The Most IMPORTANT Thing That DETERMINES Our Health | Dr. Ellen Langer x Rich Roll

most of the deterioration we experience is a function of our minds if we could only wake up life would be very very different for virtually all of us most of us live mindlessly most of the time Dr Ellen Langer is the author of several books on mindfulness including her latest the mindful body Medical Science can only give us probabilities there are still doctors who will say something like you have 6 months to live there is no no way they could know that Harvard psychology Professor Ellen Langer showed that mental attitude can reverse the effects of Aging her groundbreaking research spanning over 40 years delves into the Mind Body Connection everything you think you know for sure every limit you place on yourself is a function of your mindlessness people think they want complete success not knowing that if they had complete success life would be empty that's maybe the most inspirational monologue I've heard in a long time [Music] today's episode is brought to you by the awesome organizations that make this show possible thank you for coming it's an honor to meet you I appreciate you coming to do this today it's a treat to have such a legend uh in our presence today you know one of the things that I love so much about you and your work is just the kind of Novel unconventional approach that you've taken to psychology and you do it with this seeming kind of Twinkle in your eye like you know kind of pushing boundaries that's right like I'm doing what you're doing but not but with a beginner's mind and this kind of sense of awe and wonder says a lot about your imagination like all of these studies you've done so many studies over the years that the average person wouldn't even concoct in their wildest dreams and you're just putting them to the test all the time like over the course of your career like what is one of the wildest craziest studies that you came up with and tested we're doing one right now and all you're doing is watching somebody eat pizza that's the whole thing watching so we give different instructions one group is supposed to count the number of times the person is chewing that's the control group the um important group is um imagining tasting it and smelling it and you know uh feeling it on the you know it's a whole bringing and so the question is will they gain lose or no difference in weight that's pretty wild yeah if they lose weight um I'm going to have to rewrite physics uhhuh well you've already demonstrated that this has an impact on Sati on Hunger right like even with the time that you spent with your friend and she's eating her Sunday it was amazing you know in fact I'm very external in that way and whenever I go out to dinner it's very important to know the time between when I get there and start watching somebody else eat and when they're going to take my order because I don't want when you're taking your last bite of that burger for me in that order because I'm not going to want the burger in another five minutes right there's so much to kind of uh extrapolate from that right I think there is some kind of you know weight loss like Guru uh protocol that we could Divine from okay so here's one um we haven't done this yet but you know David Edwards so David was the MIT I think he still might be there and he has these things they look like hourglasses and you turn it over and it emits an odor one of these is the order of chocolate and it seems to me that if people smell chocolate and then have available to them all sort of snacks you know chocolate they're going to eat a lot however if they do it multiple times they won't want the chocolate it's like people who you walk by a bakery you have to have it but maybe you don't have to have it but the people who work there you know don't eat the stuff very well you tested that with cheese as well like people no that wasn't mine that was was a different one yeah but it's in the book idea imagining eating a bunch of cheese and then that translates into when you're actually presented with cheese like you're going to eat less yeah similar but the point here would be if you wanted to um control your weight by eating less so the substance you want to eat less of you overdose on the smell uhhuh at some point you would develop a tolerance for that I think that you know we haven't tested that part I watched um remember Mad Men And every minute they're smoking yeah so and I was a smoker I still smoke so I walk into the room no one's listening don't worry I walk into a room and madman is on and he's putting out a cigarette one of them and I didn't want a cigarette okay so if they're lighting up I want a cigarette if they're putting it out I don't um and so the you if you break up in your in your mind imagining different it's not you know one activity it depends on where you are in the activity sure well it's that sort of Q Behavior reward cycle right so if he's putting it out it's telling your brain oh I've already satisfied the craving like what's the wildest study that you would like to put to the test that you haven't yet well one is I would like to take hundreds of people who were just diagnosed with cancer we could use three four different kinds of cancer and you know nobody is going to be happy when they get a diagnosis so give them three weeks then after that measure their stress level every 3 weeks four weeks and I predict independent of their genetics independent of their treatment independent of nutrition and the kind of cancer stress will predict the course of the disease that hypothesis comes from where this idea that you have that stress is really foundational to way more than we think yeah you know I couldn't tell you where any of these ideas come from but I'm overwhelmed I can't get out of bed what is your what is your process do you wake up in the morning and jot down ideas must hundreds of so I have I have um a a friend collaborator who's a member of my lab Philip mman he's big in Ai and I know he can't possibly remember these but at least I feel so I Phillip I have this great idea I tell him and then it's out you know whether it'll ever come back or not I don't know so the foundation of your work is essentially uh disabusing people of this dichotomy between mind and body oh when I think about it people talking about mind and body these are just words and people have um made them reified them in in some sense um and it seemed to me from just the work on placebos alone that there's more going on and you know the mindful body when I first um it was first going to be a memoir so I have lots of personal stories in there and two that speak to the Mind Body Unity broadly both about pancreas now you tell me how many people you know who have even one story about pancreas I have two yeah all right so um I was married when I was very young foolishly maybe maybe not and went to Paris on my honeymoon I was 19 going on 40 and um s uh have to be very grown up because after all now I'm a married woman doesn't follow but it did in my mind at that time so we're having dinner on Paris and I ordered the mixed grill and on the mixed grill is pancreas so I asked my then husband which of these is the pancreas he points something I'm big eater I love eating I eat everything else with gusto now the moment of truth can I eat the pancreas and you know I feel I have to cuz I have to prove that now I'm all grown up so I start eating it and then I get sick literally sick to my stomach he starts laughing I say why are you laughing he said because that's chicken you ate the pancreas a while ago okay so what was going on there um another pancreas related story with the same um uh bottom line perhaps was my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas that's the endgame and then all of a sudden it was gone and the medical world couldn't explain it and so um um for me just entertaining the possibility even if just for Uris purposes just to generate new hypotheses let's put the mind and body back together see them as one and see how far we can push it and that would explain both of those uh pancreas instances and and then we've done study after study and they just keep um uh turning out to make it so that we don't gain anything I don't think by keeping them as separate and the separate has delayed research because the question it raises is how do you get from this thing fuzzy thing called the brain to something material called called the body and so everybody's looking for mediators and um you put it back together you don't need a mediator because it's one thing right the findings are so astonishing that it's very difficult to digest and I think despite the fact that the kind of Advent and awareness around mindfulness is growing kind of exponentially right now there is still this recalcitrance in the western medicine kind of you know kind no there's no question about corate industrial complex to resist that notion when it comes to diagnosis and treatment yeah there was an article that somebody wrote about me for um I was a head of the uh magazine section of the New York York Times and so it took me forever to explain to him Mind Body unity and then when he turned the article in and these are very smart people um who already agreed to publish the article still they kept asking sort of what's going on under the hood what's going on inside and I'm not suggesting that there's nothing going on I'm simply suggesting that more or less it's all happening simultaneously now decades ago uh the medical model was such that um they didn't believe that psychology mattered at all I mean it's nice to be happy I'm sure they felt that way but that the only way you're going to become ill was the introduction of an antigen pathogen what have you and uh then that model uh shifted to the biosocial model um so now they know psychology matters some and eventually I think we'll get to the point to realize that it's really in some sense the whole bold that that leads me to recall the study around colds and flu yeah that's in the book which is incredible you and it's so funny because I've done uh several podcasts once the book came out and I've never talked about it and I you know each time I say to talk about the gold study yeah yeah please please elaborate so um basically people come in um to the lab or the room and there's a large television and the television is showing a video of people coughing and sneezing um the room is full of uh things like tissues chicken soup Vaseline whatever might prime a cold and essentially without the introduction of a virus um people who believe who for whom we prime a cold get sick there's no evidence I think I'm not sure of this but that if your hair is wet and you go outside that you're going to get a cold but I believe that if you believe you know if you go out you know that you're going to get a cold and you know um which would be a nice test to see to take people to find out how they believe colds come about and then test them in those circumstances the interesting thing would be to put him in a situation where you a different situation from that where uh you're introducing a virus and to see if they get sick there was some added Nuance to that as well wasn't there was some interesting prompts like sort of telling people like hey you might be on the verge of a cold or and then having a control group and seeing what would happen and then they would start to express symptomology and obviously I guess on some level we're all harboring you know viruses and bacteria so maybe that well that's what that that sort of activates or or represses an immune response when um I try to explain it and I thought well I mean you know where is this where is it coming from then all of a sudden you become sick the weak hypothesis and I couldn't answer that but that would be the strong hypothesis the weak hypothesis is that the last cold you got or the cold before that wasn't um 100% cured and so it's dormant and what this did was um make it active again