Vitality Unleashed: The Functional Medicine Podcast

The Counterclockwise Effect: Can You Think Yourself Younger?

• Dr. Kumar from LifeWellMD.com • Season 1 • Episode 197

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What if your expectations quietly shape your hormones, your inflammation, and even how fast you heal? We dig into the science of mind-body unity and show how a shift in mindset can trigger measurable changes in weight, blood pressure, cognition, and recovery—without adding a single new medication.

Drawing on Ellen Langer’s pioneering research, we explore why mindlessness—living on autopilot with rigid assumptions—keeps your biology stuck. You’ll hear how the famous counterclockwise study led older adults to improve posture, memory, and dexterity by inhabiting an earlier identity, and how hotel attendants changed their metabolic markers simply by reframing work as exercise. We also unpack the placebo effect as your “inner pharmacy,” and explain how clinical language and labels like prediabetic can unintentionally sabotage outcomes by elevating stress and narrowing possibilities.

Then we get practical. We share clear methods to apply this science today: challenge fixed labels, track symptom variability to expose patterns and agency, set fastest-known healing expectations rather than averages, and turn ordinary routines into health-promoting signals. We reframe stress as a prediction you can edit and offer a decision strategy that trades perfectionism for adaptive follow-through. The throughline is simple and powerful: your story is biochemical, and small, mindful shifts can recalibrate your nervous, hormonal, and immune systems for better health and longevity.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who needs a spark of possibility, and leave a review to help others find the show. Ready to rewrite one belief about your body and see what changes next?

Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your supplement regimen or health routine. Individual needs and reactions vary, so it’s important to make informed decisions with the guidance of your physician.

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If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and share it with someone who might benefit. For more insights and updates, visit our website at Lifewellmd.com.

Stay Informed, Stay Healthy:
Remember, informed choices lead to better health. Until next time, be well and take care of yourself.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to a deep dive into what we at LifeWellmd.com know is just so foundational to real wellness. We're talking about the astonishing power of your mind to control your physical health.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. We're diving into sources today that give, you know, hard scientific proof that our beliefs are expectations. They're not just thoughts floating around. They're actual instructions for our biology.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell And we're going to be unpacking decades of really pioneering research, mostly from Harvard's Dr. Ellen Langer. She's often called the mother of mindfulness.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell That's right. We're going to show you why this split between mind and body is probably one of the biggest mistakes in Western thinking. And understanding how they're unified is well, it's the shortcut to reclaiming your health.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell So our mission today is to walk you through some of these scientific examples. Real studies that show how changing your mindset can lead to, I mean, actual physical changes, things like losing weight without changing your activity, or even literally reversing the measurable signs of aging. This all ties back to the holistic approach we champion at Life WellMD.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell We want to arm you with this realization, backed by science, that you have so much more control than you've probably been led to believe.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, let's unpack this, starting with the big one: mind-body unity.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Right. And when we say unity, we don't mean it as some spiritual metaphor. The research is clear. This is one single unified system. Your thoughts, your expectations, they have a direct causal influence on your body.

SPEAKER_02:

Causal. So thought A causes physical reaction B. It's not just a correlation.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Precisely. The field is actually called psychoneuroimmunology or PNI. It sounds complicated, but it's really just the science of how the body's major systems talk to each other. Okay. So PNI proves that your nervous system is constantly sending chemical signals to your hormonal system and your immune system. Your beliefs literally become hormones. They become neurotransmitters. And those chemicals regulate inflammation, your stress response, even how your genes are expressed.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell So if the systems are one, then what we tell ourselves, our internal story, becomes a biological regulator. And that leads us right to Dr. Langer's idea of mindlessness. She says most of us operate in this state. What exactly is it?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Mindlessness is basically being on autopilot. It's a rigid automatic state where we just rely on old categories, old information, and we accept it as absolute fact. We forget that in reality, everything is always changing. We live in a world of maybes, but we act like everything is a definite.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell And that certainty, that's what's so limiting. I love her example of one plus one. We all learn one plus one is two. It's an absolute. But in the real world, if you take one watt of chewing gum and add another wad of chewing gum, you guys get one bigger watt of chewing. Exactly. Or one lasagna plus another lasagna is one giant lasagna. Absolutes are just they're mental shortcuts, but they don't really apply to the real messy world.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Ross Powell Dr. Langer had this personal moment that really drove it home for her, the hot dog horse story. She was absolutely certain, you know, with her scientific training that horses don't eat meat. It was a fact. And then she saw a horse eat a hot dog.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00:

And that one little event just shattered her certainty. It made her realize everything I thought I knew could be wrong. And that's where possibility opens up.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell So if being mindless and stuck in these certainties is the problem, what's the solution? Her version of mindfulness is a bit different from what people might think.

