Sukie Baxter

February 25, 2019 Healthy Aging

How Do You Loosen Tight Neck Muscles?

Tight neck muscles and a lack of neck flexibility are common complaints. Many people find that their neck gets stiff after hours spent peering at spreadsheets on a laptop, traveling in airplanes, or even just sleeping.

If you wake up with a stiff neck, find it difficult to look over your shoulder without twisting your entire body, or if you suffer from frequent tension headaches, you may want to address your tight neck muscles.

Of course, before we dive into the nuts and bolts of loosening your neck and shoulder muscles, let’s take a quick look at anatomy. I find it incredibly helpful to be able to picture what I’m working with when I’m stretching my own body, and many of my clients report that it’s useful for them as well.

Anatomy of Your Neck

Your neck as anatomically described is comprised of seven vertebra that link your skull to your thoracic spine, or middle back. Of course, these vertebra don’t just hang out on their own, completely isolated from the rest of your spine.

When you turn your head, your neck twists, sure. But that movement should travel down into your thoracic spine, too. If your mid-back is stuck and rigid, your neck will experience limited range of motion and impaired flexibility.

The muscles of your neck largely connect the vertebra upward to your cranium and downward to your ribs and shoulder girdle. It’s not necessary to memorize these muscles, but it’s useful to understand that they don’t exist solely within the structure of your neck but rather as links to the rest of your body.

Stiffness in your neck is related to shoulder and back tension as well. Often, radiating pain in your the arms and hands can be traced to restriction in and around your neck and shoulders that clamps down on a nerve, limiting its ability to glide and irritating the fibers.

One such place that this happens is within the brachial plexus, a large nerve bundle that exits the spine in your neck, crosses over your first rib and extends into your armpit area. Any tension or restriction in your neck or shoulder muscles can cause impingement to these nerves. Sometimes lying on your side can exacerbate tightness, resulting in numbness or tingling in your hands or arms.

The Connection Between Stress and Neck Tension

Ask anyone where they store their stress and I’d put money down that nine out of ten times, the answer will be in the shoulders. It’s a universal truth that stress makes our backs and shoulders clench in defense.

As you can see from our discussion of neck anatomy, tight shoulder muscles are also tight neck muscles. They’re really not separate. They’re not even different muscles. Neck muscles are shoulder muscles. Shoulder muscles are neck muscles. It’s the same structure.

(Which begs the question, really: what exactly is a neck? Where does it truly start and where does it end? All division within the body is artificial and contrived, an artifact of an anatomist’s scalpel.)

There are other effects of stress which contribute to tight neck muscles as well. Stress and trauma results in a biological flexion response from the nervous system designed to protect your vulnerable organs and genitals. In short, it’s an innate response for humans to curl into the fetal position, even mildly, when placed in a stressful situation.

Years ago, someone sent me a fantastic study that looked at photographs of people under varying degrees of stress, including images of political prisoners who had been undergoing interrogation. It’s been probably a decade and I can’t find the dang images, but I wish, wish, wish I’d saved them.

It was fascinating to look at how in every scenario, even if the person was standing upright, there was contraction through the core, shortening the psoas — a deep core muscle stretching from the base of the diaphragm across the front of the hip and inserting on the upper thigh bone.

Stress, Stretching, and Flexibility

There is a physical tug on a neck that exists in a stressed out body with a tight core. Shortening in the psoas and associated tissue (remember: one muscle never tightens in isolation but only as part of a larger complex) constricts the spine, inhibits the function of the diaphragm — your primary breathing muscle — and draws the chest downward.

When your sternum — or breastbone — sinks in and down, your entire rib cage then effectively hangs like a giant anchor slung from the delicate muscles and vertebra of your neck. These structures aren’t designed for such heavy lifting. No, in fact, your neck is intended for movement. It is, in effect, your antenna, the branch of your body that moves the sensory organs of your face around, taking in information from the world around you — seeking food, watching for threats, connecting to other humans, relating.

And so, when your neck is put upon to do the job of holding up your rib cage, the result is tight muscles and a lack of mobility.

Of course, in addition to this physical burden on your neck, stress creates a physiological effect as well. Stress in any form — even in its beneficial state — activates the sympathetic branch of your nervous system. You may be more familiar with this as your fight or flight response.

This is a good thing. You need sympathetic neural activation. Without it, you’d never do anything. It’s your motivation. It drives you to eat, connect, to stay alive.

But chronic activation without discharge is very damaging, indeed. Long term, low-grade stress has this exact effect on your nervous system.

Not only does the physical flexion of your core and psoas muscle impinge your diaphragm, creating a shallow breathing pattern that perpetuates stress activation in your body, the ongoing stress causes a body-wide threat response, elevating cortisol, accelerating your heart rate, raising blood pressure, and triggering muscle tension.

Therefore, while moving the muscles (i.e. stretching) is helpful to dissolve tension, the state that your body is in also plays a significant role. Calming this stress response not only decreases muscle tension in and of itself, it also makes your body more receptive to stretching and movement practices.

How to Calm Your Stress Response

There are a million ways to reduce stress. Most of them deal with the mind — controlling your thoughts, focusing on gratitude, avoiding negative thinking loops, meditating, etc.

These are excellent practices and can be useful for handling stressful moments. But the ultimate metric of a stress management technique is: does it calm your sympathetic nervous system activation and stimulate the opposing response in your parasympathetic (rest, relax, restore) branch?

Many of these practices do, in fact, have that effect. However, these are all brain-based, meaning you have to work to control something that’s a bit ethereal and hard to get your hands on: thoughts.

We’re such a mind-focused society, believing that all our power lies between our ears. And yeah, the brain is pretty cool and can definitely have an effect on the body. But your body can — and does — also affect the brain.

Therefore, a more tangible strategy to discharge stored stress can be to focus on decreasing muscle tension. One symptom of stress that greatly contributes to tight neck muscles is a clenched jaw. Many of my clients who experience neck pain and stiffness also report teeth grinding and TMJ issues.

First Relax Your Jaw

The first thing I recommend when dealing with neck tension is to focus on softening your jaw muscles. You can do this right now, wherever you are. It takes no special skills or equipment.

