Dr. Ellen Langer

Essentially, Mel, what I'm telling you is that rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, what we should be doing is simply make the decision right.

Should I have the surgery or not have the surgery?

Should I break up?

Should I not?

Yeah, we drive ourselves crazy.

And the important thing, Mel, is that all of that stress is eating at us, is destroying us slowly but surely and making us ill.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

We can make whatever it is work.

and this is an interesting thing, people actually know when you're there.

And that's some way in which our mindfulness is contagious.

And when you're approaching somebody who's mindful, implicitly you know you're going to be, if not understood, at least appreciated, not disparaged.

So you open up more, your relationships are better.

Everything just gets better, and it's so easy.

Well, if you just think, okay, so stress about past decisions.

So the first thing is,

is um to understand everything you do makes sense or else you wouldn't do it so why you chose the thing that you chose that now you're saying oh i shouldn't have chosen was a good thing at the time there was no way to know all of the things that subsequently were going to happen it made sense or else you wouldn't have done it that's number one number two

is to look at the advantages of that particular choice.

You know, everything has advantages and people think they know this.

I had submitted a proposal years ago to my publishers and essentially was saying that everything that's good is bad or whatever.