The Harvard Scientist Who Says You Can Use Your Thoughts To Improve Your Health | Ellen Langer

10% Happier with Dan Harris

10% Media, LLC

Dan Harris, Health & Fitness, Mindfulness, Dharma, Mental Health, Meditation

4.6 • 12.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2024

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The connection between your psychology and your health, and how to work with it.

Ellen J. Langer is the author of eleven books, including the international bestseller

Mindfulness, which has been translated into fifteen languages, and Counterclockwise:

Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. Most recently, she is the author of The

Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health.

Langer is the recipient of, among other numerous awards and honors, a Guggenheim

Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public

Interest from the American Psychological Association, the Award for Distinguished

Contributions of Basic Science to the Application of Psychology from the American

Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, and the Adult Development and

Aging Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological

Association.

She is the author of more than 200 research articles and her trailblazing experiments in

social psychology have earned her inclusion in The New York Times Magazine’s “Year

in Ideas” issue. A member of the psychology department at Harvard University and a

painter, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In this episode we talk about:

The power of placebos
Why she isn’t a fan of positive thinking as it is talked about in new age circles
Her version of mindfulness, which is quite different from the version we usually talk about here on the show, which comes out of Buddhism
Psychological treatments for chronic illness
Smart strategies for reframing aging.
Why the world would be boring if you knew it all
What she means by her concept of a “mindful utopia”
And her favorite one liners

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wundry Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now.
0:05.0	Join Wundry Plus in the Wundry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:08.0	This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody how we doing
0:29.7	how we doing you might have looked at the title of this episode and thought has Dan lost his mind.
0:35.2	He built his career, at least in part, on rebutting the power of positive thinking, that
0:40.3	magical notion that you can use the so-called law of attraction to
0:44.4	control your health or make yourself rich. Making matters worse perhaps is the
0:49.4	fact that today's episode comes on top of an interview a few weeks ago where I talked to a
0:53.8	Stanford neuroscientist who got me to open my mind to the possibility of
0:57.7	manifestation. I'll drop a link to that episode in the show notes if you missed
1:01.6	it. Anyway, the short answer here is no, I have not lost my mind.
1:04.8	That Stanford Scientist who talked about manifestation readily admitted that
1:09.1	his version involves no magic whatsoever.
1:12.4	And the same holds true for the Harvard scientist
1:14.8	you're going to hear from today who has spent several decades over her illustrious
1:19.3	career demonstrating that
1:25.0	famous phrase, the mind-body-body connection,
1:26.0	in fact, she makes a compelling case
1:28.0	that that famous phrase, the mind-body connection,
1:31.0	actually understates the truth of the matter. She calls it
1:34.1	mind body unity. Ellen J. Langer is a member of the Psychology Department at
1:39.0	Harvard. She's the author of more than 200 research articles. She's also written 11 books. Her latest is
	...

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