Title: Your Body posture can change your brain.

Source: http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/your-body-posture-can-changeyour-brain/2710394.html

Title: Your Body posture can change your brain.

Source: http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/your-body-posture-can-changeyour-brain/2710394.html

Your Body Posture Can Change Your Brain

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From VOA Learning English, this is the Health &Lifestyle report.

We have known for a long time that our body posture
the way we hold our bodies when we sit, stand or walk-- tells the world a lot about us.
People who walk with their heads bent down can appear unsure, or
not confident, about themselves.While people who walk with their shoulders back andhead
s held high appear confident.
But can our body posture affect the way we see ourselves?
A social psychologist named Amy Cuddy believes it can. And
she wants to share this information with the world.
The now-famous TED talk
More than 24 million people have viewed Amy Cuddys TED talk on powerposing. It is
the second most viewed TED talk in the history of all TED talks.TED is a nonprofit organization with one goal: to spread ideas in the form of short talks.
The power of the power pose has taken on a life of its own. Ms Cuddy
speaks all over the world sharing the power of the two-minute power pose.
She says her goal it to empower the powerless.

Before facing your next stressful situation or

a difficult challenge, Ms. Cuddywants you to take two minutes to power pose. Spread your a
rms wide aboveyour head as if you are winning a race.
Or, stand like the superhero Wonder Woman with hands on hips and feetshoulder-width apa
rt. Hold these poses for
at least two minutes. According toresearch by Ms. Cuddy and her colleagues your brain che
mistry will change, giving you more confidence.
The experiment
Amy Cuddy is a professor at Harvard Business School. Back in 2010,
shebecame interested in male and female body language from watching studentsin one of h
er classes. She said, for the most part,
the men held power poses.These students would take up a lot of physical room in
the class. They would raise their hands and answer questions.
Ms Cuddy said the female students, for
the most part, did the exact opposite.They sat with their legs together and made their bodie
s as small as possible.They seemed unsure when they raised their hands to answer questio
ns.
Ms Cuddy knew much about body language as
a social scientist. Bodylanguage is what the look of our physical self communicates to other
s.
ButProfessor Cuddy started to wonder what our individual body language says toour individ
ual selves.
So,
she set up an experiment with colleague Dana Carney, then a socialpsychologist at Columb
ia University. The two women wanted to know if a
persons body language affected the brains chemistry.
They asked 42 men and women to randomly hold high- or low-power poses.
The researchers did not tell any of the participants in the experiment what
they were testing. People in the highpower pose group held poses such asputting their feet on
a desk with their hands behind their heads or stretchingarms out wide as if winning a race.

People in the low-power group held poses such as sitting in a chair with arms held close to
the body with hands folded or standing with arms and legscrossed tightly.
Both groups held the poses for two minutes. Then Ms. Cuddy and Ms. Carneytested hormo
ne levels of the study subjects. The brain chemistry of both groups had changed.
The researchers found that two minutes of high-power posing lowered thestress hormone c
ortisol and increased levels of testosterone. Also, all thesubjects in the highpower pose group said they felt powerful and
in controlafter the pose. They also took more risks during the experiment.
Lower-power posing did the opposite
it raised cortisol levels and loweredtestosterone levels. These low-power posers also took fe
wer risks during thecourse of the experiment.
How do these chemicals affect the brain?
Too much cortisol interferes with learning and memory. High cortisol levelsalso increase the
risk of depression and mental health problems.Testosterone, on the other hand, is
the hormone linked to assertiveness and confidence.
Ms. Cuddy, Ms. Carney and another Columbia University researcher, AndyYap, co-wrote th
e 2010 study. It was published in
the journal PsychologicalScience. Ms. Cuddy and her colleagues found that body langua
ge andposture can temporarily change the chemistry of our brains.
Ms Cuddy has said her goal for researching this subject was not to create testosteronedriven, super-competitive people. She has said that thisresearch can have real lifechanging effects on people who feel powerless people who are healing from
an illness, facing a job loss, or dealing with abuse or bullying.
She adds that anyone needing higher confidence levels -from athletes andperformers to people heading into a job interview -- could benefit from pow
erposing.
Fake it till you make it
Ms. Cuddy says she also wants to help people who have what somepsychologists call the
imposter syndrome. The imposter syndrome is the feeling that you do not deserve to
be where you are and that you will soon be discovered to be a fake, or well, an imposter.

She knows the imposter syndrome well.

At age 19 while in college getting her undergraduate degree, Ms. Cuddy was in
a serious car accident. The accident left her with a severe brain injury.
Doctors advised her to give up her dreams of getting an advanced degree andtake another
path in life. She says she was always known as an intelligent girl and good student.
The news was difficult to hear.
Finally, Ms. Cuddy decided to stay in college.
She worked hard and, eventhough it took her four years longer than everyone else,
she finally got her degree.
She wanted to get her Masters degree at Princeton University andfound an advisor who bel
ieved in her.
But Ms. Cuddy lost her nerve. She told her advisor she wanted to quit. She
felt like an imposter who was not good enough to be at Princeton. Her advisor
ordered her to go to class and to just fake it. Fake it till you make it, is the
expression her advisor used.
Ms. Cuddy continued faking it, getting more and more confident. She faked it
all the way to Harvard Business School where she is now a professor. Then
Ms. Cuddy simply forgot to fake it.
She forgot until one day when a female student came into her office and saidshe wanted to
quit.
This student said she felt as if she didnt belong. Ms. Cuddy told the girl, You do belong!
and gave the student the
fake it till you make it speech that Ms.Cuddys advisor gave her all those years ago.
It was at that moment Amy Cuddy realized that finally she had made it. She no
longer felt like an imposter. She had become the person she wanted to be. She
has since changed the expression to fake it till you become it.
Amy Cuddy urges people to share the information on power posing withanyone who may ne
ed to feel more powerful. It is simple, free and might be life-changing.
Im Anna Matteo.

And Im Mario Ritter.

Anna Matteo wrote this story for Learning English based on Amy CuddysTED Talk and oth
er articles. Caty Weaver was the editor.