right human beings are insane oh there's no question about it and you you've sort of backed this truck up into this world that pulls the covers on like you know we think we're sentient and we're making logical rational decisions all the time and we're not easily manipulated and and that we have agency in control and and you know the book really pulls the covers on that to reveal a very different picture of how we operate how easily we're we're conjured into believing one thing or the other how we can be manipulated and the power of belief on outcomes in terms of physical manifestations yeah no um I don't know if it's how easily we're um deceived uh because I think the whole structure since we're little kids everything is sort of conspiring against us you know um you're taught right and wrong as if these are completely different you taught absolutes at every turn and so then when you grow up and you believe these absolutes absolutely um doesn't seem quite as surprising within that structure then you can prime people and move them around those structures give us this illusion of control or a sense of security um which of course leads to this idea of mindlessness which is really how you kind of enter this world not through the traditional kind of Zen Buddhism world of mindfulness but from the opposite direction it's even worse than that okay so I start studying mindlessness and from the very beginning I'm going to have data so much data showing that virtually all of us are Mindless almost all the time then I had a conversation with somebody and I wish I could remember with whom it was because he said to me uh I don't know if he said in this nasty way but I don't know how you make this nice you are what you study I took it seriously so then I decided to to look at the other side of it and it was only after looking at the other side of it that I learned all about Buddhism and you know um Eastern uh philosophy and so on but my ideas had already been formed and what was interesting to me was for me from a Western Scientific perspective to come to you know the same point Time After Time as this ancient thinking um felt that you know it there must be something there mhm the idea that we're mindless most of the time is a disturbing thought but when you reflect on that it becomes very clear how true that is and there's a couple quotes that I jotted down that You' said that I think can can can kind of set this up you said we don't enjoy our lives enough because we are not actually there we are Mindless not mindful virtually all the world's ills boil down to mindlessness most of us live mindlessly most of the time yeah no I mean big it's even bigger than that when I give talks about it where I I have a slide that says virtually um all of our ills personal interpersonal professional uh Global are the direct or indirect uh result of our mindlessness now when I give the talk on that I say and just Among Us and the other million or so people I've said this to I mean all um so yeah I think that um if we could only wake up life would be very very different for virtually all of us well let's tease that out a little bit like what would be a good example like I'm thinking of those moments when you're driving the car and then you kind of come to and realize you don't even know where you were the last 10 minutes oh yes it was that example that made me realize it in the first place you know that I'm driving and I think I'm going to be an exit 3 and I say I'm at 38 where was I no um everything you think you know for sure every limit you place on yourself is a function of your mindlessness I mean we make people more Mindful and they live longer so we're talking you uh we're talking about very big changes as a function of giving up this view that you know the the powers that be I think would like us even in our democracy uh to stay mindless because that instantiates the status quo in some sense um but I think everybody knows they don't know they just don't know that they can't know so they pretend and they upt out and when somebody asks as if they know then what you do is genuflect or give them the power of a stage um but because everything is changing everything looks different from different perspectives you you can't know so when I lecture on this I often uh give this example one one thing that everybody thinks they know how much is one plus one well I'll play along I've read the book so the answer is two okay so uh it is sometimes two but not always if you add one wat of chewing gum plus one wat of chewing gum 1 plus one is one if you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry 1 plus one is one you had one Cloud Plus One Cloud 1 plus one is one in the real world 1 plus one probably doesn't equal to as or more often as it does now imagine right after we finish talking someone comes over to you and says Rich how much is 1 plus one you're no longer going to mindlessly say two what you're going to do is pay some attention to the context and then you're going to answer more Mindful and say it could be and then you can say could be one it could be two right and and what does plus even mean exact yeah right right um it's simultaneously humbling but also confronting uh and as you know a scientist who is in a world where the scientific method is everything and there are guardrails and rules and protocols and this is the way we do it and we don't do it like this and this is the way it has to be uh I would imagine that you're ruffling some feathers here and there yeah but I'm oblivious to it most of the time I just ruffle and then find um I had written another book uhu about it was the art I'm becoming an artist I started to paint and I didn't I was applauded for not following certain rules and then I admitted I wasn't I didn't know the rules of course I couldn't find him so much of the time when I'm being uh recalcitrant it's uh it's out of ignorance rather than courage I think this is really important um especially but not exclusively with respect to Health Medical Science like all science can only give us probabilities an experiment says if it's reliable that if you do it again the exact same way which you can never do exactly the same thing you're likely to get these findings those those probabilities are presented in um medical journals textbooks what have you as absolutes when you know something absolutely you don't pay any more attention to it and uh people need to know that everything they're told is a probability is a best guess um you know so I I mean I can't imagine but there are still doctors who will say something like you have 6 months to live there is no way they could know that and when they're progn es become self-fulfilling then I you know I get upset um even the the diagnosis of cancer that you have cancer you could have something that people have called cancer but is different from it in you know in these ways and those you know um we just don't know uh so you know and if I got sick I'd certainly go to the medical world but I wouldn't just hand over to them and any Doom and Gloom hypothesis um I don't think I would be quite as willing as many people seem to be to accepting the truth of it yeah there is a sense despite the illusion of control which we're going to get into there is this kind of hopefulness around agency that emerges from the book because when you realize uh that you do have a little bit more control than perhaps the traditional Dynamic of a doctor telling you this is the way it is and this is how it's going to go um it's empowering yeah you know I mean for one thing when uh you're told you have a chronic illness the way people understand chronic is it's uncontrollable well you can't prove that anything is uncontrollable all we know is that we don't know it's indeterminate now if you think you definitely can't do something you're not going to do it if you think who knows maybe not even probably not you may try it and so um there's always a modum of control we can exert even the simplest thing I believe this one I don't have data for but that if something is ailing you know your your arm is in bad shape if you make the rest of your body healthy um you're going to have a better chance of beating whatever the disorder is you know imagine you have an Olympic runner and you have a couch potato who's you know overindulging in bad food or whatever um and they're both exposed to um covid I would bet on the athlete sure um but so then you can't say it's uncontrollable there's two things operate here one is sort of the calcification of thoughts and ideas and possibilities on the one hand um and then on the other hand it's uh it's about the power of language and how we communicate ideas and how potent the words we choose to describe certain things can be in terms of how we think about ourselves our belief about possibility and the physical kind of outcomes and and manifestations that we demonstrate physiologically as a result you pull that out because um that's a very important part of the book but when I start talking about it I usually just end up with all of the you know exciting to me studies on Mind Body Unity but language you know even a simple thing so I went to visit a friend who had a very bad case of cancer she just gets back from the hospital hi Eva how are you she said fine I said what they say my Cancer's in remission and then all of a sudden I thought about it oh wait a second if I went for the very same test chances are they tell me I don't have cancer why is it I don't have it but she has it in remission and that seemed to me um a a way of understanding almost everything in this culture that you know you could have the thing is bad you have it in remission is better but they never go the whole distance there's a better than better way of understanding almost everything we do and um hopefully I can give examples of that but to say your cancer is in remission what does that mean is it lurking someplace no it's sort of in some ways is the medical world edging their bets and um if it comes back but the understanding that if cancer comes back it's in some ways the same cancer that's why we call it cancer in some ways it's different and what we need to do is attend to the ways it's different the example I use is a cold you get a cold when the cold seems to be gone you don't say you're in remission you say you're cured now if you get a cold after that you see it is a different cold mhm like it's cancer in some ways it's the same in some ways it's different by seeing it is different you're empowered I can beat these look at how many i' I've handled in the past and then the one thing that drives me the craziest is the fiveyear rule that a woman has breast cancer the cancer is gone they sold a remission they would be better off calling it cured they have to wait 5 years without it reappearing for the medical world to say it's cured believing that it could be there is very stressful and we've made clear my views on stress you know so in the choice of language uh they're keeping people in a state that I think is U very unhealthy and before I did this by the way um so I had my views of remission cure then I called Susan love Susan was um when she was alive was a breast cancer the an expert the expert and uh she agreed with me so you know I felt a little more comfortable going against the many people in the medical world with that it's not just a differentiation in language and word choice it's really a different Paradigm on the one hand these are binary dualistic terms where there's hard lines before and after and and kind of a um a concretism to the whole thing where your whole deal is attention to variability everything is in flux all the time nothing from any moment to the next is the same in any conceivable possible way and within that there is this again hopefulness like a sense of possibility or something being different and an appreciation or or in a a mindful attention to that um offers new ways of of perceiving it and and ultimately considering and treating it yeah