Simply bring your attention to the tension in your chin and jaw area. Inhale deeply and slowly, and then as you exhale, soften the muscles holding your jaw in place. It won’t fall off, I promise.

Relax your lips, soften your eyes. Allow your vision to blur slightly, to grow diffuse. Release tension from the muscles around your eyes and cheeks.

Let your jaw drop and mouth open slightly. Imagine your entire mandible sinking lower, opening from the back first (your jaw doesn’t, in fact, open like a hinge, but rather glides downward in the back to lower the entire bone).

Gently wiggle your jaw back and forth, right and left. Jut your chin a bit forward and back, sliding your jaw in and out. Move slowwwwwly! The more slowly you move, the more opportunity you give your nervous system to feel the sensory stimulus being generated, which calms your body.

Focus your attention on your ears. Can you relax the muscles around them? It’s totally okay if you can’t wiggle your earlobes or anything, just think about softening the tissue that’s around them. If it helps, place your fingers on the areas just in front and just behind your ears to help you feel them better.

Notice your breathing. Do you feel it deepen and slow as you release tension in your jaw, cheeks, eyes and ears?

Stay with this practice for as long as you feel progress happening. If you have quite a lot of stored stress and/or you’ve been stressed for a very long time, you may find that it takes ten minutes or more to feel a full relaxation response. In some cases, it make take half an hour, forty minutes, or even longer.

You don’t have to spend that much time, of course, but be cognizant of the fact that your biology isn’t on any schedule. It’s operating on primordial time, where it has the space of millennia to change.

Then Release Tight Neck Muscles

Only after you’ve completed the above should you move on to the video practice below. This video will walk you through some movements to restore flexibility to the muscles in your neck while also lubricating the small joints between your vertebra.

You will get far more out of this practice if you enter into it in a relaxed state, first making use of the techniques above. Relaxation calms the nervous system, making your muscles more receptive to stretching and mobilization techniques.

Otherwise, you’re merely stuck in a tug of war with your own nervous system, and that’s just exhausting.

For more great tips on how to calm your nervous system in order to decrease tension and increase flexibility, check out my ebook Perfect Posture for Life. It encompasses my more than thirteen years of experience helping hundreds of clients to improve posture and movement. You can order it by clicking here and start alleviating the pain caused by tight muscles immediately.

February 18, 2019 Pain Relief

8 Healing Foods for Pain Relief

Disclosure: People frequently ask me which products I like or use. I’ve included my recommendations below, where applicable. Some of the links are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a bit of pocket change if you click through and buy the thing. No pressure. My feelings aren’t hurt if you choose a different product.

While posture, movement, and alignment all play an integral role in dealing with chronic pain, there’s another crucial element that often goes unmentioned: body chemistry.

This encompasses what’s going on in your physiology at the cellular level.

Cellular processes are complex and it’s next to impossible to understand every aspect of these elaborate chemical reactions, but there’s one metric with which you should familiarize yourself: systemic inflammation.

What Is Systemic Inflammation?

Systemic inflammation is a body-wide process that has the direct ability to influence your levels of physical pain.

Inflammation is your body’s natural response to irritants or injury. There are two kinds of inflammation. The first is acute, like when you sprain your ankle. The localized area swells and gets hot to the touch, which helps your body bring blood and plasma carrying healing nutrients to the wounded tissue.

The second type, and the one that we’re concerned with here, is chronic inflammation, which happens as a result of the immune system becoming stimulated by too much stress, lack of sleep, over-exercising, or consuming inflammatory foods, such as sugar and alcohol. Inflammation is also a factor in autoimmune conditions.

The result of chronic inflammation is systemic pain—aching joints, sore muscles, and gut issues, among other, more serious conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

How Do You Know if You Have Systemic Inflammation?

Blood tests that measure something called C-reactive protein can tell you how high your inflammation levels are. One study found that your likelihood of developing diabetes was increased by 1,700 percent when there were elevated levels of C-reactive protein¹.

Other more generalized symptoms of systemic inflammation include body pain, fatigue, poor sleep, imbalanced mood, depression, anxiety, and gut issues².

Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do nutritionally to reduce systemic inflammation. While eating a healthy diet free from processed, chemically-laden foods is essential, there are also many individual nutrients that aid in balancing out body chemistry. Here, I’ll cover the top eight contenders.

No 1. Magnesium

Magnesium is a simple mineral found in basic foods like avocados, black beans, spinach, whole grains, and dark chocolate. It’s involved in over 300 chemical reactions in the body, so you need quite a lot of it.

One of the very important functions of magnesium is to help your muscles release a contraction, but the benefits of magnesium go beyond just reducing muscular tension.

According to The Magnesium Miracle by Carolyn Dean, magnesium lowers C-reactive protein, boosts enzymatic activity in the bloodstream (more on enzymes in No. 8 below), supports adrenal health, lowers high blood pressure, improves blood flow, and enhances sleep quality³.

Board certified neurologist Ilene Ruhoy suggests daily supplementation with magnesium to help treat headaches, concussion, anxiety, and insomnia⁴.

Magnesium comes in many forms and each has a slightly different effect on the body. The best and most bioavailable form is magnesium chloride, which is found naturally occurring in seawater.

You can find topical applications of magnesium chloride to apply to your skin daily. This is an excellent way to supplement your magnesium because you bypass the difficulty of absorbing it through the gut⁵. If you have a damaged intestinal tract due to IBS, food allergies, SIBO, Crohn’s disease, or other conditions, this is the best magnesium for you. Look for products labeled magnesium oil or magnesium lotion.

Magnesium glycinate is absorbed well by muscle tissue, so this is a great choice if you’re looking to reduce tension. Magnesium threonate has shown a positive effect on brain health⁶.

Personally, I use a combination of both oral supplementation and topical application to maintain optimal magnesium levels. Because magnesium is a natural laxative, it can be difficult to take enough of it to boost levels without negatively affecting absorption, simply because the more you take, the faster it moves through your digestive tract.

No. 2 Boswellia

Boswellia — better known as frankincense — is a resin derived from large, branching trees native to India, northern Africa, and the Middle East. Frequently used in ancient cultures as a perfume or embalming agent, this fragrant resin is undergoing a resurgence as research has proven its powerful anti-inflammatory effects.

