Hey Professor: Mindfulness
With midterm season in full swing and more than a month of class under our belts, many of us are stressed. How can we stay calm and focused? Ellen J. Langer, the Harvard Psychology department’s first female tenured professor, is an expert on mindfulness. We discussed how to channel creativity, handle stress, and rethink unhealthy assumptions.
Fifteen Minutes: How did you get involved in mindfulness research?
Ellen J. Langer: While I was a graduate student at Yale, I did several studies that paved the way for the eventual work on mindlessness and mindfulness. One study I did was where we showed a video clip to clinicians and the person on the videotape was either called a job applicant or a patient. It was the exact same video tape. However, people’s responses varied enormously, depending on the label. When he was called the patient they saw him as sick, essentially, when he was a job applicant he was seen as fairly well adjusted. That was an early sign that labels guide most of our thinking, and we don’t include in that thinking information that’s discrepant with the label.
After we had done a few studies on mindfulness, I became aware of all of the Buddhist literature, which I found exciting, that there was a long history of coming to the same conclusions. So my work from the Western scientific perspective was lining up nicely with work coming from an Eastern philosophical tradition. Essentially, the mindfulness as we study it is a simple process of noticing new things. We don’t need meditation; meditation is just a tool to get you to post-meditative mindfulness.
FM: What draws you to this type of research?
EL: The application of these results is clear, so the feeling that by doing this work we are [not only] answering theoretical questions, but also setting the stage for potentially large impact on people’s health and well-being, is highly motivating.
FM: Has your perception or definition of mindfulness changed over the years that you have been researching?
EL: No, oddly. I started off… with the realization of the importance of choice. When you’re making choices, you’re noticing differences among outcomes. So that’s where I started and that’s where I am now. I think that my understanding of the concept has grown in many ways, but not a fundamental change in definition.
What’s clear to me is that the culprit in most of the problems that face us is our illusion of certainty. And what happens is when you’re certain, you don’t pay attention any longer. And it’s that belief that we know that keeps us from recognizing things that could work to our advantage. Everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives. So what we do is confuse the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. And once we start noticing new things, we see the things we thought we knew well, we don’t really know, and then our attention naturally goes to it.
FM: Do you have any advice for the students here, or your college-age self?
EL: Stress is not a function of events. When you’re stressed, the reason you’re stressed is that you believe something is going to happen and when it happens, it’s going to be awful. You want to open up both parts of that. First, the belief that it’s necessarily going to happen. We think we can predict, because we’re so good at looking back and saying we should’ve, could’ve known. But going forward, it’s much different. Say to yourself, this event that you’re sure is going to happen, what are three or five ways that you believe that it might not happen? You’ve gone from thinking that it’s definitely going to happen to now maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. So you immediately feel better.
Then say to yourself, let’s assume that it does happen. What are three or five ways that it might actually be a blessing in disguise? And by doing that, much of the stress that we experience dissipates. There’s a one-liner that I had in my book, “The Art of Noticing”: “Is it a tragedy or is it an inconvenience?” Most of the things that we get ourselves all worried about are at best inconveniences, not tragedies.