Posture

Listen, anxiety is real. I know it’s one of those hoo-haw reasons people use to justify their weed habit, but like wind, anxiety is something you can’t see that does a ton of real, tangible damage.

And most of us are living at least a little bit of it.

Years ago, I wandered into a yoga for anxiety workshop out of curiosity. I’m a bodyworker, so I’m always looking for ways to help people through work with the physical body.

I couldn’t believe how full the class was. It was so packed, in fact, that they had to turn people away. “Look around you,” the instructor told us. “Look at all the people who are living this secret life.”

Anxiety Is A Secret Identity

Chronic, low-grade anxiety does give you a sort of secret identity, but not in a superhero X-Men sort of way. Instead of having amazing powers, you’re crippled by thoughts about catastrophes that just **might** happen.

One minute, you’re super happy, humming zip-a-dee-doo-dah and waving breezily at your neighbor. The next, gremlins infiltrate your brain with insidious little thoughts about things you might have left undone, situations that could go wrong, disasters that have a 0.0003254% chance of occurring.

What if I left the stove on…
What if the door is unlocked…
What if the client cancels…
What if I get a negative review at work…
What if I my kid doesn’t pass second grade…
What if my spouse doesn’t love me anymore…
What if I’m not good enough…
What if my body is ugly and gross…
What if I lose my job…
What if I can’t do it?

Everyone has these fears to some extent. Life is fraught with uncertainty and we all suffer at least some level of imposter syndrome — feeling like you’re not really qualified to do whatever you’re doing (everything from writing a book to parenting to simply having an opinion).

But left unattended, these what if thoughts can start to take over your life.

My Anxiety Story

Nearly twenty years ago, I had a lot of problems. They weren’t “on paper” problems like a drug habit, alcohol addiction, panic attacks, failing out of school or other “diagnosable” issues. In fact, on paper, I was doing great.

I was a gold medal competitive college athlete, a dean’s list student and I’d just returned from my second study abroad making me now fluent in two foreign languages. Everything looked…fine.

But it wasn’t.

Inside, I was a giant quivering mess. And all that internal gnawing showed up in…well, external gnawing. To calm my nerves, I ate.

And then I punished myself for eating with diets and exercise. A lot of it. Only, no matter how much I tried to work out and eat the “right” foods, nothing really ever stuck. Why? Because food wasn’t the problem — anxiety was.

Being vs. Doing

Science has made our culture very doing focused. I’m not knocking science, of course. In fact, I’m a data junkie. But sometimes in the process of scrutinizing the microscopic picture, we look only at the toppings and not at the whole pizza.

And then we wind up treating symptoms instead of root causes. For me, overeating was a symptom of a deeply held underlying anxiety. No matter how much I tried to control the “doing” aspects of my life, i.e. the calories I was eating and burning, nothing stuck because my anxiety was the driver for my appetite.

How I was “being” on a day to day basis drove everything that I did. So trying to change my habits without changing my underlying state was kind of like trying to put a roof on a house with no walls and no foundation.

The Anxiety Switch

I was just a kid in college, but I knew something wasn’t right. After talking to counselors and therapists with little success, I tried reading body positive books. These gave me momentary blips of happiness before I devolved into anxiety again. We already know that diets and exercise weren’t it.

And then something unexpected happened. As a college athlete and former equestrian, I had a lot of tight muscles and pain. As luck would have it, someone practicing a strange sounding form of holistic postural therapy called “Rolfing” came to the barn where we kept our horses.

My mom started treatment first to address a spinal injury she’d suffered that caused her some back problems. It truly helped her, so I gave it a try as well. In seeking therapy for my broken body, I discovered an unexpected benefit.

My muscles and joints ceased hurting, my flexibility increased, but my mood was also affected. I found myself to be much more calm and centered. My creativity blossomed. I started drawing and was even asked to facilitate an arts program at the tech company where I worked.

I felt happier and more comfortable in my own skin than I ever had before. And my eating stabilized.

Now, I’m not saying it cured all my food issues. Disordered eating is complex. But changing my body made inroads where nothing else had even dented the surface.

