Newsletter 2025-1-26
Topics Covered:
A little known way anxiety affects your posture, and why
How this postural behavior influences other systems in the body and mind
How to start fixing the issue for real
How Stress & Anxiety Show Up In Your Body
**If you prefer to listen, I have a YouTube video covering the same content here.
We know that anxiety and stress can cause tension in the body: shoulders in need of a massage, stress headaches, etc.
But I want to go a little deeper and look at how a lack of internal safety, so to speak, creates ingrained behaviors that show up in the body (not just temporarily tense muscles).
First, I want you to understand the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
The ANS is basically the running the show beneath the surface. It's job is to keep you alive.
It's keenly aware of your environment and any threats that may be lurking. And the ANS will instantaneously alter your body's autonomic processes (heart rate, digestion, breathing rate, blood pressure) as a response.
This is where the term "fight or flight" comes from. If your ANS perceives a threat, it will automatically prepare your body to fight or run away.
This is good for survival, and good for situations where we need to act quickly.
But we live in an age where many of us have lost the ability to fully recover from this stress response, leaving us in a chronic state of lower-level "fight or flight."
And over time, as we continue to live life "on edge," our default way of holding ourselves (as well as viewing the world) starts to reflect that state.
The Most Common Anxious Postural Adaptation I've Seen
When it comes to those I've worked with who identify as anxious or high-stress individuals, there's one behavior that always shows up, almost without fail.
And this was true for me as well.
What's the pattern? Locked knees.
Weird, right?
Might seem so at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Let's check out what causes something like this to show up.
Body Awareness
If you've been following me for a while, you know that I often talk about interoception.
Interoception is our ability to detect what's going on in our internal environment. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to try and tune into your interoceptive awareness:
Can I feel my heart beating?
Can I sense the rhythm of my breathing?
Can I tell the temperature of different areas of my body?
Where am I holding the most tension right now?
Where does my body feel the heaviest right now?
This isn't New Age spirituality; interoceptive awareness is directly correlated with stress resilience and heart rate variability (HRV).
This is because we have a really important nerve pathway, the vagus nerve, whose two main jobs are:
Initiate the relaxation/recovery response in the ANS.
Communicate interoceptive information (i.e. body awareness) to the brain.
And because this nerve pathway is largely responsible for both of the above functions, how well we can do one will affect how well we do the other.
This should be blowing your mind 🤯.
By simply practicing your internal awareness skills, you are strengthening vagal tone (i.e. the function of your vagus nerve). And as the vagus nerve gets stronger, you become better at calming down.
Think about it. There's a reason it's so hard for anxious people to get out of the mind and into the body.
Bottom line: Your capacity for stress recovery and your capacity for internal awareness are two sides of the same coin. Train one, and you're training the other.
How This Relates to Knees (And Other Postural Patterns)
In a healthy human being, stability comes from the inside out.
In other words, muscles that we can't see -- those deep within the core of the body -- should be doing most of the work managing pressure and tension in the way we hold ourselves.
This should happen without us thinking about it.
If we have a hard time sensing our inner physical world, however, we often resort to tensing more superficial parts of the body in an effort to feel stable.
Why would we do this?
Well, without deep internal awareness, we rely more on the external world to help use sense and feel.
Since the extremities are closer to what we sense externally, it is easier for the anxious person to stabilize from the outside in.
Think about it this way.
If you're on a scary roller coaster, your "fight or flight" branch of the ANS will be active.
You're likely going to be gripping the bar tightly with your hands, while losing awareness of the deep center of your body (there's a reason it's called "white knuckling" and not "white pelvic floor-ing").
In feeling unsafe, you're tensing what is closest to the world around you.
And if your ANS is regulated, you are able to recover from that experience after the fact, and return to a natural sense of safety and stability from deep within.
But if you're always feeling unsafe...
You will always be bracing with your extremities.
Since you're perceiving the world as threatening as you stand or walk, the feet and knees can be considered your first line of defense against the world.
Keep this up for years (decades, perhaps) and you've adopted hyperextended knees as your new normal.
Issued Caused by "Anxious Knees"
The entire body and all its systems are a beautiful integrative network, each part influencing one another.
You just can't compartmentalize the human experience.
Even so, I'll give you some specific examples of common issues that this chronic knee hyperextension can cause.
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Example #1 - Challenges Loading the Hips
The glutes are supposed to have a sensory connection to the bottom of the foot.
Foot contacts the ground, glute drives motion.
