Chapter 1: How can our mindset change our physical health?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm going to say something that might sound too good to be true, but I want you to stick with me. What if the way that you think could change your physical health and improve how you feel how you deal with stress.
What if a simple shift in your mindset would boost your energy, enhance recovery, charge your immune system, make you heal faster, even slow down the aging process? Well, Dr. Ellen Langer is here, and holy cow, she says, you better believe it can. She's the pioneering Harvard professor. who says, after 50 years of research, it is very clear your body follows what your mind believes.
And look, feel free to bring all the skepticism you want. Dr. Langer is unshakable.
Chapter 2: What does Dr. Langer's research say about mindfulness?
She's going to convince you that this is true because she has the science. Your mind isn't just along for the ride, it's driving the car. And look, this research, this isn't just sitting around in some journal collecting dust. It's having a profound effect on people around the world just like you. You are so much more powerful than you know.
And today, Dr. Langer is going to teach you how to use your mind to heal your body and give yourself the gift of a happier, healthy life from the inside out.
Olipa kerran hyvä haltija, joka loihti taikasauvallaan herkullisen jouluaterjan kaikille metsän asukeille. Siinä oli tarjolla jos jonkinmoista herkkua. Oli rosollia, silakkaa, kinkkua, laatikoita, graavattua lohta ja... Jaha, joo, tämähän ei ollutkaan joulusatu. Tämähän olikin ostoslista.
Chapter 3: What are the surprising results from the elderly men's study?
Ja se on pitkä. No, onneksi kaikki ainekset herkulliseen jouluun saat. S-Marketista. Joulu on ruokaa. S-Market.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It's always such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I just want to take a sec and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
Today, you're going to learn how to use your mind to heal your body based on 50 years of groundbreaking research done by a legendary professor at Harvard. Dr. Ellen Langer is one of the most respected psychology professors in the world. She earned her PhD from Yale, and she was the first female professor ever tenured in the psychology department at Harvard.
Dr. Langer is the author of 12 books, including her latest bestseller, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Dr. Langer's groundbreaking work has also earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Distinguished Scientist Awards, the Liberty Science Genius Award, and some of the highest honors in psychology.
She'll tell you that mindfulness is medicine, and she's here today to teach you how to unlock the power of your thoughts to heal your body. The legend. Dr. Ellen Langer, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
I am so thrilled you're here. I'm just, I can't wait to get into this. And I guess where I want to start is the person who is with us right now has made time, they have no time, but they've made time to be here with you, Dr. Langer, to learn from you.
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Chapter 4: How can beliefs influence recovery from illness?
What might change about their life
Once you understand what I mean by mindfulness and how easy it is, it has nothing to do with meditation. No matter what you're doing, whether you're doing a podcast, reading, eating, taking care of a child, playing tennis, you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. Everything changes.
I had this slide when I used to give these lectures, as I still do, and I say on the slide, virtually all of our problems, whether personal, interpersonal, professional, global, are the direct or indirect consequences of our mindlessness. Now, it's interesting because then I tell them, just among us and the other 10 million people I've said this to, I really mean all. So that's enormous, right?
I'm saying all of our problems are a result of our mindlessness. So if we're able to get people to understand how easy it is to change their mind, to become more mindful, whatever ails them should dissipate.
So what made you want to study the mind-body connection in the first place?
Let me tell you three stories. Okay. So I got married when I was obscenely young. Don't tell anybody. And we go to Paris on our honeymoon. We're in this restaurant, and I order a mixed grill. On the plate was pancreas. So I asked my then-husband, which of these is the pancreas?
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Chapter 5: What impact does language have on our health perceptions?
He was more sophisticated than I. He points to that. I eat everything. I'm a big eater. Now comes the moment of truth. I still don't understand why I thought that being married meant I had to eat the pancreas. But somehow I felt as a young person, a sophisticated woman of the world, because I was now married, should eat it. I start eating it, and I literally get sick. He starts laughing.
I said, why are you laughing? He said, because that's chicken. You ate the pancreas earlier. Okay, so I had made myself sick. Now we go to my mother who had breast cancer and the cancer had metastasized to her pancreas. That's the end game. Okay, so the medical world was no longer treating her.
She became crippled because they weren't gonna exercise her limbs, which made sense if you assume she was gonna die. And then magically, the cancer was totally gone. So somehow I made myself sick, she made herself well. And of course, during those times, I hadn't yet conceived of mind-body unity.
