More Than Anxiety

Ep 98 - Body Language and Mental Health: How Posture and Expressions Impact Anxiety and Depression

• Megan Devito • Episode 98

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Do you ever trust your gut feeling in a snap but you have no idea why you're so sure you're right? This week on More Than Anxiety, I'm giving some spoilers for anyone who hasn't read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink. 

I'll explain the idea of thin slicing - how our brains can make surprisingly good decisions based on tiny bits of information and how you can use that intuition to help you when you're feeling anxious.

I'm also unpacking the connection between facial expressions, body language, and emotions. Learn how a simple smile can boost your mood and why body language is key to more confidence and better mental health for high-achieving women.

Here's what you'll learn:

  • How to tap into your intuition
  • How to use your body to change your mood
  • Why our current posture and habits might be making us feel more anxious and depressed outside of comparison, FOMO, and doom scrolling.

P.S. Want to deep dive? Grab a copy of "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (highly recommended!).

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You know you're overwhelmed, burned out, sick to death of work but also trying to do everyting for everyone at home. TAKE THIS QUIZ to find out why you're so overwhelmed and what to do about it.

Megan Devito:

Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I help ambitious women break out of the anxiety cycle that keeps them frustrated and stuck. Get ready for a lighthearted approach that will change what you think, how you feel and what you believe about yourself. This podcast is full of simple steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action, so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to episode 98 of the More Than Anxiety podcast.

Megan Devito:

My name is Megan and I'm so excited that you decided to spend your time here with me today. Whether you're listening in your car on the way to work, or if you're sneak listening during some meeting that you're supposed to be attending, or maybe you're just watching it blatantly on YouTube, I love it. Thanks for spending your time here, and I want to talk to you today about a book that has been out for a while. It's called Blink. It's by Malcolm Gladwell. I started it a long time ago and I never finished it, and I don't know why, but for some reason I decided I was going to listen to it again. So I started over and I have no idea how I did not finish this book the first time around, because it's fantastic. I'm positive that I picked it up because it's about overthinking and, from the perspective of someone who tends to overthink things, this seemed like a really obvious choice for me. How can I stop overthinking everything? But this isn't always true for me, because sometimes I get a flash little bit of insight on, 'oh, this person's really nice, I really like talking to them, but there's something about them that I don't know. They just feel like a snake in the grass" or I don't know why, but I know that's not right. Do you ever have that happen? Because I'm positive it happens to me and I'm betting that it happens to you.

Megan Devito:

So this book is really interesting from the perspective of we're really good at making snap decisions and there's something in our subconscious that we know instinctively based on past experience, based on that little bit of weird energy that you get, or maybe something that's been passed down generationally, where we talk about stored memories or stored traumas. Or maybe it's just evolution, but whatever it is, there's scientific evidence to suggest that our brains are really good at knowing the truth and knowing what's right, and knowing how to make fast decisions and make correct decisions without overthinking it. So if you are a person who tends to overthink because you are anxious, you are going to wanna check out this book. It's going to help you trust yourself a little more. It's also gonna help you understand a little bit more about how you can tell the difference between anxiety and wondering if it's intuition, or if it's intuition and you're wondering if it's anxiety, because those are two very different feelings in your body and I'm going to get to that. But really, this book talks a lot about how we can quickly make these decisions based on something that we can't put our finger on or really explain with logic. I think that's an important thing to understand is that we try to overthink things to make them make sense so we don't fail, so we don't upset anyone else. And this book tears that apart by talking about a concept that they call "thin slicing, and thin slicing is really just learning to trust that glimpse that you have or that feeling that you have or that thing that you just know. So, for example, if you are able to make a really accurate decision, like I said, judging someone's character, or maybe you aren't sure why, you know something but you just do. That's part of it.

Megan Devito:

But also being aware, another thing that this book brings up is really being aware of the biases that you have that might influence your decision or what you think. These could be stereotypes that we have. This could be cultural things that we've learned, this could be just things that we've passed down, or they could just be stories that we've told. It goes on to much bigger things, to racial inequality and things like that that we do have these side learned things that are still playing out and really noticing and being aware of those potential biases that you might have, so that you can make different decisions.

Megan Devito:

Anyways, the author goes into all of this, really talking about how there are limitations to this concept of thin slicing. I don't want to give the whole book away, but I do want you to understand the basis before I get to what I want to talk about in this podcast. So, use your brain, have some conscious thinking, but don't overthink it. This is going to challenge your views on how you make decisions. So I started reading this book from the perspective of somebody who tends to overthink things, but this also isn't always true for me, because I have really strong accurate intuition, and it's almost always right .

