How to Stop Letting Your Own Thoughts Make You Sick, Stressed, and Stuck with Dr. Ellen Langer

We get stressed by the story we tell ourselves of what could happen, which could be fact, but it could also be fiction. Mindfulness is a way of changing the story. Yes. You are experiencing something. You have available to yourself opportunity to reevaluate it, to reframe it, to understand it differently. And the more mindful you are, the more alternative.

Ways of understanding it come to mind. Is this a tragedy or an inconvenience? That's the question my guest, Dr. Ellen Langer, wants us to ask ourselves the next time life goes sideways. Because most of the time, the bad things that happen to us, the things that feel like tragedies, like losing a job or a relationship, if we're really, really honest with ourselves, for most of us. They're not really tragedies. They're just Really inconvenient.

Dr. Langer's 45 years of research show us that that single distinction can dramatically reduce stress. That's why she's often called the mother of mindfulness. She's a psychologist. Harvard professor and author of the books The Mindful Body and Finding Happy. both of which argue that thinking differently

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