Ellen Langer: Thinking Our Way to Health
If you’ve heard about a fascinating study that explores the power of the mind over the body, most likely it emerged out of the lab of Harvard Professor Ellen Langer—in fact, in 1981, Langer became the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard. There, she studies the illusion of control, decision-making, aging, and mindfulness theory. She’s responsible for the Counterclockwise study, published in 2009, where aging men recovered their youth, and Alia Crum’s famous study on chambermaids and their understanding of their own health and wellness, got its start with Langer as well. She has a fascinating mind, in part because she is always, always willing to question our underlying assumptions about where we have control and where we don’t. Now here’s an important caveat: Ellen Langer is the mother of modern mindfulness—but she is not talking about meditation. No disrespect to meditators, but Langer is focused instead on attention and the power of thought on the physical body, not so much on controlling or emptying the mind. She is a force, and I was so honored to invite her onto Pulling the Thread. Let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM ELLEN LANGER:
The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health
Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility
On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity
Ellen Langer’s Website
Follow Ellen on Instagram
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Well, thanks for joining us. And it was so fun to read your book, in part, because I was reacquainted with so many studies that I have read about in other people's books. And it was like, Oh, that was you. And that was you. And that was you.
ELLEN LANGER: That's very nice.
ELISE: No, but I feel like so many, and maybe we can talk about a few of them, but so many of the studies that seem like they've really punctured culture and captured people's minds, Came out of your lab.
ELLEN: I like to think so.
ELISE: I love, too, that you focus on mindfulness Minus meditation because I think it's become sort of a catch all, right?
ELLEN: It's not really minus meditation. There are really two separate things. Meditation is a practice. It's not mindful. It's a practice that leads to post meditative mindfulness. And mindfulness, as I study it, is just a medium. And in many ways, they lead to the same place, and in some ways, probably differences. But, the good thing about mindfulness as we study it, is that it's so easy, and the consequences are so extreme, it almost defies belief, how from doing this very simple thing, One can heal, be happy, healthier, and more popular, more attractive, find everything interesting. You know, I'm a lot older than you, so I've been doing this for a lot of years, so I've had time to plug in lots of measures.
ELISE: Well, and I know Obviously you've written so many books and extensively about specific studies, but was the call for this book specifically to draw people's attention to symptom variability and this idea that we can highly influence, it seems like it's about highly influencing our bodies with our...
ELLEN: That is the bottom line, which is that we have far more control over our health and well being than people can imagine, although this book started out as a memoir, and that's why there are a lot of personal stories in there and some sexy stories. I might have been advised to take out, and then evolved into the current book, you know, with reviews, research from the past and studies and each of them showing that our limits tend to be of our own
ELISE: Right. I know, you mentioned, I had forgotten about that classic study of the man who had the tumors, took the experimental drug, they immediately disappeared, he finds out it's a placebo, they reappear, etc. Like twice, right?
ELLEN: As I recall. Yeah.
ELISE: And then he died as soon as he realized it was another placebo.
ELLEN: yeah, but let's leave it on the positive note that placebos may be our strongest medicine and what people need to realize, you know, whether it's a sham surgery or a pill, for example, that it's not the surgery, by definition, sham, they're making believe they're doing surgery. It's not the pill, it's a sugar pill that's making us better. So what's making us better is ourselves. And so my goal has been for decades to try to make that control over our health more available to everybody.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's interesting, I mean, the placebo is so powerful and it's such a high standard, right? I don't think people really realize that you have to markedly beat a placebo, right, in order to theoretically establish a drug, and that more often than not, placebo wins.
ELLEN: I don't know more often than not, but often enough to make it very, very valuable. But, I think that what happens when people find out that they've been given a placebo, they feel like they've been fooled and they say, no, no, no, the effect was real. And that's because we suffer from mind body dualism. You know, so our minds, for most of us, are not in full control of our health and well being and that's what I'm arguing against, trying to change. So, for me, we take mind, body, and in some ways these are just words, we put them back together, then wherever you're putting the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. So we have studies over decades now, where we put the mind in strange places. And take measurements from the body. And, we're able to do things that I think will surprise the reader, or in this case, the listener.
ELISE: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, one, I think the lack of reverence that we have for placebo, right? Like we think that it's somehow if you get better with the placebo...
