Reimagining aging and longevity: Is mindfulness the secret? | Prof. Ellen Langer

it turns out that we have all these beliefs that lead us to feel better or worse depending on the belief and that many of us believe that if you take medication from the doctor you will get better so you take the medication you get better you take the medication you get better well it turns out then if you take the medication but now it's not real medication it's just for instance a sugar pill you'll get better now turns out also not my research but other people's that the more money you pay for that medication the better you're going to be welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your [Music] health I'm your host Jonathan wolf founder and CEO of Zoe today we explore the power of our mind and how to harness it for Better Health imagine if you could slow down or even reverse your aging just by changing your mindset it sounds pretty wacky for a show rooted in the latest science right but what if I told you that our guest research shows its more science fact than science fiction today we're joined by Harvard Professor Ellen Langer her groundbreaking research spanning over 40 years delves into the Mind Body Connection and with it you'll learn practical ways to apply this to improve your health Ellen thank you very much for joining me my pleasure Jonathan it's a great pleasure to be able to do this in person in Boston now we have a tradition always with this podcast that we start with a quick fire round of questions and this is always very hard for professors because we have this quite tough set of rules which is you can say yes or no or if you absolutely have to you can give a one- sentence answer but we really prefer yes or no are you willing to give it a go sure why not wonderful does Western medicine underestimate the importance of the Mind in physical health grossly yes can you think your way to Better Health yes can I lower my blood sugar levels with my mind surprisingly yes can a positive mental attitude make me younger yes wow this is pretty amazing is mindfulness the same as meditation no not at all meditation isn't mindfulness meditation is a practice you go through to set you up for postm meditative mindfulness last quickfire question can practicing mindfulness improve my health yes that Jonathan was hard for me not to give you the next I can see and if it makes you feel better it's a sort of universal test as to whether or not someone is a professor is how hard they find this so you passed you're a professor last question and you can have a sentence here rather than rather than just yes no what's the biggest myth that you've come across about the connection between the mind and the body that they are uh best seen as two separate entities I have a favor to ask 63% of people that watch this podcast haven't hit the Subscribe button we want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions so if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please hit the Subscribe button doing us this small favor really makes a big difference to me thank you I've always been sort of very suspicious about the sort of the way that Western medicine has tended to treat the mind and the body as completely separate I think it's actually rather an odd thing to believe and I was thinking about the fact that you know every time I get sick if I'm still sick after a few days then I start to get really anxious about like am I ever going to get better and it seems clear to me that when I am anxious actually I stay sick longer than if I just sort of like let you know let time on my wife always said I'm a terrible hypochondriac and you know I've obviously never had any evidence about this but it all seems pretty obvious that the brain is in fact a large physical organ and this should all be related it's therefore amazing though to speak to a scientist who's been spending their whole career doing like real research to show how these two are linked and you know I'm really Keen to actually unpick through this some of the the real ways like with real hard science that show that the Mind actually has these physical effects and I think you've had a you know a a lot of papers with some very surprising results so um I'm I'm really looking forward to that could we maybe start with what is the traditional sort of view of the Mind against the body and what you and therefore what do you think we've been getting wrong yeah well not that many years ago uh the medical model used to believe that psychology was just totally irrelevant you know it's nice to be happy they would think but that has nothing to do with your health more recently as most people know people talk about a mindbody connection that's not what I'm talking about my position is much more extreme and by my understanding more useful which is the mind and body should be understood as one unit now these are just words you know you could have had mind body and elbows and we would have developed a different understanding of people but when you put the mind and the body back together uh then wherever you're putting the mind you're necessarily putting the body and so as I report in the mindful body we have lots of studies where we put the mind in strange places and uh take measures that seem to uh justify the notion that it's one unit and when you say you put the mind in strange places what what you mean by that well the original study uh testing the Mind Body Unity was the counterclockwise study this is a famous study okay I can call my own study famous because if you watch uh The Simpsons go to Havana they actually talk about the St I agree I think you've really made it if you're on The Simpsons so what we did in the study very simple we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had old men live there and I should say elderly men you know the older I get the younger they get but basically men in their late 80s 90s Liv there for a week as if they were their younger selves they spoke about all sorts of past events as if they were just unfolding uh everything they did was as they might do it 20 years earlier they imagined as if they were living in a Time 20 years earlier in a Time Warp yes in a Time war and we took uh lots of measures and what we found it was sort of astonishing that their Vision improved their hearing improved their memory their strength and they look noticeably younger and all of that without any medical intervention sounds completely magical it does but so then fast forward we've done lots of studies that I've reported in the mindful body the next one is kind of funn also we took chamber maze now it's interesting chamber maze as you know working all day long and we asked them how much exercise they get and they say they're not getting very much exercise what well that's because to them exercise according to the Surgeon General is what you do after work after work they're just too tired okay so we take these chamber Maids who don't realize they're getting exercise and all we do is teach them but they getting exercise making a bed as like working on this machine at the gym and so on so now we have two groups one who doesn't realize they work as exercise one now does see they work as exercise we take lots and lots of measures and we want to find out after