I read Ellen Langer's "Mindfulness" 10 or more years ago. She is a professor of psychology at Harvard and is the only writer I have ever seen that discusses mindfulness without mentioning meditation. I think most writers I have read mean by mindfulness, in Deepak Chopra's phrase, something like "being aware of one's own [mental] software." That is, noticing when I am thinking and noticing what I am thinking about, with fewer occasions of getting occupied by thoughts of a particular kind or topic without meaning to let that happen or noticing it. But Langer means something a bit different. She means noticing, and maybe questioning, just about everything that is important to me, especially issues that bother or limit me.
My reason for practicing 10 minutes a day of vigilance over my thoughts is that I have found, like 3 millennia of practitioners before me, that the practice increases my awareness of my mental states. I become a little more able to notice persistent thoughts as persistent and any change from one group of thoughts to another. Langer seems to have a very imaginative and flexible mind. Much of the research she reports completing is discussed in broad, non-academic, readable terms and seems unusually creative to me.
Her most recent book, "Counterclockwise", concerns being mindful and questioning aspects of our health and interactions with medical ideas, diagnoses and personnel. The book's title refers to a study she did decades ago to see if elderly men would fare better in surroundings that were reminiscent of the times and fashions of their youth. They did fare better.
Langer's version of noticing and questioning is similar to what some people call "critical thinking". That sort of thinking does not just mean criticizing in the sense of fault-finding, although that is included. It means asking "Why?" and "What evidence supports my diagnosis?". It means noticing variability in one's symptoms from hour to hour and day to day. It means noticing when one is having a good day and trying to figure out what made it good.
Whether we are watching our thoughts or our health, we can't notice everything. We can't question everything because we don't know enough and neither do the experts. However, no one is closer to us than we are to ourselves and keeping track of our fears, what brings us joy and fun, and how we feel about this life and its events can open new vistas and possibilities each day.
