What Botox Taught Us About Feelings
Your brain cannot ‘feel’ anything so how does it know how you are feeling?
The beauty industry had a lucrative breakthrough when it discovered that a paralyzing toxin could safely make people look younger. Injecting Botox into facial muscles stops those muscles contracting and thereby reduces the deep grooves of facial expressions. It is particularly effective at paralyzing those aging frown lines.
People generally feel much better after Botox and it was assumed that this ‘feel good’ factor came from looking younger—seems like a safe assumption. Some of these beneficial results were surprisingly powerful—a 60% reduction in symptoms of major depressive disorder is nothing to sniff at. A few scientists suspected something more interesting than ‘looking younger’ was going on and designed clever experiments to test their theories.
They found that even young people (without deep frown lines) experienced reduced symptoms of depression when their frown muscles were paralyzed so the feel good factor is not a result of looking younger; it is to do with not being able to frown.
This shows us that our brain relies on information from facial muscles to know how you are feeling. After all, your brain cannot feel anything.
The brain needs to be updated constantly by information from the body’s sensors; where body parts are, how physiology is doing, what needs to be done, and how we are feeling. Information from muscular contraction tells the brain all sorts of useful information about what is going on. The process is called afferent feedback.
For some reason, many people (including many scientists) assume that emotions are brain states. There are regions of the brain associated with emotion and in MRI scans we can see these areas lighting up during emotional experiences. But emotions are not simply brain states.
It is not the body or the brain which feel emotions, it is the body-brain system.
It is no coincidence that the word ‘feelings’ (normally a word that describes physical sensation) is used to describe emotions. Emotions are sensations in our body. What is more, these physical sensations enable us to identify emotions. You will not be aware of feeling anxious until your brain registers the feedback from your tight shoulders, fast breathing pattern or stomach churning. Information about muscular contraction, biochemistry and more, constantly updates the brain about what is going on so that it can make central HQ adjustments.
Afferent feedback sustains or prolongs emotions long enough for them to get the required result. The brain might initiate a spark of anger, but it is the afferent feedback which keeps anger going long enough to solve the problem that triggered anger in the first place.
Emotions do not occur in the brain or in the body, they occur in the body-brain system.
Brain scientists have only just caught on to the idea that emotions are experienced in the body. It was only in 2013 that a group of brain researchers in Finland published a paper pointing out that there may be some recognizable somatic patterns to emotions. Emotions are not merely brain states, they have associated patterns of physical sensations mainly around the head and upper chest reflecting underlying changes in heart and breathing activity. Happiness, they found, associated with enhanced sensation all over the body, while sadness was associated with decreased limb activity. These somatic patterns of emotion were standard to humans irrespective of culture.
The somatic pattern of happiness
“We conclude that emotional feelings are associated with discrete, yet partially overlapping, maps of bodily sensations, which could be at the core of the emotional experience”
In other words, these brain researchers are saying that emotions ARE somatic patterns. They also suggest that we might use these somatic patterns to recognize emotions in other people.
“…topographical changes in emotion-triggered sensations in the body could thus provide a novel biomarker for emotional disorders.”
The fact that one person can detect emotions in the body of another person might be ‘novel’ to brain scientists but is a statement of the bleeding obvious to bodyworkers.
Why might this matter to you?
Afferent feedback explains why facial expressions, postures, and actions influence how you are feeling and knowing this can help us manage our well-being.
Remember (in the old days) when we used to get help from bodyworkers?
· A massage therapist can change the habitual tension in your facial, neck, and shoulder muscles, leaving you feeling different.
· A bodyworker can change the tension in those regions of your body where you hold your emotional patterns (e.g. change your breathing pattern or postural tension) and leave your feeling very different emotionally.
Even though we cannot go for bodywork at the moment, we can still adjust our own afferent feedback.
Smile and you reinforce/prolong feeling happier. Frown and you reinforce and prolong feeling unhappy.
Hold your spine erect and you begin to feel more confident. Slump and you feel less confident, more slumpy.
Massage your own frown muscles to release the contraction.
Do some yoga or Qigong to release habitual tension patterns in the body [Note: exercise will only reinforce your habitual holding patterns whereas mindful bodywork will change those patterns because you are encouraged to adopt postures that you would not otherwise do].
All these techniques will change afferent feedback to the brain and thereby change how you feel. None of them will change the world, but they will definitely change you.
