Better You Book Club

When it comes to our health, we tend to live our lives as though our ailments--our stiff knees or frayed nerves or diminished eyesight--can change only in one direction: for the worse. Award-winning social psychologist Ellen J. Langer's life's work proves the fault in this negative outlook as well as the healing power of its alternative: mindfulness--the process of active noticing where we are not bound by past experience or conventional wisdom.

In The Mindful Body, Dr. Langer unpacks her assumption-busting findings and outlines her bold new theory of mind-body unity, along the way clearly demonstrating how our thoughts and perspectives have the potential to profoundly shape our well-being. Whether it is hotel chambermaids who lost weight when they simply came to see that their work constituted exercise, or patients whose wounds healed faster in rooms with accelerated clocks, she shows how influential our thoughts are to the state of…