The Mindful Body

July 17, 2023
Social psychologist Langer (Mindfulness) provides a fascinating glimpse into her lab at Harvard, where for more than 40 years she’s been exploring the mind-body unity concept, which suggests “psychology may be the most important determinant of our health” and that reworking thought patterns can impact physical well-being. According to Langer, patients given grim diagnoses often adopt defeatist attitudes and other “stereotypical responses and behaviors” associated with the illnesses, but when one recognizes that diagnosis criteria, cut-off points, and labels “are made by people... we gain a newfound sense of freedom” and “can learn to heal ourselves.” Langer notes that even chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s can improve with psychological interventions, making decisions mindfully, and realizing that every choice offers opportunities for growth and education. While the author’s assertion that “health may be only a thought away” might strike some as overly optimistic, and despite a few less-convincing anecdotes, including one about an 89-year-old patient whose chronic pain disappeared after she disclosed her childhood trauma to a doctor, readers will appreciate Langer’s insightful takes on the close relationship between psychological and physical wellness and attempts to revise a rigid medical paradigm of healing. Those seeking a novel approach to recovery should check it out.

August 1, 2023
Thought-provoking exploration of the mind-body connection and its relationship to health. Langer, a professor of psychology who was the first women to be tenured at Harvard, opens with mention of an experiment in which several elderly men roomed together in housing "that was retrofitted to suggest that time had gone backward twenty years." The men quickly began to behave as if they were 20 years younger: "Their vision, hearing, strength, and even objective appearance improved." Received medical wisdom has no room for such "miracles," relying instead on hard measures that are, Langer holds, sometimes arbitrary and probabilistic. For example, there's not much difference between A1C counts of 5.7 and 5.8, but one is held to be normal and the other prediabetic. Furthermore, telling someone they are prediabetic often leads to diabetes owing to the way people are inclined to read medical judgments as infallible and fixed. "Labels aren't just labels," Langer writes. "They also can change how we behave." That behavior involves decision-making, a fraught venture: Will we decide correctly in making a medical decision such as whether and when to get that hip replaced? The thing to do, the author suggests, is to allow the possibility of uncertainty and become mindful about how we "take these probabilities and convert them into absolutes, making it hard for us to question basic assumptions." Devotees and practitioners of integrative medicine will be on top of some of Langer's thinking already, though more traditional doctors may not be quick to endorse her view that "in some sense, health may be only a thought away." Regardless, a reminder to keep tabs on how we feel and what cues we respond to isn't out of place, and Langer is both lucid and encouraging. A readable primer on how to navigate emotions and, in the bargain, become a more discerning medical consumer.

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October 1, 2023

This book by the award-winning Langer (psychology, Harvard; Mindfulness) builds on the 40+ years of research she's conducted about mindfulness and creativity. Her findings suggest there's a nearly linear relationship between mindfulness and long-term positive health outcomes. The book outlines ways in which socially constructed rules about behavior fail to acknowledge or affirm actual ways in which risk-taking and fictions of control shape people. That ultimately builds a case for approaches to health that bring together what the author terms "mindful medicine," applying the healing power of mindfulness to broader systemic changes, such as mindful hospitals. These concepts will be familiar to readers of Robin Berzin's State Change and other recent books focused on holistic, patient-centered approaches to wellness. Like Berzin, Langer draws together a well-balanced combination of evidence-based research with less empirical explorations of perception in ways that will inspire readers to look for spaces for a positive mindset within systems that often focus on symptoms rather than complete individuals. VERDICT This is not a wellness book with checklists. Instead, it serves as an exploration of what change looks like and how people can incrementally move away from learned rules toward more nuanced approaches to their own health.--Emily Bowles

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