House History Hunting Part 2: Raising the dead

The mindful body : thinking our way to chronic health

by Ellen J. Langer

158.13 /Langer
Nonfiction, Health

"A groundbreaking account of the power of our thoughts to improve our health-by 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 then 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 for the better. Taking us into Langer's trailblazing Harvard lab, The Mindful Body recounts many of her colorful experiments to illustrate the influence of expectation and belief on how our bodies function, how we heal, and even how we age. In one study, Langer rigged eye charts so that participants would get some of the smaller letters correct 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 reveals that discouraging health news can lead to a worsening physical state: she showed 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" --

I checked this book out after being drawn in by its title. A "mindful" body sounds much better to have than a mindless one! There's a lot of new science out there about how conditions of the body affect the brain, like the mind-gut connection, and this book is a great companion to those studies. I appreciated learning about the placebo affect and enjoyed listening to stories about how people experienced less pain when they were able to ignore it more. I love exploring ideas that promote the mind-over-matter concept. If you've ever wondered, "but how sick am I *really*?" this book is for you! -Melody