EP 56: WTH ?!? What the Health is Tech Neck Posture? with Dr. Krista Burns

RADIO.

Welcome to what the Health an independent approach to your health span. Have you noticed how our health care system may not have your best interest in mind? Join Dr. Eckel in this fun and sometimes disturbing exploration of the state of healthcare and what it means for you. Now, here's your host, Dr. Eckle. Indeed. Welcome back everybody. This is what the Health and I am Dr. Greg Eckel. And today we have my esteemed colleague and guest, Dr. Krista Burns. And our topic is what the health is Tek Nek Posture. Now I want to give you a little bit of background on Dr. Burns. She is a good friend of mine as well. Have really been getting to know her over the last two to three years and she is a powerhouse. So she is the founder of the American Posture Institute, author of the textbook Posture Principles and and a TEDX speaker, which it is really well worth it to check out her TEDX talk on this topic. Dr. Christa's two doctorate degrees, not just one but two, and is leading the charge against postural decline. She's been featured on Fox News Radio, Global Woman Magazine, World Neurology and the Posture Congress. Welcome aboard, Dr. Krista.

Thank you so much, Dr. Gregg. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having me on the show. What the Health is Tech Deck. That's what we're going to be talking about.

That is and this is such a timely topic with everybody kind of working from home, the kids are doing school from home, everybody's at their desks without proper support or posture. So I'm really excited to like kind of one, I want to get a little bit of your background, how you got into this. Why did you form, you know, why did you start the American Posture Institute? And then we are going to talk about posture and what to do about it. Like why is it such a big deal? So let's start with number one, you know, what inspired you to create the American Posture Institute?

Well, that started back when I was 3 years old and I had the original dream of becoming an Olympic skier. So my first 20 years of my life was dedicated to skiing. All I wanted to do was be an Olympic skier. I trained every single day. I, I was on the United States development ski team for moguls. So I was doing bumps and jumps every day. Now everything was going as planned. I was training at a high level, competing nationally, internationally, was training with world champion athletes, with Olympic gold medalists and I was right on the path of going to the Olympics. I was ranked 12th in the nation overall. It was the morning of United States Ski Team Tryouts when everything changed in an instant. I was training for my run that day, and I suffered a fall. I got pulled from the competition because my back was hurting so badly that I couldn't even describe the pain. And so not knowing what to do, the only thing I cared about at that moment was getting back out to ski, right? To compete as soon as possible. And so I looked to my coach for advice, and my coach had recommended that I go get injections in my spine. This was considered the conservative route to being. Being skiing sooner. That was my only goal. And so I did. So I flew to a spinal specialist out in Seattle, and I was getting regular injections in my spine under anesthesia, weekly. So I would fly from Idaho to Seattle, get injections in my spine, and continue this process for about eight weeks in a row. Now, not only was I still in pain after the injections, but I actually got so much worse. So now, not only could I ski, but every time I bent forward to put my shoes or my socks on, I would literally scream out in pain because the pain in my back was so intense. When I would wake up after being under anesthesia, I felt like somebody had taken, like, a staple gun to my spine. It just hurt so bad. Not only could I not ski, I could barely walk. I felt helpless. And then the solution was to get more injections. So then I went from one round of injections to the next round of injections. And after 16 weeks of getting injections in my spine under anesthesia, I watched my Olympic window literally pass me by it in that moment, here I am going. My whole life was preparing me for this moment when I would ski in the Olympics. And I became depressed. I didn't know what to do with the rest of my life. And so I started college, and I was like, I have to do something in the health field. I became obsessed with back pain at this point because it didn't make sense to me how a young athlete couldn't heal from back pain, right? If 80% of the people suffer from back pain, how could myself, a young athlete who was dedicated to the process, how could I not heal from this? So I became obsessed with back pain. I started researching it, and I came across chiropractic. And what I liked about the chiropractic approach was that it was natural and it helped improve the structure. So I thought, you know what? Maybe I should look more into this. And I went to chiropractic school. Now, I know this is a little bit of a long story, but then I was still in pain afterwards when I graduated, and I used to fake that I wasn't in pain, because what person, chiropractic school can admit that they have back pain? Right. So after that, I'm like, there still has to be more. What am I missing that is preventing me from living a healthy life? And then so from there, we created signature postural correction systems, healed myself, and then I really knew that I was onto something. And then from there, we were able to teach other healthcare providers our postural correction systems. And we've helped thousands of patients, thousands of practitioners that now implement these systems with their patients. So American Posture Institute wasn't born overnight. It was a life lifetime of experiences leading to this point.

Indeed. So how many folks, like, how many people do you have as members in the American Posture Institute?

Yeah, we have thousands of healthcare providers. So we work directly with professionals and we teach them our signature postural correction systems that they then go and teach their patients. So it's amazing because once we learned the importance of posture and how to get predictable results with postural correction, I wanted to help as many people as I could because it so profoundly impacted me. And by working with professionals who then work directly with their patients, we're able to scale at a much larger model where we can help more people than just one on one. So it's been a beautiful opportunity to help more people.

That's awesome. And that is a worldwide organization, right? You have providers across the board. Yeah. That is so impressive. So you were, I mean, basically, you were in high school when you had that injury.

Yes, exactly.

And not being able to heal at the basically pinnacle of your, you know, your beingness of going to the Olympics. Wow. So way to turn that into just some magic for a lot of other people. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on right now. Right. Because we've got this concept of, you know, ergonomics or posture. If we just started out with, like, what is posture? How do you just define that?

