Quaratine increasing your back pain? Here’s some tips to help

You’re quarantining to stay healthy—don’t let your posture sabotage that.

sitting on floor

By Hannah Seo, published in Popular Science and shared by Backbone Cushion Company, LLC on June 12, 2020

Posture can suffer while we work from home. While working from home, we tend to throw all sense of workplace decorum out the window. It’s easy to let yourself get into a slump—literally and figuratively. But even in quarantine (especially in quarantine), it’s super important to take care of your body, and posture plays a big role in physical health. So why is it so hard to sit up straight and so easy to slouch?

WHAT IS POSTURE? Posture generally refers to how you hold your body. Good posture, sometimes called “neutral spine,” is thought to be the optimal position that puts the least amount of stress on your body as you stand, sit, or sleep.

To achieve neutral spine:

  1. your head, shoulders, and hips should all be in line vertically when viewed from the side.
  2. Your spine should have three natural curves: a slight inward curvature of the neck, the upper back curved gently out, and the lower back curved gently in.
  3. All skeletal muscles are involved with posture, but the most important ones are the core stabilizing muscles around your abdomen, pelvis and back. When those muscles are nice and strong, good posture is much easier to maintain. But periods of slouching can weaken those muscles, and wrongly strengthen others, making it much harder to stand tall. Then, when it comes to correcting your posture, it feels like a workout because you’re trying to re-strengthen those muscles you’ve neglected. “Your body and your muscles are like clay: whatever position you hold them in, they will mold into,” says Rudy Gehrman, a chiropractor and the CEO of Physio Logic, a New York City-based physical wellness center. “If you keep pressing on a little sapling tree in a certain direction, then it’s going to grow in that direction.” So as we lean over our laptops, our muscles morph to fit that shape.
  4. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Good habits don’t just appear. They take conscious effort and consistency to retrain your muscles and your brain.

Get out of your bad posture! 4 out of 5 people don’t even know they have bad posture until its too late. And this bad posture is more than a bad habit—it has real physical consequences. If you recall your high school biology lessons, you’ll remember that your spinal cord is part of your central nervous system. It’s the highway of neurons that connects your body to your brain. Bad posture contorts the spine and adds undue pressure, creating an accumulation of micro-injuries that can affect a person’s health and mood. For example, research has long associated bad posture with sports injuries like ankle injuries or pulled muscles and hamstrings, and also with slower recovery time from those injuries. However, even if you’re just sitting on your couch at home, bad posture can injure you.

WHY is it bad for you? Well, it’s not just bad for you because our mothers always told us so. There’s a ton of research out there that has supported this idea for decades. However, only recently are we actually seeing that poor posture is the new smoking! One such study in 2013 from the JAMA showed that bad, forward-leaning head posture worsened pre-existing pain, and correlated with more visits to the doctor. Psychology studies show that people with slumped posture had more negative thoughts, remembered worse memories, and had a harder time recovering from bad moods.

There is clear evidence that while people are working from home they’re spending more time online than in pre-pandemic days, but time shouldn’t determine your health and mood.

WHAT CAN YOU DO? Take steps today to correct your posture. It can offer some tantalizing health benefits including reduced chronic pain & easier breathing. Good posture can benefit your mood & mental health by boosting self-esteem, mitigating & building resilience to stress, and even help alleviate depressive symptoms.

So how do you reap the benefits of good posture?

  1. Understand what good posture is. Elongation, alignment, balance.
  2. Conscious awareness means don’t just set it and forget it. You have to start by correcting your posture on a regular basis if you want to return your spine to its optimal shape. Our minds have to be retrained out of our pre-existing habits and this takes 8-10,000 repetitions so the more you do it, the easier it will get. Gehrman says one of the worst habits for posture is bringing our bodies to technology rather than bringing technology to us. Most of the products we use were never designed to work for our anatomical health, like how laptops make us lean in and how we hunch over to look at our phones.
  3. Adjust your workspace to fit you. Creating a workspace that works for your body and your posture is key to a healthy spine. Arrange your tools in such a way so your body forms right angles when seated—your back is perpendicular to your thighs, but parallel to your shins. Then, lift your head up and don’t lean forward into your screen. Chairs naturally push our shoulders forward. An additional back support between the shoulder blades (but not blocking them) will help to fill in the hollow where our natural posture needs to be supported.

Final Thought:

Fixing bad posture will be slow, but it will be worth it. “It takes one to two months of being hyperconscious of posture to change your subconscious posture,” Gehrman reiterates. To reach that two month mark of vigilant posture correction, get your friends and family involved and ask them to monitor your posture, or put little reminders on your phone.

Last but certainly not least, keeping your spine strong also requires sufficient amounts of daily, balanced exercises to offset how much we sit in a day. At the very least, get out there and walk every day. Stretch your legs, stretch your arms, get the blood flowing and, if you’re really motivated, then it’s time to address your work station set up.

If you’d like further information on postural re-education and how to address your home office set up as part of your body awareness, contact us at hello@backbonecushion.com. We will help get you and your back on track!

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