Steering Clear of the January Blues
This can be a challenging time of the year. Some parts of the world have had extreme conditions in recent months. The Eastern US has had extreme snowfall. Across much of Europe and the northern temperate zone, this time of year brings cold, and daylight hours are short. After the celebration, lights, and parties of Christmas, or the ancient festivals of the Winter Solstice, plunging back into the gray chill of winter is notorious for inflicting the “winter blues,” sometimes giving rise to a depressive seasonal affective disorder, aka SAD.
Travelers in a snowstorm round forward against a harsh wind. Francisco Goya, La Nevada c.1786.
Some parts of the world have had unusual challenges, even devastation. An example is the unprecedented wildfires around Los Angeles, which have made thousands of people homeless.
With these extreme events impacting us, I have been thinking a good deal about how our posture reflects—and in turn affects—our own emotional weather. That is not to say that you can posture your way out of extreme situations, but rather that how we feel in any given moment, and especially in sustained situations, gets reflected in our posture. Posture is part and parcel of a strong mind-body connection, and can be used in reverse to improve our state of mind.
Our postural stance can reflect wellness and an uplifted mood, as Gokhale Method teacher Doreen Giles is embodying here… or show that we are experiencing physical or emotional adversity, like the travelers in the snowstorm image.
We explored this mind-body connection deeply in last year's Women’s Empowerment course. Many of our students and teachers report feeling better not only physically, but also emotionally, for finding healthier posture. Gokhale® Method teacher Doreen Giles describes her experience here:
“I’ve been happily surprised to find that using the Gokhale Method techniques has lifted my day-to-day baseline mood. In thinking about why this has happened, I’ve concluded that our ‘body language,’ whether conscious or unconscious, not only communicates to other people, but also to our own mind.”
The result that Doreen reports on will be familiar to those of us who observe animals. In fact, the way we tell how an animal is feeling is via its posture. A few years ago I did some research into the posture–emotional health connection. Emily Hatfield’s book Emotional Contagion was very important in helping my understanding of the pathway of “emotional contagion”:
- One’s emotional state gets reflected in one’s posture
- We copy each other (we’re a monkey see, monkey do kind of species)
- Our brain scans our body for clues on how we are feeling—when our brain “finds” our mimicked posture, it concludes that we have the corresponding mood.
As Doreen says:
“When I try on my old unconscious habit of shoulders rounded and head forward with a rather sunken chest, and then feel into what this posture communicates to myself, it’s a message of, ‘Uh-oh, I need to protect myself, something bad is coming.’
When I make simple changes I learned from the Gokhale Method—mainly the shoulder roll and adjustment to head/neck position, along with the rib anchor—what’s the new message? ‘I belong here. All is well. I have everything I need. I am safe!’ No wonder I feel better!”
Another account of how posture connects to wellness comes from our student Madeleine Picozzi in Scotland.
After finishing her Gokhale Foundations course, Madeleine’s pain had improved significantly, but she said “For me, the acid test will be the winter; I am prone to hunching over in the cold weather in an attempt to keep warm. It’s certainly cooling down a lot already and I’m still making progress, which bodes well but we’ll see how things are in a couple of months."
Gokhale student Madeleine Picozzi used to hunch her shoulders against the Scottish chill.
Here’s Madeleine’s update from midwinter:
“I was just thinking, while I was at church on Saturday that, this time last year, my back was causing me a lot of grief. Now it's great!
I realized that, as well as hunching forward, there is a tendency to bunch up the shoulders and bend the neck, in an attempt to keep that wind out. The cold can definitely be the enemy of good posture!
I'm now better equipped to avoid hunching, since I know to keep my pelvis anteverted and my neck as long and straight as possible.
I'm also prone to SAD. However, the improvement in my back is cause for me to feel relief and gratitude.”
No matter where you are in the world, and whatever weather you’re experiencing—outdoors, indoors, or in your mind—improving your posture is likely to give you a welcome and uplifting boost. In our next blog post, we’ll explore how gait can reflect and cue our emotional state.