Episode 127: Self-Confidence in Uncertain Times, Pt. 1: Being Body-Centered

Having positive self-esteem is essential if we want to live our lives with more focus and less stress. In this episode, we'll take a look at the surprising role of body mechanics, posture, facial expression and breathing in helping us feel more confident. This can, in turn, maximize our impact in our interactions with others at work and in our personal relationships.

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The information contained and documents referenced in the podcast “Your Priority Centered Life” are for entertainment, educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as, and shall not be understood or construed as, professional medical or health treatment, diagnosis, or advice. We strongly encourage listeners to consult with medical providers or qualified mental health providers with issues and questions regarding any physical and/or mental health symptoms or concerns that they may have. Furthermore, the opinions and views expressed by podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates are not necessarily those of the podcast host. Dr. Alise Murray’s opinions and views are expressed in her individual capacity and are not to be construed as those of any of her podcast guests, partners and/or affiliates.

Transcript

(Transcript is autogenerated and may contain minor errors.)

Hey, Dr. Alise here.  I wanted to talk with you about when we're talking about being priority centered, living a priority centered life, the first thing that has to happen is you have to believe that your life is worth it. You have to believe that  you are worth it. And that means holding yourself in high enough esteem for that to happen. And that can be a tall order, but we're not going to get off the starting line if we don't feel like “yes, this is worth it, I am worth it, my life is worth it, to center my life around what's most important to me.” Now I know that we have not met, but I am truly certain that you have something to share with the world that can make the world better. And centering your life around your priorities can give you the energy to be able to make that positive difference. 

So, how do we do this? This episode is especially for you if A. You are someone who is multi -passionate. You feel like you have a lot of interests. If life is an all you can eat buffet, you are stuffing yourself until you're uncomfortably full. 

B,  if you are someone who is  a high achiever, someone who really feels great when they can Knock the ball out of the park. And you find yourself pushing yourself. Push, push, push. To really nail things. To really do very, very well.  

And C, if you are someone who deeply cares about others, who feels like, I really want to help. I really want to help others to feel cared about. I want to lift up others. And as a result, you can feel like everybody wants a piece of me.

Now I'm not saying choose A, B, or C. Which one are you? Because personally I feel like I could check all three of those boxes. I absolutely would fit  for being a high achiever, being someone who cares deeply about others and being multi passionate. All three of those things get checked off for me. And maybe this is you too, but regardless, we're going to talk about what can help with your confidence.

And this is a big, big subject. So we are going to start with looking at body And the role of being body centered in helping you to feel more confident.  So, first thing to think about is just the way you are holding yourself in space, your body posture, your body mechanics, because your body posture and the way that you move through this world has an impact upon your mood. Your nervous system is constantly getting signals from your body about  how you're doing. It's your nervous system's  goal. Your nervous system's focus is to keep you safe, to keep you alive and functioning. And so it is constantly looking for signals that things are, are things going well or are things not quite right? 

Research has actually found that when we don't feel as good about ourselves, when we feel more depressed, we tend to have a body posture that is more compressed. Let me see if I can do this for you. If you're watching a video, I'm going to see if I can mimic that. So being a little bit more concave, shoulders forward, and spine rounded. (voice cracks) Did you hear that? I feel like it's harder for me to get adequate breath. I find that my throat is tightening in response. And so it doesn't take very long. If you put yourself in this kind of, “I don't want to take up space”- type posture, you can feel the effects of that very, very quickly. As compared to, if you open yourself up,  take up space in your environment, open your shoulders up, put your shoulders back, sit tall. Okay. It may sound corny. It may sound like, Oh yeah, those posture lessons, those old posture videos from the fifties, or maybe, you had a parent say, Oh, stand up straight. But truly,  having a more open body posture can actually help you to feel more confident because your nervous system is going to get that positive feedback. And  when you are able to get adequate breath, that is also going to help you to feel more confident. It's going to help your cognitive function. It's going to help your emotional function.  You are able to adequately oxygenate your system. You are able to get the energy you need, and your nervous system says, Okay, cool. Everything is going well. Okay? So being aware of that can have a surprising effect upon how you feel about yourself. 