The Physiology of Anxiety

When people ask me how I got into the work that I do, typically I just tell them that I had it done and found it very helpful. I don’t go into all the details.

But the truth is that while, yes, it changed my body, what hooked me and got me to pursue bodywork as a career is the impact it had on my brain. I had never felt so…me.

But I had no idea why it had this impact. It seemed like crazy magic, and I had to learn how to wield it. For a long time even after I completed the training and was actively practicing with clients, I had no idea why postural realignment impacted people’s lives so profoundly.

Many clients have made drastic life changes after getting treatments, everything from leaving abusive relationships to switching careers, losing huge amounts of weight or even just saying that, like me, they felt that stress and trauma had loosened their grip on their emotions.

I never gave up looking for the mechanism behind the magic. I had an inkling that the nervous system was involved. And a couple of years ago when a particular training coincided with some personal life events, it finally clicked.

Tension — tightness in your muscles — is a physical indicator of activation in the sympathetic branch of your nervous system.

Say what?

Let me put that in plain English: muscle tension means you are, on some level, living in a chronic state of fight or flight.

The Body Tells the Brain What to Think

When your body is tense all over, your brain believes that there’s something to be worried about. In short, it thinks a sabertooth tiger is lurking in the bushes, waiting to pounce.

While your brain can control your body — mind over matter, and all of that — your body also talks to your brain. The mind-body connection is a two-way street.

No wonder I was anxious all the time — and so many other people are, too. With the increase in sedentary jobs, the prevalence of technology in our everyday lives, long commutes, and a cultural addiction to sitting, the health of our bodies has suffered — namely our posture.

Suboptimal posture (read: bad) puts extra strain on your body. It makes your muscles work harder to hold you up. Executing the same repetitive fine motor skills (typing, mousing, texting) over and over for hours at a stretch day after day tightens our arm, shoulder and neck muscles.

Our bodies are tight. And so our brains believe we’re in danger. They go crazy looking for the threat.

Is it the stove that you may have left on? Did you remember to lock the door?

Every quirk of an eyebrow, every snide comment, every awkward interaction is an opportunity for worry and fear.

But there is a fix.

How Better Posture Can Change Your Life

Here’s the good news: you don’t need years of therapy to calm your anxious body. While therapy is highly beneficial (and recommended) just treating the thoughts in your head doesn’t address the physical aspects of anxiety.

I have had clients come to me to work on their bodies after twenty years of therapy because they’d hit a wall that they just couldn’t break through. Working with the body can make inroads in regions of your brain unaffected by rational thought.

Realigning your posture alleviates muscle tension. Truly good posture is easy to maintain and allows your body to stay upright with the least amount of effort.

Good alignment means less physical tension. And carrying less tension causes your brain to relax.

Your nervous system has two modes: fight or flight and rest or relax.

You can’t be in both at once. Changing your posture shifts your body from fight or flight into the nice, calm, happy rest and relax response. It’s in this state that we connect to others and get creative.

You can’t fully function if you’re always in fight or flight. Some part of you is always looking for the tiger in the bushes. You’re in survival mode, focused on dispatching threats and not on connecting to others, creating, or building a successful future.

The only thing you want in that moment is to get away from the danger. To survive.

But a life lived in rest and relax is much different. When you’re in your calm state, you have space to connect, to be present to your partner and children, to build and create, to dream.

This is what Posture Rehab is all about.

The effects of better posture are like meditation for your body. When I created Posture Rehab, I wanted more for my clients than just better alignment.

Don’t get me wrong. Alignment can be a miracle for alleviating pain and body issues. Posture Rehab definitely does that…but it also works to calm your nervous system down.

The function is two-fold. First, it decreases muscle tension, which allows you to stand taller and move more freely with less effort. This takes care of making your body feel ten years younger and giving you the energy of a pageant kid on pixie sticks.

Second, it makes you happy. Better posture has been proven to boost mood, improve positive thoughts and even augment problem solving skills.

Healthy. Happy. Productive. What more could you ask?

The Posture Rehab system is a video course designed to teach you the tools of better posture so you can create these kinds of results for yourself.

