The best way to get rid of forward head posture

If you work at a desk, love playing with your devices, ride a drop handle bar bike a lot, drive/ride in automobiles for long periods you probably have a tight, stiff neck. From an emotional aspect, if you are often stressed, anxious or depressed you too might have a tight, achy neck.

If you try to remedy the problem just by addressing your neck and head you will find it's uncomfortable and awkward.

That's because your tension is not just in your neck. Nope, it's running through your whole body.

Try the posture on: Jut your face forward a bit, like you might while sitting and looking at a computer monitor. Notice what the rest of your body does simultaneously. Can you feel how the back of your neck tightens, and so does your chest and belly? You might even feel how your inner thighs contract a bit. See, not just the neck, eh? It's a full body pattern, because no area of your body works in isolation.

Sitting like that, day in and day out, your brain, which controls how your body and muscles move, gets really good at contracting you into patterns that hurt you.

You've trained your body to be tense and tight.

And a tight body is painful body.

No offense, really! It's just plain ol' neuroplasticity.

You might think stretching and strengthening are the best way to change your pain problem. I use to think so too.

But forcing muscles to change via manipulation, stretching, strengthening, etc. doesn't work to change the neural pathways between your brain and muscles.

Someone trying to change your body from the outside doesn't retrain your brain.

Stretching does not get muscles to relax to their natural resting length. Excessive stretching actually makes muscles contract even more, in a protective reflex pattern called the stretch reflex.

By trying to strengthen your upper back (a common suggestion) you aren't releasing the tightness of your chest, you are just fighting against your existing tension, with more tension. This leads to more tension and rigidity in your body. In the long run you can create more pain in other areas of your body as well.

Somatics is the efficient, intelligent alternative. 

Somatic Education teaches you how to release your tension patterns, so you can be in a more relaxed state of being, with less effort, not more. Somatic movements are called pandiculations. Pandiculations are how all animals, including us humans, are programmed to release excess tension in our bodies and lives.

In the video below I explain more, and give you an opportunity to try a pandiculation to release your neck, by playing with your whole body and spine moving.

Give it a try! Let me know what you learn about yourself.

Use the gifts of Somatics and neuroplasticity and make your life easier, not harder :-)

Practice this move regularly and notice what changes in your body and life.

Get out of pain for good and get back to doing the things you love! 

Practice Somatics and reclaim your joy for living fully and freely. Join the Think Somatics Online Classroom! There I share an ever expanding library of recorded Somatics lessons you can stream any time, from anywhere in the world.

Thanks for reading.

Please share this with anyone you know who wants to feel better too. The whole world needs it. :-)

thank you,
Kristin

Kristin Jackson, CSE, CPT
thinksomatics.com