Her Unconventional Studies Have Long Suggested What Neuroscience Is Now revealing: Our Experiences Are Formed by the Words and Ideas We Attach to them. Naming Something Play Rather Than Work — or Exercise Rather Than labor —

Ms. Tippett: Oh, they didn’t?

Ms. Langer: No. [laughs]

Ms. Tippett: But they helped you formulate these sentences, right? Or you said you formulated them there, in that context.

Ms. Langer: OK, yes.

Ms. Tippett: “And mindfulness is attunement to today’s demands to avoid tomorrow’s difficulties.”

Ms. Langer: Yeah. Did I say that? Yes, no, I did. And yes, I’m sure that spending the semester over there — I was teaching a course to their junior faculty, and it was interesting, because they approach problems so differently, and the problem, again, as you’ve said, that businesses are typically applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems. And I think that in this search for the solution, they — in this mindless search, they tend to miss what’s often right in front of them.

When I give talks in businesses, and I’m trying to get people, first, to appreciate how mindless they are, what I do is, I give them many examples. For example, even a simple thing like — I might ask, “How much is one and one?” And I know there are people that are listening to this, they are saying to themselves, “Oh, God. Are we going to have to listen to a whole hour of this?” [laughs] — thinking that — anyway. And so then they obligingly say, “Two.” And then I inform them that no, one and one is sometimes two. It’s not always two. And I give them different examples. The easiest one to understand is, if you take one wad of chewing gum, and you add it to one wad of chewing gum, you get one. And so it is with each of the things.

So I think that you have a belief, and then you seek out a confirmation for it, and so the more mindful approach would be to ask the question in both ways: How is it this way, and how is it not this way? We talk a lot about stress when — both in my lab, and then in a business context — that for anybody, when there’s stress, there’s an assumption that they’re making that something is going to happen, number one, and that when it happens, it’s going to be awful. Both of those are mindless. You want to open it up, both ways. First, the belief that it’s going to happen — all you need to do is ask yourself for evidence that it’s not going to happen. And you always find evidence for whatever you ask yourself, so if you have “I’m going to be fired,” maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t, and when it happens, it’ll have good parts and bad parts. And it’s just much easier to go forward, then. I have a one-liner with that: “No worry before its time.”

Ms. Tippett: Right, [laughs] yeah. I remember Eckhart Tolle saying that stress is all about not wanting whatever is happening to be happening — that that is the stress, which is another way of describing what you’re talking about.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think it’s more not about what’s happening, but it’s about the presumption of something that’s going to happen. What I’m saying is that I think stress follows from the belief that this future event will happen. When you’re in the middle of the event, you’re dealing with it, one way or the other. But I think that it goes back in some sense to Epictetus, who said, not in English and not with my accent, but that “Events don’t cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of events.”

And once people can appreciate — you see, right now almost everybody is mindlessly driven by these absolutes, and part of these absolutes are these evaluations of good or bad. If it’s good, I feel I must have it. If it’s bad, I must avoid it. When it’s neither good nor bad, I can just stay put and just be. So we get a lot more control by recognizing the way we’re controlling our present and our future.

[music: “Ganges Anthem” by Chris Beaty]

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with social psychologist Ellen Langer, who some have dubbed “the mother of mindfulness.” She was a pioneer in the science of revealing immediate life benefits of mindfulness, which she describes as “the simple act of actively noticing things” — achieved without meditation.

[music: “Ganges Anthem” by Chris Beaty]

Ms. Tippett: You write in an interesting way about time and how our perception of time itself plays into this.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, well, just to underscore this — that my belief is that our beliefs are not inconsequential. It’s not that they matter a little — that they’re almost the only thing that does matter. It’s a very extreme statement. OK? So that if you were going to say, what matters, real or perceived time? To me, it would be perceived time.

So let’s say we have you in the study, you go to sleep, you wake up, and you see the clock. And the clock, for half of the people, is running twice as fast as normal — not for half the people, for a third of the people. For a half, the clock is slowed down. For the last third, it’s accurate. So what that means is that upon waking, a third of the people will think they got, let’s say, two hours more sleep than they got, two hours fewer sleep than they got, or the amount of sleep that they actually got. And the question is, when you’re then given biological and cognitive psychological tasks, do these tasks reflect real or perceived time? And, clearly, I believe that when you wake up in the morning, and you think that you had a good night’s sleep, you’re ready to go, regardless of how much sleep you actually had — up until a point, of course.

Ms. Tippett: I think that’s — somehow, our perception of time, especially in this moment where the pace of technological change seems to be so fast, it really plays into a lot of stress. Whether it’s how we think about multitasking or procrastinating, all these things are involved with our relationship to time and deadlines.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, I think one of the things that we might do, when we’re so worried about what’s going to happen in the future, is to think about all the times we worried in the past and the thing didn’t happen. [laughs]

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Right. Well, OK, so I’d really — I want to ask you, what did you say a minute ago? That the way that you do this, this direct mindfulness — this is what you study. This is what you preach, in your way. And so just take us through — what does this application of direct mindfulness and all these things you learn look like, in a day in the life?

