The Align Method

CHAPTER 1

Stand Up for Yourself—Posture and Personality

Your movement is literally an expression of the way in which you think and feel. Have you ever noticed a random guy approach a beautiful girl (or vice versa) in a coffee shop and curiously observed the dynamic? You can tell from across the room if he feels confident in his approach and simultaneously see if she believes he’s a viable mate worthy of sharing her coveted digits with based purely on the dynamics of their movement. Is this because you’ve been endowed with telepathic superpowers, or could it be that you’re reading their body language? A fascinating study conducted by researchers at Ohio State University showed how posture during communication not only informs the way others perceive you, but may even shape your own self-belief.¹ They asked study participants to list three positive and three negative traits they possess that would impact their professional performance at a future job. Half of the participants were asked to write these traits while they were in a hunched-over position, while the other half were asked to assume an upright posture during the process.

The results were striking. Their posture not only impacted whether or not they identified with the positive things they were asked to write about themselves, but also affected a participant’s belief in the statements, positive or negative. That’s right: A person’s belief of their own words is associated with their postural position while thinking them. When you’re in a hunched-over position, you may begin to distrust yourself, in the same way others would distrust the level of confidence in your statements.

Along with affecting the way you think about yourself, your postural patterns even impact the filter in which you access memories. A study conducted at San Francisco State University by professor of health education Erik Peper showed that more than 85 percent of the time, students found it easier to access uplifting memories in an upright (aligned) position and, reciprocally, easier to access depressive memories in a slumped posture.² Peper suggested, “You can take charge of yourself. Put yourself in an empowering, upright position. Remember that our thoughts and emotions are represented in our bodies. And vice versa: Our bodies can change our thoughts.”

Throughout the book, I use “mind” and “body” as two separate words regularly: this is a limitation in language, not the reality of the human experience. In my career, I’ve yet to meet a person whose physical patterns did not relate to their history and personality or whose overall muscular tone did not match their temperament. If you’re feeling tense or anxious, your muscles are tense and anxious. If you feel calm and relaxed, you can imagine the effect on your soft tissues. Here’s a nice insight on trauma expressing itself in the body from one of the seminal books on this mind-body relationship, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, MD:

Let’s repeat that: “Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.” Upon gaining a relationship with your physical experience, you are simultaneously taking steps to gain control of your mental and emotional self.

Your body has an immediate physical reaction to thoughts and experiences. This is a good thing: The problem arises when a traumatic experience causes the body to contract and the afflicted individual lacks the space, resources, or know-how to naturally reset their nervous system back to a baseline of homeostasis.

In the book Waking the Tiger, master somatic therapist Peter Levine discusses the natural responses various animals display after being immobilized by stress: They literally shake it off in a self-soothing process before getting back to their daily grind. Imagine a zebra just barely making it out of the clutches of a hungry lion: The stress of the situation needs to go somewhere after the escape. The tremors following the close call for the zebra are part of the process of discharging stress, a reboot for the nervous system bringing the frightened animal back to a healthy baseline. If the process is interrupted, Levine goes on to write, the stress is not released from the body, health problems will ensue, and the symptoms will not go away until the responses are discharged and the process of releasing the stress is completed.⁴

Humans, on the other hand, experience stressful “micro-traumas” each day in the form of rejection, noise pollution, minor accidents, the mechanical stress of moving with imbalanced postures, or anything that induces a sense of anxiety or fear in the organism. The short-term solution for many people is to keep pushing on instead of allowing a moment to fully shake off the newfound stress formed in the body, leaving their physiology assuming a lion is still hanging off their backs as they forge forward into the tasks of the day.

Most folks can make it through their lives with a few small lions (imbalanced postural patterns, financial, relationship, or environmental stressors, etc.) continually hanging on and slowly draining energy, but thankfully we have Starbucks (sarcasm) to keep us moving across the savanna (no wonder Americans spent $74.2 billion in 2015 on coffee alone).⁵ If we don’t pay attention to shaking these hungry carnivores off, they’ll add up, and before we know it our precious bodies begin succumbing to postural collapse, sleep disruption, joint pain, unhealthy food cravings, dis-ease, and a mind partial to negative self-talk.

There’s a solution to this: Shake these daily metaphoric lion attacks from your back as they happen instead of allowing them to add up and compromise your ability to maintain control of your own body. The principles outlined in the coming chapters will offer you the necessary tools to unravel the day’s stressors via simple adjustments to your environment and subtle shifts in your physical inhabitance to shake any clinging lions (stressors) and prevent future attacks.

