wisewords
ELLEN LANGER How Changing Your Thinking
Changes Everything by April Thompson
F
OR 40 YEARS, Social Psy- chologist Ellen Langer has conducted pioneering research on the power of our minds to shape health and well-being. Langer’s work demonstrates that changing what we think and
believe can transform not only our experiences, but also our bodies—a once-radical idea now common among neurosci- entists. Her unconventional experiments often involve mind tricks: taking elders’ subjective thoughts back 20 years to reverse objective metrics of aging; fostering weight loss in a group of hotel maids by simply suggesting that their jobs qualify as exercise; and even changing blood sugar levels in diabetics by speeding up or slowing down perceived time during a video game session. Affectionately dubbed the “Mother of Mindfulness”,
Langer was the first female professor to earn tenure in Har- vard University’s psychology department. A prolific writer and scientist, she has authored more than 200 related articles and 11 books, including Mindfulness; The Power of Mindful Learning; On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. Langer lives, paints, works and observes the world from Cambridge, Massachu- setts. Learn more at
EllenLanger.com.
What is mindful learning, and how can we best
practice it? All learning is mindful; the only way to learn is by notic- ing new things. When we stop observing and get into our heads, wondering if that answer was right or if we
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responded quickly enough, we exit learning mode and enter mindlessness, where no learning can really take place. Part of what makes travel exciting, for
example, is that we are primed to experience new things and pay attention to them, but actually, newness surrounds us at all times, no matter where we are. What makes us mindless is the mistaken notion of already knowing, when everything is always changing.
What techniques, with or without meditation, can we adopt to change our mindset and mental habits to reduce stress and increase health and
happiness? Most mindlessness occurs by default, rather than design. If we all realized that through mindfulness we could look better, feel better, be better received and do better things— all claims that are supported by scientific research—it wouldn’t be hard to choose. Meditation is essentially a tool to lead you to the simple
act of intentional noticing, but many routes lead to that destination. One way to learn mindfully is to learn con- ditionally; to see the world as “it would seem that” and “could be”, which is very different than “it is.” If we recognized that evaluations occur in our heads
rather than the external world, much of our stress would dissipate. Negativity and stress are typically a result of mindless ruminations about negative things we think are inevitable. If we simply ask ourselves why the dreaded event might not occur, we’d be less stressed. Next, if we
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