Click here to buy Posture Rehab now >>

Posture is the position in which you hold your body while you’re doing stuff. And if the stuff you’re doing every day involves a lot of time in front of a computer, you probably already know that your posture could use a little help.

Sitting in front of computers has an uncanny way of causing our backs to scream in pain. However, it might not necessarily be the sitting that’s the problem, but rather the way in which we sit.

There are a lot of common misconceptions about what constitutes “good” posture. I find that the majority of my clients are making these critical mistakes, actually making their bodies more tense and causing extra muscle aches along the way.

So here are three mistakes you’re probably making when trying to fix your posture, and how to quickly fix them:

1. Pulling your shoulders back.

This is number one for a reason. When I say “posture,” the first thing that probably pops into your head is “shoulders back!” And anyone who sits in front of a computer knows that the struggle is real when it comes to keeping those shoulders in line with your ears. They just have a way of wanting to creep forward.

While keeping a nice vertical line from ears to shoulders is really ideal, straining to keep your shoulders back usually won’t help. Why? Because your shoulders aren’t actually the problem.

Your shoulder girdle — the bony structures that connect your arm to your ribs and spine — rests on your rib cage. Yes, you have ribs all the way up to your neck. They form the foundation for your shoulders.

Like any foundation, if it’s all caddywompus, so too will the structure be that sits upon it. Hours spent hunched in front of a computer cause tension in your hip flexors and abdomen that pull your rib cage down. This, in turn, causes your shoulders to round forward.

Pulling your shoulders back doesn’t fix the underlying problem — a depressed rib cage.

Try this instead: put your hand on your chest, just beneath your collar bones. Lift your chest up and forward (the forward is important!). You can pretend someone has a hook in the collar of your shirt and is pulling upward if that helps.

Notice how when your chest lifts your shoulders drop back automatically and without you having to hold them in place. Magic!

2. Bracing your core muscles.

Core strength is something of a trend right now, and for good reason. A strong core will help to support your spine, especially in bending and twisting movements.

But a braced core is not a good thing, and unfortunately, a lot of core strength practices get conflated with bracing. In fact, I often see advice to “brace your core” when sitting.

Noooooo!

Bracing your abdominals is not only impractical (really, how much attention can you put on what your abs are doing while you sort through complex mathematical spreadsheets for your upcoming presentation at work?), it’s downright harmful.

Too much tension makes you brittle, like the proverbial dry branch versus a nice, springy green twig. This is why I prefer the term “core integrity” over core strength. Core integrity is about having the muscles of your back and abdomen online and accounted for, but not so taught that they’re preventing your body from absorbing shock, moving, bending, or twisting.

Remember, your spine is not a column. It’s more of a spring, or a slinky even. If you splint it with muscular tension, you lose mobility, and that mobility has to come from somewhere else. That means that other joints are moving too much to accommodate joints that don’t move at all.

Be the twig. Lighten up on your dear core muscles. If you’re so tight in your abs that you can’t take a full breath, you’re clenching too much.

3. Forgetting about your legs.

So many people focus on just their shoulders and backs when it comes to posture. And sure, this is where posture shows up. As in, when you look at someone standing or sitting, you’ll notice the alignment of their back or shoulders before you think much about their legs (unless you’re me, and then you see bent people everywhere — it’s a curse).

But those shoulders and backs are connected to two very useful sticks called legs. Legs, as it turns out, have some of the biggest and most powerful muscles in the human body! Those muscles are absolutely essential to the function of your core.

Just try pressing a weight overhead in the seated position versus in standing. You’ll find that when you can contract your glutes, quads and hamstrings, you can push a whole lot more weight up than when you take your legs out of the equation.

Your legs work in conjunction with your abdominal and back muscles to support your spine. So, instead of flopping those legs out in front of you like limp noodles or tucking them under your seat like a pretzel, try putting your feet flat on the floor.

You’ll notice that with feet on the floor, your spine has a lot more support when you lean forward, which is what people do a lot of while sitting in front of computers. Over the course of eight-ish hours a day, five or so days per week, using your legs adds up to a lot of saved energy — and a much happier spine.

