I Heart Me (8 page)

The first component is, well, emotion.

An emotion is connected to the brain chemistry of that emotion. That basically means that when we feel happy, our brain produces serotonin, dopamine and sometimes endogenous opiates, the brain's own versions of morphine and heroin. These are all happy chemicals. When we feel happy, we produce happy chemistry.

Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) also shows the emotion. This basically means our skin and organs respond to the emotion. It's why our palms sweat when we feel anxious and it's why our heart races when we see someone we love.

I sometimes use a heart monitor when I teach. It swiftly and clearly shows how the rhythm of the heart responds to what a person is thinking or feeling.

The fact that the ANS is linked with emotion also explains why mental and emotional stress is linked with cardiovascular disease and even why being consistently hostile and aggressive is one of the fastest ways to harden up our arteries.

Emotion is also connected to our muscles. We don't smile when we're happy, for example, because we think we're supposed to; we smile because it's a reflex reaction due to the fact that our emotions are entangled with our facial muscles.

All the arrows go all ways, too – it's ‘multi-directional'. Just as emotion affects facial muscles and body language, so facial muscles and body language also affect emotion.

Not only does emotion affect heart rhythm, for example, but changes in heart rhythm affect how we feel. A racing heart might make us feel anxious while a calm heart might make us feel peaceful. This is the strategy behind beta-blockers (which steady the heart rhythm). Training our autonomic nervous system can therefore increase positive emotion.

Changes in brain chemistry also affect emotion (as well as vice versa). In fact, the entire pharmaceutical model for depression uses this single observation. If you get an increase in serotonin levels by taking an antidepressant drug, for instance, it will make you feel happier. You can also give a person a high with a drug that alters brain chemistry.

Despite this being the most common approach to treating depression, however, it is only one part of a more holistic approach. There are many different groups of thought on how to alleviate depression. Some people swear that drugs are the only way; others say nutrition is better. Actually, both affect our brain chemistry and this then affects our emotions. Some say a regular meditation practice is the best, others say it's all about releasing suppressed emotion and yet others insist it's all about finding meaning and purpose in life. All three of these approaches relax the ANS, though, and this then has a net positive effect on emotion. They are really just different parts of
the same phenomenon:
emotion is literally smeared throughout the body
.

So we can change how we feel by i) using our mind; ii) improving our nutrition or taking medicines that impact brain chemistry; iii) calming our nervous system; or iv) moving our body in a way that reflects how we want to feel. They all work. But the fastest of these at changing how we feel at any given moment, and the easiest way to produce long-term changes, is using our body.

If we want to feel stressed, for example, we can get there pretty quickly if we start moving our body in a jerky fashion and speaking more quickly. We can speed it up even more if we take shallow breaths.

This is great news! Why? It shows that moving our body can produce the feelings we want to produce.

So, if we want to feel happy, we can move our body in a way that says, ‘I feel happy!' And lo and behold, we will feel happy.

Surely it can't be that simple? Surely everyone would be doing it if it were?

The trouble is, hardly anyone knows anything about this. It's hardly a mainstream idea yet. Unless you happen to study neuroscience or read one of the popular science and self-help books out there, chances are you won't have heard of it. It always amazes me to see eyes widen in surprise each time I present this kind of stuff to professional audiences. It's almost always completely new information.

Some clever therapists are, however, already suggesting that some of their clients or patients do in fact fake it 'til they make it. ‘Laugh doctor' Cliff Kuhn is one of them. He encourages patients with depression to laugh and smile on purpose. He reports that, ‘Those willing to practise it experience mood elevation and a reduction in symptoms – almost instantaneously.'
¹

And it's based on real research. Simply using facial muscles, researchers at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, asked volunteers to look at photographs of people who were either smiling or frowning. Half of the volunteers were asked simply to look at the faces but the other half were asked to copy either the smile or the frown. Immediately afterwards they had their mood assessed. Those who copied a smile enjoyed a more positive mood. Those who copied a frown felt less positive. Those who simply looked at the faces didn't feel any different. Interestingly, the results were even more pronounced when the volunteers copied the facial expressions while looking at themselves in a mirror.
²

In these instances it was the movement of the muscles of the face in a way that the brain recognized was correlated with happiness that produced the more positive feelings. Moving other areas of our body works in the same way. Swinging our arms joyfully as we walk will elevate our mood, while slouching and staring at the ground will depress it.

If you've tried unsuccessfully to improve your happiness or self-love in the past, the problem could be that you didn't get your body in synch with what you were trying to do with your mind. The moment you start using your body to create happiness
you'll probably notice that you've really not been making happy movements with your body at all. In fact, you'll probably notice that a great many of the movements you do make – how you stand and hold your body most of the time, how you speak – actually convey unhappiness or low self-worth.

Initially, as you start to pay more attention to your body, you might notice that your facial muscles or your jaw are quite often tight, or perhaps your shoulders are raised a lot of the time. You might also catch yourself taking shallow breaths. All of these body conditions show stress, unhappiness or low self-worth and therefore contribute to feelings of stress, unhappiness or low self-worth.

It produces a yo-yo effect: you make an improvement through doing some mental practices but then you snap back into feeling the way you've always felt.

In
The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals
, Charles Darwin wrote, ‘Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds.'

