The Way You Hold Your Body Is Changing Your Nervous System
Years ago, a chiropractor I was seeing sent me to a trainer to learn how to walk and breathe properly.
No, I didn’t have an accident or was having any kind of issue with walking or breathing. This chiropractor sent every single one of his patients to this trainer because he found that most people didn’t walk or breathe correctly, and it was impacting their entire body.
I grew up a gymnast and did lots of dance, so learning new ways to move has always come pretty easy to me. Take me line dancing and I’ll usually pick up the dances really fast.
But it was surprisingly hard to move my body differently while doing something like walking or breathing — things I’ve been doing all day every day my entire life.
The walk is simple: move like James Bond. Seriously, the trainer told me to watch Daniel Craig and how he walks in the Bond movies. He holds himself upright and tall, but you can see his upper body moving as he walks. There are even YouTube videos analyzing the way he walks because it gives off this sense of strength and power.
Here’s how you do it: When your right leg moves forward, your left ribcage should rotate forward at the same time. Then when your left leg moves forward, your right ribcage rotates forward at the same time.
Essentially, your spine should be twisting as you walk. Just slightly. It looks like the shoulders are moving forward and back, but the motion is actually coming from the ribcage and spine.
Why is walking this way better?
Not only because you look more like James Bond (and who doesn’t want that?), but also because it acts as a massage and lubricator for your entire fascial system. It’s actually how we’re designed to move.
As a bodyworker, I’m always looking at how people move. But before, I would watch them walk and think, “oh wow, they’re really stiff in their hips.” Or, “They must have some low back pain.” Or, “I wonder if their neck is bothering them.”
I saw resistance and a lack of movement in specific areas that told me where they were restricted, which also told me where the likely root was of any pain they were experiencing.
But learning how to walk properly showed me so much more. I started seeing just how many people were barely moving at all. The legs might be moving but there’d be zero movement in their upper body as they walked. So many people look like a stiff board moving down the sidewalk.
But why does this matter? Does a slight change in gait actually make that big of a difference?
Yes, it can actually make a dramatic difference, not only in how you feel in your body, but also how you feel emotionally.
And to understand why that is, we have to dig a little deeper into the world of fascia.
Fascia: The Missing Piece Most of Us Were Never Taught About
If you had asked me about fascia 25 years ago when I was in massage school, I would’ve told you it was basically packing material for the body.
We were taught that fascia was inert tissue whose main job was to provide structure for the body and protection around organs, muscles, and bones. Very helpful and important tissue, but not very interesting. It was basically the saran wrap of the body.
But over the last couple decades, our understanding of fascia has completely exploded. Right now fascia feels a little like the wild west of body research.
Fascia is a web of connective tissue that wraps around and weaves through literally everything in your body. Your muscles, organs, nerves, blood vessels .. everything is connected through this intricate internal webbing.
If you’ve ever peeled apart a chicken breast and noticed the thin white stretchy web through it, that’s fascia. And yes, preparing meat has never been the same since I learned what fascia was. I personally find it fascinating.
But fascia isn’t just sitting there passively holding everything together.
We now know that it has its own neural network. It communicates with the nervous system. It responds to stress and movement. It slowly contracts over time based on how we use our body. Researchers have even discovered that fascia has its own microbiome! I just learned that recently and I’m still digesting what that means.
There are also fascinating conversations happening around fascia and the body that go far beyond what we can definitively prove right now. Things like whether fascia may play a role in how energy moves through us, why certain emotional experiences impact our tissue and specifically the fascia, and whether fascia may even relate to ancient maps of meridian systems. (There’s some really cool correlations between fascial neural networks and acupuncture points.)
There are a lot of fascinating theories science is still actively exploring, but what it shows is that the body is far more interconnected and intelligent than we once thought.
But the most important part to pay attention to, and where you’ll see the nervous system connection, is: your body is constantly adapting.
Your Body Becomes What You Repeatedly Ask It To Do
Your body is always listening to what you do repeatedly.
If you spend all day every day looking down at your phone, your body will respond by adapting your posture to support that position. It’s the same if you spend all day hunched at a computer.
Even if you cross your legs in the same way every time you sit, your fascia will adapt to that exact position.
This is why people who have the same jobs or do the same activities usually have the same posture. I can always pick out someone who works on a computer all day, and you probably can too. They have a head that’s forward and their shoulders are rounded.
The body is efficient. It’s always looking for ways to conserve energy. So when you stay in a position repeatedly, the fascia starts tightening and reorganizing itself around that pattern because your body assumes, “Oh, I guess this is where we live now.”
It’s brilliant when you think about it.
But the problem is when we don’t actually want to live in that position anymore. We go to move out of it and now we’re stiff and in pain. Sitting up straight starts to feel uncomfortable, because our new normal is that slouched position.
I experienced this with my hip years ago.
