Your Body Posture Can Change Your Brain
More than 24 million people have viewed Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on powerposing. TED is a non-profit 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.
Amy Cuddy is a professor at Harvard Business School. Back in 2010, she became interested in male and female body language from watching students in one of her classes.
So, she set up an experiment with colleague Dana Carney, then a social psychologist at Columbia University. The two women wanted to know if a person’s body language affected the brain’s chemistry.
They asked 42 men and women to randomly hold high- or low-power poses. People in the high-power pose group held poses such as putting their feet on a desk with their hands behind their heads.
People in the low-power group held poses such as sitting in a chair with arms held close to the body.
Both groups held the poses for two minutes. Then Ms. Cuddy and Ms.Carney tested hormone levels of the study subjects. The brain chemistry of both groups had changed.
The researchers found that two minutes of high-power posing lowered the stress hormone cortisol and increased levels of testosterone. Also, all the subjects in the high-power pose group said they felt powerful and in control after the pose.
