Ellen J. Langer is a social psychologist, writer, and Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, widely regarded as the founder of the psychology of mindfulness. Her research challenges deeply held assumptions about habit, certainty, ageing, and control, showing how mindless patterns of thought can limit human potential, while mindful attention can transform everyday experience.She is the author of numerous influential books, including Mindfulness, The Power of Mindful Learning, Counterclockwise, and On Becoming an Artist, many of which have been translated internationally. Langer’s work continues to shape contemporary discussions of wisdom by reframing it not as accumulated knowledge, but as an ongoing practice of attentive engagement with the world.
Zan Boag: I want to start with your definition of wisdom and why you think wisdom matters in our lives from moment to moment.
Ellen J. Langer: The way I understand wisdom is that it’s very closely akin to mindfulness. The best way to understand how mindfulness is wise is to understand mindlessness. When you’re mindless, you’re no different from a robot: the past is overdetermining the present, and you have no opportunity to make choices, to be happier, or to experience emotions. Most of us, sadly, are mindless almost all the time. That’s why wisdom seems so rare, just as mindfulness seems rare, but it doesn’t have to be.
I teach a course in health psychology at Harvard with very smart students, and I keep telling them that they don’t have to wait until they’re older to learn these things. What is it that you’re learning as you age? You have experiences that vary. If you only went to one cocktail party, you’d think that’s what cocktail parties are like. When you’re 50 years old and you’ve gone to 20 cocktail parties, you see there’s a great deal of variability. It’s in recognising that variability that wisdom lives. It’s an opportunity to see that things don’t have to be any particular way. Experience can teach us to be wiser, but not always, because if your experience is repetitive – this is the way to do it, and you do it the same way over and over again – that’s neither mindful nor wise.
A very important thing for people to understand is that mindfulness, as I study it, has nothing to do with meditation. Meditation is fine; it’s just separate. Meditation is a practice you engage in, hopefully to result in post-meditative mindfulness.
Mindfulness, as we study it, isn’t a practice. It’s a way of being, and it comes about through the simple but difficult understanding of uncertainty. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives, so we can’t know. People are afraid of not knowing because they think they should know. Once you realise that nobody knows – some people pretend they do, but nobody knows – it becomes very easy to pay attention to what’s going on and to learn new things.
When I give lectures on this, I often start by asking people how much is “one plus one”. That’s a fact everyone is taught, everyone is sure of, and you’ll dutifully answer “two”. But it isn’t always two. In a base 10 number system, one plus one is two. In a base two system, “one plus one” is written as “10”. To make it real: if you add one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. You add one pile of laundry to one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. You add one cloud to one cloud, one plus one is one. In the real world, it doesn’t equal two as often as we think. Once you realise that a question like this can be answered in many different ways, you start paying attention to context. You sit up and notice, and you have choices. When you’re mindless, you don’t have any choice.
My world changed for me many years ago when I was at a horse event. A man asked if I would watch his horse while he went to get it a hot dog. A hot dog? Are you crazy? Horses are herbivores; they don’t eat meat. But I smiled and said, of course. He came back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. That’s when I realised everything I thought I knew could be wrong. Thinking more about it, I realised that our facts tend to come from science, and science doesn’t give us absolutes; experiments give us probabilities. Imagine doing an experiment with horses. You’d have to know how big the horses were, when they last ate, how much meat was mixed with how much grain, what time of day they were fed. After all that, you’d find that most of them don’t eat meat – and so it becomes “horses don’t eat meat”.
Once you know that everything you know could be wrong, you sit up and pay attention. Most people would be frightened by that realisation. For me, it was very exciting, because it opened up all sorts of possibility.
You think that certainty is an illusion… do you think that wisdom, as Socrates suggested, begins with recognising, as you’re saying, how little we can be certain of and how little we truly know?
Exactly. It’s an odd thing. People seek certainty so they don’t have to worry about things, so they can feel in control of what’s happening. But it’s that very assumption of certainty that robs them of real control. Once you’re certain, you’re not really there anymore. There’s no reason to pay attention – as soon as I ask you how much is one plus one, you stop listening to me.
In reading through what you’ve written and what you’ve spoken about in interviews, you seem to focus a lot on the deceptively simple act of ‘noticing’.
Right. There are two ways someone can become mindful, as I understand it: top down or bottom up.
Top down means accepting that everything is uncertain. That’s hard for people, because your parents, your schooling, and most of what you hear in the media is presented as certainty. If you could, even for a moment, adopt the mindset that you don’t know, you would already be wiser.