ELLEN: you weren't really sick. No, not you're an idiot, so much as you weren't really sick. It was all in your head. And what I'm trying to get people to understand is everything is in our head. And that's what gives us enormous control. Because we can control the way we think about things. We can control our bodies with our minds.
ELISE: Yes. And you mentioned just that very basic example of anyone who's watched someone else vomit and then had, You know, the feeling that you're also gonna vomit, like it's very very contagious, right?
ELLEN: Well, my whole thing, my interest in what's come to be called Mind, Body, Unity started many, many years ago. I was married when I was very young, and we went to Paris. for a honeymoon, and I was trying to be ever so sophisticated, you know, and after all, now I was a married woman. And so in this restaurant, on the menu was this mixed grill, and among the other items on the mixed grill was pancreas. And for me, it felt like this was a test of my adulthood. Could I eat the pancreas? And I decided, because I was so all grown up now, that I ordered it and I would eat it. And so, as soon as it came, I asked my husband at the time, which of these was the pancreas, and he pointed to something.
I'm a big eater, so I ate everything with gusto, and now is the moment of truth. Would I be able to eat the pancreas? And I started eating it, and I'm sick to my stomach. Meanwhile, I look up at him, and he's laughing. And I said, what's so funny? He said, that's chicken. You ate the pancreas ages ago. You know, so yes, we control much more than we think that we do.
ELISE: Just to back up quickly, can you just define mindfulness?
ELLEN: Sure. So, for me, mindfulness is just active noticing. Noticing things about things we think we know. And as soon as we do that, we see, gee, we didn't know it as well as we thought we did. And then our attention naturally goes to it. And all of this is to create an understanding of uncertainty. We should be uncertain about everything. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And when we think we know, we're going to be wrong and it's interesting because we want to know. We want these absolutes. So we'll have more control over ourselves and the world. And in fact, by doing this, it's an illusion. We give up control. So what I often do when I start lectures, I might say, and I'll say the obvious, how much is one in one? Well, how much? Two. Everybody knows. So, in fact, if that's the question I ask, then most people are going to just tune out. But it turns out one in one is not always two. If you add one lot of chewing gum plus one lot of chewing gum, one plus one is one. Add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. Add one pile of laundry plus one pile of... It can go on and on like this. In the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal two, as, or even more often, as it does. But when we think we know, we don't look.
So now, forever, hopefully for you, when somebody asks you how much is one plus one, you'll pay attention to the context before you answer. So everything depends on the context. And everything we're taught in school, it tends to be context free. You know, you memorize facts, and this was something important to me, I was at a horse event, and this man asked me, could I watch his horse, because he's going to get his horse a hot dog. Well, I was a straight A student, Harvard, Yale, all the way. So no one knew better than I that horses are habituals. They don't eat meat. He brings back the hot dog, and the horse ate it. And I thought, oh my gosh, everything I think I know could be wrong. Now, while that can be scary to people, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. Everything you think you can't do, maybe you can do.
Every time the medical world tells you have this dread disease and you have... I don't know, two years to live. Yes, that too is probably wrong, or possibly wrong. What I describe in the book, The Mindful Body, is that all data, whether it's medical, psychology, it doesn't matter from what science, only gives us probabilities. And probabilities mean if we were to do the exact same thing, probably we'd get these findings. And that's reported in classes, in textbooks, and so on is absolutes. So it's not most horses seem not to eat meat, it's horses don't eat meat, period. One in one is two, period. And so then we think we know. The thing that I love most about that is that I, as a straight A student, probably, in so many ways, am more mindless than the student who didn't memorize all that information. So it's a nice leveler.
ELISE: Yeah. So within health, I mean, you write and, you talk a little bit about spontaneous remission. You write about how, who knows how many of us have sort of tumors that form and then disappear before detection, et cetera. We don't really know. Right. And we don't understand the mechanisms for spontaneous healing and they're not studied. There's no control.
ELLEN: right. I mean, that's where all the medical information were given, which is not to say medical information is useless, but we have to take in the absolutes we were fed with the grains of salt. You know, that, on whom were the studies done? So many years ago, it was the male medical student who was the subject, the participant in research. And so the amount of drug to be given to, let's say, a 25 year old male, was now given to an 80 year old female and it turns out it was poisoning her because it takes longer for the drugs to work their way through the body. So everything is good sometimes, not other times and we need to pay more attention to that.
So when, there are so many people who don't go to the doctor in the first place, that we don't know if they're sitting with tumors, currently, if the tumor came, left, and so on. So, the point is, not to be scared by the possibility that the medical information you're given is wrong, but to become pleased by the potential control it allows us. You know, and some things that the medical world does, I mean, there's some very, very fine doctors out there, but, you know, if a doctor tells you you have six months to live, he or she can't possibly know that.
ELISE: Right.
ELLEN: happens then is that it often becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, which leads them to, to feel that they were correct, right? Because if you believe you have six months to live, you change the way you do things, you become more mindless, you know, you might stop eating as much, exercising, you know, why bother doing those things that are good for you, because after all, you're going to die anyway. And those things can bring about a little bit more. Our thoughts are incredibly powerful. I mean, let's say if my wrist hurts, I'm 76 years old. I can easily say, well, for God's sakes, you know, at some point you start to fall apart. In which case, what I would do is nothing, right? And by doing nothing, I'm letting my wrist, you know, get worse. And that's what I mean by a self fulfilling prophecy, where at your age, you're not supposed to fall apart, so if your wrist hurts, you then do something to fix your wrist. So here we have, you know, a month later, I'm in bad shape and you're in good shape. And isn't it true, because I'm older? No.
ELISE: Yeah. Will you talk a little bit about the counterclockwise study? Because that's such a classic.
ELLEN: yeah, the counterclockwise study. I can even say that it's a famous study now myself, because if you watch The Simpsons Go to Havana, they describe this study, and this study is important. Lots of the studies in this book were done to test again over and over to make sure we're standing on firm ground when I'm talking about mind body limits.
At the mind body unity, we put the mind and body back together, wherever you put the mind, you're putting the body. So, counterclockwise study was the first test of this. We took elderly men, and they were around 80, which at that time, since this was in 1979, was like being 90 today. And what we were going to do was have them live in a retreat that had been retrofitted to 20 years early. So everything in that retreat was going to help them go back in time. Every book that they saw, every poster that was hanging. We'd have movies for them to see that were of the past. And what they were going to do was discuss things from the past as if it were the present. So, as well as we can do it, they are stepping back in time. And the results were actually phenomenal. In a period of time, as short as a week, it might have even been five days, their hearing improved, their vision improved. Now I've not heard that of people in their 80s without any medical intervention. Their memory improved, and their strength improved. The results were phenomenal. Their, vision improved, their hearing improved, their strength improved, their memory improved, and they look noticeably younger. And all of this without any medical intervention. And now all of the studies, not all, but several of the studies we've done much more recently have also tested this idea in putting people in very different sorts of situations.
So the next test of this, for example, was a study with chambermaids that Ali Crum and I did. Here, basically we ask chambermaids, how much exercise do you get? They say they don't get exercise because for them exercise is what the surgeon general tells you and you know after they're finished working, They're just too tired to do any of the recommendations. So all we did was train, actually teach half of them, but their work was exercise. Making a bed is like being, working on this machine at the gym and so on. So, we took many, many measures, we made sure as well as we could that they weren't eating any differently, working any harder, that all that we changed was their view of their work and now their work is exercise.
As a result of the change in mindset, they lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. And so, very powerful. So then we go on for the newer studies. I'm not going to give away all of them. In fact, I probably should wait until you ask me a question, but let me just share one of the most recent ones with you. This was a study that my graduate student Peter Ungle and I did, essentially, we create a wound. Now, it's a small wound, because I didn't want to hurt people, and the review board wouldn't let me, even if I wanted to, but, so, we create a wound by using this Chinese cupping, and they let us do that because they thought our interest was in Chinese cupping, which was to increase balance in the body or something. I don't know anything about Chinese cupping, but it creates a wound. People are in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. And a third of the people, it's real time. And the question was... Does perceived time determine how fast the wound heals, or does real time? And it turned out, perceived time. So when the clock is running fast, you heal faster.
ELISE: It's so stunning. And the implications obviously are vast. Like if you are like, I'll heal in half the time, it's possible.
ELLEN: and that's what I, when anybody tells me that, you know, you broke your own, and I say, and what does the medical world tell you, you know, let's say for argument's sake, three months, I say, I don't see any reason why you can't do it in a month. I mean, things take as long as we give them. You know, that you don't look for improvements, if you don't look for improvements, you're not going to find subtle ways to coax your body into performing better, to getting better.
ELISE: it's so fascinating to think about your work. And, you know, you write a fair amount about these incredibly subtle differences, right? Like you're talking about the measures for pre diabetic blood work and how you can be right up to the edge and be told you're normal or 0.1 higher and be told that you're pre diabetic and just that single up Differentiation creates so much more diabetes, right?
ELLEN: sure, you have a doughnut. And the donut expires today at 12 o'clock. [00:18:00] Right, and then they're not allowed to sell it anymore. And you don't get to the bakery or the supermarket, whatever, until an hour later. I mean, there are people who won't eat the donut. As if the science of how long it's going to last is absolute, the health effects are enormous because when you're given tests, Everybody is going to do, you know, there'll be people who are right at the border saying that they have the disorder, cancer, diabetes, whatever it is, or they don't have it. And so we find that when the test says you don't have it, you end up not getting it to the same extent as when the test, even though the initial difference, you know, the example that I'm fond of is, let's say we both take an IQ test and 70 is a cutoff for normal. And you get a 70 and I get a 69, you don't have to know anything about statistics or numbers to know there's no real difference between 69 and 70. I could have sneezed so I read the question wrong. You know, so many possibilities. Yet, because you're going to be seen as normal, and I am now cognitively deficient, our lives will never be the same. I will come to expect less of myself. I put myself out there in the world in a very different way. The world will treat me, as if, you know, poor me, to facilitate this view that I just don't have.
ELISE: Yeah. It's interesting to think about within health, too, and the fact that the BMI, which is such a rudimentary and coarse metric for body size anyway, it's an ethnographic measure. But when they shifted it and suddenly, I can't remember, it's a staggering number of people went from being quote unquote normal to overweight.
ELLEN: Yeah.
ELISE: And then you think about where we are now, and it's like, how much of that is a self fulfilling prophecy by telling people suddenly that they're overweight?
ELLEN: Yeah. I think that many of the deaths from, especially in the past when you were diagnosed with cancer, what people are taught when they're young was that cancer was a killer. And you take it in mindlessly because you don't have cancer, no one you know has cancer, you just read this or heard it in a course or whatever, and then you get cancer. And it's very hard then to fight. The mindset, you know, and I believe that lots of the deaths are a function of that belief. You know, there's data, not from me, but it's kind of fun, that people are more likely to die right after their birthday than before their birthday. Alright, you can say, well, they're a little older. But they're also more likely to die right after George Washington's birthday than their own birthday. There's something very real about giving up. You know, and the system turns itself off. But even if we don't find the instantaneous response that I'm suggesting here, that When you're depressed, when you're mindless, when you feel you have no reason to be in this world, you stop engaging it. And mindfulness, this act of noticing that I was telling you about, is literally and figuratively enlightening you. It's the essence of engagement. You know, and when people think that it's hard, it couldn't be simpler. In fact, whenever you're having fun, it's because you're being mindful. You know, if you do a crossword puzzle, if you like crossword puzzles, And, you do it now you're going to do it again, when you know all the answers, or at least you know the ones you don't know. You're not any smarter two minutes later. It's not fun. Like, typically when you know the end of a joke, it's not fun when you hear it the first time. And so it's going from not knowing to knowing. Noticing something new, that means being engaged. I think that when we have this realization that everything is changing and we don't know, then we tune in and everything becomes new and potentially exciting.
ELISE: yes. And variable. Because I think in our culture, we tend to say like, think positive, you know, in these broad strokes, like, tell your kids they're amazing. But it's not that. It's the granularity. It's the noticing of like, wow, that was a really creative solution.
ELLEN: But it's also okay not to get it right. You know, people mistakenly think that they want perfection, say you're playing golf and you wish you could get a hole in one every time you swung the golf club. Well, no. There'd be no game there. You know, that if you want to do something where you're always winning, play tic tac toe against a five year old, four year old. So on some level we know we don't want that. And the problem is that much of school teaches us these absolute answers. We're graded. Most tests are designed to find out what you don't know rather than what you do know, which I think is a big mistake. So, we end up with a world where we think there are winners and losers.
And, you know, I had this experience, not that long ago, where I'm at the house and we're having this truckload of furniture coming to be stored in the basement. And I see the truck, I know the furniture, I said, There's no way that that's going to fit in that space. Okay, now, the guy who's unloading it and putting it in that space takes all of this furniture, puts it in such a way that you can easily walk around everything, everything is accessible. Now, I'm supposed to be... This big whatever, genius, I'm not a genius at work. He doesn't think very much of himself. Yet, he figured this out, and I couldn't. And, you know, so I wrote this little song. It sounds silly, perhaps, but for my grandkids, I might even dare sing it for you, but I'll tell it to you: everybody doesn't know something, everybody knows something else. When we recognize that, then not knowing is nothing to be scared about, nothing to be ashamed of, because we know there are other things that we do know. And so we end up in a world where, without winners and losers, where in some sense he should be valued because of his skills, I'm valued for mine, and so on.
ELISE: Talk to us about mindfulness, when you write about the symptom variability, whether it's cognitive, tell us about that.
ELLEN: Okay. Well, we've done research on placebos and the chambermaid study was essentially a study on nocebo, the same difference. And if you look at the literature, placebos are basically our strongest medication, but you can't give yourself a placebo. And my goal for so many decades now has been how can we give people the control that they obviously have over their health, you know, that there's a sham surgery for Parkinson's. So they cut open your head, not I or anybody in my lab, like medical people, cut open your head and make it seem that they're doing something and then they sew it back up. They haven't done anything, but because you're persuaded that they've done it, then you heal. Right, so how do we do this without needing the deception?
And so, what I've come up with is this attention to symptom variability. Which is just a fancy way of saying being mindful, things change. Okay, now, when we have symptoms, we tend to hold them still. I'm always stressed, I'm always in pain, nobody's always anything. But what happens, by thinking you're always, you overlook a way to heal, which is to notice when it's better, notice when it's worse, and simply ask why. So we did this across a host of very serious illnesses: parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, stroke. Okay, so the big ones and what we did was we would call people periodically and a few times a day at different times and we'd say, how are you feeling? And is the symptom better or worse than the last time. And then why? And so first thing, since you think it's always awful, as soon as you see sometimes it's not as awful, or more awful than last time it wasn't as awful, then you feel better. Second, by asking the question why, now you engage in a mindful search to try to figure out why does it hurt more now then it did last time and people are able to come up with answers. But not only that, that you're more likely to find a solution once you look for it. So when we say somebody has a chronic illness, most people, I think, process that as we have no control over it.
So, you know, it's pretty simple to state, notice when it's better, notice when it's worse. So how do you do this yourself? Because if somebody has to do it for you, they might as well just give you a placebo. So the way to do it for yourself, so you set your iPhone, maybe a smartphone, whatever, to ring in an hour. And then you ask yourself, so how do I feel now? Is this better or worse than before and why? And then set it for an hour and a half, three hours. Vary with the time you come up with. And people will be surprised how well this works, although, again, it's not so easy. Now, when people are stressed, they think they're stressed all the time, okay, like everything else. And again, no one is stressed all the time. And when you do this, when you, what happens when you're suffering from stress, When you're not stressed, you're not thinking about it at all. And then you're stressed again, so it's as if that intervening time didn't exist. Okay, by doing this little method. That, for me, stress is the major killer, the major problem for all diseases. And I was starting to test this before COVID with some people in China, we didn't get very far for a host of reasons, but where if you took people who were just given some dread diagnoses nobody's going to be happy about it, oh great I've got, you know, whatever, so everybody's upset.
Then we check back in a couple of weeks later and now we measure people's stress and if we measure their stress, let's say every three weeks, every month I think the stress over and above everything would predict the course of the disease and we have control over stress. You know, people mistakenly think that everybody is stressed. Well, certainly everybody isn't stressed and not to the same measure. All right, so what does stress mean? Stress means you think something is going to happen. And when it happens, it's going to be awful. Well, we can't predict. We think we can, but we can't. So, something's going to happen? Ask yourself three reasons, four reasons, five if you enjoy the game, why it might not happen. And then you say, oh, maybe it won't happen, and you immediately feel better. But let's assume it does happen. How is that an advantage? And that's hard for people to understand. But once you look for it, everything cuts multiple ways. Now, what people think I mean, when I say that is, you know, that, oh, maybe there are 10 good things, six good things about this thing and four bad things, which on measure would make it good. But what I mean, each and every one of those things can be understood as positively negative.
