How to Stop Letting Your Own Thoughts Make You Sick, Stressed, and Stuck with Dr. Ellen Langer

**Simon Sinek** (0:00)
We get stressed by the story we tell ourselves of what could happen, which could be fact, but it could also be fiction. Mindfulness is a way of changing the story.

**Ellen Langer** (0:09)
If you are experiencing something, you have available to yourself opportunity to reevaluate it, to reframe it, to understand it differently. And the more mindful you are, the more alternative ways of understanding it come to mind.

**Simon Sinek** (0:25)
Is this a tragedy or an inconvenience? That's the question my guest, Dr. Ellen Langer, wants us to ask ourselves the next time life goes sideways. Because most of the time, the bad things that happen to us, the things that feel like tragedies, like losing a job or a relationship, if we're really, really honest with ourselves. For most of us, they're not really tragedies. They're just really inconvenient. Dr. Langer's 45 years of research show us that that single distinction can dramatically reduce stress. That's why she's often called the mother of mindfulness.
She's a psychologist, Harvard professor, and author of the books, The Mindful Body and Finding Happy, both of which argue that thinking differently is good for our mood and for our bodies. If you like this episode, please remember to subscribe. This is A Bit of Optimism.
Mindfulness is really trendy right now.

**Ellen Langer** (1:31)
Oh, it's been trendy for the last, I don't know, 30 years. But okay, right now.

**Simon Sinek** (1:36)
Mindfulness is trendy, and like many things that have...

**Ellen Langer** (1:42)
Nobody knows what it is. That's exactly right.

**Simon Sinek** (1:44)
The word gets overused to the point of corruption, like authenticity, like these things that actually are really important, but they lose their substance. And so just as a really good level set.

**Ellen Langer** (1:58)
Okay, let's start by my telling your audience, what is mindfulness?

**Simon Sinek** (2:03)
There we go. What is it? Because it's not some oowee-dooee hippie-dippie thing.

**Ellen Langer** (2:07)
No, it's not a hippie-dippie thing at all. In fact, when people hear the word mindfulness, many think of meditation, and meditation is fine. Meditation is a practice. You sit quietly for 20 minutes, twice a day, take yourself out of the world, repeat a mantra. And I did some of the early research on meditation. It's wonderful, but that's different from what I do. Mindfulness, as I study it, is not a practice. It's just a way of being that naturally follows from an understanding that uncertainty is ubiquitous. We don't know. We think we know. In fact, one of my definitions of mindlessness, the other side of this, is that we're frequently in error, but rarely in doubt. Everything we're taught in school by our parents, the world at large, teaches us absolutes. These absolutes are invariably wrong part of the time. I'm an A++ student when I was a student. I go to this horse of mine, and this man says, well, I watch his horse for him because he wants to get his horse a hot dog. What are you kidding?
I say yes, because that's what the nice thing to do is, but horses don't eat meat. Nobody knows that better than I, the straight A student, the genius. He comes back with a hot dog, and the horse ate it.
That's when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong.
Most people would be worried about that, but for me it was very exciting because that meant all sorts of possibilities opened up that otherwise would be closed. Think about it, most of our facts, or our facts at least that come from science, when you do an experiment, what you get at the end of this is a probability. The probability is that if we were to do this exact same thing again, we're likely to get the same findings. Imagine we wanted to see do horses eat meat. We'd have to pick what kind of horses, not all horses are the same, how heavy are they? We'd have to decide when the last time they were to be in bed before the experiment, how much meat would we mix with, how much grain? And at the end, we'd find that most of the horses didn't eat meat. It's a mouthful, so it's shortened, horses don't eat meat. But it's simply wrong. The other one that I'm fond of sharing with people is, okay, don't feel put on the spot, Simon, how much is one plus one?
Everybody knows.

**Simon Sinek** (4:32)
I'm gonna take a wild guess and go two.

**Ellen Langer** (4:34)
No, not always. So if you were to 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. If you add one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one, and somebody sent me one the other day. If you add one pizza and one pizza, you have two pizzas. But if you add one lasagna and one lasagna, you get one lasagna, just a bigger lasagna.