Injecting positivity into our lives is more than just mind over matter

Not being able to LOOK sad may help to prevent you FEELING sad. Your body may have a greater say in your mood than does your brain. And a dilute poison that flattens your wrinkles also has the potential to lift your spirits.

ONE of my big selling points is that I’m a living bitch. No kidding, I get emails every week from people seeking training sessions with me, and at some stage in the letter, out comes the truth.

They want the session for their husband/ partner/spouse because they have heard I tell it like it is, take no prisoners and show no mercy. That’s the rationale for seeking my services. You have to wonder, just a little, about the relationship they have with their husband/partner/spouse.

You’d think, if they wanted a good verbal thumping delivered, they wouldn’t want to outsource the satisfaction. But they want it done by a third party.

Sometimes, the senders are employers who have passed a troublesome executive hand to hand, manager to manager, department to department and now have him or her on the exit chute. Before they give them the final nudge, they have to be able to prove — just in case of a later court case — that every attempt was made to train them out of their bad habits before they were fired. So they send them to me for tough love. The tougher the better.

And then, occasionally — very occasionally — the individual pitches up all by themselves, driving their own metaphorical Black Maria, looking to get a pasting.

If they don’t get the full spanking (please pardon the reference) they get very disappointed. They may acknowledge at the end of the session that they now know what they need to do to get out of the career cul -de-sac into which they had diverted themselves, but they’re visibly disappointed by the process leading to that conclusion. They’d like to have been shouted at and insulted as well as fixed.

They’re not alone. A lot of the time, their employers or their wives/partners/ spouses, too, would like them to have had to sit through a good truth-telling roar.

They feel shortchanged when the executive goes back to work or to their home saying I wasn’t as bad as I was painted.

Something in the Irish psyche equates volume and venom with authenticity and value. Keeping your voice below a yell and not calling them gobshites causes them when they leave you to do so with an inchoate sense of disappointment.

You really become Atilla the Hun, however, if you seek to release the inner human in them. You work through a number of possible responses to a recurring work situation and mildly ask why they don’t ever take the positive option. They could, for example, laugh off a stupid comment from a colleague, as opposed to hitting high Doh on the bad temper scale. They could deal with policy disagreement by promising to think about the differing view, as opposed to removing the opponent’s liver, spleen and pancreas using a rusty box cutter for a scalpel. They could articulate compliments about tasks successfully undertaken, as opposed to spewing toxic emissions whenever a subordinate makes a mistake.

They look at you as if you had proposed the worst kind of corrupt action to them, and tell you that what you suggest wouldn’t be authentic. That you want them to be insincere and phony. You realise that their entire sense of self, their view of their own integrity and authenticity, resides in being able to rely on the consistency of their own nastiness. Losing their nastiness would be like losing their memory. They wouldn’t be the same person, at all, at all.

I explain that I’m not asking them to pretend anything. Just “behave as if” they trusted the people with whom they work. Just “behave as if” they liked them.

Because (I don’t tell them) it increasingly seems that attitude follows behaviour, not the other way around. If you want people to give up smoking, then, as Micheál Martin did 10 years ago today, you don’t faff around giving them advice about the carcinogenic properties of tobacco in the hope that they’ll quit. You just ban smoking in the workplace.

Once their behaviour changes, their attitude will quickly come into alignment.

Same with Uncle Gay. Start sticking penalty points on licenses. That will slow drivers down a shed load quicker than trying to change their attitude towards speeding. And once they slow down, the amazing thing is how quickly will their attitude follow their behaviour. In no time at all they’ll be decrying reckless speed merchants like they themselves were just a year earlier.

If it’s challenging, the idea that behaviour changes attitude rather than the other way around, even more challenging is the notion that paralysing your forehead could affect your depression for the better (Botox for how bad you feel, not just for how bad you look).

Which does not surprise me a bit. When I first had Botox injections into my face, I did so with twin hopes. One was that they would stop my forehead looking like a ploughed field. The other was that they wouldn’t go wrong, leaving me with one half-closed eye. Both wishes were expensively met and I was happy out.

The unexpected bonus was that they also killed my migraine. Up to then, I had experienced the migraine aura, where you get a visual distortion like an art deco swimming pool right across your field of vision, so that you can neither drive nor read nor write. That all went away once Botox arrived, and in due course, studies showed that lots of Botox users had reported this beneficial spin-off and clinical studies had worked out why, so it’s currently a prescribed treatment for migraine sufferers in several countries.

NOW, though, the Botox story moves close to the advice in the old movies, where the stars tell each other to “put on a happy face” and end up in a joyfully better place as a result. According to the New York Times, “new research suggests that it is possible to treat depression by paralysing key facial muscles with Botox, which prevents patients from frowning and having unhappy -looking faces.”

The new research is serious. It was conducted by a professor of psychiatry and a dermatologist, and will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

What the two medics did was take a group of clinically-depressed people, and inject some of them in the forehead with Botox, while injecting the other segment of the group with an inert saline material.

Six weeks later, 52% of the subjects who got Botox confirmed that their depression had lifted, whereas that relief was reported by only 15% of the others; the patients who had been injected with salt water.

Neither group knew what was in the syringe used on them.

It is not the first time that this effect has been shown, but it is solid evidence that inability to frown can have a counter-intuitive effect.

Not being able to LOOK sad may, it weirdly seems, help to prevent you FEELING sad. Your body may have a greater say in your mood than does your brain. And a dilute poison that flattens your wrinkles also has the potential to lift your spirits.