Choices

We always have a choice, although often we aren’t aware of it.  If we don’t like something – or think something could be better, we can choose to do it differently.  We can change what we do, how we do it, whether in fact to do it or not,  or how we allow something to affect us.  Doing nothing as an active choice is often the best course of action – no judgement, no action, no reaction.  Just observing, getting in touch with your feelings about it ….

In fact, a good deffinition of insanity is to go on repeating the same thing and expecting a different outcome!  Chances are that doing the same thing in the same circumstances will produce the same result.  By changing what you do, even in a small way, puts you back in control and able to bring about a different result.

Having a choice, no matter how insignificant it may appear, can have a profound positive effect on our health and other aspects of our life –  and even on our mortality.  Conversly, lack of choice, or even just a perceived lack of control, can lead to learned helplessness which in certain circumstances can kill.

This was illustrated by Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin’s 1976 study, conducted in a New England nursing home, Arden House, when they set up the experiment so that residents on two floors of the 360-bed home for the elderly would experience some changes in their everyday life, they had no idea that they were introducing factors which could prolong life.

While residents on both floors were given plants and film shows, only those on the fourth floor had the opportunity to control these events: choosing the plant and looking after it themselves, and choosing which night of the week to view the film.

Eighteen months later, when Langer and Rodin returned to the home, they were astonished to discover that twice as many of the elderly residents in this ‘choices’ group were alive, compared with the control group on the second floor, who had been given plants that the staff tended, and were told which was their film night. It appeared that taking control made you live longer.

For more information, listen to the BBC interview about the experiment.

These findings fit in well with the work on learned helplessness in dogs carried out by Martin Seligman in the late 1960s, and on Langer and Rodin’s own studies on the perception of control.

Langer also found that for residents in residential nursing homes, being given a choice as to when (and even if) they carried out a certain activity,  had a certain visitor or were  allowed to have their room  door  closed for privacy again made a huge difference to their self esteem and their health.  These basic emotional needs are often denied in the very places where we go when most vulnerable.

Our western conventional (allopathic) medical model often denies us real choice – we pass the responsibility for diagnosis and treatment to effect a cure over to the doctor, and often fail to hear conditionally and instead buy in to  the ‘box’ of the diagnosis and the prognosis given.  Not only does this places a huge and often impossible responsibility on the medical practitioner, particularly when dealing with  chronic conditions.  If we really believe what we are told, we get the healing placebo effect (believing something will make us better so our body produces all the chemicals and healing to get us better) or the debilitating and sometimes fatal nocebo effect (such as the cancer prognosis that we only have 6 months to live and fulfil that).

It can also prevent us from listening to ourselves and finding out what is right for us; living mindfully and realising that we do have choices; realising that none of us are average and so don’t conform to medical norms;  and that ‘miracle’ recoveries do happen and could do so for us.  In other words our decission to hand over control of our bodies and relinquish choice can prove debilitating or fatal.

Counterclockwise: A Proven Way to Think Yourself Younger and Healthier – Paperback (16 Sep 2010) by Ellen Langer