Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health

When Perception Changes the Body

By Ellen Langer, PhD DEC 2025

Although most of us don’t realize it, we have mindlessly accepted mind/body dualism—you have a mind and you have a body, and they are separate and independent.  In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that the medical model taught that our psychology was irrelevant to our health. Thoughts couldn’t make you sick. To be sick, you needed the introduction of an antigen. If you have a pain that isn’t understood, you might have been told, for instance, that it’s all in your head. We believed in dualism despite experiencing the effects of our thoughts on our bodies. For example, a leaf blows in your face and, for a moment, scares you, and your blood pressure and pulse increase until you realize it was just a leaf.

I have been researching and writing about mind/body unity for the past fifty years—seeing the mind and the body as a single unit. It’s had some influence, I believe, in that now most people believe in the mind/body connection. That’s great, but it still can’t handle the problem of how they are connected. How can an immaterial thought affect the material body? The problem goes away once we see the mind and body as one. Wherever we put the mind, so too will be the body. Thus, the amount of control we have over our health is enormous.

The first test of this idea was our counterclockwise study. We retrofitted a retreat to appear to be twenty years earlier and had elderly men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. They spoke, for example, about past events as though they were in the present. In less than a week of putting their minds back in time, their vision, hearing, strength, and memory improved, and they actually looked noticeably younger.

In another study, we asked chambermaids how much exercise they were getting. They thought exercise was what you did after work, and after work, they were just too tired to do anything much. So they thought they weren’t getting exercise. We simply divided them into two groups and taught one of the groups to change their minds about exercise. They were shown, for example,  how many of the tasks they did daily were similar to working on machines at the gym. We took many measures. The groups were the same regarding how hard they worked and how much they ate. Nevertheless, the group that changed their minds and now saw their work as exercise lost weight, there was a change in waist to hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down—all from a change of mind.

In another study, we had people who had type 2 diabetes come to the lab. We gave them many tests, and they asked them to play computer games and change the game every 15 minutes or so. That instruction was to ensure that they’d look at the clock near the computer. Unbeknownst to them, the clock was rigged. For a third of the people, it was twice as fast as real time, for a third it was half as fast, and for a third it was real time. We assessed blood sugar level and found that it varied with clock time—perceived time—rather than real time.

In yet another study, people who spent the night in a sleep lab awoke and saw a rigged clock and thought they had gotten two hours more sleep than they actually had, two hours fewer, or the actual amount of sleep. Again, physiological and psychological measures followed their beliefs, not the “reality.”

We have done many of these types of studies that I describe in my book, The Mindful Body: thinking our way to chronic health, and all of them support the mind/body unity idea. All of the research on placebos supports this view as well. When you take a placebo, by definition, it is inert—a sugar pill—so the pill is not what makes us better. If it’s not the pill, then we are actually making ourselves better.

Can we intentionally do anything to make ourselves better if we have a chronic disease? In a word, “yes.”

When we have a chronic illness, we mistakenly believe that the symptoms will either stay the same or get worse. Nothing moves only in one direction. In the course of the day, there are moments when the symptom is not only better, but may even be absent. We ran several studies with people with various diseases, including chronic pain, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and stroke, and in each case had them notice the variability in their symptoms across the day/weeks. In each case, we found significant improvement.

Taken together, these findings show that variability isn’t noise but opportunity. By recognizing mind and body as one system, we open the door to new ways of healing, even in the face of conditions we once thought unchangeable.

Ellen Langer was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she is still a professor of psychology. She is a recipient of three Distinguished Scientists awards, the Arthur W. Staats Award for Unifying Psychology, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Liberty Science Genius Award. She has published over 200 research articles and thirteen books, including the international bestseller Mindfulness and her most recent book, The Mindful Body: Thinking our way to chronic health. She is known worldwide as the “mother of mindfulness” and the “mother of positive psychology.”

She is also a gallery exhibiting painter, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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