Just looking at two people walk, you can probably tell that the person with some pep in his step is happier than the one shuffling along, shoulders stooped. Our ability to read body language tells us this. But this walking style–mood connection may also work in the opposite direction, according to research published in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.
Canadian researchers found that inducing people to walk in a happy style put them in a better mood than those who were prompted to walk in a depressed style.
“As social animals, we spend so much time watching other people, and we are experts at retrieving information about other people from all sorts of different sources,” says Nikolaus Troje, PhD, a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Senior Fellow at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. In other words, your body language doesn’t just communicate to other people; it also impacts your own mood and feelings.
“It just shows how strong the link is between the mind and body,” says Danny Penman, PhD, author of Mindfulness. “We’ve all been taught to believe that the mind and body are fundamentally separate, and it just doesn’t seem to be the case at all.”
Penman explains a famous study where researchers showed people a funny video. Half of the people were asked to hold a pencil horizontally in their teeth (mimicking a smile) and the other half were asked to hold a pencil through pursed lips. They found that the smile-mimicking group rated the video as funnier than the other group did.
“We seem to think as much with the body as we do with the mind,” he says. As is apparent from this study, the way our bodies are behaving influences how we feel about a situation. “The great thing about mindful walking is that it reestablishes on a very deep level the connection between the mind and the body.”
Mindful walking is a meditation exercise in which, instead of sitting, you walk. Penman says that anyone can practice mindful walking simply by paying full, conscious attention to what you are doing: the feel of ground under your feet, of your hips moving and arms moving, of your knees bending, and of a foot lifting off of the ground. By being conscious about your walk, you can short-circuit a negative mood caused by bad posture that you fall into not even realizing that you’re doing it.
“If you adopt a more purposeful, more cheerful style of walking, it will become self-reinforcing,” Penman explains. “So you start the day feeling miserable, but if you purposely walk taller with a ‘happy gait,’ as it were, it will just reinforce itself through the rest of the walk. You wouldn’t have to be purposefully cheerful for the rest of that journey, it’ll just happen quite naturally.”
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