Yeah. So posture is the structural framework of your body. We all have a posture. We either have a good one or we have a bad one. There really is no in between. So the structural framework of your body supports the upright postural design to. To prevent gravity from compressing us forward. So no matter how hard we try, we'll never get rid of gravity. We'll never beat gravity. And so you'll hear a lot of people say as they start with the aging process, they're like, oh, gravity's got me down. And they actually notice that they start to lose height as they age. That's because gravity is compressing our body. So when we have proper postural design, we're able to resist the pressure of gravity with upright posture. And this helps us support our stature upright and of course live a healthy life. So it's really the structural framework of our bodies.

Got it. So with that, you know, with proper posture, what is proper posture then? If we're talking about it, you know, like, I kind of feel like I need to like exaggerate a little bit of like when everybody's doing this tech neck posture of. What are you finding with that?

Yeah, and you know what's funny is when you say this one word, posture, there's very few words in the English language where you say one single word. And what probably happened to everybody who was listening is they probably fidgeted a little bit, right? They probably sat up a little bit straight. So we say this one word and it actually impacts our physiology, which is so interesting. So we've all been told to sit up straight our entire life. This is not the first time you've heard this, right? Like if I were to say, hey, sit up straight, you'd go like, yeah, I know. My mom told me since the time I was five years old, my grandma told me, my teacher told me, we've all been told to sit up straight. So why has this been inherently put into our systems, into our physiology, where we instantly want to sit up straighter when we hear that word, posture? So what you can do is you can do an at home posture check. So proper posture means that your ears are aligned over your shoulders, shoulders are over your hips, hips over your knees, knees over your ankles, and your both feet are going to be pointed forward. What you're going to commonly see if you have what's called a postural distortion pattern or poor posture or postural dysfunction, is that your head goes forward, your ears are forward in relation to your shoulders. So if I turn to the side, you'll see that my ears are forward in relation to my shoulders instead of being in proper alignment. It's also very common to have the shoulders rounded forward, that classic C shaped spinal curvature. So instead of being upright with our shoulders back and chest forward, we tend to, especially at the end of the day, we start to get a little bit tired or if we're on our devices, we tend to slump forward in more flexion type position. You may also see that one hip is higher than the other, creating an imbalance on our weight distribution from Right to left of our body or if you look down at your feet, you may notice that one or both feet is pointed outwards. They may be pointed inwards, but it's more commonly to be pointed outwards. These are indications that you have what's called a postural distortion pattern. What I want everybody to do is to start being a posture detective. Start noticing on yourself if you have any of these changes in posture. Also check your children because if we can help them from a younger age, we can help instill better posture habits to help them know what proper posture is to develop that posture mindfulness.

Do you have a way. So let's talk about teens, because I have a gaggle of those. What's the best way to bring it up? Rather than like sit up straight or like, hey, I want you to be aware of like you're, you know, got a teenager who's doing a lot of presses, like bench presses and really working the front. And I keep saying, hey, you've got to work the reciprocal muscles to balance yourself out.

Okay, let me answer two of those questions because one of the things that you just said I can't not mention which, which is just working the front flexor muscles. So we'll get back to your question of how to address this with teenagers, but I just have to go on a quick rant Right now, a Dr. Krista soapbox about how the fitness industry has actually has had a huge impact on having worse posture for our population. So we go into what's called flexion when we have slumped posture. So our flexor muscles like our chest and our upper rectus abdominis are contracted whereas our back muscles are elongated. Now what we want to do is we want to strengthen the back muscles to pull our bodies upright. What happens when we go to the gym or we're working on those six pack abs, or when we sit down on that peloton bike, or when we do chest presses, we're working that front part of our body. We're reinforcing the musculature that's already really tight and strengthened. And we're continuing to elongate or allow weakness of our posture muscles of our spine. And so we sit all day in this position, we eat in this position, we watch Netflix in this position, we do everything in this flexor dominant position. And then we go to the gym and we do chest press and work our flexion muscles. We do sit up and crunch after crunch after crunch and continue to reinforce poor posture. So what we really need to do is to stand up straight, work that reciprocal muscles like you mentioned and really work the posterior chain of our body. So I know that wasn't your exact question, but that's one of those things that we have to address because it's a huge myth in the fitness industry that in order to get a nice strong core, we need to do crunch, crunch, crunch. We. Or sit up, sit up, sit up. Instead, we need to elongate, work the posterior chain as well as do core exercises that are going to stimulate and squeeze the waist in versus crunching forward in poor posture.

What would be an example of a couple for the reciprocal component for people?

Yeah. So I would love to recommend doing a posture angel. So if you. We can do this right now. It's that simple. If you bring your arms up to 90 degrees, raise as high as you can by keeping your elbows out and then lower. And as you lower, you should feel a nice contraction between your scapulae. Now, if you do this against a wall, you're going to flatten your entire spine against the wall. Press back into the wall and hold. Perform this for five times and hold for 10 seconds. And what you'll notice is that instantly you're pulling your shoulders back and strengthening that musculature that holds the body in a nice upright position.

Lovely. Oh, that's a good question.

