Understanding the Relationship of
Stress, Posture, and Digestion

Even when the stress events are gone,
if your body is trapped in the background tension of stress patterns,
digestion won’t function optimally.

Your posture reveals these lingering and persistent tensions of stress. These habituated reaction patterns operate at a “background high idle.” Stress runs through the body, occasionally boiling over. It’s the persistence of these stress tensions that so profoundly disrupts how the digestive system functions. Persistent background tension signals to your digestive system that stress is still present, even when the cause is not immediately around you.

What Is Posture?

Posture is much more than being told to “sit up straight.” It’s the physical expression of the brain’s learned reactions to stress, injury, and all the challenges of life. Over time, our nervous system creates deeply ingrained patterns; it falls into tension habits that hold us in certain positions. This runs outside our voluntary control.

These habits form as the body repeatedly responds to stress and injury, becoming automatic, normalized tension patterns that show up as our posture. We get stuck in these well-practiced tension reactions, which run in us day and night. Posture is the outward expression of these persistent, background tensions.

Posture, Stress, and Digestion

With persistence of the tensions of stress, the nervous system believes it is in stress all the time. Of course, with persistent stress, digestion will be inhibited—partially shut down.

• Sadness, Worry, and Fear (Simplified as the *Curling and Hunching of Front Activation*)
• Anger, Impatience, and Anxiety (Simplified as the *Long Arch of Back Activation*)

The body contracts in these mostly symmetrical patterns under stress, which disrupts digestion. It can also get stuck in asymmetrical tensions, further affecting how well the digestive system functions. The tension control centers of the brain run these patterns automatically.

What Digestion Needs: A Body Free from Stress

The organs responsible for digestion are held in the cavity below the diaphragm, in the lower half of the torso. They work best when the body is in a state of rest and ease. When we’re truly relaxed, our belly gurgles, and everything starts moving. That’s when your system is happy to digest.

You’ve probably heard of the state called “rest and digest.” This only occurs when we are outside of stress.

Look at the Big Picture

To understand why digestion becomes sluggish, you have to zoom out and see the bigger picture. It’s sluggish because the system’s autopilot is set to STRESS MODE. When the body is stuck in stress, digestion won’t work well, no matter what else you try.

By learning and practicing the specific Eric Cooper Somatics movements to come out of stress, you can teach your nervous system to let you out of that background high-idle that contributes to your digestive problem. If you are out of stress, your digestive system will be more free to function in a more vital way. The experiment is yours to try.

Bon Appétit!

-Eric Cooper