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Tom Butler-Bowdon

self-help classics

Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life
(1989)
Ellen Langer


Have you ever said "excuse me" to a store mannequin or written a check in January with the previous year's date?' asks Ellen Langer. For most of us, the answer is probably 'yes', but these small mistakes, the author believes, are the tip of a mindlessness iceberg. A Harvard psychology professor, her research into rigidity of mind led to observations about mental fluidity, or mindfulness.

One of the great themes of self-help literature is the need to be free of unconsciously accepted habits and norms. Langer's classic shows how we can actually accomplish it. The book is in the best tradition of Western scientific research, filled with the results of fascinating experiments which should appeal to those readers who enjoy Emotional Intelligence or Learned Optimism.

Who or what is a mindful person? Langer suggests that their qualities will include:

  • Ability to create new categories;
  • Openness to new information;
  • Awareness of more than one perspective;
  • Attention to process (doing) rather than outcome (results); and
  • Trust of intuition.

New categories

To look at the first: Langer says we live and experience reality in a conceptual form; we don't see things afresh and anew every time we look at them. Instead, we create categories and let things fall into them, which is a more convenient way of dealing with the world. Apart from the smaller things, such as defining a vase as a Japanese vase, a flower as an orchid or a person a boss, there are the wider categorisations under which we live including religions, ideologies and systems of government. Each gives us a level of psychological certainty and saves us from the effort of constantly challenging our own beliefs. We divide animals into 'pets' and 'livestock' so that we can feel OK loving one and eating the other.

Mindlessness results when we don't know that the categories we subscribe to are categories, and have accepted them as our own without really thinking. Creating new categories, and reassessing old ones, is mindfulness. Or as William James put it: 'Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.'

New information

Langer talks about 'premature cognitive commitments', which are like photographs in which meaning, rather than motion, is frozen. To evoke the dangers of false, frozen images, she reminds us of Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations, who still wore the wedding dress she had donned the day she was abandoned at the altar, but which now hung like faded curtains over her aged body.

At a more prosaic level, a child may know an elderly person who is grumpy, and will hold onto a picture of 'old people are grumps' and take it with him into adulthood. In not bothering to replace that picture with different images of later life, the person is locked into a false perception that is likely to be reflected in their own experience. They will turn into an old grump too.

This of course applies to other aspects of life; if we are mindful, we will be less willing to take 'genes' as an excuse for behaviour or lack of action. Just because a parent never rose above middle management level, we don't assume we won't become company president.

Perspective and context

Mindlessness occurs when people accept information in a context-free way. The ability to transcend context, Langer says, is the mark of mindfulness and creativity.

She notes that much pain is context-dependent. Getting a bruise out on the football field will matter much less to us than if we sustain one at home. Imagination is the key to perceiving differently. The Birdman of Alcatraz, stuck in a cell for over 40 years, managed to make his life a rich one by his care of injured birds.

The implication of these vignettes for personal development is clear: we can put up with anything as long as it is within a positive context. Without a defined personal vision, life might seem like a mass of constant worries and annoyances; with one, everything is put into perspective. As Nietzsche said, if you have a 'why', you can put up with any 'how'.

Process orientation

Another key characteristic of mindfulness is focus on process before outcome, or 'doing rather than achieving'. We look at the breakthrough of a scientist and say 'genius', as if what he discovered happened overnight. With the rare exception, like Einstein's great year of discovery, most scientific success is the result of years of work that can be broken down into steps. A college student looks at his professor's book in awe, thinking 'I could never write something that good', assuming it must be higher intelligence, not years of study and work, that delivered up the weighty tome. These are all faulty comparisons.

The process orientation requires us to ask, not 'can I do it?' but 'how can I do it?' This '...not only sharpens our judgment, it makes us feel better about ourselves', says Langer.

Intuition

Intuition is an important path to mindfulness, because its very use requires ignoring old habits and expectations to try something that may go against reason. Yet the best scientists are intuitive, many spending years methodically validating what appeared to them in a flash of intuitive truth.

The amazing thing about mindfulness and intuition is that they are both relatively effortless: 'Both are reached by escaping the heavy, single-minded striving of most ordinary life.' Yet intuition will give us valuable information about our survival and success; we cannot explain where it comes from, but we ignore it at our cost. The mindful person will go with what works, even if it doesn't make sense.

Final word

In essence, mindfulness is about preserving our individuality. By choosing the mindset of limited resources, by choosing to focus on outcomes rather than doing (process), and by making faulty comparisons with others, we become little more than robots. The true individual is characterised by openness to the new, is always reclassifying the meaning of knowledge and experience, and has the ability to see their daily actions in a bigger, consciously chosen perspective.