this time is she eating any differently is she working any no differences that we could discern nevertheless the group that changed their minds that now saw their work as exercise lost weight there was a change in waist to hip ratio body mass index and their blood pressure came down so Ellen that all sounds pretty magical can you help us to understand how is it possible the mind is linked to our physical health it's not linked it's one thing every move you make every thought you have is simultaneously enacted on different levels right so there's a a physiological response you know you raise your hand your brain is now different from before you rais it so I'm not saying that there's nothing going on so-called under the hood simply that my concern are the larger measures that most people care about it's really a nobo effect a placebo you take and all of a sudden things get better for a nobo you're are releasing a way for things to be better uh typically so here you didn't know that your work was exercise and that's keeping the system in place and that realization then frees you to um enjoy the positive aspects of exercise you which is very good I mean there are some people out there like um Mark Twain who said every time the urge to exercise comes over him he just sits quietly and waits until it passes and I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't exercise there are many many reasons to exercise uh but to know that um you can be healthy without doing all of that exercise if you keep your mind active and this is where you're saying just by changing the way you think about something you actually have this physical effect I think this Ties on to mindfulness the book and I would love for you to explain what you mean when you say that I'm happy to do that so mindfulness and I've been studying this now for over you know about 45 years it's so simple possible to imagine looking at you thank you I started obviously the positive mindfulness if anyone's on video they'll be pretty impressed they'll be starting immediately it's so easy and the results are so extraordinary that it again it almost defies belief but let me tell you all you need to do is notice okay okay now people think that that's what they're doing all the time uh but our research suggests that almost all of us are Mindless almost all the time we're sealed in unlived lives and we're oblivious to it so when you're not there you're not there to know you're not there and the research says we should wake up all right so how do you wake up there are two ways the first is that if you just accept deeply understand that you don't know you don't have to feel bad that you don't know nobody knows because everything is changing everything looks different from different perspectives so if you approach something you don't know you pay attention to it right you you enjoy you get engaged and so on if your listeners thought they knew what I was going to say next why Baba listening to me but it's hard for so many of us because everything we were taught you know every fact you memorized in school everything you think you know leads you to a certain certainty so that you don't pay any attention the other way uh which is uh partnered with this is that you take things that are familiar the person you're living with or a close friend take a walk outside no matter what you're doing and just notice three new things about it and all of a sudden you see gee this thing I thought I knew I don't know so well and then again your attention naturally goes to it and the easiest way to become mindful after just listening to something you know podcast like this is next time you're unhappy all of the misery that we experience is a function of our mindlessness so at that point at least we'd remember some of the things I hope we talk about in a little while what I'm saying is that you go about your business and if you were a robot all day long you wouldn't know it all right you have to not be a robot to at least ask yourself what don't I know what is knew about the situation the person the taste of whatever I'm eating you know and so on but we know that when something negative happens even if it's damn you know I missed the bus you know whatever it is then you're thrown into a state where you're going to start to think about things people tend then to think about negative things and am I being mindful in that just mindful negative or am I okay no no because as soon as you think that you know you know you know why you're unhappy then you're being mindless what an important piece of this Jonathan is that events don't cause us our unhappiness it's the view we take of the event and so if you're more mindful you have more views available and then if you choose to pick the one that's going to make you miserable so be it you know another part of this that people don't realiz is that our emotions are really choices you know that if you think oh my God this is the worst thing that could happen you're not going to feel good about it if you look for how actually it may be an advantage um then you're going to feel much better and I think you know when I try to help people with the stress that they feel the first thing I say is okay stress turns out to be um our prediction that something awful is something's going to happen and when it happens it's going to be awful okay so look at both parts of that and as I describe in uh the mindful body prediction is an illusion we can't predict we think we can predict because we're so good at looking back and making sense out of everything but going forward we can't do it okay so you say to yourself here's this event um what are three reasons four reasons whatever you want that it won't happen and as soon as you went from it's definitely going to happen to now well maybe it won't happen so you immediately feel better then is the harder part you say to yourself okay let's assume it does happen how is this actually an advantage a silly example that's not very dramatic but I'm so used to using it so mindlessly I'm going to use it again you and I go out for lunch the food is wonderful wonderful you and I go out for lunch the food is awful wonderful I'll eat less that'll be better for my waistline I'll eat less I'll be able to take in more of your wisdom and have our relationship grow all right so uh for me having lived a life like this it it almost doesn't matter what happens I'm going to fall up if something negative happens you know if you and I were involved in my relationship you can decide what movie we're seeing you can decide where we go to dinner you can decide if we're seeing I I don't care because I'm going to enjoy myself regardless well that sounds rather magical so no matter what I was thinking about my wife thinking like my God Jonathan is so annoying which I think I am often I love the idea that she would just imag be you're really annoying but it's fine I don't I don't mind how does that because you talk in the book about mindful optimism um and when you've been as you've been starting to explain a bit more mindfulness it it feels like quite a lot of that is about um something happens and then you you're taking an optimistic view about optimism and pessimism act as if there's some real this thing is really good or it's really bad and the for