Did your mom ever tell you to stand up straight and it just felt like a chore? Or maybe even as an adult you try to have a better posture but it's difficult to maintain for longer than just a few seconds? Why is that?
Slumping the shoulders forward, sinking the chest, having a slight bend at the elbows and wrists, and perhaps even finding it difficult to completely straighten the legs are all symptoms of what we in Hanna Somatics identify as a dominance of the "red light reflex." Just as a red light tells you to stop your car, the “red light reflex” is a stop and withdraw mechanism that is triggered when we are startled. It is a reflex that is programmed so deeply into our nervous systems that we are born with it.
It’s easy to notice this reflex action where there is a sudden loud noise and we instinctively hunker down, bend the knees and elbows, compress the abdomen and duck our heads. Less obvious is also a knocking of the knees together and a drawing of the arms into the body. (A scientific way to describe this whole-body jerk is a coordinated whole body flexion response.) What is very interesting about this is that the whole body participates in one big coordinated effort, the point of which is to protect us: minimize our presence, hide our soft belly parts, pull in the limbs and draw down the head. That way, we expose our less vulnerable side, the back.
But this whole-body response doesn't just happen when there is fear of a physical threat; it also happens when we are internally threatened or overwhelmed and would like to withdraw emotionally. People's bodies engage the red light reflex in cases of depression, anxiety, verbal abuse and the like. I for one have never seen an individual suffering from depression walking with his or her shoulders back, head held high.
If the red light reflex is triggered a lot or we put our bodies its pattern through activities like excessive sitting, our body’s posture can become habituated to this mode so that we always slump. In a sense, it’s as though our bodies have “forgotten” how to straighten up.
What’s happening is that the flexor muscles associated with the red light reflex become perpetually contracted to some degree, literally pulling us down, resisting and overpowering the other set of muscles called extensors that would otherwise help us to stay upright. The more time that we spend with our bodies in this coordinated reflex pattern, the more the muscles get used to staying that way; they become habituated and chronically contracted, holding the position to some extent all the time. This is why when we try to stand up straight, it's difficult or even impossible - not because the back muscles are weak, but because the front (flexor) muscles won't let go and oppose our efforts. Worst of all, because reflexes are governed by the unconscious parts of our brains, when a reflex starts to dominate our posture, we can’t help doing it and usually don’t know why.
Whatever the cause of our chronic red light symptoms, there is a chicken and egg situation. The more we stay in it, the more the body does this spontaneously. The more the body is in the red light mode, the more we feel depressed, anxious and the like. The body posture itself tells the mind it is depressed, anxious and threatened in some way and likewise, because we are prompted to feel this way, we are also more likely to slump.
The good news is that we can correct postural problems that are rooted in habituations to reflex patterns by the intelligent use of our higher brains. When we do slow, deliberate movements, we activate the sensory-motor cortex, a highly evolved part of the brain that helps us to learn new movements and can overcome unconscious reflex-based actions. This is what Hanna Somatic exercises and hands-on sessions are designed to do.
If you find that your body is habituated in the red light (flexion) reflex, it’s very important to deal with this it because in addition to affecting one's posture, a chronic state of the red light reflex is linked to other symptoms: a shuffling back-weighted walk, digestive difficulties, shallow breathing, high blood pressure and reduced cardiac output (which can lead to a heart-attack). These latter four are related to the effects of a collapsed chest and contracted abdomen. When the chronic tension in the flexor muscles is released, better posture is effortless, and there is often an improvement in our moods and energy levels, decreased fear and anxiety, better digestion and a normalizing of blood pressure.
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