Perfect Posture

Good posture means your bones are properly aligned and your muscles, joints and ligaments can work as nature intended. Good posture means your vital organs are in the right position and can function at peak efficiency.

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Posture ranks at the top of the list when you are talking about good health.
 
Posture is as important as eating right, exercising, getting a good night's sleep and avoiding potentially harmful substances like alcohol, drugs and tobacco. Good posture means your bones are properly aligned and your muscles, joints and ligaments can work as nature intended.

Good posture means your vital organs are in the right position and can function at peak efficiency. Posture also helps contribute to the normal functioning of the nervous system. Without good posture, you can't really be physically fit.

Surprised? Well, you're not alone. The importance of good posture in an overall fitness program is often overlooked by fitness advisers and fitness seekers alike. In fact, the benefits of good posture may be among the best kept secrets of the current fitness movement. The good news is that most everyone can avoid the problems caused by bad posture...and you can make improvements at any age.

Know Your Curves
The natural state of your back has three curves which form an S.
1) The first curve of your spine is the cervical (neck) curve. Consisting of seven small, flexible vertebrae that support your skull and the cervical curve tilts slightly forward.
2) The second curve of your spine is the thoracic (mid back) curve. This curve has 12 vertebrae which are larger and more rigid than the cervical vertebrae. The thoracic curve has a prominent backward curvature.
3) The third curve of your spine is the lumbar (low back) curve. This curve consists of five massive vertebrae that carry most of the weight of your body. The lumbar curve has a forward tilt.
To keep your spine well-aligned and healthy, you must maintain the balance of these three curves. By maintaining this alignment you minimize stress on the spine, which helps prevent back pain and injury.

Yoga Can Help
Yoga helps improve your posture in the following ways:
1) Strengthens the muscles that support your spine - easier to maintain good posture.
2) Improves the flexibility of your spine, enabling you to maintain good posture throughout different movements.
3) Improves the flexibility of your shoulders, hips and hamstrings, allowing you to maintain good posture without strain.
4) Enhances your body awareness, so you are more conscious of your posture throughout the day.

Better Posture Made Simple
Follow these simple steps to quickly improve your posture.
1) Bring your feet parallel, not turned out, and about hip width apart. Bringing your feet parallel engages the muscles in the front of your thighs and keeps your hips, knees and ankles in proper alignment.
2) Reach up through the top of your head, feeling your spine lengthen, getting tall.
3) Bring your pelvis to a neutral position. To find this neutral position, place your hands around your hips, then tuck your tailbone slightly until your pelvis is directly over your thighs, so there is no bend in your hip joints, and there's less sway in your low back. As you tuck your tailbone, you should feel your abdominal muscles engage a bit.
4) Draw your shoulders back and relax them down, bringing your hands in line with the seams of your pants.
5) Level your chin, keeping your head directly over the spot between your shoulders, not forward or back.

Here are some easy ways to check your posture at home:
Stand facing a full length mirror and check the following:
1) Your shoulders are level
2) Your head is straight, not tilted to the side
3) The spaces between your arms and your sides seem equal on both sides
4) Your hips are level, not sloped to one side
5) Your ankles are straight and not turned in or out.

You can also have someone look at you from the side and check the following:

1) Your head is stacked over your body, not jutting forward or pulled back
2) Your chin is parallel to the floor, not tilting up or down
3) Shoulders are in line with ears, not drooping forward or pulled back too far
4) Your hands are in line with hips, not forward or back
5) Your knees are straight, not bent or hyper-extended
6) Your lower back is slightly curved forward, not too flat or curved too much, (creating a swayback)

Do your best to practice these points of posture everyday, and before you know it, your posture will be perfect.

www.disabled-world.com

How to Boost Self-Esteem

By Mark Tyrell:  The doorbell rang. She was perfectly on time. The first word she uttered was, “Sorry!” She said the S-word three more times before we even got to my consulting room. Later, Joy told me she sometimes felt apologetic for existing.

She’d had therapy before and been diagnosed with low self-esteem, but had unhelpfully been told to “start loving yourself”.
She told me, “The trouble was, he kept telling me to love myself but he didn’t really tell me how to.”

Joy needed practical help.

What is low self-esteem, really?

Low self-esteem is a false perception of oneself.

If you have low self-esteem then you are better than you think you are. This is the definition of low self-esteem.  When your self-esteem improves, it’s because your self-knowledge has improved; just as the ugly duckling in Hans Christian Anderson’s famous tale had to learn its true nature before it could become fulfilled.

But how do you tell if your self-esteem is too low?

Signs and symptoms of low self-esteem

Healthy self-esteem doesn’t mean loving yourself no matter what you do. Shame, guilt, and self-reproach do have a place if we behave badly. It’s just that those with true low self-esteem tend to feel these things even when they don’t behave badly.

It’s been proved a myth that people do ‘bad things’ such as child abuse, bullying, or drug-taking because they have low self-esteem (they might have low self-esteem, but that doesn’t cause these behaviours) (1).