Smiling is the essence of one component of laughter yoga. Try it now. Take a deep breath, pull your face into a large smile, then exhale and let out a little chuckle. It reduces blood pressure (ANS) and it produces serotonin, dopamine and endorphins (happy chemistry) in the brain. It also makes you feel better. Basically, a happy face produces happy chemistry.

Using facial muscles to affect emotion is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. It was first put forward by William James over 100 years ago. According to this hypothesis, facial muscles actually feed back into the brain and bring about the emotional state associated with those muscle movements.

In the 1990s, psychologist Paul Eckman showed that smiling or grimacing produced changes throughout the ANS. When he asked volunteers to smile or grimace, he recorded changes in their heart rate and skin conductance. When they smiled, heart rate and skin conductance decreased.
³

This is all very important in relation to self-love. When you feel you're
not
enough, the feeling is smeared throughout your body. It's in your brain chemistry, your autonomic nervous system and your muscles. So what if you pretended to be
enough
? What if you wore
enough
all over your body?

It can actually change how you feel about yourself very quickly. In little experiments I've conducted in some of my workshops, people notice a real difference in just a few minutes.

Participants are asked to adopt the body language of
not
enough. Most lean their head forwards and look down at the floor, adopting a serious or sad expression. Some shuffle their feet or take small steps that are overly mechanical as if they are having to concentrate on how to walk. They almost always tense their upper body. After doing this for two minutes, most report that they feel less positive than they did before they started. One man joked he felt ‘downright miserable'.

Then they quickly swap their body language to say ‘I
am
enough.' You can see immediate and significant changes in posture. Some people look as though they've grown five inches as they stand up straight, lengthening their spine. Movements are more fluid, slow and relaxed. Faces tend to show relaxed, serene and happy expressions. Heads sit comfortably on shoulders and eyes tend to face front.

Despite all these obvious changes, the transition in their emotional state is what participants notice most. Most people feel much more positive and relaxed in less than 20 seconds. Many report feeling confident and self-assured. Some have an almost overwhelming realization: first that
not
enough is actually how they tend to present themselves and second that they have a tool that can change that really fast.

Exciting new research is adding weight to the understanding of why this works. Drawing comparisons between how humans and primates behave, Harvard professor Amy Cuddy noted that when humans or primates feel powerful, they make their body appear bigger. A primate will raise its arms above its head, for instance. In effect, they become bigger and take up more space.

When people feel nervous before, say, giving a presentation or being interviewed for a job, have you noticed how many shrink in their chairs, curving their spines, or fold their arms, pulling their shoulders forwards and inwards? Nowadays, they also slouch over their phones. In effect, they become smaller.

Cuddy reasoned that if people actually made themselves bigger by adopting a confident, ‘high-power' posture, it would affect how they felt. She wrote:

The key is in the last line. I'll repeat it:

Professor Cuddy invited participants to hold a ‘power pose' for just two minutes and measured levels of cortisol and testosterone in their saliva before and afterwards.

After only two minutes, the saliva samples showed that those who did the power pose had a 25 per cent reduction in cortisol (i.e. less stress) and an 8 per cent increase in testosterone (i.e. more confidence). In people who did weak poses, i.e. poses which made the body seem smaller and weaker, their chemistry went in the opposite direction: they had 15 per cent increases in cortisol (i.e. more stress) and 10 per cent decreases in testosterone (i.e. less confidence).
⁵

The net effect was:

The experiment showed that the positioning of the body directly affected its chemistry.

It also affected how the participants felt, and you can now understand why – because body posture and chemistry affect emotion. Participants who did the power poses also said they felt powerful and ‘in charge'. When Cuddy and her colleagues invited them to participate in a risk-taking game, they were found to be more confident and less afraid to take risks than the people who did the weak poses.

The participants were each given $2 and invited to roll a dice with 50/50 odds of doubling their money or losing it. Eighty-six per cent of the high-power posers took the risk while only 60 per cent of the low-power posers did.
⁶
Not only did a two-minute power pose increase the chemistry of confidence, but it translated into more confident behaviour too. And remember, this was simply from being conscious of body language for just two minutes!

If you want to know how to do a power pose, think (or look up) Wonder Woman: upright stance, spine erect, head and eyes forwards, legs shoulder-width apart, shoulders back and hands on hips. It also says, ‘I
am
enough
!
'

Cuddy went further with the research and in a separate experiment measured how power poses affected volunteers who were about to give a presentation, something which tends to make most people feel nervous.
⁷
Could a two-minute power pose affect how a person functioned in the real world?

Half of the volunteers did a two-minute power pose before giving a short presentation, while the other half did a weak pose – the kind most people actually do before a presentation, which betrays the fact that they're nervous or lacking in confidence. A weak pose is one that makes the body smaller in any way: arms folded, shoulders rounded, body leaning forwards, etc.

Their presentations were assessed by a panel, who also rated fluidity of speaking, vocal tone, hesitation, pauses, mistakes, etc. The panel didn't know which pose each person had done, but they rated the presentations given by the power posers as of much higher quality than the presentations of the weak posers. The power posers were more fluid in their communication and showed less reliance on their notes. The weak posers conveyed much less confidence; they stuttered more and used their notes more.