I was a big kid. In my grade school photos, I towered above my teachers. My best friend was tiny. I think from a very young age I was simply trying to make myself smaller. So I hunched.

Nobody told me to sit up straight. Nobody pointed it out. The hunch just became who I was.

As I began to develop, I was self-conscious about my body in ways that made the hunching worse. I was trying to hide. The more self-conscious I felt, the more I folded inward. By the time I was a teenager, the pattern was years deep.

The first time I remember being confronted about my posture was my freshman year of college. I flew to my boyfriend's school for a formal. I was wearing a dress that bared my shoulders. At some point, he hunched over in a way that was either mocking or signaling -- stand up straight. I was humiliated.

After that I was conscious of it. I would pull my shoulders back deliberately. But I was in my 20s, and the pattern was already too deep to correct through muscle alone. Pulling the shoulders back just added a second layer of tension on top of the first. It was exhausting to maintain and the moment I stopped thinking about it, I was right back where I started.

Just before I took up running, I got breast implants. I convinced myself that if I had breasts I actually wanted people to see, I would stand up more upright. Regrettably, they were much bigger than I wanted. And whether it was self-consciousness or something else, it didn't help my posture at all -- because I was still trying to use muscular effort to pull my shoulders back. So now I was a tall person with large breasts who hunched.

I then got into triathlon. Swimming, biking, running -- all done in a pretty hunched position. The pattern kept deepening.

Then a colleague at work said to me: you don't have the posture of an executive. You need to work on that if you want to be taken seriously.

I honestly still don't know if he meant my physical posture or my executive presence. Probably both. What I do know is that by that point, my posture was genuinely bad. And I had no idea how to change it. I believed at that point that it was too late -- that the pattern was simply who I was now.

Where the "good posture" myth came from

The standard advice about posture goes something like this. Stand up straight. Pull your shoulders back. Engage your core. Hold it.

This advice is not wrong exactly. It describes what good posture looks like from the outside. What it doesn't address is why the body isn't doing that already, and why telling it to produces strain rather than ease.

Moshe Feldenkrais wrote in The Potent Self: "No voluntary direction can correct bad posture; however, it does change the appearance of the body -- not by lifting the contraction that needs lifting, but by enacting a compensatory one. The segment changes its appearance and looks roughly as it should, but not without the strain of voluntary action. By constant vigilance and self-reminding, one learns to maintain two conflicting contractions."

That's exactly what I was doing for decades. Pulling my shoulders back created a second tension on top of the first. I wasn't fixing anything. I was performing a correction while the underlying pattern stayed exactly as it was.

What forced correction does to your nervous system

Posture isn't primarily a structural problem. It's a nervous system problem.

The body holds the positions it holds because the nervous system has learned to organize itself that way. Those patterns were laid down over time -- through habits, through emotional experiences, through years of sitting at a desk or hunching over a screen or trying to make yourself smaller in a room.

Moshe also wrote in The Potent Self: "Bad posture is the externally observable physical counterpart of internal conflict or contradiction." The hunch isn't just a physical habit. It's the body expressing something. The child who was trying not to be seen. The teenager who was self-conscious about her body. The adult who was told she didn't present with authority.

When you try to correct posture through force -- through pulling, holding, bracing -- you're working against the pattern without changing it. The nervous system is still running the same program. You're just adding muscular effort on top of it. That effort creates fatigue, tension, and often pain. And the moment you stop consciously maintaining it, the pattern reasserts itself immediately.

What good posture actually looks like

Good posture isn't held. It's organized.

The difference is significant. When posture is held, it requires constant muscular effort to maintain. When posture is organized, the skeleton is stacked efficiently and the muscles are free to respond to what's actually happening rather than bracing to maintain a position.

The key is the pelvis. Most people with poor posture are sitting or standing with a posterior pelvic tilt -- the pelvis tucked under, the lower back flattened, the whole spine collapsing forward from below. When the pelvis tilts slightly forward into a more neutral position, the spine stacks naturally above it. The muscles don't have to work to hold you up. They just go along for the ride.