People with genuine low-self-esteem tend to treat themselves badly,  rather than other people. So ask yourself, do you feel:

• You are morally worse than most other people?
 
• That you have less appeal than most other people; that you are uglier?
 
• You are dumber than most other people?
 
• You’re unlovable?

You might also feel:

• Like never spending money on yourself or your looks because you feel you ‘don’t deserve it’.
 
• Your opinions aren’t as valid as other people’s opinions.
 
• Your low self-esteem is holding you back from really doing what you want to in life.

 If you feel you have low self-esteem, here are five things you can do about it. First off…

 

Self-Esteem Booster 1: Don’t spread bad stuff about yourself

Low self-esteem makes you generalize a specific incident,  situation, or trait and spread it to everything.

So Suzy burns a meal she’s prepared for her kids and from this generalizes to: “I’m such a lousy mum, I can’t even cook a meal!”

Jake fails a maths test and from this he negatively generalizes to: “I’m so stupid!" - (then, even worse) – "I can’t do anything right!”  We’ve magically gone from failing a maths test (specific) to being a failure at everything (pretty general!).

And more: Samantha really likes a boy in her class but is too shy to speak to him. She is mortified when he asks her best friend out. She generalizes this specific incident to: “I’ll never get a date; no one will ever like me!”

This is known as ‘globalizing’  and if you do this for negative things, you’ll feel bad about yourself. Knowing you are doing it is the first step to challenging it. If you catch yourself doing this - for example, telling yourself you’re stupid because you made a mistake - then force yourself to find examples that contradict your own negative blanket statement. 

Self-Esteem Booster 2: Look to the origins - briefly

Low self-esteem usually results from how we are conditioned by other people. If you were systematically insulted, criticized, or bullied, then you are more likely to have absorbed the negative messages about yourself instigated by other people.

Think about who these other people were and when you feel bad about yourself, take a moment to ask yourself: “Hold on. Whose voice is that in my head?”

I bet it really belongs to someone else originally. Starting to override other people’s conditioning of us is the first step to psychological independence; the real ‘you’ (that you should be listening to) can be much kinder and more reasonable about yourself.

 

Self-Esteem Booster 3: Be fair to yourself and others

Low self-esteem makes us magnify failures and personal faults and minimize or completely discount successes and personal strengths. Don’t do this. Be fair. If other people say you are attractive, clever, kind, fun, or whatever, respect them enough to at least consider that what they say is a probability.

Remembering and dwelling on criticisms while discounting and forgetting compliments (or any positive feedback) is a very biased, off-balance way of travelling through life.

 

Self-Esteem Booster 4: Ditch the imperfect perfectionism

“If it’s not perfect then it’s a total failure!” The idea that something is 100% useless unless it is 100% perfect, is a trap. Low "self-esteemers” often see things in very all-or-nothing terms. “That family is just perfect!/I’m just useless!”

Of course nothing in this world is perfect and no one is entirely useless. To stop this destructive black-or-white thinking, do this: Think, "If 100% is perfect and 0% is ‘total failure’ or ‘totally useless!’, how do I rate the meal I cooked?" This forces realism.

You might only give yourself 20% for the meal or your speech or whatever, but then look at that 20%  and ask yourself: “What enabled that 20%? And how can I build on that to get to maybe 25%?” This breaks down the perfect/disaster thinking which drives and maintains low self-esteem.

 

Self-Esteem Booster 5: Take care of your appearance

Low self-esteem leads to a vicious cycle. We feel bad about ourselves, so we don’t dress well, keep fit,  or get decent haircuts; but neglecting our appearance in turn causes more low self-esteem. Take time out to look after your body. Get a massage or manicure (unless you’re a macho guy, of course : ) ). Buy clothes that look good on you.  Don’t see this as superficial or irrelevant, because the ripple effect of changing outward aspects of yourself can lead to changes on the inside.

And you can take time to close your eyes and start to visualize yourself looking fit, healthy, and nicely dressed whilst doing something you can be proud of - whether that’s talking confidently to others or just looking so calm and relaxed.

Healthy self-esteem consists of:

• Honest respect for your own abilities, potentials, and value.
 
• Knowing your strengths and trusting in them.
 
• Appreciation and open acceptance of your limitations.
 
• Acceptance of these limitations whilst understanding that some limitations can be overcome.
 
• Freedom from being overly concerned with what we imagine others think of us. Whilst accepting these  perceptions do play a part in everyday life, remember they do not determine who we are.

Remember: a diamond doesn’t know its own value, but it is still a diamond nonetheless.

Joy came on in leaps and bounds. I noticed she stopped saying sorry (unless it really was justified),  and one day she proclaimed: “It’s as if I’ve found the real joy in my life!”

  (1) See the 2001 Rountree Report on ‘The causes and consequences of low self worth’.

 www.uncommonhelp.com