Posture and Breathing: The Physiological effects of Shallow Breaths - Part 1
- Mar 25, 2023
- 5 min read
If you’re reading this post on your phone, make yourself comfortable. It might hurt.
Here are the facts:
Text neck is the term for the modern spine ailment that everyone needs to know about. It’s the same “forward head posture” that afflicts computer operators and desk workers since humans moved from manual labor to sedentary jobs. Now young people are already showing signs of repetitive strain from overuse of mobile phones which manifest as neck, jaw, and shoulder pain, headaches, and spinal changes.
Your body is designed to move and change positions frequently but poor posture, sedentary work and long-term high volume use of mobile phones is having a knock on effect to many of our body systems and functions
It doesn’t take long before the muscles of our neck shorten and overwork adapting to their new normal workload and position. The Cinderella Hypothesis is the theory that just like Cinderella some muscles fibers do all the work and are constantly used over time and generate trigger points and muscle pain. Our posture and the way we breathe can lead to these muscles doing the wrong job and being overworked just like Cinderella.
Over time the joints and ligaments deteriorate to a point where the neck stays stuck in a forward head position. This gives us a hunched back and dowager’s hump posture. Thanks to our heavy heads, weighing on average 5kgs, (the size of a 2 month old child) being a few centimeters out of the optimal position (right above the spinal column) and at an angle of around 60 degrees when texting we also get pain in our lower backs, far from the location of the problem.
Imagine walking around with a two month old baby hanging around your neck while you worked or texted. Does that sound comfortable?
What are the effects of shallow breathing?
Humans and animals take short shallow breaths when they’re nervous, threatened, afraid, or anxious. Shallow breathing is the opposite of belly breathing or abdominal breathing. When we breathe “shallow”, we recruit our back up breathing muscles of our neck and chest to inhale, we often over-inflate and stay hyperinflated in our ribcage. We can do this for short periods of time when stressed but we are not designed to be on alert all the time.
When we take shallow breaths, we over-breathe oxygen and breathe out too much carbon dioxide, stressing our body and telling our nervous system to stay on red alert. In contrast, breathing in a calm pattern that activates the rest digest and recovery part of our nervous system requires us to lengthen our exhale and slow down the number of breaths we take a minute. To prevent the negative long term effects of this “stress-like” state, we must try to prevent shallow breathing.
But this is where posture can cause us further problems. People with poor posture (rounded shoulders, tight pectoral muscles, forward heads) tend to have trouble establishing a good breathing pattern. Diaphragmatic breathing is difficult for these people and even their shallow breaths are inefficient because of the restrictions around the chest. The implications are severe. To reset your posture you need to find ways to release these bad breathing muscles that get short and tight from overuse.
Stress-related illnesses, sleep problems, respiratory problems, immune system weakening and high blood pressure are all symptoms of long term shallow breathing.
Posture Influences Everything
Posture affects our health and how well we perform in all areas of life. For example, people with rounded shoulders, hunched backs, and necks that force their gaze towards the floor, generally do less well at interviews, are perceived as less attractive, and have a gloomier outlook on life.
Your phone is a big part of the problem. And let’s not forget about the time we spend at desks in school and work. Kids spend years hunched over books and computers at a desk. We’re only starting to understand the implications of the “always on” culture that the smartphone has introduced to society.
Constantly being bombarded by messages and social media activates our stress response, dumping cortisol and adrenaline in our blood, mobilizing our body into action. No wonder it is hard to switch the brain off and sleep at the end of the day after being on social media or working at a computer.
Younger populations are the most affected as millennials live their lives through their devices but older enthusiastic phone adopters also feel the effects.
But the way we physically use phones isn’t the only influence on our posture. Yes, the hunched position we adopt for scanning our Instagram feed creates tension in the postural muscles. But indirect causes such as stress, anxiety, loneliness and depression contribute too.
Depressed, stressed people do not generally walk with confidence or sit with straight backs and open shoulders. Overuse of phones can also lead to sleep disturbances, which has the chain reaction effect of lowering our immune system, impacting our posture, and increasing levels of stress and depression.
Our posture affects our mood and emotions, which affects our health, which changes our breathing pattern, which changes our posture again. And so the cycle continues.
The good news is by changing your posture you can help break the cycle, shifting your emotions, making it easier to access your optimal breathing muscle, the diaphragm.
How Posture Affects Breathing
This is the one time a physiotherapist is going to ask you to slump and slouch(only if it is pain free). Now in this position try and breathe in.
How does it feel?
Hard to do a belly breath right?
Poor alignment in that slumped position means your diaphragm can’t descend easily making it hard to activate the posterior half of your diaphragm that attaches to your lower ribs and spine. Your body will want to get air in still so it can replenish its oxygen stores. To do that it has to recruit its back up breathing muscles around its neck and chest to help inhale, expanding the rib cage to get air traveling down into the lungs.
These neck muscles are not very efficient and are not designed to be used for the 17,000 breaths we take on average per day. They get tired, fatigued and we create muscle trigger points that can generate headaches, jaw and neck pain.
Research into breathing patterns and emotions has also shown that when you adopt a slumped posture/breathing pattern you experience sadness. The powerful finding in this research is if you change your posture and breathing pattern you can change your emotion.
What if the world all knew how to breathe in a joy breathing pattern? What impact would that have on our conversations and relationships with others?
How does our muscles affect the breathing and what are the ways by which you can take control before the situation gets out of hand.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
By Hariharan. V
DYOFITXⓇ Instructor
DYOFITXⓇ does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any information published on this website or by this brand is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, and you should not take any action before consulting with a healthcare professional.
Credits
https://www.thebreatheffect.com/posture-breathing-physiological-effects/
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