ELISE: I actually first read about your chambermaid study and Kelly McGonigal's book, The Upside of Stress, which is powerful because it's essentially asserts that our response, our feelings about stress are what make it inherently stressful.
ELLEN: of course, and, you know, so if we talk about positive rape, you know, I mean, I disagree with everybody who's talking about positive and negative stress. That's fine. I think stress is bad but, you know, if you can make it work for you, then it's not stressful. Then it's a motivator. And, you know, then it'll have positive consequences. So, you know, it's a different way of saying many of the same things. But the bottom line to it is we don't have to experience stress as debilitating. That's a choice that we're making. And most people, when they're experiencing negative emotions, don't realize that they're actually making a choice. And if they simply thought of everybody they knew.
Who might have been experiencing those circumstances, would they all respond the same way? And as soon as they say, no, Lisa wouldn't respond that way, you say, well, what is she doing? You know, what she's doing is understanding the situation differently. Then when we're mindless, we're oblivious to the fact that everything we understood could be understood differently. Everything we understand could be understood differently. When we're mindful, we're aware of how the context helps shape the meaning to what we're thinking.
ELISE: Yeah, I love that reframe that you offer. And it's funny, I think you talked about it in the context of someone deciding whether to have a knee replacement surgery. And my dad who's 78 is making that decision. And you say that is don't try to make the right decision, make the decision right.
ELLEN: Yeah. Yeah. This is a nice part of the new book, The Mindful Body. I don't know if it loses anything, in a program like this, just to say it quickly. But let me give you some of the bottom line. People think they should do cost benefit analysis before you make a decision. And it really makes no sense, because as I said a moment before, every cost is a benefit, every benefit is a cost, it all depends on how you look at it. You know, you and I are going to go out to lunch, if the food is good, great, if the food is bad, great, I'll eat less. Right? So you can't add up the good things and the bad things because if everything is simultaneously good and bad, it doesn't lead you anywhere and that's not a problem. I mean, you know, what we should be doing is instead of trying to make the right decision based on predicting we can't predict. All we should do is make the decision right.
ELISE: I thought this part was so stunning is the way that our mindfulness, our attention to difference, paying attention to each other, can affect outcomes. That part was so stunning. How contagious mindfulness is just being in the presence of someone who's mindful. And at that study about drinking was so cool.
ELLEN: yeah, thank you. There's a part of the book, when I first wrote it, I had what I called the woo-woo chapter, with things that were, you know, some people would say, what is she talking about? And, you know, my editors wanted me to get rid of most of it, because, you know, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath, the other stuff is so solid, you know, why give people a reason to think twice about anything in it? But there are a couple of things that I left in and this is not quite as woo-woo as what I'll tell you about in a moment. But here, you know, the, if you look at people who are heavy drinkers, who are not wanting to be heavy drinkers, they don't drink heavily all the time. And so, a question is, why now? And, you know, what circumstances. Now it turns out, when people are mindless, you know, we have expressions like, there's only one oar in the water, the light's on, but nobody's home. We know when somebody is not there. But when somebody is not there, since we haven't had a name for it, just being mindless, it makes us feel uncomfortable. Alright, and so then you're going to drink. So, we have people show up for a wine testing experiment, heavy drinkers for a wine testing experiment. And, they're told to give us the answers as they're comparing the different wines. They can drink as much as they want. And half the time, the experimenter is mindful. Half the time, the experimenter is mindless. And when they're with a mindless experimenter, they drink much more. In the similar way, we have with kids who are autistic. When the adult that they're with is mindful, they behave just like normal kids. So, our mindfulness is readily available, it's attractive, we have early studies where we would have people, women, who were supposed to have trouble being leaders, Because if they're really strong, they're seen as too aggressive. And if they're very woman like, female like, they're seen as weak. So we had women who are going to be strong, some very feminine, but half of each group, those two groups, were going to be mindful or mindless. And it turned out that when they were mindful, it didn't matter whether one was, You know, that when people are mindful, they're seen as trustworthy, authentic, and somebody you'd be willing to follow. So as you can see that if you're more mindful people are going to find you more attractive. Why? Because you know they're going to be less judgmental, that they're actually in the same present situation you are. So your relationship, you see how easily it can improve just by actually being there. I talk in the book a fair amount about the way to stop being judgmental, which is very simple again, it's if one is mindful, recognizing that people's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it. So what are they intending? So you don't like me because I am so gullible. But that's because I'm trusting. And that's kind of nice. I can't stand you because you're so inconsistent. Oh, from your perspective, you're flexible. That's nice. And when we evaluate people's behavior from their perspective, typically we don't want them to change. And you see how the relationship would improve. But, as with everything, as soon as we think we know, the one in one is two. Horses don't eat meat. You're that kind of a person. Symptoms only get worse. In each case, once we think we know, we stop exercising control. And it affects everything about our lives.
