Publisher Description
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 When it comes to our 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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About Ellen J. Langer
Ellen Langer, Yale PhD, Harvard Professor of Psychology, artist. Among
other honors, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three
Distinguished Scientist Awards, the World Congress Award, the NYU Alumni
Achievement Award, and the Staats award for Unifying Psychology, and has
authored eleven books and over 200 research articles on the illusion of
control, perceived control, successful aging, decision-making, to name a few of
the topics. Each of these is examined through the lens of her theory of
mindfulness. Her research has demonstrated that by actively noticing new
things—the essence of mindfulness—health, well-being, and competence follow.
Her bestselling books include Mindfulness,
The Power of Mindful Learning, On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself
Through Mindful Creativity, and her most recent book, Counterclockwise: Mindful
Health and the Power of Possibility.