The other way is bottom up. That means noticing. Look at the person you live with, if you live with someone, and notice three new things about them. Walk outside and notice three new things. Go to the office and notice three new things about it. Each time you notice something new about what you thought you knew, you realise, “I didn’t really know that at all.” And that naturally leads you to accept how pervasive uncertainty really is.
A lot of people feel very uncomfortable and they resist uncertainty. How do we tolerate it and accept uncertainty as part of our lives?
That’s a very good question. There are two things.
The first is recognising that nobody knows. You have to make uncertainty universal. Right now, people treat uncertainty as a personal failing: I don’t know, but I don’t want to look like an idiot, so I’ll fake it. If instead you make a universal attribution–I don’t know, you don’t know–then not knowing takes on a very different flavour.
The second thing is that people feel they have to know in order to protect themselves from negative outcomes. They do everything they can to get the good things and avoid the bad things. But things, in and of themselves, are neither good nor bad.
It’s like stress. Stress doesn’t follow from events; stress follows from the view you take of events. If you take a more mindful view and can see how something might also be an advantage, the stress dissipates very quickly.
This stress that you’re talking about here, our reaction to an event, it’s mind-made, as you call it. How do stress, attention, and poor decision making interact with one another? We face a particularly difficult moment in time – that has changed over the course of your life and my life – in which it’s very difficult to pay attention all the time. There are so many demands on our attention. How do we deal with this? How can we be mindful in such a difficult moment?
It’s interesting. I can’t tell you how many times over the years people have said to me, “There’s just too much information now. How can we deal with all of it?” But there isn’t more information than there was before. If you were a farmer, you could go on endlessly describing wheat. There has always been a tremendous amount of information.
What’s different now is that people believe it’s in their best interest to master more of that information. I don’t think there’s much evidence for that.
When it comes to decision-making, people think they should do a cost–benefit analysis. But costs and benefits are ideas in our heads. If every cost can also be seen as a benefit, then you can’t simply add them up and know what to do.
To make it concrete, if I say, “Do you want to meet my friend Joe? He’s very spontaneous,” you say, “Sure, bring him along.” If I say, “Do you want to meet my friend Joe? He’s very impulsive,” you say, “No, are you kidding?” But spontaneous and impulsive describe the same behaviour.
Another issue is that people think they need to gather information, but nobody can know how much information is enough. There’s no natural stopping point. So you keep gathering information, feel overwhelmed, make a decision – and then discover that the next piece of information would have changed the meaning of everything.When you put all of this together, you arrive at a strange but liberating place: instead of trying to make the right decision, make the decision right.
I once asked my graduate students to spend a week not making decisions in the usual way. Flip a coin, use a simple heuristic, go with the first thing that comes to mind–just don’t do cost–benefit analyses. (Obviously, if someone says, “Kill somebody for me,” you don’t flip a coin.)
They came back the following week and told me the week had been largely stress-free. Worrying about whether you’re making the right decision is extremely stressful, and you can never know that anyway. What people don’t realise is that we make decisions in order to act, and once you act, you can’t know what the alternatives would have produced. I give the example of choosing
between Harvard and Yale. You choose Harvard and hate it. Should you now go to Yale? You’ll never be a first-semester freshman again, so there’s no way of knowing. Regret is mindless, because it assumes the road not taken would have been better. It might have been worse, it might have been the same–but in truth, it’s none of those things. It’s only what you make of it.
Many decades ago, I read an interview with a share trader, and he said something very similar. He said it didn’t matter how you started your trade, rather it was a matter of what you did afterwards – whether you bought or sold to begin with was irrelevant. What was important was the decisions that you made after that initial trade; when you were in play. He agreed that you shouldn’t analyse things too much – instead, make a decision and then how you deal with that decision that would determine how things turned out for you.
Exactly, yes, because there really is no rational way to deal with it. What’s interesting to me is that people don’t actually do cost–benefit analyses before making decisions. They make decisions based on who knows what, and then they gather a little information afterwards to justify them. Then someone else says, “How could you have done that stupid thing?”
Years ago, I was contacted by NBC News for a program about people getting involved in so-called get-rich-quick schemes. They wanted me to say, “Aren’t these people stupid?” But nobody gets involved in something they think is a get-rich-quick scheme. You get involved in something that makes sense to you at the time. It’s only afterwards, when it doesn’t work, that people label it that way. At the moment you act, you’re behaving as if it’s a wise speculation.
