Are you struggling to remember to fix your posture? Using word associations from the things all around you is a good way to train your brain to sit taller, stand straighter, and move about your day with confidence. You’ll go from someone who has family and friends poking your back or telling you to “straighten up” to someone who turns heads with your good form. Having good posture isn’t just about remembering to be straight as a board all day, it’s about awareness. You can’t fix what you don’t notice. Luckily, there’s a simple brain hack that can help: word association.

Word association is the process of linking a word, phrase, or cue with a specific action. Similar to training a dog to sit or go by the door when it’s time to go outside, we can train ourselves to do anything when it’s linked to a word or cue. 

Think of it like this: if you are looking at your phone for 4-6 hours a day (unfortunately, this is the North American average nowadays), you’ll have your head bent over your body for that amount of time. But if you find a way to associate “phone” or “texting” with bringing the arms up a bit and raising your head to meet the phone screen, you’ll solve a huge problem of having neck pains and headaches. 

It’s unfortunately not a fix that happens overnight, but over time these small cues become subconscious reminders. You’ll have no need for alarms, alerts, or sticky notes to be moving a lot better and needing fewer hands on therapy or adjustments. 

If you’re not someone who picks up on words or events, you can make your word association a sound, a person, or whatever you see throughout the day that could help you make this new posture a habit. It could even be a treatment reminder from Westside Chiropractic 😂.

If nothing else will help motivate you to put this to practise, I tell people, “the more often you can cue and reset, the less you’ll need to correct, and the less you’ll be in pain.”

Happy cueing, happy posture!

Dr. Cole Maranger