How to Avoid Playing Whack-A-Mole with Your Posture

Do you ever feel like improving your posture or dealing with stress and tension is like a game of whack-a-mole?  You solve one problem, but then another one pops up in it's place?  This might look something like you catching yourself slouching and then pulling your chest up and arching your lower back to try to sit up straight, but then feeling tense or stiff after awhile.

(If you're not familiar with the expression "playing whack-a-mole" it refers to a popular arcade game where mole figurines pop up out of holes on a table and the purpose of the game is to hit them back in the holes with a hammer as quickly as you can, but as soon as you hit one, another appears out of another hole on the table...and so on.)

Watch TV is something I usually don't have time for in my schedule, but now due to the pandemic I've been indulging in a bit of Netflix.  In the current series I'm following, some folks have gotten themselves into a tricky situation and each step to get them out just seems to set off another unexpected problem, all stemming from one bad decision. 

Sometimes the trouble we get into with posture can seem a bit like a television drama, but unlike a life decision that sets a person down a troublesome path, it might not be clear exactly what is setting off the posture problem...or you might know that it has something to do with how you sit at the computer or how you react to a stressful situation, but the details as to how might not be clear.  

Looking at posture from this perspective, I see two keys for getting out of playing postural whack-a-mole.

1) Find the source of the problem...What's the first thing that sets off a chain reaction leading to strain and compression in the body?

2) Address the whole pattern...The expression "playing whack-a-mole" outside of actually playing the arcade game refers to trying to address a problem in a piecemeal way.  If you look at how all of the pieces fit together, you'll have a better chance of solving th puzzle.

In my case, I started taking Alexander Technique lessons as a college student studying acting and I was playing my own game of whack-a-mole trying to deal with issues related to my posture, having scoliosis, and generally feeling restless...plus trying really hard to do what I was being taught in my classes with little success.  I was playing whack-a-mole and taking shots in the dark, trying to basically guess at how to make my body, breathing, voice do what I thought it was supposed to do.  It wasn't until I had the experience of the whole pattern that I was able to actually make the changes I'd been trying so hard to make.

In my lessons and classes, I teach people how to figure out what the source of the issue is and experience how the whole body has it's own postural pattern that you can start to unravel once you begin to pay attention.