One study demonstrated the anti-inflammatory effects of boswellia on autoimmune conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and bronchial asthma. There were fewer side effects with boswellia supplementation than with traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)⁷.

I’ve found both oral and topical use of boswellia resin to be extremely helpful in alleviating sore muscles and joints. Boswellia is one of the several anti-inflammatory herbs present in the herbal supplement I take for broad spectrum anti-inflammatory support that I personally take daily.

No. 3 Turmeric

The hero of all anti-inflammatory foods is actually a spice called turmeric. Turmeric is a bright yellow-orange-colored rhizome similar in appearance to ginger and has been used as a healing food in Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine systems for centuries.

While turmeric may best be known for its natural anti-inflammatory compound curcumin that’s responsible for reducing muscle and joint pain, it has also shown promise in treating cancer, inflammatory conditions, and pain.

There is also strong evidence for the use of turmeric in slowing the progression of neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis⁸. And turmeric has an additional litany of health benefits, from lowering cholesterol to cardiovascular protection.

With anti-inflammatory effects comparable to over-the-counter drugs such as ibuprofen⁹ and none of the unsafe side effects, it makes sense to include turmeric as an integral part of your diet.

While turmeric is a delicious spice with myriad health benefits, but it’s also bright orange, messy, and stains everything. Getting a consistent dose every day can prove trying, so you may prefer to choose a potent supplement to ensure the daily anti-inflammatory benefits.

I switched to a broad spectrum herbal anti-inflammatory supplement featuring primarily turmeric along with a few other powerful anti-inflammatory herbal extracts after getting frustrated by the orange-yellow mess that turmeric created in my kitchen. I noticed an immediate difference, and when I run out or forget to reorder, I can really tell.

There are many high quality supplements on the market, so you certainly don’t have to take the same one that I choose; however, this is the one I personally prefer .

No. 4 Devil’s Claw

Native to southern Africa, devil’s claw is a fruiting plant that has a bitter root containing anti-inflammatory properties traditionally used to treat painful conditions including arthritis, bursitis, gout, neuralgia, headaches, and other musculoskeletal aches¹⁰.

Studies have demonstrated the anti-inflammatory effects of devil’s claw for treating osteoarthritis¹¹ and found it to be especially helpful in cases of lower back pain¹².

Devil’s claw is rich in antioxidants, nutrient compounds that help reduce oxidative stress on cells. In fact, the high content of water-soluble antioxidants¹³ appears to fuel the anti-inflammatory potency of devil’s claw¹⁴.

Devil’s claw does not appear to have serious side effects, but more studies are needed to confirm this. According to WebMD, people with heart problems, hypertension, low blood pressure, diabetes, gallstones, and peptic ulcer disease should avoid devil’s claw¹⁵.

Devil’s claw can be consumed as a tea, tincture, or in capsule form. My preferred herbal supplement for anti-inflammatory support contains a synergistic amount of devil’s claw as part of the compound.

No. 5 Ginger

Like turmeric, ginger is a rhizome containing anti-inflammatory compounds, mainly gingerols. Yellow in color and sporting a spicy kick, ginger has been used by Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Unani Tibb traditional medicine practices for centuries¹⁶.

While ginger is largely known as a culinary spice popular in Asian cuisine, demand for the spicy rhizome is growing in North America due to its health benefits. In addition to its powerful anti-inflammatory properties, ginger has been shown to have antibiotic, antioxidant, anti-diabetic, and cholesterol-lowering properties¹⁷.

Research has also demonstrated the effectiveness of ginger in relieving menstrual pain¹⁸, migraines¹⁹, and, to some extent, arthritis²⁰ (although turmeric does outperform ginger alone).

Adding ginger to your diet isn’t complicated as it livens up almost any culinary dish. While I’ve personally found the most potent results from consuming the rhizome as part of a freshly squeezed juice, you can also add a chunk of fresh ginger to a pot of bone broth, grate some on top of a salad, or combine it in soups.

While consuming ginger as part of a healthy diet is ideal, I still prefer to take a daily supplement that contains a potent extract along with other anti-inflammatory herbs to ensure both a therapeutic dose and consistent intake. I love the taste of ginger, but even a zesty warming spice like this can become tiresome when consumed daily.

No. 6 GABA

For better sleep, a more stable mood, and reduced levels of muscular tension, you may want to consider taking steps to boost your brain’s levels of a calming neurotransmitter called gama-aminobutyric acid, or GABA.

Neurotransmitters are chemicals that allow neurons—the cells in your brain—to communicate with one another. GABA is one such chemical with a calming effect on neuronal activity.

GABA improves sleep quality²¹, reduces anxiety²² and muscle tension, and boosts mood²³. Low levels of GABA have been linked to anxiety, sleep disorders, depression, inability to focus, seizures, and chronic pain. Depleted GABA also results in chronic sympathetic nervous system activation and can be an underlying cause of adrenal fatigue²⁴.

While GABA isn’t something you get from foods like you do other vitamins and minerals, certain foods can support its production inside the body by providing crucial nutrients for the synthesis of GABA.

According to Dr. Ilene Ruhoy, board certified neurologist, GABA requires pyroxidine—more commonly known as vitamin B6—as a precursor. Eating foods rich in B6, such as spinach, bananas, potatoes, rice, raisins, and chickpeas, can support your brain’s GABA production²⁵.

One study showed that probiotic supplementation both increased GABA production in the gut tissue and decreased abdominal pain²⁶. Be sure to include plenty of raw, unpasteurized fermented foods in your diet such as sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi, kefir, yogurt, etc.

Exercise, meditation, and yoga can also boost GABA production in your brain. Researchers found a 27% increase in GABA production in study participants after practicing yoga²⁷.

It’s important to note that movement, deep breathing exercises, and meditation can have fairly immediate effects on GABA levels but the results may be temporary, while nutritional approaches may take a while to naturally increase GABA but are more long-term.

While you can purchase GABA in supplement form, the research is still out on whether this is the best way to replenish depleted GABA levels in the body. For maximum benefit, emphasis should be placed on consuming nutrients that are precursors to your body’s own GABA production⁴.

