Tal Shafir: How Your Body Affects Your Happiness at TEDxJaffa 2013 (Transcript)

Just as this period started, I happened to attend a dancing in the street event, where I saw people dance swing in the street. And I fell in love with swing music and the joy of the dance and it inspired me, and I started to dance swing regularly. And again, the movement and the dance just made me feel better.

Each time I danced, I felt happier, I felt energized and motivated and these effects lasted not only while I was dancing, but for a few hours after each time I danced. The dancing was really what helped me keep up my mood elevated during that difficult period.

And once I started dancing, it also reminded me of my dance movement therapy background, and at home I would also dance and elicit and process through movements, all the difficulties, and the feelings that I had in relation to the difficulties. The effect of the dancing on my mood and emotions during that period — both the social dancing, swing dancing, and the dancing at home — was so incredible that it made me want to research that in order to understand how does it happen. How come our movements have such a big effect on our emotions and feelings? What is the underlying brain process behind that effect? And how can we use this phenomenon to create simple motor intervention to help people with psychological and psychiatric problems?

But in order to research these questions, one has to understand what are emotions? Do you know what are emotions and feelings? Our body constantly sends signals from the body to the brain about its current condition. And whenever our life is in danger, these signals create in the brain a drive to act, to do something that will preserve our life. And these signals which are presented in the brain in the form of chemical and electrical signals, these are actually our unconscious emotions which are then translated into the conscious feelings. So for example, our body constantly sends signals to the brain about our blood sugar level. And whenever the brain identifies that the sugar level goes down too much, it creates a drive to act to go and eat something so that the sugar level will go up again. And this translates into the feeling of hunger which makes us go and eat.

Another example is if you see something threatening. Imagine that you’re hiking in Alaska, enjoying the view, the wilderness, the quietness, and suddenly you see a huge grizzly bear ahead of you. That’s what happened to me a few years ago. Well, the bear wasn’t really in front of me, it was running parallel to the path where I was hiking, about 500 meters away, and luckily the wind was blowing in such a direction that the bear didn’t smell me. But during the first few seconds that I spotted that bear, and until I realized that I was safe, my heart rate went up like crazy, my eyes and pupils got enlarged, and all the blood went into my muscles which became ready to fight, flight, or freeze.

So all these signals coming from the body to my brain, according to Darwin, James and others, all these signals made me feel frightened. It was not that was I afraid and as a result my heart rate went up, but because my heart rate went up, I felt fear. So it is the feedback that comes from your body to your brain that determines your feelings. And you’ve all experienced that.

Just think about it, whenever you’re stressed or anxious like I am right now, what people tell you to do? They tell you to take a few deep, slow breaths. You do that and then it helps you to calm down. That’s because the body sends to the brain the signal that your breathing is slow and deep, which is the pattern of breathing that you usually have when you’re relaxed. So it translates that into the feeling of calmness and that’s what helps you to calm down.

And the same goes for movements. Among all the signals that go from the body to the brain — the blood sugar level, and the hormone levels, and the heart rate, breathing rate, and all the other signals, the brain also gets signals from the muscles about the amount and speed of their contractions, and from the joints, about their angles and the rate of change in the angles, the movement in the joints. And these signals from the joints and from the muscles, tell the brain what postures and movements we’re doing. And in the same way that the reduced blood sugar level creates the feeling of hunger, in a similar way certain muscle activation patterns and certain joint configurations are associated in the brain and enhance the feelings and emotions that are associated with them. So this is how our postures and movements can actually affect our feelings.

This has been researched and shown in several studies done by several different researchers, using different movements to enhance different emotions. One of the studies showed that two minutes of standing or sitting in a closed posture, which is associated with helplessness and submissiveness creates — not only increased the subjective feeling of the person who did that, subjecting feeling of powerlessness but also reduced their willingness to take risk in a gambling task, and it increased the level of the hormone cortisol, which is the stress hormone that secretes when we’re stressed, and whose level is really high when we’re depressed.

Now pay attention: only two minutes of closed posture significantly increases the level of that stress hormone. Can you imagine what might eight hours a day of sitting at the computer in a closed, crouched posture can do to the level of that hormone? And I’ll tell you even more than that.

In my studies I found that not only doing certain movements enhance the associated emotions, but sometimes even just watching or imagining yourself doing those movements can have the same effect although slightly weaker than actually doing the movements. But what if one cannot do the movements? I remember that when I first flew to present that study in a conference, the woman that sat nearly me on the airplane started a conversation. She was in her 40s and she had some kind of a disease which limited her mobility, and she was walking with a cane. And when I told her about my study, she told that she used to love dancing but she couldn’t do it anymore. So now, instead of dancing, when she is in weddings, she substituted that by watching the other people dance and imagining herself dancing. It’s not the same thing, she told me, but when she’s vividly imagining herself dancing, it feels almost like dancing, and it still elevates her mood.

