How the Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel - Softcover

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Sian Beilock, a leading expert on the brain science behind human performance, is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Chicago. She has PhDs in both kinesiology and psychology from Michigan State University, and received an award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science in 2011.

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How the Body knows its Mind

CHAPTER 1

The Laughter Club

THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF EMOTION

It is estimated that one in fifteen American adults, about 21 million, is living with major depression.1 Most of us feel down in the dumps from time to time, but depression is a never-ending feeling of sadness that affects how you think, how you feel, and how you behave. For people living with a major depressive disorder, everything is gray and life seems bleak, not worth living.

Despite recent headway made in understanding the inner workings of the brain, there is still no treatment for depression that works for everyone. Psychotherapy and drugs like Prozac have helped millions of people stave off depression, but these modalities haven’t worked for millions more. The sad fact is that some individuals’ depression is resistant to treatment.

Yet consider for a moment that almost all available treatments for depression (whether therapy or medication) target what’s going on inside the head. What if there were a way to alleviate depression that went beyond the cortex and altered the body? It might seem odd to focus on the body as an antidote for a disorder seemingly rooted in the mind, but striking new scientific evidence suggests that our body has a powerful influence on our psychological state.

Take the case of Laura, an intelligent, driven twenty-two-year-old. Laura had just graduated from a prestigious Ivy League university and taken her first job at a top public relations firm in Manhattan when her fiancé, Brian, was involved in a car accident and died. Laura was devastated.

Brian and Laura had been high school sweethearts. He was her third kiss and her first love. Even though they had gone off to college on different sides of the country, the two had managed to stay connected as a couple. Brian was her family, the “one,” but suddenly, in the midst of planning their late summer wedding and only three short weeks after they had moved into their first apartment together, Brian was gone.

In the several months after Brian’s unexpected death, Laura tried to put her life back together. She rented a new apartment in order to get a change of scenery and even went out on a few blind dates her concerned friends had set up for her. But her heart just wasn’t in it. While her friends were busy planning their lives, Laura spent her days contemplating the bleakness of life. She constantly broke down in tears and often had trouble getting out of bed, especially on weekends and holidays when she wasn’t expected to be anywhere in particular. Her physical energy and her ability to concentrate all but disappeared, and she became increasingly isolated from friends and family. She was noticeably different. As Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about her own depression in Prozac Nation, that’s how depression hits: gradually, then suddenly. Laura woke up one morning afraid of what might happen that day, scared to live her life. Everything seemed dark, and she could not think of anything that would make her happy. At some point her mother suggested that she see a psychiatrist, who, not surprisingly, diagnosed Laura with a major depressive disorder.

Laura initially began taking Prozac and going to weekly psychotherapy sessions. At first the drug’s effects were almost miraculously positive. Laura couldn’t believe how much better she felt. She was more energetic and motivated at work, started seeing her friends, and became interested in life again. Over time, however, she had to take higher and higher doses of Prozac to beat her depression, until the drug seemed to stop working completely. Laura’s doctor started her on another medication, but again Laura’s depression failed to lift. After a few years she gave up on both drugs and therapy. She was stuck. Then she heard that Botox had been found to help ease depression.

Depressed individuals can often be recognized by their facial expression: a frown with a furrowed brow and downturned mouth. Kurt Cavanaugh, a cosmetic surgeon, immediately picks up on this when patients like Laura walk into his office. On a cool fall day, almost two years to the day after her fiancé had been killed, Laura went to Cavanaugh for Botox treatments.

The active ingredient in Botox is a neurotoxin that paralyzes the muscles into which it’s injected. When people get Botox for their frown lines, not only do the frown lines disappear, but their ability to produce unhappy or sour expressions goes away too. Physicians believe that preventing the outward expression of negative emotions helps alter the inner experience of negativity. In other words, certain body movements (or lack thereof) help to change the mind’s experience of emotions. On several instances Cavanaugh had casually noted that the moods of his Botox patients after treatments seemed less negative than those of his patients who didn’t use Botox. Of course, such differences could easily be due to increased feelings of attractiveness after treatment.

In Hollywood the immense pressure to stay youthful drives actors to use Botox repeatedly. But too much Botox can immobilize your face and your internal feelings. This is bad news for an actor, who needs to convey emotion, but maybe not for someone like Laura with major depression. The media has reported that Nicole Kidman, for example, has had a Botox-induced frozen face; this appeared to be in evidence when she accepted an Academy Award for her performance in The Hours. She was clearly crying, yet nothing on her face seemed to be moving. Actors’ emotional expressions make their performances more believable to their audience and also help them internally experience their character’s feelings. The eighteenth-century German philosopher Gotthold Lessing wrote, “I believe that when the actor properly imitates all the external signs and indicators and all the bodily alterations which experience taught him are expressions of a particular [inner] state, the resulting sense impressions will automatically induce a state in his soul that properly accords with his own movements, posture, and vocal tone.”2 Botox can be bad for actors’ ability to emote convincingly, yet it can help depressed individuals to quell their internal feelings of sadness by blocking its physical expression.

It may seem odd to think that the expressions we produce outwardly can affect our internal state. After all, we tend to assume that it’s the mind that controls the body, not the other way around. But there are direct connections running from the body to the mind. For example, when people are asked to hold a golf tee between their eyebrows in such a way that they have to furrow their brow, they report being in a bad mood.3 People also judge stories, pictures, and cartoons to be less funny when they are asked to hold a pencil between pursed lips so that their face makes a frown. The opposite is also true: when you hold a pencil in your teeth so that you are smiling, you feel happier. And it’s not just facial expressions that send feedback to our brain about our feelings and emotions. When you sit in a slumped position (as opposed to straight, with shoulders back), you don’t feel as good about your accomplishments, such as how you just performed on a test or in a presentation. Simply assuming a happy or sad bodily posture, a confident or anxious mien, conveys to our brain what emotional state we are in.
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