Counterclockwise Quotes

“The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“We simply don’t know, which is why scientific research is an almost constant search for better truths and not “the truth.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Helping feels good to the helper, but over time it may make the helped feel incompetent. Dr.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Wouldn’t it be more advantageous to recognize that when placebos work we are the ones controlling our health, to learn how to exercise it directly, and to see ourselves as efficacious when we do?”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Instead of one big problem to be killed with pills, we could interpret pain simply as sensations. There may be an advantage to not naming our sensations but merely to experience them. If we did, we would see that they don’t stand still. They change. A headache may throb at one point while the sensations are barely noticeable the next. To notice the changes gives us a chance to control the sensations. Noticing the changes may also lead us to not need to exert any control. After all, the pain may subside on its own.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Negative stereotypes about aging, as we have seen, may directly and indirectly prime diminished capacity for older adults. Similarly, the absence of these cues may prime improved health. The general hypothesis examined here was that if we are in contexts that prime older age, we will age more quickly. We examined the effect that our clothes may have on us given the age-appropriate stance we take on clothing. Imagine a sixty-year-old woman trying on a miniskirt. In most cases, she’d be well advised not to make the purchase, but we would think nothing of a sixteen-year-old wearing the same skirt.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“When we notice new things, we become mindful, and mindfulness begets more mindfulness. The more mindful we become, the more we see ourselves as white shirts and the easier it is to find the red spot and remove it. Attending”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver found a correlation between optimism and recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery.15 Others have studied how attitudes affect recovery and found that this improvement is not a function of a patient’s tendency to deny that he was ill.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Mindfulness, as I’ve studied it for more than thirty years, is the simple process of actively drawing distinctions. It is finding something new in what we may think we already know. It doesn’t matter what we notice—whether it is smart or silly.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“when new technology for cardiac surgery was introduced, those medical teams with leaders who minimized concern for status differences—in other words, were willing implicitly to admit they didn’t have all the answers and take advice from underlings—had the most effective communication, learned the most, and found the transition the easiest.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Atul Gawande writes in his book Complications, it is instead “an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, [and] fallible individuals.” Every individual is different, every pathogen is different, and therefore it should necessarily follow that every treatment strategy should be different. Yet, in modern medicine, this is rarely the case; Western medicine is embedded within institutionalized and standardized health care.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“Attention to variability in our wants, needs, talents, and skills can result in the greater well-being we seek. Holding things still because we think we know leads us figuratively and literally to be blind to what needs improvement. A small growth, a change in breathing, a change in the color of our urine—these things too often go unnoticed unless the change is blatant. When we do notice the change, sometimes we don’t want to confront it because we feel helpless. But these are signs that something needs attention. And these signs—the first change—appear much sooner than is now recognized. This blindness is not restricted to those of us who are not medical doctors. Physicians too miss minor deviations that could be meaningful.”
― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility