The Mindful Body
Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health
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Learn how adjusting your thoughts can change your health—from the “mother of mindfulness” and first female tenured professor of psychology at Harvard.
“What matters more: mind or body? Filled with original research and thought-provoking insights, The Mindful Body shows that the two are not just connected but are actually one, opening us to vast potential for health and happiness.”—Dan Ariely, New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational
Can changing your thoughts improve your health? We tend to live our lives as though our ailments—our stiff knees or frayed nerves or diminished eyesight—can change only in one direction: for the worse. Award-winning social psychologist Ellen J. Langer’s life’s work proves the fault in this negative outlook as well as the healing power of its alternative: mindfulness—the process of active noticing where we are not bound by past experience or conventional wisdom.
In The Mindful Body, Dr. Langer unpacks her assumption-busting findings and outlines her bold new theory of mind-body unity, along the way clearly demonstrating how our thoughts and perspectives have the potential to profoundly shape our well-being. Whether it is hotel chambermaids who lost weight when they simply came to see that their work constituted exercise, or patients whose wounds healed faster in rooms with accelerated clocks, she shows how influential our thoughts are to the state of our bodies. Her work has likewise proven that discouraging health news can have negative effects. Learning you are prediabetic, for example—even if your blood sugar reading is only a fraction away from “normal”—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 minds.
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Social psychologist Langer (Mindfulness) provides a fascinating glimpse into her lab at Harvard, where for more than 40 years she's been exploring the mind-body unity concept, which suggests "psychology may be the most important determinant of our health" and that reworking thought patterns can impact physical well-being. According to Langer, patients given grim diagnoses often adopt defeatist attitudes and other "stereotypical responses and behaviors" associated with the illnesses, but when one recognizes that diagnosis criteria, cut-off points, and labels "are made by people... we gain a newfound sense of freedom" and "can learn to heal ourselves." Langer notes that even chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's can improve with psychological interventions, making decisions mindfully, and realizing that every choice offers opportunities for growth and education. While the author's assertion that "health may be only a thought away" might strike some as overly optimistic, and despite a few less-convincing anecdotes, including one about an 89-year-old patient whose chronic pain disappeared after she disclosed her childhood trauma to a doctor, readers will appreciate Langer's insightful takes on the close relationship between psychological and physical wellness and attempts to revise a rigid medical paradigm of healing. Those seeking a novel approach to recovery should check it out.