I mean we have um several studies as you know on what I call attention to symptom variability that's just a fancy way of saying being mindful being mindful is noticing change when you're given a diagnosis of some dread disease the assumption most people have is that it's going to stay the same or get worse but nothing goes in Only One Direction there are always blips you know it's like the stock market you know goes up goes down a little bit goes you know if it's on a course to go up you still have moments where it's falling and vice versa if it's going down and if we paid attention to when it's better why is it better now um we'd have a way of of controlling it so we do these studies where we call people at random times in the day and ask them is that symptom better or worse than before from the last time we called for instance and why now three things happen four things happen when we do that the first is you start this process where you feel in control you're doing something to make yourself better second by noticing that now it's a little better that feels good because you thought you was only awful and you know there are moments of some relief third by asking yourself why you engage in a mindful search and we have so much data that that mindful search alone is good for your health last that if you believe or look for a cure I think you're more likely to find one now we've done this with multiple sclerosis Parkinson's um arthritis chronic pain um you know a host of real things uh things that are scary for people to have and in each case uh we get um a great Improvement and you can do this yourself you know which is how it all started which is people when they take a placebo you know the doctor is wearing a white coat gives you this nothing you take it and you get better clearly you're doing it yourself so what do we need the doctor for and so that's how this attention to variability started most people have a smartphone so you set your smartphone for an hour okay in an hour it rings and you ask yourself is the symptom better or worse than the last time and why then set it for 3 hours and 2 hours and 10 minutes doesn't matter just random times in the course of a day over the week and two weeks whatever and that um even if you don't get the answer you're going to end up better for the reasons that I said because you are paying mindful attention to what's uring which is connecting you more deeply to yourself and when the neurons are firing that's literally and figuratively enlivening um it's energ ing which is something that I often fail to remind people of because I think we should be mindful all the time you say it to people oh my God it sounds you know scary to to them unless you're an academic it's confused with thinking and even thinking has gotten a bad W it's not thinking that's hard it's the worrying that you're not going to be able to solve whatever the problem is that's hard um so what we find is that the more mindful you are the more energized you are and the way for people to understand that is if they think of doing whatever they enjoy doing that the only way you can enjoy it is if you're there for it uh so it turns out mindfulness is energizing turns out that it's good for you turns out that it feels good and you know you know that I've been doing this for so long there's been lots of opportunity to put in all sorts of dependent measures so it's better for everything people see it as charismatic um it actually leaves this imprint on the products you produce uh your relationships improve your memory is better so on and so on so for somebody who's new to this idea of mindfulness or or have traditionally Associated it with a meditation practice something formal like that what is the process of getting somebody mindfully engaged what we have people do is notice new things three five really doesn't matter but people need a number so he say notice three new things about things you know go home and notice three new things about your spouse notice three new things about the lawn three new things about uh something at work and what happens is when you're noticing new things about the things you think you know you come to see you didn't know them very well so your attention naturally goes there now the other way the top down way is to accept that everything is changing everything looks different from different perspectives so uncertainty is is the rule most of us have been taught from day one certainties and those certainties are making us mindless um they make us uh unaware of all sorts of possibilities for every aspect of our mind for me life changed when I was at this horse event you remember I'm a straight A student I'm the you were also well we're the ones people hate you I might have even as a kid memorize what was underneath the pictures I mean that was terrible okay so I know now I'm at this horse event this man asked me if I'll watch his horse for him because he's going to get his horse a hot dog I roll my eyes internally so he can't see important to be nice and I think he's crazy horses don't eat meat everybody knows or at least all the ace students know that okay good horses don't eat meat he comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it and it was at that moment that everything changed for me um that everything became possible because all of the things that were preventing that possibility now just crumbled there are so many ways that they're wrong you know that how many horses were tested in these studies how much grain was mixed with how much meat how hungry were the horses you know you know when you're doing a study these sorts of questions really matter and they're typically ignored when the the results are being reported and reported in [Music] magazines who needs cuple when you have a camel back and I have white seats it's not going to spill we're brought to you today by a brand new sponsor camel back so much more than just those hydration backpacks we love coming in hot with a gorgeous line of super functional beautifully designed vacuum insulated drink wear they will not leak for all of us who enjoy our beverages on the Fly for all of us who are fed up with hot stuff not staying hot cold stuff getting warm and that lid that you were absolutely sure was sealed just pops off problems no longer courtesy of the legends of camel back who get it and deliver basically they have sizes colors shapes Essentials for every occasion and all your beverage needs go to camelbak.com sign up with your email and use my code Rich Roll for 20% off your entire purchase at checkout or you can click the link in the description below from there it's sort of a short leap to this idea of the illusion of control that we walk around with like in addition to these rules and these structures and organizational systems that help us make sense of the world that we kind of adhere to that drive a sense of mindlessness because we can just operate within that context we have this sense that we are exerting some level of control over our lives and external events while also feeling like we're pretty good at assessing risk when it comes to decision- making and of course you know I disagree with everything I'm just said I'm just loving you ass softball here but there's so much I don't know I don't know which one to hit um all right well the first thing is that people hold things still because they think then they'll have greater control over it if I can say what kind of person you are and now I know you're a whatever then I can make sure um you don't hurt me in that way but that's the evolutionary kind of explanation for why we're wired that way that's what you're saying no no no never went there if um I think you're the kind of person who's late you so we're married um and um I'm going to make dinner we'll make it very traditional them too old for you but that uh if I know that you're always late I adjust myself accordingly right and um U but you're not always late and if if I cared more about you and wanted to facilitate different things in the relationship I would pay more attention to when you were and when you weren't just like the symptoms that we were talking about a moment before all right but I hold you still now you're that kind of person you're always late you're always cheap you're always whatever we call people and um that makes us feel in control as long as I know how everybody else is I know how I should be um but because everybody is changing and because sometimes you are this way sometimes you're not and even when you're this way whatever that is there are other ways of looking at it you know so you're being careful with money you're not being cheap when we recognize that then we actually have more control and the relationship improves we pigeon hole people we make comparisons all the time that are Mindless um as a a way I think to exercise control but since we're so often wrong we're actually giving up control I mean if I see you as a snob all right uh what am I going to do I'm going to avoid you m right why do I want you in my life if you're a snob if I take that same behavior that looks like you're a snob he's really shy you wouldn't expect a tall handsome man to be shy but he's shy now every behavior that was true for you being a snob is also true for you being shy once I call you shy though I want to embrace you kind of speaks to this other idea that you have around transcending judgments and getting to this place of of of understanding this is the most important it's so funny because in 45 years of research and some of them life and death changing the meaning of Aging um and big potentially big important things this is the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart which is behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else he or she wouldn't do it no one wakes up in the morning and says you know today I'm going to be clumsy um inconsiderate um and uh I'm going to procrastinate so when people are doing things that get on your nerves what is it from their perspective now so I was doing therapy when I was at Yale at first it was fun and you know then I didn't have the patience for it because I wanted to say you have all of the behaviors you want just do them you know but of course you can't say that to people just do it so what was it that was keeping them from doing it and then I realize that when people are trying to change a behavior they're not looking at it as the same way as when they're motivated to do the behavior so for example um I am uh scarily gullible really it's very easy to take advantage of me several have um so I want to change you see how gullible I am it's not good for our relationship illan you've got to change I keep trying and trying and I'll fail the reason I'll fail is that because going forward I'm being trusting and I don't want to stop being trusting even if it means sometimes people will take advantage of me see you are so damn inconsistent it's really hard to tolerate you I love your flexibility I am so impulsive that I need to change but that's because I value my spontaneity so we did a study ages ago we gave people 300 Behavior descriptions um and we said Circle those things that you've Tred to change about yourself and you have trouble gble for me impulsive okay then you turn the page over and in a mixed up order are the positive versions of these now Circle the things you really value about yourself my spontaneity um and uh my being trusting so so in other words with this you can see how relationships would improve right because now there's no reason to demean you because what you're doing makes sense I was just mindlessly saying it um uh in a rigid way there's always a reason for the behavior and what you're referring to are the values that motivate and underly the behavior so trust is a value that is important to you and the manifestation of that is gullibility you can change gullibility and still hold on to not really trust well you can set healthy boundaries and do there's way I think there's