🧠 My Favorite Health and Wellness Book This Month
This book found its way to my Audible and I'm about to restart it it's so good.
We’re often reminded that our minds are powerful tools, but they can also be instruments of self-sabotage if we’re not mindful.
One of my goals for this year is to eliminate this self-sabotaging behavior about my health. I’ve written previously about my battles with health anxiety, and I’ve been trying to tap into a new calmness by meditating on my current fitness.
A health and wellness book that came my way from the Thrive25.com newsletter (a good friend of HPH) and that I’ve been absolutely in love with is The Mindful Body by Dr. Ellen Langer.
The book gives great evidence and perspectives on how much of our physical reality is shaped by our thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, and decisions.
Newsletter Summary:
My review (so far) of The Mindful Body and why I highly recommend it
One thought from the book that is especially poignant
🧠 My Favorite Health and Wellness Book This Month
Langer’s book chronicles her journey into teaching as Harvard’s first tenured female professor of psychology, along with her discoveries about how her mind and mindfulness shaped her research.
Her chapter on decisions, for example, sounds like a lot of us when we’re trying to do something awesome.
Langer highlights overthinking her decision to start her post-graduate career at Carnegie Mellon — an esteemed university with notable credits — or CUNY (shoutout to my alma mater!), in her home city of New York.
In retrospect, her stress over the decision and whether or not it was the right one wasn’t worth it. She eventually landed at Harvard, where her self-questioning behavior during the interview process could have almost lost her the job.
She’d assumed she wouldn’t be tenured while interviewing with the hiring team and even told them it might deter her from accepting the position. To her surprise, Harvard’s professors stated, “It’s not a policy that new professors can’t be tenured. With your resume, we’re actually considering it.”
Expectations, past experiences, overthinking, and negative emotions can cloud our understanding of what may happen in life, whether that’s with exercise, our overall health, that next job interview, or our partners.
Langer says predicting things is a fool’s errand.
There’s no way to know whether or not you’ll lose 20 lbs in the next 4 months, compete in a marathon next year, or add 5 lbs of muscle before the summertime.
The only way to arrive at those outcomes is to assume control of your mindfulness and commit fully to the process instead of romanticizing the outcome.
The works that Langer cites throughout the book help give us an understanding of the raw power of the mind in affecting physiology.
For example, an MIT study sought to assess the eyesight of a group of individuals — some who believed they had “poor eyesight” and those who believed their eyesight was good — and were given the Snellen eye chart (with the smaller and smaller letters) to grade each person.
Those who believed they had poor eyesight were told they would be wearing a different set of clothes — pilot outfits since it’s required that all pilots have 20/20 vision — to view the Snellen chart.
After analyzing both groups, the “good” and “bad” seers, the seers who believed they had worse eyesight with the pilot suits read just as many small letters as the “good” group.
By simply changing the expectations of the testing, the scientists had changed the outcomes physiologically.
“If I wear this suit, I will see better.”
Improving your physical outcomes is not just limited to tests of the senses, either.
Thinking you’re strong enough to lift something, capable of running a certain distance or pushing yourself past a certain plateau will all likely improve your results at those individual tasks versus believing that you can’t.
It is a mindful decision to elect belief in yourself.
My advice for you today is to mindfully decide you are capable of whatever task it is that is plaguing you.
“One you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
— Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson
One Thought About Mindfulness To Start Your Week
Langer starts off the book with a sad story about her late mother to put into perspective just how wrongly we’ve been steered by our institutions about health.
Her mother had received a cancer diagnosis at the age of 57, which sent her mother into a depressive state.
Rounds of chemo, radiation, and the usual hospital visits became standard for her. One thing that was never practiced during her cancer treatment — movement, exercise, and a focus on proper nutrition.
Langer views this as a failing of the current medical system.
As her mother progressed through the stages of treatment, her stage 4 cancer had actually healed, and she’d gone into remission.
However, because there was no focus on empowering her mother and making sure her body was as healthy and strong as it could’ve been throughout treatment, after about nine months, her cancer returned and killed her within a year.
This tragedy is not an uncommon story in the world of healthcare.
After her extensive radiation, Langer’s mother was weak, defeated, and had no desire to move because of the toll that the therapy had taken on her body.
It’s a cruel reminder that the decision to press forward with treatment at the recommendation of a doctor or medical professional — who can, at times, be acting over-cautiously and without all the requisite knowledge of how to maintain homeostasis — can trick us into thinking we’re helpless.
We have the power to save ourselves.
Could Langer’s mother’s death have been avoided? There’s no way to say. But could her odds have been improved by not treating the cancer diagnosis as a death sentence and being coaxed into medical dependence? It’s likely.
Regardless, it’s worth reflecting on what kind of response you’ll have to the stressors of life.
Choosing to view something as fatal — seeing no way out of it without the help of some higher, non-Godly power — can ultimately make it so.
But trusting in your body’s resilience and being mindful of your strength could bode well for adding years to your life.
I highly recommend The Mindful Body. Read it here. Read it twice.