How Your Mind Can Change Your Body | Dr. Ellen Langer & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | If one has parents, let's say, who are "slowing down" a bit, and they're talking a little

00:00:07.920 | bit about some aches and pains, and there's a stairwell in the house, for instance, and

00:00:13.600 | they're starting to say things like, "You know, at some point, we're either going to

00:00:17.160 | have to move into a place that doesn't have a stairwell or put one of those chair lifts

00:00:21.320 | and things, or maybe just move into the downstairs," do you think that in just thinking about that,

00:00:29.320 | they're going to accelerate the demise of their locomotor ability?

00:00:33.760 | I do, actually.

00:00:35.800 | I think that when we start entertaining these negative thoughts and evaluating ourselves,

00:00:41.920 | we're always going to find evidence.

00:00:43.280 | As you get older, you start, "Oh, my God, am I forgetful?"

00:00:47.600 | You pay attention each time you forget, and that makes it even worse.

00:00:52.480 | I said to my students in this health class, smart kids at Harvard, this is on Thursday,

00:01:00.320 | I teach Tuesday and Thursday, I said, "What was the last thing I said in class on Tuesday?"

00:01:06.080 | Nobody remembers.

00:01:07.080 | I said, "You must be getting dementia," so that when a young person forgets, it's okay,

00:01:13.480 | they don't pay any attention to the forgetting.

00:01:15.440 | As you get older and you forget, you get less involved in what you're doing.

00:01:20.600 | If you're trying to learn something, you have the competing part of you saying that you're

00:01:25.800 | not going to remember this, and so on.

00:01:29.800 | Independent of all of this, I think a lot of the loss in memory has nothing to do with

00:01:35.720 | memory.

00:01:38.640 | When I was young, and you're introducing me to people, I thought it was important for

00:01:44.080 | me to remember their names.

00:01:46.400 | Andrew, I know, doesn't speak well of me.

00:01:47.960 | I don't really care.

00:01:48.960 | You're going to introduce me to five of you, what do I care?

00:01:52.520 | If I'm going to need their names, chances are I will meet them again.

00:01:56.800 | Afterwards, if you say to me, "Remember Jim," and I say to you, "Which one was Jim?"

00:02:02.920 | It wasn't that I forgot.

00:02:04.800 | To forget means I had to have learned it in the first place.

00:02:09.360 | If you don't learn it in the first place because you don't care, because your values change

00:02:16.480 | as you get older, then it's not a matter of forgetting when you don't know it in the second

00:02:20.840 | place.

00:02:22.760 | I think that if we turn it around, because now I'm doing this because I know you expect

00:02:27.440 | it of me, and we say, "What if you remembered everything?"

00:02:31.240 | Everything.

00:02:32.240 | That would be terrible.

00:02:33.240 | How would you get through?

00:02:34.240 | It's a picture.

00:02:35.240 | You wouldn't get to experience anything new.

00:02:38.760 | Everything serves a purpose.

00:02:45.160 | I never tested this.

00:02:47.600 | We came up with this years ago, and I think it's probably wrong, but it's kind of fun.

00:02:52.960 | People as they get older, they become hard of hearing, but it also happens that the older

00:02:59.080 | you get, the more you realize nobody is really saying anything.

00:03:03.880 | Being hard of hearing protects you from a lot of that noise.

00:03:08.920 | My grandfather used to turn off his hearing aid.

00:03:12.320 | I've always had glasses for reading at night when my eyes would get fatigued or something,

00:03:17.360 | but recently I came to my awareness that my vision at a distance is very, very sharp.

00:03:23.280 | I'm like an eagle.

00:03:24.280 | I can read numbers very far away, but my vision up close has been diminishing.

00:03:31.840 | I find myself straining a bit more even than it is, so I started wearing eyeglasses.

00:03:34.920 | Or you should have the book further away.

00:03:37.440 | Or I should have the book further away, but I've just defaulted to eyeglasses.

00:03:42.000 | I realized that because I understand the neuroplasticity of the visual system that I'm certainly accelerating

00:03:48.320 | the demise of my near vision by wearing glasses, and so I'm trying to balance the two.

00:03:54.120 | Do you know our vision study?

00:03:56.040 | This is kind of fun.

00:03:57.840 | I'm in the doctor's office, and like everybody else, I'm given the Snellenite chart.

00:04:04.560 | The Snellen is the letters and numbers, yeah.

00:04:07.840 | But I'm different from most people, and I resent that the letters are getting smaller

00:04:15.240 | and smaller because it's creating an expectation that soon I won't be able to see.

00:04:21.840 | So I ask, "What would happen if the letters got larger and larger?"

00:04:26.600 | Which would be to change the expectation that soon I will be able to see.

00:04:30.940 | So when we do that, people are able to see what they weren't able to see before.

00:04:35.960 | Now, most of us have trouble around two-thirds of the way down the chart, so what we did

00:04:43.440 | was start the chart a third of the way down, so the letters are smaller than on top.

00:04:50.280 | So now two-thirds of the way down, that starting point, the letters are really small, and what

00:04:56.160 | happens is, again, people can see what they couldn't see before.

00:04:59.640 | Awesome.

00:05:00.640 | Yeah.

00:05:01.640 | So the idea that your vision has to get worse, I think there are many, many instances where

00:05:09.760 | that's not the case, but also the whole test of vision is bizarre.

00:05:14.400 | How often in your life are you looking at letters that make no sense?

