Reinventing Yourself Through Mindfulness

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer is best known for her work on the subject of “mindfulness”, by which she means paying attention: consciously looking for what is new and different, questioning preconceived ideas, and stopping to think about what you’re doing and how you’re reacting.

Of course, the opposite of mindfulness is being on automatic pilot (much of what we believe is rational thought is actually our brains on automatic pilot), stereotyping, categorical thinking, simply accepting what we’re told, and acting mechanically.

Here are two examples of mindlessness; the first is an illustration of categorical thinking, and the second is an illustration of stereotyping (Source):

First. Suppose that a rich-looking man rings your doorbell late one night and tells you that he’s on a scavenger hunt and desperately needs to find a 3′ x 7′ piece of wood. He’ll give you $10,000 if you help him find one.

You try to think of a lumber yard, although you have no clue where one is, and then you conclude that nothing would be open at this hour anyway. So you turn him down. It doesn’t occur to you that the door you just opened is a 3′ x 7′ piece of wood, because you think of it as a category called “door,” not “wood.”

Second. During a psychology conference, a fight broke out. Unbeknown to the attendants, the fight was staged. Immediately after the fight, the forty witnesses were asked to write down an account of what they had seen. The results were as follows (remember that these are psychologists, people trained to observe):

• The majority of the psychologists made mistakes regarding more than 50% of what had taken place.
• In addition, several of them came up with numerous “facts” that were completely made up.

Why did more than a majority see a scene that had not taken place? Because what they saw was not the fight that took place in front of them, but the stereotype that they had of what “a brawl” is supposed to look like.

Langer explains that being mindful is very significant.  She adds that being mindful makes people more effective, more creative, and healthier. Below you’ll discover how being mindful can help you age better, be more creative, and enjoy life more.

Mindfulness and Aging

In 1979 Langer conducted a study with a group of elderly men, retrofitting an isolated old Monastery in New Hampshire so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time.

• They watched Sgt. Bilko and The Ed Sullivan Show on a black-and-white television set.
• They listened to Nat King Cole on the radio.
• The men had discussions about Castro marching on Havana and the latest NASA satellite launch – all in the present tense.
• In addition, although these men were used to being taken care of, they were encouraged to be active: carry their own bags, put their things away, help around the house, and so on.

The idea was to see if changing the men’s mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness.  Langer’s findings—published in her book “Counterclockwise”–were stunning:

• After just one week, the men in the experimental group–compared with a control group of men of the same age–had more joint flexibility, increased dexterity and less arthritis in their hands.
• Their mental acuity had risen measurably, and they had improved gait and posture.
• One man even decided he could do without his walking stick.
• Outsiders who were shown the men’s photographs judged them to be significantly younger than the men in the control group.

Langer holds that by encouraging the men’s minds to think younger their bodies followed suit and actually became “younger”.

Another of Langer’s mindfulness studies involved an ordinary optometrist’s eye chart—the chart with the huge “E” on top and descending lines of smaller and smaller letters that eventually become unreadable. She wondered: what if we reversed it? The regular chart creates the expectation that at some point you’ll be unable to read the letters. But what if the chart was turned upside down, so that people would expect the letters to become readable?

She found that by creating the expectation that the letters would become more readable as they descended, the subjects still couldn’t read the tiniest letters, but they were able to read smaller letters than they could when using the “regular optometrist” chart. Their expectation—their mindset—improved their actual vision. (Source and Source).

Langer and her Harvard colleagues have been running similarly inventive experiments for decades. Her theory is that we are all victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health. We mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our self-concepts and our behavior.

If we release our negative preconceptions about aging and about health, we can “mindfully” open ourselves to possibilities for more joyful, productive lives.

Mindfulness and Creativity

“What attracted me was less art itself than the artist’s life and all that it meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life.” – Pierre Bonnard

Langer explains that we’ve all had the experience of being deeply engaged in something, whether it’s a book, a conversation, playing a sport, and so on; we seek lives steeped in such experiences. Langer’s book “On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity” is a guide to opening up to creative engagement on a daily basis in all that we do.

She argues that instead of judging everything we do by its end-product, we should ask whether we were mindfully engaged while doing it. What does Langer mean by mindfulness?

• Mindfulness is an effortless, simple process that consists of drawing novel distinctions.
• It’s about noticing new things.
• Noticing new things puts you in the present and makes you sensitive to context and perspective. It allows you to notice the novel in the familiar.
• It requires that we give up the fixed ways in which we’ve learned to look at the world.
• It’s about gaining an enhanced receptivity to new information and to different points of view.

Questioning the Rules

Langer argues that we are taught that we live in a world of “is”, rather than a world of “maybe” or “it depends”. Most of what we believe is certain about the world we live in is simply the result of a decision that someone made at some point. Then we’re told that “this is the way that it is” as if it were something that is God-given and not to be questioned. This makes us accept a world, or a life, that is less exciting than it otherwise could be.

The world we live in is simply a social construction. People change their minds, there’s room for negotiation, and the fact that someone made a decision means that there was uncertainty at some point. So everything becomes more malleable.

Langer goes on to say that rules and ways of doing things that are giving to us as guidelines help us make our way in the world. But if these rules are given to us as absolute statements, they tend to hold us back.

The Power of Mindfulness

To illustrate the power of mindfulness, Langer explains that she took up painting a few years back.  She showed one of her paintings, which was made on glass, to a friend.  Her friend told her that she loved it, but that she should have painted it on canvas instead. So Langer went back and redid the same painting on canvas.

Then the friend told Langer that she should have painted it on a larger canvas. Langer then created the same painting again for a third time, this time using a larger canvas. She noticed that as she repeated the painting the process of creation became less interesting for her.  In addition, the quality of the painting dropped each time she repeated it.

Based on this observation from her own work, she conducted an experiment in which students were divided into two groups:

• The first group was told to create a painting and then copy it.
• The second group was told to create a painting and copy it, but to add some subtle changes. That is, to be mindful while making the copy.

A random group of people were asked to select which paintings they preferred. Overwhelmingly they preferred the paintings which were created mindfully. This led Langer to conclude that mindfulness is visible on the canvas.

A similar experiment was conducted with orchestras. Musicians have to play the same piece of music over and over again; often, they reach a point in which it becomes boring for them. Langer took an orchestra and told them to play a piece twice: the first time they had to remember the best time they had ever played the piece and try to repeat that performance; the second time they had to make subtle changes to the piece (be mindful).

These two performances were recorded and were replayed to a group of people knowledgeable about music. Overwhelmingly they preferred the performance where the musicians were mindful. In addition, the musicians reported that they preferred playing mindfully. (Source; thank you Mimi. ).

Conclusion

Mindfulness is, in large part, about preserving our individuality. It’s about questioning so-called rules and assumptions given to us by others, making our own decisions, reassessing beliefs that no longer serve us, and being willing to express ourselves without worrying about how others will judge or evaluate us.

In addition, it’s about slowing down, being in the present, following your intuition, and putting more emphasis on the process instead of the outcome.

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(Reinventando a roda photo courtesy of everton137.)

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