The larger point is that behaviour makes sense from the actor’s perspective, or else the actor wouldn’t do it. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I’m going to be obnoxious, rude, aggressive, or impulsive.” When people behave that way, it’s because, from their perspective, each so-called negative trait has a positive counterpart that’s just as powerful.
For example, someone might come to you for help because they’re impulsive. You help them try not to be impulsive, but they keep returning to that behaviour because their intention isn’t to be impulsive; it’s to be spontaneous. Or someone might be inconsistent and drive their friends or partner crazy. You try to help them be more consistent, but you fail as long as they value being flexible.
We did a study that explored this. We gave people a list of about 200 behavioural descriptions and asked them to circle the things they kept trying to change about themselves and failing. For me, it was “impulsive” and “gullible.” Then we gave them a second list, in a mixed order, with the positive versions of those traits, and asked them to circle the qualities they really valued about themselves. For me, it was being trusting and spontaneous–and that’s why I’m gullible and impulsive.
What happens then is that people stop coming down so hard on themselves. They begin to understand why they did what they did, even if the outcome didn’t work in their favour. Relationships improve too, because once you understand behaviour from another person’s perspective, you’re far less inclined to disparage them.
One thing that I mentioned right at the beginning that I’d like to get to… some of the decisions I make, perhaps aren’t the best, although I’d like to think I’m capable of being wise. Is there a gap between being wise and then acting wisely in stressful or difficult situations? How do we bridge this gap between being wise and acting wisely? Let’s say, you’re angry or you’re emotional in some way. How can we make better decisions in emotional situations?
I understand what you’re saying, but I question the basic assumption. I don’t think there is a gap. When you’re wise, you behave wisely. If you’re not behaving wisely, then you weren’t wise in that moment.
Take anger. Anger means that you looked at a situation and only saw the ways it was negative. That negative framing was controlling you, so you responded just as you would have in the past and blew up.
I was doing a podcast recently and trying to explain that outcomes are in our heads. They’re not in events. I gave an example: if the internet goes out right now, so what? I’ll go and have lunch. I remember this because, right after I said it, the internet actually did go out, and I walked the walk. I didn’t just talk. I went and had lunch.
It reminds me of the fable The Fox and the Grapes. The fox reaches for the grapes, can’t reach them, and says, “They’re probably sour anyway.” We’re taught that this is rationalising. But being mindful and wise is very different from rationalising, because it’s a going-forward strategy. It’s knowing from the outset that anything can be understood in multiple ways, and that whatever you’re doing, you can find an advantage in it.
When you approach situations this way, a great deal of negative emotion simply doesn’t arise in the first place.
I’d like to reiterate the question: How do you bridge the gap between knowing what is wise and doing what is wise?
They’re not separate questions. Once you know that you can’t know for sure – and we agree on that, that uncertainty is the rule, not the exception – then you take action. That action made sense, given at least one of the understandings that preceded it.
If you remember that, you don’t come down hard on yourself or on the other person. And if you’re mindful – or wise, to use your language – you’re not stuck on a single path.
You take some action. For example, I might explain to you why you shouldn’t do something because I thought you had done it. When I realise that you didn’t do it, I should simply stop that part of the conversation right there and say, “Oh, I thought you did it for this reason, and I’m so glad that was wrong.”
That flexibility is the key. You’re able to move forward without being trapped by your earlier assumptions.
One other thing that I’m thinking of… I feel like we have preconceptions that we bring with us all the time. How do we get past these filters, these preconceptions that we’ve carried with us for years?
That’s a wonderful question, and it’s not easy. Everything we’ve learned – not just that horses don’t eat meat and that one plus one is two, but what it means to be a man, or what the likely course of events is after you turn 70, and so on – all of that is, in many cases, misinformation we’ve been fed.
So how do you turn it around? We need to hear ourselves speak. I had this funny experience as an undergraduate. I wrote a paper late at night – which was very unlike me – and the next morning I read it over and saw the word “obviously”. I realised I had no idea what I was talking about. If we can hear ourselves using words like “clearly” or “obviously”, a bell should go off telling us that we’re being mindless.
The easiest way to be mindful is to learn mindfully in the first place. That means that no matter what you’re taught, no matter how absolute it sounds, you treat it as conditional. If I’m teaching you how to play tennis and I say, “Here’s how you hold the racket,” what you should say, if you’re being mindful, is, “That’s one way.” Because if you have a burn on your hand, you wouldn’t hold the racket the same way as if you didn’t. You learn conditionally. Everything becomes “could be”, “it would seem”, “perhaps”, “from one perspective”, rather than “is”.
