My dad is approaching 80, though he doesn’t seem it—he hikes and bikes and rides horses and skis. He’s compulsive about his health and readers of On Our Best Behavior might remember that he’s maniacal about his weight. (Though this is easy for him, as he eats twice as much as everyone else and doesn’t gain weight.)
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Last summer, he was experiencing a lot of knee pain, and needed to consider a knee replacement—a surgery that can be heinous in terms of its recovery. He didn’t want to do it, out of fear that the results would be worse than his current discomfort—he’d read the research and surveyed many friends. I had some thoughts, as I had just read Ellen Langer’s The Mindful Body and interviewed her for the podcast. And based on her wisdom, I told him he’d never make the right decision; he just needed to make his decision right. Let me explain.
Langer, who in 1981 became the first woman to ever be tenured in psychology at Harvard, runs a lab that’s responsible for (almost) every fascinating study that explores the relationship between body and mind, whether it’s about the illusion of control, decision-making, or aging. She’s behind the original Counterclockwise study from 1979, where aging men recovered their youth by literally stepping into the past and acting like much younger versions of themselves with the set pieces to match. She’s also behind Alia Crum’s famous study on hotel cleaning staff and how reconceptualizing for them how much exercise they were actually getting (a lot) resulted in health changes not explicated by other factors. Langer has a fascinating mind, in part because she is always, always willing to question our underlying assumptions about where we have control and where we don’t—and the way that these ideas impact our bodies. Another fascinating tidbit: When people are told their bloodwork is pre-diabetic (specifically when it’s a statistically insignificant deviation from the “normal” range, like the difference between 5.9 and 6), they are far more likely to become diabetic. She makes the point that those who minimize the power of the mind over the body haven’t observed someone vomit in response to seeing someone vomit.)
Throughout her work, Langer comes back to beat the drum for one of the most important themes of her research: “People act in ways that make sense from their point of view; otherwise they would act differently.” It makes sense that our bodies also conform to our sense of reality—or that this relationship is far more powerful than we typically allow.
Case in point, 45 years ago, Langer conducted the first illusion-of-control studies, which have been recreated by scientists in various iterations over the years: The general idea is that when we perceive ourselves as having control, we’re far too confident that we’ll be successful as compared to the actual probability of success. But this confidence has its benefits. She writes:
I believe that the illusion of control is not always an illusion. While it might lead people to choose seemingly worse gambles in the lab, it can also help us cope with risk and uncertainty in real life. In this sense, the so-called illusion is often a necessary psychological strategy. Control is motivating, helping us handle all sorts of unpleasant and difficult situations. After all, if you believe you have no control, then you may become helpless.
In an experiment that psychologists David Glass and Jerome Singer conducted in 1972, participants were exposed to uncomfortable noise. One group had a button to press if they wanted to stop the noise, but they were discouraged from using it. The comparison group was not given any means to control the noise. Neither group took action to alleviate the discomfort, but those who believed that they had control over the noise so that relief was available if they needed it had fewer adverse reactions.
Here’s the thing: None of us have control. Or, to be more precise, we have a limited amount of control that is more or less confined to our ability to respond to the world. But living like that is hard.
Per Langer, some researchers have found that those with “power” like money and education feel like they can better control their fates. This makes sense, as it’s our tendency to conflate these two concepts, but there’s a critical difference. As Richard Rohr writes in What the Mystics Know, “What most people call power is just control. When I need to see that actions are done my way, I might have control over passing events, but that is not power in any full sense. Real persons of power can act, succeed, thrive—even when they do not have control. Power is the ability to act from the fullness of who I am, the capacity to establish and maintain a relationship with people and things, and the freedom to give myself away.” Again, power to control the way you respond to the world.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Phil Stutz, psychiatrist and co-author of The Tools and Coming Alive, and author of Lessons for Living (you can listen to our podcast conversation here), and he makes the point that the people who make the best decisions are not those with the most information or even the “right” information—they’re the ones who make the most decisions, who work the “Instinct Cycle” the most, refining their relationship to their intuition over time. (He talks about this with me in the beginning of our podcast conversation.)
Stutz doesn’t care about proof, which is part of his magic, but Langer theoretically does. Although she agrees with him, writing, “We should give up the idea of objective probabilities, or predictable risks, or decisions that can be classified as right or wrong in advance. Instead, we should treat all of our choices as opportunities for growth and education.”
There’s more, though, as she cites research from Barry Schwartz and his colleagues who “found that considering more options and taking in a good deal of information results in a decrease in happiness, self-esteem, satisfaction with one’s life, and optimism. It was also correlated with an increase in depression, perfectionism, and regret.”
I mean, doesn’t this apply to everyone about everything? It’s buyer’s remorse, in part because every time we decide, we cut off (de + caedere, Latin) options. We can see this as an essential and clarifying pruning of options, or a chance to paralyze ourselves with regret. Point is, this isn’t Sliding Doors, there’s no backsies, and we don’t get to A/B test our own lives. We just have to keep going.
As Langer explains, emphasis hers, “don’t try to make the right decision, make the decision right.”
As for my dad? He decided to do the knee surgery, and then had to decide whether to sacrifice a season of skiing or a season of golf. He chose the former and scheduled his surgery for November. And what do you know? He ended up not having to forfeit either: He was back on skis in February.
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Love this. The refinement of our intuition is a forever-project and when we manage to heed it, all falls into place even when it feels a bit like it's crumbling.
In my previous life, I was gut-washed; taught to not trust myself. I appreciate this work. Thank you for sharing!