If the knees are always locked, it's sort of like you're shutting off communication between the foot and the glute.
Now instead of absorbing and transferring force primarily with the glutes, you start doing so with the knees and the low back.
If you need help feeling the difference, try this (only if you can do so safely, of course):
Bend over with locked knees.
Bend over with bent knees.
Decide which position you'd rather absorb force in.
To better understand how this affects the low back (and more), let's move on to the next example.
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Example #2 - Lumbar / Pelvis / Hip Instability
Going from standing in a balanced way to locking out your knees is going to cause your center of mass to shift forward (try it).
So to stop yourself from toppling forward while standing, the body unconsciously compensates by shifting the pelvis forward.
This is sometimes called anterior pelvic shift.
You may be able to see in the image how this compresses the low back.
And when this is coupled with not being able to load the hips (see Example 1), that compressed low back is going to be taking the impact of every step you take.
Another example of this compensation that you might see would be a late term pregnancy.
In order to avoid toppling forward from the change in center of mass, the mother-to-be shifts her pelvis forward in this exact same way.
There's a reason a common pregnancy complaint is low back pain!
Fortunately for those of you who aren't pregnant, you can reprogram the way your body holds itself for the better 😁.
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Example #3 - Rib Cage Dysfunction
Now that the pelvis is shifted forward, the body must continue to adjust to avoid toppling over.
As you can see in the image under Example 2, the ribs can compensate by tilting downward in the front, causing an overly rounded upper back.
But those who are conscious of "good posture" will often try to counter that tendency.
The problem is that if the knees, pelvis, and low back stay in these positions, any adjustment you try to make to the ribs isn't going to solve anything.
In most cases, well intentioned "posture adjuster" types will end up tilting the ribs backwards, causing the front ribs to "flare" forward and outward (see below).
Trying to fix rounded posture often leads to "rib flare," which is essentially the same issue in the opposite direction.
Whichever one of these rib cage positions you end up adopting, it's likely going to contribute to breathing dysfunction.
A rounded upper back can restrict breathing by compressing the diaphragm on the front side.
Rib flare can restrict breathing by compressing the diaphragm on the back side and making it difficult to fully exhale.
Either way, these compensations are not making breathing easy. And that brings me to the fourth and final example.
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Example #4 - Feedback Loop & More Anxiety
Just as anxiety in the mind can cause patterns in the body, the opposite is also true.
In fact, the mind and the body are always feeding information back and forth to each other.
So if you're body is always doing the things that a body does under stress (e.g. locked knees, shallow and restricted breathing), your brain is going to interpret your very existence as stressful.
And if the brain believes you're under threat, it will continue to reinforce thoughts and beliefs that encourage your body to stay stuck in its current state.
It's a vicious cycle. But it works both ways.
So let's talk about how we can begin changing the messages being communicated between body and brain.
What You Can Do About It
Reminding yourself to soften your knees in the moment can be helpful.
But the goal here is to get the body feeling safe and natural with new patterns and positions, and that takes regular practice.
Below are three things you can do to start.
Practice #1 - Interoceptive Practice
Carve out 10 minutes, preferably during a time you naturally need a break from life's demands.
Lie down in a comfortable place where you won't be disturbed.
Tune into various sensations within your body. Using a guided recording can be very helpful:
Don't worry about "doing" anything. The keys are relaxation and physical awareness.
Repeat 3-5 times weekly.
Practice #2 - Functional Breathing
Carve out 5-10 minutes daily.
Sit or lie down in a comfortable place where you don't be disturbed.
Begin with awareness of your breathing and any notable physical sensations.
Begin to gently adjust your breathing as necessary, layering on the 4 qualities of a health resting breath:
Nasal
Gentle
Slow
Expansive
Using a guided recording is also helpful for this one. I have free one, which you can access here.
Practice #3 - Physical Training
Unfortunately, there are too many variables here for a play-by-play tutorial.
But a great place to start is to practice bearing your body weight with knees more bent than you'd normally have them.
This could take the form of a hinge, a half squat, or a half lunge. Just be weary of compensation patterns that your body may want to resort to in other parts of your body.
And if you're not confident in your ability to hunt down these compensations, and/or you're having trouble getting things to feel "right," this is where hiring the right coach is a game changer.
If you'd like to work together directly, you can apply for 1:1 coaching here.
And if you choose to work with a different coach, that's wonderful as well! But don't settle. Find someone who makes you feel confident navigating the complexities of the mind-body connection.
Wishing you easy breathing and fluid movement.
-Griffin