Another way to switch it around is to work from moments when you’re experiencing something negative. This may not sound useful at first, except that stress seems to be taken as the baseline today. People believe everybody experiences stress, and that you have to be stressed. But everybody doesn’t experience stress, and certainly not to the same degree in every circumstance.
As soon as you feel stressed, realise that you don’t have to feel that way. Stress requires two things: first, that something bad is going to happen; and second, that when it happens it will be awful. Give yourself three or four reasons why it might not happen, and you immediately feel better, because it shifts from “this will happen” to “this might not happen”. Then comes the harder, but more interesting part: assume the thing you fear does happen. How might that actually be an advantage?
When you practise this often enough, you don’t need to reframe situations anymore. The negative frame doesn’t arise in the first place. And once you can see how something might be an advantage, you don’t dread it. You’re not afraid of it. In fact, when the feared circumstances don’t occur, you might even find yourself a little disappointed.
I like this idea of labelling and fixed realities that you’re talking about here. I know you’ve written and spoken about this in relation to things like depression or being anxious or aging. What role does delabelling or reframing play in, developing a more flexible, clearer perception of things?
People need to understand that these are just labels, just roles. As the general semanticists say, “the map is not the territory” and “the word is not the thing”. The more often you ask yourself simple questions like, “How else could this be?”, “Who might see it differently?”, or “How might this be a good thing from another perspective?”, the more natural it becomes to experience the world as less fixed.
If you lived in my world, you’d be living in a world where you recognise that virtually everything that is was once a decision. And for something to be a decision, there had to be uncertainty beforehand – there is no decision without uncertainty. The end result of this way of seeing things is recognising that everything is mutable. Everything. So you start changing small things.
When I was very young and giving lectures, I knew I would be frightened if there was a great distance between me and the audience, so I moved all the chairs. Most people wouldn’t do that. They take what is as if it has to be that way. But what is was just somebody else’s idea.
To make this concrete, think about decisions around whether a drug should be reimbursed. That answer isn’t handed down from the heavens – it’s made by an insurance company. Now imagine the drug is Viagra, and the people making the decision are lusty 50-year-old men rather than a group of nuns. And so it is with virtually everything.
Anytime something doesn’t work, recognise that somebody designed it that way – and that there are many, many businesses waiting to be started that could design it differently.
I’ve got a quote here from you that “virtually everything is controlled by our thoughts”. From listening to you today, I can see that this is certainly something that you believe and live by. If this is true, what are the ethical and moral responsibilities that follow from understanding the mind’s influence?
That’s an interesting question, because it’s our mistaken notions about things like scarcity that often lead people to misbehave. Take something as simple as grading in a class. If you fail some students, those students may later feel the need to fight back – who wants to see themselves as a failure?
Then you have the next group, the Bs and Cs: who wants to see themselves as just average? They’re not happy either. And then you have the A students, who may not be sure why they got As or whether they can continue to perform at that level. It doesn’t work for anybody, and it leads to a surprising amount of immoral behaviour.
And it’s not just in schools. It’s in everything we do. We tend to structure life around winners and losers. In my world, what I want to do is take that vertical structure – where some people sit near the top – and make it horizontal. I even wrote a little song for my grandkids when they were five. It goes: “Everybody doesn’t know something, everyone knows something else; everyone can’t do something, everyone can do something else.”
We need to recognise the value in others. I thought COVID was going to bring this about, because suddenly the people delivering toilet paper were at the top of the list – more important than architects, dentists, doctors, and certainly lawyers. But it didn’t really work out that way.
When you understand that everyone’s behaviour makes sense from their own perspective – otherwise they wouldn’t do it – and that good and bad live in our minds rather than in events or in people, everything becomes kinder.
Why does someone steal? I’m not talking about stealing to feed a family – that’s a separate discussion. I’m talking about stealing out of resentment, because someone else has something you don’t. If you were happy with what you had, you wouldn’t resent what someone else has. And if you realised you don’t need everything you have, you’d probably give some of it away anyway. When people are made to feel powerless, it’s not surprising that they fight back. We need to recognise that morality is very different from legality, and that immorality is honed by our mindlessness.
I have one final question for you: what is it that tends to get in the way of being wise?
If you’re asking me what keeps us from being wise, it’s mindlessness. It seems to me that when you’re in charge, and you can lead people to believe that you know for certain — while they know that they don’t — that helps you stay in charge. If you insist there is only one way of doing things, and that you’ve mastered it, then people who might do things differently are discouraged from exploring those differences.
So, again, I think the absence of wisdom is mindlessness.
