BITESIZE | The Power of Mindset: How Your Thoughts Transform Your Physical Health | Dr Ellen Langer #587

Today’s guest has spent over 50 years conducting ground-breaking research showing that your thoughts can have a profound impact on your body. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 537 of the podcast with Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Dr Ellen Langer. Ellen has spent decades studying how our beliefs and perceptions can directly influence our physical health - from how we age, to how we heal, and even how our immune system functions. In this clip, we explore some of her landmark research. Ellen is a wonderful human, full of knowledge, expertise and passion. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/537 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 537 of the podcast with Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Dr Ellen Langer. Ellen has spent decades studying how our beliefs and perceptions can directly influence our physical health, from how we age to how we heal, and even how our immune system functions.

• 2:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  In this clip, we explore some of her landmark research.

• 2:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  The implications of your work and what you're talking about are so, so profound for people when they really understand how much our mindset influences every single aspect of our lives. Some of your studies, the counterclockwise study, the chambermaid study, the nursing home study, these are legendary. In fact, a lot of listeners, I'm sure, will have heard about them without necessarily knowing that you were the creator and the author of these studies. So could you just go through some of these top line studies to explain some of your work to my audience, please?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Okay, well, so I got into all this in the first place with a nursing home study, where we took people in nursing homes and we either gave them tender loving care is the comparison group, or we gave them choices to make and a plant to take care of. And we went back 18 months later and twice as many people in the group that we gave these active choices to were still alive. Right, so then the first thing that came to me is, well, wait a second, how is it that making a choice translates into longevity? And that led me to the mindfulness work.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  But the mindfulness work here, you know, how is it your thoughts have all these powerful physical effects on you? And I started to think that, well, it was clear to me that we had, it had this effect on us. This was before people were talking about mind-body connection. We had a mind and a body, and the big question was, well, how do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called a body? And these are just words. So I argued, let's put the two together, even if it's just for useful purposes, heuristic purposes, although now I think it's literally true. Put the mind and body back together, then wherever you're putting one, you're necessarily putting the other. Wherever you're putting the mind, you're putting the body.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  And the question is how you get from one to the other goes away. Now, I had been talking about this, we did the, I published the counterclockwise study in 1981, a long time ago. Takes so long for things to change. And people finally start talking about mind-body connection. That's wrong. You have the same problems. How are they connected? See it as one thing. Yeah. So the first study that we did, and the BBC did a replication of this called The Young Ones, but to go back to the study itself. What we did was to take a retreat and retrofit it to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there as if they were their younger selves.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  So they discussed past events as if they were just unfolding, for example. In a period of time as short as one week, we found their vision improved. When have you ever heard an old person's vision improving without medical intervention? Their hearing improved, their strength, their memory, and they looked noticeably younger. That was the first test of mind-body unit. The second test, which was a few decades later, was we take these chambermaids, this is work I did with Ali Crum, and very simply first asked them, how much exercise are they getting? These are women who are exercising all day long, right? Cleaning the hotel and motel.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Still, they thought they're not getting any exercise because exercise, they believed, according to the surgeon general who sits at a desk all day, is what you're doing after work. And after work, they were just too tired. We, very simple study, divided them into two groups. And we're going to teach one group that their work is exercise. So we're changing their minds. They're taught, working on this machine at the gym is like making a bed and so on. We teach them, they are getting lots of exercise. So you have two groups now. One who doesn't think they're getting any exercise, one that does. They're not eating any differently from each other. They're not working any harder. Nevertheless, simply changing their minds

• 6:27Speaker 01

  to see their work as exercise resulted in a loss of weight, a change in waist-to-hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down.

• 6:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  An example of another, we take people who have type 2 diabetes. We take many measurements. We're going to have them play computer games. And there's a clock there and they're told, change the game you're playing every 15 minutes or so. That ensures that they'll look at the clock. Unbeknownst to them, the clock is ripped. So it's going twice as fast as real time, half as fast as real time, or real time. And the question we're asking is, well, blood sugar level vary based on clock time, perceived time, or real time? And it turns out perceived time.

• 7:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, this stuff, Ellen, is just so fascinating because it also highlights arguably one of the biggest holes in all of medicine and the way we practice, which is we just don't take into account our mindset, or our thoughts, or our beliefs.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Well, everybody knows that, you know, placebo is something inert. You believe it's going to be effective and hence it's effective. So the chambermaid study, this was actually a nocebo study, which is important in its own right. Now, people know placebos, you take something that's a nothing to lead to a positive response. A nocebo, you take real medication and you believe it's not effective and it wipes out the effect.

• 8:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  So explain that in the context of the chambermaid study. They're not taking a medication.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, because people are exercising, but they're not getting any of the benefits of exercise because they don't realize they're exercising.

• 8:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So we say all of these things that are good for you, you know, many, if not all, are good for you if you believe they're good for you. That element of belief is not inconsequential in any of these circumstances. You know, so there was a study with ipecac. So I don't remember who did this, but, you know, so ipecac is what you take to make you vomit in case you've accidentally or on purpose ingested poison. All right. So whoever this was took ipecac with people who were having trouble doing too much vomiting. And they're given the ipecac and they're told it'll stop the vomiting. And you know what happens? It stops the vomiting. People who are rubbed with poison ivy, who believe it's not poison ivy,

• 9:01Speaker 01

  or rubbed with another leaf that they believe is poison ivy that isn't poison ivy, you know, get the rash when they believe.