I discovered this through Feldenkrais lessons. Not through being told to tilt my pelvis -- but through the lessons working on pelvic movement until my nervous system figured out a more efficient option on its own. I stabilize my sit bones into the chair. I find a slight anterior pelvic tilt. My spine stacks above it without any muscular effort. That's all it takes. The awareness to find the position, not the effort to hold it.

What the lessons actually did

I wrote a wish on a piece of paper at a health and wellness spa, tied yarn around it, and sealed it into an arrow. My wish was to improve my posture. The next day I went to my first Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement® class.

The class helped my back pain. That was the part that surprised me most in the moment. But I kept doing the lessons partly because I'd been told they would help my posture. And without really trying, without pulling my shoulders back or thinking about it at all, I began to stand more upright. I didn't understand why. The lessons were just working in the background.

What was happening, as I later came to understand, was that the lessons were giving my nervous system new information. The slow, attentive movements were helping my brain build a more accurate and complete map of my body -- particularly of my spine, my pelvis, and my ribs. As that map updated, the nervous system found more efficient ways to organize the body. More efficient meant more upright. Not because upright was commanded. Because it was easier.

The side bending lessons in particular opened up my rib cage in ways I hadn't expected. More pliable ribs meant better breathing. Better breathing meant a calmer nervous system. And a calmer nervous system meant less chronic bracing throughout the body -- which is a significant part of what makes posture collapse in the first place.

There was one unexpected complication. During my Feldenkrais training, the prone lessons -- lying on the stomach -- were genuinely uncomfortable for me. I eventually figured out why. Years of breast implants had created significant scar tissue. Lying face down on a hard floor was painful in a way it shouldn't have been.

I eventually had the implants removed and replaced with a fat transfer. I wish I'd known that option existed in the late 1990s. What I know now is that I cannot get enough of the crawling lessons. They have reorganized my entire musculoskeletal system in a way nothing else has. The lessons I couldn't do comfortably for years are now among my favorites.

The posture I spent decades trying to force is simply there now. Not because I'm holding it. Because my nervous system found it.

How ease replaces effort

The Feldenkrais view of posture is that it's a side effect of good movement organization rather than a goal to be achieved through discipline.

When the pelvis moves freely, the spine moves freely. When the spine moves freely, the breath moves freely. When the breath moves freely, the nervous system regulates more easily. And when all of that is happening, the body tends to find an upright, efficient organization on its own -- not as a performance, but as a natural consequence of the system working well.

I still catch myself hunched when I've been at the computer for a while. The old pattern is still there. But now I know what to do about it. I don't pull my shoulders back. I find my sit bones, adjust my pelvis, and let my spine stack. No effort required. Just awareness and a small adjustment.

The posture-mood connection

Moshe asked a question in his writing that he never fully answered: does a hunched posture cause depression, or does depression cause the hunched posture?

The research since then has moved toward both. The relationship between posture and emotional state is bidirectional. Upright posture is associated with improved mood, increased confidence, and reduced cortisol. Collapsed posture is associated with the opposite. The body and the emotional state are not separate systems -- changing one changes the other.

I know from my own experience that the change in my posture changed how people perceived me. It also changed how I perceived myself. Standing more upright, effortlessly and without thinking about it, felt different. Not like performance. Like arrival.

The colleague who told me I didn't have executive posture was right. What he didn't know was that the answer wasn't to try harder to stand straight. It was to give my nervous system enough new information that it found its way there on its own.

Why I built Pauseture

To every young person hunching right now -- trying to make themselves smaller, hiding something, carrying a pattern they didn't choose and don't know how to put down.

This is why I built Pauseture.

I struggled with poor posture for decades. People judged my abilities because of it. Made assumptions about my confidence, my authority, my presence. Some of them were right that it was a problem. None of them told me there was something that could actually help.

Moshe Feldenkrais was training people in San Francisco from 1975 to 1978. I was ten years old. The method existed. 

I can't go back. But I can make sure it's findable now -- affordable, accessible, on your phone -- for anyone who is still carrying what I carried for thirty years longer than necessary.

For the research behind the method, visit pauseture.com/research.