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Counterclockwise
Mindfulness, Health, and The Psychology of Possibility
Ballantine Books
This is a gem—a book that is equally practical and philosophical without seeming to be either, and one that makes you feel better—more conscious and more prepared—about growing old, even if you weren’t feeling bad about it in the first place.
—Sue Halpern, author of Can’t Remember What I Forgot
Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected.
—Dan Ariely, Ph.D., author of Predictably Irrational
Ellen Langer offers us brilliant insights into subtleties that hold us back in life, and shows the way to shining new possibilities. Counterclockwise will change the way you see and think.
—Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., author of Emotional Intelligence
If we could turn the clock back psychologically, could we also turn the clock back physically? In 1979, social psychologist Ellen Langer conducted a ground-breaking study that aimed to answer this provocative question.
For just one week, Langer arranged for a group of elderly men to live in a house staged as though it were 1959, a time that most of them considered their prime. The men experienced amazing changes across the board: their physical strength, cognition, vision, hearing and taste improved dramatically, and by the end of only the second day, all were less dependent on others to get what they needed.
Drawing on this elegant study and colorful examples from her full body of work, Counterclockwise explores the ways in which our thoughts control our moods and our physical state; how our attitudes define our limits; how our mindless desire for stability actually cuts us off from the healing power of mindfully attending to variability; and what we can do to be free of these restrictions. At once scientifically riveting and immensely inspiring, the theory and advice in Counterclockwise has enormously exciting implications for our general health, for our outlook, for our fundamental happiness. If the elderly men in Langer’s original experiment could produce such dramatic changes in their lives, so too can the rest of us, but we don’t have to live in a time capsule to do so.
Counterclockwise and the story of Ellen Langer’s work on mindsets and aging will be the subject of a major motion picture to be released by Universal Studios.
Foreign editions of Counterclockwise
Chinese (complex characters): Fine Press
Chinese (simplified characters): Oriental Press
Croatian: V. B. Z.
Danish: Plurafutura
German: Junferman Verlag
Italian: Corbaccio
Japanese: Kofukuno Kagaku
Korean: Science Books
Russian: Eksmo Publishers
Spanish: Ridgen Edit S.L
Turkish: Marti Yayinlari
UK and British Commonwealth: Hoddard & Stoughton
To inquire about international rights please contact Ballantine Books.
