How Your Thoughts Influence Your Health | Dr. Ellen Langer & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I love the way that you look at things that we take for granted as operating one way through

00:00:07.000 | this different perspective.

00:00:09.260 | Our mutual friend, Allie Crump, told me the story that at one point she was in a conversation

00:00:14.760 | with you and you said, "Well, maybe exercise and all its effects on our health is just

00:00:18.960 | an epiphenomenon."

00:00:19.960 | I mean, could you talk a little bit more about that?

00:00:22.240 | I think first of all, I don't think most people are familiar with what epiphenomena are, but

00:00:27.100 | this idea of looking at things through a different portal seems so valuable, regardless of what

00:00:32.180 | the experimental outcome turned out to be, and perhaps we should touch on that experimental

00:00:35.940 | outcome about labor versus non-labor.

00:00:40.860 | There's so much there, I don't know where to go.

00:00:43.660 | I mean, we want to talk about that, the research.

00:00:47.500 | Let's talk about the study.

00:00:48.500 | Before we go to the study, though, let's go to the reason for the study, way back when.

00:00:54.020 | Okay, so there's so many paths I can take here.

00:00:59.100 | Let's take them all.

00:01:00.100 | Okay, we'll start with one.

00:01:01.380 | So I did some research back in the '70s with people in nursing homes, and why did I do

00:01:08.060 | that?

00:01:09.060 | Because I had somebody in the family who was in a nursing home, it was very distressing

00:01:13.300 | to see people just sitting there doing nothing and barely existing.

00:01:19.540 | And so we had the idea that if we gave people choices, that might get them more engaged

00:01:25.900 | in their living.

00:01:27.860 | And so we did that.

00:01:28.860 | We gave people encouragement to decide where to see people, whether to visit them in your

00:01:34.980 | room, in the lounge.

00:01:35.980 | You have to remember, you can't go into an establishment, a business, and turn the whole

00:01:40.780 | power structure around.

00:01:42.540 | So within reason, we came up with choices people could make.

00:01:47.100 | We gave them an opportunity to see a movie, you could see it on Tuesday or Thursday.

00:01:51.820 | We gave them a plant to take care of.

00:01:54.060 | The comparison group, the tender loving care group, we told them, "People will be visiting

00:02:00.700 | you and we'll set it up so you'll be visiting in the lounge."

00:02:06.100 | Everything was controlled in that way.

00:02:07.100 | "You're going to see a movie, and we'll let you know if you're going to see it on Tuesday

00:02:11.300 | or Thursday, here's a plant, and the nurses will care for it for you."

00:02:17.500 | So we do this.

00:02:19.780 | We come back, I think it was three weeks, actually, I don't remember, it's been so long.

00:02:26.420 | 18 months later, first we took initial measures, come back 18 months later, those people who

00:02:32.900 | were given these choices live longer.

00:02:40.660 | And that was the beginning of all of my work on health in some sense.

00:02:46.340 | How could it be that making choices results in a longer life?

00:02:52.700 | All right, so what is there about choice making?

00:02:55.820 | And then the choices were Mickey Mouse choices, you know, and you always have choice available

00:03:02.900 | too.

00:03:03.900 | You can turn on a light switch.

00:03:04.900 | You can do it with your right hand, your right hand, your left hand, one finger, three fingers,

00:03:10.340 | lift your foot, so many choices that you can bring to the table.

00:03:14.340 | If choice making is good for you, why don't people do this?

00:03:18.500 | And that got me more into the mindlessness and mindfulness work now.

00:03:24.180 | So we have people living longer.

00:03:27.000 | How can it be that you're making choices, your mind is active, and your body complies?

00:03:35.700 | And so then I thought about it, not in one fell swoop, but realized that this whole notion

00:03:42.940 | of mind and body, these are just words.

00:03:46.620 | We come together, here I am, all of me, my fingers, my shoulders, my thoughts, as one

00:03:54.620 | thing.

00:03:55.620 | And if we put the mind and body back together, then the amount of control we have is enormous,

00:04:02.420 | right?

00:04:03.420 | So wherever I put my mind, I'm also putting my body.

00:04:07.300 | So in the Mindful Body, which started off as a memoir, I have lots of stories that show

00:04:14.340 | the leading up to this idea.

00:04:16.420 | Let me just tell you two very quickly.

00:04:18.940 | One was I got married, Andrew, you won't believe it, I was obscenely young.

00:04:23.960 | And you'll find that if you read the book, I was even younger than admitted, because

00:04:28.180 | I was secretly married years before that.

00:04:30.700 | Okay.

