Bad Posture Can Get You Down

Posture says so much about a person. What does your posture say about you?

If you ever watched Michael Jordan walk through a room and studied his posture you would notice something he has in common with most other commanding, powerful men and women.  He walks with his chest in the air.  No, not like the Skipper off of Giligan’s Island, but he carries the top of his chest just a few millimeters higher.  To find the spot to lift, place your finger in the notch right below your throat and drop it down an inch.  Yep, right there.  Michael lifts that area just a little bit higher.  Why?  That is an area when carried high, projects certainty and power.  Does he consciously think about it or is it just happenstance?  Doesn’t matter, that is the posture of certainty.

If you get depressed, what tends to drop?  First your head but ultimately your shoulders round in and your chest drops.  This leads to not enough oxygen, poor vitality and an overwhelming feeling of being “down”.  Hmm, I wonder where the phrase “being down” comes from?  Your posture maybe?

If you want to snap out of depression, a great place to start is standing in the mirror and smiling.  That’s right, a big toothy grin.  At first you may look pained and crooked trying to smile in the mirror.  Only because if you’ve been “down” for a while you can forget how to smile.  Overtime you will retrain your facial muscles to flash those pearly whites.

Your posture says a lot about you.  If you walk around bent forward with your head in front of your body then you are probably ‘ahead of yourself’.  You might even be angry or feel a little powerless depending on the position of your tailbone (if it is too far tucked under, kinda like ‘your tail between your legs’ then you probably feel a little powerless.)

How you feel in any given moment is in direct relationship to your posture.  Said another way, if you want to feel different change your body position.  That’s why after you have been sitting at the computer for a while and you get all in your head.  It’s best to stand up, focus on something in the distance, lean back and then side to side.

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