Using Your Mind to Control Your Physical Health & Longevity | Dr. Ellen Langer

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Mindfulness, in Langer's sense, means actively noticing new things, not meditating

  The Harvard psychologist calls meditation a practice that leads to post-meditative mindfulness. Her mindfulness is a way of being. Bottom-up, you notice three new things about the person you live with or your walk outside. Top-down, you accept that everything is always changing, looks different from different perspectives, and that uncertainty is the rule. Her example: 1+1 isn't always 2, since one wad of gum plus another is one.

• 02

  Mind and body are one system, not two things to be connected

  Langer argues that 'mind-body connection' language leaves you having to explain the connector. If they're a unity, wherever you put the mind, the body follows. Most of her health research tests this premise.

• 03

  Small choices extended life in nursing homes

  In 1970s work prompted by a relative's decline, residents were encouraged to make choices: where to receive visitors, whether to see a movie Tuesday or Thursday, and caring for their own plant. A comparison group got the same visits, movie and plant, but staff decided everything and nurses cared for the plant. At 18 months, the choice group had lived longer. Langer says this began her health research.

• 04

  Beliefs about exercise changed physical outcomes

  With then-student Alia Crum, Langer studied hotel room attendants who said they barely exercised because they saw exercise as something done after work. Half were taught that their work (bed-making, cleaning windows) was exercise. Without changes in diet or effort, that group lost weight and improved waist-to-hip ratio, BMI and blood pressure. Langer frames the untaught group as a nocebo: doing the exercise without realizing it seemed to blunt its benefit.

• 05

  Placebos are underrated medicine

  Langer calls placebos perhaps our strongest medicine and notes they got a bad reputation because drugs must beat them in trials. Her examples: people told ipecac would stop vomiting stopped vomiting, and people rubbed with a leaf react as if it were poison ivy depending on what they believe it is. If a placebo cured you, she points out, you cured yourself.

• 06

  Perceived sleep shapes next-day functioning

  In a sleep-lab study, a clock told people they had slept two hours more, two hours less or the actual amount. Cognitive and biological measures tracked perceived rather than actual sleep. Huberman adds that positive anticipation of the next day may reduce sleep need, and warns against 'sleep anxiety' from tracker scores. Langer's personal claim that relaxing with dim lights for two to three hours before bed lets her sleep two to three hours less is her own experience, not a tested protocol.

• 07

  Labels hide ambiguity: the borderline effect

  An 89 and a 90 are essentially the same score, but one is a B and the other an A. Someone scoring 69 versus 70 on an IQ test may be labeled cognitively deficient, get less training and come to believe it, so a trivial difference becomes real. Langer says her data show the same thing with medical diagnoses near a cutoff.

• 08

  Symptoms vary, and noticing why helps

  Nothing stays at maximum. Langer's teams call patients periodically to ask whether a symptom is better or worse than last time and why. This reduces helplessness, reveals that things are sometimes better, engages mindful attention, which she says is itself good for health, and makes solutions more likely. She reports positive results in multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, Parkinson's and stroke, with no side effects, alongside rather than instead of medical care.

• 09

  Expectations about decline may become self-fulfilling

  Langer thinks spontaneous cancer remissions are more common than medicine recognizes because they're rarely studied. Believing a disease is a death sentence can change behavior in ways that make it one. She says hope needs only that something be possible, not frequent. These are her views rather than established findings.