SPEAKER_00:

It is. It's not necessarily meditation, though they aren't mutually exclusive. Langirian mindfulness is just the simple process of actively noticing new things.

SPEAKER_02:

Actively noticing.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, drawing new distinctions. When you realize you don't actually know something for sure, you naturally start paying more attention. You become sensitive to the context. And that engagement, your neurons are firing, your brain is working, that is literally not just figuratively enlivening, it's good for you.

SPEAKER_02:

This is where it gets really interesting. Let's get to the evidence. The famous counterclockwise study from 1979.

SPEAKER_00:

This was just it was revolutionary. It took the fixed idea of aging and completely turned it on its head.

unknown:

Dr.

SPEAKER_00:

Langer took eight elderly men, all in their mid to late 80s, to a retreat. And this retreat was retrofitted to look and feel exactly like it was 1959.

SPEAKER_02:

So the magazines, the music on the radio, the furniture, everything was from 20 years earlier.

SPEAKER_00:

Everything. And here was the key instruction. They weren't there to reminisce about 1959. They were told to live as if it were 1959.

SPEAKER_02:

In the present tense.

SPEAKER_00:

In the present tense. They had to psychologically become the person they were two decades earlier, a total psychological reset.

SPEAKER_02:

And the results after just one week.

SPEAKER_00:

Genuinely astonishing. They showed measurable physical improvements across the board. Better hearing, better memory, better posture, more dexterity. Their cognitive abilities were sharper.

SPEAKER_02:

And they looked younger.

SPEAKER_00:

They looked visibly younger to outside observers who just compared before and after photos and had no idea what the experiment was about.

SPEAKER_02:

Wait, hold on. So the physical decline we just accept as part of aging. You're saying it was partially reversed just by changing their mindset and their environment.

SPEAKER_00:

That's exactly what the data suggests.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

That many of the limits we associate with old age aren't biological destiny. They're they're beliefs, their expectations we've internalized about what an 85-year-old body is supposed to do.

SPEAKER_02:

So when they were put in a context where they were younger, their bodies just followed the new command.

SPEAKER_00:

The mind commanded possibility and the body responded.

SPEAKER_02:

That is just lit. It's profound. So that's aging. But then there's the chambermaid study, which shows how this works right now in our daily lives.

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Yes. This is maybe the perfect example of perception being physiological reality.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell So the setup was they took hotel room attendance.

SPEAKER_00:

Right, whose jobs are incredibly physical, lots of lifting, bending, moving. They were already meeting or even exceeding the Surgeon General's recommendations for exercise, but they didn't see it that way.

SPEAKER_02:

They just saw it as work.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. So they were split into two groups. The informed group was told, hey, your job is great exercise. Cleaning bathroom burns this many calories. Making your bed is like that much time on a treadmill. The other group, the control group, was told nothing.

SPEAKER_02:

Same job, same workload. What happened?

SPEAKER_00:

After just four weeks, with no other changes to their behavior or diet, the informed group showed a decrease in weight, in blood pressure, in body fat, and BMI.

SPEAKER_02:

How does a belief burn fat? What's the mechanism there?

SPEAKER_00:

Once they started seeing their work as health promoting, as exercise, their whole biological response changed. That belief likely lowered their stress hormones, like cortisol.

SPEAKER_02:

And cortisol is the one that tells your body to store fat, especially around the middle.

SPEAKER_00:

You got it. So by simply relabeling their activity, they change their hormonal profile, which allowed their metabolism to work more efficiently. Their mindset determined the health outcome.

SPEAKER_02:

And we see this even in how quickly we heal from, say, a cut.

SPEAKER_00:

Mm-hmm. The studies on wound healing are fascinating. The speed of healing was tied more to perceived time-like from a clock that was sped up or slowed down than actual clock time. Our brain sets the pace.

SPEAKER_02:

Aaron Powell, which makes you rethink how doctors give prognosis.

SPEAKER_00:

It does. Instead of telling a patient with a broken arm the average healing time is five weeks, which sets a slow expectation.

SPEAKER_02:

You tell them the fastest known healing time.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. You change the expectation, and you might just speed up the cellular repair process.

SPEAKER_02:

Of course, the most direct, undeniable proof of all this is the placebo effect.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. The placebo is not fake medicine, it's ultra-powerful, innate medicine. The person is activating their own internal pharmacy just through belief.