Sorry about that. Back to your question about how to address this with teenagers, because I know that you're not the only parent wondering, okay, how am I going to make this matter to my kids? Right. So here's what I want you to talk about with your teenagers is you have to meet their value system. What is their value system? Well, cell phones and text messages are definitely in their value system. They don't want to miss out on texting their friends. Yeah, they also want to look good, don't they? Teenagers are very, you know, that's a moment in their life where vanity is an important aspect of their health. So with proper posture, it helps you instantly look better, move better, and feel better. For some of us, if we're suffering from back pain, like myself, for example, back pain was the driver to correct my posture. For many of us, if we're not experiencing that tightness in our shoulders, we're not experiencing back pain or headaches yet, which are going to come from forward head posture, then it is a great way of communicating how much better you look with upright posture. Now, there's so much research out there, not that you have to express all the research to your teenager, but just to give some emphasis of how important this truly is. They've done research studies comparing two groups of students, university students, and there was nothing different between the two groups of students, except for this one factor, their posture. The group with poor, one group was supposed to sit in poor posture in a hunched forward position, and the other group was supposed to sit with an upright posture. And what they did between these two groups is they asked the group a slumped posture to recall memories about themselves and adjectives about themselves. 86% of the group with poor posture recalled a negative memory about themselves and had a negative adjective to describe themselves. They then asked the same questions to the group in proper posture that was sitting upright with more confident posture. And that group, 87% said something positive in terms of their memory and something positive about their body image. The only difference between these two groups of people was the slumped posture versus proper posture, negative versus positive. Now, I love having this conversation with teenagers because they care about how they look. And as parents and as practitioners, we care so much about them having that confidence that they can walk into a room with proper posture that projects body confidence. And then we know that they're automatically thinking with more positive thoughts. They have higher levels of self perceived leadership, which is another research study, and they're more in a power state versus feeling shy and timid and closed and unsure about themselves during that important developmental period. So make it about how they look when they have nice upright posture and how they portray confidence to their classmates and to their friends with proper posture.

Love it. I mean, I think that could be applied to all of us as well.

Absolutely.

In any situation in life. And it makes sense. So why did they have any speculation as to why Was that on blood flow or did they have an understanding? Like what did the research say?

Yeah, well, number one, less blood flow to the brain. So that inhibits certain parts of our brain, which I know that you certainly work with patients to make this. But in addition to that, it's just if you think about those words depressed and uplifted, what does that look like and how does it feel? So when you're depressed, you're depressed with gravity, Right. You're depressed and you're down, you're closed. Whereas when you have an uplifted mood, you're upright and you're uplifted. And so we truly embody through our postural design how we're feeling. And just by making slight changes of our posture. I always tell patients, a change in centimeters of your body can actually dramatically change your outlook on life, your quality of life can improve Just by changing your body position, even as small as centimeters from here to here, this can be all the difference.

Within centimeters. Right? I mean, that's not much of a change here, folks. On our posture and blood flow, you know, that's the way that I talk about it in a Chinese medicine fashion, is around blood flow. The healing properties of the body travel into blood. So really coupling this with the posture in our innate intelligence and design, that's why we were designed this way. So that is really. It's very uplifting. Yeah, thank you. Well, what about. So you mentioned posture is declining at the speed of technology. So have you seen over the last decade or two decades or three decades a worsening of posture?

Yes, absolutely. Posture is declining at the speed of technology. Meaning that as a human species, we evolved to be upright, and going from a quadruped position into a bipedal position took us 3 million years. This was a huge change in physiology. And what happened when we evolved to be upright now, suddenly, instead of navigating our world from all fours in a quadruped position, suddenly we were able to stand upright. What happens when we're able to stand upright is we can look further in each direction. We can grab things with our hands and feel them and perceive them. We can do more movements than we can from a quadruped position. So what happened when we evolved to be upright is that we had so much incoming information to our brains that our brains actually grew in size. And so what's amazing is our ability to think and have thought processes as a human being. The front part of our brain controls this. This developed after we evolved to be upright beings. So it took 3 million years for us to evolve to be upright. And then with the onset of the digital age, it took 20 years. And suddenly we have devolved. We have never seen such a rampant decline in postural design in human history until the onset of the digital age. That's why I always say that at the speed of technology is progressing, we are regressing in terms of our posture. Now, I'm not. I would be a hypocrite if I said we should just get rid of technology altogether. Don't worry, we're going to talk about strategies to overcome tech neck where you don't have to get rid of phone and you can still do zoom meetings. Because I know for so many of us right now, especially we need to be on zoom. We need to be connected with digital technology. But what matters is not just how much time spent on technology, we need to monitor that, but also how we're positioning our body while on technology because we're seeing this rampant decline where we went from being upright to having technic posture, which is looking down with our ears in front of our shoulders, looking down at our devices, to also being a more sedentary society where we're desk bound and we're constantly typing and hunch forward looking at our devices. So we've seen this rampant decline of posture associated with the onset of the digital age.

Now there is a concept that you educated me on was around digital dementia. So will you speak into that a little bit here?

Yeah. So I know Dr. Greg, at your practice, you work with a ton of patients who are suffering from advanced neurological disorders. For example, a Parkinson's disease is one example. Now what's really interesting, if you were to look up Parkinson's patients, you know, on, you know, on textbook, or if you were to do a simple Google search, what you would find is you would find a picture that looked something like this is you would see that the patient was slumped forward, that when they walked they had a slower gait pattern, they walked slowly, they shuffled their feet, and they don't move their arms a lot. Okay. That's what you would see as a classical sign or symptom associated with Parkinson's disease. What is Parkinson's disease? A decline in brain function. Now I want you to keep that image in your mind. And now think about maybe your teenage daughter, maybe your teenage son who's walking with their smartphone. What happens when I'm walking with my smartphone is my head goes forward in relation to my shoulders. My shoulders roll forward. I'm taking slower, smaller steps because I'm looking at my device and I have no arm swing. Okay. This is the exact, a very similar presentation to advanced neurodevelopmental disorders. Right. And so the difference here is that gait, slower gait and slump forward posture for Parkinson's patients is due to the onset of a neurological disorder. Whereas carrying our smartphones daily with us is now creating dysfunctional patterns of our brain that we would normally associate with more advanced neurodevelopmental disorders. So then what's digital dementia? This is we're spending too much time on our devices. We're hunched forward in a seated, sedentary posture. We've changed our gait patterns, how we walk, we've changed our posture around our devices, and now we're only stimulating certain parts of our brain. So when I'm staring at a device, I'm overstimulating the back part of my brain. Called the occipital lobe. The name's not all that important, but what it does is it takes our incoming visual stimuli and makes sense of it. What's inhibited when I'm not moving, when I'm not sitting up straight, and when I'm not thinking at a high level is my frontal lobe. And so the front part of our brain, where we do all of our thinking and our cognition, our thought processes, is inhibited. And so what we're seeing then, when children stand up after spending hours on their devices is they have short term memory loss. So short term memory loss is a strong word. They have symptoms associated with what we would consider loss of memory over short periods of time, loss of working memory. So for example, when they stand up, they may be a little bit clumsier. They checked their device to check for a message and then two hours went by and they can't even remember what they've been doing on their devices. They're having a hard time paying attention in school and they're having lack of focus and more brain fog. So a great term for it is digital dementia. But what we're seeing is that having slumped forward posture with technic posture over our devices is mimicking neurodegeneration that we have classically saved for individuals who are presenting with this later in life.

