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How To Take Control Of Your Health Using The Concept Of "Mind-Body Unity"

Author:

Ellen Langer, PhD

September 13, 2023

Harvard Psychology Professor

By Ellen Langer, PhD

Harvard Psychology Professor

Ellen J. Langer was the first woman to be tenured in psychology at Harvard, where she is still professor of psychology. The recipient of three Distinguished Scientists awards, the Arthur W. Staats Award for Unifying Psychology, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Liberty Science Genius Award, Dr. Langer is the author of 13 books. Her trailblazing experiments in social psychology have earned her inclusion in The New York Times Magazine’s “Year in Ideas” issue. She is known worldwide as the “mother of mindfulness” and the “mother of positive psychology”. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Image by W2 Photography / Stocksy

September 13, 2023

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We hear a lot these days about the "mind-body connection," and most people have a baseline understanding of and belief in it. But I have spent my career exploring a paradigm shift from this common idea: I believe that mind and body do not simply have a connection but are one entity. Wherever we put the mind, we are necessarily putting the body.

A simple way to illustrate mind-body unity is to consider your own arm. You can see and experience it as an arm—or as a wrist, elbow, upper arm, and forearm. But by moving any part of your arm, you move or affect all of its parts. In the same way, every thought you have affects every part of your body.

Researching the mind-body connection

I first tested this theory in 1979, when I conducted research that essentially turned back the clock both physically and mentally for a group of elderly men. Known now as the "counterclockwise" study 1, the research took place over the course of a week at a retreat that had been retrofitted to recreate the world as it was 20 years earlier.

The men we were studying were encouraged to live as if they were their younger selves, by dressing in the style of the era, talking about the past in the present tense, and listening to the radio shows and reading the magazines that they had enjoyed when they were younger.

The results were astounding. Simply by living as if they were in their heydays, the men's hearing and vision improved, as did their strength and memory. Moreover, at the end of the week, they even looked noticeably healthier and fitter. All of this occurred without medical intervention.

Every thought you have affects every part of your body.

I have since conducted many studies that lend clear support to the idea of mind/body unity.

In one study 2, we talked to hotel chambermaids about exercise and their health. At the outset, they did not see their work as exercise, so we showed them that making a bed, for example, was like working on a machine at the gym and that every time they worked to tidy and clean a room, they were moving their bodies in ways that qualified as exercise.

This mindset—that they actually did get quite a lot of exercise—led to physically quantifiable changes. Without eating any differently or working any harder, they lost weight, and their body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio decreased. Even their blood pressure came down.

Of course, a mindset change can go the other way, too. In my own life, an important personal example of this occurred when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The disease had taken over her body, and her prognosis was grim from the start. According to the doctors, she had only a few more months to live. I stubbornly tried to keep her spirits up and pretended that the nightmare would pass, but I was more or less the only one with this optimism. Everyone else seemed to see her as frail and doomed and treated her with kid gloves; no one pushed her to keep up her strength or prepare for a cancer-free life they didn't believe she'd ever enjoy.

Then the unexplainable happened: My mother's cancer vanished, and we were given reason to think it might stay that way. But the damage was done; she had let others' beliefs about her health lead her to become weak and more helpless. When the cancer returned some months later, she succumbed to it.

How to use mind-body unity to your advantage

Many of us are not dealing with dreaded diseases. Still, we are not experiencing the joyful lives we could be having. Shifting our thinking, however, can reduce our stress and change our experience and our health. Remember:

Our thoughts make something good or bad, not the event itself. Ask yourself if it was a tragedy or merely an inconvenience.
We can change our perceptions of how healthy we are by considering health to be the chronic condition.
We need to question our dreaded diagnoses and resist the thinking that could make them self-fulfilling prophecies.

As I explore in my new book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, being mindful is not only good for us; it's very easy. All we need to do is actively notice new things about the things we thought we knew, and our attention naturally goes to the new understanding.

The takeaway

Once we begin to appreciate mind-body unity and realize that medical science can only give us probabilities, not absolutes, we begin to see that we have far more control over our health than we might have imagined.