the really good the pessimist is saying wrong if it's really bad and it's nothing it just an is and then we interpret it and so um it's not a matter of changing you know if something bad happens now if you go to cognitive therapist for instance and you're telling about something bad if they're good at what they're doing they're going to help you reframe it as something positive but when you're more Mindful and you're more used to living your life this way I never reframe it's it's the frame I see in the first place it's Al important to me that I'm not my intention is not yay me you know my intention is to tell people that this is available to all of them and then make people aware that the way you're choosing to see the world actually has an impact on your health no that's really helpful I'm just wanting to make sure I understand because I think for those of us who haven't been exposed to this it's it feels pretty radically different from the way that um we were brought up or naturally think about things so how does that compare with I guess this word sort of positive thinking which I've definitely heard which is I'm considered the mo by some the mother of positive psychology so there's a relationship clearly but when you're being mindful you're not being positive you're not being negative you're just being all right now if somebody asks you to describe the situation I mean probably you would be more likely to describe it positively you know everything is okay we just need to know that some of the things we do come at a greater cost than other things and you you need to make an intentional decision as to whether you want to incur the cost this study has been replicated in South Korea the Netherlands and Italy right um and I think people you to ask how many people were involved I don't know if the audience is aware nor should should they be that it's much easier to get significant effects when you have a massive siiz population the statistic sort of um control for all of that their Vision improved their hearing improved their memory their strength and they look noticeably younger but the important question is Professor Langer do you stand by these findings and you know essentially yes or I wouldn't have written about them and I wouldn't be talking about them and what do you think that imp so you ask these people to live as if they were living in a Time Warp It's a Wonderful question because you don't have to be 60 you don't have to be 40 you don't have to be 100 the the number is irrelevant what the what you need to recognize is that you cannot even with an experiment prove that you can't you know and that's what happens when as people get older they change uh their yard stick for what they're capable of doing and um so I wanted to do this study and I'm I'm really pretty confident that it would work but I never did it where if he took elderly men and I don't know how old just make them 70 so they're young old all right and we were going to have them play baseball the the people who used to play baseball when they were younger so the image I have is that we have them walking around their house and you know hesitating to pick up something that was dropped or picking and really looking a little decrepit now fast forward we have them in their old baseball suits or ones that have been altered so they fit them now and he's out on second base and there's a grounder and he bends down and picks that up without any thought that he can't um and um you know we've all seen things like that but uh I need to do the study to put it out there differently but that's what I'm saying you can't know that you can't and another thing that I find fun is that people need to realize they really don't don't want the complete success at anything that they think they want because you know so let's say you're a golfer if you're a golfer said wouldn't it be great if I could get a hole in one every time I swung the club well no because at that point there'd be no game yeah all right you know and so when we recognize that it's the challenge it's the mastering not having mastered uh then we go easier on ourselves with mistakes nothing goes in just a straight line you you can do a little and then you fall back a little and then you you know to to get to your ultimate goal and I think that what people need to do there's there's always a step from where you are to where you want to get uh that you can take move in that direction and that's all you need to do it doesn't have to be a big thing so let me give an example if you don't what I'm saying so first of all do you know who Zeno was I'll tell you who goo Zeno was a Greek philosopher and Zeno had a lot of paradoxes so he had this paradox that if you always go half the distance from where you are to where you want to be you're never going to get there so let's go to the very end of this you know you're an inch away then you're a half an inch away then you're a quarter of an inch an eighth of okay there's always a step small enough from where you are to where you want to be that you can get there do you want to um you eat a box of cookies a night and you don't want to do that so eat half a box you can't eat half a box eat a quarter of a box you can't eat everybody can eat a crumb less and then you have a new starting point and from that point you know you do the same thing and with the understanding that engaging in whatever that activity is to get to your goal is its own reason for doing it now a lot of people talk about this is in terms of like maybe like training your body so if you're saying that you want to um do some physical activity then the idea is you know you start you get better and better and better but you're saying something quite different which is really interesting which is you're saying in some way your body has these capacities and your brain is um is somehow getting in in the way of this let me give you an example an easy one so I'm 76 you're much younger but we'll make you even younger to make the example so let's say you're 20 years old and you hurt your wrist what do you do you take care of it right but at my age there are a lot of people who believed you know were taught when they were younger and just mindlessly accepted it as you get old you fall apart so then if you're an older person and your wrist hurts you say well what do you expect you know um and you don't do anything and so then in a very straightforward way you know a month later my wrist is going to still hurt or be bad and yours is going to be better or the younger you because basically you're not looking after yourself way you should because You' been told this story like you're older now so don't worry about you should just accept it and then also when we're doing things you know surely if you're doing something oh I don't know I had played I remember playing tennis not that long ago with uh these 17-year-old boys and they were running all over and they didn't know what they were doing but they were much faster than I but because I knew what I was doing it you know it was easy right you know then we get a little older and these same boys that I was playing tennis with are now more mature and now they know what they're doing and my game has changed and why should I play the game the same way I did 20 