Wow. Wow. So, and are they also seeing changes on brain imaging as well?

Yes, in fact, there's a research study that's going out right now. It's happening right now. It's a 10 year study, which I love that it's a 10 year study because it's actually tracking, I think 10 and 11 year olds over the course of 10 years of how much time they're spending on devices and how it's impacting their brains. A full decade has not passed on this study yet, but the National Institute of Health did release the initial research. What they found is that when children spend more than seven hours per day on devices, which is really not that abnormal, is there? I'm not, I'm not saying it's good, but it's very frequent that children are spending seven hours or more on devices, that they're actually having brain shrinkage. So by spending so much time on our devices, we're literally outsourcing our brains to our device. And instead of being upright, moving around, we are completely in a sedentary posture, slump forward in the technic posture. So we're seeing these brain changes. And a lot of research studies are coming out. 2019, 2020, brand new research, all about this, how too much time on tech in a seated, slumped forward posture is dramatically impacting brain function and brain size of adolescents.

Wow. You know, so that is, that's compelling to say. While we see Alzheimer's and dementia raising, you know, going up as we age, then we have this component of tech neck and digital dementia also playing a role here. You know, seven hours when I, back when we were doing live lunch and learns in the community, I would share that information with workers and they're like, well, what are you saying? Like I'm in front of the computer ten hours a day. Like, are you talking about me? Like that study was with kids? What about for adults? How do you answer that?

Yeah, no, the same is true for adults as well. What's so interesting about that children group is that the brain is still developing, right. And so a really important thing happens called synaptic pruning early in life. So with synaptic pruning, what that means is we have all these synapses that occur in our brain as we're learning all these new things that we learn as children. And then at about age 6 or 7, we actually prune out the things that are less important. So if children are on devices early on, and we're talking 25% of infants have a smartphone that they use regularly, we're talking infants, 75% of children under the age of six have a device in their bedroom. So if they are on technology regularly, we're reinforcing the synapses associated with being sedentary, being hunched over and looking at a device. Now when we go and do synaptic pruning, we're going to keep the synapses that we use the most often. So if we're being, if we're moving less and spending more time on devices, we're reinforcing the synapses associated with spending time on devices. So, so now fast forward and how that's impacting us later in life is that lack of proper development from an early age is now showing up as I know that you know this, but dementia is now happening to people as early as in their 30s, as early as in their 50s. We used to associate this with somebody in their 80s, in their 90s. Right. And now when you think about that, I want you to picture that 80 year old or that 90 year old in your mind. What comes to your mind when you think of somebody in their 80s? Do you instantly picture somebody who's hunched forward? Maybe they're walking with a cane, they're walking a little Bit slower. And, you know, maybe they have dementia like symptoms. Now, what did we notice here? They have dementia like symptoms. They also have a change in their posture and they have a change in their position of walking. So if we spot these changes early on, this is an indication we want to make changes early to prevent this from leading to poor synapses or poor input to our brain function. With adults, it's definitely impacting us as well, but we can control it by having proper posture habits with technology.

Love it. All right, everybody, this is what the health I am Dr. Greg Eckel. This is my guest, Dr. Krista Burns. Please share this show with your loved ones as we are kind of in this new economy where we're doing a lot more online. Posture and blood flow are so essential. And what we're learning here today is this is on cognitive decline, this thing. It's real and we're seeing it in younger and younger children. So if you're older and watching the show, you have loved ones, maybe you have kids yourself. This is really great information to share. This is where you're getting it is at what the health. So please share us with your loved ones. That's the world we want to see and live into are ones where people have the information that they need to thrive. So, Dr. Christa, thank you. So what are we talking about? So we're talking about there on the brain health front and poor posture. How else does posture affect our health?

Yeah, so posture affects a lot of aspects of our health from a physical perspective as well as neurologic. So from a physical perspective, when we have poor posture, it's really common to have headaches, to have neck pain, to have back pain, to have that tightness in your shoulders. Also eye strain or migraines. So if you've ever felt that at the end of the workday, you're like, oh, I just, I feel so hyper stimulated and my shoulders are pretty tight. Or maybe you're fidgeting in your seat or when you wake up, you have some stiffness in your low back. These are really common structural symptoms that are associated with a decline in posture. Now, from a functional perspective, it also impacts our balance and our ability to breathe. One of the things I like to always do as an example when it comes to respiration is this right here. And I'm going to ask you to do it with me. Dr. Gregg. If you roll your shoulders forward, just be in poor posture for a minute. Permission to be in bad posture. And everybody who's watching, do this with us too. Now from here, take a deep breath in. How's that feel? Restricted.

