76. Time to let down your hair

Ever have trouble relaxing? Yah, me too.

It is time to let down your hair!

Something is always born of excess. Great art was born of great terrors or great loneliness. Great inhibitions. Instabilities. And art always balances them. This quote from Anais Nin starts us off today as we're talking all about art, and we'll be looking at fairy tales, self-expression, personal style and metaphor as it relates to a certain aspect of letting your hair down and relaxing. 

Transcript

Something is always born of excess. Great art was born of great terrors or great loneliness. Great inhibitions. Instabilities. And art always balances them. This quote from Anais Nin starts us off today as we're talking all about art, and we'll be looking at fairy tales, self-expression, personal style and metaphor as it relates to a certain aspect of letting your hair down and relaxing. 

Welcome to the modern, creative woman. I'm Doctor Amy Backos, and I am here to bring you the art and science of creativity. This community is for you. We are all about learning to use creative thinking and creativity to build lives that we love. Before we get started, I have one request. Would you share this episode or the podcast with a woman that you know who would appreciate and learn from the art and science of creativity? I really want to make the free part of my program as widely listened to as possible. It's my value to be of service in the world, and I have programs at various price points. The podcast is always free, and I deliver the quality information that has made a difference in my life, and has the science and evidence behind it to make a difference in the lives of women around the world. So if you would share, you would be helping me fulfill my purpose and my mission to share this information and art with other women. So let's get into it. Let's get this started. 