ELISE: Yeah, no, and it speaks to like the cultural morass that we're in right now of binaries and assumptions and, you know, I think often about Amanda Ripley's book called High Conflict, where she just talks about how we live in a culture that suggests that people cannot handle nuance or complexity, and all the data suggests nuance and complexity is essential for us to
ELLEN: operate. Not only essential, but all of the nuances change over time.
ELISE: Yeah.
ELLEN: So, Mindfulness, which I wrote forever ago, I think I used an example about gender or sex, where, you know, if a person is heterosexual, and then has one relationship, one night, with somebody of the same sex and then dies. So, were they homosexual or heterosexual? You see what I'm saying? You know, I mean, categories keep switching. And there's a freedom in that. If people, I believe, were more content with themselves, gave them, you know, understood that what they were doing makes sense or else they wouldn't do it, that there were all sorts of possibilities open to them, they'd be less interested in pigeonholing other people.
ELISE: Yes. 100%. I mean, that's a perfect example, because also, who cares? You know, like the things that we tend to care about are so inconsequential to our own lives.
ELLEN: Exactly. You know, that, the way for someone to feel better is not by taking somebody else's support, but learning how to do whatever it is better and be aware, again, that there are things you can do that that person can't do, whatever it is.
ELISE: Well, thank you so much for your work, and I loved your book. It opened so many doors in my mind, and I want an earlier draft of the book, please, so I can see the woo-woo chapter in its full- force. I'm sure I would love that chapter.
ELLEN: Well, I think that for me, the way I try to open people's minds is to make them realize that the things they think they know, they don't really know very well. I mean, how is it that people are in their cars now and listening to me talk to them? And you say through electricity, what does that really mean? And yet they accept it. And if we recognize that we accept so many things without being able to explain it, maybe we'd open our mind to some of these other things. Now, I'm not suggesting that most of these woo woo were real. What I'm suggesting, it behooves us to be open to the possibility.
ELISE: a thousand percent. You write, "As Schopenhauer is presumed to have said, all research passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. And third, it is accepted as self evident."
ELLEN: That's right. You know, that's why if you have a strange idea, don't give it up so quickly.
ELISE: Well, thank you for your time and I loved, loved this book and will be pressing it into everyone's hands, first my parents.
ELLEN: Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you. This was great fun.
ELISE: Well we touched only a fraction of this book, which is just one of those great reads. And she’s written so many great books and I can’t believe I haven’t read them because literally every study she cited it was like “Oh, that was her…that was her…that was her,” including, we didn’t talk about this, but she writes about how in her lab they ran several studies to test the idea that fatigue is a mental construct. Anyway, this is a really fun, fast read, that’s full of mind bending studies, that I think gives credence to those of us who believe that there’s something more at play here then just matter affecting matter, while also rigorously supporting it in the lab. I mean she is a total legend, and as we opened the conversation, this is about mindfulness not specifically mediation, and I think many of us, myself included sometimes, I hear that word and think “I’m a terrible meditator” and then I just cutout and her point is that mindfulness is just literally being present, paying attention to subtle differences, listening carefully, and using our senses to understand the world more fully than most of us do as we’re busying through our lives. But when we start to pull our experiences apart, there’s a lot of variability, specificity in there, and what we can do with our minds is quite stunning, including our self-conception, this idea that being told that you’re on the cusp of being overweight, or whatever it is, is quite stunning. So, definitely read and gift this book, I’ll see you next week.