• 9:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I spoke with Camilla Nord, this neuroscientist from Cambridge University, and Camilla basically shares some research showing that in psychedelic trials, some of them, when you're given a placebo and you think you're taking a psychedelic, but you're not, you still hallucinate. You know, in medicine, and I think with the public, we've used the term before, oh, it's just a placebo effect, right?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  And it's just got to change.

• 9:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly, as in underplaying the value. And then there's another study, I'm pretty sure it's in your new book, about diabetics. There's a belief that giving people more information is a good thing, right? That would be the conventional belief, and I think much of me subscribes to that belief, but.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  But it doesn't, it doesn't matter that whether you give them more or less, it depends on how the information is received. So if more information leaves people to be more certain, and more certain leaves them to be more mindless, then that's how the problem arrives.

• 10:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, maybe you could explain that through the lens of this diabetes, prediabetes study. They were told they were on the borderline of prediabetes, right? Could you could explain that study?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Sure, so I call this the borderline effect. It's not just in medicine, no matter what you're doing, there's always a point where people above this borderline respond one way, people below it respond a different way, and where there's no meaningful difference above and below. So for example, let's say you're grading papers, and you give one student an 89, or they take a test and they get an 89. That makes it a B. Another student gets a 90, that makes it an A. Nobody's going to think there's any meaningful difference between 89 and 90, but there's a real difference over time between a B student and an A student.

• 11:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  In terms of their perception of themselves, you mean?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Not just them, but the world's perception of them as well, right? You know, you take a typical example, you take an IQ test, and.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  If you get sixty-nine, then you're cognitively deficient. You get seventy, you're in the normal range. But again, one could have sneezed, misread the question. But once you're labeled, you've got this cognitive problem, or you're normal, over time, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's, that's the point to a lot of this. That we, um, once we get these labels, uh, we then behave according to those labels, and they become true, even if they work.

• 11:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, this, you know, you write about the effects of our beliefs on our immune system. I think it's at Astia Rolls, you talk about this idea that immune, the immune response begins in the brain, and positive expectations boost antibacterial and anti-tumor activity. I mean, that was incredible, those studies. And I just, just going back to that borderline effect for a minute, Ellen. Was that study, am I remembering correctly, that the patients who were told that they were at risk of diabetes, they were more likely to get it?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Yes, we looked, we looked at the people who fell right below the diagnosis, compare them to those right above. So one is told they have the disease, one is told they don't. And that label became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• 12:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. What about the relationship between our thoughts, our beliefs, our expectations, and our immune system?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Well, if we go back to what I'm saying about the mind and the body, it's one. If you recognize that it really is one thing, then every thought is simultaneously affecting every part of our body. Now, it's interesting because the coin of the realm for neuroscience now would be something like MRIs and FMRI, right? They're going to look at the brain. And see how the brain changes under these circumstances or those circumstances. And of course, the brain is changing. However, my belief is every part of the body is changing. Every part, and it's happening more or less simultaneously.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  That your eyes, your skin, you know, that in the book I talk about how a teardrop of happiness is biochemically different from a teardrop of sadness. I had this strange experience because I, you know, have always been up for anything, almost anything. And I'm with a friend in Kansas City. And we go to an iridologist. Somebody looks at the iris of the eye. Now, I don't believe any of these things, but I also am always, you know, who knows? Right? So I go, she looks at my eye and she tells me I have a gallbladder problem. So at the time, I thought, this is ridiculous, right? You know, what nonsense? Anyway, I came home and I did have a gallbladder problem.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Then I start writing about mind-body unity and realize, yes, it's all right there. We don't have the machinery, the technology to notice the subtle differences. But if we developed it, I think we'd have support for this. So when you say the immune system, every system. Yeah, I go like this. My brain is different. Every part of my body is different.

• 14:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's ridiculous if you have the fixed belief that actually, I've never been taught that there's a relationship between what you can see in the eye, my gallbladder, therefore this must be rubbish, right? Because what are we seeing now, right? We're seeing so many things that traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda medicine, has been saying for years, not everything, but many of the things, we're now going, oh, wow, now we've got modern science to support the facts that, oh, different organs have different rates of genetic expression at different parts of the day. Well, these guys have been saying this for thousands of years. We've poo-pooed it in Western medicine for many years, until recently when we're now, oh, yeah, there's this thing called circadian biology and right?

• 15:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Each cell in the body has got its own circadian clock. And I'm like, yeah, but...

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of this, a lot of this results from our T-chain absolutes.

