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Mindfulness (Ellen J. Langer)
- Our life is what our thoughts make it. Marcus Aurelius
- When the will to act is thwarted, it atrophies into a wish to be taken care of.
- The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play. Arnold Toynbee
- Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.
- Mindfulness can encourage creativity when the focus is on the process and not the product.
- This ability to transcend context is the essence of mindfulness and central to creativity in any field.
- It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover,” said the mathematician Henri Poincare
- The way we first take in information (that is, mindfully or mindlessly) determines how we will use it later.
- In a society concerned primarily with process, the notion of deviance might have much less, if any, significance.
- If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.
- Second-order mindfulness recognizes that there is no right answer. Decision making is independent of data gathering.
- Changing of contexts, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, generates imagination and creativity as well as new energy.
- Because rigidly following set rules and being mindful are, by definition, incompatible, this book will not offer prescriptions.
- When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case.
- It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon, so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits.
- Work/life integration seems to me a better goal than balance. Balance suggests that our lives are in two parts. The more mindful we are, the less we compartmentalize our lives.
- Mindlessness is pervasive. In fact I believe virtually all of our problems—personal, interpersonal, professional, and societal—either directly or indirectly stem from mindlessness.
- If we describe someone we dislike intensely, a single state-ment usually does it. But if, instead, we are forced to describe the person in great detail, eventually there will be some quality we appreciate.
- In combating prejudice, then, the issue is not simply how we might teach the majority to be less judgmental, but also how we might all learn to value a “disabled” or “deviant” person’s more creative perceptions.
- If we examine what is behind our desires, we can usually get what we want without compromising: love, caring, confidence, respectability, excitement. Compromising is necessary only if what we want is in short supply.
- Instead I invite you to consider why you laughed at a joke the last time you did. If the punch line made you realize that the story could be understood in a way other than how you first heard it, you have experienced a moment of mindfulness.
- Regardless of how we get there, either through meditation or more directly by paying attention to novelty and questioning assumptions, to be mindful is to be in the present, noticing all the wonders that we didn’t realize were right in front of us.
- The successful leader may be the person who recognizes that we all have talents and who thus sees her or his main job as encouraging mindfulness in those being led.”Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.
- In contrast, a process orientation . . . asks ‘How do I do it?’ instead of ‘Can I do it?’ and this directs attention toward defining the steps that are necessary on the way. This orientation can be characterized in terms of the guiding principle that there are no failures, only ineffective solutions.
- The more we realize that most of our views of ourselves, of others, and of presumed limits regarding our talents, our health, and our happiness were mindlessly accepted by us at an earlier time in our lives, the more we open up to the realization that these too can change. And all we need do to begin the process is to be mindful.
- The more we realize that most of our views of ourselves, of others, and of presumed limits regarding our talents, our health, and our happiness were mindlessly accepted by us at an earlier time in our lives, the more we open up to the realization that these too can change. And all we need do to begin the process is to be mindful.
- Out of time we cut “days” and “nights,” “summers” and “winters.” We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. William James
- Social psychologists argue that who we are at any one time depends mostly on the context in which we find ourselves. But who creates the context? The more mindful we are, the more we can create the contexts we are in. When we create the context, we are more likely to be authentic. Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.
- Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change. When we feel locked into strict work procedures and rules, we can recognize that these were once decisions made by certain individuals. These people lived at a particular point in history, with particular biases and needs. If we realized this, more of us would consider redesigning our work to fit our skills and lives.
- A mindful approach to our health is particularly effective for ‘chronic’ conditions. For example, consider depression. When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case, which itself is reassuring. By noticing specific moments or situations in which we feel worse or better, we can make changes in our lives. If every time I speak on the telephone to Bob I feel worthless, for example, the solution may be obvious.
- Research like these vision studies highlights the dangers of setting limits for ourselves. For instance, I’ve asked my students: What is the greatest distance it is humanly possible to run in one spurt? Because they know the marathon is twenty-six miles, they use that number to start and then guess that we probably haven’t reached the limit, so they answer around thirty-two miles. The Tarahumura, of Copper Canyon in Mexico, can run up to two hundred miles. If we are mindful, we don’t assume limits from past experience have to determine present experience.
- A true process orientation also means being aware that every outcome is preceded by a process. Graduate students forget this all the time. They begin their dissertations with inordinate anxiety because they have seen other people’s completed and polished work and mistakenly compare it to their own first tentative steps. With their noses deep in file cards and half-baked hypotheses, they look in awe at Dr. So-and-so’s published book as if it had been born without effort or false starts, directly from brain to printed page. By investigating how someone got somewhere, we are more likely to see the achievement as hard-won and our own chances as more plausible.
- When we think of resources being limited, we often think of our own abilities. Here, too, our notion of limits may inhibit us. We may push ourselves to what we believe are our limits, in swimming, public speaking, or mathematics. However, whether they are true limits is not determinable. It may be in our best interest to proceed as though these and other abilities might be improved upon, so that at least we will not be deterred by false limits. It was once assumed that humans could not run the mile in fewer than five minutes. In 1922 it was said to be ‘humanly impossible’ to run the mile in less than four minutes. In 1952 that limit was broken by Roger Bannister. Each time a record is broken, the supposed limit is extended. Yet the notion of limits persists.
- Trying to remain mindful in all that we do may seem exhausting. In many talks I’ve given over the years, people shudder when I say we should be mindful virtually all the time. They think it’s hard work. I believe that being mindful is not hard, but rather it may seem hard because of the anxious self-evaluation we add. ‘What if I can’t figure it out?’ Anxiety causes stress, and stress is exhausting. Mindfulness is not. Being mindful allows us to be joyfully engaged in what we are doing. Time races by, and we feel fully alive. It can be physically strenuous, but also great fun. We did a study in which we had two groups of people do the same task: rate cartoons. One group was introduced to the task as work and another as play. The first group found that their minds wandered, and they clearly were not having fun. The group who approached the very same task as if it were a game enjoyed the entire experience.
- One day, at a nursing home in Connecticut, elderly residents were each given a choice of houseplants to care for and were asked to make a number of small decisions about their daily routines. A year and a half later, not only were these people more cheerful, active, and alert than a similar group in the same institution who were not given these choices and responsibilities, but many more of them were still alive. In fact, less than half as many of the decision-making, plantminding residents had died as had those in the other group. This experiment, with its startling results, began over ten years of research into the powerful effects of what my colleagues and I came to call mindfulness, and of its counterpart, the equally powerful but destructive state of mindlessness. Unlike the exotic ‘altered states of consciousness’ that we read so much about, mindfulness and mindlessness are so common that few of us appreciate their importance or make use of their power to change our lives. This book is about the psychological and physical costs we pay because of pervasive mindlessness and, more important, about the benefits of greater control, richer options, and transcended limits that mindfulness can make possible.