I always sat with my left foot tucked under me. It was so extreme that I would actually take off my left shoe in restaurants and other public places just so I could sit comfortably with my leg tucked under.
And it really was comfortable. It became the only way I could sit that felt right for that hip. Trying to sit with both legs straight out in front of me felt like torture.
But eventually I realized something needed to change because my hip started hurting all the time. Even while sitting my hip would just ache. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize it was because of the way I was holding my hip whenever I sat down. I had trained my fascia and muscles to stay in that rotated position, so walking and sitting in a neutral position became strained.
So I reluctantly stopped sitting that way. I forced myself to sit with both legs straight out in front, with no rotation in my hip. And the pain started to go away, because the fascia was able to reset to a more natural position that allowed for functional movement.
This shows that your body can become very comfortable in positions that are actually limiting your movement, your breathing, and your circulation. Just because it’s comfortable, doesn’t mean it’s ideal.
But beyond just pain and comfort, one thing that is most often missed is that posture isn’t just mechanical. The way we hold our body is also sending information about our state back to the brain.
Which means, posture can actually impact whether or not we feel safe.
Your Posture Is Communicating Constantly
The trainer that I saw that taught me to walk and breathe correctly also taught me a lesson that I will never forget. It’s one that he highlights with every woman client he sees.
He told me to look out the window and imagine I saw a dog walking by. He asked me, “How quickly would you know if it was an alpha dog?”
I told him I’d be able to tell right away. And then I described what that would look like: Head up, chest forward, direct eye contact, and it’d be moving with confidence.
So then he asked me what it would look like if the dog was fearful or submissive. “That’s easy. The head would be lowered, the body collapsed inward. They’d be avoiding eye contact and would be moving like they’re trying to make their body smaller.”
And then he made the point that completely changed how I try to move through the world.
He explained that humans were no different. Just like in one glance I can tell a lot about a dog, in one glance, another person can tell a lot about you, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.
He pointed out that predators are more likely to target people who appear distracted, withdrawn, unsure, disconnected from their surroundings, or lacking confidence in their body language.
I had heard this before, especially as a woman when in public. I was told to keep my eyes forward, make eye contact, and stand up straight. But for some reason it hit me differently this time. My posture was communicating to people the kind of person I was, whether I liked it or not.
After this, I started noticing it everywhere. It’s like it gave me an entirely new map of other humans. Where I used to only see muscle and joint restrictions, I started to see posture from repeated positions, movement that showed their emotion, people who were afraid to take up space.
But here’s where this gets really interesting: whether or not that posture starts because of stress, insecurity, overwhelm, pain, exhaustion, or survival mode, over time the posture itself can start reinforcing those feelings back into the nervous system.
The body and brain are constantly communicating with each other. When you’re anxious or depressed, your posture naturally shifts inward, right? Well, the opposite is also true.
The way you hold your body also sends a signal back to the nervous system.
When you stand tall, lift your head, move confidently, and make eye contact, your body’s position communicates confidence back to your brain. It makes you feel more capable, more present, more in control, and more safe.
There has been research done on power poses to prove this true. Even when we don’t feel it initially, the way we hold our body can change how we feel.
Which gives an interesting and dismal new perspective on how our modern life is impacting our posture and how we feel.
So many of us exist in that head down, shoulders slouched, forward posture. We collapse into couches, hunch over laptops, barely rotate our spine while we’re walking, barely expand our ribcage when we breathe… barely move at all, really.
In our modern tech life, we’re now spending hours a day in the exact posture the body naturally takes when it feels overwhelmed, ashamed, exhausted, or unsafe.
So even if your life is objectively okay, your nervous system is receiving signals from your body that something might be wrong. Which then impacts how your nervous system responds.
The Breath Is Part of the Pattern Too
And yes, breath is a part of this puzzle as well.
As a long time massage therapist, I thought I knew how to breathe correctly. All day long I was helping people to breathe deeply. I knew the mechanics of diaphragmatic breathing. I knew what it looked like. But it was something I always struggled with in my own body. Doing it felt weirdly uncomfortable for me, and I never really understood why.
What the trainer taught me was not just how to take deep belly breaths, but how to include expansion through the ribcage and sides of the body as well. A full, expansive breath instead of the shallow chest breathing most of us default to.
I created a walk through on exactly what he taught me HERE.
When I first tried this new way of breathing, it was incredibly difficult. My ribcage barely moved, it was even hard to make the connection. Everything along my sides felt restricted and tight.
Which is exactly what happens when you’ve gone through life always bracing for the next thing to go wrong.
And when you’re always bracing, your body adapts to that too.
When you’re under threat, your breathing shifts. You stop taking deep breaths and start breathing shallowly instead. We do this to prepare for having to fight or flee. Short intakes of air to keep enough oxygen in the blood.
