Dear Friends,
At 82, five years ago, two different medical specialists diagnosed me with terminal illness within a two-week period.
The first specialist was my cardiologist. My echocardiogram showed a left ventricle that was pumping insufficiently, producing an ejection fraction (EF) of 34, which is 21 points below the lowest normal. The ejection fraction is the percentage of blood pumped with each beat, and the normal range begins at 55. I was also told I had a 60-to-70-percent blockage in the Left Anterior Descending (LAD) artery, aka the widow-maker.
I had been a marathon runner and was still an endurance athlete, and I was told to cut my exercise back and begin putting my affairs in order.
A few days later, a mole I had finally talked my doctor into biopsying, after a year of freezing it, came back as an aggressive nodular melanoma—the kind AI told me could kill within six weeks. I had been carrying the cancer, unknowingly, for a year.
I am still here to tell you how that all turned out. But first I will tell you about the scientist I interviewed on MBHP this week, because her life’s work helps explain what happened to me.
The Act of Noticing Things
Dr. Ellen Langer has been a professor of psychology at Harvard for half a century—the first woman ever tenured in that department—and she has spent those fifty years proving something most of medicine still treats as a slogan: that the mind and the body are not two separate things. They are one unit. Wherever you put the one, she says, you are necessarily putting the other.
She started somewhere that surprises people. When most of us hear “mindfulness,” we picture meditation—sitting still, eyes closed, repeating a mantra, leaving the world behind. Ellen’s mindfulness is almost the opposite. She defines it in five words: the act of noticing new things. And her uncomfortable conclusion, after all these decades of research, is that nearly all of us are mindless almost all the time. “When you’re not there,” she told me, “you’re not there to know that you’re not there.”
What puts us on autopilot is certainty. We are handed absolutes as children—facts to memorize, answers to know—and the instant you believe you know a thing, you stop paying attention to it.
She learned this, of all places, from a horse. A man at an event asked her to hold his horse while he fetched it a hot dog. Everyone knows horses don’t eat meat. To be polite, she said nothing—and the horse ate the hot dog.
“That’s when I realized,” she said, “that everything I thought I knew could be wrong.”
For Ellen, that was thrilling rather than frightening: if the things people swear can’t be done might actually be possible, then a great many doors we have been treating as walls are standing open.
Our Strongest Medicine
The most important of those doors is the one between the mind and the body, and her most famous demonstration of it is the counterclockwise study. She brought a group of elderly men to a retreat outfitted exactly as the world had been twenty years earlier—the magazines, the films, the news of the day—and had them live surrounded by the materials of their younger selves, in the present tense, rather than as men reminiscing about the past.
In five days their eyesight, their hearing, their strength, their memory, and even how old they appeared all measurably improved. The point, she was careful to say, was never that you should freeze your house in time. The point was possibility—that so much of what we accept about decline is something we mindlessly swallowed when we were young and never thought to question.
Dr. Langer also conducted a fascinating study in which she took various measurements on hotel workers before and after they were told that the Surgeon General considered their daily work to be exercise: vacuuming, making beds, cleaning bathrooms, pushing carts, climbing stairs, and scrubbing floors. They were also told how many calories each task burned, along with a good deal more about the health benefits of their movement. As you might now guess, the workers improved on many indices of health, and it was based on having been given the information, not on anything else changing in their lives.
Then Dr. Langer said the thing the pharmaceutical industry would prefer you not know. “Our strongest medication,” she told me, “is placebo.”
Dr. Langer walked me through sham-surgery studies in which patients with Parkinson’s had their skulls opened and closed with nothing done inside—and improved anyway, because they believed they had been treated. Her conclusion is as radical as it is simple:
“The pill is not making you well. You’re making yourself well.”
A drug that wants to reach the market has to beat that inner pill, which is exactly why the placebo is given a bad name it has never deserved.
There is a shadow side to mind-body unity, and it is the label. Ellen described what she calls the borderline effect: score a 69 on a certain test and you are called cognitively deficient; score a 70 and you are average. Nobody believes there is a real difference between 69 and 70—a guess, a sneeze, a misread question—yet those two people walk out into entirely different lives, and the label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The same machinery, she argues, runs disease, and it runs the epidemic of diagnoses we now hang on our children.
Dr. Langer is warning us about the dangers of limiting what we believe is possible, the dangers of labels, very much including the label of age. Especially later in life, acting one’s age can be dangerous to your well-being.
Add More Life to Your Years, Not Years to Your Life
Now I will tell you how my own story turned out, and you will see the connection with Dr. Langer’s research.
I did very nearly the opposite of some of what I was told by the cardiologists. Instead of cutting my exercise back, I went from three or four days a week of aerobic exercise to seven days a week, an hour at a time, building the pace slowly until I could go faster.
I began weight lifting three times a week with Mike Mihos, a professional trainer and bodybuilder. I further cleaned up my already clean fuel intake, and I created a ten-point rejuvenation program for myself.
I made a decision: I would live as a living man. I would live every single day as though I felt wonderful, because in fact I did. I refused to allow the words on a page to disrupt my lovely daily life, so long as I could direct that life.
I did not allow the diagnoses to harsh my mellow. To do so would indeed be adding insult to injury.
Three months later, my heart was pumping normally—the ejection fraction had climbed from 34 to 62—and it has stayed there ever since; my cardiologist eventually discharged me, told me I no longer needed him. I have a new cardiologist who monitors me yearly, and I continue to be tested, because prevention is my game whenever possible.
