

Mel Robbins: Oh, the E and the Fs and the Gs and the Hs?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes, okay. Now, a normal person just answers what letter it is. For me, I say, wait a second. This thing is rigged. As you go down, they're creating the expectation from me that soon I'm not going to be able to see. I say, what would happen if we reverse the eye chart where now the letters get larger and larger, thereby changing my expectation to soon I'll be able to see? And when we do that, people can see what they couldn't see before.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But just think about it. You go and you're reading letters that have no meaning. I'm sitting there looking at shapes. I'm like, is that an I or an H or a flip or a Y? Is that a J or a J? Yeah. And it's in black and white. What does that have to do with the real world? I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I can see that restaurant sign very far in the distance. Colors are different from black and white. Things that are moving are different from things that are still. For me personally, I see best, I believe, probably around 10, 11 o'clock in the morning rather than 4 o'clock in the afternoon. But that's not what happens. You go to the doctor. You can't see for whatever reason. You're given a prescription. And then you put on glasses, which are now going to ensure that your eyes don't get better on their own.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So we take the eye chart. Now, most people believe when you get about two-thirds of the way down, now you're not going to be able to see. So that's a mindset, right? So what we did, we started the eye chart a third of the way down. So now two-thirds of the holy constant, the two-thirds part, but they're much smaller letters. And again, people could see what they couldn't see.

Mel Robbins: So you took away the big stuff. You started with the middle layer, and that tricked people into being like, oh, I can do the top layer.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Exactly. So the whole point is to recognize that who says you can't do it? And you don't want to be able to do everything perfectly because then it's like playing tic-tac-toe with a five-year-old. You're always going to win, but there's no there there.

Mel Robbins: So based on the years of work, because my mind is now, I feel like I have popcorn popping in my brain as I'm grabbing onto these ideas and entertaining the possibility that I know nothing.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Nobody knows anything, right? Nobody knows what's going to happen. And how that's exciting, even though it used to be terrifying, right? But the reason we have to understand that it's exciting is because we don't have to be afraid of quote, negative consequences. Because consequences in and of themselves are not good, they're not bad, they're just events. But when we frame them as awful, then we're going to experience them as awful. All you want is to constantly be inspired, excited, engaged in something. And when you're not sure, it's easy to become engaged. If you knew what I was going to say next, why listen to me?

Mel Robbins: You have a reading from your book, page 53 of *The Mindful Body*.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Oh, 53, yes, I remember it well. It's called "Just Try Harder."

Mel Robbins: Yeah.

Dr. Ellen Langer: "If we find that something is unpleasant to do, we may try to overcome the feeling and do it anyway. Given that the taste is in our head and not in the task, thinking differently about it is likely to be more successful."

Mel Robbins: Right. So we have to get rid of the idea that there are good things and bad things, things I like, things I hate, people I like, people I hate, tastes that are good for us, bad for us. All of this is a function of our mindsets.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So how do we—you did this incredible study that you ran at a hotel with housekeepers.

Mel Robbins: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Ellen Langer: So this is the second study in testing the mind-body unity idea. Okay. So here we take housekeepers who, first thing we did was ask them, how much exercise do you get? Now, these are women cleaning hotel and motel rooms all day long. Oddly, they say they're not getting any exercise. And that's because they think exercise is what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired.

Okay, so now we take these women, divide them into two groups. One group, we're going to teach them that their work is exercise. They're told, you know, working at the gym on this machine is like making a bed is like working on the machine. We teach them that everything they're doing is, in fact, exercise. So very simple studies. We have two groups. One group that now knows their work is exercise. The other group that doesn't realize their work is exercise. We take a host of measures before we start and at the end. The two groups are not eating any differently. One group isn't working any harder. They're basically the same except one group believes their work is exercise. As a result of that change in mind, they lost weight. There was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down from changing their minds.

Mel Robbins: Why do you think that happens? Is there something about the lack of stress or judgment that shifts?

Dr. Ellen Langer: There may be some explanation like that, but I believe that our minds and bodies are one. And if our mind is set to see what we're doing as something good for us, it'll generally be good for us.

Mel Robbins: I think that makes sense because if you see it as something bad for you, you're creating a stress response. And nothing itself is good or bad. So you can take anything. This comes to mind, but it was just so ridiculous. But I remember doing something for somebody years ago, and I thought I was being so generous. And she was a very negative person, and she thought it was grandiose, which I imagine that I guess it was because most people wouldn't go to that length. So you can take anything, even this gesture that was coming from kindness, and make it into something negative. And you could take negative. It doesn't reside in the thing.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Got it. It resides in the way we appreciate or show a lack of appreciation for the thing.

