Mindset, Health, And Life | Dr. Ellen Langer | EP 381

I say Mind Body these are just words imagine we could have had mind body and elbows you know that would lead us to a different conception of people the problem is for people who separate mind and body is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body so I said you know I don't want to pay attention to any of that it's all uh interesting philosophy but it's not useful say put the mind and body back together then wherever you're putting the mind you're necessarily putting the body I'm extremely pleased to announce that daily wire plus has decided to make the 16-part Exodus seminar fully and freely available to everyone over the next four months on YouTube we are therefore truly Beyond pleased to invite you almost hospitably to partake in this great moral banquet [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with the mother of mindfulness Dr Ellen Langer Dr Langer was a colleague of mine when I worked at Harvard in the early 90s and so it's a particular pleasure for me to be talking to her today we discuss her latest book the mindful body thinking our way to Chronic health we explore how intentional awareness paired with humility allows for a healthier mindset and body how the perception of time impacts the effects of disease and age the way to view tragedy and suffering so that we might conquer them through Faith and Hope and the immense benefits to be found in carefully considering to what where and who you direct your attention so I was reading your new book today the mindful body thinking our way to Chronic health and you know we were colleagues back in the 1990s I suppose we still are colleagues in some ways that's right and I was thinking about mindfulness again uh and I have a proposition for you and you tell me what you think about this I was thinking that mindfulness is something approximating paying attention to what you're paying attention to but I'm open for definitions you don't know I like that but the way I have defined it is actively noticing um you know that if you um people give people instructions and say pay attention um be present and that's sweet but it really falls on deaf ears because when people are not there they don't know they're not there and all of the research we've done over 40 years says most of us most of the time are Mindless so to be mindful you can do one of two things the the one most um uh the easiest for people is probably just to notice new things about the things you thought you knew and then you come to see you didn't know them as well as you thought you did and then your attention naturally goes to them the other is to adopt a mindset the only mindset we should have for uncertainty people don't realize that everything is always changing everything looks different from different perspectives so we can never know and um and if you know you don't know then you naturally stay tuned in if you were going to if you thought you knew what I was going to say next why listen to me so Jordan it's fun when I lecture I often begin election I ask people so I'll ask you how much is one plus one and people are annoyed with me because they think it's ridiculous and then they dutifully say too but it's not always two if you add one Cloud Plus One Cloud one plus one is one add one pile of laundry plus one pile of a pile of laundry one plus one and one watt of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum one plus one is one so in the real world one plus one probably doesn't equal to as more often as it does and the problem is that we're all taught absolutes we're taught facts that we think are unchanging and when you get again when you think you know you don't pay any attention so that's why I like the one plus one because that's the the most basic where people think surely they have the right answer now I must tell you so I was at this horse event many years ago it changed my life this man came over and asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to go buy his get his horse a hot dog you know you know I'm Harvard Yale all the way through nobody knows better people know as well that horses don't eat meat they're herbivorous right he comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it and it was at that moment that everything I thought I knew I realized could be wrong which for me was very exciting because I'd opened up a world of possibility when was that oh God that was about um a long time ago I'd say maybe even 30 years ago you know so I have been in this state of openness for at least if not for my lifetime for at least the last 30 some odd years so this you ancient art and you you um mentioned actually that people should pay it pay more attention to what they take for granted and one of the things that I've come to realize I think I can't now but Jordan and they can pay attention to what they take for granted because it doesn't occur to them they're in right right a robotic state of mind I'm sorry to interrupt well no no that's fine it's it's I I had I have written a little bit about the role of Art in remediating that because one of the things that happens as far as I can tell you can see this for example I think it's exemplified well by Van Gogh's painting irises in particular because it's easy in some ways to take what you've looked at many times for granted but what an artist will do and this is really their function is to put a Twist on the perception and then snap you out of that habitual frame of mind so that you see the object that you have taken for granted outside of the strictures of your preconceptions and the object always transcends your preconceptions because there's much more to it than you think we we have so what seems to happen neurologically is that we build up these little modules that specify our perceptions and then we default to them but it's possible to stop those modules and to re-novelize the phenomena and then to see it again in its glory and that is one of the things that what would you say keeps us falling in love with life yeah I mean I think that's perfect the only thing is that once somebody sees it anew if they think now they know what it is then they're going to be mindless again you know with just that breeze uh interval of being Mindful and it's interesting and I don't know if you know I started to paint um about well after I turned 50. and I'm you know I'm not one of those kids when I was younger who knew how to draw draw but nevertheless I took to the whole thing it was very exciting and prior to my painting um I had just assumed leaves for example on trees were green you know except in the fall when they turn brown but you know then I started looking at the leaves and there are hundreds of shades of green and so they they've um taking to painting opened my eyes and made me say that again things I thought I knew I didn't know at all so whether you're creating the art or observing the art in both cases it can have that effect as long and it can be an important effect as long as people don't think ah now I know so I on this theme of paying attention to what you pay attention to I want to tell you a bit of a story and get your comments on it so for years I was trying to sell tests that help people buy uh by by aiding them and specifying better employees and I talked to hundreds of middle managers about the tests I developed them actually when I was working at Harvard in our in our department there and uh what I found was that people didn't want those tests but what they did want to know was how to deal with people their employees that they already hired who weren't doing well and I thought well there isn't anything you can do with them because you're just a manager and you don't have the time or resources to deal with people's serious problems but no one really liked that answer so I went into the literature and I tried to see if there were any interventions that were scalable and inexpensive and harmless that actually produced a remedial effect and there there was a couple of sources of literature that specified exactly that one was derived one stream was established by people studying goal setting in the industrial realm and the other stream was established by James penabaker at the University of in in Austin in the University of Texas at Austin and what pennebaker showed was that if you got people to write about their past traumas that made them physically healthier and people varied his research to show that if you got people to write about their future that that also made them healthier and the goal-setting literature showed that if you got people to write about their future that they became more productive so we developed this program that was a vision program essentially called future authoring and you can do it in 90 minutes it it asks people to develop a vision for their life and so that means to pay attention to what they're paying attention to to decide what they want if they were going to optimize their life to do it consciously to decide what they didn't want and to aim away from that and then to do that in seven different dimensions of their life if you have students do that this is so fascinating I said well I hope you find it fascinating too if you have students do that for 90 minutes when they come into college for their orientation they are 50 they're 50 percent less likely to drop out and their grade point averages go up 35 percent 90 minutes of I'm yeah now I think that's great Jordan I'm not surprised because everything that you just mentioned you know Penny Baker's work for instance is an instance of making people mindful if you are writing about traumas that you've already discussed with people it doesn't have the um ameliorative effect um and the thing about about coming up with a scale it's very interesting because people don't realize that what we're always doing is trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's Solutions and um so when you're taking a scale you're assuming everything is staying still and those people may have if they did well on those scales possibly do well at the job as it was defined in the past but it's going to change so I have a different approach to all of it which is um essentially the same thing that you're you're suggesting with this 90-minute um uh interaction for students which I think is you know is wonderful what you're doing is waking them up and you know when you're writing about uh the past where you have to write about something you never explored before obviously you're being mindful because the idea of being mindful is noticing new things when you're writing about the future because you haven't experienced a future um again you're being Mindful and so um you know they should be taught just to be mindful from this art either in your way or added to it or in place of it and just an understanding that is very unusual especially in schools for people to be taught to exploit the power and uncertainty again all of the schools schools parents the Army you know industry in general teaches people absolutes this is the way you do it this is what it is horses don't eat meat one and one is two you know and so on and by teaching people that everything looks different from different perspectives everything is always changing uncertainty is the rule not the exception and you don't have to feel bad about not knowing you should make a universal rather than a personal attribution for not knowing because nobody knows and not knowing is good because then it makes everything potentially new and exciting I'm I'm thrilled that you found this in 90 minutes oh it's just stunning well it it actually shocked me half to death because I started thinking about it I had been using the same program in my classes because I had people outline a vision for their future and then I started thinking about the fact that we don't do this in the education system so I was teaching kids who had 15 years of education already and no one had ever sat them down once once in their entire educational history and said why don't you think about what you really want and who you could be and how you might lay that out and so then I did some research to trying to figure out into trying to figure out why in the world this was because it was as if we have a society that's predicated on literacy and forgot entirely to teach people to read there's nothing more important than having helping people establish Vision so I looked at the history of the development of the education system and it turns out that it was developed as a consequence of bringing in Prussian militaristic models of blind obedience in the late 1800s right to produce to produce mindless workers who would not be creative and who would not question authority and so that's actually