No. 7 Omega-3

Omega-3 oils from foods like flax, chia and deep, cold water fish are nature’s first line of defense against inflammation. Clinical trials have shown that fish oil benefits many autoimmune and inflammatory disease conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and migraine headaches²⁸.

In addition to decreasing inflammation, omega-3 oils are a fundamental building material for your brain, supporting the production of new neurons²⁹.

Basically, your brain can’t exist without omega-3 oils, which makes them pretty vital.

It’s a great idea to optimize your diet to include plenty of healthy omega-3 oils, the best of which can be found in wild salmon, grass-fed beef, trout, and sardines.

One study that looked at the diets of Dutch adults found that eating more fish was correlated with a reduced risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s³⁰.

Many westernized diets, such as the standard American diet, are high in another type of polyunsaturated fatty acid: omega-6. Where omega-3 fights inflammation, omega-6 is pro-inflammatory. This doesn’t necessarily make omega-6 bad; your body needs both.

But it needs both omega-6 and omega-3 in a balanced ratio of about 4:1 (four grams of omega-6 to every one gram of omega-3)³¹, although some experts recommend as much as a 1:1 ratio in favor of more omega-3³². Since many people have a diet high in omega-6 oils from soy, canola, and corn, omega-3 consumption becomes crucial to decrease inflammatory responses in the body, thus easing pain and improving brain health.

No. 8 Enzymes

Enzymes are probably the number one anti-inflammatory compound that almost nobody has ever heard of; however, they’re crucial to not only your health, but also to your body’s ability to preserve life.

Your body uses around 50,000 to 70,000 different types of enzymes to break down food and convert it into energy as well as to support metabolic processes. Without the catalyzing properties of enzymes, your body would straight up die³³.

You might be familiar with digestive enzymes — those secreted by your stomach and pancreas.

While digestive enzymes are beneficial to aid in breaking down food in your digestive tract and making nutrients more bioavailable, there is a second type of enzyme that we’ll be focusing on here: systemic, or proteolytic, enzymes.

While digestive enzymes dissolve in your stomach so that they can break down fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, systemic enzyme tablets are enteric coated so that they survive the harsh stomach acid. The enzymes then cross through the intestinal wall, entering your bloodstream and traveling throughout your body.

This allows them to act as blood cleansers, ridding the body of inflammatory proteins that not only cause pain, but can result in diseases which have inflammation as a root cause such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

Proteolytic enzymes decrease systemic inflammation throughout your entire body, improve blood flow, dissolve blood clots, and help to alleviate allergy symptoms. They can also destroy invading bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and fungi by dissolving the protein coating that protects them³³.

Supplementation with systemic enzymes both prior to and following strenuous exercise was found to reduce exercise-induced muscle damage, showing favorable benefits for inflammatory, metabolic, and immune biomarkers³⁴ and reducing delayed onset muscle soreness—the achiness you feel a day or two after exercising³⁵.

As you age, your enzyme production drastically decreases, dropping significantly past the age of 27³⁶. While fresh fruits and vegetables supply some enzymes, they’re easily destroyed by cooking them at temperatures above 115 degrees. Therefore, supplementation is imperative to help your body maintain optimal enzymatic activity. It might just be the most important supplement you ever take, in fact.

Enzymes are generally considered as safe and have been in use for decades in Europe, and some are even classified as prescription drugs in Japan³⁶. However, they can have a thinning effect on the blood. You’ll definitely want to check with your doctor before taking enzymes if you’re on prescription blood thinners or have an upcoming surgery scheduled.

It can be tricky to find a high potency enzyme formula that meets stringent quality standards. While there are a few good ones on the market, this one is my current personal favorite and the one I use daily to support decreased inflammation and musculoskeletal pain.

And that’s a wrap. These are eight powerful nutrients with pain relieving qualities. Use one or use them all and you’re sure to see a difference in your overall well being.

For more pain-busting secrets like these, check out my ebook Perfect Posture for Life. I cover every aspect of standing tall and moving without pain (including nutritional secrets like the ones above). Click here to order it and start reading in minutes!

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5. https://medium.com/@mikemahler02/the- hormone-optimizing-benefits-713d701f4a4a
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February 11, 2019 Pain Relief

What Does Burnout Have to Do with Muscle Tension?

I have never quite understood why psychology and physical medicine are separate branches of healthcare. It’s not as though the brain were a separate entity floating out there in the ether, merely tethered to a lumpy, unintelligent body like some supercomputer chained irrevocably to a vehicle that carts it around.

No, in fact, your brain and body aren’t distinct. They’re the same freaking thing. Your brain is your body, and your body is your brain. That’s basic anatomy.

The gray matter of your brain condenses down to a ropy cord of neural material that runs through the core of your spine, branching out along the way into millions of nerves that terminate in muscles, bones, and organs.

It is impossible to have a thought or feeling without a corresponding physical reaction. Impossible.

When you have an experience — any experience — every cell in your body mobilizes to support that. Fear does not exist merely in your mind. It resides also in the tension of your muscles, the clenching of your jaw, and the shallowness of your breathing.

All emotions are the same. Joy, grief, anger, love…they manifest in your movement.

And while you’re probably familiar with the concept of “mind over matter” where your brain can influence the state of your body, the opposite is equally as possible. The set of your body — your posture, if you will — influences the state of your mind.

Just as smiling when you feel down can lift your spirits, so too can standing tall elevate your mood and even improve focus, productivity, and your capacity for solving complex problems.

The Software in Your Muscles

The generally accepted view on muscles is that if they’re tight, you must stretch, roll, and pull them like taffy until they agree to lengthen. Muscles are more or less considered to be a sort of rubber band that has, for some reason or other, become mechanically too short.

Muscles aren’t inanimate objects that spring back into place of their own accord like elastic, though. In fact, a muscle in and of itself has no ability to maintain tone. It requires a signal from your nervous system in order to contract.

Tension isn’t a muscle problem — it’s a software problem. Yes, there are mechanical influences on your tissue. At the site of an injury, the body lays down dense layers of fascia to “bandage” the area. This is what we refer to as scar tissue. It can effectively restrict mobility because the fibers tend not to follow the original grain of the muscle and instead run in every direction, thus fortifying the integrity of the muscle or tendon but restricting mobility.

