The Link Between Your Posture and Mental Health

Did you know your posture can affect your mental health? Never really thought about it, huh?A study from The University of Auckland concluded that sitting in an upright posture can function as a coping mechanism against stress.The researchers asked participants to complete several questionnaires about their affect/mood, self-esteem and arousal levels after performing a task designed to induce mild stress. During the task, the participants were randomly assigned to one of two posture conditions. One group was instructed to sit in an upright posture, while the other was instructed to sit in a slumped position. In order to reduce expectation effects - i.e., the idea that knowing the purpose of an experiment might influence behavior - the researchers told participants a fictitious cover story that the experiment was investigating the effects of a technique used by physical therapists. At the end of the trial, the participants were debriefed on the true purpose of the study.By the end of the stress-inducing task, participants sitting in an upright posture displayed an overall more positive emotional state compared to those in the slumped posture group. The upright position group reported higher self-esteem, as well as “feeling more enthusiastic, excited, and strong, while the slumped participants reported feeling more fearful, hostile, nervous, quiet, still, passive, dull, sleepy, and sluggish.”The researchers concluded that the findings might have something to do with arousal and what is known as embodied cognition. The upright group showed an increase in physiological arousal (spike in pulse pressure and cardiac output) that enabled an active coping response to stress. While the slumped back posture led to lower levels of arousal, likely leading participants to become more susceptible to stress.Embodied cognition describes the interrelationship between mind and body, in other words, how bodily experiences can affect cognitive and emotional states, and vice versa. The researchers theorized that as the brain receives muscular and hormonal signals with information about bodily posture, it then translates those signals into emotions.Researchers at Ohio State University and the Autonomous University in Madrid, Spain, examined the relationship between metacognition and body posture, and found differences in how participants evaluated their own abilities and judgments depending on whether they were sitting in a “confident” versus a “doubtful” posture. They defined confident posture as sitting up with a straight back, and the chest pushed out, while doubtful posture was defined as sitting slouched forward with the face looking toward the knees. Their experimental results showed that participants sitting with confident posture truly felt more confident about themselves, and held more positive self-attitudes when evaluating themselves as potential professionals. The conclusions of this study highlight the role of posture on self-validation and self-perception.