Here’s What Happens To Your Body When You Cross Your Legs

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If you cross your legs regularly, you’re not alone. Sometimes it just feels right. What you may not know, though, is what is physically happening to your body while you’re in the position. In most cases, the long-term effects rarely develop, but a lot is going on in that moment. If you’ve ever felt ridiculously uncomfortable after sitting with your legs crossed, here’s why.

Physical feeling: Your leg is going numb.

What’s actually happening: Your peroneal nerve is being pinched.

When you keep your legs crossed for several minutes, you’ll feel pressure on the back of your knee, then numbness or that pins-and-needles feeling moving down your leg and into your foot. Your peroneal nerve, which is a nerve behind the knee, is actually a branch of the sciatic nerve, which runs from your lower back to your thighs and supplies feeling to your legs, ankles and feet. Pinching that nerve temporarily will make your leg go numb, but within a few minutes of uncrossing your legs, your feeling goes back to normal. The bad news: If you cross your legs frequently enough, you can damage your peroneal nerve or stretch it to the point of distress.

Physical feeling: You feel a strain in your lower back or neck.

What’s actually happening: Your posture sucks.

The issues that accompany poor posture are a-plenty, but when you cross your legs, the uncomfortable feeling you get might be amplified if you’re not sitting up straight. If you don’t sit with your legs crossed that frequently and feel strained, you’ll notice your body feeling more normal after uncrossing your legs. But if you’re an all-day leg-crosser, we have some bad news for you. Researchers found that people who sit with their legs crossed for more than three hours a day tend to lean forward, arch their back and hunch their shoulders, which can wreak havoc on your lumbar spine. The findings also showed that the same people were more likely to angle their pelvises to one side or the other. Sitting this way can put a major strain on your neck and back and can cause both short-term and long-term effects.

Physical feeling: Your leg is throbbing.

What’s actually happening: Your blood pressure is spiking.

If you consider the actual position you’re in, your legs are compressed when laying on top of one another, constricting blood flow. This is partially why you’ll feel numbness, but you may also experience some pain and throbbing in the affected leg. What’s really happening is that by limiting blood flow, your heart has to work harder to provide blood for your legs. When the blood can’t pass through those passageways near the site of constriction, your blood flow backs up toward your heart, causing a temporary spike in blood pressure. Note that those with already high blood pressure experience this more aggressively than those who do not. Once you uncross your legs, everything goes back to normal.

It’s not common to have long-term effects from crossing your legs as long as you don’t cross them for multiple hours throughout the day. The short-term effects, though, can seem fairly scary when you take a deeper look. Know the risk of sitting in that position even if it seems more natural. We’re definitely planning to be more mindful from now on.