Chapter 6: How does mindset affect stress and decision-making?
But I had another story that was kind of fun. I think I tell it in the Mindful Body, but I haven't told it on a podcast before. So when I was about, I guess I was 14, I had a friend and I lived in Westchester and I had a friend who lived in the Bronx and she was 15 or 16. So she was in charge because she was the older woman. And I would go visit her every Saturday.
And every Saturday, for whatever reason, We'd go and have, she would have a hot fudge sundae or a banana split. Now, I was always on a diet, so I never had it. Nevertheless, while she was eating, I was eating it with her in my mind. And I swear to you, Mel. that when she was finished, I was full.
These things together suggest in each case that here I'm thinking that I'm eating, but I'm not eating, and my body is feeling satisfied. I think I'm eating this pancreas, and it's chicken, which I love, and then I get sick. Or my mother, however she did it, where the pancreatic cancer goes away.
So do you believe your mom healed herself based on her thoughts?
You know, it wasn't based on anything the medical world could explain. So what else is left?
So those are examples of things that happened before you could articulate this theory about mind-body unity. So how do you articulate the theory now?
Yes, your mind, people have no idea, I think, in general about what we're capable of.
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Chapter 7: What strategies can we use to become more mindful?
The power is enormous. And so the way I encapsulate this to make clear it's our physical well-being as well as our emotional, mental way of being is to question what people mindlessly accept without knowing they're accepting it, which is mind-body dualism.
Mind-body dualism? Dualism. What does that mean? Exactly.
Nobody knows what it means, but everybody acts. That's why you're here. Exactly. Everybody acts as if this is true. You have a mind and you have a body, as if these are separate. All right. And so if they're separate, you run into the problem of how do they speak to each other? Now, everybody knows that the mind is affecting the body in some way. Right.
Well, we know that because if you're stressed out, if you're ruminating, if you get really negative, you know that it makes your body feel bad.
Yeah, but you see somebody vomiting, and all of a sudden you feel like you're going to regurgitate, and there's no reason except that person has stimulated this. So you're walking down the street in the fall, a leaf blows in your face, and all of a sudden you're startled. Your blood pressure and pulse increase until you say, oh, it was just a leaf. Right.
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Chapter 8: How can we apply the mind-body connection in daily life?
So we have lots of experiences like this. But way back when, the medical world believed that psychology was independent of health. And I'm sure doctors in the past still wanted you to be happy. But I think that they believed it was totally separate from the disease process. In the medical model, the belief was to get a disease, you have to have the introduction of an antigen.
Now, people, and I think that I might have had some... part in bringing it about, although people still get it wrong when they talk now about the mind-body connection. What do they get wrong? That's better than we have two separate things. Now they're connected. Well, the reason it's wrong, how are they connected?
How do you get from this fuzzy thing called a thought to something material called a body? And you can't explain it. I say, wait, these are just words. You know, this is going to sound silly, but you could have had mind, body, and elbows. And then we consider people in a different way. Let's just put mind and body back together. You're one person. It's one thing. Now think of it.
If it's one thing, wherever you're putting one mind and body, you're putting the other. What that means is that our minds have enormous control over our bodies. And once we recognize that, then we can harness some of our own power and cure many of the disorders or certainly help along many of the problems that afflict too many of us.
So when you use the word mindful, though, you're not talking about meditation. You've got a very different definition for what mindfulness is when you're talking about the power of your mindset and its ability to influence your body. Dr. Langer, what does mindfulness mean to you?
Okay, yes, very important. So when people hear the word mindfulness, in spite of the fact that I've been doing this for over 50 years, people still think of meditation. Meditation is fine, it's just different. Okay, to meditate, you take yourself out of the world and you sit still for 20 minutes twice a day. It's a practice. And what it's supposed to do, it's not mindfulness.
It's supposed to lead you to become more mindful. Mindfulness, as I study, it is not a practice. It's just a way of being. And it results from a deep, deep, but easy, appreciation of the power of uncertainty. We're taught by our parents, by schools, everything you read are giving us these absolutes, these rules, as if we know that this thing is true right now is going to be true forever.
Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So we can't know. Now, this came to mind to me years ago, but it's really, for me, it was a very important incident. I'm at this horse event. Remember that I'm a straight-A student, obnoxiously so, right? And this man asked me, can I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog?
Wait a minute. Horses don't eat hot dogs. They eat carrots. They eat grains. They don't eat meat.
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