Posture at the workplace, part 3
The third in our series on posture at the workplace - this one is about poor posture, its effects and why we get it.
The story so far
We started in the first article with the importance of correct alignment of joints, then in the last issue looked at the relationship of muscles, balance and nerves.
Poor posture - what happens if posture is poor and why do we have it?
In each of the areas of joints, muscles and nerves there can be effects of mal-alignment. These ill effects may start out as very slight, they may remain at a very low level, but if the cause does not disappear, they will get worse and may become intolerable.
Mal-aligned joints and ligaments may just feel uncomfortable, may ache, or hurt. Shear forces (that is, across rather than along) the spine may affect the discs, putting pressure on the nerves that fan out from the spine.
Muscles will suffer through lack of circulation, which may manifest itself as discomfort, ache or pain as well as lack of performance, getting tired quickly. The body’s healing process is impeded when blood-flow is restricted.
Pain may arise when nerves are stretched or inflamed by mal-alignment. Again, the range of symptoms may be from discomfort, through tingling, pins and needles, hot or cold feeling or numbness to pain. A characteristic of nerve damage is that sometimes the symptom is not in the place where the damage is being caused. For instance, a nerve being damaged in the lower back may cause tingling in the thigh or pain around the ankle.
Why do we have poor posture?
There are two sides to this, physical and mental.
Physically, the short answer, going right back to fundamentals, is that we are hunter-gatherers, with our roots on the savannah, evolved to spend our days wandering in search of berries or pursuit of prey. We no longer do what we evolved to do. We are emphatically not designed to spend our day sitting on our bottoms staring fixedly at a screen or a road, or for any of the other activities of our modern life that are so far from our origins.
Mentally, we have unnatural pressures that bear on us all the time. No doubt the link between posture and attitude derives from relationships within our hunter-gatherer community – authority, submission, joy, sadness and so on – but today life is complicated by the sheer variety and duration of circumstances and information that affect us. Thus a person with an oversized mortgage, an unpleasant commute and an unhappy job will tend to have a worn-out demeanour with the posture to show it: round shoulders and a curved spine.
In the next two articles we will start to talk about what to do when you have discomfort or pain.
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