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Pain and its close association with stress
Stress makes us take shallow breaths and tighten our breathing which not only makes us chronically tired from lack of oxygen, but we also lose the full range of motion of our chest, middle back and rib cage. This leads to contracted shortening of the anterior muscles at the front of the chest (shoulders forward and drooping chest) while increasing the thoracic spine curvature (slouched and rounded middle-back with head poked forward). Not at all attractive - and the beginnings of "old" posture.
To make matters worse we spent most of every day sitting slumped forward for long hours, typing on computers and mobile phones or just walking around with tensed shoulders, neck and diaphragm. Imagine moving in poor movement patterns or just not moving at all, fixed in bad postures for long periods. First, this puts huge postural strain and contraction into our structural muscles and tendons which should normally be relaxed - but which soon become fibrous, painful and injured through overuse.
Secondly, we're not using the muscles that should actively be working, which leads to chronic muscle weakness and atrophy. Thirdly, specific spinal joints suffer from this increased pressure, leading to early degenerative joint disease (DJD). Finally, repetitive poor movement patterns and bad posture leads our neck, shoulder and back to lose flexibility with advancing joint stiffness.
After reading this it is easy to understand why stress has such a negative impact on the way our body works. It is only natural that if we rush around all day not breathing well and adopting bad postures, eventually 'something's gotta give' and will start to hurt. But it doesn’t end there. When stressed we ignore the niggling pains our brain is creating to warn us we have a problem. Then one day ... all of a sudden ... as if from nowhere ... injury strikes and the pain becomes so unbearable that it's impossible to move or to ignore it.
Sayer Clinics' experienced and specialist hands-on physiotherapy and gentle chiropractic treatment not only helps by treating your joint and muscle pain in the short term but most importantly helps change your long-term future.
We improve your chest flexibility and posture, change your breathing pattern, guide you to good movement and fitness and help you change your stress. We, naturally, also make it our business to address the ergonomic problems which led to your acute pain in the first place.
Marta Dias De Oliveira
BSc (Hons) in Physiotherapy
Practitioner in NLP
Senior Physiotherapist practising at Sayer Clinics Kensington W8 and Mayfair W1