Did Ellen Langer's 1959 retreat really make old men younger?

Imagine arriving at a country retreat and finding that every object in it has gone back in time. The radio plays period songs. The magazines on the table are old issues. There are no mirrors. You are asked to talk about the news as if it were happening now, and “now” is 1959.

That was the setup of the study Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer ran with men in their seventies and eighties, usually dated to 1979, though a 2010 Harvard Magazine profile places it in 1981. It is one of the most retold stories in popular psychology, and the retelling is usually cleaner than the evidence.

Did the counterclockwise study really make people younger?

Partly, and nobody can say how much. According to Langer’s own account, as summarized by Harvard Magazine, both groups of men improved in strength, flexibility, posture, hearing, vision and performance on intelligence tests, and the group asked to act as if it were 1959 improved more. The catch is that the study was small, ran for a week, and, per the same profile, was reported in her books rather than in a journal. Treat it as an intriguing pilot, not a proven way to reverse aging.

What actually happened at the retreat?

Two groups of men spent a week at a monastery in New Hampshire that had been set up to look like 1959, twenty-two years earlier. The first group was told to behave as though they were the younger men they had been then. The second group, which arrived a week later, was asked only to reminisce about that era while staying in the present.

Researchers measured things like grip, posture, vision and memory before and after, and outside observers rated photographs for apparent age. Popular accounts add that the men stood taller and spoke with more confidence, though I could not trace that to a primary source. Sources disagree on the headcount, with figures from eight to sixteen floating around, and I could not find a reliable primary number. That alone tells you something about how the story has traveled.

What do the critics say?

The objections are mostly about what the design could not separate. Everyone was in a new, stimulating place with attention and company, so a week of that might lift anyone’s mood and movement. Langer herself wrote that “We cannot be sure just to what to attribute these changes,” and noted that the team could not add comparison groups who simply took a vacation at the monastery.

Skeptics of her wider body of work also point out that she often discusses unpublished or in-progress studies in books and lectures. The same Harvard Magazine piece says as much, while noting that many of her empirical studies are peer reviewed. Statistician Andrew Gelman has criticized her more recent mind-body claims on analysis grounds, and when Freakonomics host Steve Levitt asked in 2024 whether the counterclockwise result had been replicated, Langer said yes, in different ways. Those follow-ups are related studies, not a repeat of the original design.

What happened when the BBC tried it again?

In September 2010, BBC One aired The Young Ones, with Langer working alongside Dr Michael Mosley. Six well-known older Britons, including cricket umpire Dickie Bird, newsreader Kenneth Kendall, performer Lionel Blair and actress Liz Smith, spent days in a country house dressed as the 1970s. A review of the show says all six scored better on physical and mental tests at the end than at the start. The series was later nominated for a BAFTA.

It is a fun watch, but as science it is thin. Six people, a camera crew, a pleasant house and a lot of encouragement. I found no published scores and no comparison group, and an Italian repeat in 2018 had published nothing as of 2024, according to Wikipedia’s summary. So where things stand: nobody has shown that pretending to be younger turns back the biological clock.

What is the part worth borrowing?

Strip away the time-travel claim and what is left is Langer’s older, sturdier idea. She calls mindlessness running on autopilot and mindfulness “the simple act of noticing new things.” Her nursing-home research with Judith Rodin in 1976 found that residents who were given small choices and responsibilities, such as caring for a plant, did better than those told staff would handle everything. The hotel-maid study, with 84 workers, found that women told their cleaning counted as exercise lost weight and blood pressure over a month, with no change in what they did.

None of this says your mind can stop aging. It says that how you frame an ordinary day, and whether you feel any say in it, changes how you move through it. That fits a pattern in our own library, from why life on autopilot feels so flat to what a rotation of small changes does against boredom. It also helps explain why the same morning can feel dreadful or fine depending on who is in charge of it.

The morning is where most of us are most mindless. We reach for the phone before we have looked at the room. Someone who wakes up already half-gone into a feed has done the opposite of noticing. A pre-dawn alarm you have to answer on camera, like the one in DontSnooze where a missed video sends a random camera-roll photo to friends you chose, at least forces your eyes open and your attention onto the actual room.

What are three things to try?

1. Notice three new things before the screen. On waking, name three details that differ from yesterday: the quality of the light, a sound in the street, how your shoulders feel. It takes under a minute, and it is the cheapest version of Langer’s noticing. If the days all feel identical, the novelty formula offers more ways to vary them.

2. Make one small choice that is yours. The plant in the nursing-home study was a minor decision with a real owner. Pick one part of the morning to control deliberately, whether that is the music, the route, or what you eat first. A bigger menu is not the point, only that you chose it. The notes on choice architecture show how to set that up so it survives a tired Tuesday.

3. Run a seven-day act-as-if morning. Choose a past version of yourself you liked, perhaps the person who got up for a sunrise run or a 6 a.m. flight, and for one week borrow that person’s first twenty minutes. Same wake time, same posture, same pace. Keep it as an experiment with a start and an end, much like the setup in boring on purpose, and write one line each day about what you noticed. If it does nothing for you, you will have lost a week; if it does, you will know it was you and not a 1959 radio.

For a gloomier angle on the same urge to wake up fully, a morning memento mori practice takes the opposite route and starts from how few mornings anyone has.