How do posture, stress, and digestion intertwine?
How can your digestion work if your
persistent, automatic holding patterns of stress
are running?
Stress tensions are mostly front and back.
What is posture?
Posture is much more than the voice in your head saying, “Sit up straight!”
Take a moment to do a body scan. Is your head forward, chest depressed, and shoulders rounded as if in a withdrawal response? Is your low back tight and arched as if you are jumping into action under stress? Sometimes the back can be tight simply because it is holding open the contracted front. These are all elements of posture that can affect digestion.
When someone always stands with one leg straight and the other out to the side, or when one shoulder is low, or the head is tipped to the side, that’s posture, too. The brain also learns the tensions we hold in response to injury, which creates these types of postural asymmetries. Our brain holds our posture day and night without much relief.
Posture is the habit of stress and injury response.
Most of what defines our posture, that involuntary expression of how we hold ourselves, has been learned by the endless practice that our brains get in reacting to stress. Tensions become deep habits that we can’t sense, and these habits hold us in certain positions.
Posture, stress, and digestion
Since posture is the involuntary habit of reaction to stress, soon the system thinks it’s in stress all the time, because it stays functionally in the pattern of stress. Obviously we don’t digest when we are in fear or worry (tight front activation). We don’t digest when we angry or feeling aggressive (tight back activation). The tension control center of the brain runs these tensions automatically. We can’t feel the tensions accurately, but we do know it’s hard to relax.
What digestion needs you to be out of stress.
We have a cavity below the diaphragm in the lower half of the torso that holds our viscera. These soft organs do the hard work of digestion. The system digests well only under ideal conditions. We know that when we are resting and relaxing, that is when our belly gurgles and things start moving, and that’s when your system is happy to digest. We rest and digest.
Look at the big picture.
You have to zoom way out to see why digestion is sluggish. It’s sluggish because the autopilot is set to STRESS MODE. The system in stress will not digest well.
It doesn’t work to “effort” into standing up straight, because that only increases overall tension. Nor does it work to “stretch up straight” because the brain doesn’t learn much form a stretch. Without learning, the system wants to return to the habit. With the pandiculations of Somatics, you can teach your nervous system to be free from the residue of stress. You’ll relax up straight, and your digestive system will be more free to digest. Bon appetit!