Body language: talk to yourself

CULTURA BODY LANGUAGE: TALK TO YOURSELF!

VERONICA GUARISCO, 2D

How much have you missed relationships in these two years? Since the beginning of the pandemic, everyone has complained almost once about feeling alone, even if owning the whole technological devices essential to keep in touch with friends. As matter of fact, we can’t help conversing face to face: it strengthens social ties and favours empathy. According to experts, we have had to deal with the lack of body language, a type of nonverbal communication in which physical behaviours are used to convey information. Indeed, by means of facial expressions, posture, gestures, or eye movement, we transmit 60 to 65% of the sense speech, although most of it happens without conscious awareness. As in the animal kingdom, when humans feel powerful and dominant they usually make themselves big, for example by opening up shoulders, though when they feel powerless they do exactly the opposite, closing up as if to try to occupy less space. Our mind surely changes our body, whereby is it possible that even our body changes our mind? In order to discover this, the social psychologist Amy Cuddy in 2012 ran an experiment in which people were directed to stand in high-power or low-power poses, assigned randomly, for two minutes, then they were given the opportunity to gamble. She found that 86% who posed in the high-power position would gamble, versus 60% for low. The result confirmed the hypothesis that also our body affects our mind: just pretending to be confident, participants had significant hormone changes, increasing in testosterone of about 8-10% with a reversed pattern for cortisol. More precisely, is the combination between a high concentration of the first one, associated with dominance and risk-tolerance, and a low concentration of the second one, associated with stress response, to make people be decisive and always on the spot, therefore the ability to manipulate them can deeply affect both the way others and you yourself think about you. If one of the secrets for being enthusiastic, reliable, authentic, and passionate about life is so handy and can bring so many benefits, why don’t start right now? Don’t fake it till you made it, but fake it till you make it!