Megan Devito:

The part of the book that led to this podcast, though, was a chapter on snap judgments and facial expressions. Now, I will admit that I will be the first to think that something is wrong, because I like to make people right. This is probably one of my biggest anxiety problems is that I'm very much a people pleaser, and I don't like people to be upset with me. Maybe this is oldest daughter syndrome, but this is a big part of my life that I'm still working through and figuring out. But this part of the book really spoke to me. And this is when, as soon as I got to a place where I could turn on the voice recorder on my phone.

Megan Devito:

I just started talking so that I knew everything that I wanted to say to you all in this episode, but the chapter that really caused me to stop and create this podcast episode starts with a story about an immigrant from Guinea who was murdered in New York City by the police officers who had driven past and seen him standing outside of the building where he lived. The police officers misread movements that this man made and they made a snap judgment which resulted in his murder. It's a horrible and a sad story and it led to a secondary topic, and the secondary topic outside of this horribly sad story about this man, was about how they could have misread the cues that this man had given from standing in the alley and as he had made the movements to try to pull out his wallet. That was, you know, when fear settled in and the police looked at him and thought he had a gun and really all he had was his wallet. And all of the different conversations that were happening, and what was playing out, and how the clues that this man had been given on his face or by his body, movements and like the way his body was standing how, if they would have been interpreted correctly, the man would still be alive. So the theory is that the physical act of making a facial expression, so the facial expressions that this man was making, were giving the clues that the officers needed to be able to read.

Megan Devito:

You know someone who is autistic, then you might know that people who are autistic really cannot read facial expressions. They can't read the emotions from people's face. That part of their brain doesn't interpret those really tiny muscles that move in people's faces that we can pick up on. But if you're not autistic, there is a theory and the theory is that the physical act of actually making a facial expression during the study after the murder of this man, when they did all of these studies on people who make expressions, people who scowl, people who are always smiling, those people, how those facial expressions can trigger a corresponding emotion. Now, to be sure, we know that when we're happy we smile and laugh, and when we're mad we scowl, and when we're scared we make a scared face. But we have these expressions based on our emotion. But what they found when doing the research after the fact was that making the expression on its own, without something happening to cause you to feel happy or sad, or scared or anything else, actually can produce the emotion and

Megan Devito:

the feeling inside of your body.

Megan Devito:

because I thought what? A little backstory on this. I had actually driven to the store when I was listening to this book because I was feeling kind of yuck, just one of those days where I was bored but there was nothing that I wanted to do. I was a little bit sad, kind of just a little depressed for the day or a little down for the day where I was just like eyebrows, is just kind of blah. here And I'm listening to this book and they started talking about the facial expressions that you make and how it influences your mood, and I noticed instantly that I had been straight faced and blah all day long, like not really sad or anything like that, but definitely on the verge of sad, to where my face was kind of slack and emotionless and it didn't feel good to me. So I heard this and, as I noticed that my face had been in this position most of the day, I was like what the hell? You're right.

Megan Devito:

So they started talking further in the book about the studies they were doing on facial expressions and one of the things they said was, if you move like Q5, a4, blah, blah, blah, there's 45 different muscles in your. Because and 300 and some odd different muscle combinations that achieving, they're do to make these different things. And they noticed that these two researchers had been doing these muscle motions like bring down the corners of your eyebrows and bring this other piece here and here. So I started trying to do it while I was driving and I noticed that like that's mad, and I don't know what Q5A4 or whatever the combination was, but I knew that when they said bring your eyebrows down and do this, it was mad. And they said making that face alone will increase your heart rate by 10 to 12 beats per minute. I'm not kidding you. As soon as I made the face, I was like I can feel it and I know the emotion.

Megan Devito:

And this goes back to something that I learned when I was getting my coaching certifications that I have practiced so often with myself but also with people who I've coached to talk about body posture and your emotions and growing your confidence, because I work primarily with women who are high achieving. They're going after their goals, whether they are big corporate work goals or they have goals for how they want to feel when they are balancing being a working mom and growing their career. All of these different people who are doing these incredible things, and one of the things that I ask them every time is how are you feeling? How would you rather feel? And we notice, you might notice that on those days when you're feeling low, check yourself, because I noticed, like I told you in the car, that I was slack and I was doing this. So, because there are these studies and these studies are still ongoing. Nothing is 100% lock solid ever, but I think it's really worth paying attention to, because if you are always noticing that you have a low mood, I want you to check your posture. If you're always noticing that you're anxious, I want you to check your face. I want you to check what you are doing with your body, because there is power in your posture.