years ago so you have to let yourself adapt to the circumstances you know that surely if you're 50 trying to do it the same whatever the it is the same way you did when you were 20 you're not likely to to do it as well um so when people learn sports for example they learn mindlessly you know you're told for instance this is the way you hold the tennis racket the golf club whatever it is and you know that's fine but you know if you hurt your shoulder a little bit you didn't sleep well you you should change the way you're holding the racket or the club or whatever also this is kind of fun and your analogy helped me to understand the so help me to understand the analogy from the sport for someone who's really doesn't play any sport what does that mean about how I should live my life everything should be different every day of your life so for example what I was going to say when I'm lecturing in person and I'll look in the audience is there a big man there and almost always is in a 65 okay so I ask him to come to the stage so we look kind of silly because I'm 53 you know he's bigger than I put his hand next to my hand his hand's three inches larger and I just raise the the question should we do anything physical the same way now it turns out the more similar you are to the person who created the thing the way to do it the easier it's going to be so the more dissimilar so as a a short you know uh let's say if I were a short heavy uh woman um and I'm doing something that was designed by a tall thin man I'm I'm not going to do it as well as I could if I'm doing it his way and so what we need to understand is everything we do everything we experience was at some point just somebody's decision about how it should be I mean a humorous example we take the six-footer and let's say his wife is 411 just for fun until recently when they go to the bathroom they're both sitting on a toilet seat the same height one of them is not getting their needs met and you don't need to know anything about medicine right you know so I can tell which is not meting their needs almost certainly going to be designed for the man is I think the answer for our our universe is everything every you know so now when you recognize that virtually everything that is was a decision wow that means everything is mutable you can change everything so when I go to give a talk and a long time ago as a young person and I'd walk into the room and I knew that if the you know if I'm standing with a lot of distance between me and the first row of seats I'm going to be nervous so I rearrange the furniture most people wouldn't think to do that you know so I think we should uh take everything as potentially changeable to meet our needs so you're incredibly Dynamic and positive which is very impressive I think lots of people will still be saying but can that really affect you know real conditions I'd love there's another study that that you looked at which was looking which I think is called something like the reverse eye charts study okay so I think your listeners um already know that I'm strange good or bad okay but different so when I go to uh the doctor and I'm uh given the Snelling eye chart and we go down the chart and I say to myself wait a second because the letters are getting progressively smaller they're expecting that soon I'm not going to be able to see yeah so what I did was with my uh students as a study we reverse the eye chart so now the letters get bigger and bigger hey the expectation is soon I will be able to see and what we find is that people can see what they couldn't see before could you just explain a little bit more what you can see is largely determined by your expectations look if I'm hungry I can see that restaurant sign from a much greater distance if I know you're going to be around and I don't want to see you I I see you a lot sooner there are lots of things that influence our vision and rarely in the world are we ever asked to look at letters that are out of context you know I mean there's sort of to me a big disconnect just talk us through so what were the results of this okay the results of a study was that when we changed the expectation so that now you think you're going to be able to see you can see what you didn't see before so by changing your expectations suddenly your eyes can actually read letters that otherwise you just can't read so your eyes actually got better yes your eyes were free to see in some sense hello listeners a quick message from me it's pretty hard to believe your mental attitude can change your body like that right well it's also hard to believe that it's been 18 months since we started this podcast and I've had the privilege of spending hundreds of hours speaking with the world's leading scientists and diving into their research our mission to uncover how the latest science can help you to live longer and healthier life and we've done just that now if you're thinking I wish I could get the key insights without listening to all those 100 hours we have a solution our team has created an amazing guide that summarizes the 10 most impactful discoveries from this podcast so that you can use them to improve your health and you can get it for free simply go to zoe.com free guide or click the link in the show notes and please let me know what you think of it okay back to the show that is really remarkable now presumably you're not saying that or are you saying that your eyes change or are you saying that I'm saying everything changes everything and what we do and what these numbers the medical world gives us you know leads us to hold everything still I'll go back to the eyes but let me give you another example the other day in the health class I'm teaching there was a large lecture and I said does anybody here know they collect cherol level and you know somebody who's got good waving their hands please call on me yes and what is your cholesterol level and she tells us I said oh nice I said and when did you have it measured and she said about six months ago and then I said oh and you haven't eaten or exercise s and if you die you're can you know without going again you'll die a healthy person all right the point is that all of these measures vary over time but the medical world for good reason can't take your blood pressure cholesterol level test your vision you know 20 times in the course of a day but we when our vision our cholesterol level our heart rate whatever it is are given those numbers we need to realize that those numbers are not stable and that you know and the number isn't stable gee and if sometimes my blood pressure is less well why is that if less is better in this case and if it can be less at this moment well then maybe I can make it less than this other moment and I'm not um a victim of whatever circumstance led to whatever these numbers are it's the same story with everything essentially we hold things still because we think we know or in this case we think the medical world knows things are necessarily varying and control over our health and our happiness over everything I mean if your wife and you're saying there's a lot more more control we have over our once we because things are varying so that if we can recognize that they're varying we said then why are they varying and we can get even