that that rule following that mindless rule following that you're describing is built right into the system yeah that's great you know that um I've been studying mindful learning where essentially all you do when you're teaching is make it conditional you know rather than saying here are three reasons for the Civil War or whatever um it would be here are three reasons that could explain the Civil War from this perspective or that so you change things horses don't eat meat too it seems that most horses don't eat meat possibly horses don't eat me it could be that horses don't eat meat you know all of the words that suggest it's not always so and then you get an enormous difference because people don't learn the lesson and then think now I've got it and then close their mind to all the ways um it's changing uh it's interesting because if somebody asked me the other day when I was doing the podcast because I said we should be mindful all the time and I'll explain what I mean by that to you in a moment and and they said you know um isn't it exhausting and I'll talk about that but the important thing was they said you know why is everybody so mindless doesn't it serve a purpose and my answer to that and I'm curious about your reaction to this because I think you're better read in this regard than I that I don't have any data but my armchair reasoning leaves me to believe that teaching everybody all this mindlessness instantiates the status quo you know there's no reason why you and I should have these lofty positions and so many others um who would have something else to bring to the table that's no less valuable uh don't get a chance to offer it you know so um uh and so it will speak to that and then I'll tell you what I mean by why we should be mindful all the time as central banks and countries like China India and Australia begin transitioning to a digital currency the Federal Reserve has been contemplating the same for the U.S with the digital currency the government can track every single purchase you make officials could even prohibit you from purchasing certain products or easily freeze or seize part of or all of your money these are some of the reasons concerned Americans reach out to Birch gold they want to have a physical asset like gold that's independent of the US dollar you can protect your IRA or 401K by diversifying with gold from Birch gold historically gold has been a safe haven in times of high uncertainty which is right now learn if gold is right for you too text Jordan to 98 9898 and they'll send you a free info kit on gold with an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau thousands of happy customers and countless five-star reviews I trust Birch gold to help you diversify into gold if a central bank digital currency becomes a reality it will be nice to have some gold to depend on again text Jordan to 989898 well I think that you can make a case that and this is a common case made by say social critics particularly on the left is that anything that biases behavior in favor of Maintenance of the status quo obviously benefits people who are highly positioned in that status quo right now but there's there's another psychological reason for that too which is that if you introduce anomaly into a conceptual scheme you include you increase entropy by increasing choice and increased entropy if if you increase entropy and that happens involuntarily you catalyze the stress response now if you increase entropy voluntarily you don't catalyze the stress response you catalyze a challenge response and the challenge response looks like it's associated with positive emotion exploration and play and so that's another issue where attitude makes all the difference you see this in clinical work too because if people are exposed accidentally to a stressor and their phobic that tends to make them more phobic but if they're introduced voluntarily to a stressor of the same magnitude then the introduction of the stressor is Curative and then to on your final point you said that it's also easier let's say to default to mindlessness and the thing is you know that's true no I I don't think it well I don't think it's really easier in fact I think people don't fully understand what uh what I mean by being mindful because they think you know uh when I say should be mindful all the time people get crazy how could that be because they confuse mindfulness with just thinking and thinking has gotten a bad rap yeah thinking is fun what's what's not good about uh thinking and stressful about thinking is worrying about whether you're going to get the problem solved whether you're going to look stupid when you come up with your answers and so on um which uh you know which is the stress that you're talking about and that's debilitating but all stress is Mindless you know so my view is that if you're gonna do it you should be there for it and that mindfulness it turns out is energy be getting not consuming and that you know when you're if you came here to visit me Jordan since you've never been at my house here um everything would be new you'd be looking around you'd see what books is she reading oh you know there are all those Fritos that your um men who helped set this up left around you know you would notice and it wouldn't be hard for you um you'd go on a trip to Europe you don't have to practice being mindful your expectation is it will all be new and so you are Mindful and mindfulness is the essence of Engagement it's what you do when you're having fun so um you know is there a limit to how much fun and how happy you can be I don't think so so we should be mindful all the time if people say well aren't there circumstances where it's your advantage to be mindless my answer is emphatically no and I say let's say you're at the park and you took a a two-year-old with you and this is a person trying to challenge me and says now and the two-year-old wanders into the street wouldn't it be best to mindlessly just grab the child um so that the child doesn't hit by the oncoming car and my response to that is twofold the first is that if you were mindful the child wouldn't have ended up in the street in the first place and secondly that um probably in grabbing the child you want to notice the posture of the driver to figure out whether they're going to turn right or left to know if you should take the child out of Harm's Way going to the right or left and so on um that the only time one should be mindless I believe is when you found the very best way of doing doing something and nothing changes and so clearly I don't think those conditions can be met so mindlessness feels good I have I have over 45 years of research showing that um it's good for your health people it's good for your relationships people see you as authentic charismatic and it even leaves its imprint on the things that we do and given that it's so easy I can find no reason why people wouldn't begin immediately after understanding us today to become more mindful so a variety of things there the first is the the behaviorist the Neuroscience oriented behaviorists distinguish two forms of reward there is satiation reward consummatory reward technically an incentive reward and Conservatory reward tends to bring about quiescence and sleep and so I might say well you should be mindless when it's time to go to sleep because it's time to go to sleep if you're satiated there are there are times for rest with regard to optimized engagement that seems to be an incentive reward phenomenon that's mediated by dopamine and it's Associated as you already pointed out with exploration and play and I would say that is is it exhausting I mean it depends on the level of intensity but it's definitely engaging and and it's it's also engaging in an interesting manner because what play does is engage you in a manner that expands your realm of adaptive competence right so you're you're doing the task but you're simultaneously getting better at doing the task and that that's a very that's an optimized place to stand that's vygotsky's zone of proximal development because you're continually expanding your domain of adaptive competence by playing and the emotions that are associated with that are associated with engagement and meaning and depth right right yeah yeah yeah you know it's interesting you mentioned fatigue so um in the mindful body I have I present some research on fatigue let me give you um the simplest of these lists let's imagine uh we have what do I have to imagine and I'll report it so we have a group of people we have them do 100 jumping jacks very simple and tell us when you get tired so they get tired around two-thirds of the way through the activity around 67. so then we have another group of people they're going to do 200 Jumping Jacks and we ask them tell us when you're tired and they also are tired two-thirds of the way through which is twice as many jumping jacks as the former group and we do this across all you know but ballerinas uh in all different uh spheres so there's a degree to which fatigue itself is a mindset and limits us um but I think that you know if you go back to I I you made me think about something of somebody you get into bed and you want to go to sleep and you are suggesting that maybe at that point they should be mindless I think that what happens too often is that the stress of the day uh keeps people awake you know um and that um if they weren't stress and stress is Mindless you know when you're stressed two things are happening first you believe something awful is something's going to happen and second that when it happens it's going to be awful and prediction is an illusion so if you said to yourself simply what are three five reasons why this thing won't happen you won't fail the test you won't be fired your spouse won't leave you whatever it is that's keeping you awake at night and you give yourself three to five reasons why it won't happen well you immediately feel better maybe it'll happen maybe it won't rather than it's definitely going to happen and then turn it around let's assume it does happen What are three or five reasons ways that that's actually a good thing and if people don't realize that events themselves don't come pre-packaged there aren't good things bad things that whatever happens needs to be interpreted by us and the more mindful you are the more available are multiple interpretations good bad and whatever and I don't know why I keep using this as an example maybe help me come up with a better one but if you and I went out to lunch and the food was delicious wonderful the food's delicious if you and I go out for lunch and the food is awful wonderful the food is awful presumably I'll eat less and that'll be better for my waistline you know that um when you know and and with this attitude and I don't know if I'm going to be able to make this clear but I hope people will think about it there's a way I live my life and I fall up I don't fall down you know my car gets a ding on it I get it repaired and I fix something that uh something else about the car so afterwards it's better than it was before um you know so when you realize that events don't determine how you feel it's the view you take of the event that determines how you feel um then you know it's hard to understand why we would come up with explanations that are frightening and stressful and people say you know everybody has to experience stress they just take it as a given and I tell you uh Jordan let there are things you know I'm 76 years old so certainly in my life there are things that have happened that have been big but um in the normal course of a day a week a month a year I don't experience stress and I have this one liner that I think people will find useful you know ask yourself when something happens is it a tragedy or an inconvenience rarely is it ever a tragedy the dog ate my homework I missed the bus I burnt the meal you know whatever it is that causes us stress and it turns out that almost everything that we're stressed about virtually all of it never happens so you talk take the attitude no worry take the attitude no worry before it's time okay you're the reframing that you talked about with regards to people's um worry at night that's something that's very much part and parcel of cognitive behavioral therapy is that one of the things that you do is involved in the beginning right right well you take people who are locked into say a depressive or an anxiety-inducing pattern of of repetitive thought and you have them open up a wider realm of possibility and then you have them practice instantiating that so that becomes more part of their well part of their nature let's say you also mentioned the jumping jack study and uh it reminded me of studies done by Peter