Finding Ease Part 1 – Making Peace with Posture and Pain

What is a “good posture”? When 295 physiotherapists across the world were asked this question, they could not agree on what it looks like. If you were to ask more than one person who claims to work on posture this same question, odds are pretty good you will get different answer. Despite a lack of agreement, people still believe that a “good posture” exists. On the other end of a spectrum, a number of scientific research studies have failed to demonstrate that “bad posture” (whatever that means) causes pain; most could not find a connection and those who found a correlation could not separate out cause from effect.

Despite these contradictions, the widely held belief that a “perfect posture” and a “bad posture” exists continues to be spread.

As much as I would love to believe we all recognize that the complexity of pain makes something as simple as posture simply a grain of salt in the big picture of the worldwide disabling epidemic of pain, this recognition does not appear to be trending much better, yet…  A slight glimmer of good news occurred as some international news circuits have picked up on a recent study which nicely demonstrates that the fear-mongering “text neck” does not cause pain and the Guardian recently had a great post regarding the myth of sitting posture. If these don’t get you thinking, check out a great video from Greg Lehman titled “Perfect posture doesn’t exist.“

If you think about it, it never really made sense, take a moment to look at life around the world and recognize how what many perceive as “bad postures”, are in fact, a normal variation in the demands of daily living. The body is remarkably resilient and designed to take on the stresses of daily living:

Part of the problem in interpretation of “good” or “bad” posture is the illusion that somehow, we are all keeping certain postures during the day. The truth is, we rarely keep the same posture for long. Dreischarf et al. looked at 208 adults with no current low back pain and monitored their lumbar spinal postures via electronic sensors for 24 hours. They found that the average range of change during the day was 8-33 degrees of lumbar lordosis! What we think of posture is just a tiny snap shot in the motion picture that makes a person’s day:

Another problem is that what we perceive as a “bad posture”, may simply be representative of an unconscious protective behavior. If you introduce a noxious stimulus to someone’s back, IE: inject a high concentration saline in their back, they will change their posture. As shocking as it may sound, our body wants to protect itself, and it will change its behavior with, or without, your input. What the body perceives as threatening is more than simply nociceptive input, your emotions influence your posture as well. Moderate to severe depression is associated with classic “poor postures” and fear of pain reduces lumbar flexion to provide just a few examples. If you combine fear of pain with minor injury such as a workout which produces normal “muscle soreness”, your body may avoid lumbar flexion. Furthermore, if you have an episode of back pain, even if you do not have fear about it, your body will change you trunk musculature to behave in a more protective manner.

So where am I going with this?

I think we are looking at posture too much like a stand alone “thing”. Rather than being a cause, or a victim, it seems posture itself is a biopsychosocial representation of human needs, experience, and expression. It is reflective of a moment in time (or series of moments) and a person’s relationship to posture in that moment. Biologically, our nerves may need blood, movement, and space and posture change may be needed for that to occur. Culture and society may deem certain postures necessary, or conversely, inappropriate, and this may conflict with the needs of the physical body at the time. Emotions could be drivers and/or expressions of posture, ideomotor expression is a fascinating phenomena. Are we at peace with our body, avoidant and ignorant of our needs, or does it appear like it is is constantly on alert for a possible threat? If we are stuck in state of threatened existence, how do we find ease? Is it enough to tell some just to “relax”, do some breathing, move more, or do they need a little more guidance?

Below is the first of a series of “finding ease” guided experiences I wanted to share regarding how I believe we can use physical, cognitive, and emotional strategies to find ease in a posture for a moment. I must give a massive shout out to Joe Witte, a local physical therapist who is also a Feldenkrais practitioner, who cued me into these strategies for laying down, sitting, and standing. However, I will acknowledge I have essentially butchered the original non-verbal guided beauty of how he introduced me to this approach, but this is intentional. My belief is that simple experiences, such as this example of laying down, are ideal opportunities of effective therapeutic neuroscience education that may be helpful to unravel beliefs and open a person to new options for potential change in their life. Combining education, with an experience, body awareness, postural and movement variation, and re-assuring human contact has offered a number of my patients life changing insights into the complexity of their pain and a very real sense of hope that they did not previously have.