How Poor Posture Can Negatively Impact Your Physical and Mental Health

Your parents hounded you about your posture growing up — stop slouching, lift your head up, sit up straight. As with many things, it turns out that they were absolutely right. Bad posture can wreak havoc on your musculoskeletal health, and perhaps surprisingly, poor posture can also impact your mental and emotional health.

As a practice that places the focus on holistic and integrative health, the highly skilled team here at Atkins Chiropractic routinely helps patients to undo the effects of bad posture. From neck pain to back pain, poor posture can leave you physically uncomfortable and influence your mood.

The posture problem in today’s world

Between 3 and 6 million years ago, humans made the transition to upright. In the last 100 years, however, we’ve gone backward thanks to a more sedentary lifestyle in which we hunch over desks and flop on sofas to watch TV. All this is exacerbated even further with tech — we stare down at our laptop, and when you look around, most heads are buried in phones these days.

This hunching and lack of movement can exact a big toll on your body, especially in your spine. The added pressure you place on your lumbar spine when you sit and on your neck when you’re working on a computer is considerable and can lead to degenerative changes, such as degenerative disc disease, which leaves you wide open for back and neck pain.

Furthermore, the effects of poor posture aren’t confined to your back and neck. When your spine is misaligned, it can throw off major joints like your hips, shoulders, and knees.

The mental effects of poor posture

Although poor posture is a fast road to misalignments in your body that can lead to pain and discomfort, poor posture can influence your mental well-being, too.

For starters, when you have poor posture, it can create a negative impression — the person who walks in the room with a straight spine and head held high exudes confidence and invites connection. Conversely, the person who enters a room hunched over sends a message of being closed off.

Though poor posture can affect how others perceive you, this negative body language can also affect your own mood and mental well-being. To illustrate this point, we’re going to look at the use of Botox® for mental health — there’s mounting evidence that reducing frown lines can improve your mood and reduce anxiety.

Studies show that posture and body language work the same way as facial expressions — when you stand straight and tall with your shoulders back, you can elevate your mood and reduce stress. In the words of one study, “Adopting an upright seated posture in the face of stress can maintain self-esteem, reduce negative mood, and increase positive mood compared to a slumped posture.”

The road to better posture

If you’d like to see for yourself how better posture can improve your life, it’s a good idea to come in and see us. Through our chiropractic work, we can adjust your spine and get rid of the misalignments that have formed over the years of hunching and slouching.

Once we set this stage, it’s up to you to maintain good posture — whether you’re sitting or standing. To start, you can set an hourly timer that will chime to remind you to:

Sit straight
Place both feet on the floor
Keep your shoulders back
Lift your head (and place your screen at eye level)

It’s also a good idea to get up at least once every hour to stretch your body out.

At first, practicing great posture may feel forced or uncomfortable, but the more you sit and stand straight, the more your body adapts to this improved position, and you’ll soon see improvements in all aspects of your life.

If you’d like to get on the road to great posture, we’re here to help. To get the ball rolling, we invite you to schedule a visit at our office in University Place, Washington, today.