Your Posture, Your Life
Which came first:
your posture or your life?
Posture isn't just how you sit, stand or walk; posture informs your attitude
Can straightening your spine straighten you out?
Can you develop self esteem by standing tall?
Are you more likely to you be confident if you're walking tall?
Instantly. Here's how it works.
Go ahead, try this at home...
- Wherever you are right now, sit or stand a little taller.
- Shoulders down, shoulderblades lightly back.
- Tailbone tucked slightly down and under
- chin slightly down and back so you feel the back of your neck lift.
Take a deep breath, in through your nose/out through your nose hearing a loud HA resonate in your throat.
How do you feel?
A bit calmer? More energetic? Slightly happier?
According to the Wall Street Journal Article, How Bad Sitting Posture at Work Leads to Bad Standing Posture All The Time, "There's growing evidence that good posture contributes to a range of health benefits, from reducing back and joint pain to boosting mood."
The article further notes, " Health-care practitioners from physical therapists to surgeons to psychologists increasingly take posture into account when evaluating patients, and offer tips and tools for improvement."
You’re not just hearing it in hot yoga class - the medical profession is getting behind that what you felt during Pranayama: that straight posture leads to deeper healings, lighter feelings, both physical and emotional, and all from a few moments of guided practice in getting things straight.
Straightening up will surprise you - and others.
People will ask if you’ve had plastic surgery because suddenly, inexplicably, you'll look ten years younger.
Your backache will subside. Your shoulders will loosen.
You might actually grow in height. A person who is a mere 5’1” has a spine 3 feet long, a smart stack of vertebrae resting on cartilaginous, pillow-like material betweent he bones. At any time, these pillows are flattened or fluffed by your posture. All that fluff is nothing to take lightly: as you puff up and lift, you may begin to feel ...uplifted. You may seem to be stepping more lightly. You may begin to take your worries more lightly despite nothing actually changing in your situation.
You may even smile.
But perhaps the most powerful surprise is how empowered you feel when you straighten up.
There is something energetically powerful about standing up straight. Our vocabulary informs that feeling: “Stand up for yourself,” we say to encourage people, or “He’s a stand-up guy” to describe someone with integrity, or “I’ve got to get this straightened out,’ when we talk about getting things as we want them.
Another Wall Street Journal article, How Power Poses Can Affect Your Career, states, "...striking a powerful, expansive pose actually changes a person's hormones and behavior, just as if he or she had real power."
Merely practicing a "power pose" for a few minutes—try standing tall and leaning slightly forward with arms at your side, feet planted firmly—leads to higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, physiological changes linked to better performance and more confident, assertive behavior, recent studies show.
Now here's where we - this yogi and that latest research - disagree:
"Because poor posture can often be caused by obesity or weak muscle tone, correcting it isn't a quick fix for many patients. Even for people in good shape, bad posture habits can be so ingrained that it takes constant vigilance to improve them."
Nonsense. You can straighten up any time now.
Yoga poses not only offer instant relief, they can change your bad habits faster than you were told and with a lot less effort. Hot yoga in particular: it seems to blast through old habits that aren't serving you like dynamite.
Once you feel how badly that old body posture feels and how amazingly different you feel when guided through the 26 yoga poses - who wouldn't want more of that?
Simple posture adjustments and you can keep your spine in line at home, in the office, standing at a Bruce Springsteen concert.
Effort? Nah! You will simply want to do them. It doesn't take hard work or vigilance - that's how your posture became so clenched in the first place! - it takes a moment of feeling how much better it feels to feel better, and then choosing to return to feeling better over and over again.
Good posture, like a good feeling life, is your choice. Available anytime.
And just a little more justification from the medical world: while Yoga offers thousands of years of anectodal evidence of the link between body postures (also called asanas) and mood, outside of yoga it has long been observed that depression can affect a person's slumped posture.
New research now suggests it may just be the other way around, as yoga always informed us: slouching can start a spiral downward into negative emotions and thoughts:
"In one recent study, 30 people receiving inpatient treatment for major depression disorder in Germany were divided into two groups, and asked to sit in either a slumped or upright position. Participants were shown 16 positive words, such as "beauty" and "enjoyable," on a computer screen, and then 16 negative words, such as "exhaustion" and "dejected."