However, barring any actual scar tissue, muscles become tight because the nervous system tells them to contract. There are many reasons that your nervous system sends these signals, including to perform basic movements like sitting, standing, walking across a room, or reaching for a mug of coffee.

But tension is also a readiness response. Your body tightens muscles to prepare for action, and perpetual readiness, which accompanies chronic stress, results in perennial tension.

Living in Fight or Flight

Everyone is busy. That’s a function of modern, urban life. We all have too many places to be, too many tasks on our to-do lists, and a slew of things that never even get attempted because, priorities.

This kind of modern frenzy results in chronic activation of your sympathetic nervous system — your stress response. This is the branch of your autonomic (meaning, beneath conscious control) nervous system that deals with threat.

The sympathetic branch has a correlate that helps you relax, rest, and replenish your energy: the parasympathetic branch.

In a balanced nervous system, these two have an inverse relationship, meaning they’re not both active at the same time. The sympathetic branches readies you for action while the parasympathetic branch helps you to relax and recover.

Sympathetic:

Increases heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure
Mobilizes blood away from digestive function into skeletal muscle to prepare for quick movement
Constricts blood vessels
Dilates pupils and focuses eyes

Parasympathetic:

Reduces muscle tension
Lowers heart rate and blood pressure
Aids in digestion
Slows and deepens respiration
Supports immune system function
Aids in the secretion of bodily fluids

Your sympathetic nervous system is like your gas pedal, mobilizing you for action, while your parasympathetic branch is the brake that allows your body to slow down and rest. A healthy nervous system swings, as a pendulum would, between activation and relaxation, never getting stuck to one side or the other.

Sympathetic Lockdown

This pendulum dance is how we maintain what’s called in fancy-schmancy science talk homeostasis. Homeostasis is a balance. Your body is constantly working to preserve it.

But, just like standing on one foot, it’s not a static place. There are millions of tiny micro-adjustments happening in every moment to keep you upright. Balance—or homeostasis—is actually a process of coming into and out of your center, over and over again.

But here’s the thing… when you’re chronically stressed, and thus living in perpetual fight or flight, you don’t get that natural, normal pendulum swing from activation to deactivation. You just stay charged all the time.

And because your body cannot physiologically exist in perpetual activation, it uses your parasympathetic nervous system like a lid to hold down your escalating fight or flight response. It’s a bit like a pressure cooker where the steam is your neural activation and the lid is keeping it in.

When that lid comes off, the whole system blows up.

There are a few side effects of living in chronic activation with your parasympathetic nervous system “covering up” all this stress. One is a type of numbness — officially called dissociation — where you feel sort of disconnected from yourself and lost, or floating.

People who are dissociated often don’t really feel truly alive. Nothing really touches them, and they’ll require ever increasing levels of stimulation to have any sensory experience at all.

In my observation, our whole society is living in this state, which explains why we keep reaching for ever higher levels of extremity — deep, deep tissue massages; extreme sports; bio-hacking; etc.

What I believe we’re reaching for is not higher levels of achievement, but a sensory experience of being alive.

Another common side effect of dual autonomic neural activation is having a hair trigger — sometimes called moodiness or explosiveness. Have you ever met someone who seemed super chill, but randomly flew off the handle at the smallest thing?

That’s a symptom of this kind of dysregulation. You may have heard of really extreme cases, such as the kind of PTSD that soldiers returning from war exhibit, but it exists on micro-levels, too.

Living in a perpetual state of activation—which you probably just call being stressed—is what I term Sympathetic Lockdown. It’s a state where you’re just getting through, moment to moment, without actually discharging the stored tension and neural activation in your body.

Burnout and the Brain

Nobody wants to be stressed, angry, explosive, and emotionally absent from their life. This is not a pleasant place to live.

So, what do we do about it?

We’re just not set up for mental relaxation in our daily lives. There’s constant stimulation from smartphones buzzing and beeping, televisions in every restaurant, and little face to face contact with other humans.

With no built-in triggers for slowing down and dropping into peace, our world is fraught with catalysts for activation, all of it driving us further into burnout.

Burnout is a frightening place to be. Participants in studies on burnout have demonstrated measurable changes to their brains, showing an enlarged amygdala — the fear center¹.

In short, burnout doesn’t just make you feel like crap, it also destroys the very structure of your brain.

Most approaches to dealing with stress and fixing burnout focus on controlling either your thoughts or your external circumstances. You either need to think and feel differently about the life you have, or you need to change your reality.

But in a modern world fraught with perpetual triggers, it can be next to impossible to escape the hamster wheel of stress. There’s always one more near-disaster waiting in the wings to give your nervous system a good solid zing.

There is a third strategy that pretty much everyone overlooks: reducing physical stress to calm your mind.

Stress — especially the chronic, perpetual stress that results in burnout — is a form of micro-trauma. In fact, the brains of people diagnosed with burnout mirror those of people who have experienced severe childhood trauma when examined with fMRI¹.

The interesting thing about trauma is that it isn’t traumatizing, so long as an organism (person or animal) has sufficient time and resources to release the resulting charge in their nervous system — i.e. to down-regulate the fight or flight response in the sympathetic branch and activate its correlate, the parasympathetic branch.

This is according to the research of Dr. Peter Levine, author and founder of Somatic Experiencing, an embodied trauma healing approach. His research focuses on the ability of wild animals to process trauma. He has found that when the sympathetic charge is released after a traumatic event, there is no lasting effect on the animal.

However, if that activation isn’t fully released, the sympathetic nervous system remains charged and active on some level. Essentially the animal—or the person—remains locked in fight or flight mode.

This is what’s happening to stressed out, burned out people day in and day out.

You’re living on some level as though there were a literal tiger on your heels. And existing in this perpetual state of neural activation results in ceaseless muscle tension, disrupted sleep, an inability to focus, lack of creativity and inspiration, difficulty connecting and relating to others, digestive issues, and even your plain old garden variety generalized anxiety.

Body Over Brain

While mindfulness strategies such as gratitude journals, meditation practices, affirmations, and even psychotherapy are helpful, the reality is that their ability to effect change can only reach so deeply when it comes to your biology.

