Ellen Langer and mindfulness

This video is Ellen Langer's TED Talk.  She's very quick, smart, and funny.  It covers a lot of ground that I feel like I'll be digging into.

Langer is known as the "mother of mindfulness."  Her version is completely not-religious.  It's also not "a practice."  Instead, she emphasizes, it's a "way of living."  This way of living involves constantly challenging yourself to notice new things, especially in typically-routine situations, like your daily commute.  A couple experiments she references involve asking participants (classical musicians (who she says are typically bored in concert) and door-to-door magazine salespeople) to do a "script" (the score or the written sales pitch) but "in your own way," or "in a way that was different in a way that only you would notice."  Each of them improved their performance in ways that outsiders who didn't know about the experiment found appealing.  She refers to this as what others call "charisma."  Another experiment asked people "what could you do with a product that was a temporary adhesive" which boosts creativity.  (This makes me think of "life is your curriculum"... reframing, making something of what you have).  She says that it makes you engaged with your world.  

A couple connections I'm making.  She says that our NORMAL state of being is mindlessness.  That's right in line with the style of Buddhist thinking that I'm interested in (Goldstein, Brach).  The "notice 10 things" activity that I do is right in line with what she's suggesting because the practice forces you to NAME new things that you're seeing or sensing.  (So, when I've been good with this practice, I'm doing Langer-style mindfulness.). I adapted this practice, I think from Sarah Susanka's The Not So Big Life, specifically her idea of stopping several times a day to say "what is happening RIGHT NOW?"  The difference between Langer and Susanka isn't just noticing "what is happening" but in actively seeking out what is "novel"(?) about a situation.  

Another connection.  At the NCTE conference where I learned about Kate Smith's Explore Your World book, the leaders of the seminar first asked the audience, "you've been in this room for 10 minutes waiting for us to begin.  Take a look around and notice five (?) things that you've not noticed before."  This is a Langer-esque activity for sure.  

Another connection.  The Gottman institute asks you to name your gratitude to your spouse.  This is good for the relationship.  Maybe it's good because it encourages you to engage with the actual person rather than your mindless image of the person.  Maybe it's good because the naming makes the other person feel like YOU are interested in them more... and that's a virtuous cycle.  

What I'm seeing now, though, is this connection among:  making your life into an exploration game, being grateful, building relationships, noting things in your environment (noticing), engagement, (maybe enthusiasm), getting OUT of your own head and INTO the actual real world (we don't notice things on the commute because we are in our own heads, in our own thoughts).

A couple more resources:

Langer talking to an International Women's Forum about using mindfulness during the pandemic.

WBUR interviewed Langer here and posted an article titled "9 Ways to be More Mindful from 'the Mother of Mindfulness,' Ellen Langer."  These 9 ideas seem like a pretty good summary of the interview and a good primer to Langer's work at that time:

1. Notice new things:
Ellen Langer: "You come to see that you didn't know what you thought you did as well as you did. And, because everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives. We tend to hold it still and think we know, and then life becomes uninteresting. By actively attending [and] noticing new things...the familiar becomes interesting again and we become more aware of the inherent uncertainty, and that promotes even more mindfulness."

2. Avoid being mindless:
EL: "We're taught to be mindless. We're taught in schools that there are absolute answers, we're — I think — mistakenly taught that those who know the most, win. And so, there seems to be an effort to hold things still so that you can feel you have control over them and, oddly or ironically, when you do that you're actually giving up control, because you're no longer in that moment where you can take advantage of benefits and opportunities and avoid mishaps."

3. Re-frame what you think of as negative attributes in your loved ones:
EL: "Let's say I say that you're impulsive...I'm not going to be fooled by you...But, in fact, since behavior always makes sense from the actor's perspective, or else the actor wouldn't do it, and you wouldn't intentionally be impulsive, that if I opened up my mind and looked at it more mindfully, I would see that you were probably being spontaneous. And so our whole interaction changes by my not being wedded to that negative trait description."

4. Be responsive, not reactive:
EL: "Right now, people are brought up to believe that if it's good, I have to have it. If it's bad, I have to stay way from it. And not realizing that the evaluation that you're making is in your head, not in the event. So, that when you see it's neither good nor bad, then you can just be still and notice...It speaks to bullying...Rarely, if you're feeling to be made small by somebody, [would] that would happen if that person had it all together. And so, instead of being intimidated, you should feel sorry for that person. And then, again, you can be responsive but not reactive."

5. Always look for growth:
EL: "You work the same job for 20 years, the same relationship for 20 years, people tend to be bored. And, again things like boredom, excitement, stress, these are in your mind. They're not in the events. And so the example that I use is...when your son is 20 years old, that's 20 years of watching him, talking to him...I doubt that at any time during that time you're going to be bored by him. We tend not to be bored with our children, we're not even bored with our plants. And the reason for that is that we expect them to grow, we expect them to change. And so, by looking for these differences, noticing what's new, we become engaged."

6. Change your thoughts, then you can change your body:
EL: "I'm saying that you change your mind from...doing this activity to, now it's exercise, exercise means it's going to be good for your health and you're going to lose weight and, bingo, you lose weight without anything intervening. That the people who now saw their work as exercise...that was the only thing that we could ascertain was different between the two groups. They're doing the same thing — one sees it as exercise, one doesn't, and the group that does results in a change in body mass index, waist to hip ratio, weight loss, blood pressure and so on."

7. Don't worry about meditating:
EL: "I did research on meditation 20, 30 years ago. No, this is a different way of getting, basically, to the same place. Meditation is a tool that sets you up for post-meditative mindfulness. My approach is, in some ways, more direct. So, rather than, 'Come, over time, after you meditate, to see that it's only a thought that's driving you crazy.' I say, 'Let's go in and attack the thing.' You know? You say it's bad, let's look at all the ways it's good. You're sure it's going to happen? Let's look at all the ways that it might not happen and you end up, again, believing that the stressor doesn't have to have the negative effects on you."

8. Don't have "worries before their time":
EL: "What happens is that, with the worry....we've wasted all this time and the event may not even occur. So, that's why we should put it off. But it's also the case that there is really no time for the worry because the worry suggests, again, that, 'Oh my goodness, this is going to be awful.' And it's delight or awfulness are our function of the views you're going to take."

9. Strive for work-life integration instead of work-life balance:
EL: "Right now, from many people, behavior is context-dependent. You act the way the situation demands implicitly. And that when you really get it together, that you should be deciding to be the same person regardless of the context that you're in. And in doing that, you can take the benefits from one context and bring it to another. So, lots of business gurus say, go for work-life balance and, certainly, work-life balance is better than work-life imbalance. However, I think better still is work-life integration. You're going to be Anthony whether you're at work, whether you're with your son trying to get into the bathroom, no matter where you are. The point being that there are things that we do at home, the absence of stress, for instance, that we should introduce to our work life. There are things that we do at work where we come with a more serious focus that we could introduce to things we do at home