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.

"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. 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."--