The aspects of your brain affected by stress and trauma are ancient, primordial. You can’t have a rational conversation with them. Not only do they not speak English (or any other human language for that matter), they also don’t even know that language exists.

But you CAN talk to them — if you learn their language. And when you do this, you have access to the greatest free bio-hack that no virtually one else knows about.

Because just as your mind can influence your body, so too can your body influence your mind. In fact, the body sends signals to the brain far more frequently than the brain does to the body. The heart, for example, contains sensory nerve bundles that send information to the brain about nine times more frequently than the brain sends signals to the heart².

The body and brain are constantly “checking in” with each other, asking how things are going, ascertaining whether a state change is necessary. Thus, you can think all the happy thoughts you want, but if your body is chronically sending fear and threat signals upward to the brain, it will be nigh impossible to achieve true relaxation.

Balancing Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Activation

While accidents, injuries, and traumatic events usually happened in the past, there is no need to mentally travel back to them. The stored charge in your nervous system is current and happening in present time, so that’s when and where we’ll deal with it.

We’ll use a body-up approach. Rather than trying to talk sense to your nervous system and explain that the tiger in the bushes is simply a figment of its imagination, we’re going to instead learn and make use of its own language: sensation.

Felt sense is a powerful communication tool, but many people have a diminished ability to actually feel their own bodies. Reestablishing this connection can take a little practice, but it’s not hard and anyone can do it with just a modicum of time and attention.

Working with Felt Sense

If I were to ask you what you feel right now, you’d likely tell me that you either feel nothing (or nothing of note) or you would indicate areas of your body that are tight, tense, aching, or painful.

This is true of most people. We either hurt, or we feel nothing at all. But there are tons of sensations happening in your body all the time that have nothing to do with pain. It’s just that you haven’t trained yourself to pay any attention to them.

Developing your sensory awareness is a skill, and the best way to enter into it is through objective description of your present moment sensory experience in your body. For our purposes, you’ll want to describe sensation as though you were a scientist in a lab examining a specimen.

Tight, dense, heavy, warm, dark, gummy, thick, or bubbly are examples of descriptive sensory language. These are helpful. They allow us to get a handle on your body’s experience. What’s not useful are stories about sensation.

Things like…

Sometimes I notice my left shoulder feels a little tight, like when I do an overhead press at the gym.

What usually happens when I’m sleeping is that my arm goes numb and it wakes me up.

My yoga instructor said my pelvis should be more tucked under, like this…

When I’m sitting at my desk, I tend to hunch over and lean on my elbow and I really just need to strengthen my back muscles more, I think.

These are an intellectualized version of your experience. They come from floating above your physical sensations and analyzing them in a detached, clinical way. What we want is for you to connect to the sensory experience directly. In this way, you’re able to converse with your biology.

The Felt Sense of Feeling Good — Resourcing

We’re conditioned to seek and destroy problems, but when it comes to stress, trauma, and burnout, this problem-fixated focus is actually causing you a lot more pain. If the underlying tension and tightness that are causing your discomfort are related to sympathetic lockdown—and they are, I guarantee it—then focusing on the pain perpetuates the threat response, and thus the tension.

One way we can back ourselves into pain relief is by using a little reverse somatic psychology and putting your attention on the areas of your body that feel really good. In this way, we’re creating a sense of safety for your biology which effectively allows it to discharge the stored sympathetic nervous system activation.

This is a form of resourcing — using people, places, things, experiences, and even sensations that have a positive impact on your well-being to create a sense of safety and connection that soothes your nervous system.

This is a relatively easy practice that can be done anywhere, but until you develop your skills a little bit, it’s best to be in a private, quiet location where you won’t be disrupted.

Sitting, standing, or lying down, scan your body with your attention. What sensations feel pleasant?

Because it can be difficult to notice your sensory experience in a vacuum at first, I like to employ one of Dr. Peter Levine’s practices to jumpstart your awareness:

Place your right hand under your left armpit, flat against the rib cage. Place your left hand on your right shoulder. You should now feel as though you’re giving yourself a hug. Notice what feels pleasant about this position.

Use sensory language to explore the feeling. Describe the pressure, temperature, and weight of the sensation if you can. Remember to use words like warm, tingling, sticky, dense, thick, light, empty, firm, etc. and not to delve into mind chatter or stories about why you feel the sensations that you do. Stay in your body.

Focus your attention on positive sensations—things that feel pleasant, safe, and secure. When you have a firm grasp of a positive sensation, see if you can expand the feeling just a little bit further into your body. For example, if you have a warmth surrounding your heart that’s comfortable and cozy, see if you can spread that glow a bit, maybe extending it out to your shoulders, up to the base of your throat, or downward into your abdomen.

Spend at least a minute, but longer if you like, exploring this pleasant sensation expanding in your body. Once you feel complete, release your arms and notice how your body feels overall.

What has shifted? Is there less tension in your shoulders and neck? Have painful symptoms dissipated? Do you feel calmer and more centered?

Focusing your attention on pleasant sensations in your body is something you can do at any time of the day, no matter where you are, to down-regulate stress responses and restore neural balance.

You’ll notice the tension in your muscles dissipate, your breathing will slow. Often, colors become brighter as your vision clears and mental focus improves. These are all effects of discharging sympathetic lockdown.

Resourcing as a Skill

Resourcing and working with felt sense are tools that take some time and practice to develop, but they have a profound impact not only on your physical and mental well-being, but also on focus, productivity, and performance.

Of course, as with anything, developing skill in this practice takes time and effort. Somatic Experiencing practitioners can help you to finesse your technique, but you can also work on your own.

There’s an entire chapter in my ebook dealing with neural regulation, including detailed information on working with felt sense and specific practices to help you calm your stress response. You can order it here.

1. https://www. psychologicalscience.org/observer/burnout-and-the-brain
2. Blake, Mandy. “1.2 Heart Brain” Body=Brain.

February 4, 2019 Pain Relief

Is Lower Back Pain a Symptom of Poor Posture?

One symptom of poor posture is lower back pain. Of course, there can be multiple reasons that your back aches and a lot of those depend on your individual structure, genetics, and life history.

I generally recommend that clients consult a physician and receive any necessary imaging to rule out lower back pain causes that require medical intervention prior to engaging in bodywork or exercises targeting their symptoms.