That's tight.

Yeah. Okay, now sit up straight. Pull your shoulders back, look up, have your eyes parallel with the horizon and take a full deep breath in and out. Oh, so much easier, right? Different world.

Yeah.

So taking one breath in, poor posture, that's okay, you know, it happens. However, if we've had this slumped forward posture for 20 years, imagine having full, having less respiration over the course of that many years of your life. What is hyperventilation and what is this associated with our posture? So when we're in a slump forward posture, because we can't take a full inhalation in and out, we end up taking shorter but faster respiration. So we start to hyperventilate. So we start to go into this type of respiratory pattern. Now what is that associated with? It's associated with more stress. So with our nervous system we have what's called the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is associated with what? With fight or flight, with fear, with panic, with stress, with anxiety. And so when we go into this hyperventilatory state, many times caused from poor posture, now we're hyperventilating and we already have enough stress in our society. Like we're, I mean, we have enough stress this year alone to last a lifetime for many of us. Right? Yeah. So we know this stress is coming at us. If we're not in a resilient posture to maintain our respiration, that can instantly bring us into a parasympathetic, which is a healing state where we're less stressed out, we're not panicked, we're resting, we're digesting, we're in a healing state. So if we're in poor posture, we have stress come our way. Imagine that deadline, you're sitting at your computer like, how am I going to pay the bills? I have a deadline coming up. And we're just seated in this posture pouring out cortisol. We're not moving because we're at our devices and we're in a slump forward posture and we're in a hyperventilatory state. So it's continuing to propagate that stress cycle instead of bringing us into a natural, a parasympathetic state, which is going to be more natural for healing. So just honestly, when we have stress, we can help combat this. We're never going to get rid of stress, but we can help combat or choose to overcome stress and be more resilient. When we sit up straight and take full inhalations and exhalations. By controlling our breathing, we're tapping into that parasympathetic nervous system to then overcome the stress response that's associated with so much health decline and of course mental health struggles as well.

I think that breathing aspect is so crucial as with stress and that whole discussion around stress of having proper breath and creating the space for that. I'm wondering, are we seeing also more scoliosis then as a result of this?

Yeah, we're seeing more scoliosis as well. And what I always refer to. So a scoliosis is going to be an abnormal curvature of the thoracic spine. The thoracic spine spine is just the middle of your back, the middle and lower part of your back, your thoracic and lumbar spine. And so that's going to be an abnormal curvature to the side laterally. In addition to seeing more scoliosis, we're also seeing what's called a hyperkyphosis. So what a hyperkyphosis is is a C shaped spinal curvature. One of the things we say at the American Posture Institute is generation C. This is generation C that has tech neck. They're looking down at their devices. So my ears are forward in relation to my shoulders, then my shoulders roll forward and I have a C shaped spinal curvature. So instead of being upright, I'm going flexed forward into a C shaped. As I go into the C shape, this is inhibiting my normal respiration and it's creating that hyperventilatory state. Now I'm more stressed out and on top of it I'm having the physical pressure of looking down at my devices. Just by looking down in this technic posture, we're actually adding up to 60 pounds of additional pressure on our necks. It's no wonder at the end of the day we're going, oh, I have a knot in my shoulder. Or we're feeling like we have a headache because we're adding this amount of pressure to our cervical spines to our necks by looking down at abnormal posture. I mean imagine if you went to the gym and you grabbed a 60 pound barbell and placed that on your head. It's crippling. Like we would never do that. That would hurt so bad. And yet every time we've been down and look at our devices, we're adding that amount of pressure to our necks, which is having a great impact on our physiology, our ability to function as well as our structure.

So what do you recommend then? Are like people then looking at their devices like bring it up to your eye level?

Yeah, that's a great question. So when it comes to our smartphones, it is unrealistic to say, I want you to hold your arms straight out and hold your device up. That would be great for our posture. I agree with it from a posture perspective, but it's just unrealistic because our arms are going to get really tired. What I want you to do, Dr. Greg, is I want you to pull your elbows in close to your body. And then with your smartphone, I want you to hold it with your elbows in and then bring it up in front of you. So now you're able to maintain it at eye level without having to look down, but your arms are supported. So instead of, you know, telling our teenagers, for example, that they have to bring their arms all the way out and that they can't look down, they're going to go, what am I supposed to do? I have to check my messages. I have a notification coming in. So just tell them to bring their elbows in close to their body so it's supported from here. Now I can check all my messages without looking down and by not fatiguing my arms and my shoulders as well. And then with computers and with laptops, you know, if you have a standing desk, it's the best case scenario that it can be have a sit stand capability. Now if you don't want to invest in a standing desk, no problem. All you have to do is grab one of those old Amazon boxes. All of us are getting Amazon boxes all the time, so just grab one of those and put it underneath your computer monitor or underneath your laptop. So now you can see that I'm standing, I'm standing. I'm moving around a lot as I'm, as I'm on technology. This is really important. So you can grab an old box, you can grab an old bunch of textbooks that nobody's read in forever and put those under your device, bring that up to eye level so you can still work, you can still communicate on your device, but you're in a healthy posture to do so. And again, with those smartphones, make sure to bring the elbows in, bring the device up to eye level.

Love it. And do you want like on a desktop or on a laptop? You want the top, top of the screen with the top of your eyes or what's the best recommendation there?

