Your Body Language: It speaks so you don't have to!
How well do you know what you are saying to others?
Over 70% of our communication is non verbal and we communicate with our bodies and our faces faster than we can create the words to describe how we feel.
We have three brains. The Walnut is the human thinking brain, the clever bit. The lemon hidden inside is the emotional centre of the brain, and the bit at the end that connects it to our body is the reptilian brain, providing us with danger responses and balance.
So what are you really saying, as you sit there adjusting your posture because you are now aware of it.
Did you know it was being controlled from a different part of the brain than the words you are thinking now?
Like in the image above, we posture. Based on our environment, we release hormones and send signals to the brain stem telling us how to stand, how to hold ourselves and what to do with the muscles. Automatic responses to the world and people around us. All while thinking about something completely different.
Think about when you are scared. We become smaller, we close off our posture, roll our shoulders forward and try protect ourselves. Our facial posture changes too. We pull with ligaments and tendons to make the mouth smaller, bring the eyebrows down and to the centre.
When we are happy, we become bigger, happy to be seen, when we meet an old friend. We throw our arms out and up. The same as the shape of our brightest smile. All this without ever assigning active thought or words to the sensation we feel.
Neuroscientist Guillaume Duchenne with a subject
Our bodies, and our minds work in tandem. Like a spiders web. When a fly gets stuck in the web, no matter where on the web the spider is, it feels the vibrations from the struggling fly and is alerted to it's presence.
Our minds and bodies are the same. Once one is altered, by proxy so is the other. So maybe it is time you started to listen to what your body says. It doesn't have the facility to be wrong.