Mel Robbins: Well, there's really interesting research about optimism and pessimism.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah, because when you're optimistic, you're more mindful. You know, when you're optimistic, you interact with people. You're not afraid of people. You're expecting good things. So you're out there in the world being. When you're pessimistic, you cut yourself off more or less. You see everything is negative. You're bracing for the worst to happen instead of saying. And that's very important. You have these people who are called defensive pessimists. So they're always, you know, prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.

Mel Robbins: But hope is interesting. Talk to me about hope.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Okay. I love language. So hope sounds good, right? Hope is certainly better than being hopeless.

Mel Robbins: Yes.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But when I get up in the morning and I go into the kitchen, I don't hope there's going to be coffee. So again, hope also has built into it a negative expectation. I know that there's going to be coffee. And if it turns out there isn't, all right, so what? I'll deal with it. But to believe in all these negative things is a burden. So the defensive pessimist, you see, when you recognize that things in and of themselves are neither positive or negative, when you're defensively pessimistic, you're seeing the negative, and that's going to have an effect on you. And those things could have just as easily even seen otherwise.

Mel Robbins: Why is it important to believe that things turn out, even when you're in a moment in your life, you know what I mean, where things are really, because I'm sure that there are people that are not, that look at the surface takeaways of your work, and they're like, ah, toxic positivity, think positive, think positive, think positive, but that's not what you're saying.

Dr. Ellen Langer: No, not at all. Some of the positivity follows from what I'm saying, but it's certainly not the major message. And the thing that came to mind, and I don't know if this is a good example, is the trend and the number of people that are in their 20s and 30s that I hear saying, well, based on climate change and based on this and based on that, I don't know if I'm going to have kids because I don't know if I want to. And so I can hear the rigidity in that absolute statement.

Mel Robbins: Yeah.

Dr. Ellen Langer: You can't know. You think you can know. People don't realize that prediction is an illusion. We don't know. You know, so I, an example, say Michael Jordan and I are going to have a foul shooting contest. All right. So you'd put your money on Michael Jordan. But, you know, if we're going to shoot 100 baskets, surely he'd win. We're going to shoot one basket. Is he going to win? He sometimes misses. I sometimes make it. Also, what if he said to himself, let the old woman win? What is it going to cost him? There are so many ways of understanding how I could make that basket. You can't predict what's going to happen. Remember, as I said before, science only gives us probabilities. So when I have this medicine that I've given to hundreds of people to test the efficacy of the medicine, it's not the case that it works for every single person there.

Mel Robbins: You know, in the example of the basketball, what I find exciting about that example is that I won.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes, anything could happen.

Mel Robbins: Right. Anything could happen.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Right. Oftentimes it doesn't, but anything could happen.

Mel Robbins: And what I'm starting to really take away. And it doesn't matter. That's what people have to understand. You engage in it in order to hopefully bring about some event. But if you're doing it mindfully, you're enjoying the journey anyway. Based on your many years of work, are there other studies that you love that are less talked about that you think are important for us to know about, that the results were exciting to you in the mind-body unity?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, in mind-body unity, the most recent that my graduate student Peter and Uncle and I recently did. So we inflict a wound, not a big wound, because we're not sadists and the higher-ups wouldn't let us do it anyway.

Mel Robbins: We were.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Okay. But we inflict a minor wound and individually, the person, the wounded person is in front of a clock and unbeknownst to them, the clock is rigged and it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time or real time. And the question we're asking is, does that wound heal based on clock time, perceived time, or real time? And the answer is perceived time.

Mel Robbins: You know, I mean, just think of that. Well hold on. Let me just ask. So that means that the person who watching the clock that is sped up meaning their perception of time is that time is passing quickly. Oh two hours just went by.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah.

Mel Robbins: That they heal more quickly.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah.

Mel Robbins: And you're measuring the body response physically?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah.

Mel Robbins: That physically your healing mechanism speeds up?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah, well, just think about it. That when, you know, you ask a doctor, let's say you break your arm, and you ask the doctor, how long is it going to take to heal? I don't know how long this takes, but let's make it up. Four weeks. Five weeks. Six weeks. I don't know. Which one do you want? Let's take the average. Six. Sounds horrible. You want six? Okay, well, take five because I'm in charge now. Okay. So the doctor tells you it's going to take five weeks to heal. You can't possibly believe that everybody who's broken their arm is going to take five weeks to heal. You know, if somebody is an Olympic athlete and somebody else is a couch potato, it doesn't feel like they're both going to, you know. So what is determining who heals more quickly? There's always some give. And what we do is we align ourselves with this absolute, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We did so many of these mind-body studies, a study on diabetes. We take people who have type 2 diabetes. We give them a host of tests. We're now going to have them sit in front of a computer, and we're asking them to play computer games. This will all be clear in a moment. And there's a clock next to the, I'm big on clocks, a clock next to the computer. And we tell them, we want you to change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. So they have to look at that clock. The clock is rigged. So for a third of them, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third, they're going half as fast. And for a third, it's real time. Then we assess their blood sugar level. Blood sugar level follows perceived amount of time, not real time, whatever that is, because the mind and body are a single unit.

Mel Robbins: Huh. That's amazing. Let me tell you a story about something that happened recently that people are going to get crazed with this, but that's part of the reason I'm telling it. Okay. So my partner and I are leaving Mexico, we have this giant armoire. She steps on the shelf of the giant armoire because she wants to see if there's anything that she put on top, okay, to hide. The armoire now forces her to the floor, knocks her head onto the concrete floor. Okay. She's trapped by this armoire that weighs twice what I weigh. If I hadn't been there, she would have bled to death. Okay. So it's imperative. I have to lift this thing that weighs twice what I weigh. And I'm able to lift it enough for her to get out from under. Now, when I tell this story that it's not yay me, that people say, oh, it's the adrenaline. It drives me crazy. As if adrenaline has a mind of it. Oh, adrenaline, please come. You know, I need you now. It's all one thing. My adrenaline, my biceps, my fingers, everything. It's all one thing working in a coordinated way to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. When we get fooled into, in my view, mind-body dualism, then somehow it's my mind and my body. They're separate and I have to figure out how to organize them and we give up a lot of control.

Another very important example that's out there, not our research, is on the placebo. Just everybody accepts that a placebo is effective. I think it's our most effective medicine. So what's going on? You take this nothing, you think it's something, and then it acts like something. In fact, the chambermaid study that we talked about is a nocebo, which most people don't understand.

Mel Robbins: Yeah, what is a nocebo?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Nocebo is you do something, but you think it's nothing, and it wipes out the effect. So they're getting the exercise, but they don't realize that it's exercise, and so it doesn't have the effect. Okay, so we can bring it about. We can make it disappear. The control we have over our health and well-being is enormous. You add that to what I was saying before about everything that is was at one time a decision, which means it's mutable. Everything can be changed. If something doesn't work, change it.

Mel Robbins: The super interesting thing that you said about the placebo is that that is a concrete example of mind-body unity.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Of mind-body unity.

Mel Robbins: And simply believing that it's working physically made it work in study after study after study.

Dr. Ellen Langer: But you know what happened is that placebos get a bad rap. Because if somebody gets better with a placebo, says, no, no, the pain was real. As if we have a mind and a body, and that body was really experiencing pain, and now all you've done is screwed around with my mind. It's one thing. You also can't sell the drug if the placebo works.

Mel Robbins: Well, that's what I'm going to say. That's, in my view, the reason that placebos get a bad rap. If you're part of a pharmaceutical company, you have to do a trial with real medication and a placebo. And in order to bring this drug to market to make billions of dollars, that drug has to outperform the placebo. You're not rooting for the placebo. And nevertheless, even when it does outperform, the difference is often small. So many people getting help just by this sugar pill. And then when you say to people, look, if it's not the pill that's making you better, what's making you better? The belief. We're making ourselves better.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Right.

Mel Robbins: I mean, you can't give yourself a sugar pill because, you know, it's fake. But what you're saying, Dr. Langer, if you want to apply this research to your life, you're saying that you can use the mindfulness, self-awareness, and noticing that you're talking about, that it's been proven in studies. Simply notice your symptoms, ask yourself why you may feel better or worse. Just doing that over the course of time, based on the studies, can decrease the symptoms that you feel and make you feel physically healthy. That's incredible. Do not discount the power of the mind-body unity and your own thoughts and beliefs. In fact, you have done remarkable work challenging the language that healthcare professionals use because it does matter based on the research. So how should you talk differently about your health? Can you share about some of that?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah. Well, one of the things that bothered me is when people have cancer and then the cancer is gone and the medical world tells you it's in remission. Now, that was fine years ago, decades ago, before we knew that stress was crucial to one's physical health. And the reason for that is that when you're told it's in remission, you're happier than it's active.

Mel Robbins: It's true, but it sounds like it's going to come back.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Exactly. And so what are you, you're scared. So it started from me as most of my things in real life. I go to visit my friend, my friend Eva. She has a terrible case of cancer. I go see her and she had just come back from Mass General. I said, how are you? She said her cancer's in remission. And then the bell went off. Wait a second. If I took the exact same test, presumably they'd tell me I don't have cancer. Why is it you have it in remission? And so then I spent a lot of time thinking about, again, things go from bad to better. But there's a better than better way that we keep overlooking. And I likened it to a cold. So you get a cold. And then the cold is gone. You don't say the cold is in remission. And then when you get the next cold, it's seen as a brand new cold. It's less scary because you beat all those that came before it. So you're in remission. If cancer comes back, in some ways, just as a cold, it'll be the same kind of cancer. But just as certainly, if it comes back, it will be different. Everything is both same and different. I'll see you tomorrow. I'm the same person. I'm also a different person. You know, and so reasonably, you can see the cancer as cured or in remission. When we see it as cured, we go about living our lives. We become more mindful, open, happy, successful, enjoying ourselves, probably even better than we did before we had cancer because all of a sudden we realize, you know, life doesn't go on endlessly. So let me make the moments matter. And the moments can't matter if you're mindless.

Mel Robbins: You know, Dr. Langer, what you're making crystal clear is this. What you say to yourself matters. Thoughts aren't just some commentary. They act as instructions to your body, and your body listens to it and responds. I've never considered that, and I'm sure you haven't either. And I would imagine you have people just like I do in your life that are like, oh my gosh, they need to hear this. They need to use this. So take a minute while you listen to our amazing sponsors to share this with somebody that you know and love, because everybody can benefit from Dr. Langer's research on the mind-body unity. And don't go anywhere, because she has so much more to teach us about how to apply this in specific ways when we return. So stay with us.

[Musical break]

Mel Robbins: Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. And today's episode is all about the power of the mind and the body working together. Dr. Ellen Langer has spent 50 years researching how the thoughts you think, the words you speak, the beliefs you hold change your physical health. So cool. So Dr. Langer, this is the next question that I had. Based on all this research on the mind-body unity, what would you recommend we say if you have been diagnosed with cancer and then you just cure it? Don't use the word remission.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, I think that if the medical world tells you you're in remission, you should remember what I'm saying now.

Mel Robbins: But what would you say instead?

Dr. Ellen Langer: I would say you're cured.

Mel Robbins: Great. If you're cured from a cold, doesn't mean you won't get another cold.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, and I think it's important because the language matters and you talked about stress, that if you are in, quote, remission, you are bracing for five years. It is in the back of your mind, which means you're activating the stress response, medically speaking.

Mel Robbins: Exactly. Now, Mel, I believe, so everything I've said so far is based on hard research. I don't have the research for this particular statement. Nevertheless, I believe it as fully as one can and still be mindful.

Dr. Ellen Langer: I agree with you.

Mel Robbins: Which is, stress is our major killer. I was going to do this study years before COVID with people in China, and it just didn't happen. Where we take people who are diagnosed with cancer. So hundreds of people, different kinds of cancer. And anybody who's just told they have cancer is not going to be a happy camper. Everybody is going to be stressed and unhappy. So let's give them three weeks to adjust to it. And then after three weeks, we measure them once a month. How stressed are they? I believe that that degree of stress will predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, nutrition, and even treatment.

Mel Robbins: Well, isn't that because stress impacts your immune system?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Everything. And not just everything on any level is impacting everything simultaneously. Okay, so now add that to what I said before is that events don't cause stress. What causes stress are our views of events. So we can control stress. If stress is a major killer, then clearly.

Mel Robbins: So let me give you a couple of one-liners for people.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Great.

Mel Robbins: Who haven't, you know, I don't know if what I've just said is clear or not. But next time you're stressed, ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Because almost always, it's not a tragedy. I spoiled the meal, I missed the appointment, I banged the car, so what? And so that you immediately breathe a sigh of relief. Now, next time you're stressed, do this. Ask yourself, because stress requires two things. It requires a belief that something is going to happen. And when it happens, it's going to be awful. Okay, so you're stressed. Give yourself three, four reasons why it won't even happen. Now, you're immediately less stressed because it was definitely going to happen. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Now, the harder part. Let's assume it does happen. How is that actually an advantage? And once you do that, okay, so we did an early, early study with people about to undergo major surgery. And so I taught them this procedure, essentially. And then I said to them to see if they understood it, okay, so let's say the doctor tells you the surgery has to be delayed so you have to spend another few days in the hospital. The people who think they got it but didn't would say, it's all right, I'll tolerate it. No, it's a good thing. So if I'm, you know, what are the advantages to my being in the hospital? Somebody else is controlling all that I'm eating. I won't get a million phone calls in the middle of the night. I have more time to myself. I can read. I can watch whatever movies I want to watch. It's delightful. Okay, so now you tell me I have to spend three more days in the hospital. That's great. More reading, more relaxing, more dieting, self-imposed, and so on. And so we would go through it again until they finally got it. And when they did, the surgeries went better. They needed fewer sedatives and pain relievers. Because they were relaxed and just in flow.

