What if I told you that stretching your hips would help your nervous system to be more balanced?
You would probably look at me with a bit of suspicion.
And then you would remember “I think I’ve heard somewhere that the hips are connected to the emotions”…
There is an explanation for that. And that explanation lies in the electrical grid that connects the whole body and mind.
Your nervous system.
The brain guides the nervous system’s response to stimuli (e.g. experience), and the activation of different parts of the nervous system corresponds to different brain patterns and patterns of muscle activation and tension.
And when it comes to the hips, the muscle that’s being activated and that I’m going to talk about is the psoas.
To fully understand why and how the psoas influences your nervous system, let’s take a short anatomy detour:
The psoas is one of the most interesting muscles running internally through the body. It attaches to the front of the lumbar spine and runs through the diaphragm tendons (crura), merges with the illiacus muscle to form the iliopsoas, and finally attaches to the front of the femur (your thigh bone). It is a hip flexor connecting your lower body to your upper body and, through its fascial connection to the diaphragm, it has a major influence on the dynamics of your breathing (Siccardi et al., 2023).
It gets chronically shortened by sitting for extended periods and by stress.
How? Keep reading.
When we face a stressful stimulus, the brain gears up the nervous system in response, preparing the body to move away from the threat. The muscles in the front of the hips, including the psoas, activate and tighten up. Interconnected with the diaphragm, the psoas pull on the diaphragm and change our ability to breathe freely – our breathing becomes fast and shallow. We’re ready to fight or flee.
It’s easy to imagine that this happens in the face of physical stress (a predator let’s say), but emotional pain and stress get processed in the body in the same way. On the neural level, the somatosensory representations of both types of pain overlap (Kross et al., 2011), the bodily reaction is the same.
This is how, through chronic stress and a sedentary lifestyle (and let’s be honest, these often go hand in hand), the front of the body tightens up. It has been shown, that chronically shortened psoas can then lead to postural imbalances, back pain, and an altered breathing pattern.
But the nervous system is a two-way road and there are things you can do to loosen the grip of the psoas on your breathing pattern and your well-being:
Movement and breath itself.
Focus on yoga postures such as high and low lunge, or implement a quick and simple stretch like this on the daily – when you get up from your chair or any time you feel contracted and slouching.
Remember: the nervous system is powerful and its power lies in the breath. Focus on long and deep breathing through the nose to communicate to your body that it is safe to relax now.