How Your Mind Controls Your Body: Dr. Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness Research. Episode 535
How Your Mind Controls Your Body: Dr. Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness Research
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You are doing everything right for your health and you still don’t feel like yourself. Dr. Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist known as the mother of mindfulness, has spent fifty years showing that the mind and body are not two separate systems. They are one. And when you understand that, it changes everything about how much influence you actually have over your own well‑being.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why “mind-body connection” is actually the wrong way to think about mindfulness and health, and what to believe instead
- How your expectations about your body (coffee keeping you up, catching a cold, feeling fatigued) can directly create the physical symptoms you’re bracing for
- Why women especially get stuck waiting for certainty before starting a business, and how to make peace with uncertainty instead
- The simple daily practice of “noticing new things” that Dr. Langer’s research links to longer life and more happiness
Timestamps:
(00:00) – Why Dr. Langer is called the mother of mindfulness
(00:58) – What has surprised her most about her own work after 50 years
(02:06) – The history of mind-body unity research, and why “mind-body connection” undersells it
(05:06) – The two pancreas stories from her book, “The Mindful Body”
(07:15) – The coffee experiment that shows how belief creates physical reality
(09:36) – The “how much is one plus one” question and what it teaches about mindlessness
(13:06) – Making peace with uncertainty as a business owner
(16:03) – A nursing home story on why running risks is the essence of being alive
(18:56) – Reframing failure: the glue that became the Post-it Note
(22:50) – The Counterclockwise Study on reversing signs of aging
(23:47) – The chambermaid study on mindset and exercise
(25:04) – The wound-healing study on perceived time
(27:24) – The “borderline effect” in medical diagnosis
(29:06) – Why fatigue is largely a psychological construct
Links to great things we discussed:
I hope you loved this episode! 🎉
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