Hermann showing that if you imagine you bring people into the lab and you have them watch a movie and you give them a bag of popcorn if you give them a small bag of popcorn and you ask they'll eat the whole bag of popcorn and then if you ask them if they want another they'll say no but if you give them a bag of popcorn that's five times that big they will also eat that yes exactly exactly it's like it's and it it what what seems to happen is that we set up a Target and the target is somewhat arbitrary right so it could be portion size and then the goal is to hit the target and And You And the emotions that are experienced in relationship to that Target are Target dependent and so and this is also it's also part of the trick of setting optimal goals right is that you want to set a goal that challenges you and that pushes you beyond your limits but you don't want to set a goal that's absolutely impossible to attain if you set a high goal the amount of positive emotion that you experience as you move towards the goal increases but if the goal is too high and it's impossible well then it's you know then that can be frustrating and and disappointing but it's very interesting let me see how malleable that is well it's interesting because one of the ways I Define mindlessness is to be goal driven Rule and routine driven you know that it's fine to have a goal but you have to realize we're setting that goal at time one and oftentimes uh moving towards something several years in the future Lots change and there's no reason for us not to take advantage of the changes and perhaps change the goal you know when we form these goals where do they come from you know somebody said it's important to be a doctor for example and so you're on your way to be a doctor but you really don't want to be a doctor you know change it um essentially at the end of the end of the game you want to feel good about yourself you want to feel good about your relationships and feel perhaps that you've made some contribution in some way to somebody or To The World At Large and you can do that almost um uh in any occupation and um I think that you know there are people who are given goals they I want to be a billionaire used to be when I was younger a millionaire that's not enough I want to be a billionaire but I think that if we surveyed most of the billionaires and they were honest you'd see most of them are not very happy so if you sit back at square one do you want to be an unhappy billionaire or a happy um bike store owner I think people might choose differently so as you're gaining information uh pursuing the goal you want to in fact be open to possibility I mean so I say to my class that you know um let's say that on your way to school today you run into I I don't know uh who's famous these days that they might like yeah that you are just so cool or whatever word they use um please you know let's go have a cup of coffee uh but you say no I can't I have Professor Langer's class meeting now I that's ridiculous you know that here's an opportunity that you're probably not going to get again something you would really want to do um you should deviate from the plan you know you should be in the and the state of mind so that whatever you're doing is in a sense what you would choose to do now not doing it because what you decided to do in a for you a prior life you know years ago it goes against lots of what people think I mean I'm sure you're going to say to me after this well what about delay of gratification and here I have a lot to say that is probably going to be met with um um I don't know disagreement rage outrage who knows I don't think we should delay gratification I think that first of all since everything is changing you know if I decide I'm not going to do this now I'll do it next week this good thing because next week will be better for me on the world may change and often changes in such a way two ways one that I may not have the opportunity to do it in the future as in the going for the coffee with Taylor Swift or a second that my desires very well may change now so you say well what about studying and um you know things of this sort where we have to do the work so tomorrow we prosper and it's very simple Jordan you know that no matter what you're doing there's a way of doing so that it's fun and enjoyable almost no matter what if you put away the stress of failure of not being able to complete it successfully and so on then all the little challenges that present themselves motivate us and feel good and um you know so there's I don't know if you've ever seen it but you should it's wonderful there's a YouTube called Piano stairs and so what these people did in Scandinavia they go um to uh subway stations all over the place and in all of his subway stations you have an escalator and stairs and so the film is very clear everybody takes the escalator everybody random young person who wants to take the stairs then they laid down piano keyboards on the stairs so it actually makes noise so now you go do as you're going up because it's such fun in a very short amount of time nobody virtually takes the escalator everybody is taking the stairs anything can be made to be fun and so I tell my students why wait for somebody to put down the keyboard you know one can do it I can't say or else I would make it more compelling for you um as they go up the stairs there's a way to make everything if not fun interesting and potentially exciting once we take off that layer of um uh evaluation apprehension the Bible is the root of all wisdom inspiration and spiritual nourishment the Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible's profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life a great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out father Mike schmitz's Bible in a year available on the Hallow app for brief daily readings and Reflections here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans accompanied by insightful Reflections and audio guided meditations whether you're a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey hallow provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before studying the Bible's 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in potential necessary tasks right to help them recraft the way that they're looking at the world so for example one one way of approaching that is that if if someone lives in a very messy and disordered environment and they want to put that into something approximating order you experiment with them to find out how much they could work on that every day until they find an optimized balance so that they're compelled and interested in doing it and it might be that they can only do it to begin with for two minutes or three minutes but they can joust with themselves to find out what's what's interesting and engaging and it is certainly the case that you can ask yourself regardless of the task that you're engaged in how you could Orient your attention so that that task would be as engaging and meaningful as possible and that's a constantly worthwhile thing to do now I want to decorate that with something so this you might find this interesting I hope you find it interesting so you know this this issue of attention has been an obsession of deep thinkers for thousands of years I spent a fair bit of time studying ancient Egyptian theology so there's a set of stories that derive out of ancient Egypt that were well they're extremely influential in fact some of the symbols we still know so one of the symbols is the famous eye you know the Egyptian eye with the curved eyebrow so here's what the Egyptians figured out they figured out there were four deities so one deity was the king that was Osiris one day and he was the king's evil brother that was Seth that word eventually becomes Satan one deity was Horus who was a falcon and the other deity was Isis who was Queen of the underworld so Osiris is habit and Osiris is represented by the Egyptians as a great king who's now anachronistic archaic and somewhat senile senile and willfully blind okay now he has an evil Uncle he has an evil brother and that's set the evil brother of the king and he's the proclivity of ordered systems to become malevolent with time the antithesis of that is Horus and Horus is the Open Eye and the Falcon and he's the Falcon because Falcons can see better than any other animals including human beings and so the Egyptians determined that Horus who was the god of attention was the force that kept the evil King at Bay so destroyed the negative consequences of habit and revitalized the social order and they prioritized attention as the highest God and so did the Mesopotamians so they had a a god Marduk who was their Pinnacle God said Jordan they all beat me to the punch so this is good to know and the question is why has it taken so long for cultures around the world to uh see the wisdom in all of this you think it's partly because if you start to become mindful there's also the possibility that you'll bring your shortcomings to mind like imagine that you do start a practice of attending you're as you attend you're going to learn things about yourself that are interfering with your ability to openly attend right and and that can be challenging and and off-putting because you can see because you're wondering well if this is so obvious why don't people notice it why don't people just automatically do it and I do think that part of it is that when you start to pay careful attention you find things that need to be fixed and that calls you that okay so well that's one possibility anyways well so let me let me speak to that because something that's very important to me um is the idea that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else he or she wouldn't do it and so if one were mindful they'd be aware of why they're doing what they're doing and it turns out that every description we have of people ourselves or others has an equally potent but oppositely valence alternative so you want to diminish me because I'm so gullible which I am from my perspective I'm trusting you drive me crazy because you're so inconsistent from your perspective you're flexible you can't stand me because I'm so impulsive uh that's because I value being spontaneous so it's interesting I like this as a clinician years ago we did this study where we gave people about 200 of these Behavior descriptions and we said Circle those things about yourself that you want to change but you have trouble changing okay so for me it would be gullible um impulsive for example now you turn the sheet of paid page turn the sheet of paper over and in a mixed up order of the positive versions of each of these and now we ask people Circle those things about yourself you really value trusting and spontaneous and so as long as I value being trusting I'm going to necessarily be gullible as long as I value being spontaneous people on occasion are going to see me as impulsive and when you realize that behavior makes sense then we don't want to change ourselves or other people in in the same way you know that you might be tired of me because I'm so whatever and then when you see the positive version of it you welcome it and our relationship flourishes and we become less judgmental because before you were talking about um uh what do we do with people in Industry who um who don't do well at whatever the task is and um it occurred to me that everybody doesn't know something every I met wrote a little song about this that I uh sang from my entire but my grandkids um I'm not going to sing it because I can't carry it too and although I should Jordan because that's what it's about I do a lot very very well so why should I hesitate so here we go you ready I'm ready everybody doesn't know something but everyone knows something else everyone can't do something but everyone can do something else so my long-term goal is to take the horizontal where we comfortably sit on top and the vertical rather and make it horizontal where everybody is valued and so the person who seems not to be able to do whatever it is will be able to do it differently somehow else you know it goes back to um you have your teaching and you ask your students how much is one in one and one person in the class says one and what we do now is we belittle that person we teach the these students around to have no respect for that person where in my world what we do is say Johnny Susie whatever how did you come up with that and then they tell us I added one Cloud plus one cloud or however they came up with it um and that we learn that much more you know I was lecturing on South Africa many years ago and I was staying at this fancy hotel and I note I was down at the pool resting one afternoon and I notice