Aging - Is It All In Your Head?

Waxing Crescent at Sunset in the Yampa Valley - December 2023

The Power of Your Mind
The placebo effect seems a testament to the power of the mind. If it is true that we can feel better with a sugar pill or have our bummed-out mood uplifted by a positive occurrence, it is fair to ask what else our mind is capable of. Ellen Langer has been asking, and her intriguing work explores how we might even reverse the aging process. 

Langer, Ph.D., social psychologist and the first woman to be tenured in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, has headed up some thought-provoking studies that explore the power of the mind. 

You might have heard of Langer’s 1979 Counterclockwise Study, in which several men who lived for five days in a retreat set in 1959 (the music, the dress, the decor, the television and radio), demonstrated notable improvements such as physical strength, gait, memory, cognition, and more, by the end of the study.

In her 2007 study, one group of hotel workers was told their daily work and movements were similar to exercise performed at the gym - and after one month they lost weight, improved blood pressure, and improved waist to hip ratio, compared with the group that was told nothing different regarding their daily work. 

Learn More

• Link to the published hotel worker Harvard Article:  Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect
• This New York Times article takes a broader look at the implications of Langer’s work, and at Langer herself. 
• In this video, Ellen Langer discusses how regarding the world with a certain amount of uncertainty can allow change to occur.

Though Langer’s ideas have not always been broadly accepted by the scientific community (critics note that she hasn’t been published in peer-reviewed medical journals, for example), her work is worth considering. 

Originally published May 2022