your relationship with your wife so what did you say she thinks you are I can't remember I mean annoying I was the word that I went with at the time but you know F so if your wife thinks you're annoying then what will happen is every time you're sort of annoying she's going to see that as confirmation that you're annoying right and that when the way you were could have been confirmation of you know 10 other things if I now think that g you're not annoying when are you annoying and when aren't you annoying and I start paying attention to it I might find when I don't give you a chance to talk um that's when you're annoying in which case I'm I'm part of the problem for me all right and then I have more control so this is back to like being more mindful is like sort of being aware and asking questions rather than just assuming this is and looking for confirmation or or just noticing but you can't just look for the thing you think is there because then that's all you're going to notice you have to also look for when it's not there you're you're you're suffering chronic pain and so we have hard data with this you know this is work that um I think actually people should pay attention to it's work on what I call attention to symptom variability and that's just a fancy way of saying mindful being mindful you're noticing changes all right so when you have a chronic condition most people presume because the medical world lets us um unintentionally in some sense think that there's no way to control it you know there's no way to cure it right we can never prove that you can't remember so you don't do anything about it you just assume it's going to stay the same or get worse and this is regardless of whether you're taking medications or anything else all right but nothing only Moves In One Direction there are always times where it's a little a little better a little worse and so what we did was we would call people with major disorders we'd call people throughout the day at random times uh across days just two weeks to find out so how is it now so Jonathan you know how is it now is it better or worse than before okay well as soon as you say it's better because there will be some you know wow I thought it was always awful and then I asked the important question why so now that does three things well three things happen with this the first is by saying that it's not always awful you feel a little better second by looking for why now you end up doing a mindful search looking for things you don't already know and that is good for your health as 40 Years of our research 45 has shown and then finally I believe that you're more likely to find a solution if you believe there is a solution so we took people who had um Parkinson's um multiple sclerosis arthritis chronic pain stress depression lot lots of big things and we simply had them in this way attend to the variabil by calling them um and got uh um positive results across the board and so this was my answer in some sense to the placebo the placebo may be our strongest medication you take this pill that's nothing but believing at something and you get better so you're making yourself better so how could we have people make themselves better without the charade well you can't give yourself a placebo because you know you know that it's not a real drug could you take for a second on this because I'm not sure everybody is as familiar with the placebo as as you are and I was actually thinking about that a bit could you explain for a minute what a placebo is because you just said it might be one of our strongest medicines but it turns out that we have all these beliefs that lead us to feel better or worse depending on the belief and that many of us believe that if you take a medication from the doctor you will get better so you take the medication you get better you take the medication you get better well it turns out then if you take the medication but now it's not real medication it's just for instance a sugar pill you'll get better now turns out also not my research but other people's that the more money you pay for that medication the better you're going to be sugar pill that's right now if you take um injection that's you know uh not real medicine right just water or whatever that the medic the injection is even better than the pill because the more I suffer the better I'm going to be if I do sham surgery so now I open up your head you've got Parkinson's I open up your head I you know you as the patient believe that boy this is a whole big procedure I sew you up you will get better and so I'm not guaranteed to get get better but like significantly better than the control with that is that right for sure yes how does that link back to what you were talking about the study you were doing with people with sort of chronic um diseases okay before we link it to the chronic diseases people need to understand the it's um an explained by Mind Body Unity so you're doing this thing believing you're going to get better and since your body is is at one in some sense with your mind you know you you get better it's hard to know people don't know how does this Placebo magic work and it's interesting because the medical world all accept placebos without knowing exactly how it works and yet still are not fully convinced to a one at least about uh how strong our mind is in our experience of disease but when you take a placebo and you think it's real medicine you expect to get better and if you have a big illness you don't expect to get better instantly right so you start looking for when do you get better and when are you not so better and in that way it initiates this attention to symptom variability and so when you're paying attention I think you are um saying that you can actually have improvements in the way that you're feeling is that no there there are separate things first we have lots of evidence where we just make people mindful notice new things and so by noticing new things over time you become healthier the neurons are firing and it's literally uh not only figuratively en enlivening that's separate from what I'm saying now but still operative okay so when you're um attending to the variability that's a way of being Mindful and so you're getting that boost but it's also the case that when you're attending to look let me give you an example to make it easier so let's say you um Jonathan think you're stressed all the time no one is anything all the time all right and what happens is you're stressed oh my gosh you're not stressed you're not paying attention to the stress and then you're stressed again and that intervening time sort of goes by the body so let's say we were going to intervene and call you periodically Jonathan how are you feeling right okay and um and in doing this we find when you're stressed and when you're not and it turns out not to my surprise but when you're talking to Ellen Langer you're maximally stressed well then the solution is easy don't talk to me right you know and so with lots you know you raise your arm you you're in pain but it's when you're sitting this way you know that it's bigger pain than you know so either don't sit that way or work slowly in that um you know tiny movement uh as I was saying with um zenos Paradox so I feel like there's a lot of different