that there was this enormous amount of real estate in the hotel you know part of the hotel that nobody was using and the only person who knew that was the lowly Cabana Boy you know that of course if we assumed that he had something really to offer we could we would think to get that information from him and then make more money which seems to be the goal of most of these uh entrepreneurs or hotel owners or what have you um you know so we we're brought up thinking there's a single way of doing things there's a single answer to questions and all of that Fosters our mindlessness and you know sometimes when I'm lecturing I'll look in the uh audience to see if there's some guy who seems really big and I'll say you know uh ask him if he'll come to the stage so let's assume I'm lucky that day and he's six five well I'm five three almost all right and so we look ridiculous next to each other and then I asked him to put his hand up and his hand is three inches bigger than mine and then I raise the question should we do anything physically the same way should we hold a tennis rack a baseball bat a golf club um and the answer is clearly no and that the more similar you are to the person who wrote the rules perhaps the the better it is for you to follow but the more important part of that is the more different you are the more important it is for you to find your own way of doing it and you know and that when when when people are taught conditionally you know you sort of hold the racket like this or you could hold the racket like this they're more likely to come up with their own way than somebody who's told this is the way so I want to sort I want to sort what appeared to be two competing claims out in my imagination so on the one hand as far as I can tell you're making the case that all things considered um an attitude towards the world that's more attentive and mindful is better so that's a definite um okay okay yes but now but you you added to that a different conception which was that every um negative trait let's say has a positive element which by the way is something that that seems to me to be an appropriate statement but there's a there's somewhat of a contradiction there as far as I can tell because on the one hand you're you're flattening out the moral hierarchy and saying well there's a multitude of ways of looking at things and just because you think something is bad it isn't necessarily bad it could be good in another way but at the same time there is a sort of ultimate exactly yeah yeah so so how do you reconcile those that's right I don't I don't I think that um you know that in today's world we all aspire to certain things and given the values that are currently operative uh to to meet those values to live the kind of life that most people seem to want which is not answering the question about whether they'd be better off living a very different kind of Life uh mindfulness sets the stage for it and there you know that if it's a contradiction so be it you know that I think that um we can live with contradictions until we accumulate enough wisdom to resolve them but at this point yes that's exactly what I'm saying nothing is uh good or bad except it's better to be mindful um so but you know I think one of the things that I'd I'd like to talk about if you're willing is some of the health work and the mindful body because here one of the values that we seem to have um is to be healthy to live a long happy um healthy life and one could argue that also that if one is going to live multiple lives which some people believe in a reincarnation and whatever maybe that goal is misplaced but if we take that goal as real a great deal of the information we've been given is simply wrong and I go back to the the horse that ate the hot dog and what people need to realize is that that studies research can only give us probabilities do you do a studying and the study shows you that if you were to do it again the exact same way which we could never do we're likely to get the same findings these probabilities are then taught to us as absolutes Horses don't eat meat one and one is two and so on now when you're given a diagnosis and you're told um research shows that you have six months to live or whatever it is I mean that's insane you know nobody can know that and when you realize that everything we're taught or maybe is it allows us to go forward and find new ways of doing things new ways of meeting our needs um and so on so I talk a lot in the mindful body about Mind Body unity and tell me what you think of this I say Mind Body these are just words imagine we could have had mind body and elbows you know that would lead us to a different conception of people and right now people think um you know that mind and body being separate and they know well they're sort of connected they don't know how um that the problem is for people who separate mind and body is how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called the body so I said you know I don't want to pay attention to any of that it's all uh interesting philosophy but it's not useful say put the mind and body back together then wherever you're putting the mind you're necessarily putting the body and we've done so many studies on this uh the first one you you might know about because I reported it earlier on in work is the counterclockwise study do you know this Jordan we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there as if they were their younger selves so they're speaking about the past in the present tense um everything is designed to make them think that now was 20 years earlier as a result of this without medical intervention in a period of time as short as a week I think it was only five days actually their Vision improved the hearing improved their memory improved their strength improve and they look significantly younger just by putting the mind in a different place so you want me to tell you about a couple of the newer ones please do please do and then all then I'll respond okay so um I'll go in some chronological order the next one we did uh was a study with chamber maids and we asked the chamber Mains how much exercise do you get they thought exercise is what you do after work because that's what Surgeon General leaves people to believe and they're just too tired so they don't think they get any exercise so all we did was take half of them and teach them that their work was exercise you know making the bed is like working on this machine at the gym and so on so I think we have two groups one who sees they work as exercise the other who doesn't realize they work as exercise just changing that mindset eating the same working in the same way they're not working harder they're not eating less they're not eating more just changing their mind so now their work is exercise they lost weight there was a change in race um ways to hip ratio body mass index and their blood pressure came down okay so now let's go fast forward let me just give you one of the new the newest studies so we inflicted wounds well you know that it would be wonderful if I could do some something dramatic and really hurt people I have no desire to do that and even if I did luckily the review board is not going to let me so we inflict a minor wound now we have people sitting uh it's a little more complicated than I'm saying but just so it becomes clear they're sitting 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 for a third of the people the clock is real time and the question is how long does it take the wound to heal well it turns out the wound heals based on clock time perceived time and we have studies with diabetics you know the same thing we find that insulin increases or decreases based on perceived time rather than real time we have people in a sleep lab they wake up they think they got two hours more sleep than they got two hours fewer or the amount that they got biological and cognitive functioning seems to follow perceived slave and all of this this might be a fun story for you you know somebody had asked me where did this come from I mean how did I get into this and um I was married when I was very young and I went to Paris on my honeymoon and it was very important that I was very sophisticated because now I was a married woman even though I was a baby and I ordered mixed grill on this restaurant we were eating in and on the plate was pancreas and I said to my then husband which one is the pancreas this is that one okay so now I don't know if I can do it but I feel like now I'm so sophisticated I have to be able to eat the pancreas I eat everything on the plate with gusto now the Moment of Truth can I eat it well I start eating it and I'm literally getting sick I I can't swallow it my stuff okay and my then husband starts laughing and I say what's so funny he said that's chicken you ate the pancreas 20 minutes ago yeah it's going on here you know um it's like you're walking down the street and a leaf blows in your face and you get all startled um Until you realize it's just a leaf you know that um our thoughts have enormous control uh over our health and we need to pay more more attention to that so you know my mother uh had breast cancer The Last Story my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to have pancreas and that's the end game right pancreatic cancer and then magically it was just gone and the medical world couldn't explain it then and they still can't explain it now and this mind-body Unity idea does explain it and I think spontaneous remissions are much greater in frequency than people realize you know you have people who never get to the medical world in the first place who have tumors that they don't know they have or even you and I um tumors that are there that you know are magically gone you know we've all heard stories of people who are told they only have a year to live and they're telling us a story 10 15 years later you know um and when we believe again that we can beat whatever this thing is we organize ourselves differently and even in a very mundane way you know if I think that I'm going to live like I start living and I start doing things um the you know the neurons are firing where if I believe my demise is only moments away I shut down you know and um help in some sense uh the end of my life according to a recent study of hundreds of post-abortive women sixty percent of women reported that they would have preferred to give birth if they had received more support from others or had more Financial Security and that's where preborn steps in pre-born is there for women in their Darkest Hour deciding between the life and death of their Precious Child the reality is that women are being pressured to make this fatal decision and are being told that their babies are just a Clum of cells pre-born welcomes women with love and introduces them to the beautiful life growing inside of them which doubles their baby's chances at life when you support pre-born you not only support women you Empower them your donation of 28 will help a woman receive a free ultrasound your love can save a life dial pound 250 and say the key word baby or visit preborn.com Jordan all gifts are tax deductible you will never regret saving a child's life that's pound 250 baby or visit preborn.com Jordan [Music] okay so I've I've got a variety of comments about what you just said my wife was diagnosed with cancer first of all in principle a trivial form and then that was a misdiagnosis and then she was diagnosed with the cancer that only 200 people in the world have been reported to have that killed every single one of them in 10 months and she told me about six months into the treatment that she would be better on our wedding anniversary which was August 19th this was three months ahead she got better on our wedding anniversary and it's been five years yes it's so so so I'm telling you that so you're a Believer well I'm telling you that because I've seen strange things happen now I've also seen in my clients for example you see this with people who are retiring and retiring is generally a very stupid plan for people because last thing yeah well they have a they have a very narrowed image of what retirement means so they imagine themselves you know surfing slip sipping Margaritas on a beach in the Caribbean which is a real good plan for the first night but a really long really bad well right you just turn into like a fat sunburned alcoholic in no time flat and like I've seen people around 55 start to decide that they're old you know they've sort of decided that they've had the adventure of their life and that they're done and that makes that does facilitate their aging very rapidly now but by the same token this is and this is where all this is going you know I understand that