ways you can play no what you're saying is you can be a little less gullible by being a little less trusting and sure yeah but um the two are the same it's the same thing but I think getting to the values that are driving the behavior is the pathway to understanding and to your point that every behavior is motivated by some reason that makes sense to the person who's perpetrating it it's this idea my wife says it's all the time like every man or every woman is right from their perspective and if you can understand that and embrace that I think it allows you to kind of have a little bit more grace and a sense of empathy and understanding yeah I think that because we're brought up mindlessly which means we seek single explanations for events that if you see something different from the way I see it I see it the way I see it it must be right because if I if it weren't right I would change it right so anything you do that's different from me means that you're wrong and um you know so we have to open up all of that and all of that stems from Strangely I think a belief that uh the things that are after are scarce you know that we both can't be important happy um full people um there's always this you know who's better on which dimension uh whether it's you know with friends relationships and I think we're taught that in the beginning we're taught that in schools by there being a normal distribution for grades you know Harvard had this thing this was years ago where we got a print out that um that compared the grade you gave the student with the grade that student got other in other classes basically saying you shouldn't give that student an a because the student is a b student and um I don't know I think uh well sometimes I give all A's because they all deserve A's well it's interesting how rules and institutions and structures Drive that sense of a scarcity mindset from the moment we come into the world right and we're not even kind of consciously aware of it and you have a whole chapter on this in the book this difference between an abundance and a abundance mindset and a scarcity mind this came to pass with somebody that I knew who I I'm like a little kid and I would you know you wouldn't believe us I got these sneakers on sale okay big deal right you have a lot of energy I do and this is your third podcast today so this this mindful approach is working for you know mindfulness is um energy beginning so I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight because I'm going to be too energized anyway so I come back and I say I got these sneakers on sale excited my mind what I'm doing is sharing right I got the sneak you get the sneakers I'll tell you where to go she um thought I was bragging and it took me so long to figure out how could I be bragging but because her mindset was one of scarcity so if I got them now there are fewer available for other people um mine was sneakers can be gten at this price which led to her resentment or jealousy but how does mindfulness work to disabuse us of a scarcity mindset um well for one thing um things are you see how things are more abundant you see how um several things can be used in several different ways you know we have Notions of Natural Resources you want more natural resources call more things natural you know it's um I I mean that you know half seriously yeah the things that we care about but people don't know that this is what they care about are um not limited they're not scarce as I said a moment before despite all the normal distributions we set up saying some people should have a lot some a medium amount and some very little whether it's Talent Beauty money Health the things we care about are not limited that we can live in a world you can just forget the world have a relationship where both of you prosper it doesn't have to be you know here's my domain where I'm better than you here's your domain um which is when the good relationships work tend to be that way scarcity isn't unrelated to control issues either right like if you're driven by a scarcity mindset you want to kind of control you know what you have access to Etc and that kind of gets into this idea of future casting and you know probabilities and how we as human beings think we have a sense of what's going to come next and your whole thing is like virtually nothing is predictable this is so hard to communicate to people people think they can predict all the time you know because they're making predictions and then if you know if I make a prediction that you're going to smile you see but I could have kept man I could have left it for 3 Days right and at some point you're going smile so it's very easy seeing that our predictions are right um we think we can predict because we're so good at postdiction looking back so an example John and Mary are at a party they're fighting and if I said to you you think they're going to get divorced you say how do I know people fight but if we don't have that conversation you see them fighting a month later two weeks later doesn't matter uh somebody says to you hey did you know John and Mary are getting I knew it you should have seen them go at each other mhm and I think that people don't understand that well you may be able to predict for the group nobody who knows anything about numbers believes you can predict the individual case so what does that mean if I were to say to you here's a used parking lot a lot of cars in another parking lot and here's a Mercedes dealership now you go and we pick 20 cars at random um or we look at 100 cars and we just tried them once chances are more Mercedes are going to start than the used cars but I don't know if anybody who take the bit for all the money all the future money you're going to make and I'll match it that any Mercedes that we pick at random will start because we know things happen if I in a foul shooting context uh with um Michael Jordan whoever's the lead now um I could win if we only shoot one ball I sometimes get it in he sometimes misses if we do many you know the difference in our talent will reveal itself and most of the time what we're doing is making decisions about individual cases now when you know you can predict it throws everything into disarray but it also makes life easy most people get themselves crazed with should I do this or should I do that the decision is based on a prediction right should I do this is because I'm predicting that this will be great or this which will be great which will be greater I don't know and so on when you can't predict it doesn't matter and if it doesn't matter then life actually becomes easy so my bottom line rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision make the decision right randomly choose now you can randomly choose if you want an AM and Joy or Snickers nobody's going to care right but it's the exact this is the hard part to swallow it's the exact same thing about getting an abortion or not getting married or not taking the job or not doesn't matter whether the decision is big or small you can't know that's a very confronting idea yeah well I mean you've you can only live one life if there were some magical way that I could live a life as somebody who's had three kids and live a life as somebody has one kid and somebody who hasn't had kids maybe I can make a comparison but you don't have that available to you so I say to my students let's say should you go to Harvard or should you go to Yale so they made a decision to go to Harvard so let's say it's terrible you know they screw up royally and they say oh I wish I had gone to Yale there's no way of knowing that Yale wouldn't have been worse better uh the same and that's why regret is so mindless because the choice you didn't take you're presuming would have been better um and you know there's no evidence for that but we have this predisposition to haunt ourselves with these sorts of things looking retrospectively over our life and wondering what could have been or what should have been had this or that gone differently but you you only do that when your pres is not right exactly but the labels good bad better worse are all words and subjective thoughts that we place on top of these things and they become real or emotional experience only by Dent of the fact that we've made that decision and labeled them yeah exactly exactly and mindfulness is a way of putting distance between you and that well the way you put distance between It Is by um seeing it in its multi in a multifaceted way so here a five ways it's good here five ways it's bad you know um I don't have or what is good or bad well but if you if you're using that language for yourself right now we have if it's good I have to kill people what I can to get it right stay up all night I mean I have to get that thing cuzz it's good and if it's bad I have to do everything I can to stay away from it now when you know it's neither good nor bad I don't have to do anything whatever you if this podcast is wonderful that's great if the podcast turns out the cameras aren't working it's also great because I can enumerate all the advant this is funny the other day I was told of uh this very very large um prize uh if you can extend life which is what I've been doing right for the past 45 years okay so somebody the Peter dandis thing somebody tells me about this $100 million okay so I'm driving by myself I have an hour drive so oh okay now first to the government I don't live in that moneyed world but I'll assume the government wants 50 million what am I going to do with the other 50 million and I it's taking me my whole ride home you're already mad at the IRS for taking away I didn't care about that because the 50 million was enough from me and and and by you and if I give this to you oh then you're going to be upset that I didn't give as much to you uh at the end I was fine not having the money uhhuh you know you created your own like sort of accelerated suffering as a result of trying to experience what that might be like that's so the point is you know with everything good um there's a way of constructing it understanding construing it so that it's not so good and vice versa and people need to understand outcomes are in our heads the value of outcomes the outcome is nothing you know uh the way you understand it will determine your emotional response to it and there the more mindful you are the more ways you can look at it the more choices you actually have how well do you practice that yourself you know I'm almost embarrassed to tell you I virtually never experienced stress wow yeah I'm I mean I've had some big things happen in my life you know um major fire that destroyed 80% of what I own my mother died when she was young you know these sorts of things but when the uh house went up and smoked and I called the insurance uh agent came the next day and he said to me in his 25 years on the job this was the first time that the damage was worse than the coal oh my God oh my God is what most people say I can't oh and yeah and it's nothing right here it was a lot and but my feeling was I had already lost the stuff throwing my sanity away wasn't going to get it back and I also felt I'm not so attached to things I love nice things but I don't need them you know so um and those things were all part of my past as long as you have a rich present you don't need uh the momentos from the past what I extracted from that story is like the the the sort of golden lining or the benefits of this were was a like a new kind of understanding of the meaning or importance of material things in your life realizing like okay that wasn't so great but like I'm actually fine and then going lecturing without your notes and having a kind of revelatory experience of finding something new and different that one uh so um I didn't care really about anything that I lost in the fire except that in a short time uh from the the date of the fire I had to give a large lecture class and my notes were destroyed and so what am I going to do what am I going to do so what