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Nearly two million workers in Great Britain reported suffering from work-related ill health in 2022/23. According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), approximately half of these 1.8 million cases were down to stress, depression or anxiety.

Pressures may come from many sources and their combined effect is stress of body and mind. So, what happens to us when we are stressed? We go through a physiological reaction, a stress response called fight or flight. Hormones are released in the body, prompting us to stay and fight or flee from danger.

While this response is very useful in emergency situations, constantly being in the heightened state of stress means that the chemical changes associated with it which are meant for emergencies stay permanently present in our system.

An effective way to combat stress, is to activate the body’s natural release response.

The 10-minute chillout that re-balances the nervous system

To clear your head from the clutter of the day and give your mind and body a chance to rebalance itself, try this 10-minute lying down practice.

Lie on your back on a medium-firm surface with your knees bent so that your feet are drawn up as near to the body as is comfortable. Feet about shoulder width apart, knees pointing up to the ceiling. Place some paperback books under your head and let your hands rest palm down on your belly.

Spend the first five minutes quietening your mind and getting into a ‘being’ state of quietness. Give yourself time to be in a receptive state in which your mind can observe and sense your body.

After you have familiarised yourself with tuning in (not easy at first), you can then turn your attention to a more active type of thinking into your body.

Ask your neck to release by thinking of the back of the neck being soft and flexible and how your neck is being gently lengthened by your head releasing away from the shoulders.

The crown of your head releasing into the space behind you. This direction of the head will initiate a release and lengthening of the whole spine. 

Without pressing allow your back to fill out onto the floor. Allow this spreading out to happen gently so try not to push your back flat.

Bring your attention to your lower back allowing it to release and soften onto the floor, your tummy muscles and buttocks softening too.

Bring awareness to your shoulders and allow them to expand outwards as they drop to the floor and release away from each other.

Let your knees point to the ceiling releasing away from your hip joints. Think of the inside of your thighs lengthening and relaxing.

While all this is happening keep being observant of the changes and that you are breathing in and out of the nose. Mouth breathing is emergency breathing and it stresses the system.

When you get up, keep noticing the difference in your mind and body as you gently begin to move again.

PS: this is fabulous for a sore back too!

You can read more detail about what I offer (including my current seasonal special offers!) at my sessions page.

Click to hear my audio guide to practising semi-supine floor work.

 

 

“Back injuries are extremely common, yet often misunderstood” says an article in the Guardian.

The article goes on to suggest useful lifestyle choices that can help with back pain. Including how helpful it would be to learn the Alexander Technique. In doing so, it cites the British Medical Journal’s randomised trial, which showed the benefits of the technique for back pain to be both effective and long-lasting.

This is very good to see. For lately there has been a fashion for undermining the importance of posture. I have even seen suggestions that slouching when sitting is not that bad for us.

I beg to differ. Both my personal experience of back pain and my experience as an Alexander Technique practitioner have taught me otherwise.

Posture awareness to maintain an upright flow in the body is a basic requirement in the daily life of us humans. This is at the core of the Alexander Technique. Integral to good posture is good sitting.

Our spine has three main curves. These are designed to maximise mechanical advantages for weight bearing and distribution. They act like shock absorbers when we move. How can it not matter if we excessively compress these curves by slouching?

Sitting is a sedentary state recognised as not being good for us. How much worse then it is to sit badly! The long-term effects of compressing the spine curves by slouching will be felt at some point. We can minimise the negative effects of sedentary sitting by learning to sit on… guess what? Our sitting bones!

These bones (or Ischial tuberosities, to give them their proper anatomical name) are located at the bottom of the trunk forming part of the base of the pelvis. When we sit, their job is to support the skeletal structure of our backs.

Sitting like this leaves the bottom end of the spine—the tailbone—free from the pressure of the chair. This allows the entire vertebral column to keep its natural length.

That’s one end of the spine. What happens at the other end, where the neck connects to the head? Well, you may well be familiar with the expression computer or text neck. Suffice to say that when our head, neck and back are correctly aligned, the body is naturally self-supported upright, against the pull of gravity, with minimum of effort.

The link between poor sitting and poor posture—and back pain—is clear. But when we regain our natural upright posture we function in a physiologically efficient way. This is described In the Alexander Technique as functioning with “maximum of efficiency and minimum of effort”.

In highlighting the usefulness of learning the Alexander Technique as a means of addressing back pain, this article hits the nail on the head.

The pure joy of walking: An Alexander Technique teacher’s morning thoughts

September 8, 2022

A few days ago I was sent a video of my one-year-old nephew taking his first steps. I was struck by the pure joy that he expressed as he laughed with delight every time he picked himself up from the floor and was able to take a few steps, his postural balance developing at every […]

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Introducing the Alexander Technique to Sonographers at the Royal Free

May 1, 2022

I have just finished running a three-session workshop on “Alexander Technique for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders and Release of Stress for/in the Sonography Profession at the brand new Chase Farm Hospital, for the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Over my years of working with Alexander Technique for the radiography professions, I have learned […]

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Alexander Technique and its relevance for free breath and voice production: My latest article

April 3, 2022

Alexander Technique ‘directions’ and their relevance to breath and voice: This is an article I wrote for the 2021 Review Journal of AOTOS (Association of Teachers of Singing), focusing on the important role of coordination of the neuromuscular skeletal system for breath and voice.

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THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE AND ME: My personal journey of self-discovery

January 6, 2020

I was in Istanbul with my partner, celebrating my birthday when my neck froze for the first time. We had visited Hagias Sofia in the morning, then went for an afternoon dip in an open-air thermal spa, followed by dinner in a tiny restaurant on the Bosporus. It had been a lovely day. I woke up […]

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SEMI-SUPINE FLOOR WORK: a practice that promotes back realignment through tension release 

February 23, 2019

An integral part of learning the Alexander Technique is to practise this resting balancing state. In semi-supine we are encouraging the back muscles to coordinate so that deeply held tensions can start to let go. The intervertebral disks in our spine are subject to pressure during the day as our body weight pushes down. Cartilage […]

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Low-level letterboxes should be banned to prevent postal workers straining their backs or being bitten by dogs, a Conservative MP has said

January 29, 2019

It’s going to take a while to change all the low level letterboxes already in existence so, in the meantime posties could adopt some of the Alexander Technique advice on how to bend correctly. There are many posturally balanced positions that we can learn in order to use ourselves in an efficient, organised way, bending […]

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“An Introduction to Alexander Technique for Mammographers”: Course I am running in London

June 24, 2018

I have been running these workshops for the Society of Radiographers since 2010. The latest took place on 7th June 2018. These interactive practical workshops are an introduction to the Alexander Technique as an educational training programme and specifically its application to working as a mammographer. The Technique is a practical method which involves the participants taking […]

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Explaining the Alexander Technique to clinicians and scientists: a very useful presentation

January 15, 2018

In late 2017, I attended an inspiring presentation (organised by HITE at UCL in London) given by Alison Loram and Ian Loram–“Mechanisms of sensorimotor control relevant to the Alexander Technique”. Particularly interesting to me was the scientific focus on the importance of the neck as a key factor in sensing and controlling motor response in […]

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