"Is Bad Posture Spoiling Your Life?"

  by James Crow
  BSc Hons Cog Sci MSTAT

  Bad Posture?

• Slumping
• Dowager's Hump
• Fatigue
• Neck Hanging Forward
• Back and Neck Pain
• You Look Worse than you could
• You Worry about how other people see you
  

Humour me now by doing your best to sit up straight. Go on, sit up straight in your best possible posture. Now hold that posture and read through this page. I think you will find the results surprising, and not what you expect.

Ok. Are you sitting up straight?

The Good: (You stop doing the things that make your posture bad)

When you learn to improve your posture...

• You change the ways you move and perform ordinary activities. This is how you get an improved posture.

• You gain a new, more comfortable, less strained way of standing and sitting. Work and play become much, much easier.
  

• You learn how your tensions and muscular pulls are dragging you down, compressing your spine, narrowing your back and restricting the movement of your ribs and breathing, pulling your neck forward and your head back and down.

All of these bad habits feel natural to you right now because you have been doing them for so long.
There is a way to change.
You can learn

• How to stop doing the "bad things", and as a result your head sits comfortably poised on top of your spine, which lengthens and provides the support for the rest of your body, your ribs free up, your breathing improves and you tire a lot less easily.
  
• So Your posture improves as a result, leaving you fresher, better-looking, more poised and in control.
  

Here's an example:
Your neck can come back into alignment with your back.
Do you know how high your neck really goes?  Run a finger up the back of your neck until you reach the back of the cranium (the big sphere that contains your brain). The neck goes a lot higher than you think, and "the neck" is in fact just the top area of your spine.  Notice how you may have a hump where the neck joins the rest of the spine, or how the neck sinks forward off the spine. This tension and pressure affects you all day, every day. And because it is so 'normal', you don't realise it's there until the suffering boils over.

The Bad: (You impose extra tension to try make your posture good)

Its such a shame that whenever we think of good posture we think of images like Sergeant-Majors from the army. 
Traditionally when we think of improving our posture, we stiffen our backs and necks and stick our chests forward. Of course, we look like our posture has improved. At least for a while...
All that pushing and pulling and stiffening isn't doing you any favours. Are you still sitting up straight?
The effort to do this is substantial. Muscles that remain held for a long time get tired, and then you want to let them go. To slump.
And back you go into a see-saw of stiffening then slumping, stiffening then slumping (you know the one!)

Help is at hand. There are inbuilt in each and every one of us, a series of reflexes throughout the body that support us against the force of gravity, that naturally co-ordinate our movement. You can see this reflex working naturally in toddlers and young children. There is a way to release these in-built reflexes - the ones that you have been suppressing. It allows you to sit and and stand up naturally balanced, supported by gravity rather than fighting against it.
Are you still continuing to make yourself sit up straight? Is it getting tiring? Don't stop yet!
Ok, only joking, permission to slump, soldier!

The Ugly: (You finally get tired of "sitting up straight" and fall back into a slump, more tired than when you started)

All that effort and tension takes its toll.
Sorry for asking you to sit up straight for so long. It doesn't work does it?
You probably feel more tired or even stiffer than before.
And even more bad news - a slump is not just a collapse. In fact, when you slump, many of your muscles are actively pulling you down. You just can't feel it, because you are so used to being a slumper. Check your posture now.