And even with respect to chronic illnesses, which I have a lot of information on in the book, as you recall, where you're given a diagnosis of a chronic illness. And what that means to people is nothing I can do about it. This is going to stay the same or get worse. And all it means, the word chronic means, is the medical world doesn't have a solution yet. Doesn't mean that there aren't solutions. So we did some research where I take people who have all sorts of chronic illnesses. And, you know, you recognize no symptom stays the same. And nothing always moves in one direction. It's not, it gets bad and worse and worse. You know, with 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, down. And, you know, we draw a line through all those curves. It's tending to go up. Same thing with any of our symptoms. Okay, but people hold it still and think it's just getting worse because you get whatever you're looking for. That's why I said before, don't be a pessimist because if you're looking for negative, you're going to find negative. If you're looking for positive, just look without the evaluation. At any rate, we did a lot of studies on what I call attention to symptom variability. It's a mouthful. It just means being mindful. Being mindful is noticing change. Attention to the changing of your symptoms. So we call people periodically throughout the day, throughout the week. Who have a chronic illness.

Mel Robbins: Who have a chronic illness.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Okay. And we simply ask them, how is the symptom now? And is it better or worse than the last time I called? And why? And that's the crucial question. Okay, so what happens now? First, most of us when we have chronic illnesses feel helpless and are waiting especially for what's the next thing the medical world is going to give. So now all of a sudden we're doing something for ourselves. That feels good. Now when we're noticing the symptoms and we see it got a little better, that feels good because we thought it was only moving in one direction. Now when we ask the question, why? Why did it feel better or even worse from the moment before? That engages in a mindful search and that mindfulness is good for our health. The neurons are firing. It's good for us even if it doesn't tell us what the actual cause is of the symptom changing.

Mel Robbins: All right.

Dr. Ellen Langer: And I believe that you're going to be more likely to find a solution if you're actually looking for one. People who are stressed think they're stressed all the time. Nobody is anything all the time. So I call you periodically. How stressed are you now? Give me a number. I call you later. How stressed are you now? You're less stressed. Why? You pay some attention, you know, and then you find out, Mel, that you're maximally stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. The solution is simple. Don't talk to Ellen Langer. Or talk to me differently. But the point is everything. I feel more in control if I see that. Everything varies. So now we did this with people who have multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, Parkinson's, stroke. I mean, biggies.

Mel Robbins: Yeah.

Dr. Ellen Langer: And across the board, people are helped by it.

Mel Robbins: I'm so happy you're here, really. And I just got this very big insight because I do think that we often try to combat the negative with the positive. And what you're here to say is, no, no, no, no. It's not negative. It's not positive. It's nothing. It's just an event. And being more open to the possibility. And also being more accepting of your ability to ride the wave that comes instead of bracing.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, to ride it, you want, you know, again, you don't want to be living in a world of pressing the elevator button.

Mel Robbins: Yes.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Or, you know, getting a hole in one every time you swing the golf club. There's no there there. So it's the difficulty that makes the adventure.

Mel Robbins: So Dr. Langer, in your book, *The Mindful Body*, Chapter 4, "Why Decide?" You write, "There are probably few things as stressful as having to make a difficult decision. And every time we're faced with these decisions, our bodies suffer." And this is one where I think all the experts, virtually all the experts, have it wrong. The thing to remember about a decision is that you can never test the different alternatives. And if you can't test the different alternatives, you can't know what the other alternatives might have been like. So randomly, flip a coin, have a rule that the first thing that comes to mind is the choice you're going to make. Just make the decision, any decision, and then make it work for you. Look and see how it's to your advantage, how you can grow with it, enjoy it, and essentially make it work. Because outcomes, again, are not independent of the way we see them. So making it work means appreciating what it is rather than looking over your shoulder at some outcome that you didn't experience. You know, what people don't realize is regret is mindless. Regret suggests that if you only did this other thing, life would have been fine. And that other thing, even if you were mindless, could have been worse. We don't know. But the important thing is that it is neither good, bad, or indifferent. It's nothing until we act on it. And so if we know why we did what we did, appreciate the good things that followed from what we did, there's no reason for regret. Essentially Mel what I telling you is that rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision what we should be doing is simply make the decision right.

Mel Robbins: Well what I love about this because people agonize over making the right decision. Should I have the surgery or not have the surgery? Should I break up? Should I not?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yeah, we drive ourselves crazy.

Mel Robbins: Should I go back to school? Should I not go back to school?

Dr. Ellen Langer: The important thing, Mel, is that all of that stress is eating at us, is destroying us slowly but surely, and making us ill. And what you're basically saying is stop agonizing. It doesn't matter. We can make whatever it is work. And this is an interesting thing. People actually know when you're there. And that's some way in which our mindfulness is contagious. And when you're approaching somebody who's mindful, implicitly you know you're going to be, if not understood, at least appreciated, not disparaged. So you open up more, your relationships are better. Everything just gets better and it's so easy.

Mel Robbins: So a big source of stress that I've noticed for people in my life seems to be about the past and just agonizing over past decisions, not being able to let things go. How do you use some of the mind-body unity research?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, if you just think, okay, so stress about past decisions. So the first thing is to understand everything you do makes sense or else you wouldn't do it. So why you chose the thing that you chose that now you're saying, oh, I shouldn't have chosen, was a good thing at the time. There was no way to know all of the things that subsequently were going to happen. It made sense or else you wouldn't have done it. That's number one. Number two is to look at the advantages of that particular choice. You know, everything has advantages, and people think they know this. I had submitted a proposal years ago to my publishers and essentially was saying that everything that's good is bad or whatever. And they thought they understood it. And I said, no, because I hadn't written the book yet. Do you ever experience regret? Do you ever experience disappointment? Do you ever procrastinate? All of these things rely on not understanding what I'm actually saying. That if you say everything is good and bad, what they mean is this thing maybe has six good things and four bad things, which means net-net, it's more good than bad. I'm saying each of those things is not good or bad, can be understood as good or bad. And so life becomes what we make it. Shakespeare said this, others have said it. There are songs and movies about it. People just need to embrace it. It's raining. It's a sing in the rain. Who decided rain? So, oh my God, when I was a kid, I didn't want to go to school because my hair would curl and now curls are in. Who knew? But why did I have to accept? So what people don't understand that things either happen once in a while, so who cares? Or they happen all the time where you can adjust to it. So if my hair curled, all I had to realize was the people who see me every day know typically my hair isn't that curly. And if you see somebody just once, who cares?

Mel Robbins: Well, you know, one of the things that's interesting, because you basically said there's two things you can do if you keep looking at the past and torturing yourself over it. One is to actually give yourself some grace and say, look, it made sense at the time to me. That's why I did it.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Exactly.

Mel Robbins: And then again, is to say, okay, this thing isn't all bad. How might it be good?

Mel Robbins: Where if even this major fire turned out to be an advantage. People, this data—these data don't come from my lab, but it's reliable—that people who just have, let's say, a heart attack and live through it. Or when you're given a diagnosis for one of these dread diseases, I said to you before that people are sealed in unlived lives. Sometimes that diagnosis breaks the seal. And all of a sudden, oh my God, I'm not going to live forever. I'm not going to be bothered by the trivia that has typically consumed me.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, I can think about even like, I have friends that were able to stay home with their kids. And now that the kids are gone, now they're torturing themselves for not going back to work while the kids got older. And yet, if you look at the advantage, which is you got that time.

Mel Robbins: Right.

Dr. Ellen Langer: And now you have a chance to be who you want to be now, not to be who you thought you should be 20 years ago.

Mel Robbins: Yes.

Dr. Ellen Langer: And at the time, it was the right decision. But empty nest is the same experience, postpartum blues, emptiness. It's all the same, which is you become totally engaged in something, and then it's finished. And now, oh my God, you feel lost. And people don't realize transitions by their very nature are difficult. Transitions mean you're not where you were, you're not where you're going to be. And so you allow yourself—you know, when you're with the kids, you're not with all your friends. And so all of a sudden, there are all these things happening that you're not part of. Okay, so the kids aren't there. So now you have to make some effort, invite some people over.

I guess the bottom most line of all of it is that everything can be changed. People, as I do a lot of research, as you know, with older adults, and people are now crazed. I mean, my friends, you know, with everything to live longer. And I think it's a mistake. I think rather than add more years to your life, what you want to do is add more life to your years. And that will probably extend your life. And that's what you want to do in each of these.

You know, if I get people calling me and they say they told me I had six months to live. I said, "I can't tell you what to do. All I can tell you is if I thought I only had six months to do, first thing I'd have is a hot fudge sundae." And then I do—you know, you want to not waste any of the moments. And the good thing is that all of those mindful activities are the neurons are firing, and it turns out that itself is good for your health. So when you're having fun, it's good for your health. And it feels good, obviously.

Mel Robbins: Dr. Langer, this framing that whatever it is that someone else is doing, they're doing it because it makes sense to them. And if it didn't make sense to them, they wouldn't be doing it. What I like about that framing is that it comes from a place of compassion. You're kind of assuming good intent. Like, that's why somebody's doing something that I think is idiotic. It makes sense to them. I love that you're using that to help us just be more compassionate. And if you can extend that to other people, you can also extend that to yourself. Like instead of constantly obsessing over the things that you think were mistakes or the things that you wish you would have done differently in the past, if you extend that same frame to yourself, well, whatever I was doing in the past that I would change now, I did it back then because it made sense to me then. That's why I did it. I mean, I love that. I can see why that would actually alleviate stress. It would help you to stop beating yourself up. I mean, that's super powerful.

So what I'd say to somebody, you tell me you're stressed up the wazoo, I'd say, okay, what I want you to do, we'll talk about your stress in a minute, because I know you're overwhelmed, you're always stressed, is to just thread a needle. And so what happens is you'll thread that, and I'll ask you, "Were you stressed?" And of course not, because you were threading the needle. And so if we're not thinking about the stressor, it's not going to have the same effect.

I just want to unpack this because I think this is actually really important and it's a visual example that'll help. It helps me, so I'm assuming it's going to help you as you're listening or watching really grasp this. In this example, when you're stressed out—like you're stressed about what's going on with your kids at school, you're stressed about AI taking over your job, you're stressed about the headlines that you've read—your mind and the premise of your work, mind-body unity, it is proven. They're—whether it's top-down, bottom-up, mind-body unity—they are one in the same. You are focusing your mind's activity on this thing outside of you, whether it's the worry about the kids or the headlines or AI or your bank account or whatever else. When you ask somebody to then thread a needle, you are now focusing your mind singularly on trying to get that little thread through that thing, which means you're not thinking about all these on the other thing.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes.

Mel Robbins: You have this very provocative idea that I would love to have you explain to us. It's on page 171.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes, I remember it. You're amazing.

Mel Robbins: The Mindful Body. You write, "What does it mean to be confident but uncertain?" Okay. So this is one of these things that I think is really important because people conflate—put together—confidence and certainty. And you have all of these people who act like they know and are very confident and are very certain, but certainty is mindless. If everything is changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, you can't know. And so what you want to do, once you make this universal attribution for not—nobody knows—then I'm comfortable in my own skin with not knowing. And so, you know, I live my life this way. I'm very confident, not because I know, because I know nobody knows. When you know you can't know, then be confident in your not knowing. Your not knowingness, so to speak, allows everything to be new, everything to be exciting, everything to be experienced as if it's the first time.

Mel Robbins: Well, I think there's a deeper layer underneath that that allows you to do it, which is you also trust in your ability to navigate what comes.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, yes. Okay. Once you realize that outcomes, good or bad, are in your head, not in events, you don't have to worry. Right now when people thinking there are good things and bad, you have to kill people to get to the good things, run as fast as you can from the bad things. But once you recognize that your well-being, your sanity, your happiness, your peace of mind, don't depend on anything but your eagerness to create the world you want, life becomes easy. I'm virtually never stressed. Whatever happens, it's fine. I'll find a way for that to be actually an advantage.

Mel Robbins: How does the person who's watching or listening start applying this? You know what I mean? Because I think when you hear the word "mindful" and we talk about things related to thoughts, it can feel like, okay, well, how do I start doing today?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Okay, so it's unlikely that most people will fully accept that they don't know. Because we've been taught—you know, I mean, it's very hard. I'm periodically mindless. My response to it is different from most people. I go, "Yes, I'm right." But you know, you can't help it. The culture has taught us not to be there. And so we dutifully are not there. What we want to do then is two things.

One is just the active noticing of new things. Increase your novel experiences. You know, it's fun. Summer is approaching or here right now. People go away and they look at all sorts of sites. I know in Europe, you look at the churches. We have churches here. No one ever looks at the architecture. You know that. You don't really need to go away because everything here is already brand new.

Mel Robbins: That's actually a great suggestion because when you go away, you are in an entirely new place. You're mindful and you're looking for novelty, but everything at home is already novel. So you could start this right now by simply whatever you're doing, just notice and try to see something that you haven't seen before on this walk or in your kitchen or the spot on the dog.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Exactly, exactly. And then the other thing that I think that we should do is that the next time you're stressed, remember some of the things we've talked about.

Mel Robbins: So if somebody feels... Okay, so how to become mindful immediately. Yeah, especially because especially if somebody is like completely overwhelmed in their life and it's easy to be right now.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, no, if you're overwhelmed, first of all, just choose one of the things and ask yourself how you might do it differently. And does it really matter if you don't do it? Because most of us—you know, a friend of mine is overwhelmed with things and she says, "Ellen, help me. I just can't get through my list." And I said, "All you need to do, make a shorter list." Anybody could generate a list that you can't get through of things to do.

