Place your hands on your hips, feet shoulder-width or greater distance apart, and stare up into the sky for two minutes. How do you feel? Confident? Positive? Powerful?

There’s a study which proves that standing like a superhero for 120 seconds acts as a performance enhancer- increasing your focus, boosting your confidence, increasing your testosterone, and lowering your cortisol. Boosting testosterone leads to increased feeling of power. Decreasing cortisol, which is a hormone produced as a result of stress, makes you more capable of handling difficult situations. The superhero posture is also known as a power-pose, in which your body position is open and taking up lots of space. Power poses pack a whole lot of, well, power. They have the potential to not only change how the world perceives you, but how you perceive yourself.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that we are capable of anything, as long as we can put our fear and frustrations aside long enough to accomplish it. Even superheroes experience darkness. Even they falter and doubt, questioning whether they will be able to overcome the great adversity that faces them. They get scared, just like us.

And we, just like them, must take a moment to breath and find our inner strength.

Sometimes it feels as if there isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough time to put out all of the fires in front of you. There isn’t enough time to complete all of the tasks on your to-do list. There aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all you need to do and also eat and also sleep. There isn’t enough patience left in you to deal with the most difficult of people over and over again, draining your life force. There isn’t anyone to turn to who will solve all of your problems- except for you. And it is all just so overwhelming.

On our darkest days we cannot and do not give up. We are survivors. We pick ourselves up and get it together and figure out how to solve it. We may not do it perfectly, but that does not matter. The important thing is that we do it. Again and again.

You’re struggling to do your best, and to be your best, and sometimes it feels as though you are hitting wall after wall after wall. It’s beginning to feel impossibly difficult to be truly seen or heard. You don’t know how you can possibly continue to keep giving so much of yourself when it seems to go so unnoticed by all around you.

Your effort is never unnoticed. In these moments, the ones in which we don’t know how to keep on going, we have to be our own superhero. It’s in these moments that we assume the wonder woman power-pose and channel all of our positive energy into believing in ourselves. Saying over and over, I know I can do this.

We dedicate ourselves to our education and our careers, to our papers and finals and our bosses and employees; to our parents, our friends, our boyfriends, husbands and children. We give so much of ourselves, for such a large portion of the day, that of course we get overwhelmed.

Deep breath. Take your moment, for you have earned it. One more deep breath, and then move forward. Put on your cape and your favorite shade of power-red lipstick, and walk back out into the world. Ready to conquer it all.

Because you will. You will conquer every last bit. You can do anything.

xoxo

Sarah

*The above mentioned study can be found in its entirety here: