How to Use Your Mind to Heal Your Body With the #1 Harvard Psychologist

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Mindfulness is noticing, not meditating

  Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist with about 50 years of research, says meditation is a practice that may lead to mindfulness, but mindfulness itself is 'a way of being.' It means actively noticing new things, grounded in an appreciation that things are uncertain and could be otherwise. You can do anything mindfully or mindlessly: a podcast, tennis, caring for a child.

• 02

  Most of us are mindless almost all the time and don't know it

  'When you're mindless, you're not aware that you're not there.' Rules we absorbed when young keep running us later, so your 15-year-old self ends up dictating your 30-year-old's life. Her example: 'Do horses eat meat?' feels like an obvious no, yet in some contexts horses do eat meat.

• 03

  Mind and body are one system

  Langer prefers 'mind-body unity' to 'connection.' Wherever you put your mind, your body follows. She calls the placebo 'our most effective medicine': you take nothing, believe it's something, and it acts like something. Placebos get a bad reputation because people treat 'it was all in your head' as if the head weren't part of the body.

• 04

  Your beliefs about aging and ability are often rigged against you

  She notes that forgetting is treated as decline at 70 but ignored at 20. When she asks Harvard students on Thursday what she said on Tuesday, nobody knows. Tests can be designed to make anyone look good or bad, so she urges people not to accept limits passively. One of her book's working titles was 'Who Says So?'

• 05

  Words carry expectations

  'Try' builds in failure: you don't try to eat an ice cream cone, you eat it. In her study, people told to 'do' a task outperformed people told to 'try.' 'Hope' also implies doubt. She doesn't hope there's coffee in the kitchen, she expects it. She suggests saying 'cured' rather than 'in remission,' because she says remission keeps people braced and stressed for years. That one is her opinion, not a tested finding.

• 06

  Stress comes from predictions, not events

  Stress requires predicting something awful, and prediction is an illusion. She argues stress is 'our major killer.' She believes, without the data yet (a planned study of hundreds of cancer patients in China was derailed by COVID), that stress levels will predict the course of disease beyond genetics, nutrition and treatment. She's careful to label this as belief, separate from her research.

• 07

  Paying attention to variability helps with chronic illness

  In her studies of people with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, Parkinson's and stroke, participants were simply phoned and asked: how is the symptom now, is it better or worse than last time, and why? Noticing that symptoms vary ('nobody is anything all the time') gives people a sense of control and helped 'across the board,' she reports.

• 08

  Don't agonize over decisions, make them right

  You can never test the road not taken, so you can't know the alternative would have been better. Flip a coin or go with your first thought, then make the choice work by looking for how it helps you grow. Langer calls regret 'mindless,' because it assumes the other option would have turned out better.

• 09

  Things aren't good or bad in themselves

  This isn't toxic positivity or even optimism, she says. Once you see that events are neutral until you interpret them, you're less overwhelmed and more open to possibilities. Michael Jordan would beat her at 100 free throws, but in a single shot, anything can happen.