Does positive thinking really work?

You’ve heard the advice/clichés:

But do you believe they really work?

Is it all just “Pollyanna” thinking?

Well, are you familiar with this fascinating experiment done by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer back in 1981?

She and her colleagues piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove them two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped them off 22 years earlier, in 1959!

They were surrounded by mid-century mementos-1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio-and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters.

They had agreed to live in the setting for seven days, thinking, talking and acting as they had twenty years before. They had taken a battery of cognitive and physical tests before and after that one week and there were dramatic positive changes across the board, and not just in their frisky attitude!

They were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision-even performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis.

AS Ellen Langer said in a 2010 interview about that monastery study, “Men who changed their perspective changed their bodies.” Context, she says, is everything.

The more we learn, the more we realize that the way we think really does matter! Our mind really does affect our body! And it’s our choice.

And of interest to me, is her later study on breast cancer survivors where she asked the survivors whether they considered themselves in remission or cured.

 I’m Cured!

The “cured” group reported better general health, more energy, less pain, and less depression. The research was correlational (findings that suggest a relationship between the variables, but cannot prove causation) but warrant a possible rethinking of how to instruct breast cancer survivors like me to envision their relationship with the illness.

She suggests we contrast the way we talk about cancer to the language we use to describe a cold. We think of each cold as a new one-we’re not in remission. So cancer can be thought of the same way too.

Martin Seligman, in his book Learned Optimism,  invites pessimists to learn to be optimists by thinking about their reactions to adversity in a new way. The resulting optimism—one that grew from pessimism—is a learned optimism. The optimist’s outlook on failure can thus be summarized as “What happened was an unlucky situation (not personal), and really just a setback (not permanent) for this one, of many, goals (not pervasive).”

Something to think about-we choose our outlook!

 So what belief do you want to test it on? Or have you already experienced it?

Please share your thoughts on how your thinking has changed something in your life, for better or for worse.

And what you think about this positive thinking “stuff”?

Tags: breast cancer, change your thinking, colds, Ellen Langer, experiment, frowns, learned optimism, Martin Seligman, pessimism, Pollyanna, silver lining