As for the aggressive melanoma, after the great surgeon Dr. Jonathan George performed a sentinel lymphadenectomy and biopsy, he called and reported that I was cancer free. I asked how it was that the cancer had not killed me. He said my immune system had built a capsule around the cancer and prevented it from spreading for an entire year. I was clear.
Dr. Ellen Langer’s counsel for all of us, and especially for those of us who are older, is to stop chasing the longevity industry’s serums and scores. “Rather than spend your time trying to add more years to your life,” she said, “add more life to your years”—and her data suggest that doing so actually adds the years.
I believe we create our own reality through our thoughts and feelings. Deep healing is something a person adds to consciously, from the inside. We are only beginning to learn how powerful the mind is in our healing process. One of the most powerful tools for that learning is psychedelic medicine.
Food for thought.
Golden light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Today’s Practice: Notice 3 new things.
A simple thing to take with you from this week’s conversation.
Ellen Langer gave me a practice on the program that I told her, on the air, I could not wait to start using—and I have been using it ever since. It is the whole of her mindfulness in one move: notice three new things.
Pick a person you think you know well—your spouse, an old friend, the colleague you see every day. Today, find three things about them you have never noticed before. The way they hold a cup. A word they keep reaching for. Something behind the eyes you had stopped seeing because you were certain you already knew them.
You will find, as Ellen’s fifty years of research found, that the noticing is enlivening—it wakes you up. And there is a gift in it for the other person, too. As she told me, when you truly notice someone, “they’ll feel cared for. They’ll feel that you’re actually noticing who they are.” Three new things. That is the whole practice. Try it for a week. And if you do, write back and tell me what you notice.
Show notes
In this episode—Dr. Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist who has studied mindfulness and mind-body unity for nearly fifty years, joins Richard to explain why mindfulness is not meditation, what the counterclockwise study revealed about aging, why the placebo is our strongest medicine, and how a diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Richard shares his own recovery from two terminal diagnoses at 82.
Guest: Dr. Ellen Langer—Professor of Psychology at Harvard (the first woman tenured in the department), author of Mindfulness, Counterclockwise, and The Mindful Body. More at ellenlanger.com.
[03:03] Mindfulness is not meditation
“Mindfulness, as I study it, you are very much in the world... it’s the act of noticing new things.” — Ellen Langer
Her sobering finding: virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. Certainty is the culprit—when you think you know, you stop paying attention.
[04:30] The horse and the hot dog
“And that’s when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong.” — Ellen Langer
[20:15] The counterclockwise study
Elderly men lived as their 20-years-younger selves for five days; vision, hearing, strength, memory, and apparent age improved. The point was possibility, not a prescription to freeze your home in time.
[30:01] Imagined exercise
Data from other labs: a group imagining lifting weights gained virtually the same muscle as the group actually lifting—both far above the do-nothing group.
[31:21] The borderline effect
69 vs. 70 on a test sorts people into “deficient” vs. “average” with no real difference—and the label becomes self-fulfilling. The same machinery runs disease labels.
Richard: “The psychological diagnoses we put on people... it becomes like a letter A on their foreheads.”
[40:05] Placebo and “you’re making yourself well”
“Our strongest medication is placebo... The pill is not making you well. You’re making yourself well.” — Ellen Langer
Attention to symptom variability (Langer’s self-treatment for chronic illness): set your phone to check in through the day—“How is the pain now? Better or worse than before, and why?” The “why” engages a mindful search; symptoms often recede. No side effects, no cost.
[45:40] Richard’s two terminal diagnoses
“I did not change my way of life. I did not think of myself as a dying person.” — Dr. Richard Louis Miller
“If you went from feeling healthy to defining yourself as sick, you’re instructing your body how to no longer operate optimally.” — Ellen Langer
[52:30] Add life to your years
“Rather than spend your time trying to add more years to your life, add more life to your years. And... that will indeed add more years.” — Ellen Langer
Resources mentioned
Dr. Ellen Langer—ellenlanger.com; The Mindful Body, Counterclockwise, Mindfulness (books)
Further reading
Crum, A. J., & Langer, E. J. (2007). Mind-set matters: Exercise and the placebo effect. Psychological Science, 18(2), 165–171. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/
Ranganathan, V. K., et al. (2004). From mental power to muscle power. Neuropsychologia, 42(7), 944–956. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14998709/
McRae, C., et al. (2004). Effects of perceived treatment on quality of life and medical outcomes in a double-blind placebo surgery trial. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61(4), 412–420. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15066900/
Rodin, J., & Langer, E. J. (1977). Long-term effects of a control-relevant intervention with the institutionalized aged. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(12), 897–902.
Aungle, P., & Langer, E. (2023). Physical healing as a function of perceived time. Scientific Reports, 13, 22432. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50009-3
Langer, E. J. The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health (Ballantine, 2023). https://www.ellenlanger.com/books/
A note on working together
For those who feel drawn to working together more directly, I offer a limited number of one-on-one sessions.
These are not traditional therapy sessions. They are quiet, practical conversations focused on calming the mind, easing anxiety, and working with simple tools that support steadiness in daily life.
We move at a thoughtful pace. We work with what’s present. We focus on what helps.
My Books
I wrote Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential to contribute to how we, as a community, handle a moment of unprecedented attention and capital.
Will psychedelic medicines be another drug dispensed in 15-minute sessions with psychiatrists, or will they be used properly as facilitators of psychotherapy?
Early feedback:
Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.
— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming AbyssPutting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.
— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
If any of this speaks to you, you can order the book here.
My Other Books
Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking
Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)
