Caroline Cavanagh shares practical ways to lift your mood when you're feeling low. She suggests using your body: change your posture, jump, dance, or sing to shift how you feel. Small movements can actually change your emotional state.
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Hi, my name's Caroline, and I put this little video clip together because at this time of year, lots of people really struggle with their mood. It's a natural time of the year, and you can probably hear the wind and rain beating off the window right now, when people tend to feel life's a little bit harder. The nights are drawing in, days are getting grey, and it's very hard for even the most buoyant of person to be in an upbeat mood. So what I'm going to give you is a couple of little hints and tips in this clip and in ones that are going to come in the next few days of how you can actually help yourself to feel a little bit better, to change your state, change your mood. Now, we have a lot of phrases in our language about mind and heart, how we separate, we kind of create this barrier here. Head's doing one thing, body's doing another. But you know, the two are so intrinsically linked that what we do with one always, always, always impacts on the other. But we can use that to our benefit. So, play a little game with me. Come on, indulge me. I want you to imagine you are an Oscar-winning actor or an actress, and I want you to do depressed. Come on, really get into it. If you were depressed, how would you look? What would you do with your body? What would you do with your facial expression? And if you don't want to do this yourself, get someone else to do it. Play with the kids. Get them to act depressed. Now I bet what you did, or what others will do, straight away the body slumps, the head goes down, you get a sullen look on your face. And now, when staying in that position, try and feel happy. Try and do something that lifts you. Do you find it hard? I bet you do. When your body is in one way, It really leads us to feel a certain way too. So when you're all down and slumped and feeling gloomy, it's very hard to then feel happy, to feel buoyant. So let's do the opposite. Jump up and down, dance, get physical, straighten up your back if you don't feel like jumping up and down. Raise your hands up, get some movement in. And in that position, now try and feel depressed. Can you do it? I doubt it. So just a very, very simple game. What we do with our body has a very, very strong link to how our head starts to send messages out and how we feel, what emotions we have. So if you're feeling down at the moment, become aware, is your body tend to be slumped? Get up, move around, jump up and down. It is really, really hard To feel sad, to feel down when you're bouncing. You may feel stupid. Hey, do it on your own. It will snap you out of that down state, and you know, you may even start laughing yourself. Fantastic. So give it a go. It's very simple, it's very effective. What have you got to lose? Use your body to decide on the emotion you want to feel. If you want to feel good, move, jump, dance. Sing! It will change how you feel. Have fun with it, and I'll be talking to you again tomorrow with some other great hints and tips on how to feel good about life. See you soon.