Ms. Langer: I think that what happens is that I’m not afraid of very many things out there, because I’ll be able to handle it. I’m not going to give up today, worrying about tomorrow. And that’s — I don’t want to get into an argument with economists, which I could, about putting money away for the future, and so on. It’s — this is at a different level of analysis, but that much of the worrying, almost all of the worrying we engage in is about something about tomorrow, when we can’t predict what tomorrow is going to be like.

Ms. Tippett: But you say and write, again and again, that this is easy. But it doesn’t sound easy. And is it something — does it get easier with time? Is it something that you’ve learned?

Ms. Langer: Yeah, and I think it’s not easy to — where you do this for five minutes and then — with respect to one kind of content, and then your whole life is going to change, although that could happen. But the practice — I said to you, just go home or call somebody on the phone or, when we stop now, go see somebody in the next room, and notice new things about them. And this person that you thought you knew will feel different, and that person will respond to you differently.

And this happens instantly — that if you are doing something that is difficult, and you say to yourself, “What am I so worried about? What are the positive things that could happen by my not completing this?” Or, “How can I make this into a game?” “Why is it that I think my life depends on whatever this thing is?” — because very rarely does our life depend on any particular action — do you know what I’m saying? People live a life that is ongoing, but treat it as if whatever’s happening at the moment is the last opportunity they’re going to have.

Ms. Tippett: Right, right. So it’s very striking that the American Psychological Association has said of your work that it has offered new hope to millions whose problems were previously seen as unalterable and inevitable. Will therapy, 20 years from now or 100 years from now, be — resemble at all what was in Woody Allen movies — [laughs] which remains the kind of stereotype of what therapy is, a couple of decades ago?

Ms. Langer: I think probably not. I think it’s already changing. I think that many, many years ago, I had said that therapy should be divided into two parts. And so we have people who can say to you, in a sophisticated way, that “I know how you feel. And you’ll be OK.” But they’re not the same people who necessarily can tell you how to get on with it and what actually to do to be happy. So they can get you from being unhappy to neutral, in some sense. So what happens is, now we have a new discipline of coaches, and that’s where they take off. And so I am — many of the people who are seeing coaches would have been people who would have been in therapy in the past.

Ms. Tippett: Right, right. That’s interesting. Yeah.

Ms. Langer: And I’m sure that there will be many changes in the future, but — go on.

Ms. Tippett: It seems like psychology — this is not my observation, it’s behind a lot of, like Richard Davidson’s work, for example — that a lot of psychology and psychiatry was so focused on pathology. You’re also — you’re focusing on taking charge of and making each moment what you want it to be, in a positive sense.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, when I started doing research, the field was consumed with problems, and right from the start, my research was about well-being and — interesting, that it was too soft a word to talk about happiness, so I talked about well-being.

I think that things are progressing in this way that surely, now, we have a whole field of positive psychology. And I think that my last book, the Counterclockwise book, the subtitle, “the Psychology” — or “the Power of Possibility,” is still a little different, where instead of describing what is, even if we’re describing it in a more positive way, that we create what we want it to be.

Ms. Tippett: I want to say, I think it’s really important when you say — this sentence that you spoke just a moment ago, about — that we think about what is — instead of thinking about what is, it’s what we want to be, what is possible. We hear a lot of language like that now in the self-help genre that can be thin, but you say that as a scientist who’s been actually seeing this actualized.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, again, back to the study of language — many years ago, I talked about the difference between “can” and “how can.” It seems so similar, but they’re vastly different. When you ask yourself, “How do you do something?” you’re bypassing your ego, in some sense. You’re just out there examining, fiddling with things, trying to find the solution. If you ask yourself, “Can you do it?” then all you can appeal to is the past. And so with lots of things — when people say, “People can only do A, B, or C,” the first thought in my mind is always, well, how do we know that? How could that be?

I ask my students that. I say, “How fast” — this was around the time of the Boston Marathon, and I’ll say, “How fast is it humanly possible to run?” And they do some strange calculations, because these are wonderful kids. [laughs] They come up with things like 28 miles, 20, 32.5 — who knows? [laughs] And then I tell them about the Tarahumara in Copper Canyon in Mexico, and these are people who are, without stopping, running 100, 200 miles a day.

I had this discussion with a friend of mine, when we were both part of the medical school division on aging, and I called him one day, and I said, “How long would you say” — he’s a physician — “it takes for a broken finger to heal?” And so he said, “I’ll say a week.” I said, “OK, if I said to you I could heal it by psychological means in five days, what would you say?” He said, “Well, all right.” I said, “What about four days?” He said, “Okay.” I said, “What about three days?” He says, “No.” I said, “Okay, what about three days and 23 hours?” OK, the point being, when is that moment that on this side you can, on the other side, you can’t?

