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If youth is wasted on the young, then height is wasted on the young and tall. I can recall with total clarity my disappointment in my sixth-grade class portrait. I had experienced a growth spurt that summer. I had always been tall, but now the fact of my height was unavoidable—a topic among relatives, teachers, even strangers at the grocery store. I had picked out my outfit that day with care. But the school’s photographer assigned me to the back row, next to the tallest boy in the class—such cruel fate! From then on, I had only contempt for my height.
My solution was to hunch. To shave even just a few inches from my stature, I’d slink to my classes with my shoulders rounded forward and my head down. Later, I spoke to boys with my body awkwardly tilted against a wall or, preferably, sitting down. This was the late ’90s in Northern California. There were no deportment classes, no one telling me to stand, as my mother’s generation did, with my shoulders back and chest out. If anything, the pervasive look and feel of grunge and the laid-back cool of California’s surf and skate culture only further reinforced my decision to slouch. There was a rebellion to slouching, an insouciance to bad posture that felt in tune with the bleached-out, tomboyish femininity of the world around me.
Eventually, I grew out of it. I discovered that my height was something of an asset. I started a career, got married, had kids. Motherhood finally allowed me to feel a purpose with my physical self that wasn’t tied to vanity. The only problem was that I had completely obliterated my posture. Years of rounded shoulders had taken its toll. Two pregnancies had stretched out my core. The decades spent working in front of a computer hadn’t helped either.
I wanted to investigate what it would take to course-correct. After all, there are benefits to standing straighter. Studies point out that people with clinical depression tend to hunch more than those who don’t. Another shows that those who slouched walking down a hallway had less energy throughout the day than those who skipped (presumably with a straighter spine). Besides, I had reason to be optimistic. “Even the most dramatic habits can be broken with a reasonable plan of action,” says Amir Vokshoor, a Los Angeles–based neurosurgeon who specializes in spine surgery.
“Imagine you’re wearing a beautiful necklace. Wouldn’t you want it to glitter in the light?” asks one of my oldest friends, Adrian Danchig-Waring, who is a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet. We are standing on the top floor of the Whitney Museum, meaning to look at art but instead attempting a small lesson in the art of standing well. He turns his perfectly straight spine to the left and to the right, and I attempt to mimic him—though on Adrian, I can envision stunning jewels on his décolletage, while I move more like the inflatable man at a car dealership sale.
“It’s old-fashioned advice, but picture a string lifting you up from the ceiling,” says Randi Jaffe, a New York City–based chiropractor. She explains to me that so much of modern life contributes to poor posture: sitting for long periods; carrying heavy backpacks or handbags. It’s even worse for mothers like myself who are breastfeeding, picking up small children, and pushing a stroller. “Now, of course, the phone is the worst culprit,” she adds. I stare guiltily at mine. The human head weighs, on average, about 10 to 12 pounds. When we bend our necks forward just 60 degrees, the stress on our neck increases by some 60 pounds. Many of us are increasingly working from home, which is also having a devastating effect on posture. Even the way we sleep, she tells me, can make a difference (on your belly is the worst). She recommends the Dosaze pillow, made of memory foam, that slopes down on one side and encourages correct alignment as you slumber.
Jaffe stretches my back on her table, a process that involves pulling my legs down and away from my shoulders, and makes a few slight adjustments to my sacrum. Afterward, I ask Jaffe to assess my posture. “Not too bad,” she says politely, gently pulling my shoulders back. Then she assigns me homework: to look at the posture of other New Yorkers around me. Seeing bad posture might make me correct mine.
After all, awareness is key to fixing a nasty slouch. Clothing or accessories “that make the shoulders and the scapula, our wings, closer to each other are very helpful,” advises Vokshoor. Which is how I find myself wearing a posture corrector called the BackEmbrace, a vaguely bondage-looking elastic strap thing that you hook around your shoulders and velcro across your torso. “That’s weirdly kinky?” offers a friend when I reveal it to her. Still, I find it remarkably effective. It is actually quite easy to wear underneath a shirt or a dress, and it helps to pull my shoulders back, its presence reminding me to do so whenever they round down again. A number of posture correctors exist on the market these days, from little widgets like the Upright Go 2, which you can discreetly affix between shoulder blades (and which comes with an app) to more rigorous athleisure items like the Forme Power Bra, whose patented fabric, designed by an orthopedic surgeon, helps pull your body into its correct alignment. “Wearing posture supporters is a good way to help the body hold itself into the desired position,” says Dani Olson, a Los Angeles–based chiropractor.
But my real problem, as Lia Bartha, the creator of B the Method knows, starts deeper, with both my core and my pelvic floor. Bartha is a classically trained Pilates instructor who launched her own methodology five years ago, focusing on using a small balance ball and mat instead of your traditional reformer. A former dancer with scoliosis, Bartha turned to Pilates after she found herself unhappy—and uncomfortable—in her corporate desk job. She thinks it’s helpful to remember that good posture comes from more than just the shoulders. “Don’t feel yourself just lifting from your ribs,” she tells me. “Think of it as though you’re lifting from the pelvic floor, which is this hammock of muscles around your hips. When you feel a little bit supported in the hips, it’s much more powerful.” I confessed to her that after two kids my core felt like a wet noodle, but Bartha was encouraging, suggesting that with consistency I’d eventually see results. Indeed, after a few weeks of doing her workouts—some of which are specifically designed for posture, others for what she calls “length and reach”—I feel less sore pulling back my shoulders, and more inclined to use my lower abdominal muscles to hold my whole body upright instead.
Flexibility is important too. I also meet up with New York City–based yoga instructor Ashley Dorr at Souk, a yoga studio in Chelsea. Dorr guides me through a flow designed to open the chest, gently twist my spine, and relax my glutes. Poses like baby cobra, upward dog, fish pose, tree pose, and triangle pose are all great, she says. She gently massages my neck as I release my head in a forward fold, and I feel the weight of my head momentarily vanish. But the real benefit of yoga is the way it “connects the mind with the body,” Dorr explains. “We may enter a room standing as straight as possible, but in an instant we can forget and revert back to what feels most comfortable—or most ingrained.” We end in a savasana where Dorr tucks my shoulder blades under me and tells me to simply experience the sensation of my spine lying flat against the ground.
Most everyone I speak to is keen to remind me that no two spines are alike. Some simply curve more than others. At the museum, I watched my friend Adrian, the ballet dancer, move across the gallery floor, his head so perfectly upright that it could have carried a book across the room. In the window, I caught my reflection and paused. I took a breath, pulled back my shoulders, tilted up my chin, and pulled myself up from the pelvic floor. It was a start.
In this story: hair, Shingo Shibata; makeup, Kanako Takase using Addiction Tokyo.
