BITESIZE | The Power of Mindset: How Your Thoughts Transform Your Physical Health | Dr Ellen Langer #587

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite-size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 537 of the podcast with Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Dr. Ellen Langer. Ellen has spent decades studying how our beliefs and perceptions can directly influence our physical health, from how we age to how we heal, and even how our immune system functions.

In this clip, we explore some of her landmark research. The implications of your work and what you're talking about are so, so profound for people when they really understand how much our mindset influences every single aspect of our lives. Some of your studies, the counterclockwise study, the chambermaid study, the nursing home study, these are legendary. In fact, a lot of listeners, I'm sure, will have heard about them without necessarily knowing that you

were the creator and the author of these studies. So could you just go through some of these top-line studies to explain some of your work to my audience, please? Okay, well, so I got into all this in the first place with a nursing home study, where we took people in nursing homes and we either gave them tender, loving care is the comparison group, or we gave them choices to make and a plant to take care of. Um and um we went back 18 months later and twice as many people in the group that we gave these active uh choices to were still alive. Right.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (22 minutes, 3,706 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.