Why we slouch

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The benefits of good posture include:. The first step to not slouching is to be aware of your posture. Make it a habit to check on your posture throughout the day. Make corrections whenever you find yourself slouching or hunching your back or shoulders, or pushing your head or neck forward to look at a screen. The following strategies and exercises can help you cut back on slouching and use good posture instead. You might not pay much attention to how you stand, but it can make a big difference to your posture.

To stand with good posture, keep these tips in mind:. Holding one position, whether sitting or standing, for a long time can cause muscle tension, discomfort, and fatigue. To prevent muscle pain and fatigue, make a point to get up, stretch, and walk around for at least a few minutes every hour. Set an alarm on your phone to remind you to get up and move. It may also be helpful for relieving tightness in your neck and shoulders.

This simple exercise helps to stretch your spine, as well as your glutes and hamstrings. It can also help ease tension in your back and neck. Scapula retraction is a fancy way of saying to squeeze your shoulder blades together. Grab resistance bands in front of you and pull the bands to your chest. Squeeze your shoulder blades together and concentrate on stretching your upper back. Come back to your natural position and repeat in three sets of Sitting at your desk, suck in your chin.

Feel the stretch in the back of your skull and then relax. Do a set of 10 to 20 at least three or five times throughout the day. To slouch is to trigger a process of cognitive atrophy. To slouch is to unlearn by letting go. You slouching is the same thing as nature doing a stock buyback of investment in you.

Not quite as complete as dying, not quite ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust. Perhaps we should call it bits-to-bits. You will notice that your arm does not dangle as freely. You really do have to let the associated mind states go, a trick many uptight people never learn, which makes them poor learners overall. Structural properties such as the length and density profile of a hanging cable might modulate the evolution of a sagging equilibrium, but the state itself contains no real information that is not already in the environment.

The sagging behavior is merely an informationally passive transformer of things happening in the environment. The transformation might dampen or amplify environmental forces, but it does not add information.

But the opposite of a sagging state, an unsagging state, is one where a decision process has active control of the state. The opposite of dragging your feet could be any of a huge number of more information-rich gait states — walking briskly, walking meditatively, jogging, running, skipping, or hopping.

What these non-sagging states share is that there is someone in charge; someone injecting regenerative energy into a degenerate condition. The entity in charge, however, need not be part of the entity being controlled. Military drills are explicitly built around someone else being in charge.

The most basic drill commands are a pair that simply put one person in and out of charge of another. At ease! A return of nominal control to a primary agent. When you are at ease, you are not in control of your state.

The environment is. Absent a drill sergeant, it is by no means obvious that you can get back in control, because you might have — without knowing it — ceded control of the getting-back-in-charge process as well.

To take the simplest case, when you settle into a couch, the body starts to wind down. Many more things start to let go in a cascade. Slouching is not the same as relaxing. To relax is to restore fungible resources that have been temporarily exhausted by action.

To slouch is to destroy capability by letting it atrophy. In the short term, slouching is relaxing. In the long term, it is a different pattern of stress; one that banks longer-term survivability by giving up shorter-term aliveness. Sagging is a one-way door to a sort of reverse mission creep. A snowballing degeneracy that has a tendency to expand in insecure environments. Mission creep is when you take charge of one thing and are forced to take charge of more and more things due to the unanticipated consequences of your decisions with regard to the first thing.

One reason this happens is that when one behavior sags, other behaviors must now serve as backstops. The increased strain on these backstop behaviors exhausts those behaviors, increasing the temptation to let those sag. And so on. Consider a chain hanging in a catenary shape on the deck of a ship being tossed about by a stormy ocean. If the ship is tossed about with sufficient violence, the chain is heavy enough, and the posts are weak, the transmitted forces might break the supports.

The sagging object then enters a new sagging equilibrium in relation to the next set of backstop constraints past the first structural breakdown. In this case, the loose chain and posts sliding about on the deck of the ship, soaking up the energy of the storm and doing further damage.

Recall what I said earlier: a sagging state is a passive transformer and transmitter of the environmental forces it is subject to. Depending on the details, it might dampen or amplify those forces. These then act on the sagging substrate via the backstop constraints.

These transmitted forces might cause breakdowns and cascades of further sagging. At ease does not equal at rest under all conditions. Nature is a good steward of all atoms and bits that have slouched into her, but not necessarily a gentle one who respects boundaries we care about. Unslouching is not guaranteed.

At ease might mean cascading through a series of increasingly expansive and energetically expensive slouching states, with steadily narrowing pathways for control to return to any locus. The dramatic way this can happen is when the energy in the system increases. The more common, undramatic way is for the control authority to dissipate through the snowballing degeneracy of a runaway slouching. But on the other hand, when unslouching is possible, it requires information to actualize.

This is not a theoretical problem. Giving your body things to do while you talk is a good example of an unslouching challenge. One that even the best public speakers, actors and directors have trouble solving well. So you have the familiar cliched gestures of TED talk givers, actors known for doing far too many things with cigarettes, and directors like Aaron Sorkin whose characters walk-and-talk far too much.

This is not a challenge specific to the verbal performance professions. It is a challenge inherent in any kind of unslouching, the challenge of behavioral invention. Slouching destroys information, and sagging is the resulting degenerate state.

To take control is to bootstrap into a non-degenerate state with more active dimensions by inventing behaviors to occupy them.

The dangling arm is no longer one of billions of pendulums owned by Mother Gravity around the world. It is now three angle variables sitting, waiting, in your brain. Controllable, energized, active states waiting for a controller. Characters waiting for an author. Actors hanging around waiting for a director. Sometimes it is obvious what kind of behavioral Lorem Ipsum filler makes for safe, but non-sagging states. If you are a Buckingham Palace guard, you can stand at attention for long periods, not reacting to anything except legitimate commands from a commanding officer.

To unslouch without sufficient information to fill behavior takes serious discipline. That discipline can break down as energy continues to drain.