Becoming a Mindful Athlete
Get ready for a mind-expanding ride into how mindfulness can forever transform your health and fitness journey.
Issue No. 50 January 2024
The Mother of Mindfulness
One person who has shaped my thinking on the mind-body connection more than anyone else is psychologist Ellen Langer (considered “the mother of mindfulness”).
Some researchers study ‘milquetoast’ topics that offer little impact and ask questions that don’t move their field forward much at all. While others expand their field in direction no one thought possible. Langer is one of the latter.
She is a rogue psychologist who does ‘disruptive’ research – research into what’s really possible. And specifically she looks at the power of mindset on things like weight-loss… vision… blood sugar… and even aging.
She continues to surprise me with the profound questions that she asks and the topics she explores. And her latest book, The Mindful Body does not disappoint.
If you want to greatly expand your beliefs about health and fitness, it’s well worth checking out (along with her other books).
In an interview with University of Chicago, Langer shared one life-changing moment that spurred a whole new way of looking at the world and conducting research. One day while at a horse event, a man asked her to watch his horse while he went to fetch a hotdog for it.
Yes, a hotdog for the horse. Now Ellen is no crash test dummy. She is a graduate of Yale and a professor at Harvard. So she racked her brain on the idea of a horse, an herbivore, eating a hotdog! It went against everything she had learned.
They don’t eat meat, she thought to herself.
Shortly after the man returned with the hot dog and fed it to the horse. At that point she realized:
Everything I think I know could be wrong.
What else might I be wrong about?
What else could be possible?
And that opened up a universe of possibilities. She started to explore topics with a new sense of uncertainty and wonder - realizing that maybe we know less than we think we know. And this led to some of the most trail-blazing studies in psychology.
This month we are going to unpack one of her most profound models on mindfulness.
Now mindfulness is a loaded term that is tossed around a lot. It’s rarely defined though. Some people think it has to do with meditation (which it doesn’t). Some people will say it’s being present. Or being in the moment. This is along the right track… but how do you get there? How do you become more present now? That’s where Langer’s definition clears this all up:
Mindfulness as we study it is not about meditation. It’s the very simple process of actively noticing new things. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. Yet we think we know. And when we think we know, we don’t pay attention.
So why is mindfulness important to fitness?
If you are stuck at a plateau… or if working out or eating healthy or other activities have become mundane or demotivating, chances are you are stuck in a lower level of thinking (which we’ll cover in a moment). In essence you are going through the motions and have lost your sense of purpose or sense of adventure.
When you become more mindful, you start to open that experience back up. You start to look at it with fresh eyes. You start becoming more aware of what works… you start to discover new solutions… and new ways to innovate what you are doing or how you approach it. When you become more mindful you also start noticing your progress more and catching your small wins. You start to immerse yourself in the experience instead of trying to push through it or escape from it.
And what’s incredible is that Langer and others have shown that mindfulness might actually bring additional health benefits as well.
Get ready for a mind-expanding ride,