the structure of reality is malleable in relationship to interpretation and to a degree that is unspecifiable right however I'm curious about your notion of where the limits to that are I mean you took these elderly people and you put them in a situation where they were acting out the proposition they were 20 years younger and they were getting all sorts of feedback from their environment that that was valid but the the painful truth of the matter does seem to be that we all age and that we all die and so you know there are there are intrinsic limits too so so tell me how you what you make of that yeah yeah I don't know what the limit is I think that it's to our um uh Advantage as individuals and as a culture uh to assume that we can exceed wherever we are you know I think that um people what people used to die you probably know just when when they were 20 years old and then people were dying mostly at 40 years old and uh this you'll find this funny do you know who Willard Scott was I've never never said this publicly anyway Willard Scott was the um a weatherman for um a news program and what Willard Scott would do is every day every morning he'd say and happy birthday Rosie from Michigan who just turned 100. and happy birthday Peter who I just turned 100. and so the idea of turning a hundred became to my mind for many people much more likely and I think that oddly You know despite all the work I've done in the uh aging area all the medical work I think he had a very significant role in extending our lifespan you know again if you think you're going to live um a long life you organize yourself differently and it's that organization those thoughts of how to continue growing uh no it's very funny the other day I was helping this person on this old woman with something and my spouse said to me you know she's probably a lot younger than you were which I didn't even realize so um I just don't have a sense of I don't use age as a measure of do it don't do it and I think that that's that's healthy I think that you asked about limits um interestingly years ago I think it might have even been when you were at Harvard um I was on the division of Aging at the medical school and Jack Rowe was the chair of the committee and I called Jack one day he was my doctor of choice at the moment and I said Jack how long does it take for a broken finger to heal and he says I don't know let's say a week I said what would you say if I said I could heal it psychologically in five days she said okay I said what about four days okay what about three days no okay what about three days and 23 hours you know where is where is the breaking point and so that's the way things progress is in these small steps um um but if you follow that logic you know if you know that if you can do it in three days and 23 hours so why not three days and 22 hours and why not you know and then you slowly get yourself to the point where you can do it in three days and if you do it in three days why not two days and 23 and a half hours and so on and I don't know what the limit is I just think we're so far from what these limits to what we can do in in any parts of our Lives not just our health um that we we can far exceed whatever goals we set for ourselves I've been writing about there's there's a notion that's deeply embedded in in the Genesis text that human suffering is a consequence of sin and not built into the structure of the universe right and it's a it's a strange Doctrine in many ways because as I pointed out earlier the normal course of human events is that everybody ages and dies and so the notion that suffering and limitation is built in seems self-evident but then there's another part of me that thinks you know we all waste an awful lot of our own time in futile Pursuits and self-defeating Pursuits and we impose limitations on ourselves that are arbitrary and often lazy and we hurt ourselves by doing that and then collectively we deceive each other and we lie and we don't cooperate well together and we manipulate and that interferes with our ability to apprehend things properly and to structure our existence properly and you know the wildly optimistic side of me thinks and and I do think there is reason for believing this that if we got our act together completely insofar as that's possible and that might partly be by paying more attention that there aren't any intrinsic limits that would necessarily stop us we'd still have to figure out for example like it's an open question to me and I'm kind of curious about your attitude towards this you know if you if you could choose how long you would live do you have any idea how long you would choose I mean an indefinite existence you know of hundreds of thousands of years that seems yeah it seems to me to be like incomprehensibly dramatic it is and awesome right I mean it's a long time yeah but but 80 years seems kind of short so laughs I think that um you know it depends what people should strive for rather than adding more years to their life they should be adding more life to their years and by doing that then um you'll want to extend you know if today is really exciting you look forward to tomorrow if you're miserably depressed today you're scared about tomorrow and so that if we were able to create a world where people were more mindful where people had more respect for each other by noticing people's behavior makes sense or else they wouldn't do it um that um I think that there'd be no reason to fear you know you you can't imagine what life is going I can't even imagine what life is going to be like in 50 years and I'm I'm a survey which is separate from whether I'm going to be alive or not most people would say no but you know who knows um you know AI is changing things the iPhone change things the railroad change things and all of these so it we don't know what the big change is going to be it could be I which planet was it was it Venus where they just found ice um making space travel to whatever wherever it was um seemingly more possible I don't know I don't claim to have any uh special knowledge about what the Deep future holds so I wouldn't know how to think about it so you I do know how to think of you you think that if you concentrated on maximizing the quality of your life the issue of how long that should extend would more or less solve itself as a consequence of that exact orientation yeah that seems it seems reasonable Ellen can can I can I change the topic please when we were when we were um when we were College well no when we were discussing the possibility of this podcast one of the things we had talked about a little bit is the the state of the university and I do want to I do want to approach that with you too when I when I worked with you if you don't mind um when I worked with you in the 1990s I was at Harvard between 92 and 98 and I really thought I thought it was a great privilege to be there I really enjoyed my time in terms of attitude there was something interesting that happened then too that that you might find um worthy of of contemplation given given your attitude towards attitude you know that the junior professors at Harvard were always destined to leave in 99.9 percent of the cases you know and when I first came there I observed that some of the junior faculty who were at the outer limits of their of their brief tenure there were unhappy that they weren't likely to be considered for permanent status and that they'd have to move on and I thought but I don't want to be in that position in six years I think I'll go there and think if the turnover of junior staff wasn't High I wouldn't have got this job to begin with and that I'm pretty damn lucky to go to Harvard and meet all these people and be paid for it because most people who go to Harvard have to pay to go and I got paid for going so that was a good deal and that I should be happy with the outcome regardless of what it was and then move on to wherever I was going and that was an attitudinal shift that was very helpful to me and made the transition out of there much smoother than it might have been even though it was accompanied by a certain amount of grief anyways when I was there I also felt that it was a very admirable institution and and that I was there in a kind of golden age I thought the university had prioritized the research um requirements of the senior faculty as their number one goal and then they treated undergraduates exceptionally well and then they were pretty good to Junior faculty and graduate students kind of in that order and the administrative apparatus was essentially there to facilitate all of that so it was it was structured in a lovely way and I also found that my colleagues Junior and senior alike were fundamentally focused on their intellectual interests and their research and they did the what was necessary to keep things moving forward on the administrative front effectively but that was not anyone's primary concern so I was thrilled to be there um I can't say that the University of Toronto offered operated with that degree of professionalism let's say and and commitment to Excellence and I also saw a decline in the quality of the University Enterprise that was quite precipitous over about a 20-year period And so I'm wondering well I'm wondering your reactions to that and I I'm not happy with what's happened in the university community in general um what's your what's your take on on the educational front yeah um well the first thing is that we have to be aware that anything I say uh may just be the difference of being you know 30 years old versus as old as I am you know rather than a change in the University itself might change rather than the universities change um the idea that um most people are not going to get tenure was the rule I was actually I was I tenured when you were there yes you were yes I was a no no no and then it's much later because I was the first tenured woman in the psychology department and there were years where there was you know nobody else right right that was by far though I yeah but I remember um you know I was hot stuff then I'm allowed to say it because it's the past right you know that um and I suffered you know with am I going to get tenure am I not going to get 10. I was the hottest thing out there I shouldn't have had to suffer and I said to myself you know having gone through this nobody should have to go through this um and it turned out to be positive and that was wonderful well the university changed over time so now if you were to come as a junior person um you're very likely to get tenure it's now just like all the other universities in the world so um so that's a good thing um as far as and then the students are still spectacular um and my colleagues are doing very interesting work and the university supports all of that so those things haven't changed my feeling is that there are more rules and regulations than there were in the past which um interferes at a time with uh certain intellectual activities you know if I wanted to and this has happened over and over again um I want to do research the research I'm doing is not like in the medical school where you can take one person's head and put it on another person and then see if it works you know most of the things we're asking people to do are innocuous and it takes forever so we have the idea then it takes um a good over a year to get approval to do it and then we actually do it and it's just it's too many steps and um so I find for whatever reason I don't know what the reason is actually but that when I was younger it was easier to get these things done and not because I'm an older person now I mean I I think in this way I'm Wiser you know but um things have just become more complicated you know I used to have um somebody from Europe or or then the states or um even somebody in Boston right next door want to volunteer to be in my lab well it turns out and that was great because you know I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do I need an army of people to help me do it it turns out you can't take volunteers unless they're Harvard students why can't you take volunteers well because um unions and whatever has changed so that in one person's lab somebody found out that they weren't getting paid they were volunteering and they were doing the exact same thing as somebody else volunteering excuse me as somebody else so same job One is paid one isn't that caused a lot of difficulty with the result that I can't take these people you know it's things like that that make it hard um at any rate uh but it's still a wonderful place to be everyone's talking about how chat gbt and artificial intelligence are going to change the world big tech companies are all investing heavily in AI for search they're