Yeah, that's wonderful. So if you're doing a video, you're going to be looking at the top of your screen, so you want to make sure that you can look at it. At eye level if you're reading. So if you're like writing or if you're reading, you're going to have it be a little bit higher because you're going to be looking at the middle of the screen. So ideally, we want to keep our eyes so that they're parallel with the ground so that we're not looking down or looking forward. And with typing, again, it's very important that we have support of our wrists. Carpal tunnel syndrome is another one of those very common things that people present with when they have bad posture. So save your wrists by supporting your wrists while typing and keep your shoulders back while typing as well. It's very common, once we start typing, to do this posture in there.

Right. And having the wrist too far up. Right. Like, you recommend having a removable keyboard or something like that if you're working on your. The height of the monitor. Well, so you had mentioned in kind of passing here. So thank you, number one, thank you for all of that. Those specifics are really important. I mean, I find myself too just out of old hat of just like looking down. And I've been hearing from you this information now for over a year, and it's like I'm still catching myself, like, okay, really get this in. Like, put those elbows in. You had mentioned on the kind of the mood of the individual, right, from the slump position to the better posture position and their mood and happiness, how does that equate then into mental health? Mental health and awareness there?

Yes, absolutely. So research study after research study after research study, which, don't worry, you don't have to go read all the research studies. I've done it for you. What I want to translate and let that know to you is that when you have upright posture, you have a better quality outlook of life. You're more confident, you have better body image, and on top of it, you're more resilient to stress. There's what's called a power posture. So a closed posture then is going to be that slumped, forward, flexed posture. When I'm in a closed posture, if I'm in what's called a power posture, which is a nice upright, open posture, we actually changes the neurochemistry, the chemistry in our brains to perceive ourselves at a higher level. So if I have what's called a power posture, the research demonstrates that I have less cortisol output. What is cortisol associated with? It's associated with stress and with weight gain. So by changing my posture even for as little as two minutes, even just by a few centimeters for two minutes. I have less cortisol and I have more testosterone associated with dominance and power. So why is this important? Now imagine going into your next sales meeting or the next time you need to get on a call that you've been putting off for months now and you know, or a, you know, a confrontation or anything that you need to walk into confidence with. If you walk in slumped and feeling timid about yourself now, you're more stressed out, you have more cortisol, you have less self confidence. Whereas if you just hold a nice upright posture for a couple of minutes, you have nice full respiration. So now instead of being stressed out, fight or flight, you're in a parasympathetic state. You're calm, you're portraying confidence as you walk in. This alone is going to help you be more powerful with how you're presenting your message, more powerful with how you show up to other people around you. And it's going to make you feel more powerful too. So it's so important to have proper posture. And Dr. Gregg, one of the things I want to make sure we mention to the audience is proper posture is not the only thing you need to do for your mental health. Of course, there's so much more to the story, but what I love about posture is we can control it voluntarily, right? So we can just by when we start to feel stress coming on, when we start to feel down in ourselves, we start to feel depressed. When we start to have those. That anxiety, it's like, oh my gosh, how am I going to get everything done? You know, you start to get that anxiety, then just know that there is more to consider with mental health. However, if we can instantly change our posture, instantly control our respiration, we have done what we can in the moment right there to overcome the stress response and have better mental health. So just remember, proper posture helps you have better quality of life, helps you look better, move better and feel better instantly, and you can control your posture system. So if you need to put down those devices, just stand up, have a nice power posture, take a few deep breaths that can change the trajectory of the rest of your day by having better mental health.

Love it. So what would be minimum effective dose then on that power posture, breathing and moment? Like two minutes or what is that?

Yeah, minimum two minutes. But ideally we want to work to the point where we're always maintaining an upright posture. Now that's hard to do overnight. And I recognize that we've all had a posture for many years before today's conversation and you hear the word posture, you instantly sit up straighter, but then your mind, you forget about it and suddenly you're back in this position even though you had the best intentions in mind. So what I always recommend to patients is use a posture reminder. So this is going to remind you to go into upright posture. So we always gave our patients bracelets that said check your posture. And we gave them those cling free stickers that they place in the areas where they spend the most amount of time. So for example, if you're a computer worker, you want to put it right there on your computer and it says check your posture. So every time you see that posture reminder, then it's going to remind you to go into upright posture. Another way of using tech for good is they have posture sensors. You can put one right underneath your neck and it's going to buzz every time you go forward. You can also set an alarm on your phone that reminds you to take posture breaks, which I'll show you how to do a posture break here in a second and to check your posture throughout the day. Should we do posture breaks?

Let's do a posture break.

Okay, so posture breaks, all of us are spending time on devices, if we weren't already. We're spending more time on devices right now, and that's okay. But what we need to do is have proper posture while doing it. So what I want you to do is set an alarm or use your posture reminder and take 30 seconds every hour to do a posture break. And how we perform this, perform it with me here is you're going to bring your arms out to the side. You're going to press your chest forward and drop your head back. So from this position, you're going to hold for 30 seconds. As you're holding, I just want you to be mindful of your posture and take nice deep inhalations and exhalations. So hold for 30 seconds. Okay, you're going to perform this for 30 seconds every hour of your workday or for your children, 30 seconds every hour that they're on devices and or in their classroom room. What's going to happen? So after doing 30 seconds of a posture break, you're going to feel more stretched out. You just feel better instantly. You're going to feel like, wow, you know, I feel like I can sit up straighter right away. Right? That was a nice stretch. In addition to that, you're going to be able to focus better. And here's why. So the part of our brain that controls it's Called a reticular activating system. It controls our alertness and what we pay attention to in our focus. Now, there's a descending pathway that goes to our posture system. And so when we go into upright posture, then suddenly we're activating that reticular activating system. And so it helps us then when we go back to work, to be more focused than we were before. I mean, if you think about it, when you get tired at work and you're like, at the end of the day, it's like it's 4:30, for example. You're like, oh, just how am I gonna get through the rest of the day? What does your posture look like? Or if you start to fall asleep in class, I mean, you kind of go into this posture, don't you? Maybe fall asleep, you know, forward onto your desk. Now imagine that scary professor back from college. They call your name and you didn't want them to know that you were asleep. What would be the first thing?

