Ellen Langer

Yeah.

So, um, one of my teachers, uh, Ellen Langer, she says that instead of live every day as if it's your last, try to live every day as if it's your first.

[laughs]

Uh, in other words, with, with freshness.

... not try and understand ourselves but to interrogate our own behaviors and whether that's living up to the values that we have and who we wanna be as a person.

I wanna see what you think of this quote from Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer, who says, "If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.

When people are depressed, they tend to believe they are depressed all the time.

Mindful attention to variability shows this isn't the case."

He also developed an app, the Ten Percent with Dan Harris meditation app.

Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University and the host of another terrific podcast, The Happiness Lab podcast.

We often talk about how September is the other January and how we can treat this moment as a clean slate.

September is back-to-school time.

I have two guests today, people I happen to love.

Uh, Gretchen Rubin is host of the Happier podcast and the author of multiple bestsellers, including The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, and her latest, uh, Secrets of Adulthood.

And Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of, uh, uh, another excellent podcast, The Happiness Lab podcast.

Uh, just to say quickly, uh, this episode is part of an occasional series we're running this year where we're celebrating, uh, the 10th anniversary of this show, and during the series, we bring back some of our favorite guests and do a top 10 list.

I'm gonna change." I mean, she just went into a dissertation to the doctors, preventing them from giving her the information that she knows would have affected the cells in her body.

We spoke to Dr. Ellen Langer from Harvard on the podcast, and she describes that a prognosis is simply a mathematical probability based on everyone else.

They're not able to consider all the multiple variables of that individual.

So while you should never necessarily outright ignore the fact that you may have a specific condition that needs, um, treatment, limiting yourself to the statistical average doesn't take into account our unique situation and, and what's possible for us.

And so that inhibition might look like rationalizing ways to not try something or rationalizing not, changing your prices or not releasing a new product something like that it'll feel very rational in the moment because it's a very tricky subconscious mechanism there it's difficult to track down that that sort of saboteur or the way that the system can be hitting the brake but it is like like sort of pulling the emergency brake trying to limit you from doing something that might otherwise be perceived as unsafe and one of the cool things about exploring these different parallels is that it has helped me understand even more concretely and have an even greater sense of conviction around the work that we're doing in the muscle and nerve business right we're not really in the muscle and nerve business we're in the safety business and everything else follows from that and that framework helps us understand ways to be more effective with patients and clients every day.

And it also leads to this sort of foundational metaphor where Ellen Langer, I'll give her some credit.

Ellen Langer is a psychologist at Harvard and has several famous studies that I'm gonna talk about next.

And I love her most recent book as of the early 2020s, it's called The Mindful Body.

subtitle is Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health.

I'm also fascinated by some of these examples that I'll share next of how entering through the mind door affects the mind body system.

And there's really some fascinating examples.

So these are from Ellen Langer and her students, some of whom have become famous scientists in their own right, including Alia Crum, including Adam Grant.