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Your body language can send powerful signals to your brain, influencing hormone release and emotional responses. Chronic stress due to poor posture can lead to long-term hormonal imbalances, affecting your mood, sleep patterns, and immune function. Your hormones, confidence, and sex life will thank you. Open, upright postures signal dominance and readiness, which tell the endocrine system to release testosterone. Over time, this weakens the core, tightens the hips, and collapses the chest — leading to a hormonal state of stress and passivity. Poor posture, on the other hand, sends your body into stress mode. We found no main effect of pose type on testosterone, cortisol, risk or feelings of power.
Let’s explore how slouching, hunching, and other bad postural habits could be sabotaging your body’s ability to produce this essential hormone, and what you can do to fix it. But what if I told you that the way you sit and stand could be quietly draining your testosterone levels? When you think about testosterone, posture probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. This means more oxygen and nutrients are delivered to cells, promoting better mental clarity, mood, and energy levels. Good posture doesn’t just improve overall circulation; it can also impact blood flow to key areas, such as the brain and genitals. When the body is slouched, it can compress vital areas such as the chest, abdomen, and lower back, restricting blood flow to essential organs and muscles.
Additionally, our results do not provide evidence for an effect of power postures on progesterone levels. Participants adopted an expansive or constrictive posture three times for 2 min each, in between the blocks of a face categorization task. First, we excluded one participant from all time points and hormones due to extreme progesterone values (around 1,500 pg/ml, outside of normal range even for women, see Liening et al., 2010), clearly indicating a problem with his salivary samples. Figures 1A and 1B depict the time course of postures, saliva samples and interleaved blocks of the face categorization task. These were the only available effect sizes for posture effects on hormone levels when we conducted our study. Indeed, adopting expansive postures for about 5 min throughout a stressful experience boosted the cortisol response to stress (Turan, 2015). Nevertheless, and despite previous null-findings for hormones, the evidence for posture effects on feelings of power and other emotional and affective self-report measures in their p-curve analysis have led Cuddy, Schultz & Fosse (2018) to call for more studies on psychophysiological outcomes.
Altogether, it appears that additional empirical evidence is necessary to reach final conclusions about whether expansive and constrictive postures induce changes in testosterone or cortisol levels at different time points than assessed previously or when adopted for longer durations. Neither testosterone and cortisol levels linked to dominance behaviors, nor progesterone levels related to affiliative tendencies, responded differently to adopting expansive as opposed to constrictive postures. Despite this growing body of evidence that does not support posture effects on hormone levels, the question remains as to whether repeatedly holding postures over time and/or assessing hormonal responses at different time points would yield different outcomes. From cortisol levels to testosterone production, your posture can have a profound effect on various hormones that influence your mood, stress levels, and even your confidence. In doing so, it assessed whether larger doses of posture or collection of saliva samples at longer time intervals than previous studies would produce similar effects on testosterone and cortisol as the study by Carney, Cuddy & Yap (2010) in contrast to previous non-replications. The current study assessed whether repeatedly adopting expansive and constrictive postures known as power postures induces endocrine responses that resemble the hormonal correlates of dominance and affiliative behavior.
Using a large sample of 247 male participants, natural winners and losers of a physical competition were randomly assigned to hold a low, neutral or high-power postural display. Power displays naturally occur within the context of competitions, as do changes in hormones, and researchers have yet to examine the effects of poses within this ecologically relevant context. The effect of postural power displays (i.e. power poses) on hormone levels and decision-making has recently been challenged. Low testosterone has been linked to increased anxiety and depression, and poor posture itself can negatively affect mental health. Incorporating small changes to your daily habits — such as standing tall, strengthening your core, and taking posture breaks — can lead to lasting improvements in both your physical and mental health. For men, improved posture can increase blood flow to the pelvic region, which is important for sexual health and function.