Shift your Mood!

Posted 12 February 2013 in Self development

Shift Your Mood!

(Adapted from a piece from a recent Oprah newsletter)

Posture. Depression is a slump -- literally and figuratively. Slouched over our desks, or walking slowly, looking down, we reinforce bad, low-energy moods. Recently, Erik Peper, PhD, a professor at San Francisco State University, asked volunteers to try walking down a hallway in two different ways: once with a slumped bearing, and again with a bouncy skip. The more depressed a person was feeling before the experiment, the more the slouchy stride drained him and made him feel worse. Bad posture, according to Peper, may only strengthen a vicious cycle of sadness and depression. It's another artifact of the brain-body link: we act how we feel... and we feel how we act.

TIP: Make the feedback loop work in your favour. While Peper found that energetic skipping raises energy levels, you can go even one step further by adopting the "power posture." Social psychologist Amy Cuddy, a researcher at Harvard Business School, found that spreading your legs and raising your arms above your head for two minutes -- like an Olympic gold medalist receiving the world's ovation -- increases testosterone and decreases the stress hormone cortisol. This technique not only makes you look happier and more confident. You feel it.

Social Media. Eighty-one minutes -- that's how much time the average woman spends every day on Facebook, finds one study at University of Gothenburg in Sweden. And the more time people spend on the social networking site, the more likely they are to be unhappy and discontent with their own lives. Correlation is not causation; it may be that we take refuge in Facebook, Twitter and so on, when we're unhappy. Or, as we've all been told, the problem may be that we become discontent with our own lives after comparing ourselves to our "friends" who only eat the fanciest food, jet-set with flair, soar in their careers, have blissful families.

TIP: We can cut back with apps like Facebook Nanny, which limits the time we spend on social networking sites. Jeffrey Hancock and Mary Gonzalez, who have studied Facebook's effect on mental health, found one way to avoid the "my poor, pale, little life" syndrome: Post your own flattering photos, joyful events, and witty repartees. Posting positive information sets in motion a virtuous loop: by focusing on the best parts of our lives, we reinforce them. The person on your Wall is your best you -- and it becomes you.

Smell! We know that we can be infected by the fear and stress that we see on other people's faces. We unintentionally imitate them, and then feel what they feel. This transfer is what psychologist Brené Brown calls the work of gremlins -- little tricksters that bring us down. The big surprise is that the infectious agent may be in the air. When volunteers at Stony Brook University sniffed pads that had been in the armpits of anxious first-time skydivers, their amygdala -- the brain region associated with emotion and danger -- "lit up" in an MRI (brain scan) in a way that it didn't when they smelled "exercise sweat." At Rice University, the smell of "fear" sweat biased women toward interpreting ambiguous facial expressions as negative. And in another experiment, people who smelled "fear" sweat made fearful faces, and people who smelled "disgust" sweat made disgusted faces. Their gasps or grimaces were completely unconscious.

TIP: Picking up on others' moods is nothing new, but smell contagion is a surprise. The science here is still young; there's no saying that the chemicals in another person's sweat will definitely make you feel the same way they do. But there is mounting evidence that, on a subconscious level, exposure to their stress sweat might make you more vigilant and cautious about potential threats. (An upside to stress sweat is that it might also make you sharper temporarily.) The standard advice for avoiding emotional contagion applies: Reset yourself by going on a long walk -- ideally outside or in a well-ventilated place.

Food. We all know that comfort foods such as crisps, chips, processed food and ice cream make us feel guilty (also bloated). Yes, these treats -- which are deep-fried or contain vegetable oils, and dairy -- are high in fat, but that's not the whole problem. They're rich in omega-6, a type of polyunsaturated fatty acid that may affect mental health when there's too little of its cousin, omega-3. When researchers raise mice on a diet that has a high omega-6/omega-3 ratio, those animals suffer from depression symptoms similar to those observed in people (they brood more, give up faster and explore less).

TIP: Try snacks that are higher in omega-3 -- e.g., nuts instead of potato chips, avocado instead of mayonnaise, grass-fed milk instead of ice cream, and foods not cooked with vegetable oil. But when you've already succumbed there's another way to help balance your wonky ratio. Some studies, but not all, have found that mild-to-moderate depression may be relieved with fish-oil supplements, which are high in omega-3s.

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