Can Your Mind Change How You Age? | Ellen Langer

**Ellen Langer** (0:00)
When you realize that you don't know, you tune in. When you tune in, everything is exciting. The neurons are firing, and the 45, 50 years of research that I've done on this show that it's literally and figuratively enlivened. So you wanna be happy, actively notice. You wanna live longer, actively notice. If you're gonna do it, be there for it, show up.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis Podcast with Chip Conley, where we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful chapter of your life.

**Chip Conley** (0:41)
Welcome to The Midlife Chrysalis. This is Chip Conley. And you're gonna hear a Bronx accent from this gal. Ellen Langer is famous. She's the first woman ever tenured in psychology at Harvard.
She's been called the mother of mindfulness, the mother of positive psychology. Her work is legendary in terms of helping people to understand the mindset of aging. Talked a lot about Becca Levy and her work about showing that if you can shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive, you gain seven and a half years of additional life. Well, Ellen was Becca's teacher. But most importantly, Ellen questions everything. And she's just a fun person to hang out with and to argue with. It's hard to get a word in with her. But she's an inspiration. And I think what you're going to find in this episode is just the fact that all the good and the bad in life is in our heads. It's not in the circumstances. It's in how we respond to those circumstances.
And I'm going to start thinking on a bad day, what would Ellen do? Because she's got a very positive point of view on life. I hope you'll enjoy this episode. And at the end, I'll tell you my three key lessons. Ellen Langer, you're somebody I would love to just go and give a big hug to. I don't know if, do you take hugs?

**Ellen Langer** (1:59)
Oh yes, yeah, I'm a hugger.

**Chip Conley** (2:01)
Okay, I'm a hugger too. All right. Well, it's great to see you again. And thank you for being here on The Midlife Chrysalis. Let's dive in. I want to talk about mindfulness. I want to talk about counterclockwise. I want to talk about your relationship with aging personally. But let's start with this idea of mindfulness because you're one of the people, maybe the person, who helped to introduce the idea of mindfulness to the Western world.
What's your definition of mindfulness?

**Ellen Langer** (2:25)
Okay, so when I first started studying mindfulness, which is way back early, late 70s, early 80s, I was studying meditation. And when people hear the word mindfulness, most people still today think of meditation. But I broke away from that. Meditation is fine, but meditation is a practice.
And I came to understand that there's a very different way of becoming mindful. And it's so simple, Chip, it almost defies belief. All you need to do is notice. Now, people think they're noticing all the time, but it turns out that virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. When you think you know, you don't pay any attention. And the problem is that, or my definition of mindlessness is frequently in error, but rarely in doubt, all right? Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. So in fact, we virtually never know. So what I do to explain this to people, to persuade them, I'm doing this in person, I might ask, cause I'll ask you Chip, how much is one plus one? This is the fact that people all over the world think they know.
And so if I did ask you this, I'm a cocktail party, you'd probably find a reason to walk away from me. Right, because you think it ridiculous. But how much is one plus one?

**Chip Conley** (3:50)
Two.

**Ellen Langer** (3:51)
No, not always. You see, if you're using a base 10 number system, one plus one is two.
If you're using a base two number system, one plus one is written as 10, but who cares about number system? So nobody understands that.

**Chip Conley** (4:05)
Unless you're a caretaker.

**Ellen Langer** (4:07)
If you add one wand of chewing gum plus one wand of chewing gum, one plus one is one.
If you add one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. If you add one cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one. I can go on endlessly. All right. So in the real world, one plus one probably doesn't equal to as a more often as it does. So what difference does it make? Now imagine somebody asks you how much is one plus one. All of a sudden, you're in control, you have choices. You pay attention to the context because you can say one, ten, or two. When you're a robot, you don't have these choices, you've been programmed, and when we're acting mindlessly, we're no different from robots. Speaking of robots, do you know any happy robots? All right. Well, the only even know what's a robot.