I’m not sure why there are so many misconceptions about good posture and how to properly sit in front of a computer. But, if you want my complete guide to getting good posture even if you sit at a computer all day, check out my ebook Perfect Posture for Life.

Not only does it have a whole section on sitting and standing desks, it also has gobs of good exercises for releasing the tension you’ve got built up in your body from years of sitting improperly.

Click here to learn more and order the ebook >>

You already know that your mind can impact your body. There are piles of studies showing how “mind over matter” breaks through seemingly impossible physical limitations.

The placebo effect is well-documented in medical studies, and athletes use the power of visualization to optimize their sports performance.

But does it work in reverse, too? Can the state of your body influence your thoughts and emotions?

You’d better believe it.

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of just how much our posture and movement influence our brains. It turns out that your body is in constant, two-way communication with your brain, transmitting all kinds of data about safety, connection, even social hierarchy through your nervous system.

Your posture even has the power to influence physiological processes like body chemistry. So if you thought better posture was just about alleviating that ache in your neck, you might be surprised to learn just how crucial standing up straight can be for things like energy, focus, and confidence.

Here are five ways that better posture improves brain health.

No. 1 Sitting up straighter improves problem solving skills.

Have you ever experienced the sweaty palms and rapid heartbeat that accompany test anxiety? That’s no fun, but you’re in luck. A minor tweak to your posture can vanquish your stage fright altogether.

Sitting up straighter was shown improve focus for fifty-six percent of students who participated in a study at San Francisco State University. The study asked the students to rate their test anxiety and the difficulty of solving math problems. Those who sat up straight reported less anxiety overall and had less difficulty solving the math problems than their slumped counterparts.

“For people who are anxious about math, posture makes a giant difference,” said Professor of Health Education Erik Peper. “The slumped-over position shuts them down and their brains do not work as well. They cannot think as clearly.”

So, the next time you’re facing a difficult exam or have to give a career-making presentation, check your posture. Take a moment to relax your shoulders, lift your chest and elongate your neck for a quick cognitive boost.

No. 2 Sitting up straighter trains your brain to be happy.

Do you struggle with negativity and pessimism? This is a natural tendency. Our brains are wired to assess our immediate surroundings for threats and then dispatch the danger as quickly as possible.

From a survival standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. The saber tooth tiger that’s about to eat you for dinner will have a bigger impact on your life expectancy than plotting out a farm that will feed your family for generations. We’re immediate gratification machines.

But, it’s also really easy to get stuck focusing on all the bad stuff that could happen. Psychologists call this catastrophizing.

If you’re trapped in this loop, you could benefit from a simple postural shift. Sitting up straighter helps you to recall more positive memories, or even just think more positive thoughts in general.

The next time you find yourself trapped in the downward spiral of positive thinking, do a little check in with your body position. Are you hunched and crunched or sitting up straight? For an added happiness boost, combine upright posture with a practice that steers your mind toward positivity, like keeping a gratitude journal.

No. 3 Power poses make you feel more confident.

If you missed the wave of “power posing” a few years ago, then you might be wondering why people are standing around in bathrooms before job interviews with their arms overhead in a victory-V.

Well, the science is in, and adopting expansive postures — think Wonder Woman or Superman — doesn’t just make you look confident. It actually affects your brain’s neurochemistry to not only trick you into feeling courageous, but also having the hormonal profile of a more self-assured person.

Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy showed that Wonder Woman-like “power poses” actually change the neurochemistry inside your brain to produce hormones that make you look and feel more confident.

Participants in Cuddy’s study who adopted more expansive postures tested higher for testosterone, a hormone related to confidence and security, while those who assumed slouched, crunched, or diminished postures showed elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.

Interestingly, yoga poses traditionally thought to ease anxiety are also all about taking up space. This is another example of science confirming hundreds-of-years-old practices (happens all the time, and I love it).

Making your body expansive signals to your brain that you are safe, you don’t need to curl up and protect your vital organs, and you can relax. It also opens your breathing and removes physical stress from your digestive system, which is great if you suffer from any kind of impaired gut health.

No. 4 Upright posture makes you feel more rested even if you got crap for sleep.