But if you’ve been to the doctor for a thorough evaluation only to be sent away with a shrug and a prescription for pain pills you don’t want to take, you’re certainly not alone.

Physicians are wonderful at what they do and have my utmost respect for their ability to address life-threatening conditions, but unfortunately the conventional medical approach to treating back pain often leaves something to be desired.

While doctors typically rely heavily on their two heavy hitters—drugs and surgery—to treat a variety of conditions, not every case of back pain needs to be addressed in this way.

Non-specific lower back pain—that is, lower back pain of indeterminate cause—typically results from one of two issues in the spine: a lack of stability or a lack of mobility. These are actually two sides of the same coin. Where your body is not properly supported—a lack of stability—there will be additional tension to compensate, resulting in reduced mobility.

In order for your body to function optimally, you must have adequate support. Your body is an incredible feat of engineering, a system of levers and pulleys more complex than any machine we could ever hope to create. Each tiny joint in your body supports a system of joints above and below it. Irregularities in movement in one tiny area of the body can affect the functioning of everything else.

Your sacrum—a large, triangular bone at the base of your spine consisting of fused vertebrae—fits into the pelvis much like the keystone of an arch. If the two pelvic bones are imbalanced, they will torque the sacrum, putting strain on your sacroiliac joints (the points at which your sacrum connects to your pelvis) and causing lower back pain.

The five vertebra that make up the portion of your spine in your lower back—your lumbar vertebrae—are particularly prone to shifting and torquing as a result of poor postural habits. In fact, if there are twists in your body, they almost always show up in this area due to the lack of bony support between the bottom of your rib cage and the top of your pelvis.

Your lumbar spine is designed to allow ample movement in forward, back, and side bending¹. Because one of the primary functions of the lumbar spine is stability during load bearing, the surrounding muscles are vulnerable to compression from sitting and gravity, as well as compensation for postural restrictions elsewhere in your body.

Additionally, if you suffer from the rampant occurrence of tight hips that’s so common in urban professionals who spend a lot of time in front of computers or commuting in cars, your spine is doing some heavy lifting that it was never intended to assume.

If your hip joint is so restricted that your femur moves only a limited amount in the joint, then your thigh bone and your pelvic bone effectively function as one single unit—as though there were no joint in your hip at all.

Thus, to move your leg, the muscles of your lower back have to pick up and swing your entire pelvis and thigh forward, doing the job that’s supposed to fall to bigger, more powerful muscles like your quadriceps, glutes, and hamstrings.

Over time and thousands of steps per day, this causes tightness and rigidity in the muscles supporting your spine, and finally pain. It can even cause structural issues and inflammation in surrounding joints, like your sacroiliac joint.

Use the following exercise to reduce muscle guarding and tension around the hip joint, which helps to restore normal function to the lumbar vertebrae of your spine.

Exercise for Lower Back Pain Relief

1. Lie on the floor or on a yoga mat, face down. Bend your knees so that your feet are pointing toward the sky. Let your feet be relaxed.

2. Cross your feet right over left, and then cross them in the reverse, left over right.

Repeat this movement, increasing the speed. The movement should be relaxed and free, not controlled. What you’re doing is using the momentum of your feet to roll your thigh bone in the socket and warm up the joint.

The more speed you add, the less you’ll tend to control the movement and the more mobility you will encourage.

3. Once you’ve completed around fifty repetitions, lower your legs so that they’re flat on the floor again. Now we’re going to initiate a twisting movement for the lower back, opening up the front of the hip as well.

Please note, if at any time you experience pain with twisting, make the movement smaller until you no longer feel the pain, or stop completely. You should have no sharp pain or muscle spasms with this practice.

4. Bend your right knee so that your right foot is toward the sky. Imagine your right knee floating up off the floor, and twist your leg and hip so that your right foot reaches across your back, opening up your hip and touch your right foot to the ground on your left side.

Allow your body to roll and open up as you do this. Only go as far as is comfortable.

5. Switch and bend your left knee, floating the knee and thigh off the floor, reaching across your body to touch your left foot down on your right side.

Use as little effort as possible to lift the leg and reach across to the other side.

Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine a string pulling your foot toward the sky, across your body, and to your other side. See how much tension you can let go of and still complete the movement. The goal is to make this as effortless as possible.

Complete about ten to twenty repetitions of this practice toward either side.

For more movement practices that help reduce muscle guarding and tension and alleviate common, painful conditions like lower back pain, get Perfect Posture for Life, my ebook that goes covers posture correction in-depth. Click here to order the ebook.

1. Calais-Germain, Blandine. Anatomy of Movement. Eastland Press, 1993. Print.

January 28, 2019 Pain Relief

My Guaranteed Method to Fix Your Hunched Back for Good

Is upper back, neck and shoulder pain the bane of your existence? You’re definitely not alone.

Over half of all Americans experience back pain symptoms every year¹, yet the medical establishment’s ability to address spinal pain is fairly limited. Doctors rely on anti-inflammatory drugs and muscle relaxers to alleviate the symptoms, turning to spinal surgery for more acute cases.

While I’ve seen surgery help some of my clients in more dire circumstances, it’s a bit terrifying that spinal surgery fails to resolve a patient’s condition so frequently that there is actually an official diagnosis for this lack of result: failed back surgery syndrome.

Perhaps even more frighteningly, doctors have been recently found to be splitting their attention across multiple operating rooms at the same time² and taking kickbacks from medical device companies³. It doesn’t take a leap to realize that a person struggling with chronic back pain is facing a dire situation fraught with risky and possibly perilous choices.

Yikes. With all of our advanced imaging and research, why are doctors still unable to address such a common health complaint?

Understanding the Spine

From my perspective, the reason that people aren’t getting the help they need for stiff, aching backs is that the way Western medicine views the spine is somewhat limited.

That view is reflected linguistically in our reference to the backbone as a spinal “column.” When we talk of firmness in the context of having good boundaries, we refer to “having a spine.” In short, the cultural view of the spine is as something rigid and unyielding.

