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Counter clockwise langer5/18/2023 We see a rat and show signs of fear as our pulse races and sweat breaks out on our skin we think about losing a significant other and our blood pressure increases we watch someone vomit and we feel nauseous ourselves. While we easily see evidence of the connection, it’s not well understood. It raised a nagging question: “What is the nature of the link from the nonmaterial mind to the material body?” Examples of this connection are all around us. Although we couldn’t make an airtight case, subsequent research would bear out our original understanding. Our research had taken place at the beginning of what was later termed the “New Age” movement and well before mind/body studies were conducted in laboratories around the country. Our explanation was that the results were due to the power of making choices and the increased personal control it affords. Over the next several years, I spent a lot of time thinking about what had happened. Allowing for the fact that they were all elderly and quite frail at the start, we were pleased that they were also much healthier: we were surprised, however, that less than half as many of the more engaged group had died than had those in the control group. A year and a half later, we found that members of the first group were more cheerful, active, and alert, based on a variety of tests we had administered both before and after the experiment. Our intent was to make the nursing home residents more mindful, to help them engage with the world and live their lives more fully.Ī second, control group received no such instructions to make their own decisions they were given houseplants but told that the nursing staff would care for them. Each also chose a houseplant to care for, and they were to decide where to place the plant in their room, as well as when and how much to water it. For example, they were allowed to choose where to receive visitors, and if and when to watch the movies that were shown at the home. In the 1970s my colleague Judith Rodin and I conducted an experiment with nursing home residents.1 We encouraged one group of participants to find ways to make more decisions for themselves. Once sickness is upon us, we give ourselves over to modern medicine and hope for the best. Chronic illnesses take their toll, our health and strength diminish accordingly, and the best we can do is graciously accept our fate. There’s no way to turn back the clock or to fight the inevitable. We age and the vigor of youth becomes only a memory as we are ravaged by time. What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out. –William Wordsworth "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. A hopeful and groundbreaking work by an author who has changed how people all over the world think and feel, Counterclockwise is sure to join Mindfulness as a standard source on new-century science and healing. Provocative and riveting, Counterclockwise offers a transformative and bold new paradigm: the psychology of possibility. Improved vision, weight loss, and increased longevity are just three of the results that Langer has demonstrated. With only subtle shifts in our thinking, in our language, and in our expectations, she tells us, we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap health, optimism, and vitality from our lives. If we could turn back the clock psychologically, could we also turn it back physically?įor more than thirty years, award-winning social psychologist Ellen Langer has studied this provocative question, and now, in Counterclockwise, she presents a conclusive answer: Opening our minds to what’s possible, instead of presuming impossibility, can lead to better health-at any age.ĭrawing on landmark work in the field and her own body of highly original experiments-including her “counterclockwise” study, in which elderly men lived for a week as though it was 1959 and showed dramatic improvements in their hearing, memory, dexterity, appetite, and general well-being-Langer shows that the magic of rejuvenation and ongoing good health lies in being aware of the ways we mindlessly react to social and cultural cues.Įxamining the intricate but often defeatist ways we define our physical health, Langer challenges the idea that the limits we assume and impose on ourselves are real.
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