Why is it so difficult to improve our posture? We’ve all heard about it, talked about it or tried to improve it. There is a whole profession devoted to ergonomics, that aims to improve our posture within the workplace. Yet who has ever really had any success with ergonomics, to the point that posture becomes ideal and our pain and discomfort resolve never to return again?
This gets pretty deep so firstly, what is posture?
Posture is not just the position we sit in at our desk or on the couch. It’s the way we coordinate our body as we move through every minute, of every day of our lives.
Posture is ever present. It is present when we sit, stand, walk, run, play sport, play music, sing, dance and on it goes. Posture is NEVER NOT present.
And what is it that defines our posture? Well, everything does. From the moment we are conceived, factors start affecting our posture. In fact we could go a step further with epigenetics and say that from the moment our grandmothers were born, the external world started to affect our posture. Let’s leave epigenetics alone for now though.
Developmental movement and milestones most definitely play a major part for all of us. Good movement is like an unfolding sequence. It always happens in the same order in each of us as children, regardless of who we are and where are parents came from. We don’t learn to walk, and we don’t need to be taught, we simply express our innate capacity to walk. But as this happens, we are changed and altered by the world around us and within us.
Externally, every thought, feeling and spoken word directed towards us and every decision made by our parents or guardians on our behalf when we are children, all culminate into the being that we are and that we are becoming. This continues throughout our life and is happening to us right now.
Then there is the internal dialogue that affects our posture. The “self talk” that develops as we grow, and all the feelings and emotions we have, all of these things begin to shape our physical being.
If that seems a stretch, then let’s dive a little bit further.
I’m not an academic, so there are no specific studies to reference but I’ll refer to a few commonly known ideas derived from research over the decades.
The first is as follows: When we are happy, we smile. When we practice smiling, it makes us happy. There is sufficient evidence to support this although you’ll have to trust me despite the lack of “peer reviewed literature!”
So it’s a two way way street, right? Emotions affect our movement in this case, and the movement affects our emotions.
Let’s take depression for example now, where the depressed feelings make our shoulders slump, our head drops, we drag our feet etc. These are just stereotypes by the way, as we are all different. But it turns out, if we practice moving like this, it starts to create feelings of depression!
The same applies to anxiety, where there are specific movement, breathing and posture traits associated with the emotional state.
In fact, every emotional state is associated with stereotypical postures, movements and breathing patterns.
Like the smiling example though, it’s all two way traffic. Movements affect emotion and emotion affects movement. But it’s not as simple as just changing the way we move, because the internal story we are telling ourselves, coupled with the reality of the world around us, makes for a pretty complex problem.
We can stand up straight and tall, as if we are the happiest person in the world, but if we hate our job or live with toxic relationships for example, we simply can’t maintain the external facade. That would require some big decisions and some big life changes. Toxicity must be removed first before we can thrive. But if we can understand the relationship between posture and emotion, and just how deep this goes, then at least we have a starting point from which to make some true change.
Beware! From here, it only gets harder! Because if we put all the pieces together, then we recognise that posture and movement are not just simple mechanics that we can override. Posture and movement are the physical expression of our personality. Every event both external and internal that has occurred in our lives up to this point, every thought and action, every value and belief, have quite literally shaped and cultivated the physical person that we are right here in this moment. Our movement and posture is thus defined by who we think we are.
So then do we really want to “fix” our posture?
What is required of us to do this, is for us to change our own personality. We must consider who we really are. Strip it all back an examine our own consciousness, our own awareness. And that is very, very confronting. Talk about tackling the big stuff!
Can it be done?
None of us are going to change this over night, or next week, or over the next year. We can’t change it once and then expect the changes to stick. It will take each of us a lifetime. Because posture is happening in every moment of every day, from now until the end of our days. Changing ourselves and our posture is an immense challenge that never goes away. Every thought, decision and action we take will play a part in our movement and posture as we evolve through a lifetime. If we want ideal movement and posture, then we must make a conscious effort to always be the very best version of ourselves. It’s tough, maybe even impossible, but it is definitely still worth the attempt. None of us will ever be perfect, but aiming to be the best version of ourselves sounds like a good target to aim for, don’t you think?