But when we feel like we’re under threat all the time, this shallow breathing means you’re barely moving your diaphragm, and it means the muscles along your ribs (which should be helping you to breathe) are barely being engaged. This causes the fascia around the ribcage, diaphragm, neck, and shoulders to adapt to this restricted movement.
This not only impacts your ability to take in deep breaths correctly, but it can even impact how you move. Remember the Bond walk? That gentle twisting of your thoracic spine with each step impacts the ability of your ribcage to expand with each breath. Your walking can impact your breath, and your breath can impact how you walk.
But this is the most important piece we have to come back to: your shallow breathing also communicates stress and danger to the brain.
You might be breathing shallowly because of your body position, because of habit, because of airway problems. Regardless of why, that shallow breath communicates to your nervous system, “I’m not safe.”
Which then only causes the nervous system to reinforce the signal to keep breathing shallowly.
It’s a feedback loop that’s so easy to get stuck in.
This is also why breathwork can feel surprisingly emotional or uncomfortable for some people. You’re introducing movement and expansion into areas that may have been guarded for a very long time. Which is why we want to go slow with this. Breathing the way we would when we’re safe can actually feel unsafe at first.
If it’s always felt unsafe to close your eyes, closing your eyes is going to bring on a lot of anxiety, even if you logically know that there’s zero danger around you. The same response can also be true with our breath.
But the beautiful thing about the nervous system and the fascia is that it’s incredibly adaptable and responsive. It will adapt to stress, but it will also adapt to healing.
Small Changes That Start Rewiring the Body
The good news is that the shifts needed in order to change the signals we’re sending to our brain and fascia are really simple and really subtle. But they do take conscious effort.
Which is why the first step, as always, is just awareness.
Notice how you hold yourself.
Pay attention to your posture throughout the day.
How are you sitting right now? Where is your head? Are your shoulders collapsed forward? Is your jaw tight? Are you holding your breath or breathing only in your upper lungs?
Most of us move through the day completely disconnected from our body position. When we just start noticing, those small shifts can be powerful.
Practice Walking Like James Bond
I’m serious. I even encourage you to set up a camera and watch how you walk. Do you swing your arms but your ribcage doesn’t move at all?
Here’s how I ensure I’m doing this correctly:
Place both hands on your chest with your elbows out to the side.
Without moving your arms independently, gently rotate your ribcage so one elbow comes forward, then the other.
Now try matching that rotation to your steps:Left foot forward = right ribcage forward.Right foot forward = left ribcage forward.
It can feel awkward at first, but if you do this enough, it starts to feel like a massage for the whole body.
That same chiropractor who sent me to learn how to do this also said he’s had multiple clients that didn’t need an adjustment after doing this walk for a few miles. Everything realigned on its own because the movement encouraged proper alignment all the way up the spine.
At the very least, when you’re walking around, lift your head up. Relax your shoulders. Make eye contact with the people you pass. Allow yourself to take up space.
Then notice not only how your body feels, but notice if it changes how you feel emotionally when you move through the world that way.
Practice Diaphragmatic Breathing
A few times a day at least, practice taking slower, fuller breaths that expand through the ribcage. Use the tutorial I shared above and practice.
It’s totally normal if it feels awkward at first. You may even think, “My body doesn’t move that way.” But I promise it does. You just need to retrain it. Fascia isn’t quick to adjust, but it is a very responsive tissue. The more consistently you create movement, expansion, hydration, and circulation through your body, the more adaptable it becomes.
Stop Staying Frozen In One Position
One of the best things you can do for your fascia and nervous system is simply move more often. The body thrives on movement variability.
Change your position, move your joints in their full range of motion. Move at different speeds and in different types of movement.
When I’m working on something that requires a lot of concentration — like writing this blog — I set a timer on my phone for 45 minutes.
As soon as it goes off, I get up and move. I might do some squats, pushups against the counter, jump around for a minute, do some range of motion exercises, or even take a longer break and go for a short walk.
Even if it’s just a short 5 minute break .. it’s enough to remind my body that I’m not frozen in place. (Ideally you’d get up and move every 20-30 minutes, but that breaks me out of my zone too much so 45 minutes is my compromise.)
Your Body Is Listening
And if you take nothing else away from this blog, it’s this: your body is always adapting to the signals you repeatedly give it.
The way you breathe, move, hold your body in space, and even the way you walk into a room .. your body responds to all of it .. not only in the fascia, but also in your nervous system and the signals that it sends in response.
Your body and nervous system are constantly in conversation with each other. Which means we have control over what that conversation looks like. You have more nerve fibers that go from your body to the brain than there are from the brain to the body.
Which means, we can create big shifts with subtle change.
A deeper breath.
A lifted head.
A fascial system that’s free and moving.
Walking down the sidewalk with your arms swinging can now communicate that you’re safe, not only to yourself, but even to the world around you.
And that can change everything.