So now you know that if you want to enhance a certain emotion you need to do the movements that are associated with that emotion. But what specific movements are these? Do you need to do the exact same movements that were done in those experiments that demonstrate this effect? One of the movements that we did in an experiment that we’re trying to do to enhance happiness was skipping. Skipping worked great for women. They immediately naturally started skipping. They felt like children and smiles spread on their faces, and they felt great.

But some of the men, not all of the men, but some of the men they just couldn’t do it, it didn’t come naturally to them, they had to think what they were doing: Step, hop, step, hop. Literally, it looked like that. And of course doing that didn’t enhance their happiness. If at all, it probably enhanced their embarrassment and shame that they couldn’t really do it.

So obviously, not every movement affects everybody the same. And different movements affect people slightly differently. But whenever you see somebody do a happy movement, you see it’s happy because it has some quality that is associated with happiness. And whenever you see somebody express sadness, you know it’s sad because it has another quality that is associated with sadness.

So what if instead of asking people to do a specific movement like skipping, we’ll ask them to do their own natural movements, whatever they feel comfortable with, but to do it with that specific quality that is associated with the emotion that we want to enhance? Maybe this way, it will also enhance that emotion.

So to test that, we did a research experiment, we took clips of people expressing different emotions in movements, and then using a movement analysis system called Laban, we found what are the motor qualities that characterize all the movements that express a certain emotion? And then we asked people who are experts in Laban movement analysis to move those qualities. We didn’t ask them to move specific movements; they could move any movement that they wanted, but with that quality. You can do many movements fast. You can walk fast, you can get dressed up fast; you can eat fast, you can type fast; you can do all kinds of movements fast. But they’ll all be fast and not slow.

So we asked those people to do different movements with a specific movement quality. And after doing several movements with each motor quality, we asked them, what emotions it enhanced in them. And using this paradigm, we found that indeed there are some qualities that are associated that enhance specific feelings.

So I’m not going to tell you in detail all of our results, but I’ll just give you an example and I’ll use this example, happiness, because I assume most people would like to be more happier rather than more angrier or more afraid. So among the qualities that we found that characterized happiness were lightness; expanding the body in horizontal and in the vertical direction; upward movements, like jumping and raising your arms up; and repetitive, rhythmic movement.

So now if you want to be happier, all you need to do is incorporate those movements into your everyday life. Whenever you walk down the street or anywhere else, just walk lightly and not heavily. Because heaviness is actually one of the qualities that characterizes sadness.

When you wake up in the morning, just stretch, stretch in all directions. And do it several times during the day. In fact, let’s do it now. Please, start in a crouched posture, just to see what it feels like. Closed and crouched posture, and pay attention to how it makes you feel. And now start stretching. Stretch your arms, stretch your torso, stretch your legs if you can. Don’t follow me. Do your own stretching, whatever feels comfortable for you. Just do your own stretching.

And now sit erect, elongate your torso, open your chest, bring your head up, and take a deep breath. Don’t you feel better now, and more energized than before? And as for repetitive, rhythmic movements, when you think about it, all dances are comprised of repetitive, rhythmic movements. So no wonder dancing always made me feel good.

In a recent study that was done in Germany, they found that dancing the Israeli folk dance Hava Nagila, was more effective in reducing depression than riding a stationary bike. Riding a stationary bike is a good aerobic exercise, and it was effective in reducing depression, but dancing the Hava Nagila, which, in addition to the repetitive rhythmic movements in it, it also incorporates some hops, that actually are vertical movements, which is another quality that we talked about that characterizes happy movements. Dancing this dance was more effective than riding the bike.

Now like skipping, dancing might not work for some people, but I believe that for most people dancing can really have an effect, and can really make a difference in how they feel. Why else would dancing be so popular throughout history and in all cultures? So be conscious and aware of how you hold and move your body. Because your body continuously sends signals to your brain, and constantly affects your feelings. And use this effect to help you regulate your emotions. And if you’re like me and you want to be happier, make sure that you don’t stay in closed postures, and don’t make heavy movements, because those are associated with negative feelings. And incorporate those qualities that I told you that are associated with happy movements. Move lightly. Hold your body in an opened, long and open position. And whenever you can, dance. Nike said: Just do it! I say: Just dance it!

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