things here and I probably only Capt I think I'm only catching a small part of it so it's part of this that you are not really paying attention to your own body or understanding your own situation that you're in and so part of this mindfulness is is actually by just by having a better understanding of what's going on as well as this thing you're talking about about the positivity of the approach to it right what not positivity you know you're not being POS you're just noticing and the the noticing um uh is good for your health but let's say you're a garage mechanic okay you know you're a car expert and you get in that car and you start the car you're going to hear if it's subtly not as good as it was the day before for most people you get you know the only time you notice anything is wrong is when the engine falls through the you know okay so that's what we need to be is more tuned in to the subtleties which you're not going to be tuned into without realizing that they're changing and and I'm not talking about you know becoming obsessively concerned with your body but you just feel yourself so I do want to talk about one more study before we talk about I think what could people do which I know they want to do which is um you did a study uh about blood sugar yeah which I was looking at last night which I thought was another one which was both extraordinary and like beautifully put together would you explain just what the study was and what you saw so we had people who had type 2 diabetes show up to be in the study and we take all sorts of measures right then we have which means they have very poor blood sugar control well yeah and now um we're going to ask them for a reason that'll become clear in a moment to play computer games okay and to change the game they're playing every 15 minutes or so that's to ensure that they look at the clock next to the computer now unbe knownst to them for a third of the people that clock is rigged and it's going twice as fast as real time for a third of the people it's going half as fast as real time for a third of the people it's real time and the question is is blood sugar level controlled by the perceived time the clock time or what people think of as the real time and the answer obviously or I wouldn't be talking about in this context is perceive time we can control our blood sugar level so just to play it back to make sure that I understand everybody understands it by changing your perception of how F time is going actually the blood sugar that you're measuring independently which is this thing that's clear in your body not your brain is actually you know changing faster or slower even though in theory that should be controlled by things that had nothing to do with your mind just because you think it's 2:00 or 2:30 but I'm not I'm not saying that we should control our blood sugar level by getting someone to rig clocks all I'm trying to do is to show that our minds can control the blood sugar Li a beautiful demonstration of the way in which our mind has much more control over our body than we would think in a way that is super um subtle but you know really measurable so this study you'll like uh this is the probably the most recent so we inflict a wound now it it would have been very dramatic if I could really hurt people but clearly I didn't want to and as I'm you can get ethics approve exactly exactly so it's a minor wound but it's a wound nonetheless and we have them again I've become clock obsessed so they're in front of a clock that's going twice as fast as real time half as fast as real time or real time and the question we're asking is does that wound heal based on whatever we think is real time or based on what we think is real time the time the clock tells us and again the answer is clock time and so your skin heals faster so you're if you were you doing a video recording of this depending upon the participants own view of time passing if they thought the time was passing faster this wound actually healed faster lots of people listening on to this will say that's surely not true but you have published and peer-reviewed this cor yes in fact yes but what you know when you go to the doctor and's say you break your something you break your arm and um how long does it take do you know for a broken arm to heal I don't know but my broken toes took about six weeks for the for the bone to so you break your toe and you're told it's going to take 6 weeks they can't know this right but you come to expect that it's going to take six weeks and six weeks it will take but uh we're doing a study now where we have Physicians instead of giving the average amount of time so when you given it an average you know there are some people who healed more quickly some people who took slower you know and then we get a mean and that's what people essentially are told and we give everybody the fastest healing time and my expectation is that you know when when somebody tells me that something's happened to them and that you know it's going to take six months I said you can do it in three sometimes I tell them they can do it in one month I don't know if they believe me or not but so Ellen I would love because I think lots of people listening to this are now probably saying okay there's something real about this so I'm convinced there is this link now between the mind and and the body and they're equal to understand okay what could I do so where would someone who has never a practice mindfulness stops okay well again mindfulness as I study it it isn't a practice okay all you really need to know is that you don't know you know when I'm doing this on a large audience I'll I'll ask a question I'll ask you Jonathan how much is one in one two no okay you see that's what we're most sure of okay that's you know you know this better than you know your name right okay so if you were to add uh one watt of chewing gum plus one watt of chewing gum 1 plus one is one one Cloud Plus One Cloud one plus one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry is one pile in the real world one plus one probably doesn't equal two so now when you the thing you think you know the the best you see gee you didn't know it maybe you can generalize some but let me tell you something that happened to me it was a while ago now where I was at this horse event and this man asked me would I watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog I'm Harvard Yale all the way through nobody knows better than I do horses don't eat meat right he comes back with the the hot dog and the horse ate it okay and that's when I realized that everything I think I know could be wrong right and the point to me that was exciting because that opened up all sorts of possibilities for us you make it sound really easy oh just question everything but I feel like it's almost like I'm talking to a black belt karate saying oh will you just do this and I'm like well I don't even how to walk the r it feels like this is so this is too big a step let's say someone's saying I'd like to try and understand this help me to understand you know like the first steps how would I start to approach this is there like okay there yeah there are a few things you can do the first thing is look around you look at something that you think you know and notice