Ellen Langer was recently
a guest on the show “On Being.” A social psychologist and well known researcher, Langer is considered the mother of mindfulness. During
her interview with Krista Tippet’s, she described how 80% of what she owned was destroyed by fire. When the
insurance agent came to her house, he told her that s it was the first call
they had ever received where the damage was far more significant than the reaction
of the caller. As Langer noted, ‘...It’s
already taken my stuff, whatever that means. Why give it my soul. You know,
that — why pay twice?’ Which is what people so often do. Something happens, you
have that loss, and then you’re going to now throw all your emotional energy at
it. So you’re doubling up on the negativity.
Langer went on to
describe how tragedies can in fact have some very positive outcomes. Living in a hotel while her home was being
repaired after the fire, she went out on Christmas Eve, returning to find her
room filled with presents from the maid, wait staff, parking valet
etc. It was marvelous. When you strip
away all the mindless insecurity, people, are quite something....so I reflect
on that. I couldn’t tell you anything that I had lost in the fire....but at
this point, I have that memory that was more than positive.
Those affected by chronic conditions can quickly name
how it’s negatively impacted their life. How often do we ask, what are the
positives that have come from this diagnosis and even more importantly, how
negative do we really need to be? As
Langer noted Epictetus, the ancient Greek philosopher, said, “Events don’t cause stress. What causes
stress are the views you take of events.”
Langer researches the impact of chronic disease on
those who are dealing with it . "When
I started the Counter Clockwise
book, I looked at chronic versus acute illness, and I couldn't find a
definition for chronic. You know, did you need to have the symptoms 24/7, three
hours a month? There was no definition. But it mattered enormously because when
people see that they have a chronic illness, they believe that there's nothing
they can do about it. And so then we set out to study this in various ways, not
the least of which is once you start paying attention to when you have the
symptoms and when you don't, three things happen.
"The
first is you see you don't have it all the time, so it's not quite as bad as
you thought. You know, people are depressed, they think they're depressed all
the time. No one is anything all the time. People who are dyslexic, it turns
out that most words, over 90 percent of the words, they're reading they tend to
read correctly, yet they define themselves by their illness.
"So
what happens is first you see you're not as bad as you thought you were.
Second, by seeing that sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse leads you to
ask the question — well, why? And you may well come up with a solution. And the
third, even if you don't, that whole process is mindful, and the 35-or-so years
of research we've done shows that that kind of noticing new things leads to
health and longevity." Thinking ‘Counter Clockwise’ to Beat Stress
 |
| Langer's artwork |
Bottom line: We can mindlessly think about how
dreadful our chronic condition is, allowing a diagnosis to suck out our soul, or we can mindfully engage in our life being
aware that the words and ideas we attach to situations changes everything.
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