I have once heard it called our American Sickness—our seeming need to fill every waking minute with activity.
In my last post I talked about the relationship of stress to excess muscular tension to poor posture.
One way you create stress is how you habitually think about time.
Always lacking enough time is typically more of a thought or a mindset than reality.
Another way many of us in our US culture create stress for ourselves is choosing to be busy all the time. The operative word here is choose.
Never having downtime, time to just be and not do, is stressful.
And stress leads to excessive muscular tension which contributes to poor posture.
Why is it that we always need to be doing something? This has fascinated me for a long time.
And often doing one thing at a time is not enough! Driving is not enough. We must be catch up on voice mails while speeding down the freeway. Eating is not enough. We must catch up on the latest news feeds or Facebook posts while we down our lunches.
We could blame our culture. I do, to some extent. If everyone around you is busy all the time it’s easy to get caught up in it and subsequently almost feel guilty if you are not busy yourself. Or feel that you are not important, if you are not busy. In our culture productivity and hard work are lauded. Being busy is equated with being important. But 24/7?
It is probably easier to not create such a busy life for yourself if you are living in an environment where life is slower paced—a tropical island perhaps (in my dreams…) But no matter where you are, if it is important to you, you can make a decision to exercise your ability to choose how you want your life to be.
Just as you can choose to do many extra things at work and activities outside of work, volunteer and otherwise, you can choose not to.
If you want to work on your posture, work on decreasing the stress in your life by choosing not to fill every waking moment with activity.
You are after all a human BE-ing not a human DO-ing.
Give yourself permission to just BE and not DO some of the time.
Your body and your posture will thank you for it.
Image by Alexandr Litovchenko from Pixabay
