Helix Clinic blog

Following on from  yesterday’s post about the connection between childhood asthma and watching TV, we thought of an interesting way to use posture to help someone who is trying to stop smoking.

Many smokers have a similar posture where the upper spine is collapsed (like the children mentioned yesterday). Smoking is inherently unpleasant to the lungs, so part of this contraction happens over time as a defensive postural reaction to the smoke.

If you are a smoker, take a brief moment to assess your own posture to see if this holds for you. If it does, and if you are currently trying to give up smoking, you can use the following exercise as a way to condition yourself away from cigarettes.

Take a few minutes to close your eyes and imagine yourself as a healthy non-smoker sometime in the future, standing in a beautiful natural environment where the air is clean and clear. Picture yourself with a naturally straight upper spine, so that your lungs are fully open to the clean air and you are able to breathe deeply and well. Physically allow your posture to adjust at this point so that your spine is straight and you are breathing deeply. Continue to imagine yourself immersed in this scene, and become aware of how good you feel about the fact that you are no longer a smoker. Stay aware of your good posture, and allow yourself to feel free of all past cravings for cigarettes. Notice how good you feel confident in the knowledge that you are now healthy and smoke-free.

Enjoy this visualisation for a few minutes and then slowly come back to yourself. With this exercise, you will have effectively anchored a postural state to a state where cravings don’t bother you any more. This means that the next time you experience a cigarette craving, simply adjust your posture, make your upper spine straight so that your chest and lungs feel open, and imagine yourself back in that natural scene, enjoying the clean air with no more cravings. If you visualised the scene well enough, you should find your cravings reduce and eventually disappear by using the power of your posture and the power of your mind!

Tags: cravings, posture, smoking, visualisation

A research study carried out by researchers at Glasgow University was published today in the journal Thorax.  They used data drawn from the medical records of 14,000 children who were followed from birth until the age of eleven-and-a-half. Parents were asked whether their children had shown signs of wheezing, and if their GP had diagnosed asthma at any stage.

The researchers found that children who watched more than two hours of TV a day at 39 months were twice as likely to have developed asthma compared to more active children. The baseline showed that 6% of children whose breathing was healthy at 39 months went on to be diagnosed with asthma by the age of eleven-and-a-half. The results were the same for boys and girls, and were unrelated to the children’s weight.

This study makes us think about how posture relates to lung function. Many small children sit on the floor to look at the TV (like in the picture above), which creates a classic slumped spinal posture with the neck tilted back. Traditional energy-building forms of exercise such as qi gong or yoga emphasise the importance of a straight spine. If the spine gets used to being in an unnatural position, then the organs of the body near to that part of the spine can often be affected. One of the most common examples of this that we see is if a patient comes in with a respiratory problem, and when we look at their posture we see that the upper part of the spine is often collapsed. The connection between the strength and structure of the spine and the internal organs is an important one, and the results of this new study certainly fit with that view.

If you suffer from a respiratory condition like asthma, take a minute or two to examine your own posture. Is the upper part of your spine collapsed in any way? If so, you may have found the key to changing your condition for the better, without the use of any steroid drugs or other medication.

Tags: asthma, children, television