Change Your Body Language

 

📸: Gran Canaria, 2022

It’s hard to crack a smile when things are going wrong. But a 2003 study by Simone Schnall and James Laird showed that if you fake a smile, you can actually trick your brain into thinking you’re happy by releasing feel-good hormones called endorphins. 

This might seem a little wacky at first. If smiling for no reason feels too strange, then find a reason to smile. 

You could smile at the prospect of your smile itself making someone else feel happier. They might smile back at you, giving you a genuine reason to keep your smile alive. 

In fact, our entire body and physiology can affect our thoughts and feelings. By changing our outer state, we can change our inner state. 

If I told you to show me how someone would appear if they were depressed, you’d probably know exactly how to portray them: you’d slump with your head down, looking grim. If I asked you to show me how someone would appear if they were angry, you could do that with ease, too. 

Now think about how a person is happy and feels high on life would appear. What would their facial expression be like? How would they be standing? Is there a particular way they’d be moving? Where might their hands be? Are they likely to be making any gestures? What time would their voice take? How fast or slow would they be taking?

Amy Cuddy, social psychologist is renowned for her work on how body language not only affects how others see us, but also how we see ourselves. 

Some people get the wrong end of the stick and pretend to have some particular asset or talent to seek attention from others so that they can feel better about themselves. 

But if you simply act a particular way to enhance your confidence and feel better about where you’re going, it becomes a useful technique. This imagined confidence will then gradually start to become genuine confidence, and the closer you get it through matching vibration, the more genuine it becomes. 

Love, 

Ms. Elista