When I was in Paris, I kept noticing that women treated their hair with a little less. Fussiness. And I'm not saying that women weren't doing their hair, but it was just a different look than I'm used to seeing in San Francisco. It was going for natural beauty and allowing themselves to look the way they wanted to look. That perhaps flattered them the most felt most authentic or self expressive or culturally relevant, and less trying to look like everyone else. There wasn't this singular standard of beauty, and it got me thinking about hair as a metaphor. Everything can be an incredible metaphor from which we can learn. So what do you think of when you hear the phrase let down your hair? It can mean a lot of things about relaxing or unwinding. And I want to talk about the really positive aspects of letting down our hair. It was, of course, made famous by the fairy tale of Rapunzel, and in that story, a witch would call out to Rapunzel and say, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair! And the witch would climb up the tower to visit her. And that fairy tale was compiled from the Grimm Brothers collection of other stories. So I'll tell you about where this letting down your hair story came from in just a moment. And if you recall this story, Rapunzel's mother was pregnant and had a craving for a vegetable that only grew in her neighbor's yard. And her father went over to negotiate with the witch to get the vegetable. And the more his wife wanted it, the the more sort of reluctant the witch was. But she finally agreed and said, well, if you give me your child, I'll give you the vegetable. And evidently these two parents were frantic to satisfy the craving, so they agreed to trade their daughter for this vegetable. The witch accepted. The child named her Rapunzel, which was the name of the vegetable, and locked her in a tower. The witch served as a mother figure for the girl, but she kept her locked up and away from the world and not able to enjoy her life. And she had no entrance to this tower, so she had to figure out how to come visit Rapunzel every day. She grew her hair long and she would climb up her hair. And ultimately there was a young prince who noticed that this was happening and decided to go visit Rapunzel for himself, and they were able to escape together. So that Grimm Brothers version of the story was in 1819 and before Grimm. There was an Italian fairytale in the 1600s, Petronella, and that was a fairy tale similar by Basile. There is another French fairy tale, very similar by Charlotte Rose, to come on de la force, and that was in the late 1600s. And even before that there was a Persian epic poem, a Shahnameh. And in this story, Ruba allows her lover to climb her hair up to a tower. And so that's where it began. So when we let down our hair, we're open to perhaps some interesting company. And the phrase became really popular in the 17th century, and women in the upper classes at that time were wearing their hair in these elaborate hairdos. If you imagine, you know, a Marie-Antoinette, two feet tall pile of hair with feathers and flowers and even a birdcage. And so when women were at home, they could, quote unquote, let their hair down and relax in a more natural way. So I think all of us, if we were wearing a birdcage on our head, would want to let that down and relax when we get home. And at that time, wearing one's hair in this natural or messy manner, you know, it was for private, for at home, for close friends. And the taking down of the hair was called disheveled. Now we have kind of a negative connotation to disheveled thing where it looks like not kempt. But then it was about relaxing. And since that time, the phrase really did stick. It's become an idiom that means to relax, be uninhibited, or have fun. And in idiomatic expression is one of those linguistic phrases that the words put together are way more than what they mean. Literally letting down our hair is, you know, underpinning our hair. But it metaphorically means to relax, enjoy, to be yourself, set aside formality or personal restraints and historically underpinning one's hair was about trust and comfort. And if you think about social norms, they're they're often suggesting that hair be pinned up or covered completely. And there's certainly a lot of racism and discrimination around how women wear their hair. When you think about those cultural associations, we want to have cultural humility and avoid judging how other people put together their hair, their outfit, how they express themselves across different cultures. Women's hair has held significant social, spiritual and political meaning, and this has happened around the world. So letting down her hair can be a metaphor for challenging societal standards. Stereotypes about women's appearance. In some cultures, covering one's hair is about personal empowerment, modesty, religious respect to a Christian and Baptist, Jewish, Muslim. All of these traditions have a way of covering the hair. But then there's later that they might let their hair down with friends or in the privacy of their home. Now, natural hair for African American or Native American is also a symbol of freedom and resistance from oppression. The phrase also means shedding the weight of these external, social, political, and oppressive expectations. When we allow our hair to be as we like it, it's a break from the polished, curated versions of ourselves. It allows us to embrace naturalness and imperfection. The modern creative woman is all about self-expression and creativity and expressing our cultural or religious heritage, political freedoms, self-expression. All of that fits in with how we look as well, choosing how we want to express ourselves through our facial expressions, what we put on our clothes, what we do, what we say. Acknowledging that there are so many pressures for us to perform or appear in a certain way as women, and really deciding how you want to express yourself and figuring out who you can do that with, where you feel safe to really let your hair down is so important. My goal is always to be a humble scholar and acknowledged that I don't know everything and I can't speak to everything. I have my experience. I have the literature, both scientific and artistic, and I have the experiences of the work that I've been doing. But there's always more to learn. I found out February 1st is Hijab Day, and it's a day to remind us to learn a little bit more about why women in the Muslim religion cover their hair. There's also a Crown campaign, and the Crown stands for creating a respectful and Open World for natural hair. And this Crown Act was created in 2019 by dove. Yeah, the soap dove, the Crown Coalition and California State Senator Holli Jay Mitchell. And the idea of coming together in dove making efforts to be about conscious capitalism. They all came together to really insure protection against discrimination because of race based hairstyles. And it's all about extending statutory protections for people to wear their hair texture how they like. And you can look at what they're doing. It's called the Crown act.com. And we're still needing to protect women who are wearing braids or locks or twists and knots, both in the workplace and in schools, that this form of self-expression through hair upsets people and leads to discrimination. It really matters that we show up in a culturally humble place, and we don't need to be afraid of women doing things differently than us. However you do your hair, however you choose to let down your hair metaphorically, we can support other women in how they want to express themselves. So To whatever you need to do wherever you notice your bias. Do some research. Have a Google search to educate yourself. So many times we repeat what we've heard from other people, or we caught a clip of on social media and we need to do our own research and we also need to connect with other women. I found some really great scientific research on the act of literally letting our hair down. Some incredible studies. I found one in particular was about the beneficial effects of craniofacial massage on quality of life and mental health, and they did it with menopausal women. And this particular massage really helped with menopause symptoms and even body image. This was a randomized, controlled clinical trial. This is not. Just a guess. This has really powerful evidence behind it. So the author of this study is a group of people, but the main author is SB Lopez, and the study came out in 2020. I'll drop the link in the show notes if you want to read it. They had their first objective was to determine the effect of massage in a craniofacial area in menopausal women. Let me tell you what craniofacial massage is and then I'll tell you the rest of the study. It's a therapeutic massage that involves just this really gentle pressure and stretching on your face, your head, your neck and shoulders. The second objective in this study was to measure the influence of massage on quality of life. In particular, they were looking at and measuring symptoms of menopause, various aspects of mental health and body image perception. And they measured it before and after treatment. And a month later as well. They had 50 participants. They were women aged 45 to 65, various ethnicities, but all were in the experience of menopause. It's a single blind, randomized, controlled trial, and participants were assigned to two groups the group that got the craniofacial massage, and a control group that did not get the massage. So here's what they found. This is really exciting. The cranial massage group had a large positive between subject effect and a large positive within subject effect. What that means is the group that got the massage showed great improvements compared to the group that did not get the massage, but they also showed between subjects change, which means the individual women in the massage study showed big changes, large and positive. And that's exciting. The treatment, the craniofacial massage improved their experience. It helped ameliorate and lower the scores on a menopause rating scale that the act of massaging in your scalp can help you feel better about your body. It's that relaxing. So why does this work? I had to do a little bit more research. Why would this work? And why are we all going to be doing cranial facial massage now? The massage is really stimulating these pressure receptors inside your hairline and on your face. It improves vagal activity. It lowers our cortisol level. You can do it right now I'm massaging right inside my hairline. It also improves our sleep and the the act of improving our sleep lowers our distress, improves our mental health. It gives more of a feeling of peace and well-being that's available to us when we're well rested. And here's one that I love. Massage has been found to improve what's called subjective sleep quality in postmenopausal women. And what that means subjective sleep quality is. It means that women who are having this kind of massage wake up feeling more rested, and that could be that they are waking up and going right back to sleep instead of staying awake, or they forget that they woke up right because they're still so relaxed they go back to sleep, but they have an experience of feeling that their sleep is better. It's either better quality or longer lasting. That's incredible. So there's a lot that has to do with our hair and feeling good. I want to give you a little bit more about the scalp massage that you can do for yourself. And a student of mine taught me about massage right inside your hairline, and that if you are rubbing just inside your hairline, you're actually catching all your facial muscles and it feels really great. It's really helpful for increasing mental health and wellbeing. It helps you feel relaxed in the moment, which ultimately lowers our overall stress. And why do we have that scalp tension where we're holding our face in a certain position? That scalp tension just inside the hairline happens from poor posture. How's your posture right now? Are you sitting up straight? It also happens when we're holding the same position at work for long periods of time. And we all know it's essential to get up and stretch and walk around at least every hour more. If it's possible, when we're working on the computer. And I also found some research showing that scalp massage with your partner promotes healthy bonding because it's releasing oxytocin. And, you know, oxytocin is all about bonding. It gives a feeling of closeness and security. So I really want to encourage you to have a look, see how this kind of massage can help you. You can look online at different ways to do this kind of massage. There's some wonderful scalp massaging tools that can also help. Great for, you know, use in the shower, but they're great for relaxation. So this is what research offers us. And I wanted to share that study in particular to highlight the creativity in this study. It wouldn't have been on my radar to wonder how this kind of massage could help with menopausal symptoms or stress. And all of that put together makes for an incredible study. So these authors used a synthetic form of creativity. They pulled things that already existed and put them together in a new way. Synthetic, not like plastic, but like synthesizing. They took various components and put them together. And I want you to think about this study and see where in your life you could have some synthetic creativity, synthesizing creativity, pulling different things together. And it might be that you pull out some nice dishes to use with your regular dishes. It might be that you try a different way of putting together an outfit. It might be using something for not its intended purpose at work. One system could help another system. There's so many ways that you can experiment with synthetic creativity. I found a quote from Judith Hanson last year. She's a PhD, a physical therapist. She's written 11 books that you might be interested in. She's a teacher of yoga, and she's been doing this around the world since 1971, and she's adamant about this. Taking time out each day to relax and renew is essential to living well. There's just no way around it. We have to relax and renew. And of course, sleep is a huge part of that, as is creativity. Let me know what you think about this episode and the idea of relaxing, letting down your hair, and how that one metaphor inspired me to synthesize so many things. We talked about a fairy tale. We talked about cultural ways of expressing or covering our hair, talked about cultural humility and not judging others. And then we talked about that powerful research study around the craniofacial massage. I'll leave you with this quote from Coco Chanel. A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life. Have a wonderful rest of your week. 

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