Learn how adjusting your thoughts can change your health--from the
"mother of mindfulness" and first female tenured professor of psychology
at Harvard.
When it comes to our health, too many of us think that a medical
diagnosis describes a static or worsening condition. We live our lives
as though our ailments--our stiff knees or frayed nerves or failing
eyesight--can only change in one direction: for the worse. Ellen J.
Langer's life's work proves the fault in that logic. She has spent more
than forty years testing the limiting effects of our negative
assumptions as well as the healing power of being mindful--present in
the moment and not distracted by memories or projections into the
future. In The Mindful Body she unpacks her findings and boldly
demonstrates how our thoughts and perspectives have the potential to
shape our well-being.
Taking us into Langer's trailblazing Harvard lab, The Mindful Body
recounts many of her colorful experiments to illustrate the influence of
mindfulness on how our bodies function, how we heal, and even how we
age. In one study, Langer rigged eye charts so that participants would
identify some of the smaller letters correctly right away, giving them
the expectation that they could improve their overall eye test scores.
And they did. In another, she showed that wounds heal faster when
subjects are placed in rooms with accelerated clocks; when you think
that time is passing faster, your body heals faster!
On the other hand, her work also reveals that discouraging health news
can lead to a worsening physical state: She shows that learning you are
pre-diabetic--even when only a fraction separates your blood sugar from
a "normal" categorization--may actually play a part in the development
of the disease.
A paradigm-shifting book by one of the great psychologists of the
twenty-first century, The Mindful Body returns the control over our
bodies back to us and reveals that a true understanding of health begins
with our mindset.