You sit up straight.

You would sit up straight, right? I wasn't sleeping. What are you talking about? We inherently do this because when we want to pay attention and we want to be alert and we want to be focused, we sit up straight. So it's our inherent response. Now, if we can continue to control that voluntarily by taking a posture break for 30 seconds every hour, we're going to feel stretched out, we're going to go anti gravity instead of going forward with gravity, and we're going to pay attention better when we get back to work as well.

What are some of the common pitfalls around this process? Because I've seen some folks that have tried to overcompensate into this good posture and then they start to get military backs of a total flat back. Do you have any other pitfalls that people fall into with this?

Yeah, well, first of all, take it step by step. I appreciate the enthusiasm to want to have great posture. That's always a good thing, right? That's a good first step. But of course, we have to give ourselves credit for knowing that we've had our posture for many years and we're not expecting to change it overnight. So one of the pitfalls would be, would be to stand up really straight and be super rigid and not move around enough. Also, when we talk about proper posture, and I probably should have said this at the beginning, I'm not just talking about how you sit without moving, I'm talking about your posture in movement as well. So when we go into our daily lives, we want to have, we want to develop postural fitness where we can prevent postural collapse. So, for example, if I have great posture, I'm standing in perfect posture, military posture, if you will, and then I sit down at my desk and I just collapse forward and start working. Or every time I get stressed out, I just go right into this position. That's called the postural collapse. We want to. Instead of just focusing on sitting up straight and perfect for the moment, we want to develop postural fitness. That goes back to our conversation before about not just working the front part of your body, but really in reinforcing the musculature of your back to support upright posture. Also using posture reminders, taking Posture breaks for 30 seconds every hour and bringing those devices up to eye level and setting up your workspace or your learning space for your children, especially if they're doing virtual school right now, then make sure that you set it up in a way where they can move around more and they can have the opportunity of being in an upright posture. And another pitfall, again, goes back to just thinking that our core is just our rectus abdominis, our rectus abdominis muscles. And if you were to look at your stomach, you can see your rectus abdominis. That's why we spend so much time thinking about this rectus abdominis muscles, because you can see them. If you were to wear a bathing suit, for example, we spend so much time doing crunches to reinforce those and make them strong. But what we're missing out on is we're just working the top part of our abs instead of the side of our abdominals, as well as the lower part of our abs. And so that brings us into the. The pitfall of having poor posture when we think we're strengthening our core, but we're really reinforcing bad posture. So make sure to work the lower part of your abs as well.

Got it. Cool. Any special specific workout for that one? For the lower ab?

Yes, doing planks is really good. So a plank position, I'm sure everybody's heard of it before. You're going to be in a plank position where you're holding a nice, firm position. And what you're doing is you're contracting what's called the intercourset abdominals. So it's going to be a squeezing, cinching around your waist, but you're not going into any sort of flexion. So work up to being able to do three sets of planks for 30 seconds. If you feel that you start to go into poor posture, then start for 15 seconds or even 10 seconds. Start for 10 seconds, then 15 seconds, then 20 seconds and build up to that postural fitness where you can maintain proper posture by doing a plank. Also, a superman exercise is really good. So when you're laying down on the ground, remember, most of us have a C shaped spinal curvature. What we want to do is reverse that by doing a Superman. We're lying flat on the ground and we're going to lift up into a superman position. If you're lying flat, you're going to bring your arms and your head off the ground as well as your feet and you're literally reversing that C shaped spinal curvature and going into a superman position. That'll reinforce the musculature of your back to have a nice strong posture, develop that postural fitness and prevent postural collapse.

Lovely, lovely. Now, I think we are hitting some of the strategies of preventing this technique. So we talked about kind of the elbows in reading this way, the setup of the desk, the ability to move with your posture in relationship to each other. Are there. What other ones did we miss in there?

Yeah, a couple more. First is having sit stand capability and having a more active workspace or learning space. Again, please apply all of this to your children as well as. So when we have sit stand capability, we're not so desk bound that we're just in the seated sedentary posture all day. It's hard even for me to sit in perfect posture if I'm completely sedentary. Now I want you to think about your day and just be honest with yourself. It's totally okay to be honest and forgive yourself for it and then continue to be better. Is if we think about our day as we wake up, we sit down and we have breakfast, we sit as we commute to work, we check our messages. You know, we sit and we check our messages. We get to work and we sit at our computer. And then afterwards we get home, we sit down for dinner, and then we sit down with the family and watch some Netflix and then we go to bed and we are literally sedentary for like 21 of 24 hours per day. And so we're spending so much time seated. So what I want you to do is start adding more activity into your workspace or into your workday. So right now I'm standing, like I said, I'm moving around a lot. So you can have the stand capability where you bring your device up to eye level and you can still work. You know, if you're having a zoom call conference or if you're, you know, zoom learning, you can still be moving around. Also, you can have what's called an active sitting solution, because I also recognize that in certain circumstances you need to sit, right? So it's called an active sitting solution, where you can either be on an exercise ball or a posture cushion. So with a posture cushion, it's a disc and it emulates an exercise ball. You guys know what I mean? With an exercise, one of those big balls that you find in the gyms, for example. Now you can sit on that or you can sit on a posture cushion, which is a disc that you sit on. What's so beneficial about this is that it's an unstable surface. Now that sounds. Why would that be beneficial if it's unstable? The reason it's beneficial is because when we sit in an old chair, the chair holds our body upright against gravity for us. Meaning if I sit down and I plop down on my chair, I have poor posture, I won't fall out of the chair. So even if I start to fall asleep, even if I'm totally hunched forward, the chair holds me upright, right? However, if I'm on an exercise ball or a posture cushion, it's unstable. And so as soon as I start to get lazy with my posture, I could actually fall off. So this is a good thing, because what happens is we have these receptors in our inner ears that stimulate our vestibular system. And it says, wake up, wake up, wake up, you're about to fall. And it recentralizes our posture so that we no longer are in that position where we could fall over. Okay? So by having an instable surface, we move around more often, engaging our muscles. We're going to be in proper posture. And on top of it, we're utilizing our brains, right? Our brains and our bodies to maintain upright posture. One other thing for you too, Dr. Greg, unless you have any comments on.

