Your body constantly sends signals to your brain which have an affect on your feelings.
You can affect your mood simply by holding and moving your body in a certain way. You can regulate your emotions and happiness by certain body positions and movements. You can enhance your emotions by doing movements that are associated with specific emotions. You can make yourself happier just by incorporating ‘happy’ movements and avoiding postures and movements that are associated with negative feelings.
Tal Shafir speaks on How Your Body Affects Your Happiness
Key Takeaways
Our body is always sending signals to the brain about its current condition. Whenever we are in danger, our brain signals the drive to act, to do something to preserve our life.
These signals are presented in the brain in the form of chemical and electrical signals or are our unconscious emotions, which are then translated into conscious feelings. For example, our body sends signals to our brain of our blood sugar levels. Whenever the brain identifies that the blood sugar level goes down too much, it creates a drive to go and eat something (hunger)
The feedback that comes from your body to your brain can also shape feelings. Think about when someone tells you to take a deep breath and relax. It’s because the body sends a signal to the brain that breathing is slow and deep which is the breathing pattern associated with being relaxed.
Same goes with movements, certain muscle activation patterns and joint configurations are associated in the brain and enhance the feelings and emotions that are associated with them. This is how our posture and movements can affect our feelings.
Studies show that even two minutes of standing or sitting in a closed posture, which is associated with helplessness or submissiveness, creates not only a feeling of powerless, but also increase levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Sometimes even watching, or imagining these movements can have negative effects.
Knowing this, we can use movements associated with happiness to increase our happiness. (light walking, expanding the body in horizontal and vertical directions/stretching; upward movements like jumping or raising your arms) If you want to be happier, you can start using some happy movements!
Be conscious and aware of how you hold and move your body. Your body constantly sends signals to your brain which have an affect on your feelings. You can use this effect to help regulate your emotions.