7 Quick Ways to Feel More Energetic Without Drugs or Caffeine. How to Use Your Body Language to Feel More Energetic.

7 Quick Ways to Feel More Energetic Without Drugs or Caffeine.

How to Use Your Body Language to Feel More Energetic.

 

 

How you hold your body can actually change how you feel, in less than a  1/40 of second. If you hold and move your body the way you want to feel your bodies chemistry can change in a fraction of a second. Your posture and movement create a message that acts like a doctor’s prescription the message is sent through your neural  synapsis to the brains pharmacy. The brain notes the posture and movements and creates chemicals that match and sends them out into your blood stream so you begin to feel chemically the way your body language is held or moves. If you drag around head down feeling tired your will get the chemicals that make your feel more tired. You think your body language reflects your fatigue and lack of energy but you can change your energy by how you hold and move your body. I have been writing about the biochemistry aspects for over 30 years. (In her Ted Talk Amy Cuddly speaks about Power Poses using research about this phenomenon.

Keep your body language “up.” Up energetic body language is beautifully symbolic–you go up when you’re feeling up. In addition up body language brings your posture up in way that allows more deep full lung capacity breathing with gives you more oxygenated blood, thus more energy. Though the steps may seem wacky, if your are feeling sluggish and just want to lay down and take a nap, these methods can charge you up very quickly.

 

 

Five Quick Ways to Use Your Body Language to Feel More Energetic

1. Take five deep full breaths.  Breath in a count of three, hold for three sounds and let your breath out slowly on the count of three. Make sure your lungs fill up fully.
2. Stand up so and lift your chest up and out.
3. Stand up against a wall and see if you can get your shoulders back against the wall. Pull the shoulders back  so even the tops of the shoulders touch the wall. Now step away from the wall and see if you can stand and walk with the shoulders back.  This posture enlarges the chest allowing the lungs to fill up with air giving your body more oxygen.
4. Bring your hands up and gesture high in the air. The location of your hands also affects other nonverbal behavior. Put your hands at your sides and your energy goes down your voice lowers and can become more monotone, and you tend to move less and show fewer facial expressions. Bring your hands to the level of your waist, and you become calm and centered. Bring your hands up high to the level of your upper chest or above, and your voice goes up; you become animated.

You can have fun for second and pretend you’re a conductor leading and orchestra. Coincidently researches so conductors tend to live longer and they believe one of the reasons is their high gesturing that increases their oxygen. You can pretend like you have just won an Olympic competition and bring both hands up above your head and hold them there for three seconds, lower them then raise them again. You can dance to Pink’s song, “Raise Your Glass”, “YMCA” or Taylor Swifts, “Shake it Off.” All contain up gestures! (I just love the up shake it off body language at the end of Taylor Swifts Shake it Off video! The link to it is hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM

5. With a lot of energy and at a very loud volume read a paragraph of something, even these instructions. Overdo it have fun. Sing the lyrics to the songs in step 4.
6. Make up facial expressions. First bring your eye brows and forehead muscles up and down and up again in a look of surprise. Now smile and open your mouth so you cheeks and the corners of your lips come up.
7. Have you ever notice how children skip and move up when they are happy and filled with energy? They are moving with up body language. See if you can walk across a room with the same upward energy. You don’t have to skip just move so that your energy is up. 

Patti Wood, MA - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com.
     

How Do You Know If You're an Introvert? Being and Introvert in and Extroverted World.

1. At what point in your life did you realize that you were an
Introvert? When I was an undergrad student in Nonverbal Communication at Florida State or Dean of Communication, Dean Clevenger came into our classes to give us the Myers Briggs test. I tested as an extrovert, but when we had our meeting about my results, he told me I was an introvert and why he knew that. Including that I loved going to study in the library every night! He said he wanted me to know I was, in actuality, an introvert. He said he knew I thought it was better to be an extrovert had unknowingly skewed my answers on my Myers Briggs test to be an extrovert. He said he had done the same thing when he first took the test, and he was an introvert. He said, "I know you want to go to grad school, and I want you to know you will thrive because of your intelligence and introversion." Dean Clevenger said, "Be proud of the fact that you gain energy from being alone and don't judge yourself by the Extrovert world standard." He gave me some of the best insights and advice I have ever received that day, and he went on to be a mentor, and later offered me a partnership in a  consulting business he had with another professor. To this day, I hold him to be one o the most exceptional human beings I have ever know. He was a man of strong character and morals and kindness.

2. Did people ever give you a hard time because of your introversion? My mother gave me a hard time my entire childhood and adult life because I was an introvert, and she was an extrovert, and she thought there was something horribly wrong with me. As a child, I was chastised for as she said, "… always having my head in a book." She would constantly berate me for reading and would even rip my book out of my hand and tell me to go out and play with other kids.  Later she wanted me to go down to the clubhouse to the bar and meet a nice divorced man. Even when I was visiting her on my grad school vacations and had textbooks on statistics, I was studying, and she wanted me to go down to the bar and meet a nice man. I never went to the club or bar, that would have been agony for my introverted personality.  This judgment of me was one of the reasons I was so grateful to my Dean for explaining. It was great to be introverted, and there was nothing wrong with me.

 3. What strategies have you evolved to fight back?  In both junior high and high school, the school library staff asked me to work at the school library because I checked out more books than any student that they ever had. So I knew that reading was a good actor, so I kept checking out books, and I would read in my room out of sight of my mother!  I became a keen observer of people and carried a little notebook with me wherever I went to write what I saw about people, mostly in the form of poetry and songs. I also kept a journal. In college the dorm at school that was so noisy because we had sixty girls partying on my floor and the doors of everyone's rooms where open because we had airconditioning, I went to the library. I embraced the quiet and the company of other introverts.  

Later I studied and got degrees to become one of the world's top body language experts.  I embraced being a watcher!

4. Tips for people who are struggling to make peace with their introversion?   Find role models who are introverts.  Keep a diary or journal so you can see how full your internal life is.  Notice how often you are at peace when you are by yourself or with close friends and family and let gratitude for that peace wash over you. Embrace the fact that you can be in the present moment and don't have the leave your house to find energy and engagement. 

Patti Wood, MA - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com.