Unlocking the mind’s power to change your life
A Harvard psychologist has shown how being ‘in the moment’ contributes to success, writes Claire Keeton
EXPERIMENTS showing how powerful the mind is catapulted Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard University, into the limelight early in her scientific career. She demonstrated that skilful use of the mind can help to reverse ageing and boost health, creativity and charisma.
On a trip to Johannesburg this month, the “mother of mindbody medicine” shared findings from nearly 40 years of research into “mindfulness”.
Her “counterclockwise” study in the late ’70s demonstrated that elderly men placed in a setting with props from 20 years earlier and told to speak and act as if they were living in 1959 began to behave as if they were younger.
Their memory, vision, flexibility and strength improved, and some dropped their walking sticks to play touch football. The effect was much weaker in a control group of men who only reminisced about the past.
Langer, 67, has written or coauthored 11 books and features in The Great Lesson, a documentary about “the power of mind and body”. A Hollywood feature film is now being made about her work.
Langer spoke at a Discovery Vitality conference last week about the ways that a mindful state of awareness can enhance wellbeing, help people to live longer and allow them to transcend what they thought were their limits.
She suggested that people typically operated on auto-pilot, letting the past determine the present.
“Most of us are not there most of the time,” she said.
“We don’t taste what we are tasting, we don’t hear what we are hearing. Mindfulness is the simple process of noticing — noticing what’s new about peo- ple and things we know. When you notice, neurons are firing.”
Langer said a person’s thoughts could profoundly influence not only his or her behaviour, but what he or she became.
A study of 84 female hotel cleaners, for example, showed that those who were told their work provided good exercise experienced health benefits: their blood pressure dropped and they lost weight.
But a group of chambermaids who were given no information about how much exercise they were getting by cleaning rooms recorded no change.
Langer said at the time this did not mean that it was enough to sit on a couch and tell yourself
It is the simple process of noticing. When you notice, neurons are firing
you were exercising. “You’re not going to believe yourself and so there will be no change.”
The power of the mind has long been known through the placebo effect — when participants in drug trials who are receiving no active medicines show benefits anyway.
Langer’s research on firsttime mothers found that those who were aware of the physical and emotional changes during their pregnancies reported feeling better “and having healthier newborns”.
“Mindfulness leads to a superior individual and group experience,” she said.
The Langer Mindfulness Institute has conducted research in workplaces as diverse as call centres and orchestra pits.
The outcomes show that be- ing engaged “in the moment” contributes to success, whether trying to sell a magazine or playing a symphony.
Langer teaches that making snap judgments about people reduces the chance of connecting with them meaningfully. In contrast, mindfulness makes other people appear more attractive.
Langer told the Harvard Business Review: “We’ve looked at the bind that women executives face. If they act in strong, stereotypically masculine ways, they’re seen as bitchy, but if they act feminine, they’re seen as weak and not leadership material. So we asked two groups of women to give persuasive speeches.
“One group was told to act masculine, the other to act feminine. Then half of each group was instructed to give their speech mindfully, and we found that audiences preferred the mindful speakers, regardless of what gender role they were playing out.”
Langer, the first woman professor to get tenure in the Harvard psychology department, said: “I am a straight A, Harvard-Yale PhD and all the facts I took in, which make people feel superior to others, I realise now are wrong. Everything is open to interpretation and everything we know is wrong in some context. It’s OK to say we don’t know.”
There was always more than one answer, she said, and more than one way of doing things.
She said schools promoted the opposite of mindfulness with rote learning and boring routine.
Her work on positive psychology has been popularised in magazines such as the New Yorker and Forbes. “Mindfulness is the antidote to an increasingly chaotic world,” said Langer, who is also an artist.