Dr. Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychology professor, explains how to handle anxiety after loss. She lost 80% of her possessions in a fire and reframed it as an opportunity to redefine herself. Stress is a mental construct, she says; events are neutral until you label them.
Chapters
All of stress is in our heads. The assumption is that what's going to follow is going to be negative. Events themselves are neither positive nor negative. It's our minds that frame the event. We can make the experience of tomorrow positive or negative. It's entirely up to us. The legend, the mother of mindfulness, professor of psychology at Harvard University, the mother of positive psychology, Ellen Langer. Ellen Langer. Ellen Langer. Ellen Langer. Dr.
Ellen Hello, my name is Nosha. Today I'm here with my dear co-founder and colleague, Dr. Ellen Langer. She's the number one psychology professor from University of Harvard, and today I'm going to ask her some of your questions. Let's dive in. Dr. Langer, this is our first question. This user is saying that currently she's dealing with the aftermath of a house fire and staying for now in a rehab facility with her grandmother. But they are moving her grandmother to a more permanent long-term facility care, and this move, the moving of grandmother, is making her living situation, our user's living situation, a little bit unstable and uncertain. This uncertainty is causing her a lot of anxiety and worry. Sometimes in this kind of situation, you feel that life is really overwhelming and anxiety is attacking you from different angles and different places. So what are your suggestions and recommendations? How should we, you know, manage our anxiety when life is hard?
All right. Well, the first thing that people need to understand is that everything is always changing. And so not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow for you is really no different than it was before the fire. The anxiety about the fire— I myself had a major fire to deal with that destroyed 80% of what I owned. And I realized that everything that was burned in the fire represented who I was in the past, not who I was at the moment. So there's a way that this is an opportunity to start fresh. There's anxiety. All of stress is in our heads. The assumption is that what's going to follow is going to be negative. And events themselves are neither positive nor negative. It's our minds that frame the event so that it's positive or negative. Now, when I had my fire, and I wrote about this in The Mindful Body, I moved into a hotel. It was Christmastime. I went out Christmas Eve, and I came back, and the room was full of gifts. Not from the hotel management, not from the owner of the hotel. The people who parked my cars, the chambermaids, the waiters and waitresses. It took me over a year to be able to tell the story without it bringing happy-sad tears to my eyes. Now, every single Christmas, I remember nothing about anything I lost in the fire. All I remember is the basic kindness of strangers. And so even though it felt initially like a loss, over time it was actually a gain for me. So the larger point is we never really know what tomorrow brings. We can make tomorrow, the experience of tomorrow, positive or negative. It's entirely up to us. So look at it as an adventure. The first step is to see it as an adventure, to recognize that you've managed in the past. There's no reason to think you won't manage in the, in the present and the future. You don't really want to know exactly what's going to happen next, because then you'd be living your life like painting by numbers. So you need to have I have the confidence that it essentially, for almost all of us, it all works out. But the journey will be better for you if what you do is look to see all of the advantages to the current situation. You're not burdened with anything from the past. It's like starting over. And that can be new and exciting. It is new and can be exciting.