Megan Devito:

So let's talk about body language. One of the things that I learned when I was getting my teaching certification because I was a teacher for a long time before I was a coach is that if you want to know if a kid's paying attention to you. Look which direction their knees are pointing in their chair, because if you have a kid whose knees are going to the side and you're standing on the other side, wherever their knees are pointing, that's where their attention is directed. If you wonder if someone is paying attention to you, look where their body is positioned and if they're turning their head to look at you, because if most of their body is pointing towards someone else, they're just waiting for you to shut up so they can get back to what they were doing. That is true when you're a teacher. I'll be like turn your knees and point them at me. You can tell that's body language. You can also tell by little smirks and little things that people do on their face. You can tell if people are doing this. Or if you have somebody who has their phone and let's say that you're talking to them and they're like uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and they're always on their phone. That's going to tell you exactly where their attention lies. It's not with you.

Megan Devito:

So when we talk about body language and how we can read body language, this is something that we do subconsciously. We're not saying I see that your arms are swinging as you walk or I see that your knees are pointed to the left, but I'm on the right. You're not saying that, you just happen to notice it. So there's research on this mind-body connection and I've talked about this over and over and over, about how your emotions are stored in your muscles and the connection between your body influencing what your mind thinks. When you feel anxious inside your body, when you notice how much the adrenaline and the cortisol has increased your heart rate and made your hands feel shaky, and that your brain is cloudy and you feel like you're going to throw up and have diarrhea, your brain will start coming up with all kinds of stories to explain that feeling. But the same is true, apparently, for those little, teeny, tiny muscles in your face.

Megan Devito:

So let's talk about posture. We have two different kinds of postures that you might notice yourself doing. We have a slumped posture or a closed posture where you turn in on yourself, your head's down, your shoulders are forward, you're kind of rolling into like a roly bug position where you're like hunched over. We stand this posture or we hold this posture so often throughout the day when we're sitting at a desk and we're typing on a computer, or if we're holding our phones and we're crunched over and we're always looking down. So if we are noticing that our posture has turned inward or it's closing off or it's slumped, that posture alone can produce feelings of anxiety and depression. So the fact that we have our noses in a phone or in a computer all day explains a lot about why we feel the way that we feel. On the other hand, if you sit up straight, if you pull your shoulders back, if you raise your chest up, if you sit proud, if you lift your head, it increases your energy, it increases your confidence head. It increases your energy, it increases your confidence and it helps you to feel open to better feelings. So automatically your heart rate drops and you notice that it's easier to smile and you're willing to talk to other people and you're not as stressed out, you're not as tired. This is all body position. And if we think about where we are in terms of the amount of anxiety and depression on the planet today, it makes total sense to me not a researcher or a scientist that after listening to this book and knowing what I know about posture, that if we put our phones down and closed our computers for a while and sat up tall and took a walk tall, we might feel a little better.

Megan Devito:

So let's go back to the book for a second. If we talk about these two snap judgments and facial expressions, like the snap judgments that those officers made on that man who was killed, think about him. He was scared. He was curled into a ball, he was doing all these things. We read other people's body expressions. If they would have known that, they would have seen what was happening with him, that he was scared, he was curled up. So if we talk about the book and how it explores this idea that facial expressions can show us what we need, they would have noticed that his face wasn't looking mean or angry, that he was looking scared. They would have noticed that maybe his eyebrows were raised and his eyes were open wider.

Megan Devito:

Think about how your face feels when you're scared. You can bring on the feeling right there. We ? would also be able to say, hey, what's going on here? We'll be able to read the situation. We talk about reading . When room all slump, this. Look at people's body posture, look at what they're doing. That's how you read the room. We do it all the time. We just don't think about it. The book kind of just brought this to my head and maybe you're thinking yeah, megan, I know all this already, but for me this was eye-opening, so I thought it might be for you as well.

