Many people are often surprised when I check to see if they are taking their weight evenly while they are standing up. And often I see a person lay down on the table for an adjustment and look bent like a banana. As I straighten them up they will often comment that they now feel ‘crooked’ despite the fact that they are lying straighter.
If you think about it, your sense of self, or where you are in space is dependant on a lot of information that you just aren’t consciously aware of. Things like muscle length, joint position, gravity, sight, balance mechanisms in your ear and neck. You can’t really feel these but your brain is taking this information and making sense of it and it shapes how we work in the world.
What is also really interesting is that it doesn’t have to be a physical reason your posture is out of whack. Have you ever felt stressed and felt your shoulders become tight? What if one side tightens up more than the other?
When I see a person who is carrying 2kg or 10kg more down one side than the other and not evening noticing the difference, it tells me quite a few things about what’s going on on the inside. It tells me that the person has become so used to being crooked they don’t even notice it anymore. And they don’t realise what this is costing their health. It may surprise to realise you are now using more energy than you need to just keeping yourself upright. This is energy that could be used for fighting infections, for growing, for repairing, for maintaining your body, for thinking at work or learning at school for that matter. And you may be putting excess strain or load on tissues which now have greater opportunity to be injured or worn out.
If you have been leaning more to one side and it feels normal to you because you have got used to it, then you aren’t going to correct it, are you. Because you don’t even realise it’s a problem. I wonder, how much difference a postural check would make to your life? I wonder how much it would make to your children’s?
Dr Steven Hawkins (Chiropractor)
What is also really interesting is that it doesn’t have to be a physical reason your posture is out of whack. Have you ever felt stressed and felt your shoulders become tight? What if one side tightens up more than the other?
When I see a person who is carrying 2kg or 10kg more down one side than the other and not evening noticing the difference, it tells me quite a few things about what’s going on on the inside. It tells me that the person has become so used to being crooked they don’t even notice it anymore. And they don’t realise what this is costing their health. It may surprise to realise you are now using more energy than you need to just keeping yourself upright. This is energy that could be used for fighting infections, for growing, for repairing, for maintaining your body, for thinking at work or learning at school for that matter. And you may be putting excess strain or load on tissues which now have greater opportunity to be injured or worn out.
If you have been leaning more to one side and it feels normal to you because you have got used to it, then you aren’t going to correct it, are you. Because you don’t even realise it’s a problem. I wonder, how much difference a postural check would make to your life? I wonder how much it would make to your children’s?
Dr Steven Hawkins (Chiropractor)