Janice Kaplan
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Janice Kaplan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It turns out that we're happier in blue spaces near water and in green spaces when we're outside. There's a psychologist out of the UK who found that two hours a week spent near the water actually improves your well-being quite dramatically.
Hi, Mike. Thanks so much. Great to be with you.
So the idea here is that there are really strong links between our bodies and our minds. And we tend to think of our brain as being the big computer that controls everything. But the truth is that your brain is just this three pound mass sitting up there in a very dark skull. And the only information it gets is from your body, from your environment, from your senses,
all sending that information up to your brain. And the more we can understand about how those links are working and the information that we're sending, the more we can control them and the more we can use them to make ourselves feel better and happier and improve our well-being.
Well, I'll give you sort of a funny example here that was some research that was done out of Yale where people were given a warm cup of coffee to hold or else they were given an iced coffee to hold. And they didn't even realize that that was part of the research because then they were brought in and they were asked to describe how they felt about certain people.
And the researchers found that those who had been given the warm coffee described people as being warmer and kinder than those who had been given the iced coffee. So how does that possibly work? Well, our brains in some ways think in metaphors, and they're getting the information of something warm or something cold, and they're actually misattributing it and assuming that it
has to do with the person rather than with the coffee that they've just held. Another researcher who's now at the University of Michigan did something similar where he had people sitting in soft chairs and hard chairs.
And he found that the people who were sitting in the hard chairs negotiated harder in a question about how much they would pay for a car than the people who were sitting in the soft chairs. I guess you could say soft chair, soft heart.
I know, I absolutely agree with you. It sounds crazy. And we just don't want to attribute so much to our bodies. But think about it this way. If you touch a classic example, if you touch a hot stove, your hand is going to pull back long before your brain actually registers what has happened. And we want our bodies to be able to be sending that information. If you had to
wait for your brain to go, oh my goodness, I have just touched a hot stove, I think I had better remove my hand, you're gonna have a lot of burns. So we understand that our bodies have these instinctive responses. What we don't always realize is that they're happening on every level of our environment, all around us, all the time.
Let me give you one other example of similar research where people were given resumes to evaluate. Now that's a kind of standard psychological experiment. And if I handed you two resumes, you'd probably say, oh, she's checking for unconscious bias and I'm gonna make sure not to get influenced by the person's name or where they live or ethnicity.
But what you might not think about would be the weight of the clipboard that was holding the resume. And the researchers found that when people were holding the resume on a heavy clipboard, they described the person as being much more serious. I guess somehow the heavy clipboard was sending the information of a heavyweight, while the light clipboard was sending the information of a lightweight.
Well, great question. And I think the answer is that being more aware of the body-mind links allows us to use our bodies in ways that are going to improve our well-being. So something very simple like sit up a little bit straighter when you're feeling down, stand a little bit straighter, Research shows that when you're depressed, you just naturally slouch.
And so when you're in a slouched position, your brain, which is constantly scanning your body for information, assumes that something's going wrong. And somehow when you stand up straighter, the message is getting sent to your body that you're a little bit happier. So those little tweaks actually work. You're probably familiar with the research that's been done on smiling.
It goes back a long time where people, the first research was people were given a pencil to hold and some of them were given it in a way that would make them frown and some of them in a way that would make them smile. And those whose faces were put into a smile actually reported feeling happier.
And this research has been repeated, has been challenged, has been done all over the world in many different ways. But the ultimate result is that yes, indeed, the position that the muscles are in in our face affect how our brains feel.
Well, again, your brain is always getting the information from your neurons and from your senses. And when your muscles are in a particular position, if your muscles are tensed, your body is realizing that you're tense. There's an old story about what would happen when you're walking down the street and you encounter a bear.
I guess in more modern days, we can update that to you encounter a dark alley. And what happens, of course, is that your heart starts pounding and your hands get sweaty and you're scared. And so the question is, are you scared because your heart is pounding and your hands are sweaty? Or is your heart pounding because you're scared?
So most of us would say, well, of course we're scared and that causes the physical symptoms. But it now seems to be that it works the other way around. that once again, just like with that touching the hot stove, our bodies are responding first and our minds are taking that information in and realizing what's going on. So how can you use that for good? How can you turn that around?
Well, let's imagine you're about to give a speech or you're about to ask your boss for a raise. And sure enough, your hands are sweating and your chest is pounding. Well, if you just try to tell yourself, no, no, no, I'm calm, I have this under control, all is going to be well, it's not going to work because your body is sending a different message.
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