After each word, they were asked to imagine themselves in a scene connected with the word, such as a time when they'd felt depressed or beautiful.
The participants were then distracted with other tasks for five minutes, and afterward asked to recall as many of the words as they could. Patients in the slumped position recalled more negative than positive words, while those in the upright position showed more balanced recall.
Another study in the journal Biofeedback in 2012 notes researchers in California and Taiwan had a group of 110 university students to rate their energy levels, then walk in either a slouched position or skipping. You guessed it: students reported decreased energy after the slouch and an increase after skipping.
Don't skip this good news: you can always stand up for yourself. Posture is your instant attitude adjustment. Stand up over and over or better yet - skip through your day.
And then we'll talk about the physiology of smiling....
Rhonda Uretzky, E-RYT
Reader Comments (7)
After reading this blog, I applied this 'action' of straightening up my posture whenever I noticed that I wasnt. Which sadly is often. Its amazing and I knew it would work but knowing and doing are not the same! I INSTANTLY felt better, more confident, more approachable, hard to describle exactly how this changed the way I felt. I know if it did that for me, then it must be making an impact on anyone crossing my path.
Sitting in front of a computer all day, it is easy to let your posture go. But taking that second to notice and to adjust how you are sitting, oh what a fantastic sensation. You suddently feel awake, energized. The tightness in your shoulders goes away, it's like a weight has been lifted off you shoulders and you are a whole new person
Interesting, isnt it? The body is a map of all that you have ever felt and experienced. Noticing when something hurts during a yoga pose can be a clue to a deeper healing coming up. Even without knowing what's going on in someone's life, you can sense the weight of it in the way they walk, sit, carry themselves. And you can help with words of compassion. Aligning the body as we do in hot yoga can put you in line with your overall sense of well being. With hot yoga, you get the wonderful benefit of a healthy body and a life that lines up the way you asked.
Totally agree Gabby! Sitting at my desk staring at a computer, I often find myself slumping and then I sit up straight, shoulders down and I feel more alert, aware, it's a good thing.
Bad Posture has always been an issue for me....I don't have back problems or anything like that....but if I'm sitting and in a conversation I'm usually hunched over with shoulders scrunched together.....
Sometimes I notice this and sit myself up and can kinda feel it in my spine after being hunched over for a while. I used to have a desk job where for 7 hours I was expected to work at a desk....I usually kicked my chair away and stood up to read reports and paced around cubicles as I read....I wouldn't acknowledge people but pace up and down the aisles reading....I would hear them talk about me....
What about that really old statue "The Thinker" is the name of it I believe.....isn't he hunched over in thought and even accessing his pineal gland? or is his hand on his chin? Either way he is hunched over in thought and maybe theres something to that ancient piece of artwork thats so deep in thought and may have scoliosis....
Well, I dont know about the scoliosis but maybe his posture is why The Thinker never found the answer...
No matter how you look at it, hunched posture won't get you anywhere. Straighten up and fly right (there's some wisdom that makes sense)
As for pacing while you're reading: let 'em talk! Its been proven that a body in motion helps the mind to focus and memorize. In teacher training, we recommend you pace while you read/memorize your asana scripts. Move around a lot: motion creates emotion and emotional memory trumps mind memory everytime. Just throw your shouders back, stretch your chest open, tilt your chin slightly up and smile...good posture does something amazing for you, body and spirit
Pacing and moving around while memorizing the script does really work!
The only thing hunched posture will get you is pain and a kyphotic curve (widows hump) in your spine that all your muscles will be forced to accommodate to.
Try this postural alignment on yourself. Begin by standing tall with chest forward, shoulders back, feet together, arms forward. Hey its standing Savasana!
Imagine a line going through the side of your body. Going through your ear lobe, through your shoulder joint, through the center of your hip joint, through the midline of your knee and through the center of your ankle joint.
The line should run straight down and hit the center of the the above points, this would be great posture. For example if the line dosent go through the ear lobe, then your head is to far forward. If your aware of this then you can adjust by bring the chin and neck back to get the ear in proper alignment with the shoulder.
This is a good tool to use to self correct your own posture.