Megan Devito:

If we want to talk about feeling great, how can I make myself feel better so that nobody knows I got you? You ready? We've already talked about posture and how, if we sit up, we're going to have more energy when we . slump You This is a tired, depressed'oh anxious feeling. Something as simple as pulling a string from the top of your head up. Sit up tall, roll your shoulders back and' look up. That change alone can increase your energy levels. It can clear your brain. It can make you feel less depressed and less anxious.

Megan Devito:

So when we talk about how posture can determine your mood or your energy level, the simple act of putting down your phone and pretending there's a string on your head that pulls you straight up, straightening your spine, looking up, smiling on purpose you know that whole thing about oh my God. And then he told me to smile and I just wanted to punch him in the face. Don't tell me to smile. I'm going to tell you right now you need to smile on purpose, even when you don't feel like it, not because I'm telling you to fake it and be fake and try and make someone else happy, but because the simple act of smiling has memories and good feelings attached to it and the muscles in your cheeks and inside your nervous system. So when you smile on purpose and you go from this to this, your mood instantly lifts and you have more energy, you can think more clearly, you've got more creativity, you're ready to talk to other people and things change.

Megan Devito:

But you have to get out of your chair, you have to stand up, you have to be willing to do these things, to do this, so what you can do, what has to happen to be able to be able to do these things, is the first thing you have to do is strengthen your core muscles, and your core goes from your chest to your hips, your butt, all the way up your back, and it basically holds you upright. We are in slouch position most of the day, working on our phones, working on our computers again, and when you're depressed, if you think about it, we tend to slunch over. Even when we walk, we tend to look down. The act of raising your head and standing tall is going to make your back and your core feel tired for a while. So finding a way to incorporate some more core exercises just simple things, simple things that you can pick up. You can Google these and find them on YouTube. Simple core exercises to help your posture is going to be huge.

Megan Devito:

Also, simple acts like changing how you breathe this is something that I work so often with my coaching clients is let's just change the way you breathe. Are you breathing like short little breaths? Let's practice breathing. Let's practice breathing from your diaphragm, getting that air to go really, really deep, because that also We learned this last week when we talked with Tabitha Green. You should check out that episode to hear more about how your breathing can change your body and how it can change your anxiety levels and strengthen your pelvic floor. There was so much goodness in that episode.

Megan Devito:

Another thing you wanna do is if you are feeling intimidated before you go into a meeting or you're feeling less than or small in your overthinking, let's talk about a power pose. A power pose is something as simple as standing there and increasing your body size. Pretend like you're trying to scare something away. You know how bears will do this like ah thing. Or think about if you've ever seen the show Ted Lasso Nate spits on himself in the mirror, which is totally disgusting and not actually a power pose, but that was his version of a power pose, an expansive body posture, which means making yourself bigger. Standing taller, pulling your shoulders apart, like flexing your arms, automatically increases your confidence and your energy. That's how important these body poses can be.

Megan Devito:

If you are wondering how this all goes together and how you can use how you move your face or the way that you stand to feel better and you need to know more information message me, because let's talk about how we can start incorporating these habits into your daily life by just changing what you're thinking about. How your body is moving. How does your body feel? What do you need to do to stand taller? How can we practice this? .

Megan Devito:

What are the things that you can say to yourself to help you feel more relaxed so it's easier to remember to stand up and do these things when really your thoughts are making you want to curl into a ball, because the connection between your body and your mind is constant and you are not even paying attention to it happening. None of us are. We're just learning about how strong that connection is, and every single day, I learn something new that I just wanna scream like on a loud speaker Devito just gets piped into Threads, everyone's home hey Devito are you standing up? Do you know Devito I just heard today? Here's what you need to do. I've got some encouragement for you.

Megan Devito:

This is what coaching "Blink about. It's me helping you get what you want by you finding what works for you, by you finding the thoughts that are keeping you stuck and the habits that are keeping stuck, and then finding the habits that you want to do to make your life better and to help you achieve your goals. It is so simple to talk with me about how I can help you. All you have to do is reach out via Messenger. You can go on Facebook. I'm Coach Megan DeVito on there. Instagram Threads Coach Megan DeVito in all those places, and I'm Megan DeVito on LinkedIn. And, of course, if you're watching this on YouTube, just leave me a comment and I will get back with you. I hope this was as interesting for you as it was for me.

Megan Devito:

Check out the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I loved it. I thought it was a great read and I would love to hear what you think as well. So if I don't talk to you before on a consultation call, I will be back again next week. Take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More Than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel calm, to stop overthinking and have a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. I'll talk to you soon.