Awareness

I mentioned yesterday that watching various classes and courses has what made me actually keep at the treadmill nearly every day. I can know something is good for me and still not get around to doing it if I don't find it interesting. If I do find something interesting then it is very difficult to do something else. 

I have also discovered that I need to keep a pencil and paper on the treadmill because more often than not, I will hear an idea or book or fact that I want to keep track of. Which is why I have a very scribbled note here on my desk with the word 'phone' followed by other cryptic scrawls. I wrote this yesterday so I still have a chance of remembering what I was trying to remember and that I wanted to write about it. So after that very long introduction, here we are. 

I'm currently watching a course on people skills and what I like about it is the presenter references various scientific studies. I'm all about an interesting brain/behavior study. The one that caught my attention was done regarding how people carry themselves and how that relates to their mental and emotional states. The very short version is that people who stand tall, carry themselves with ease, and are essentially expansive are happier and more confident. People who make themselves small, hunch over and look down a lot, and keep their arms close next to them are less happy and confident and are more unsure of themselves and anxious.

Lest you think that mental state dictates body language, this study was done with people being asked to hold a certain pose for five minutes and then asked to do some type of mental challenge, followed up by questions about how they felt. (A pretty typical study setup.) Even if a subject felt pretty good before the exercise, by taking the smaller, more drawn in pose, they changed their mental outlook. 

Stop and think about that for a moment. As much as we tend to think that state dictates form, the opposite would seem to be equally true. The way we hold our bodies tells our brain whether things are good or bad and our brain releases the appropriate hormones accordingly. 

I've been sharing for a very long time that just by smiling (whether we mean it or not) we can change our brain. A smile indicates all is well and emergency steps are not necessary. However a frown or grimace or tension triggers the brain into self-preservation mode which involves a good bit of cortisol. It seems that this is true for out entire body. How we carry ourselves is a way for the brain to determine the level of peril we are currently facing. 

Here is what this has me pondering the past couple of days. Think for a moment how most of us hold our bodies while looking at our phones... Head down, back curved, shoulders hunched, arms close to our bodies. This is the exact posture they tested in the study and the exact posture that had such negative effects on the test subjects. 

Now, add in what is often happening during idle scrolling... Seeing other people's very much edited version of their life. A life designed to make them look good and really on top of things. (I don't believe any of it. Everyone is a mess in their own way and no one really has it all together. I've had too many conversations with people who look really good on social media and who are literally falling apart behind the scenes to think otherwise.) But even I can fall prey to the pretty pictures and seemingly fairy tale life. So there we are hunched over our phones, triggering our brains into feeling on alert all while viewing things that make us feel less than. Yikes! Is it any wonder that we have epidemic levels of depression and anxiety? 

I really want someone to dig into what the correlation is between societal levels of depression and anxiety with smart phone use. I don't just think it's the social media, I think it's also our physical stance, often done in complete unawareness, that is helping to push people into this feedback loop. Because think about it, if you've been scrolling for a while, all the cute kitten and puppy videos in the world don't make you feel any better. On some level you know this, but because your brain has already started to disable conscious thought, you sit there thinking, "Just one more." I know for myself, when I do manage to pull myself away and start moving it's a bit like my brain wakes back up and I wonder what the heck I was thinking. Well, I wasn't is the short answer. 

This isn't meant to cause shame, in fact just the opposite. If we are not aware of what is happening to us there is no way we can work against it. It's not a moral issue; it's not a personal failure. I might suggest that the next time you find yourself in the negative feedback loop that hunching over can cause, that you simply become aware of it without beating yourself up. Then after that moment of awareness simple look up or roll your shoulders or both and then sit with that for a moment. If you still want or need to look at your phone, change your position, but it could also be just as likely that you will find the desire to do something else.