How Good Posture May Help with Depression Symptoms

It’s that time of the year for the depression blues. Don’t forget the vitaminD3. Spring is just around the corner.

Source: How Good Posture May Help with Depression Symptoms

http://www.livescience.com

By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer

February 3, 2017

How Good Posture May Help with Depression Symptoms — **Credit: Dreamstime**

People with symptoms of depression may see temporary improvements to their mood by following the age-old advice to sit up straight, a new study from New Zealand suggests.

However, the researchers cautioned that the findings are preliminary; it’s not yet known whether an upright posture could actually aid in treating depression, or if the effects last over the long term, they said.

“Changing posture is a simple, highly acceptable and low-risk intervention that could be applied either by itself or alongside other treatments,” the researchers, from The University of Auckland, wrote in their paper, which will be published in the March 2017 issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. “However, more research is required to corroborate these findings, especially in clinical settings” outside of a laboratory, they said.

Previous studies have found that stooped posture is a feature of depression, the researchers said. In addition, other studies have shown that adopting an upright posture improves mood and self-esteem in people without depression, but few studies have looked at how changes to posture affect people with depression. [Posture Pointers: 7 Tips for Breaking Bad Habits]

The study involved 61 people whose scores on a survey indicated that they had mild to moderate symptoms of depression. (These participants were not necessarily diagnosed with depression by a doctor.) The researchers excluded people who were already being treated for depression and those who had symptoms of severe depression.

About half of the participants received instructions on how to adopt a good posture (sitting up straight), and the researchers also applied sports tape to the participants’ backs in a manner that’s been shown to improve posture. The other half of the participants were not given any instructions about posture, and had a few pieces of tape applied to their backs in a random manner that was not thought to help with posture.

All of the participants were told that the aim of the study was to examine the effects of sports tape on their thinking abilities. The researchers told the participants this fake premise to reduce the chances that the participants would experience a placebo effect, or a result of people’s expectation that a treatment would work, rather than an effect of the treatment itself.

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