also the same big tech companies that determine your search results only now they get to cut out a whole new layer from the information you see why should they link off to third-party websites in the search results when they can let their robot generate the perfect answer to your question that's why I use expressvpn to add a layer of protection between me and big Tech the expressvpn app hides my unique IP address on all of my devices this makes it much more difficult for big Tech to identify who I am and match my activity back to me it's so easy to use all I have to do is tap one button on my phone or computer to turn it on and that's it expressvpn also encrypts 100 of my online traffic keeping me safe from hackers and prying eyes the best part is one expressvpn subscription covers up to five devices at the same time so my whole family can use it too stop letting big Tech leech onto your data freely expressvpn.com Jordan that's e-x-p-r-e-s-svpn.com Jordan and get three extra months free expressvpn.com Jordan proliferation of bureaucratic impediments it's well it's hard on the research side because if you're an entrepreneurial and creative person which is what you need to be if you're going to generate a lot of research ideas there's a certain quickness of mind and approach and striking while the iron is hot that goes along with that right because you have to follow that thread of interest and for me to for me to have to delay a study for a year means that by the time the study is possible well not in the least it's like I what I haven't learned anything in the intervening year right you know what kind of useless bastard would I be in that situation yeah so let me tell you something so I think that this was actually I don't remember the year but it was a long time ago so it might have even been before things were bureaucratic you still had people on these review committees who um I disagree with vehemently so I want to do this study I actually talk about this in the mindful body and this which we ended up doing but the study is we want to see the difference between seeing your cancer as in remission versus seeing it as cured all right now um when the cancer is not there it's you know this happened a friend of mine who had very bad case of cancer one day she comes back from Mass General and she said I said how are you Eva she said great my cancer is in remission and at that moment the light bulb went off why is it if I had the exact same test they'd tell me I don't have cancer and she has cancer and remission and you know once a person is told that cancer is in remission the Indica you know implication it may still be there and that you're stressed and that stress I think stress by the way is the major killer over and above genetics over and above nutrition um and so a woman with the silly five-year rule where there's no data for it you know the cancer is gone they're not going to declare her cancer free and any permanent sense until five years have passed five years of stress is awful and what people need to understand is that if you're in remission and I'll tell you about the study in a moment but if you're if you're in remission you're worried about the cancer if you're cured you go about living and um if cancer comes back in some ways it'll be the same cancer that's why we call it cancer but in just as many ways it's brand new and so there's reason to see it as something different it never comes back exactly the same and so when you have a cold and then you're the cold is gone you don't see yourself as in remission you know and when you get another cold you don't see it as the same cold as before it's a brand new cold even though they both bear similarities which is why we call them both coals and so each time you beat a cold you become in some sense less and less frightened of getting a cold um I can I can beat this I've beaten it many times in the past which is not the case oftentimes uh with cancer so what we did and here's where the review board comes into play the first attempt at this was to ask people women on a cancer awareness walk um about whether they see their cancer as in remission or cured and then we'd check back a while later six months later to see how their health has progressed the review board wouldn't let us do this because asking somebody about their cancer they thought was stressful these are women on a breast cancer awareness walk I mean you know and so it required lots of fighting with them um the best one years and years ago this um uh student comes in she's gay and she believes and I think it's a very reasonable assumption that if a child is brought up by two women since mothers are so important to the upbringing of kids this child is going to be better off and and that would have been worth noting so what she wanted to do was to go into gay bars and if there were women in gay bars she wanted to ask them if they had children and if they had children she wanted to ask them to be in the study and the review board said asking remember any gay bar asking people uh if they're gay is insulting you know well when I heard this I went crazy how homophobic and whatever now the point the larger point I guess is that the people who are on these boards are ordinary people with ordinary biases things change over time I couldn't imagine that that study wouldn't get uh be allowed to be run immediately now For Better or Worse um and um you know so for me these review boards while I appreciate their need maybe um it's always been the bane of my existence because if they do a cost-benefit analysis you know should we be able to run the study well let's see what the aggravation and potential harm is going to do to people and what we're going to for my work they almost never think it's going to work which is why I want to do the study in the first place and so if you don't you know if you're on the board and you're going to do a cost-benefit analysis and you don't believe it's going to work even if I just ask you to fill out three questions the costs exceed the benefits so it's always been hard for me and the you know I know that the original nursing home study that we did where we gave people a plan to take care of encourage them to make decisions for themselves um and they live longer this was a very important study not just from the Mind Body Unity idea but for medicine in general um and um I I don't think they'd let me do it now and um so and I think that's a shame well we don't exactly understand the invisible preconditions for the scientific Enterprise right I mean we tend to think of science as a robust Enterprise and in some ways a self-evident Enterprise and that's stupid because it's only about 450 years old and it only emerged once as far as we know in human history and God only knows why we ever allowed it I mean a lot of the great early scientists were independently wealthy or they had a patron like an artist and they were left the hell alone thinking of people like Darwin I would love that right right if you know anybody I'm I'm uh available yeah well you know well it's really how it's really what scientists should be looking for I would say instead of government funding because along with that Government funding comes exactly the sort of problems that we're discussing right now which is well you know is this going to be of broad public benefit and the answer is well if I knew that I wouldn't well I would turn it into a company in a second right if you knew for certain that your new discovery was going to be of broad significant economic benefit you'd raise money and you'd have entrepreneurs on board in two seconds and so that problem would take care of itself and as you pointed out too is that the the probability that a given study will work is inversely proportionate to its daringness and its creative nature and so those are exactly the studies that are going to be scuttled by anything even approximating a cost benefit analysis which no one on an Ethics Committee ever does anyways because they don't have the technical technological qualifications for doing so no I think they do far more harm than good you know people point out on the same page well look the the overall evidence for malfeasance on scientific side of things in relationship to the treatment of research participants is very very sparse there are some egregious counter examples right experimentations in in in the concentration camps in in Germany um experimentations by the Chinese the Tuskegee experiment like you can point to exceptions but all things considered well most scientists who run a research lab would just assume for example that their participants might come back again or that you know bad word doesn't get out about exactly what's going on in the lab and so and most scientists who are genuine scientists also have a very high regard for ethical conduct and the truth because if you don't you never discover anything right I mean you cannot be a crooked scientist and discover something it's it's just not possible so I also wanted to point out you may know this already but you know that involuntary exposure to stress directly compromises immune function right because what happens is you produce cortisol and that heightens immediate responsivity but it compromises any long-term adaptation and so the idea basically is as if a tiger is chasing you around a tree you can afford to suppress your immune system temporarily because you want to devote all the resources to getting the hell away from the tiger getting away but if you are stressed and so it does beg the question that you were pointing out with regards say to the I the attitude of remission versus cure if if you are stressed even at a low level but that's chronic like it might be by noting that you're now at heightened risk and you're only in remission that stress might compromise your immune system enough so that the probability of cancer recurrence is you know is is as high as is higher sure it's certainly possible I mean the physiological the physiological Pathways for that being a reality are definitely there I I wanted to ask you about a dark side of of re-assessment of illness though look I was in an elevator once in a hospital this is when I was doing clinical work and a patient got on and she was muttering to herself and she was muttering she was very distressed she was completely white ghostly looking like sweating unbelievably stressed eh and she let the people in the elevator know that she was suffering from cancer and that she was extremely guilty because she believed that it was an inadequacy in her attitude that had led her to contract this disease and to be unable to deal with it and so one of the things that that I I have wrestled with because I do understand the utility of maintaining let's say a positive attitude in relationship to illness and a can-do attitude let's say but by the same token you know it's it's very hard on ill people when they have to cope with the fact that they're ill and suffering and okay so so yeah what do you make okay so I gave yeah so I gave it a design if I'm understanding you correctly I gave a talk many years ago to five thousand um women with breast cancer and at the end I I remember it was you know the end of the talk this man said um that aren't I blaming the victim yeah I'm telling you that and I said to him no I'm not blaming the victim the culture teaches us or you know that we don't have any control over these chronic illnesses Now remind me I want to talk to you about the attention to variability where we've looked okay we have a psychological treatment for big illnesses um and as long as the culture teaches us that we have no control how can you blame anybody for presuming they have no control and then he said and besides that you're wrong because my wife fought the cancer at every turn and she still died and then I said to him well let me ask you something if a little kid let's say a two-year-old is tugging on your your pants do you see yourself as fighting that little kid so the language of fighting the cancer already says it's this gigantic Beast very strong which says also that in your own mind you're not very likely to win to beat it and so I think that as long as the culture teaches us and it it's done so less so now over time because there are so many people who manage to beat cancer but when I was young all you knew cancer was a killer and as long as you believe cancer was a killer it was going to be very hard not to succumb to it and I think that we need to celebrate you know the people who beat it and and as with that um living to a hundred example you know these small numbers but they can Loom large if uh we have them Vivid and come to people's minds when my mother was in the hospital this woman a very nice