Now I know some people roll their eyes about the idea of “fake it till you make it”. But truly, there's some truth in this. Just in terms of a personal observation, I used to lead weight loss groups. And one of the things I would ask folks to do would be to spend a day  imagining that you are already at your ideal weight. Hold that mental picture and just go about your daily activities. And then when we would come back to the group the next time, inevitably people would say, Wow,  I felt like I was taller. I felt like I made more eye contact. I initiated more conversations. I just felt better about myself.  I think that when we don't feel good about ourselves, then we might try to take up less space. And then that just has this negative domino effect. So it's a pretty simple thing to do. But this is where I think, no, fake it till you make it really does make sense in this context. Try it out. Try to practice  sitting with a more open posture, standing with a more open posture, and so forth. 

Now this doesn't mean military style, it does not mean rigidly locking your spine. You may know that I'm a yoga teacher. We talk a lot about really grounding through your feet, just paying attention to your body mechanics. Okay. If you feel like your breathing is constricted, that's a signal. Oop, I better open it up, open up that breathing channel.  So that is one thing to think about is your body posture. 

Another thing to think about is your facial expression.    For example, the well-known pencil experiment, where they asked folks to put a pencil between their lips and then to look at some cartoons and judge how humorous they were. So some of the folks in this experiment held the pencil between their lips like this. Now, I know if you're listening, I will describe it to you. Just a moment.  So what I did is I put the pencil between my lips horizontally  and that forces your lips to come back into a smile.  And the others were told to put the pencil between their lips more like a drinking straw. So of course what happens there is you're in more of a pucker position.  And they found that people who had their lips artificially put back into a smile judged the cartoons as being funnier than the people who had the more sour expression caused by having the lips around the pen in a pucker expression.

We also know that facial expression has an impact upon how we feel through studies of Botox. And this is really interesting to me. It just really makes me think about all the Hollywood stars who get Botox and how that might potentially affect their acting ability. Now this is a bit of a leap. But  what we do know in studies looking at people who have had Botox is that  Botox tends to, of course, work by freezing  the movement in certain facial muscles wherever it's injected. When we have this freezing of the muscles, this is, of course, affecting our emotional expression in certain ways, because you're just not as able to mobilize the muscles in your face to make different expressions. 

Also interestingly,  it's been found that Botox injections can actually impede or impact your ability to process emotions. So when you think about someone who is acting, they're trying to cultivate a particular emotional experience so that they can express it on the screen or in whatever medium that they're trying to use.  Botox might actually interfere with that because you're not getting full Use of your facial muscles. Remember that nervous system feedback. Your nervous system is constantly getting feedback from your body about how are we doing? How are we feeling? , and it's been found in some research that having repeated Botox injections can actually affect the functioning of your amygdala.

Now your amygdala is the fight or flight response center. It's a very important center for processing emotions. So I’m not saying having Botox makes you less happy, period, full stop. But just saying that Botox injections, there's some evidence that suggests that it may just kind of  blunt your emotions a bit more.

 I'm not saying do it, don't do it, whatever. I'm just giving you a couple of examples of how your nervous system gets Feedback from your facial muscles and that in turn can affect your emotional experience. When your emotional experience is affected, that can affect your confidence. 

In addition to having a more open body posture, think about what's happening with your face.  And I used to always wonder about this when I was just a yoga student and not a teacher. I, I would hear things like if we were moving into a challenging posture that really requires a lot of flexibility, then I would hear the teacher say, keep your face soft. And I would think, what does this have to do with anything? I'm stretching my hamstrings. But it does because if you’re in a posture and your face is all scrunched like, “oh, this is really difficult”, then  your muscles can very well tighten in response because of that feedback loop. Your brain can say, “something's wrong, you're frowning, you're experiencing stress, we're going to tighten up the muscles so that you can get ready to fight or flight”. Not what you want when you're trying to relax in a yoga class or when you're trying to relax during your day and just feel more confident. So think about keeping your facial muscles soft, or possibly having a bit more of a pleasant expression more of the time, and see where that takes you.  