SPEAKER_02:

But in the drug development world, it's treated like the enemy.

SPEAKER_00:

It is, because a new drug has to prove it's better than the placebo. But we should be celebrating it, studying it. It's proof of the body's incredible capacity to heal itself.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so let's shift to how we can all actively apply this. It starts with challenging the labels we're given, especially in medicine.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. We have to challenge these negative fixed diagnoses. Think about the word chronic. When a doctor says your condition is chronic, what does your brain hear?

SPEAKER_02:

It hears permanent, uncontrollable, incurable.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. But all it really means medically is we haven't yet found the universal cure for this. It does not mean it is uncontrollable for you.

SPEAKER_02:

There's a great example of this with the pre-diabetic label. They call it the borderline effect.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. They looked at patients with an A1C, which is a measure of average blood sugar of 5.6%, which is considered normal. And they compare them to people with an A1C of 5.7%, which gets you the prediabetic label.

SPEAKER_01:

A tiny, tiny difference. Physiologically, almost identical.

SPEAKER_00:

Negligible. But the group that got the 5.7% label reported way more worry, more perceived risk, more health anxiety. The label itself became a source of physiological stress, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

SPEAKER_02:

So once you realize you've accepted a fixed label, pain, illness, age, what's the strategy? Linger calls it attention to symptom variability.

SPEAKER_00:

It's so simple, but it's so powerful. Instead of accepting that your symptom is just constant, you start to actively look for small changes. You ask yourself, okay, how's the pain right now? Is it a tiny bit better or worse than it was an hour ago? And why?

SPEAKER_02:

You're turning this solid, scary thing into something that's actually fluid and dynamic. You notice the small shifts.

SPEAKER_00:

And when you do that, you break the belief that it's constant. And that second question, the why, is key when you start looking for reasons. Oh, it's a little better when I'm distracted, or it's worse after I eat that.

SPEAKER_02:

You're engaging your mind, you're no longer helpless.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. You're restoring your sense of agency. And that mental activity itself, as PI shows, is good for you. It dampens the stress response.

SPEAKER_02:

We can apply that same logic to stress itself, which is really the number one enemy of longevity.

SPEAKER_00:

Stress isn't the event. It's our perception of the event.

SPEAKER_02:

So instead of just predicting disaster.

SPEAKER_00:

You challenge that prediction. You ask, okay, what if this goes wrong? What if I missed the bus? But then you also ask, how might this not happen? Or even better, assuming it does happen, how could it actually be a good thing? An advantage?

SPEAKER_02:

It's not a tragedy, it's just an inconvenience. You're giving your brain more than one story to believe.

SPEAKER_00:

That's it. And it works for big decisions too. We stress ourselves out trying to find the one single right decision.

SPEAKER_02:

The perfect choice.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and that's a trap. Dr. Alanger says instead of trying to find the right decision, focus on making the decision right, make a choice, and then stay mindful and flexible and adapt to make it work. It takes all the pressure off.

SPEAKER_02:

So bringing this all together, what does this mean for you, for the person listening who wants to live a healthier, longer life?

SPEAKER_00:

I think the science is. It's just crystal clear. You have far more control over your health and vitality than you've been taught. By challenging these rigid beliefs about what's possible for your body, by actively noticing change, by seeking possibility, you are literally engaging your brain's neuroplasticity and activating these powerful internal healing systems.

SPEAKER_02:

And that paradigm shift, you know, going from a passive recipient of a diagnosis to the active architect of your own well-being, that is the absolute heart of the longevity medicine we practice at lifewellmd.com. Dr. Kumar and his team in Florida, they are all about integrating these powerful mind-body strategies with cutting-edge medical care. It's about getting you out of those fixed boxes.

SPEAKER_00:

And we really encourage you to just start today by questioning one fixed assumption you have about your own health. That's the first and most powerful step.

SPEAKER_02:

If you feel like you're ready to move beyond those restrictive labels and start using the power of your mindset for a healthier, more vital future, we really do encourage you to start that journey. You can call Dr. Kumar's team at 561-210-9999 to book your consultation at lifewellmd.com. That number again is 561-210-9999.

SPEAKER_00:

And remember that core lesson from the counterclockwise study our potential is so often just constrained by what we've learned is impossible. Imagine if every doctor, instead of telling you your limits, asked how can you achieve this? Yeah, your whole sense of what's possible would just it would expand instantly. So what's one belief about your own health, your own capacity that you're ready to challenge today?