woman who she didn't know walked in because she knew my mother had a pancreatic cancer and you know obviously was told she didn't have very long to live and she said Sylvia my mother's name they told me 20 years ago I only have six months to live I went and I spent all my money I'm still alive but now I'm poor you know and everybody knows of examples like this they don't they should never say anything like that because they can't know and so as long as you can't know then first as long as you're alive you should be living you know I was going to write a book many years ago entitled life before death because sadly for all too many people um their lives they're sealed in unlived lives and that's what all my work is designed to do is to help you know break that seal are you looking for an all-in-one e-commerce platform that can help you easily set up and grow your business online look no further than Shopify with Shopify you can quickly and easily build your own online store manage your inventory and accept payments from customers plus Shopify offers a range of customizable themes and templates to choose from so you can create a professional looking store without any design experience it even helps integrate with other popular tools to help you sell across social media marketplaces like Tick Tock Facebook and Instagram with shopify's 24 7 support and an extensive Business course library that is available to support you every step of the way Shopify is the Commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide if you're ready to get serious about selling try Shopify today sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com jbp go to shopify.com jbp to take your business to the next level today that's shopify.com jbp well it's a when you're suffering I've also been looking at the Book of Job you know and and job is a book that exemplifies human suffering and one of the morals in the story Steve Job yeah yeah exactly no it's the older Jew from you know from way back when yeah and so everything possibly bad that could happen to someone virtually happens to him and one of the morals that's embedded in the story is that regardless of that and also regardless of the relative unfairness or perceived unfairness of the Fate your best and most appropriate attitude psychologically is to keep Faith and Hope alive and that story in particular is very dramatic in that regard because the reason that job suffers is because God himself has a bet with Satan that Satan can torture job enough to make him lose Faith you know and that's pretty rough right if you're going to have forces arrayed against you God and Satan is a pretty rough battle and what happens in the story of job is that he determines to abide by his Faith and Hope regardless of circumstances and so maybe you can say to people who are suffering say from uh terminal cancer diagnosis that um obviously a large degree of compassion on the part of themselves and observances in order but that they will make they will make the best of a terrible situation by reorganizing their attentional structures so that the maximum amount of Faith and Hope can be present at every moment and that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll win so to speak in the final analysis but it might mean that the course of the cancer is going to be less like hell than it could have been and that's also yeah no that's terrific um you know I think I speak to many people who are given these dread diagnoses and they're stressed they're angry and I I simply asked them um an aggressive way let's assume for a moment that that's correct is this the way you want to live the last years last days or a month and when you realize that no I mean you know first thing I want to do is go have a hot fudge sundae you know um whatever it is one thinks that they shouldn't do that you know now why not do it so yeah I'm in agreement with that but the the interesting part of that I think is that when you then make the decision to make the moment matter and that's all we have you know when you're talking about people who are depressed one of the best things I think as far as therapy goes is just deal with the moment and then the next small and a moment is easy to deal with and if they are mindful in the moment they will probably end up um beating the cancer they stand a good chance of beating the cancer let me give you an example of something Jordan I don't have to remember in the book I talk about what we call the borderline effect now so um let me explain this let's say you and I both take an IQ test and you get six uh you get 70 which means you're normal and I score 69. which means I'm not normal that I'm cognitively challenged sorry nobody in their right mind they don't need to know anything about statistics to know there's no meaningful difference between 69 and 70. I could have sneezed so I read the question wrong and so on but my life and your life will diverge from that moment in dramatic uh quick and extraordinary ways and you will be growing and I will be coming less and less because now I'm cognitively challenged what we used to call okay so it starts out there's no difference but in some sense that diagnosis causes the difference all right that's the same thing for all different diseases so we did some work with diabetes and cancer just there is some point on some tests uh where one of us Falls right above that borderline and so we're told we have it whatever the it is one of us right below it and so we find that those who are give in that diagnosis Fair terribly the people who are just like them right before they get on the diagnosis do fine which suggests again the control we have over our health in this case you know not not um using that control yeah well and um that issue of the edge case is very interesting I mean it's so you can tie a bunch of things that you just discussed together so the first is you said you know you should pay attention to the moment and there's a gospel injunction in The Sermon on the Mount to do exactly that right is to focus to make the concerns of the day sufficient thereof essentially and what that means what that means is that you want to you want to occupy a time frame that optimizes the challenge within that time frame without it being too stressful so one of the things you do for example with people who are depressed or anxious is you you narrow the time frame over which they're apprehending their behavior and if you're like if you're really suffering if you're really in pain you might narrow your time frame to the next minute like you might not be able to handle the next day right and so you want to never bite off more than you can chew and you can do that partly by minimizing the time frame you're Computing over and attending more particularly to that narrow time frame and also by narrowing the scope of your activity which we discussed a little earlier too if you can't take on a major task you can't put your family in order you might be able to say something kind to the sister you haven't seen for five years right you can take that incremental tiny step forward and and and there's real power in that in that minimal transformation now you also talked about attention to variability in the edge cases I mean how do you reconcile that with the apparent necessity for categorization you know at the edge of every category is an indeterminate margin right and and you said well if you're in category a versus B that can have a massive effect even though there's no real distinction now that's and that's an a very important question you know that am I saying people should never be given diagnoses because there has to be you know these have it and these people don't have it I'm not saying that what first I use the borderline studies as a way of showing if there's no meaningful difference between two people when they start and they're given the diagnosis and then uh the two groups come apart that means that this group that's given that diagnosis could do whatever they were doing that was similar to the other group and um diminish the negative consequences so it was a way again of showing the mind-body unity and we have control over our health whether we should or shouldn't be given diagnoses I don't know um but I do know that if you or anyone you love is given a diagnosis you make them aware that it's a best guess that these diagnosis um are based on Research they're based on probabilities not absolute facts and when you are told that you may have it you know that um is very different from you do have it when you're told it may run its course in the following way is very different from being told it will unfold in this way you know and I think that's crucial for us behavioral psychologists aren't very uh positively inclined to psychiatric diagnosis and the reason for that is that they're very pragmatic and so the the orientation of a behavior psychologist is well let's differentiate your problems to the point we can Envision potential solutions to them and The Meta construct isn't all that valid I think there's an exception possibly and you tell me what you think about this I found diagnosis useful in salutary in my clinical practice when it helped people bind their otherwise catastrophic anxiety and when it pointed to a direction forward so someone might come in and say look man I haven't been able to get out of my house for the last five years I'm completely out of my mind I'm the only person in the world like this and there's no hope and you say to them look you're agoraphobic lots of people have this problem here's the associated symptoms so you're not the only one you're not uniquely insane and we know how to treat it well then diagnosis has a binding capacity right it boxes in the issue and and it and it has a direction yeah now you go to the doctor and you your stomach is hurting and you leave and he tells you have gastroenteritis it just means a stomach ache and you feel better I I think you know for sure but I want to ask you something before I forget about depression so I've often thought that if we were able to give people a placebo or um convince them in whatever way that their depression will only last another three weeks that they would instantly become better that the most depressing thing about depression is that you assume that's all you're going to see going forward well and you know I think there is evidence for that on the treatment front because one of the things you do in cognitive therapy with depression is challenge the Assumption of Eternal permanence so depressed people tend to think okay I feel awful right now I have always felt awful every single day is unending awfulness and that will extend indefinitely into the future and so what you do one of the things you do is you have people track their moods over a week hourly and you show them that there's substantive variability in their mood even though they were blind to that and then you also often have them so so first of all that shows that it's not permanent and unchanging and then you often do very detailed history that helps them understand that they haven't experienced this before and almost invariably it has receded like it's it's almost invariably cyclical it doesn't feel like that when you're depressed that's perfect because that's what we were doing with um major um um diseases teaching people attention to symptom variability so when you have a major disease you assume your symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse nothing moves in Only One Direction all right so what we did was we would call people and we'd ask them how do you feel now and is it better or worse than before and why and three things happen um the first is wow I thought I felt this you know whatever the pain is all the time now I see there are moments I don't feel it so you feel a little better second by asking why the search is Mindful and as we've said now enough times that that mindfulness feels good and is good for your for your health the neurons of firing and um it's um it's good for you and third I think that you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for it so we've done this with big ears with um uh stroke Parkinson's multiple sclerosis chronic pain uh even depression and in each case we have very very positive results and so you know I when I first proposed this I was seeing it as um um an antidote well you know you can't give yourself a placebo and you you have to when you're given a placebo somebody is fooling you into thinking that is real medication and then you take it and it's not the medication clearly it's a sugar pill so you are helping yourself so I was trying to think well how can we have people give themselves placebos and this was a way so imagine that you have chronic pain