I ended up doing was calling a student who took the class the year before and I borrowed her notes like a telephone and because they were somebody else's notes even though they were basically copying down from what I had said um I involved myself I engaged myself in the preparation for each lecture in a way that I hadn't done in a while you know the problem um PowerPoint slides are wonderful but once you have it it's sort of hard to to change your thinking about all of it so here since I didn't have any of the slides um everything was new and um I think it was the best class that I had taught do you have a formality in the way that you bring mindfulness into your into your moments and your hours and your days or is it now just a muscle memory where it's none of those things I mean I think that it's the way I do everything it's sort of up and out you know in some sense a lot of people ask about uh my doing a study um has the study changed my life the results of the study surprise me or whatever and I I don't know if I do this backwards you different from other people uh but for me I do something and I notice the doing of it and then I say well do other people do this and you know if not why not and then I set up the study so I already have evidence I don't have evidence that it's going to be broadly done but at least evidence that at least I do it it feels like a uh a natural inclination that that you have as a result of this that you can kind of see things through a unique different lens that other people don't see and that energizes your imagination it's not that I see it the way you see it and I see it the way I see it and you know that many times I'm oblivious to the fact that you're seeing it differently you know and it's only then talking about it I remember and even know because that was I had a lot of mem more stuff in it that when I was an undergraduate uh and I had been helping this professor with something and I came up with something that she didn't come up with which is going to happen but she then decided it was because I was creative which was never a label I had for myself those were the people the kids who could draw or who were in band so now I'm creative then almost at the same time um I had written a program text um for a paper a final paper in a class and the teacher wrote back got my A's I wrote back I have such hutzpah well is Yiddish you know it means you're able to go out there break the rules and do whatever and you know which I never saw myself that now I had double permission creative hutzpah you know telling me that I I can break out of um a structure that you know is stifling for people um I want to get back to this idea of of of how much agency and power and control we unknowingly kind of yield over for the well-being of our bodies and our and our minds not to be dualistic about it but I think a good way to kind of elaborate on that is some of the work you've done around aging and belief and in particular maybe you know start with the counterclockwise study yeah well the counterclockwise study was the first test of the Mind Body Unity hypothesis again mind and body if it's one thing wherever you put the mind you're necessarily going to put the body so you have a host of studies we would put the mind in strange places and take our measurements in this case what we did was to um retrofit um a retreat to seem to be 20 years earlier and we had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves so uh they would be talking in the present tense about things that had passed um the books all of the props the TV shows that we showed everything said this was 20 years earlier the comparison group uh stayed in the same Retreat not the same time um but and talked about the same thing except they were talking about it in the past tense and it it was clear that now is now and then was then where those merged for the first group um and uh their results um were big I think that in this period of one week these are men in their late '70s 80s and that was you know 20 uh 1979 so lots of years ago when um 80 was probably like a hundred yeah it was different yeah um anyway so without any medical intervention their Vision improved their hearing improved their memory their strength and they look noticeably younger in a week one week one week and you were measuring all these biomarkers yeah yeah well the funny thing is before I started this and I was trying to get the measures together I called all the geriatricians um uh that I could think to call and I said okay if I have a 50-year-old man in one room and a 75-year-old man in the other what measure do you want me to give you so you'll know who's who um they couldn't come up with anything you know so um whatever that means so what do you extrapolate from that finding most of the deterioration we experience is a function of our minds you know that um you know we see with old people I experience it myself I forget something oh my goodness you know am I becoming uh demented um and you know for me it's odd I mean I teach undergraduates they don't get 100 on the test you they forget also the thing is that they don't worry about forgetting as we get older we stop ourselves we presume we can't do things so we don't do them and um by removing that all sorts of possibilities present themselves you know that uh you can do the same things you did before maybe it's better to do them differently you know I I thinking about when I played tennis with these young kids and uh I was playing very differently from them they were 16-year-old boys full of energy running all over the but I knew the game and I knew if they're standing there the ball's going to come here they're standing the ball's going to go there I don't have to be racing around quite as much as as they did and so if you assume that as you get older you become wiser you should change some of your behavior but if you're not aware of changing your behavior because of these positive things we tend to to always make um negative explanations for why we've changed it's always based on you can't and I don't think that there's any we can never prove that we can't uh which people don't seem to understand right and trying is a whole ball game Rich this is the piece that I don't know how this came about but this massive misunderstanding where people think they want complete success not knowing that if they had complete success life would be empty so example I'm fun of using you play golf good if you got a hole in one every time you swung the club there'd be no game right you know an example I used earlier today you're in the elevator you're a little kid you try to reach that button you can't you can't your father picks you up you press the button wowe wow then you get a little you still can't now finally you're tall enough you press the button tell me how many times you've been in an elevator where you were excited about PR you so once we can do it it's no longer meaningful to us right I got you but what I do do is I always press the door closed but me too even if it doesn't work and I know it doesn't do anything and I know you've written about this as well uh but I still do it every time yeah me too um in reflecting on the counterclockwise study I can't help but wonder if part of it is the sense of of hopefulness like the idea that you're younger there's a future that that's Unwritten that lies ahead that kind of drives a sense of youthfulness as opposed to the person who is sitting in their older years and and looking in the rearview mirror where life is about memory and the sense of possibility for the future seems much more uh ciled that's what people say um my own feeling is that if we're you know if we're both here now we're we're in the same now and that uh um you know well I don't it's nice for you to decide in 10 years you want to do X but it would be stupid mindless if you really had a commitment because you don't know what you're going to want to do in 10 years um so um I don't think most of us when I was younger I didn't spend that that kind of time thinking about the future people say that but at least for me it wasn't true so do people ask you what your Five-Year Plan is or your 10e plan I tell you that worse than that I was uh in Australia and I gave a talk and there were several people giving talks then the person who organized us had us all come out on the stage and surprised us and asked what is Your Bucket List which is the same sort of question right about the future what is and so each person Big Shots give their bucket list she comes to me and I I don't have a bucket list first I felt bad I didn't have a bucket list if everybody has a bucket list and then I said wait a second if I don't have a bucket list it's good that I don't have a bucket list why and then I realized you know you can't make the moment more full than when it's full and so you know it'd be nice you know if I were unhappy here now I might long to be in Paris again not having the pancreas but is you know being in Paris um if I'm filled up while I'm here mindfully engaged enjoying myself I don't need to be any place else that's a beautiful way to think about that but it's the same with looking in the past or looking to the Future yeah if you're fully present for what is happening right now that sense of yearning for something better Over the Horizon isn't nagging on your [Music] soul we've all had that experience of looking at photographs from you know a bygone generation what does a 60-year-old look like and you know 1880 or 1920 uh and then looking at photographs of people today at the same age and it's very clear that we have a different relationship with aging like people do look younger now and I have to believe that that's because we have a different sensibility around what it means to be a certain age there's some crazy illustrations of this same thing in in the work that you've done like and the studies that you talk about in your book like I think one of the ones that's that that stuck out the most for me is the ones that you did with the diabetics around perception of time and perception of sugar intake yeah so we have people come in who are type two diabetes and we give them all sorts of tests um and then we sit them down at a computer and the reason for what I'm going to say next will become clear at the end of a sentence so we're going to have them play computer games and we tell them change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so that's to ensure that they'll look at the clock that's by the computer the clock is rigged but they don't know it so for a third of the people the clock is going twice as fast as real time for a third of the people it's going half as fast as real time for a third of the people it's real time most people would assume that blood sugar level will follow real time what's the difference what the clock says our hypothesis which was confirmed was that um blood sugar level will follow perceived time clock time now is the same thing we did with people in a sleep lab they go to sleep we change the clock so they think they got more sleep than they actually got less sleep or the amount of sleep cognitive and behavior functions seem to follow perceived amount of sleep and and this is also relevant to a larger thing I don't know if we talk about uh fatigue so fatigue is largely a psychological construct as an athlete this is really fascina yeah I mean you know but people believe that the body is such and if you don't do your weights and build yourself you know you're going to repeat out that's all there is to it now you know the more mindful I get over time now the more animated but so uh the first thing we do is I give people I ask people to do uh jumping jacks simple very simple study to start do 100 jumping jacks tell me when you're tired they get tired at 70 we have another group do 200 jumping jacks tell me when you're tired they get tired at 140 oh now we have many of these sorts of things now I say to my class how far is it humanly possible to run