Another thing to think about when we're thinking about the role of the body  with self confidence, it's worth thinking about  the breath from time to time during the day because we can forget all about it. We can forget to breathe. Particularly if you're feeling stressed, you definitely want to just ask yourself, “okay, what's happening with my breathing?” This doesn't mean focusing on, “I need to take some deep breaths” (sharp inhale).  Because that is going to make you light-headed. That's going to set off, ding ding ding, alarm bells in your nervous system if you're hyperventilating. That's not what we want. Instead, to feel more relaxed, to be able to focus better, concentrate better, you want to emphasize the out breath. Obviously you're going to do in and out, but don't think so much about taking deep breaths. Think about instead, “I'm going to just expel some of this stale air from my lungs.”  

There's a reason why when we're under stress, we unconsciously might sigh, as compared to Unconsciously breathing in, (gasp), that's not going to be helpful. I mean, maybe if you're feeling extremely stressed, you might unconsciously gasp. But normally no, when you're feeling like, “darn it, I wish I had a little bit more time,” probably what's going to happen is you’re going to be (sigh)  Exhaling. And in that case, using your vocal cords, which helps activate your vagus nerve, which also helps with relaxation. Although you're going to annoy people mightily if you keep going through the day using your vocal cords when you exhale. People are going to ask for a different cubicle if you do that. So don't do that unless you're alone. And then it can be a useful reset. But what I'm saying  is, think instead about just checking in with yourself. Where is my breathing? Put your hand on your belly. Is my hand moving?  Because we want diaphragmatic breathing.

We want to use the whole lung, not just moving our shoulders up and down when we breathe. We want to breathe doing belly breathing like babies do. Babies do this quite naturally. So just really practicing, “I'm going to see if I can breathe into my hand”, having your hand on your belly, or “I'm going to see if I can breathe into my waistband”, and you can think about,  “I'm going to expel some of this stale air  and then just let the inhale happen naturally”, or you can think about “I'm just gonna smooth out my breath, lengthen it a little bit.”

You can do this with nobody knowing what's going on. Nobody has to know you're focusing on your breathing, and it doesn't take any extra time. This is definitely something you can do while doing other things. 

So, okay, so we've talked about  body mechanics. your posture, how you move through space. We've talked about facial expressions,  how your facial expressions can have an effect on this, and we've talked about breathing, particularly diaphragmatic breathing, particularly using the exhale.  So, what does all this have to do with living a priority centered life? 

It has a profound effect, as I mentioned at the beginning, because if you  don't feel like  you are worth it, if you don't feel like you are going to be effective,  then you're sure as heck not going to put energy into identifying what's most important to you and centering your life around that.  You can very well default into people pleasing, default into external standards of what you “should” be doing  to be successful in this life. External standards of what success even means.  And that is doing  others and yourself a grave disservice. It is doing others  a grave disservice because  we have this ripple effect every day of our lives. 

The decisions that we make impact others.  Sometimes,  quite often, people we don't even know. Because we are impacting people that we have direct interactions with, and those people are then going on to have interactions with others and so forth. So,  that ripple effect can be a negative one, or it can be a positive one, or if you're not feeling good about yourself, you can withdraw from others and then  others are not going to get the benefit of what you have to offer. And as I said at the beginning, I am 100 percent confident that you have something powerful to offer. I'm not just blowing smoke. 

 So it starts with doing things to help you to feel more secure in your body to feel more confident  and it doesn't matter incidentally  what size your body is, it doesn't matter how much physical ability you have. What matters is intention. Intention to live more fully in your body instead of living from the neck up.  

So think about that. Think about how making these little changes, being aware from time to time and practicing  about your body,  about your facial expression, and about your breathing, can help you to feel more connected to yourself, which can then help you to center your life around your priorities and be less stressed and happier. It's a positive feedback loop. 

 All right, time to wrap this up. Next time we are going to be talking more about self- confidence. We're going to be talking about it through the lens of the company you keep, as well as the thoughts that take up space in your mind. Have a great week!