• 15:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 15:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  That be open to all sorts of, I mean, there are so many things, you know, um, I, I teach some of this stuff. It's mind boggling to me that people think they need eight hours of sleep. I mean, how big are you? How small are you? What is your life like? If you just ran a marathon and I stayed home in bed, eating chocolate, watching movies all day. That night, would we both need eight hours sleep? You know, um, so it's not just that there are individual differences, but within the individual, um, you know, it, it's, um, people buy these facts, um, they talk about them, they teach them.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  You know, when you see something happen, I think the nature of science is you see it, you then develop a theory to explain it. So now it seems like it can be no other way.

• 16:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  And so then somebody has some other experience and, you know, the response to them as well, you know, you're simply wrong, crazy, what have you.

• 16:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Have a beginner's mind, right? That old concept, have a beginner's mind. This whole idea of stress, our beliefs, the immune system. Uh, and there are many studies in your book talking about this, right? So if people want to dive deeper, please do check out The Mindful Body. It's such a fantastic read. It really is. Um, you mentioned vision before. People think of, you know, vision static. It is what it is, right?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  No, just think about it. How mindless it is that you go to the doctor, you're shown this, uh, Snelling eye chart with letters out of context in black and white. And then you're given a number to tell you how well you see. Uh, yeah, I don't know about you, but if I'm hungry, I see that restaurant sign much further away.

• 17:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Than if I'm hungry. I see things in color, different from black and white. I see things that are meaningful differently from things that are meaningless. And so for me, I know I'm bizarre when I, you know, before I did that study, I'm, uh, Being, my eyes are being examined. I'm looking at the charts. I say, wait a second. You know, you're creating in me the expectation that soon I'm not going to be able to see. Because these wonders keep getting smaller and smaller.

• 17:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so you start with something you can do and then you go, oh, we're about to catch you where you can't see.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. So what we did is a study where we reversed it. It starts with small letters, gets larger and larger, creating the expectation that soon you would be able to see. And people can see what they couldn't see before.

• 18:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, yeah, I love it. Before we finish, I want to bring up something you said before that surprised me in the context of your work. Okay, so there was a moment where you lost your train of thoughts and you said, excuse me, I'm having a senior moment. Right.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  I was joking.

• 18:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I know you were joking.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  But now, the reason I said that was only because the other day, I thought I was so clever when I had said to somebody, I'm having a junior moment.

• 18:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  No, the reason I'm bringing it up to illustrate a really important point from your work is this whole idea that I've also had mind blanks when I'm doing this podcast before, right? But because I'm at a different age to you, I'm not going to call it a senior moment, right?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, okay, so it's cute. But let me tell you what, before I lecture in my health class about aging, I ask them a question. I say, okay, what was the last, these are Harvard students, this is the best of the best, right? I say, what was the last thing I said on Thursday? So the, our class meets Tuesday and Thursday. So it's this Tuesday, what was the last thing I said on Thursday? Nobody remembers. And I go, ah, you know, you all better check to see whether you're suffering from dementia. You know, that young people are not infrequently forgetful. The difference is they're fine with that. They don't see it as the beginning of some impending terrible diagnosis.

• 19:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and I think it's so important that this idea that if our expectation starts to impact our physiology, we've got to be very careful about what we think as we get older. We have to change this perception that old people are frail and they can't do much and they need help, right? We need to change that. And there's, again, there's quite a provocative section in that section in your book, where you talk about this idea that someone of your age, and I certainly won't ask you how old you are.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  I'm seventy seven.

• 20:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yes, seventy seven, okay. So someone of your age wouldn't typically be seen in miniskirts or have miniskirts marketed to them, right? And I really liked the way you put that because it basically, the cultural norm is a seventy seven year old lady probably shouldn't be in a miniskirt. It's not appropriate for a woman of that age, but maybe it is. Maybe if you don't subscribe to that and you go, no, I'm going to dress like I was in my twenties or thirties, well, maybe that's going to actually keep you younger.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the point of that particular research was to show that there are age-related cues all around us that unbeknownst to us are determining our longevity, our health and so on. So there what we did was compare people whose jobs require that they be in uniform. So if you're in a uniform and you're twenty five and you're wearing the same basic uniform, it's a different version of it, but for the next forty years, you're missing an age-related cue. And those people do better.

• 21:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Because they don't have that age-related cue.

• 21:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we see, you know, here, and I'm sure it's the same in the US, we have, you know, near residential homes, there are signs on the roads with an elderly couple, you know, hunched over with a walking stick saying, be careful. And again, that's an age-related cue that on the face of it is there for a reason. So people can pay attention and be considerate, right? But there's also a negative consequence of that, or a potentially negative consequence.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Although, there's one thing that older people do, which is for all other groups, there's an in-group bias.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Everybody prefers their own to people who are different, except the elderly. I hate that word now that I'm so old, but so let me give you an example. When my father was alive, I'm picking him up at the airport. He is now, at that point, I think he was 88. And I said, Dad, how was the flight? And he said, it was okay, but there were too many old people on the plane distancing himself from the group. And, you know, which is a good thing in this context because we have the view of old as only representing detriment, which is sad because, you know, you live your life the right way, it just keeps getting better and better.

• 22:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my Bite-Sized Friday email. It's called The Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're gonna love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel-good to get you ready for the weekend.

• 23:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatgy.com/fridayfive. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe, and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.