these are smart kids they know the marathon is 26 miles they know I wouldn't ask the question if the answer were 26 so they start guessing it becomes like an auction 28 30 35 no one ever goes beyond 50 whoever says 50 everybody oh groans right impossible then I play um a video I don't know if you've seen it it's a video of the teramura a tribe that lives in coer Canyon Mexico author of Born to Run here oh okay there you go uh these people can run 200 miles uh without stopping now to my mind the difference between those who can run I can't I haven't not that I can't but I've never run five miles the difference between let's just say 26 and 200 metaphorically is the difference I'm saying between where what we think we can control now and what we actually can control and maybe Beyond that we're nowhere near living the lives that we could live and our to go back to what you're saying about language all our language conspires against us seeing we make a little progress and we think that's the end you know I was thinking today about uh another thing I don't it's a medical world I don't know who to blame for this but that as soon as you take people we have people who can remember lots and we call them super memories and super tasters and super whatever making it as if that's a closed category that the rest of us can't get into rather than that it's on a Continuum and these people do it a little better and you know and so maybe we can proceed uh in the same way and I believe that any category where you have a super is something available to all of us that's maybe the most inspirational monologue I've heard in a long time I love it uh and uh and I I got a new video you're going to want to show your class cuz we had a guy in here the other day who ran 450 miles oh wow yeah I have to see that 20 200 ain't nothing anymore so that's incred but you know to say these videos the other thing do we talk about piano stairs no okay so one thing that people have to understand so when I say you want to be mindful all the time you see from the way I am now mindfulness is energy beginning mindfulness is the way you are when you're having fun so these people I think um in Scandinavia let's say sweet you know turns out I didn't know this then Subways all over the world they the same you have an escalator and you have stairs and all over the world everybody is taking the escalator the random athlete like you will run up the stairs and the young boy up the stairs now what they do they lay down a piano keys on the stairs so it actually makes noise now in almost no time everybody takes the stairs because it's fun and what I say to my students is why do you have to wait for someone to put the keyboard down there you can do this in your mind is I just do do do you know whatever um everything can be made to be fun and the world has taught us quite the contrary you're not supposed to have fun at work so you have work versus play um studying is hard learning college is hard all these things and it all keeps people in place and it's not a good place to be kept framing this is this is something you did did with the chambermaid study as well like is it work or is it exercise and uh first thing that was interesting we take this chambermaids and we ask them how much exercise they get this was surprising to me because these women all they're doing is exercising all day long but they don't think they do exercise because to them exercise according to the Surgeon General is what you do after work so for those who sit in a desk all day long they're not really exercising it's when they go to the gym after was okay so now um and imagine we didn't do this but those who exercise the chambermaids are exercising should be healthier than socioeconomically equivalent people who are not exercising but they're not okay so what we do very simple study we take the chamber Maids divide them into two groups in one group we just teach them do you know your work is exercise making a bed is like working on this machine at the gym sweeping his okay so all we've done is Chang their minds from not realizing their work was exercise to seeing that they work is exercise we took lots of measures to start um when the study is over we want to find out is she working any harder expending any more energy than this no are they eating any differently those who see it as exercise but no differences nevertheless those who now see their work as exercise we get they lost weight a change in waist to hip ratio body mass index and their blood pressure came down their minds no change in the other group it's so crazy now it's interesting you know let's talk about mindlessness that when I give these findings um I could just save a lost weight but doesn't it have more of a scientific heft when I say there was a change in body mass index and waste a hip ratio and how is how are these results received by your oh oh you know the people in the world love it because now they can see themselves as exercising um and and losing weight without you know exerting more energy you know what uh um Mark Twain I'll get to the question if I remember it Mark Twain said about exercise no sad you'll hate it he said every time the urge to exercise comes over me I know if I just sit still for a moment it'll pass right well what if you just sat down and imagined yourself exercising experience what it to be you knowed fromer your imagination is far far more powerful than most people believe there are Studies by others of people who are uh flexing you know uh their muscles and that imagined versus real and the outcome is V basically the say imagine exercise that's a hard one to believe it's not mine so I don't care if you believe it but but to go back to the question you know what are people's responses to uh to my work um the people who hate it or whatever don't come to me so I don't know and I think that you know I've been in the field for so long that um you know I I think that people assume that it's true when we think of placebos we think of uh you know the sugar pill or the you know capsule that were given that were either told or not told you is a medication or not but Placebo is actually a much broader concept it's an expectation and our expectations uh control our behavior in ways that we're not aware of simple example uh most people have used the Snelly night chart to see your vision and this whole thing is so remarkable to me that people buy this you look at letters that make no sense in a doctor's office which is necessarily stressful for so many people and the doctor gives you a number and you see that's the way you see it wouldn't occur to me I just did that like two weeks ago okay and I see you're wearing glasses okay I've worn it my whole life though then I start to feel bad about it I don't want you to feel bad about it but we we have remedies anyway so you know I look at this chart and you know we've U agreed implicitly that I'm bizarre and when I see the eye chart I don't see it the way other people see it I think if they think anything I see it as the this is a setup the letters are getting progressively smaller which is leading me to expect not to be able to see so we come up with a different ey chart where now the letters get progressively larger creating a different expectation now the expectation is soon I will be able to see and what happens is that people can see what they couldn't see before one more expectation study most people assume when you get 2third of the way down the ey chart you're going to have trouble seeing it what we did was we took the original iot we um just took the bottom 2/3 so you don't need those big letters anyway right 2/ thirds of the way down there are much smaller letters than on the original but they both occurring in the same place right two-thirds of the way down to um and again people saw what they couldn't see before you also did this study with uh with Pilots fighter pilots yeah the you know there are different variations on the same thing that if you believe you can um then all of the things that prevent you from doing whatever it is are eliminated Pilots are saying to have excellent Vision um so what we do we put people we test their Vision we put them in Pilot uniforms we have them go into a flight simulator have you ever been to flight it's very real there's an oncoming plane um and we want them to read a very small set of letters that was taken from the eye chart on that oncoming plane when they're Pilots they can see it and the ones that were in the control group who were told the simulator was broken simulate everything EXA score as high you know I mean if you had um trouble doing something and I had you put on an outfit of Superman okay you know um you know so you see yourself I I think you would be able to lift more weight um if you uh were Einstein you know I have people because they think that I'm uh less afraid than than they with certain things so if they have to go into fighting with a waiter or you know somebody employer they pretend that they're me that's that's fine you know but I you know I believe I can't sing if you saw me not saw me but heard me in the shower and when I'm being uh Maria Callis or Barbara stries in I get a lot of notes right but it's me right it's they're not there you know so I think that we we all we not all but many of us tend to underestimate our abilities and so some of these studies just sort of free us from whatever is holding us back it's very encouraging and empowering to understand that um you know belief can drive better outcomes for ourselves and if we can get to a place of you know disabusing ourselves of all the assumptions that we make about how things work and work and what our limits are for somebody who's watching or listening to this who's saying well that's great and that's super entertaining to hear that but like how do I begin to you know construct my version of this we already said that if you uh take on the Assumption by the assumption that everything is uncertain there's a way that you naturally approach things more mindfully but if you take any explanation you know if you have children and they ask you a question don't answer it with a single answer answer it with multiple answers answer it with answers that then take those answers and show how gee you know these are negatives even though they seem positive and vice just open everything up and it will all happen naturally um the other um in a more mundane way that most people are stressed most of the time um that stress means that they're making predictions about things that can't be predicted and they're oblivious to the fact that they're in charge of their experience of that so think of the things you were scared of in the past um and um how did how did it turn out it almost always turns out fine so going forward you don't have to be so afraid well anything you worry about it either doesn't happen which means that was a waste of energy and time or if it does happen it happened and there was no reason worrying about all you know all that time that you wasted worrying about before happen that's the main you know thing there so there are people who I wrote about this I think it might even been in the book about um defense of pessimism and some people so you have people like me who are you know clearly optimistic but everybody thinks that they're realistic right I don't think that I'm thinking positive but deep down I know it's negative this is the way it is and the negative person um is not being negative they're being this is the way they experience the world but defens of pessimism is basically the idea that um what you should do is hope for the best but expect the worst okay now that would be fine if the world uh existed independent of human presence where you could actually count things um without influencing them that if you're expecting the worst you're going to see the worst and if you're going to see the worst it's going to have a very different effect on you um and that the alternative is to see the best