44 | New Scientist | 19 February 2022SO
LS
TO
CK
/GE
TT
Y^ IM
AG
ES
Long-term pain may not be
an inevitable consequence
of bad posture (see main story),
but the notion that “good”
posture is beneficial isn’t
completely ill-founded. Certain
postures can lift your spirits.
An awareness of a link
between our body and our
emotions goes back to the
19th century, when philosopher
William James suggested that
we don’t laugh because
we are happy, rather we are
happy because we laugh.
This idea is now known as
“embodied cognition”, where the
body influences our thoughts. For
instance, when you meet a loved
one, your heartbeat may increase
and you might feel their skin
against your own as you embrace.
The brain, which is constantly
assessing changes to information
from the outside world and from
our internal body, combines this
new data and conjures up the
appropriate emotion. Only then
do we consciously perceive the
feeling of love, or joy.
Several experiments support
this idea. For instance, studies
by Elizabeth Broadbent at the
University of Auckland, New
Zealand, have shown that the
posture of people with depression
tends to be more slumped than
that of people without the
condition. But the effect goes
both ways. Her team randomly
split people without depression
into two groups, using
physiotherapy tape to strap their
back into either a slumped or
upright seated position. The
participants then gave a speech.
Afterwards, the upright group
not only reported a more positive
mood, but were less stressed as
measured by blood pressure.Another experiment, by
Johannes Michalak at Witten/
Herdecke University in Germany
and his colleagues, used
biofeedback to manipulate
people’s style of walking on
a treadmill.
Students were initially shown
positive and negative words
and asked how well each word
described them. They were then
guided into walking in a style that
resembled that of someone who
was unhappy or extremely happy.
These gaits were based on
experiments showing that people
who are sad tend to walk with an
increased sideways body sway,
decreased arm swing and have
a more bent over posture than
those who are happy.
At the end of the study, the
participants were given a surprise
test – to remember as many
words from the start of the study
as possible. Participants recalled
more negative words when
walking in a style that resembled
individuals who are sad than they
did when walking with a happier
gait. The researchers suggest
that the walking style may have
triggered a change in emotional
state, which then affected
memory recall.Change your posture
to change your mood
within the previous year.
The results were surprising. For male
subjects, sitting neck posture at age 17 wasn’t
a risk factor for neck pain at 22. For female
participants, those who sat upright were
actually more likely to have experienced
prolonged neck pain, whereas more slumped
postures were protective. The generic public
health message to sit up straight to prevent
neck pain needs rethinking, concluded
Richards and her team. Richards thinks that
the female subjects’ neck pain could be a result
of sustained, low-level muscle activation
needed to maintain an upright position, a
posture perhaps triggered by other factors
such as anxiety.Statue still
While the link between specific postures and
long-term pain is unravelling, the way we sit
and stand is still important, not least because
it can affect your mood (see “Change your
posture to change your mood”, left).
Furthermore, your posture might still lead
to problems down the line – not necessarily
because of how you position your body,
but because of how long you stay that way.
Many of us are becoming more sedentary.
“Over time, we are becoming less active,
at work and in our leisure time, and we see
this in most countries,” says O’Sullivan.
This means that whatever posture we are
prone to, we are holding it for longer periods
of time. And over the years, our bodies mould
themselves to the shapes we hold them in.
“The body responds to what we do with it,
particularly for children and young adults,”
says Straker. “Bones are getting rebuilt every
day, and they get rebuilt in response to the
stresses we put on them.”
Researchers strongly suspect that
prolonged slumping could eventually have
a permanent effect on the shape of our bodies.
“My best guess is that if you spend an awful
lot of time hunched over, then you’re more
like to be hunched over permanently,” says
Straker. The implications of this lasting
shape change are unknown – the cumulative
effect of decades of slouching in front of a
screen haven’t yet been studied – but someWalking with a
more upright
posture may
make you feel
happier