How much of what you think you know is actually true?
In this episode of Degrees of Health, Ben Hopkins sits down with Dr Ellen Langer, the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard and the researcher who has spent fifty years studying mindfulness, almost none of it involving meditation.
Ellen makes a simple case with enormous consequences. Mindfulness isn’t something you sit cross-legged to achieve. It’s just noticing. And the moment you decide you know something, you stop noticing it entirely. Her definition of the opposite state is one of the best lines in the episode: frequently in error, but rarely in doubt.
From there, the conversation moves through five decades of research that keeps arriving at the same conclusion, which is that our beliefs shape our bodies far more directly than most of us are willing to accept.
They discuss:
Why mindfulness has almost nothing to do with meditation
The one plus one question that catches almost everyone out
The horse that ate a hot dog, and why it changed the direction of a career
Why knowing something can be the thing that causes the bad outcome
The counterclockwise study, where elderly men lived as though it were twenty years earlier
The chambermaids who lost weight after being told their work already counted as exercise
The rigged clock experiments, where blood sugar followed perceived time rather than real time
Why Ellen thinks mind and body connection doesn’t go far enough; learning things conditionally, and the single word that changes what you can do with an idea
Why stress requires you to predict a future you’re demonstrably bad at predicting
Why every negative word we use about behaviour has an equally true positive version: attention to symptom variability, and how to run it yourself with a phone alarm
What chronic actually means, and why it isn’t what most people assume
Why the more different you are from whoever wrote the rule, the less you should follow it
One of the biggest takeaways is that uncertainty isn’t the problem. Being certain is. The more fixed your view of something, the fewer options you leave yourself, and Ellen’s argument is that most of our suffering traces back to exactly that.
A genuinely fun conversation with someone who has spent a lifetime questioning things the rest of us stopped looking at years ago. She’s 79, by the way, which makes her thoughts on healing and ageing land rather differently.
Find out more about Ellen Langer and her work:
Book: The Mindful Body by Dr Ellen Langer
Instagram, where the paintings, fairy tales and songs appear first
ellenlanger.com
If you enjoyed the episode,
subscribe to Degrees of Health and let us know in the comments:
What’s one thing you’re completely certain about?
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