In the realm of psychology and mindfulness, few names are as revered as Dr. Ellen Langer. Dubbed the “mother of mindfulness,” Dr. Langer’s pioneering work has reshaped our understanding of the mind-body connection. Her seminal book, “The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health,” stands as a testament to her decades of innovative research, challenging the entrenched beliefs about health and healing. As the first tenured female professor of psychology at Harvard, her achievements are not just academic but also historic, paving the way for future generations of scholars.
Dr. Langer believes that our thoughts and perceptions are not mere byproducts of our experiences but are powerful forces that shape our physical health, intellectual vitality, and overall well-being. With an eye for the unnoticed and an unyielding belief in the power of reframing our perspectives, she has shown that mindfulness is more than a practice—it is a transformative force. Her insights reveal that by engaging with the world with fresh eyes and an open mind, we can wield remarkable influence over our health outcomes. One of her notable experiments involved a group of men who, after adopting a mindful approach to their thoughts and activities, exhibited dramatic positive changes in cognitive and physical tests. These changes included improvements in strength, flexibility, gait, posture, hearing, vision, and even intelligence test performance.
From enhancing vision to accelerating wound healing, and even alleviating symptoms of chronic illnesses, Dr. Langer’s research illustrates the profound impact of mindfulness on various facets of health. Moreover, she warns of the negative consequences that pessimistic health narratives can have on our bodies, underscoring the critical role our mental state plays in our journey toward wellness.
Houston’s Official Fitness Czar, Samir Becic, had an hour and half interview with Dr. Langer which we will publish in two parts. “Dr. Langer is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever had the privilege of interviewing. Her mental acuity is on another level! During my interview with her, it was clear why she became the first female tenured professor in psychology at Harvard, one of the best universities in the world.”
As we delve into the first half of her most memorable quotes from her interview with our founder, Samir Becic, we invite readers to explore the empowering message of Dr. Langer’s work: that our health is not solely in the hands of fate, but also in the power of our thoughts.
Small steps make big changes: “The way I see the people in this world is here’s the metal railing, and they keep fighting against it, and they can’t get anywhere. And the reason the metaphor works is because all of my work suggests all they need to do is move a slight bit over to achieve all the things that people want. They don’t need to invest years and money to make great changes. Most of it can be done with very small changes and changes that are completely consistent with what you’d want to do anyway.”
Meditation is not mindfulness: “People often, when they think of mindfulness, think of meditation. Meditation is not mindfulness. Meditation is a practice you undergo to achieve post-meditative mindfulness. Mindfulness, as I study it, is very different, not better or worse, just different. It’s not a practice. It’s a way of being that is very much in the present. You don’t take yourself out of the present to meditate for 20 minutes, twice a day. Once you recognize, if you were to recognize, there are two ways to become mindful.
One: that’s probably harder for people, to get you to where you want to go faster, is to accept the power of uncertainty, and recognize that everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So you can’t know. So once you know that you don’t know, then you naturally tune in.
The other way is so simple that it defies belief: All you need to do is notice new things about the things you think you know, and then, you see, you don’t know them. So you go home, and you notice three new things about your spouse. And all of a sudden, the relationship will feel reborn.
So when you notice new things and you see that you don’t know, then you’re starting to learn about the inherent uncertainty and everything right now, this act of simply noticing those things is startling. When you look at the results, people become happier, healthier, they live longer, they’re more charismatic, the better leaders, memory and attention are improved, they’re seen as more authentic, it just goes on and on.”
Mental health is tied to general health: “I don’t think that we should be talking about mental health. We should just be talking about health, a healthy satisfying life. And that the way to achieve this healthy, satisfying life is essentially to put aside all of the institutional mindlessness that has led us to the place that we’re at right now.”
Our education system needs an overhaul: “Schools need to be changed. You know, our schools are probably the biggest culprits for producing mindlessness. Everything is always changing.
Everything looks different from different perspectives. So all of the absolute facts we’re given are simply wrong, some of the time. Schools in general start off with an assumption that there’s a particular body of work in whatever field that people need to know. That’s an assumption that needs to be questioned. And that the way to teach them is to fill them with “facts”. Now the facts that we’re taught are perspective free, context free.”
Question everything: “A story that I tell, and it’s in the book: I’m at a horse event and a man asked me, can I watch his horse because he’s going to give his horse a hot dog. And I laughed to myself because I’m a straight A student- horses are herbivorous, they don’t eat meat. He came back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And that’s when I realized that everything I know could be wrong, which to me was very exciting because it opened up all sorts of possibilities. Now, most of what we know is derived from science, but what people don’t realize is that research, whether medical or in any discipline, research only gives you probabilities. Research findings are “it’s likely that,” and these are reported as absolute facts. So it’s not “most horses, under many circumstances, tend not to eat meat,” it’s “horses don’t eat meat.”
And so, because of our single-minded view of the world, our mindlessness leads us to be very evaluative of other people, because if somebody else sees the world from a different perspective, that clearly feels wrong.”
Being more mindful could make the world a happier place: “Let me tell you this one statement. It’s a very big statement. I believe that all of the ills in the world, whether personal, interpersonal, professional, or global, are the result, the indirect or direct result of mindlessness. We start every place at the same time at all levels of education. We teach people mindfully rather than mindlessly, as they are currently taught. There’s some interpersonal learning that we should be given as children, which we’re not. Something that’s very important to me is a realization that behavior makes sense from the actor’s perspective, or else the actor wouldn’t do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, today, I’m going to be obnoxious, aggressive, and forgetful. So when they are that way, what’s going on? And it turns out that for every single negative behavior description, there’s an equally strong, but oppositely balanced alternative. Now, if you are mindful, you know, that, uh, there are many explanations for why somebody does something. So I can’t stand you because you’re so impulsive. Well, that’s because you’re spontaneous. You don’t have any patience for me because I’m so inconsistent. That’s because I’m flexible, and so on. So when we recognize this, we end up with a happier world. So if you’re living in this happier world where people aren’t denigrating you, mental health is going to [improve].”
Building a better future for our children: “Stress is rampant across the globe and not so interestingly, maybe obviously, stress is psychological. Events don’t cause stress. What causes stress are the views you take of the event. The more mindful you are, the more potential ways of understanding any situation are for you. And, parents are stressed, the kids feel that stress.
It affects their physical health, certainly their mental health. People are acting as if there are no choices that any of us have, right now we have a world of winners and losers and everybody wants to be on the winning team. The world needs to go from being (each individual culture) from being vertical, where I, at the world’s leading university, sit near the top to horizontal. I thought some of this might happen with COVID when, all of a sudden you didn’t give a damn about, the architect living next door to you. You cared about the driver who is going to deliver food to you. But it didn’t last. At least for a moment, people saw that people that they might have denigrated in some sense were now important for them.
We all hire for today and not tomorrow: “If we paid attention, we wouldn’t keep trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We’d find out what the square peg can do better than anybody else. You know, when you’re hiring people, you’re always hiring for yesterday and people don’t realize that because tomorrow will be different. We don’t know in what ways, and because we don’t know in what ways, that should give us greater latitude than the people that we hire. We’re hiring people who could do the jobs that are not going to be important in the future.”