you know that if you worried this I wrote this uh for um people at school about worried about being uh covid and that worrying about Co is only making you weaker should you have to deal with Co you what you need to do is develop a plan at the time so it was okay I'm going to wear a mask I'm going to wash my hands okay and I'm you know going to stay away from people who are coughing in my face now I have a plan now I'm just going to live my life now if it turns out if instead of this you worry about getting Co um your you know stress as we said many times now is very bad for your health um and you may get it or not get it so you start off you're doing these things you can get it or you cannot get it if you don't get it as you've said you've wasted all this time if you get it all that time you spent worrying makes you less able to handle it right because the stress and anxiety has it's not six of one half a dozen of the other people keep thinking that you glass half full is not the same thing as half empty if you see it as half empty you spend your time being thirsty worrying about um where you're going to get your next glass of water or whatever the martini whatever is in class um and being in the presence of somebody who is so beautifully and eloquently mindful uh and practicing you know the this idea and and kind of exuding this sensibility is actually contagious yeah we have studies on contagion but let me tell you that there are times I'm mindless my response to my being mindless is probably different from your response to your being mindless when I'm mindless I say yes I'm right you it's out there I mean I've been studying this caring about this for 45 years or more um and you know and still there are moments um where I do something mindlessly so but the more mindful you are I suspect the more questions arise and the more uncertainty becomes apparent because things aren't as they seem the more you're paying ention exactly exactly now the way it's contagious there are several ways the first is that when you're mindful you tend to be more charismatic and so people are giving you more attention more affir you know positive uh regard um and that allows you to feel better and then to be even more mindful but if I'm mindful there's a way when I'm talking to let's say you were you know um usually uh hiding what you're feeling or you know whatever may be the case you feel safe and if you feel safe then you're going to be more mindful um because it's better okay it just um leads to all sorts of good outcomes so that's one thing another is that it actually seems this is wild to be in the air so what do I mean this is a study we did with um meditators actually so we have meditators meditating in a room they leave now the participants come and we give them tests cognitive tests memory and things like that or there's no one in the room and the participants go into the room taking the same tests when people had just finished meditating the participants um perform better than in the empty room somehow it's in the air now I make clear that these studies and others like them are at the end of the book you know with enough disclaimers um you know I'm just telling you what I found I'm not telling you what you have to believe that's [ __ ] crazy but the idea being that there's a residual like vibration they meditate they leave there's some energy force in that room that is influencing the test takers next time we do the study if there ever is we should have a fan so whatever is there blow blows out and then you shouldn't get it so you have meditators is it waves or is it particles we're going going qu right um yeah like but the more the the less crazy um not crazy but different um are things like with autism so now I I think another thing that you can pull out of of my philosophy of life if it is a philosophy is that every group that is diminished in some way uh probably has some asset that's being overlooked and so I thought you know I don't know any body autistic and so this is purely most of the things that I come up with come from experience this is just derived um what if kids if most people are Mindless and if mindlessness is off-putting which it is I have other data you know where you're interacting with a mindful or a Mindless experimentor and just it's uncomfortable when the person is not there and we have expressions like the lights on but nobody's home to acknowledge that when someone's not there you you you don't like being with them okay what if the kid or adult who is autistic is hyper sensitive to other people's Consciousness more aware that and in in that regard that means that um if you're mindless it's going to have a bigger negative effect on me um so what we do is we take autistic kids and we have them interact with adults being mindful or mindless and when the adults are mindful the kids are just like well the other kids you know another example of that but the point being that that just abuses the idea that autism is about in like an an incapacity for emotional intelligence yeah exactly it speaks to the opposite of that but but I'm not you know this is one study one brief thought I'm not suggesting that now I'm an expert on autism or that this U explains everything but it's it'll end up I think a piece of the puzzle down the road but the other studies so there are people who drink a lot yeah now nobody okay well in you know once upon a time but so nobody drinks to hurt their liver that's the first thing so when you tell people you have to stop drinking because of these things again it's what I was saying before the behavior makes sense going forward or else people wouldn't do it I'm mix and match 20 different things here another way of uh helping people have drinking problem is keep a diary this is attention to symptom variability make a column you know columns where you're going to note a different times of the day did you have a drink yes or no did you want a drink yes or no and you do this even for the course of just a week you're going to see there are times you didn't drink when you wanted to drink you're going to see there are times you drank when you didn't want to and all of a sudden um despite what people argue shows you that you have some control over your drinking and then the decision to stop or whatever is much easier to make than make you feel that you're just low down whatever um people who drink if I said to you that here's John John engages John gets stressed and when he gets stressed he does X and then he's unstressed there's nothing irrational about that is it mhm so now we put in he takes a drink or too many drinks all right so I think that many of the people who have a hor are serious heavy drinkers are extra sensitive to other people's Consciousness just like the autistic person and that drink is to uh settle them down so now we run a study it's a wine tasting study and you can drink as much as you want all we want to know you you believe is your view of the wine the experimentor who's blind to the whole study idea but the experimentor is mindful or mindless well it turns out when that experimentor is Mindless you drink more mhm I really like that study and this note like I do believe that there is something to uh the hyp sensitivity of the alcoholic or or the drug addict and you know somebody who's been in recovery for a long time and um and I think that sensitivity uh makes the world kind of a scary or uncertain place and A coping mechanism is drugs or alcohol or whatever Behavior not irrational right it's a it's a survival mechanism um to reduce anxiety and stress and and and kind of you know eradicate that uncomfortable feeling that you have and we all know addicts or normal people what whatever when you go into a room and there's somebody on the other side of the room who you don't know and you know immediately whether that person is safe or unsafe like you can feel that energy and I think there is this idea that perhaps some people are more sensitive to that than others and that leads them towards behaviors that are not in their best interest but energy is real like you know we all have had those experiences or we walk into you know a room in a house that we've never been in before and we feel something you well that's what I was trying to capture but it is still a little woo woo when I first wrote the book um the chapter was called the woo woo chapter you to say look you I had an experience that I took out several of these your editors like too much yeah you're going to tell it here I'm going to tell you because I don't understand it um but it happened so I had just gotten back from um Japan and I'm having dinner and we're talking about let's go someplace and um so my partner says well we you know it's too expensive now which is self- silly because somebody is always paying for these trips but somehow we still manage to spend too much money okay where where should we go if we go and we can't remember the name of the place at that time it felt very exotic then we remember quala Lampur okay she says um uh we can't go because it's too expensive I say maybe I could at the Harvard Club to pay for it now this was insane I never had any interaction in my life with any Harvard Club I don't know what I'm talking about the next day I get an invitation to qual Lor from the Harvard Club of qual lour uhhuh you know now I've had conversation after conversation this is a long time ago with statisticians you we'll be very nice to each other and all of a sudden they walk away from me you know I just want to understand it um how do you understand it what do you make of that I I don't you know first I thought I wonder did I have a sense where I'm picking up things or am I putting them out there you know because you can't tell from that experience right that if I'm picking it up so the mail is coming you know the qu and Po and you know um I don't know all I know is that we know so little about the things we think we know that if we only recognize that these sorts of phenomenon wouldn't seem outlandish necessarily wrong from the start you know I mean so I turn on the television and I'm I'm watching people in New York how could that be you know I mean and I can give some um electrical you know electronic but I don't really understand it and most of the science explanations that we have are just naming things you know um and when you go up level of analysis in the name it's like you understand it you go down a level but uh it's really um so you know when I realize I don't know that then my not knowing something else I don't know it but I accept it makes it easier for me to accept other things like this so when you turn on the TV and uh and it's not New York but it's a congressional hearing around UFOs what's going on in your mind you know um I think that you know what do we mean by a UFO there's so many unidentified objects that uh I don't know I you know I know that I don't take a hard line about anything uh not being true um you know I just don't know but um I also not going to put myself out there and you know argue that it is true I don't I'm not I don't have a position one way or the other but people do have strong positions about some of the things that we're talking about and they say it's possible um and um I think that um we just lose an awful lot by that view um so to me everything is possible uh everything is potentially interesting life is fun you know and if we can all inhabit uh a level of of mindfulness uh that you speak about in your work and in your writings we have a chance at approaching this mindful Utopia that you talk about so yeah so this is um this was a tease at some point I'm going to write the book about mindful Utopia because I so my goal in life right now life the world is vertical you have people like us who are near the top um and you know people are ordered you're not so good you're okay you know and so on and I find that offensive uh and I want to take the vertical and make it horizontal um that none of us are better than you know