![]() ![]() ![]() So the Eastern notions - I did research, again, back in the ’80s, on transcendental meditation, and that’s also - meditation is also useful, but it’s quite different, and different ways of getting to the same place. As you’re noticing new things, it’s engaging, and it turns out, after a lot of research, that we find that it’s literally, not just figuratively, enlivening. When you actively notice new things, that puts you in the present, makes you sensitive to context. Langer: And so mindfulness, for me, is the very simple process of actively noticing new things. This was all a Western scientific notion as I was developing it. And when I address the difference between mindlessness and mindfulness - so since my mindlessness was leading in my thinking, there was no reason for me to appeal to anything Eastern. ![]() Langer: Most people are just not there, and they’re not there to know that they’re not there. Langer: No, yeah, well, actually, in the early ’70s, I was studying mindlessness, and found, and continue to find, that mindlessness is pervasive. I’m just wondering, did you ever investigate this mindfulness the way Buddhism talked about, or have you always just explored it separately? Tippett: OK, so let me ask you the question this way. So in study after study, we plug in - we manipulate this mindfulness and change the measures from study to study, and almost no matter what we put in, that when we encourage people to be more mindful, we find enormous improvements. And the consequences of being in one state of mind or the other are enormous. As I’m fond of saying, whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it either mindfully or mindlessly. And I find that I’m not infrequently - not frequently, but not infrequently, I, too, am mindless. And you say that with a smile on your face, but you mean it. Tippett: So one of the things you’ve said is that most of us live mindlessly, virtually all of the time. And I think it was because they were so supportive that I had the strength, courage, whatever, without feeling it that way, to ask questions and to be out in the world the way many others might have been inhibited.Īlso, people were constantly saying to me, why are you smiling? And so I was aware, very early on, that most of the people that I was meeting, in all different environments, were less than happy. My parents were wonderfully supportive, and my mother was so supportive, she would have had me laminated if she could have - always bragging about me. Tippett: I do always start my interviews by asking, was there a religious or spiritual or philosophical background to your childhood that had anything to do with what you now describe as mindfulness? Was that there in the - no? Tippett: Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Ellen Langer has shown it’s possible to become physiologically younger through a changed frame of mind, to find joy in what was experienced as drudgery by renaming it as play, and to induce weight loss by substituting the label “exercise” for “labor.” What makes a vacation a vacation is not only a change of scenery, but the fact that we let go of the mindless, everyday illusion that we are in control. It comes straight out of her provocative, unconventional studies, which have been suggesting for decades what neuroscience is pointing at now: Our experience of everything is formed by the words and ideas we attach to them. Her take on mindfulness has never involved contemplation or meditation or yoga. Krista Tippett, host: Ellen Langer is a social psychologist who some have dubbed “the mother of mindfulness.” But she defines mindfulness with counterintuitive simplicity - “the simple act of actively noticing things,” with the result of increased health, competence, and happiness. And you should get to the point where you’re treating yourself, whether you’re at work or at play, in basically the same way. We have the same needs we had when we were on vacation. We make them mindfully, and then we start to use them mindlessly, forgetting that when we’re at work, we’re people. And we have brains, brawn, so on, all the different distinctions that we make. Ellen Langer: We have these categories - work, life. ![]()
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