and you set your uh smartphone to ring in an hour and then you ask yourself is it better or worse than before and why and then at that moment set it to ring in two hours and 10 minutes you keep doing this over the day over the week and if you need more time um and the results have um have been phenomenal um and I think all of this work again supports the idea that I keep coming back to that uh virtually everything in the world is mutable we can make it fit for us better than it does at the moment and that our own health is largely um under our own control so Ellen with with depressed people people what one of the things you do and this this is true for psychological misery in general is you you ask them to adopt an attitude of open-eyed ignorance about their own nature so you think you know who you are but it's possible that you don't really know more about yourself than you know about anybody else like you think you are privileged access but you're pretty damn complicated and you're not an open book and so one of the things we could do is let's say track the variation in your well-being across time and then what we're going to do is we're going to focus on those times when you feel better and we're going to try to figure out what the hell you were doing during those times so with depressed people for example you find that they want to isolate themselves but if they go see family and friends they almost invariably feel better and if they try that yeah yeah right so well you can see that the same thing might apply in in a situation that's characterized by illness and you could also imagine that that would have a profound physiological effect because imagine that you're in a situation now and you're suffering from cancer and you're having a relatively good day now because you're having a good day you're not stressed out you have more positive emotion and hope and there are situational determinants of that now it could easily be if you could maximize the probability that you would stay there and then look for improvement even in that that you would tilt your physiology in a direction of having a better probability of combating the the illness itself it could easily be the case and I think for sure and another um area that uh lends itself to this attention to variability is stress there are some people who think they're stressed all the time no one is anything all the time so if we call them uh periodically and how in a stress are you now and is it more or less than before and why and so on then what happens is Jordan you might find out that you know you're really stressed when you're speaking to Ellen Langer but not when you're not then the solution is simple don't speak to me you know there's something else that I want to get your view on which is um you know I was very active in the beginning the creation of say cognitive behavior therapy and people have asked me well what's the difference between let's say a mindful therapy and cognitive behavior therapy and um so I want you I'm going to tell you what I think and then the question to you is is it a difference that makes a difference so you go to the therapist with some problem and you tell them you see the world in this particular way and the cognitive behaviorists as well perhaps it's this other way okay now because the therapist is an authority figure what I think people too often do is then take the therapist um uh frame of reference as real and and mindful therapy would be to come up with many explanations and the more explain you know it's just like um what I was saying about stress that if you uh think of five reasons why it might not happen the situation changes you know how else might we understand this when you come to CG you don't know and when you know when you know you don't know then you tune in and that's the bottom line to um to how to be healthy I guess so on that this this psychoanalysts observed first that if you impose a solution on a client or a patient even if it's an intelligent solution there's a high probability that you'll produce resistance and part of the reason for that is that you're stealing the person's Destiny it's like look if you come to me with a problem and I give you a solution and you implement it it's not your Victory it's my victory and so I've stolen it and if you fail you it's your failure not mine because you're going to suffer for it and so people are naturally inclined to tell an authority figure to go to hell if they impose a solution a good cognitive behavioral therapist won't say here's another way of looking at it although there may be situations where that's necessary because of an emergency say what they will do instead is say look could we collaborate on on on imagining alternative conceptualization under that situation right and what you really want you want the person to come up with the Alternatives and I think that actually does the rewiring right if if you deliver the if you deliver the alternative people don't act it out and they don't remember it and I think it's because they haven't undergone the cognitive reorganization necessary to actually expand their Horizon you want the client to lead always that's why Freud used free association for example yeah no and I think that's beautiful what I'm adding to it is that one should seek multiple potential understandings yes when we have the client now come up with a different understanding it doesn't make that right and it doesn't make the original one wrong and by by recognizing that this thing you assure was an ex could be a y or a z um leads you to to think think of most you know when I said to you before when the horse ate that hot dog it didn't just change my mind about whether horses are herbivorous or not it changed everything for me one event and so if the person in therapy is dealing with you know you're sure it's this and then the therapist helps you to come to could be this could be that could be the other um there are many people who can walk away from that one instance Now with an entirely New Life okay okay so so you you do that that's actually been technically termed collaborative empiricism so the notion would be the person's in a fixed mindset you help them develop a proliferation of Alternatives and then you say well look go home for a week and try this attitude and watch attend be mindful come back and tell me how it went and we're either going to find out that it's better or the same or worse and you'll be able to tell me if it's the same or worse we'll try another attitude right exactly exactly and then and that does two things as you you pointed out it may lead to uh a proximal solution to the proximal problem but it also teaches the person that they're the sort of creature that can generate alternative hypotheses and then test them and evaluate and that's kind of a meta learning right that would be more learning not to be attentive to the situation but to be attentive period to make that a habit of mine right yeah yeah yeah so and a good a good a good cognitive behavior therapist would do that they won't impose top-down Solutions they'll generate a with the client a multitude of of possible solutions and then test them do you know the early study I did with therapists and labels this was good we had an interview between uh it was actually a professor at Yale when I did this when I was a graduate student and so we take this interview and we called the person being interviewed either a job applicant or a patient and then we showed them to a therapists of all different stripes and almost always when we called him a patient they saw him as sick potentially having this and that disorder when we called him a job applicant they saw him as well adjusted the same person on the same tape it was interesting because excuse me Behavior therapists since they were more attuned to the specific behaviors or a little less likely to do this but I think that um you know I think a lot of therapy needs to be reconfigured because whatever lens you put on is determining what you're going to see and it doesn't make sense to go pay therapist top dollar for telling you how wonderful you're telling them how wonderful you are them telling you how wonderful you are and so the focus on problems in some instances at least I'm sure itself is a problem so you know so the therapist I think has to always say you know that um uh in this small realm this is what's going on not you know because as soon as you walk into a therapist's office you're declaring yourself a patient well that's even therapist now says clients well Behavior therapists have said clients forever for exactly that reason and I don't know there might be an underground uh that might be an underground consequence of your early influence on the field I mean but it's always and I always referred to my clients in that manner because I'm not the authority if I'm the authority in the session um they're paying to boost my ego right yeah that's all they have to be the authority I can listen and we can exchange ideas and we can investigate but in the final analysis the decision to attend and to change and Carl Rogers knew this too and laid it out beautifully in his work on humanism um humanistic psychology the impetus has to come from the client him or herself otherwise it doesn't work it has to be voluntary and and attention focused on on the same note um humorously that if you charge five dollars for the hour versus let's say uh five thousand dollars for the hour in the second case the person would get better faster not because it's costing so much money but because they value it so much more that's very interesting in regard to pricing period you know um we we've developed a variety of psychological interventions and tried to determine how to price them and you might think that the compassionate thing to do and the generous thing to do would be to make them free but it's not well it's not no it's not at all and it's partly because the act of paying first of all is fair exchange and that keeps the interaction like neutral and morally untraveled there's no charity in it and second it is the case that part of how you determine whether something is valuable is whether or not you've had to exchange something I have to work for it exactly you back you back so those things are very tricky yeah well so there's research well we're coming to the end here so what I should do is allow you the opportunity if you have another thing if you have something else you want to bring up um I have so much to talk to you about Jordan because it's such fun talking to you that um you know we should end here we can go on for another three hours so it's your it's your show you just well um we are going to talk for everybody watching and listening many of you half an hour on the daily wear plus side and if you found this conversation interesting and compelling which was the point then please do join us there otherwise um I'll just let everyone know again the name of Ellen's new book Dr Langer's new book The mindful body thinking our way to Chronic health and that when is that coming out um it's interesting that it seems to be already out in Canada I don't know how that happened the publication date is September 5th okay okay so you can pre-order the mindful body thinking our way to Chronic Health now and uh well thank you very much for talking to me today and for sharing what you know with everybody who's watching and listening I presume that people ill and healthy alike will find what we talked about interesting and perplexing and thought provoking that's the idea it's a very complicated that's the way I found it yeah yeah well the the relationship between attitude and brute reality is unbelievably complex and you know that it's it's it's a constant source of mystery and need for investigation and so uh attitude makes a lot of things there's no doubt about that and we don't know the limits to that and your work is certainly been at the Forefront of making that idea what scientifically investigatable and uh and widely publicly known so thank you very much for that and for talking to us today for everybody watching and listening thank you for your time and attention and to the Daily wire plus folks and the film crew here in Northern Ontario the film crew and are you in Cambridge now I'm in Dartmouth Mass you're in Dartmouth to the film crew and Dartmouth thank you for uh for facilitating this as well and Ellen will will uh we'll rejoin each other on the daily wire plus platform momentarily bye bye everybody take care now [Music] thank you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 474,688

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: MPVMcBPlKeY

Length: 117min 41sec (7061 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023