Improve Your Posture, Improve Your Mood!
Posture & Mood: An Interesting Approach
There are correlations between posture and certain moods, feelings and even pain. For example, when someone is sad or in pain, they tend to posture in a slumped position. But on the other hand, if someone is feeling happy or confident, they tend to posture in more of an upright position and look outward. As physical therapists, we do our best to be in tune with what our patients are feeling (physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, etc.) because we know that rehabilitation is not just physical and all those factors go into how a patient is interpreting their pain.
The blog post linked below goes into several studies that look at the correlation between posture and mood. One of the best takeaways is that you can change your mood sometimes by changing your posture. They give the example of people combating sadness with “think happy thoughts” and relating this to pain by using the approach of “move happy moves”. This is consistent with some of the sayings we use at the clinic, such as “motion is lotion” and “movement is medicine”. We want our patients to utilize movement in a comfortable range of motion, even if that movement is unrelated to the area of pain.
https://www.bettermovement.org/blog/2011/posture-and-mood-a-two-way-street
So, the next time you want to improve your mood, try sitting up a little straighter, putting a smile on your face, and maybe, just maybe, you will feel better!