When researchers study the brain, they put people into a reclined position before sliding them into an MRI machine. Some clever scientists realized that body position might be influencing brain function, so they did a study to find out if that was true.

And, in fact, it was! People who sat up straighter had consistently better reaction times when performing memory tests regardless of sleep quality, while those who reclined showed diminished brain function after a poor night’s sleep.

It turns out that your body position influences your autonomic nervous system. That’s the part of your nervous system that regulates physiological functions which are beneath your voluntary control, like heart rate, breathing, and digestion.

So, if you’ve been tossing and turning all night but you still have to be “on” all day, skip the coffee and pay attention to your posture. Sitting up straight will assist your brain in staying online so you can focus even when you’re tired.

No. 5 Good posture gives your brain an energy boost.

Your brain runs on oxygen, which helps it convert glucose — basically, sugar — into fuel. Without oxygen, it can’t metabolize its primary source of energy, and brain function flags.

Despite only measuring at about 2% of your total body weight, your brain uses about 20% of your total oxygen intake.

You can survive for weeks without food, days without water, but oxygen? You’d die in a few minutes if you were completely deprived. While severe oxygen deprivation would result in brain damage or death, mild depletion impairs cognitive function.

And poor posture decreases oxygen intake. Slouching or rounding your back effectively crunches your rib cage, making it difficult for your lungs to expand. That means you’ll breathe more shallowly.

In fact, hunched shoulders and forward head posture can decrease lung capacity by as much as 30% — ouch! That has a serious impact on your energy and focus.

And there you have it! Five surprising ways that better posture actually boosts brain health. If that doesn’t have you sitting up a tiny bit taller, I don’t know what will.

Of course, there’s a sneaky secret about posture that most folks don’t know — and that is that usually when people try to get better posture they go about it all wrong. Typical advice revolves around straightening your spine and pulling your shoulders back, but this just makes you tense, uptight and ultimately exhausted.

Truly good posture — the kind that gives you unshakeable self-confidence — is all about ease. I go way in-depth on this in my ebook, Perfect Posture for Life. If you want a guide to getting good posture that not only lasts but also feels damn good, check out the ebook here >>

Note: this post contains affiliate links. 

Hunched shoulders and a rounded spine might have you wondering: do posture correctors really work?

There are so many posture correcting devices on the market. Each one is supposed to help you stand up straighter. From shoulder braces to high-tech wearables that buzz when you slump over, the options are endless.

Seems like a great idea, right?

A brace to hold your shoulders back, a gentle buzz to remind you to sit up straight…

But what you don’t know about posture correctors could actually be hurting you…and your pocket book.

So before you go shelling out $80 (or more!) for posture training devices, here’s everything you need to know from a posture pro about whether these things really do their jobs.

Related:

• The Best Office Chair for Sitting Long Hours, According to A Posture Expert
• Computer Posture: How to Work at A Desk All Day Without Destroying Your Back
• Perfect Posture For Life: How To Finally Stop Slouching, Stand Tall And Move Freely (Even If You Sit At A Computer All Day)

Posture Braces

What they are:

Soft, elastic material that wraps around the front of your shoulders and attaches around your rib cage.

What they’re supposed to do:

Hold your shoulders back and keep you from slouching or hunching over.

Cost:

$25-$40

Do they work?

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of posture braces of any kind. Why? Because your body is designed to move, and no joint is more inherently mobile than your shoulder.

The humerus — or upper arm bone — attaches to the shoulder in a very shallow ball and socket joint. It’s so shallow, in fact, that it’s easy to dislocate. Your hip, also a ball and socket joint, is so much deeper than the shoulder. When you see the two next to each other, it’s easy to understand that the shoulder joint is meant for uninhibited movement.

Additionally, the shoulder girdle — which is what we call the bones of the shoulder that sit on your rib cage — basically hangs in a hammock of muscles. Your shoulder only has one bony attachment to the rest of your body where your collar bone meets your sternum.

Again, the shoulder is meant to move. Hunched over shoulders aren’t actually a shoulder problem at all — they’re a rib cage problem. Shoulders merely rest on the rib cage like  glass on a table. If the rib cage is caddywompus, the shoulder will be, too — just like a glass set on a wobbly table will also be unstable.