You know, it's interesting. I had mentioned procrastination before and a student made me aware of this that, you know, I've never procrastinated. Now, am I bragging again? No, that anybody at any time can generate all the other things they could be doing. So right now, I'm not procrastinating writing my next book. I'm not procrastinating taking my dog for a walk, returning the phone calls. I'm mindfully doing this. When you're fully engaged in doing what you're doing, you don't resent not doing the other things. If you respect yourself and you know you're doing what you're doing for some good reason or else you wouldn't do it, you don't cast aspersions at yourself. You don't suffer regrets. When you know why you're doing what you're doing, there's no reason to regret not doing something else. So procrastination is a form of mindlessness.

Mel Robbins: Yes.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes. It's not the not doing that activity. It's the believing there's no good reason that you're not doing that activity.

Mel Robbins: Oh. All the shoulds we put on ourselves. I should be writing this homework assignment. I should be making the phone calls to put this project together. I should be preparing the next podcast. Who decided that you should be? So what are a couple specific ways somebody could start to take this research and apply it?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Sure, we can take virtually everything I said and boil it down to: One, know you don't know. And as soon as you know you don't know, then you sit up and pay attention. Two, every time we're judgmental, judging somebody else or ourselves, recognize we're being mindless, and there's another way that behavior can be viewed. Their behavior that we're putting them down for actually makes sense from their perspective or else they wouldn't do it. Number three, next time we're stressed, recognize that events don't cause the stress. Ask yourself, "How is this actually a good thing?" Stress requires a prediction. Predicting something awful is going to happen. How do you know it's going to happen? How might it actually turn out into a good thing?

Most important is that when we don't know we don't know, we sit up and we notice. All we have to do to teach ourselves that we don't know is take another look at the things we think we do know and ask how it could be otherwise. How is this thing that seems awful, how might it actually be something good? How is this job that I hate might actually be one that is nurturing me in some ways, providing some nourishment? How might I do it differently?

No matter what you're doing, just ask yourself how you might do it differently. And that if we remember that what is done by people is not handed down from the heavens as to how to do it. And so you don't need to do it the same. If you're cooking, you know, it's guesswork. Somebody decided for most things—not everything if you're making a soufflé—but for most things, and, you know, you need a cup of sugar and you don't have a cup of sugar, add some honey, molasses, make it savory rather than sweet. Recognize that the recipe is just somebody's idea of how to make this thing. Make it your own and then you'll enjoy it more. And it doesn't always work out. And that's good because if it always worked out exactly the way you anticipated, it'd be like a hole in one on every shot. There'd be no there there.

Mel Robbins: Wow. So Dr. Langer, you've taught us so much today. If there was one thing you wanted the person to do that was the most important thing to take away, what would that be?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Well, if they followed all of this, which is—it's hard to, you know, this has been 50 years of my thinking, 50 years of studying and research. I can't imagine that anybody who's listening to two hours of it, read the book three times, would get the full sense of it. But if that were possible, I'd say it's time to start to exploit the power of uncertainty.

Mel Robbins: What are your parting words?

Dr. Ellen Langer: My parting words are the same as my early words, which is when we live a life that's mindful, we can't help but experience a personal renaissance and health and well-being will follow.

Mel Robbins: Beautiful. I agree. Thank you.

Dr. Ellen Langer: My pleasure.

Mel Robbins: Thank you. Thank you for being here. And I also want to thank you. Thank you for watching and listening all the way to the end and for being interested in learning how to leverage the power of your mind to be happier and healthier. I'm so excited to see what happens in your life when you take everything that Dr. Langer taught us today and you start applying it. And I also can't wait to see what happens in the people that you care about when you share this episode with them.

And one more thing, as your friend, I wanted to be sure to tell you in case nobody else does, because as we learn, the words you use matter. I love you and I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life. And based on everything that you learned about how to be more mindful and how to live a more mindful life, there is no doubt in my mind, you're not only gonna create a better life, you're going to live one.

Alrighty, I'll see you in the very next episode. I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play.

[Sound of a dog's collar jingling]

Mel Robbins: We have a drink for you. I feel like we should have a Sunday. Someone might need to take Sophie out. Go, Sophie.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Oh, she has to go to the bathroom?

Mel Robbins: I have no idea. I don't speak dog. You have this very provocative idea that I would love to have you explain to us. It's on page 171.

Dr. Ellen Langer: Yes, I remember it. You're amazing.

Mel Robbins: Do you mind if we take off Sophie's collar?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Oh, no, of course not.

Mel Robbins: Okay, let's take her collar off. It's jingling a lot. I don't know if we can get her to. Let me ask you, how much is one plus one?

Dr. Ellen Langer: Two.

Mel Robbins: That's what people think. But it's not—it's not something just dropped over there.

Dr. Ellen Langer: The books were surprised.

Mel Robbins: That's right. By the answer.

Dr. Ellen Langer: What do you mean it's not true?

Mel Robbins: Nailed it!

[Sound of a bell or chime]

Mel Robbins: Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode. SiriusXM Podcasts.