the ways it's different different from what you expect exactly all of a sudden oh I didn't see that notice about somebody you care about and you know it's interesting as you notice something about somebody you care about they end up feeling cared for and it actually and we have data improves the relationship right so you just start noticing and this should build on itself because the act of noticing um feels good so you don't want to stop when you're having fun you're being mindful you know if you were to let's say you enjoyed cross word puzzles and you did one you're not going to do it again right away because you know the answers it's not fun you listen to some a joke is only funny if you don't know the punchline all right so could if you're having fun and you tending to be mindful is that what you're saying you can't have fun unless you're mindful so just make sure you're out there having fun when something happens where you're no longer having fun then question question how it could be otherwise how do you know this is going to be the end of the world you know that how do you know find a way to make it work for you can you stop by saying I'm almost like scheduling this like I'm going to to make sure I do this once a day when I wake up or whatever as a as that is there like a I think I can see you're saying oh I do it all the time but but but I think reimagining the way you think about the world at least for me is a bit harder Ellen than the way you describe sort of when something negative happens uh you know say you spill the coffee all right so for me if I spilled the coffee that would be an opportunity first it probably wasn't good for me to drink as much coffee so it wouldn't bother me but second you know I look at the kitchen think why did I spill this coffee what is there about the mug that in fact could be redesigned so I wouldn't spill the coffee you know um you have all those people who are squeezing these toothpaste you know fighting with their spouse who squeezes from the top and you want to get every you know every bit of the toothpaste out and then somebody said hey you know let's redesign the tube of toothpaste so you put it on its head and so all the toothpaste by gravity is going and it's now easier to use so I'm saying that everything that is I feel you should be coming up with a lot of patents with this approach to to the life the other day I was thinking about and I was telling a story um about mind mindlessness which I'll tell you in a moment if you want I'll tell you now this person has seen making roast beef she cuts off a slice puts the rest of it in the pan and Cooks it why' you cut off that slice first she's asked well that's the way my mother always did it so they go to her mother she too is making roast be she cuts off a slice puts the rest of it in the pan why did you cut off that slice first I don't know it's the way my mother always did it they go to the girls grandma and say we saw your daughter and your granddaughter making roast beef they said they make it just the way you do they cut off a large slice put the rest of it in the pan and cook it why do you cut off that slice first and without skipping a bead she said that's the only way it'll fit in the pan and and that's what most of us are doing we're not really thinking about things so for me I tell this joke and all of a sudden I realize well why do we need 45 different kinds of pans why can't we make the pan the one pan that gets larger and larger you know like a table you put a leaf in and so on once we recognize that everything was made by somebody who had you know different motivations desires biases size of their hands everything different from us it leads to you know to redesigning things so that it better meets our needs and each time we do that so each time you're uncomfortable rather than suffer with ask you how you can make yourself more comfortable everything around you can be different and what about um because it feels like this is easiest to do when you're feeling calm and quite positive and much harder if you're either overwhelmed with negative emotion or let's say you are living with a chronic disease and actually you're in a lot of pain and things are it feels like this is hard to achieve is there a no there are two separate points here the first if you're living with a chronic disease you should be very excited that I'm telling you there may be a way for you to reduce your symptoms and even to the point of getting rid of them entirely so then you're going to sit up and pay notice and people are going to try it right away why not in the other instance you know something doesn't go right at some point you relax a little bit about that and you start talking to yourself well you know why didn't it go right how can I make it right and I'm just asking people now to add to that how is it not going right was actually an advantage in some way and you can always find that and we do it with people okay so here's the here's I think the best way to become more mindful every time you're comparing yourself with somebody else you're being mindless but every time you say you know I'm telling you Jonathan you are just so inconsistent it drives me crazy I'm being mindless as soon as I call him anything now if once I realize from your perspective nobody wakes up in the morning says you know today I'm going to be impulsive inconsistent stupid so what are you intending well it turns out you're intending to be flexible okay I am gullible I am so gullible I can't stand myself for being gullible but that's because when I'm being gullible it's because I'm trusting it's nice to be trusting and the point here is very simple although I'm making it sound complicated that every single negative uh way of understanding somebody or ourselves has an equally strong but oppositely veence for every negative there's an equally strong positive way of understanding it and so now uh we go back to your wife and you and I are together now Jonathan and your inconsistency your stubbornness whatever it is see you're being too impulsive is driving me crazy once I see that what you're intending from your perspective is to be spontaneous oh well I don't want him to become less impulsive you don't want me to become this back a little bit when you're talking about reframing seeing this in a different same behavior as a diff understanding it quite differently yeah so we did a study we give people about 200 negative adjectives and behavior description say check those things about yourself you keep trying to change but you can change so for me I check um gullible and impulsive now you turn the page over and a mixed up order is the positive version of all of those now the questions check those things you really value about yourself well I value that I'm trusting and I'm spontaneous and as long as I value being trusting I'm not going to be able to stop being gullible so you can yeah so we all know when somebody's driving us crazy or when we're casting dispersions and now if we accept that it's our mindlessness and we ask how did that make sense from their perspective our relationships will improve and the more you do this the more you want to do it because everything just becomes nicer for you very last question I'd like to ask um do you view this as an