Posture correctors that brace shoulders don’t fix the underlying problem — a collapsed rib cage. And worse, they inhibit shoulder mobility, promoting unnecessary tension.

The verdict:

Don’t buy one.

A better option:

KT tape (Amazon) gives you the same proprioceptive nudge as a posture brace while still allowing free movement and range of motion in the joint.

Posture Wearables

What they are:

Tech devices that you wear on your back to monitor slouching.

What they’re supposed to do:

Wearable tech posture training devices provide a gentle vibration when your body rounds forward, reminding you to sit up straight.

Cost:

$80

Do they work?

Here’s my problem with these devices (okay, a couple of the problems I see): they in no way provide input on how the person achieves upright posture. They simply measure the position of the device.

I’ve been practicing with real clients — real, live human bodies — for nearly fifteen years now. Let me tell you, if you ask a person to sit up straight, it’ll reveal some interesting neural patterns. We all think we know what straight is, but many people are still sitting on a tucked-under tailbone, hyperextending their lower backs, or craning their necks to hold up collapsed rib cages.

These devices say that 92% of users report improvements to posture when worn. I’m asking: how is this measured? Is it based on app reports of how often the device needs to buzz at you to make you “sit up straight?”

Because that’s not a really great metric. A wearable that truly measured posture would take into account way more than just the position of your upper spine. It would assess lumbar curve, pelvic orientation, muscular engagement of the lower back, and so many more data points.

Also, holding your body in an upright position frankly isn’t all that useful. Of course, culturally speaking, we have a very rigid definition of posture. We assume it’s a snapshot on the cover of a magazine. But the reality is that posture is a mode of expression. Yes, it’s influenced by your daily activities, be they sitting in front of a computer, driving for hours, weight lifting, yoga, running or anything else.

But posture is dynamic. It’s the result of a lifetime of neural conditioning. Good posture isn’t about holding one single static position for hours on end, it’s about having a multitude of options.

In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that posture is a terrible metric for physical health. It doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on back pain, either. Why? Because when we’re measuring “posture,” we’re measuring something static.

(It should be noted that posture does matter, but it requires a bit of a shift in how we understand what posture actually is.)

The verdict:

Nope, don’t like ‘em. Your money would be better spent on a luxurious dinner out.

A better option:

Consult a pro, someone who can realistically assess your body and help your brain find new, more efficient neural pathways so you don’t have to constantly “mind” your posture.

Also, set up a more ergonomic workstation.

Lumbar Support Cushions

What they are:

Pillows that work to support the lumbar curve of your lower back.

What they’re supposed to do:

Alleviate pain by making it easier to sit up straight, thereby taking strain off of the muscles of your lower back

Cost:

$15-30

Do they work?

Here’s the thing about lumbar supports: they’re behind your body, meaning you have to lean backwards to get any benefit. When you’re sitting in an upright position, the weight of your body compresses downwards, not backwards.

So, lumbar supports do work, but only if you’re already reclining and not sitting up straight. I’ve found that, in general, lumbar supports tend to promote slouching rather than correct it.

Also, due to the over reliance on hip flexors in daily activities (sitting), most people already have too much lumbar curve.

The verdict:

Not worth it.

A better option:

Most people would benefit more from learning how to sit properly in the first place. Lumbar supports are only helpful to correct already poorly set up workstations. Simply raising a person’s seat so that their hips are above their knees will do wonders for lower back strain.

The Bottom Line On Posture Correctors

Ugh, are you feeling a little depressed that posture correctors aren’t worth their hype? I feel ya. I know what it’s like to want to fix your body in the worst way but not know exactly where to turn.

The good news is that fixing poor posture actually isn’t all that hard once you understand a few basic principles.

That’s why I wrote my ebook Perfect Posture for Life sharing nearly fifteen years of clinical expertise and nitty-gritty how-to on posture correction. These are the lessons I’ve learned from working with real live clients just like you who were frustrated with hunched shoulders, lower back pain, and stiff necks.

You can check it out by clicking here.