That one, keep going, keep going.

So the next one too is digital detox doses for the whole family. So with a digital detox dose, again, I promised you, I made this promise that I'll help you fix your posture and you don't have to get rid of your devices. Even though we're talking about tech neck. I mean, what the health is tech neck, right? So we have to recognize that we are in the digital age. Devices aren't going away. We don't want them to. And on top of it, with the current circumstances of our environment, we're spending even more time on devices than we were even just five months ago, which was Already a lot. So I recommend setting time with your family where the whole family is on board for what's called a digital detox dose. So it's going to be three one hour intervals throughout the day where the whole family is tech free. Now what I want you to do if you're a parent is I want you to let your children self select the time that it is so it doesn't feel like a punishment, right? So if you help, if you allow them to decide when it's going to be, they're going to be more on board with it. And what I also want you to tell them is I want to do this with you, right? We're doing this as a family. If you see me on my devices during this digital detox dose, I want you to call me out and if you see that I have technic posture, meaning that I'm really hunched forward while I'm on my devices, call me out because I want to be better too. So now what you just did, instead of making it feel like a punishment to your teenagers or to your kids, is you're saying, okay, I want you to catch me, right? Hold me accountable. And so now they have more buy in with it. So select three one hour intervals throughout the day. The whole family's tech free have a designated area in the house where everybody puts their devices. So for example, everybody could be charging their phones in the kitchen or everybody's, you know, we put them in a basket by the front door. If you need help selecting those three hours, the ones that I recommend the most always put it through the filter of your family. But what I recommend doing is the first hour when you wake up in the morning, the last hour before going to bed at night and then that hour of dinner around the dinner table be tech free. So it's digestible. So we have proper posture while engaging with our devices. We're standing up, we're more active, we have our devices at eye level, we're taking posture breaks. In addition to that, we have three designated one hour intervals throughout the day for digital detox doses to connect as a family instead of being connected on our digital devices.

Lovely. I love those concrete examples. That's a really good one. I want to kind of, I want to incorporate that one in. I think we will have to remove them from the table. I got a talking to by my teenager over the weekend of hey papa, you're really breaking the rules there with checking in on my email or what. And I have definitely shiny syndrome, shiny thing syndrome. So I'm like very distractible. So I like it. That's a really great one to incorporate in here.

Yeah, well, devices are designed to distract us. They're designed to keep us on them. That's why we go into that digital dementia where we went to check our message because we saw a red flash. It's a notification that started a. A feedback loop in our brain that says, I want dopamine. I have to check it and find out what it says. And then you check it, you get a little dopamine hit, which makes you feel good. But then you notice once you open your screen, you have all these other notifications. Who else is trying to contact me? What else do I need to catch up on? And suddenly we spend a couple hours on our devices, we can't even remember why we got on them. And we're getting this reinforced feedback loop in our brain of feeling good, being on our device because they're designed that way. Whereas really, we have to take control. I mean, just like anything, sugar tastes good. If it were up to me, I would love to have sugar for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but I have to have it in moderation. The same thing is true with our devices as well.

That's awesome. Well, coming down to the final couple minutes here, any last words of wisdom for our listeners and viewers out there?

Yes. It's posture by design and not by circumstance. You have the ability to design resilient, beautiful, upright posture. Our environment is designed to bring us into poor posture from the chairs that we sit in, from the activities that we do, bringing us into flexion from the gyms, you know, reinforcing us going into more flexion. Our environment is designed to have poor posture. The digital age posture is declining at the speed of technology. So you have it's posture by design. You have the ability to design beautiful posture. So remember to take into consideration taking posture breaks for 30 seconds every hour. Bring your devices up to eye level, do those exercises that we talked about, take digital detox doses and be more active in your workspace to design beautiful, resilient posture. It's posture by design and not by circumstance.

Oh, I love it. Dr. Krista Burns, thank you so much for coming on. You know, the words of wisdom. I love the recap. I think you're right on the devices are just. They're meant to, like, get us on the platform and keep our eyeballs there. And now more than ever, I think getting out, breathing, connecting with family and loved ones around a table, out in nature, wherever we are, is so essential. You know, I realized, you know, over the weekend, every weekend, I try to get out and into nature and just kind of unplug, right? We have so much madness happening to realize that, you know, Mother Nature and Gaia just doesn't stop and is not involved with the kind of the goofiness of what's going on online or in the airwaves or the stressors. So I really appreciate the knowledge bombs and you coming on, sharing your expertise with our viewers and listeners. Everyone, this is what the health we are here Tuesdays from 2 to 3pm Pacific Standard Time. Please share the love, give us a comment, give us a review, if you really liked what you got in the show. We got really applicable information here from Dr. Krista and really just let's get out there, maintain our postures, take those nice deep breaths and share the love. Everybody, thanks for tuning in.