Change Your Body to Change Your Mind
The art of fooling yourself into feeling good
Can you change your thoughts and feelings by changing what you’re doing? Does advice like “smile more” and “take a deep breath” have any benefit at all, or are they just empty words that sound good? Well, the science on these questions is surprisingly optimistic. Finally, some “life hacks” that might actually work…
How your body tricks your mind
Here are three “body hacks” that are backed up by scientific evidence:
Take a deep breath: When you take a deep breath, it’s common to feel suddenly relaxed. This effect is so convincing that some scientists have referred to deep breaths as “psychological and physiological resetters.” When you’re nervous about a presentation at work or feeling a little overwhelmed at home, your first resort should be to deepen your breathing and focus your attention on how it feels. Slowing down your breathing boosts activity in the brain known as “alpha waves”, which is a common indicator of relaxation in scientific experiments.
Try smiling: It can be annoying to hear people tell you to smile more, but deciding to try it yourself can be helpful. Almost 100 years of science and philosophy supports the theory of “facial feedback”—active smiling feeds back into the emotional systems of your brain and makes you feel happier. Even when you don’t feel particularly happy, smiling drags your attention toward positive rather than negative thoughts, as your brain reinterprets what is going on around you.
Stand up straight: Your mother’s advice to fix your posture may have some important truth to it. When people sit or stand in upright rather than slouched postures, they perform better under stress and report feeling more confidence. Expansive body postures don’t just benefit humans—in other primate species for example, dominance is strongly associated with standing up forcefully. So when you need a confidence boost, try pulling your shoulders back and puffing out your chest a little.
Use the force
There are many ways you could apply the principles above in your own life so think about it carefully and test the principles in any way that suits you this week. Here are a couple of examples that always work well for me:
If you’re nervous in new environments or social situations, take a moment right before you enter them to inhale deeply and exhale slowly three times. Slow exhales are where most of your calming power will operate, so focus your attention on slowly allowing the air to flow out of your lungs after you reach the peak of your inhale.
Leading up to a stressful public event—perhaps a job interview or work presentation—do more than just practice what you’ll say. Practice how you’ll say it. Every time you rehearse, spend 5 minutes looking in the mirror with broad shoulders and an upright posture. As awkward as it sounds, you’ll not only practice looking more controlled and competent to other people, you’ll also learn to see yourself as a more confident person.
The scientific gospel
William James (1842-1910) may be the most famous and widely quoted psychologist ever to have lived. His work continues to inspire modern scientists, and there’s no doubt his thinking was far ahead of his time. In The Gospel of Relaxation, he wrote about the power of what we call “fake it till you make it” in his inimitable style. Here is a two-paragraph passage that perfectly illustrates everything I’ve described so far:
“There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind”
That final quote
Final words today go to Mark Twain:
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
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