[music: “Too Many Cooks” by Portico Quartet]

Ms. Tippett: So it strikes me that there are also really civic, public-life implications to this. And I was thinking about it, because if you think about the fact that in our public life, which is something I puzzle over a lot, we tend to only ask the “can we,” the yes/no question, and then we argue the yes or the no. And we actually don’t create a lot of possibility on really important subjects.

Ms. Langer: Right. Yes.

Ms. Tippett: Which is — so I think you’re putting that in a different context, which is really interesting to think about.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, I think that — here’s another one that will sound strange, but I’m against compromise. What? [laughs] Because to compromise sounds so mindful.

Ms. Tippett: OK, say some more. I like it.

Ms. Langer: Well, the reason for that is, because it’s an agreement for everybody to lose. It’s just reducing your losses, rather than finding the win/win solution, which is often out there.

Ms. Tippett: Well, it seems like we could talk about that for another hour. We’re coming close to the end. I want to ask you a final, big question. Talking about becoming mindful is also really talking about becoming conscious. And asking the question, “How can we live well?” is an existential question. It’s a variation, if you will, it’s an evolution of this question that’s been passed through human history. So I just wonder how this work you do makes you think differently about that big question of what it means to be human, and what we may be learning about that, that we haven’t grasped before.

Ms. Langer: Yeah, interesting. Well, I was going to write a mindful Utopia at one point, and eventually, maybe I will, and give this sort of question real thought. But I think that most of the ills that people experience as individuals, in their relationships, in groups, in cultures, globally — and that’s a very big statement — virtually all of the ills are a result of mindlessness, one way or the other, directly or indirectly, and so that as the culture becomes more mindful, I think all of these things will naturally change.

On the cultural level, people are fighting over limited resources, but resources are probably not nearly as limited as people mindlessly presume. People’s egos are at stake, even while they’re negotiating on the level of countries, and they’re not looked at in that fashion and approached in that way; that when you have people going to work feeling good about themselves, and the work life is exciting for them, fun for them, nurturing for them, they’re going to be doing more work, and they’re going to be less evaluative of other people. And once we all start feeling less evaluated, that allows us to become more creative, mindful, take more risks, because they’re not very risky, and to be kinder in our views of other people.

Ultimately, I think that for me, what it means to be human is to feel unique, but to recognize that everybody else is also unique. And I think that people — right now, I think people feel that being happy, really happy in this deep way that I’m referring to, not that you’ve just won an award or bought something new or whatever — that they think that this is something that one should experience sometimes; maybe if you experience it a little more than other people, you’re one of the lucky ones — where I think it should be the way you are all the time.

Ms. Tippett: And that — but so you said a while ago, “Most things are an inconvenience, rather than a tragedy.” There are tragedies. So what is this happiness? How does this way of being function in those moments?

Ms. Langer: Well, it’s interesting — let me give you an example of something. Many years ago, I had a major fire that destroyed 80 percent of what I owned. And when I called the insurance company, and they came over the next day, the person, the insurance agent, had said to me that this was the first call he had ever had where the damage was worse than the call. And I thought of it, and I thought, “Well, gee, it’s already taken my stuff, whatever that means. Why give it my soul?” You know, that — why pay twice, which is what people so often do? Something happens, you have that loss, and then you’re going to now throw all your emotional energy at it, and so you’re doubling up on the negativity.

And interesting — to go back to how would you take a tragedy and see it? because we can say the fire was not a simple little thing — that I stayed in a hotel for a little while; I had two dogs with me, so I was a vision as I walked through the lobby every day while my house was being rebuilt. And it was Christmas when this happened, a few days before Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve, I left my room; I come back many hours later, and the room was full of gifts. And it wasn’t from the management, it wasn’t from the owner of the hotel. It was the people who parked my car, the chambermaids, the waiters. It was marvelous. When you strip away all the mindless insecurity, people are quite something. And so I reflect on that. I couldn’t tell you anything that I had lost in the fire, but at this point, I have that memory that was more than positive. So sometimes the ways that things unfold can take place over a longer time.

[music: “Kepesh” by Arms and Sleepers]

Ms. Tippett: Ellen Langer is a social psychologist and a professor in the psychology department at Harvard University. Her books include Mindfulness and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

[music: “Kepesh” by Arms and Sleepers]

Ms. Tippett: You can listen again and share this show at onbeing.org.

Staff: On Being is: Trent Gilliss, Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Mariah Helgeson, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Bethany Mann, Selena Carlson, Malka Fenyvesi, Erinn Farrell, Jill Gnos, Laurén Dørdal, and Gisell Calderón.

[music: “Herstory of Glory” by Do Make Say Think]

Ms. Tippett: Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice you hear, singing our final credits in each show, is hip-hop artist Lizzo.

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