addition to sort of traditional medicine or is this an alternative I don't see it as an either one I see it as a different way of doing everything that's done you know that when we recognize that our psychology makes a a big difference in our health then we might approach doctors as partners in our health we don't just turn ourselves over to them when we recognize that any experiment only gives us probabilities that's a good guess so when the doctor is telling you to do something based on a good guess you you're going to take it indifferently from as if it comes on high you must take these three pills four times a day you know um and so you you become engaged in your own healthc care in a different way doctors know they don't know everybody who is expert at whatever they do knows they don't know and so it'd be a relief not met with hostility you know they should still be respected for what they do know and knowing uh best guests is still not having the Vagas notion but um when we're aware that everything is changing everything looks different from different perspectives any business that holds things still any profession is behaving mindlessly and um missing out on all of the advantage that would acrew from this more mindful noticing amazing Ellen I'm going to try and summarize the conversation this is definitely going to be my hardest ever because I feel like I only understand the the the basics of what you're talking about but let me try and do that before you do that I you know can your listeners understand that reading this you know when you're reading about some of you can stop and pause and question yourself and then it becomes I think much more accessible at least that was my goal no I think that's I think lots of people are going to be listening to this and um actually really what I wanted to talk about was you know I think there is this remarkable series of studies that you have done that look at this idea of mindfulness which is you know as as I'm understanding it sort of really paying attention to what is going on being aware that you maybe the the interpretation that you had might be wrong or that you don't really understand what is here that um what you are experiencing your mind has this remarkable impact actually on things that are just measurable separately and you showed that whether it is your blood sugar responses whether that's your eyesight whether it's people perceiving you to be 20 years younger with this um counterclockwise example and that although that I think for many people sounds sort of crazy because it sounds like it's complete opposite of everything we're talk actually you know there are a whole series of these experiments that um shows this that I think you had very interesting conversation around some of these studies looking at people living with chronic diseases where again if you change the way that you're sort of framing your experience and starting to notice also the times that are better rather than worse that this can have this impact and that somehow this is quite link to something that medical science has looked at for you know a 100 years which is the placebo where we know from many of these studies that a placebo can have this remarkable impact on people in almost anything that's been done and and and then in a sense we've accepted that as the impact of the mind on the body but you're showing that there are all these other ways in which this can can affect you and then I think you are saying it is very easy to do um and I know that you have a book that helps people to understand um how to do it but but my takeaway is that there is a there is a starting point you can say you know I would like to not just sort of just pay no attention to what is going on but actually even if I'm just doing this you know at some particular times to look and realize I don't know or that you know the person I'm with is actually different from how I imagin them and that that is what is started to unlock this thinking and and in part that if you're going to do it be there and what does it mean to be there is you know you're brushing your teeth watch what's happening enjoy it you know as silly as that sounds and this is a bit like being in the moment isn't it rather than just like Zing I'm so glad you said that because people you know tell people instruct them all be in the moment that's an empty instruction because when you're not in the moment you're not there to know you're not there right this is the way to be in the moment just simply notice three things about whatever you're doing forcing your intervention and I was say the last thing that I did want to mention I thought was fun is have fun because you said that if you're having fun you are by definition being mindful and and I love that as uh something it's something we talk about at work quite a lot CU I say like what's the point of being at work if you're not having any fun that if we're lucky enough you know to be in a position as as I think most people are at Zoe where you have choices of a lot of things you can do um then you should be trying that you would like to get you know have fun out of what you're doing at work and hopefully meaning as well there was uh there's a video that I have that has nothing to do with me but that I have my students in a health class while watch it's um piano video I don't know if you know this so it started in Scandinavia where it first Scandinavia same all over the world where you have a subway station um and you have stairs and an escalator and almost everybody takes the escalator and you'll have a young guy you know who'll run up the stairs but most of the time so then what these researchers did was they laid down a piano uh piano keys on the stairs so when you go up d d it's actually making noise and in almost no time people give up the escalator because it's so much fun going up the stairs and so what I tell my students is why wait for somebody to have the idea I go up doodling you know all the time virtually everything can be made so that it's at least interesting if not outright fun and if you can do that maybe that's the biggest takeaway right now that make what you're doing fun and you will necessarily become more mindful thank you so much for taking us in and taking us through this and I have definitely learned a lot in this episode thank you well I've enjoyed it thank you Jonathan it's a pleasure thank you Ellen for joining me today on Zoe science and nutrition this conversation has highlighted the significant role that our mind can play in our physical well-being and we know from other scientists on this podcast that the food weed can directly affect our minds and our mental health so if you want to understand how to support your body in mind for the best foods for your health then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program you can learn more and get 10% off by going to zoe.com podcast as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yellow huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fford see you next [Music] time [Music] a

Channel: ZOE

Views: 116,229

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, aging, mindfulness, ellen langer, optimism

Id: Gmi9OoCxhoM

Length: 60min 4sec (3604 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023