when when I say to somebody um that I don't think anybody is better than I am she am modest but I don't think I'm better than anybody else you know there's a different way of understanding how we might be living and uh so um I wrote this little song for my grandkids um and I was just talking about this earlier today actually I'm going sang it I'm not going to sing it for you but um it says at all everybody doesn't know something everybody knows something else everybody can't do something everyone can do something else and it's hard in two minutes to get the full feeling of that but I'm in the car the kids are 5 years old uh twins one of them starts whistling I say Theo you're such a good whistler the other one says Grandma L when Theo was learning how to whistle I was learning something else you know it just seemed to me perfect so he doesn't have to feel bad that he can't whistle he doesn't have to feel one down uh he doesn't have to compete with his brother there's no scarcity there's no competition there's something for everybody and the world is infinitely abundant everyone doesn't know something but everyone knows something else everyone can't do something but everyone can do something else when I when I start um I have a little video um where I start and I say I can't sing but I like singing why shouldn't I sing there are lots of things I can do and then we break into the the little diddy um I don't know you know it could be simple-minded um I think it's rather profound because that's the world that I see that we could be living in um I don't see that that there's anything that really prevents us from getting there except that a whole lot of mindlessness MH um well along this Continuum on the evolution of consciousness like where do we currently reside where would you like us uh like to see us going and and I know that you know you're predictions are not your bag um but we're heading into kind of a I think there's been an tricky year and I do you know I am interested in in the concept of elevating conscious awareness yeah um I think um you know as you said I I don't have to predict because we can predict and this one in particular we can predict it's a very strange time but there'll be a lot of good things that come from it and um I think we're in the midst of an evolution in Consciousness um and it can only be good I think some of the stuff with AI uh which I don't claim to be an expert on you know people just keep finding things to worry about AI is a tool and it it'll help us I remember years and years ago I came out of a movie in New York neither of those are necessary to tell you for the story sorry but and this person wanted me to sign a petition because he he felt that uh um V are uh videos what are they call Cal reality no VCRs we're going to put movies out of business you know and they were threatened there's always somebody threatened but that's also what leads us to progress in in many ways um so there'll be that um I think that if AI is is able to help take over lots of jobs um that will free people to be more Innovative uh creative or mindful in my terms um once you start paying attention uh you can take all that I've said and use it to reform almost everything applications you know so for hospitals hospitals I don't think have changed in important ways uh since they were created and that it seems to me insane if I may borrow a term from my field that here is a place that you go into and a stressed when you enter it just as I said with taking the eye test and you're going there to be healed you know there's no reason that hospitals can't be more spa-like there's no reason that uh we have very high burnout in the medical profession um and burnout is a function of being mindless so if the nurses were taught to look for the smaller changes in people it would actually help their health people when I'm mindfully engaged with you you feel seen um and everybody prospers so so it's a way of making everybody in the organization more mindful there's no reason you know we have washing machines we don't need to have so much white um there are so many changes people we know that social support is really important for People's Health yet in hospitals everybody is kept separate um you know and so on so I have a list of these if I constructed the mindful hospital if I constructed the mindful organization it would also share you know have many differences um you're going to love this so I was reading this part of the book uh which is at the end of the book this morning sitting in a waiting room at a Diagnostics lab down the street here cuz I was getting my blood drawn for a blood test and reading about the mindful hospital and and all the like everything that you just described and I looked up and took a mindful assessment of my environment and I was in this waiting room and there were some people who were like staring at their feet the walls were peeling you know the wallpaper was peeling off the walls there was a like bulletproof glass window with no that was sort of opaque and there was no human being behind it except there was a little sign on it said please don't bring firearms in here and then there was an iPad where you could check in and I literally felt like I was in a room waiting to meet with my parole officer or something it was the most dispiriting dystopic like like environment where you're going to into this room to kind of be vulnerable and have like this procedure done Etc it's a clinic it's not a doctor's office but the point remains like there's a lot of room for Improvement here yeah know um I had um many years ago had to go to court um I don't I think I was taking out of restrain you not I don't remember what it was was there's probably a good story behind that well no boring story but the point is it was all fixed in some sense the person who took me there had you everything was wired in some sense there was I hadn't done anything it was you know I was on the accusing end um and you know being a um a public speaker for so long all of this right at Harvard lofan University I go into this um uh Courthouse to make this request for and I felt scared I already had the answer I you know and I look at these other people I it's just it's criminal to borrow a term you know that um I think that the way we've constructed so many environments is a way of again substantiating the status quo keep people in place have you had Hospital administrators or any healthc care Executives approach you as a result of well I haven't had this out there you know the book came out in September this one thing I was talking with people in um China about doing a mindful hospital I don't know if that'll happen it's interesting to me because I have mindful schools that are vastly different from our current schools and there people from um India and Canada nobody in the United States um uh it's it's out there it's out there whether I I lead it or somebody else it and it will have an effect you can't help but um it's pretty cool I mean if you just got one up on its feet and then you could study it and then you have a a test case it's one of those things where um it's a a fabulous bet you know that I just can't imagine that the mindful hospital or the mindful School wouldn't be successful it almost can't be as bad as things are now yeah you really how it's not good no I mean when you think about school you have the kids who get D's and Fs they're they become our Killers or whatever right you know nobody's letting you think well of yourself you have to make a reputation some way the kids who get B's and C's they're average who wants to be average but then you take those of us who get A's now we don't know how we got the a everybody expects us to get A's we don't know if we're going to continue it's stressful nobody wins also you're being evaluated on a on an irrelevant metric which is your ability to memorize stuff and take tests yes I mean it's totally insane it's also the case that the tests are designed to find what you don't know everybody knows something you know when I give a test tell me what you do know what does it mean that there's who decided that this thing that you don't know is so important that you can't pass the course without knowing it it's ridiculous so if you found yourself uh as a teacher yes if I found myself teaching my exams would be different right well I was going to I was going to broaden that if you woke up and you were the Secretary of Education or maybe you were the new um Surgeon General and you have this agenda to roll out the mindful hospitals and a reimagination of Education like you could you could wave your wand what does it look like oh I mean I I've written about such um you know well the hospital get an inclination from here um and um you know the mindful School everything about school now is Mindless you know the um looking for single right answers to things uh giving teaching information in an absolute way horses don't eat meat one in one is two you know you can change the content to make it more sophisticated but it's the same um the same idea that doesn't lead you to look more broadly at things but rather you know close helps you close your mind so in the mindful school one of the things that we were going to do and you know I can't do all of these things at once and I say yes to everything because everything is exciting so that's why none of this gets done but uh I would find um if somebody wanted to do this could afford to do this this would be um more interesting to me than the Secretary of Education or you said um uh Health whatever surge General surge yeah yeah no I would like to just be able to do it and so um what I wanted to do was to build the school with the the building itself is upside down so everything about it says this is different and um you there should be some Silicon Valley person who's up for that if they call me I'm happy to listen well hopefully you'll get a call you're class must be very popular at Harvard is it very hard to get into is there like long waiting list like how does that work no no you you you know you have to uh decide early on so and then um then they petition and they petition and they plead you get letters slid under the door in your office and stuff and I almost always say yes you know so I don't know how long I'm going to be teaching this particular class and I just I already told um uh people at Harvard that I want it open to everyone you know right now you have to to have certain requirements which you don't really have to have so um that be my last harah take it does that I mean I can come and take it yeah I would like you to um you're an absolute delight and an inspiration this was really fun thank you enjoyed it um your work is really important it's revelatory we are in an evolution of Consciousness or perhaps even a war of Consciousness that implies a duality I don't know um but uh I think the way in which you address these topics uh from your lived experience and all these experiments that you've done is is is really it's fun like reading your book was fun and also mind-blowing in many ways so I encourage everybody to pick it up if you haven't already the mindful body and uh will you come and talk to me again sometime oh I would love to this is great thank you so much I appreciate it cheers that's it for today thank you for listen listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. roll.com if you'd like to support the pod the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason ciolo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davy Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel CIS thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler Patt Trapper Patt and Harry mathys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plants [Music] namaste [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 162,278

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition

Id: upTm2kTYxNQ

Length: 107min 57sec (6477 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024