00:05:20.100 | If I don't want to see you, I'm going to see you a lot sooner than being able to run away

00:05:24.040 | from you.

00:05:25.040 | If I'm hungry, I can see the restaurant sign much quicker than if I'm not hungry.

00:05:30.560 | I see things in color that are different in black and white, so on and so forth, and to

00:05:35.920 | lose all of that with a two-dimensional eye test seems to me ... And again, we haven't

00:05:44.000 | touched on this, but it's probably important with respect to vision.

00:05:47.680 | It's true with everything.

00:05:48.680 | In fact, I tell people, "You're wearing glasses.

00:05:53.520 | Try it without glasses.

00:05:55.240 | You want to see when you can see and when you can't see."

00:06:00.080 | With almost everything, we again hold things still when they're varying.

00:06:10.040 | Now what I mean by this is that, let's say with vision, my guess is that 11 o'clock in

00:06:18.600 | the morning, my vision is better than at 7 o'clock at night.

00:06:23.800 | The data says yes.

00:06:24.800 | Okay.

00:06:25.800 | I mean, it'd be hard for it not ... So what does this say?

00:06:28.080 | This says maybe I should either have a nap.

00:06:32.240 | I don't nap, so I should have an energy bar, and even an energy bar is cute.

00:06:35.600 | It's just a candy bar, but you call it an energy bar.

00:06:37.800 | You're allowed to eat it.

00:06:38.800 | It's like you take a piece of cake, put it in a muffin tin.

00:06:41.720 | It's called a muffin.

00:06:42.720 | It's healthier than the piece of cake.

00:06:45.000 | Anyway, I'll leave that as it may.

00:06:50.260 | That control, a great amount of control over our physical well-being comes about by attention

00:06:59.360 | to variability, which is just a fancy way of talking about mindfulness.

00:07:03.720 | Mindfulness is noticing change.

00:07:05.480 | That's what it means to be variable.

00:07:06.920 | All right.

00:07:07.920 | So if you took your glasses off and you saw for yourself, what are the times, what are

00:07:13.440 | the moments that you're having ... I'm not talking about people who are almost blind,

00:07:18.800 | where I can't see and when I can see, and then you ask yourself why, and then it may

00:07:23.360 | be the case that it's a particular font, or more likely that you're tired, and then you

00:07:29.800 | have other options.

00:07:31.480 | But once you start wearing them, it's like taking a laxative.

00:07:35.920 | Take a laxative once, it's fine.

00:07:37.500 | If you're taking a laxative all the time, you're teaching your body to depend on the

00:07:41.840 | laxative.

00:07:43.160 | You can teach ourselves by some of these things that are supposed to be helpful, and we teach

00:07:50.520 | ourselves to need them in ways we otherwise wouldn't.

00:07:54.640 | And so he did this attention to symptom variability with big diseases.

00:07:59.380 | So when you have a chronic illness, the way most people understand chronic illness is

00:08:05.520 | that there's nothing that can be done about it.

00:08:08.360 | Yeah, the word chronic implies that.

00:08:10.120 | Exactly.

00:08:11.120 | What it means is the medical world doesn't have a fix.

00:08:14.120 | It doesn't mean there's nothing can be done.

00:08:16.240 | Now, you have your symptoms of the chronic illness, the presumption most of the time,

00:08:21.320 | I would think, is that the symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse.

00:08:27.440 | Nothing only moves in one direction.

00:08:30.800 | Sometimes it's a little better, sometimes a little ... The stock market, if it's going

00:08:34.320 | up, it doesn't go up in a straight line, it goes up, down a little, and so on.

00:08:39.320 | So when it's better, why is it better?

00:08:42.560 | So we do this, we call people periodically, and we simply ask them, "How is the symptom

00:08:49.920 | now?

00:08:51.040 | Is it better or worse than the last time we called, and why?"

00:08:55.000 | Several things happen.

00:08:56.200 | The first, by engaging in the whole process, people feel less helpless, and that turns

00:09:01.520 | out to be good for your health.

00:09:03.640 | Second, once you start noticing that now it's a little better, it can even be a little worse,

00:09:09.600 | you feel better because you thought that it was always maximally, "I'm always in pain,

00:09:13.680 | I'm always stressed," whatever it is, third, or whatever I'm up to.

00:09:19.120 | By asking the question, "Why now?

00:09:21.160 | Is it better or worse than before?" you engage in a mindful search.

00:09:25.520 | I have decades of evidence that that mindfulness itself, the neurons are firing, that itself

00:09:32.040 | is good for your health.

00:09:33.600 | And then finally, I believe you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one.

00:09:39.120 | So we've done this with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, Parkinson's, stroke, biggies,

00:09:46.440 | and in each case have very positive results.

00:09:49.760 | And the good thing about these sorts of things is that there are no negative side effects,

00:09:55.040 | and it doesn't mean that you have to stop doing any medical procedures you may be doing.

00:10:01.200 | But you're asking, you're back in charge of your own healthcare.

00:10:05.440 | Why does this hurt now?

00:10:07.000 | Stress.

00:10:08.000 | There are some people who think they're stressed all the time.

00:10:11.400 | Nobody is anything all the time.

00:10:13.960 | So I call you, Andrew, and I say, "How stressed are you now, and why?"

00:10:19.080 | And we go through this over time, and then you find out you're stressed when you're talking

00:10:23.920 | to Ellen Langer.

00:10:24.920 | Well, then the solution is easy, don't talk to me.

How Your Mind Can Change Your Body | Dr. Ellen Langer & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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