00:04:31.700 | So I go, I'm 19 years old, I think.

00:04:33.020 | I go to Paris on my honeymoon, we go into this restaurant, I order a mixed grill.

00:04:39.380 | One of the foods there was a pancreas.

00:04:42.060 | My then-husband, who was more sophisticated than I, more worldly, I said, "Which of these

00:04:46.380 | is the pancreas?"

00:04:47.380 | He says, "That."

00:04:48.380 | I said, "So I eat everything, I'm a big eater."

00:04:50.980 | Now comes the moment of truth.

00:04:53.500 | Can I eat the pancreas?

00:04:55.380 | Why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas, I still haven't figured

00:05:00.420 | out.

00:05:01.420 | So anyway, I start eating it, and he starts laughing.

00:05:05.140 | Not good for newlyweds.

00:05:07.260 | And I ask him, "Why are you laughing?"

00:05:08.780 | He said, "Because that's chicken.

00:05:10.700 | You ate the pancreas a long time ago."

00:05:13.260 | So I made myself sick.

00:05:16.900 | The other side of that, my mother had breast cancer that had metastasized to her pancreas,

00:05:23.980 | and then magically it was gone.

00:05:27.500 | Somehow she had made herself well.

00:05:29.980 | So I had many of these sorts of experiences, and talk about, I've been talking about this

00:05:35.700 | since, gosh, when did we first, since '79.

00:05:40.860 | So now people are talking about mind-body connection.

00:05:43.860 | It's not a connection.

00:05:45.920 | If you're talking about a connection between two things that says they're separate, and

00:05:50.220 | you still have to deal with what's connecting them, and you've put them back together, it's

00:05:54.500 | one thing, you don't have to deal with that mediator.

00:06:00.580 | And so the study you're asking me about, which I'm surprised, I'm having a junior moment

00:06:05.780 | that I actually remembered the question you asked, rather than a senior moment, that before

00:06:12.620 | I tell you about the study with Allie, the first study we did testing this mind-body

00:06:17.300 | unity was a counterclockwise study.

00:06:20.500 | So here what we did was we took elderly men, we were going to have them live in a retreat

00:06:24.940 | that had been retrofitted to 20 years earlier, and had them live there as if they were their

00:06:29.620 | younger selves.

00:06:30.940 | So they talked about things from the past as if they were just unfolding.

00:06:35.020 | The results were incredible.

00:06:37.140 | Their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory, their strength, and they looked

00:06:41.440 | noticeably younger.

00:06:43.300 | So that was very exciting and began all this mind-body unity work.

00:06:48.980 | Now comes the study that you're talking about with Allie, where in a conversation that she

00:06:56.620 | and I had, she was my student, and she made proclamations about exercise and any proclamation,

00:07:04.540 | this is the short answer to your question, anybody proclaims anything, my mind immediately

00:07:09.060 | goes, "So when might not that be true?"

00:07:11.020 | I'm starting to pick up on that.

00:07:14.140 | It's a gimmick, I guess.

00:07:15.340 | It's a gift, is what it is.

00:07:19.220 | So the question was that how important was the understanding of exercise to the effects

00:07:27.520 | of exercise?

00:07:28.900 | So we take chambermaids, and interestingly, the first question we asked is, "How much

00:07:33.620 | exercise do you get?"

00:07:35.540 | And they say they don't get very much exercise because to them, exercise is what you do after

00:07:41.260 | work.

00:07:42.260 | It's like a surgeon general who sits behind a desk all day.

00:07:46.100 | So you would imagine whether they realized they were getting exercise or not, since they're

00:07:50.980 | getting so much exercise, that they're going to be healthier than other people who are

00:07:55.780 | not getting them, and they weren't.

00:07:57.980 | That's interesting.

00:07:58.980 | So now we divide them into two groups, very simple study, randomly divide them into two

00:08:03.620 | groups.

00:08:04.620 | In one group, we simply teach them their work is exercise.

00:08:07.940 | Making a bed is like working in this machine at the gym, doing the windows, whatever.

00:08:12.620 | So you have two groups, one who thinks their work is exercise, one who doesn't realize.

00:08:19.700 | We take many, many measures, and they're not eating any differently, one group from the

00:08:25.580 | other.

00:08:26.580 | They're not working any harder.

00:08:28.540 | Nevertheless, the group that changed their mind and now saw their work as exercise lost

00:08:34.300 | weight.

00:08:35.300 | They made a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure

00:08:39.180 | came down.

00:08:40.040 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

How Your Thoughts Influence Your Health | Dr. Ellen Langer & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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