Langer recognises the parallels in her work with Eastern religion; for example, the Buddhist understanding that meditation is about enjoying a mindful state which leads to 'right action'. Mindfulness, Langer hopes, has the same effect, and therefore has important implications for the health of society, not just the individual. The beauty of mindfulness is that it is not work; in fact, because it leads to greater control of our own thinking, it is to use Langer's word, 'exhilarating', in a quiet way creating excitement about what is possible.

Its ideas may seem difficult, but Mindfulness was written for a popular audience and is quite short. It has none of the hoopla common to self-help writing; people value it for its fine distinctions and insights based on years of research, and like it for its understatedness.

"Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of new distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew."


Ellen Langer


Born in 1947, Langer obtained a BA in Psychology from New York University in 1970, and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1974. From her position as Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, she has produced several scholarly works, numerous journal articles and chapters in edited collections. 


Mindfulness was the product of over 50 experiments, mostly with elderly people. The experiments led Langer to believe that the protectiveness of nursing homes leads to reduced autonomy and responsibility, which hastens ageing. The book has been translated into 13 languages.

Langer's other popular works are Personal Politics (with Carol Dweck, 1973), The Psychology of Control, (1983) The Power of Mindful Learning (1997), On Becoming An Artist (2005), and
Counter clockwise: mindful health and the power of possibility (2009). Her entry on Mindfulness/Mindlessness appears in Encyclopaedia of Psychology (R. Cosini ed. 1994). She lives in Massachusetts.



Source: 50 Self-Help Classics: Your shortcut to the most important ideas on happiness and fulfilment by Tom Butler-Bowdon (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey)
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© COPYRIGHT TOM BUTLER-BOWDON, 2023
​. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • 50 Classics Series
    • 50 Self-Help Classics >
      • James Allen - As A Man Thinketh
      • Dale Carnegie - How To Win Friends and Influence People
      • Stephen Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
      • Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance
      • Benjamin Franklin - Autobiography
      • Louise Hay - You Can Heal Your Life
      • Joseph Murphy - The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
      • Samuel Smiles - Self-Help
      • Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
    • 50 Success Classics >
      • Claude M Bristol - The Magic of Believing
      • Jim Collins - Good To Great
      • Russell H Conwell - Acres of Diamonds
      • Napoleon Hill - Think and Grow Rich
      • Catherine Ponder - The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity
      • David J Schwartz - The Magic of Thinking Big
      • Wallace Wattles - The Science of Getting Rich
    • 50 Spiritual Classics >
      • Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
      • Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet
      • Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception
      • Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
      • Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
      • CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
      • Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements
      • 50 More Spiritual Classics
    • 50 Psychology Classics >
      • Eric Berne - Games People Play
      • Isabel Briggs Myers - Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
      • Louann Brizendine - The Female Brain
      • David D Burns - Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
      • Robert Cialdini - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
      • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Creativity
      • Albert Ellis - A Guide To Rational Living
      • Milton Erickson - Teaching Tales
      • Erik Erikson - Young Man Luther
      • Hans Eysenck - Dimensions of Personality
      • Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
      • Malcolm Gladwell - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
      • Carl Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
      • Alfred Kinsey - Sexuality In The Human Female
      • Abraham Maslow - Motivation and Personality
      • Stanley Milgram - Obedience To Authority
      • IP Pavlov - Conditioned Reflexes
      • Jean Piaget - The Language and Thought of the Child
      • Carl Rogers - On Becoming A Person
      • BF Skinner - Beyond Freedom & Dignity
    • 50 Prosperity Classics >
      • James Allen - The Path to Prosperity
      • Genevieve Behrend - Your Invisible Power
      • Richard Branson - Losing My Virginity
      • Warren Buffett - The Essays of Warren Buffett
      • Rhonda Byrne - The Secret
      • Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth
      • Felix Dennis - How To Get Rich
      • Peter Drucker - Innovation and Entrepreneurship
      • Harv Eker - Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
      • Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom
      • Michael E Gerber - The E-Myth Revisited
      • Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor
      • Esther & Jerry Hicks - Ask And It Is Given
      • Conrad Hilton - Be My Guest
      • Joe Karbo - The Lazy Man's Way To Riches
      • Catherine Ponder - Open Your Mind To Prosperity
      • Ayn Rand - Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
      • Donald Trump - The Art of the Deal
      • Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
      • Prosperity Principles
    • 50 Philosophy Classics >
      • Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
      • Heraclitus - Fragments
      • Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
      • Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
      • Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage
      • John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
      • Montaigne - Essays
      • Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
      • Plato - The Republic
      • Karl Popper - The Logic of Scientific Discovery
      • John Rawls - A Theory of Justice
      • Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness
      • Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan
      • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
    • 50 Politics Classics
    • 50 Economics Classics
    • 50 Business Classics
  • Capstone Classics
    • Think and Grow Rich
    • The Science of Getting Rich
    • The Art of War
    • The Prince
    • The Wealth of Nations
    • The Republic
    • The Tao Te Ching
    • Meditations
    • Beyond Good and Evil
    • Origin of Species
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