How to stop slouching
1. Breathe
Imagine wearing a necktie that is glued to a button halfway down your shirt. This is the fascial equivalent of what's happening in most of us when we're struggling to sit or stand up straight. Many people's answer to that is to hyperextend their mid-back. You may be more upright but now you're tight in the front AND the back. That tension is going to constrict your rib cage and limit your ability to breathe deeply.
Your ideal posture is wherever you can take the deepest and easiest breath.
This means you can play "hot/cold" by breathing deeply while making minor adjustments to your posture (bend forward and back, move your weight around) and comparing how easy the breath feels after each adjustment. Let your breath guide you into a more and more effortless position. It may feel like your shoulders or back are more rounded than you'd expect. Years of overcompensating mean that many of us have a distorted internal sense of what appropriate posture should feel like. Trust your breath! Breathing is essential for life, "standing up straight" is not.
2. Get spacious
Did you know that there are forces in your body that are, at this very moment, effortlessly lifting each of your vertebrae up off of each other and lifting your head up and away from your neck? The connective tissue of the body forms a springy three-dimensional web like the toy pictured above. This is the principle of “tensegrity.” When you compress the structure, it springs back.
Like I said in my last newsletter, tension down the front line of our body is the major cause of slouching. This is like a little guy sitting in the middle of the structure (your chest) pulling the pieces inward. Forcing ourselves to sit up straight is like getting into a tug of war with that little guy, doubling the amount of tension in the system. It’s inefficient and exhausting. If, instead, we can get the little guy to let go, those expansive elastic forces are free to do what they’re meant to: spring us up into balanced posture. How do we do that?
We bring our awareness to the existence of those forces and nourish them with our attention. Just by noticing that space exists, your nervous system orients to the reality of spaciousness. My favorite way to do this is by thinking about various parts of my body and simply asking the question of how much distance exists between them. It’s a technique derived from neurofeedback that I learned from Les Fehmi’s book "the Open-Focus Brain.” You can listen to his meditations here.
3. Find your back
This is a practice I learned from my Alexander Technique teacher, Nanette Walsh (thank you, Nan, for the edits!)
Stand a few inches in front of a wall. Allow yourself to come to your full height, and invite your back into length and width. Allow yourself to breathe. In a minute, you are going to lean back towards the wall. Taking care that you are not holding your breath or stiffening your neck, allow yourself to lean back very slowly until your back is against the wall, (avoid over-straightening yourself or trying to put your head on the wall.) You may want to adjust your feet forward or back until you are far enough away from the wall that you have some time to explore the experience of coming back towards it, but not so far that you’re losing control of the motion and falling. Try it again. What part of your body touches the wall first? Now aim to have your upper back and butt land on the wall at the same time. Explore this a few times with that goal in mind. Notice if you're breathing. The point is not to “get it right,” but to nourish your body’s proprioception, your sense of where you are in space which is an essential foundation of being upright.
I especially like this technique because, in addition to feeding your proprioception, it’s also engaging your parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) nervous system. The sympathetic (“fight or flight”) nervous system is very forward facing and visually focused. So any time we access our back body, it requires that system to downregulate. Because these two systems exist in counterbalance, like a seesaw, when one is down, the other goes up.
You may notice this sympathetic/parasympathetic balance will be a recurring theme in this series of tips. That is not a coincidence. The sympathetic nervous system encourages contraction and tension, the opposite of what we’re going for. To get the effortless open expansiveness that defines ideal posture, we have to nourish our parasympathetic system.