And surgeries mirror this concept. When a doctor recommends spinal surgery, what they’re likely going to do is increase stability and decrease movement by fusing vertebrae. However, according to Dr. Charles Rosen, clinical professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, “Maybe 5 percent of patients with back pain need surgery.” Yet in the United States alone, over a million people undergo spinal surgery each year³.

That means that a vast number of people who experience debilitating spinal problems undergo unnecessary surgery every year that reduces range of motion and flexibility of the spine while not resolving their symptoms.

Your Spine is A Slinky, Not a Strut

There are many reasons why surgeries fail. The doctor did a poor job, or the problem wasn’t accurately diagnosed in the first place. But in my view, a major component of the failure of spinal surgery is that your spine isn’t meant to be a rigid structure.

Structure of the human spine, side view.

While absorbing compressive force is one function of the spine, in a living body that bony column also has to facilitate movement. I envision the spine functioning more like a spring, or a slinky. If you look at the anatomy of your spine, you’ll see that viewed from the side, it has three curves, one each at your neck, mid back, and lower back. You could also count the fused sacrum—the bottommost bone of your spine—as a fourth curve.

These curves function to absorb load and shock as you sit, stand, walk, and run through life. Each time your foot strikes the ground, a shockwave goes through your body. There are many structures designed to help your body cope with and dissipate this shock, but your spine is definitely a major one.

intervertebral discs of the lumbar spine

The cartilaginous discs between your vertebrae absorb shock, provide ligamentous support and allow for a measure of independent movement between the bones.

If your spine were meant to be a column—a rigid, supportive structure that connected your head to your pelvis and had no other function than to hold your head upright—it would be straight.

But it’s not like that at all. In addition to the curves that help your spine to spring, it’s comprised of twenty-four individual vertebrae (not counting the fused ones in your sacrum), separated by cartilaginous discs that also aid in absorbing compressive shock while allowing for independent movement.

The Spine Generates Movement

Your spine essentially serves three purposes. The first is to protect your spinal cord, the thick rope of neural material that runs through its center. Second, your spine provides flexible support for load bearing and movement. And third, your spine has to allow mobility in your torso—to bend, flex, and rotate.

Muscles of the deep abdomen and upper leg related to core locomotion.

Professor Serge Gracovetsky, author of The Spinal Engine, studied the spine extensively and found that in addition to the above functions, the spine is a primary generator of locomotion. What that means is that the human gait, previously believed to be primarily a function of the legs, actually stems from the spine⁴.

So, you’re not a stiff torso carried around by a pair of sticks (legs). Movement stems from your core, initiated by a lateral bend to your lumbar spine.

This makes quite a lot of logical sense when you examine the connection of the psoas, a deep abdominal muscle that originates at the front of the spine, to the upper thigh.

Hope for Back Pain – Prioritizing Resilience

In virtually every case of back pain—upper back pain, lower back pain, middle back pain, back pain on one side, back pain that spans both sides—my clients’ symptoms have shown improvement when the spine became more mobile, not less.

In fact, when assessing a person’s movement, I watch them walk and look for places that don’t allow movement to translate through the spine. It’s a bit like looking for rocks blocking the flow of a stream.

A mobile spine is a resilient spine, while a stiff, inflexible one is prone to injury. My experience with my clients has shown me time and again that restoring mobility to areas of the spine that have become stiff, fixed, or rigid releases tension from surrounding musculature and alleviates pain.

And this is yet another reason that the traditionally accepted definition of posture as a rigid pose, placing your body into straight alignment and holding it there, is less than ideal. The kind of inflexibility generated by such a practice makes you brittle over time and reduces the number of options your body has for movement.

Fixing a Hunched Back

The mid back is an area prone to tension, especially in those who spend hours sitting or standing at computers day in and day out, resulting in a depressed sternum.

When the rib cage collapses downward, it causes your belly to pooch forward and your upper chest to flatten. The result is a kyphosis in your thoracic spine—increased curvature of the mid back, like the beginning of a hunchback.

This posture provides no support for your head. Your neck is forced into a forward angle and the result is head-forward posture.

Neck and Upper Back Pain Stretch

This practice will elongate the thoracic spine, restoring mobility and decreasing tension.

1. Stand arm’s length away from the wall. Put your palms flat against the wall and spread your fingers wide.

2. Keeping your palms against the wall, step back and stretch out so your hands are directly overhead and you’re looking down at your toes with your ears squarely between your arms (Fig.26). Pull your belly button gently toward your spine to protect your low back.

3. Press your palms into the wall with a slight downward pressure, like you’re trying to slide the heels of your hands down the wall. Engage all the muscles of your arms and shoulders, using 100% of your strength to press into the wall. Remember to keep your belly button engaged.

4. Hold this isometric contraction for 15-20 seconds and then relax, deepening the stretch. Be careful not to let go of your belly button and let your low back hyperextend when you relax. You should be able to press your chest forward and down further.

5. Repeat this 2-3 times, deepening the stretch a little more with each repetition.

Mid Back Exercise for Upper Back Pain

In this practice, you’ll be waking up the muscles of your back and shoulders to “turn them on” so that your body can use them as you move about your life.

You’ll need a wooden dowel or short stick of about eighteen inches in length.

1. Lie on the floor or on a yoga mat, face down.

2. Place your arms out in front of you, palms up. Grasp the stick or dowel in your palms with your hands shoulder-width apart and your elbows bent.

3. Keeping your elbows in line with your wrist and your head in line with the rest of your spine (don’t lift your chin and look up), lift your elbows a few inches off the floor and hold for a count of ten.

4. Repeat for six sets, holding for ten seconds each time. If this is too long, drop down to only five seconds for each set. Don’t over-exert! There is no benefit to doing more than your body can handle.

You can find more posture-correcting practices just like these in my ebook, Perfect Posture for Life. Learn more and order the book by clicking here.

1. https://www.acatoday.org/Patients/Health- Wellness-Information/Back-Pain-Facts-and-Statistics
2. Baker, Mike, and Justin Mayo. “Swedish double-booked its surgeries, and the patients didn’t know. The Seattle Times, 28 May 2017. Web.
3. http://www.orthopaedicsurgery.uci.edu/pdf/rosengoodhousekeeping.pdf
4. http://www.alexandertechnique-running.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Spinal-Engine.pdf