MOVING YOUR PHYSIOLOGY

Now, where the conversation gets intriguing is when we realize our postural patterns appear to have deep physiological ramifications. It’s as though our endocrine system is deciphering our postural positions like a person reading braille and actually changing our mood based on the signaling of our movement.

It appears your hormones may act like messengers between your postural patterns and the state you experience. A trio of social psychology professors—Amy Cuddy from Harvard, Andy Nap from Yale, and Dana Carney from the University of California, Berkeley—explored this idea in 2010 when they popularized the idea of “high-power poses,” which were shown to boost levels of testosterone by around 20 percent and reduce cortisol (a stress hormone) levels by 25 percent after spending just two minutes in them. Inversely, the researchers found that “low-power poses” (e.g., hunching over to scroll on your phone) increased cortisol levels and decreased testosterone.⁶ This study was a testament to the speed at which the body is continually processing postural information into chemical stimuli: Your cells are always listening.

In Cuddy’s TED Talk (at the date of writing, the second most viewed one of all time), she describes the power of “faking it until you make it,” suggesting that you can literally change the way you feel and behave based upon the way you organize your physical body.⁷ This particular study has gone through an immense amount of scrutiny, in large part due to its popularity. A paper came out in 2017 refuting Cuddy’s findings,⁸ and then another in 2018 reaffirmed the concept referred to as “postural feedback.”⁹ At this point, it’s fairly indisputable that the way you move (or don’t) affects the way you feel, and the way you feel is inseparably tied to the expression of your internal chemistry. Envision a weight lifter hyping themselves up before stepping onto a platform or a UFC fighter strutting into an octagon as a display of dominance. Research on these miraculous moments can be challenging because life doesn’t happen in a controlled, double-blind, static, sterile laboratory setting, and thus these debates will likely continue.

An issue with faking a powerful pose does arise when the focus is solely on the upper body—the trick is to find alignment (power) from feet to head. When people pull their shoulders back to pretend a power pose, they typically end up jamming their low back into an unstable hyperlordotic (or overly arched) position that is unfortunately not very powerful at all. It can create the appearance of confident readiness but will not be stable or sustainable without a strong foundation of regular full-body integration—as the body neutralizes back to its habituated posture, the confidence boost you wanted recedes, too. Throughout this book, you will learn the fundamental movement and lifestyle practices to create long-term structural change in your body so there’s nothing to fake, and you can feel strong and confident from the ground up.

DO YOU SPEAK MOVEMENT?

You’ve almost certainly heard the term “body language,” but have you ever really thought its meaning through? Turns out, we communicate with each other nonverbally all the time. UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian coined the famous 7/38/55 ratio of our communication back in the seventies, showing that most of what we say to each other is actually conveyed via our body language and the tonality of our voice rather than the words themselves.¹⁰ Mehrabian found about 55 percent of our communication is body language, 38 percent is voice tonality, and only 7 percent is conveyed through the literal words spoken.¹¹

This is obviously difficult to quantify exactly, and Mehrabian himself cautioned that his experiments were limited to feelings and attitudes, particularly when there were incongruences: If the body language and words disagree, one will tend to trust the body. Thus, closely observing what your body is saying is wise if you care about clearly expressing yourself.

Learning to speak more effectively with your movement will not only make you a better orator, it may very well save your life (or at least your wallet) someday.

In a study from 1981, researchers Betty Grayson and Morris I. Stein asked criminals convicted of violent offenses to watch a video of pedestrians walking down a busy city sidewalk and point out who would be a likely target. It only took seconds to point the potential victims out, and the results were consistent among all the convicts. What were the patterns these clueless pedestrians were exhibiting, you ask?

It wasn’t their race, gender, age, or even size—it was the way in which they moved! Researchers determined it was nonverbal cues such as their pace of walking, length of stride, posture, body language, and awareness of the environment. One of the primary precipitators of attracting unwanted attention from a predator is a walking style lacking what researchers called “wholeness”—what we refer to in this book as integration.¹² If your body appears disorganized in the way you move, it’s perceived as weakness and makes you more likely to be exploited. That’s why realigning your movement is so important: Balancing your body parts allows you to exude strength and confidence, attracting the right people into your life and dispelling the wrong ones, even when you don’t realize it’s happening.