What Is a Concave Chest?
The concave chest is otherwise known as pectus excavatum. It is often associated with an unattractive physique. It’s challenging to live with this deformity from a social aspect.
The unpleasant looks of the anterior chest wall are closely connected to low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, diminished mental performance, disordered eating, etc.
The psychological harm from the deformity is much greater than the physical appearance problem.
Having a muscular physique in comparison to a flawed one can feel like the difference between living in a luxury mansion with maids, versus sleeping on a dirty mattress in a crack den basement.
I want to say that the concave chest deformity truly impacts the quality of your life.
Stop Giving Funnel Chest a Lot of Power
The great news is that you can move into a more positive headspace for the way you experience your physique.
I remember times where my concave chest condition made me feel horrible for my body. During that time, I hit rock-bottom.
I would desperately search on the internet for anything to make me feel better.
However, most of the information on the internet was related to losing weight, not about some rare congenital chest wall deformity.
I didn’t have any insecurities about my weight. No companies could profit from writing or finding solutions about inverted chest deformities.
I was skinny and was in desperate need to bulk up and add some muscle mass.
It’s normal for people to compare what they’re self-conscious about to other people.
Men and women who worry about whether they’re overweight or that their noses are too large, compare themselves to other people. Then they establish a sense of what they look like, comparatively.
The concave chest, in other words, known as pectus excavatum, stays hidden. The comparison process doesn’t happen in the usual approach, because sufferers don’t want to share their naked bodies with the world.
Having a hole in the chest isn’t a part of the standard human body. It is far much harder to gauge how bad it is and how much it impacts your appearance.
Does the Severity of the Concave Chest Impact You?
The amount of psychological stress experienced by sunken chest sufferers varies a lot.
It’s intuitive to believe that the deeper your pectus excavatum is, the unhappier you’ll be with it. However, that’s not how it turns out.
There are individuals with a mild case of concave chest who feel ruined. Comparatively, some individuals with severe cases of the sunken chest are very comfortable with it.
The perception you have about your concave chest is connected to how happy or unhappy you feel with it.
To keep things simple, let’s call this the relationship you have with your pectus excavatum condition.
Just like any relationship, it takes a bit of work to keep it healthy. You have to accept your partner and his/her flaws. You must improve each other daily, to keep the relationship fun and stress-free.
To maintain a great relationship with your concave chest bone deformity, you must accept it as it is.
Then, do everything you can to improve it through physical treatment exercises, stretches, braces, deep breathing, and vacuum bell therapy.
If you have a severe hereditary pectus excavatum chest pain, you can also fix it with surgery.
If you choose that option, you’ll probably undergo a Nuss procedure because it is more minimally invasive than the Ravitch procedure. However, the operation takes a lot of time to recover from.
Also, pectus bar removal from underneath the sternum (breastbone) takes an additional surgery and one week of hospital stay.
Let me share a few ideas on how to love your abnormality and live happily with it.
1. Perform Indented Chest Exercises Regularly
Perform pectus excavatum exercises frequently in an approach that’s enjoyable for you. I created an 8-week sunken chest reconstruction workout plan.
I highly recommend you follow this plan. If you’ve never been in a weight room before, please take the workout slowly. In the first month, go to the gym to get comfortable in that environment.
Don’t workout with the actual goal of trying to repair the condition. Experience your physique in a way that isn’t related to concentrating on its looks.
Focus your attention on how it feels instead. Emphasize what your muscles are capable of doing.
After you’re comfortable in the gym environment, start to follow the workout plan as it is designed. You’ll notice how your overall body appearance improves and the severity of your concave chest decreases. The protruding ribs on the front will no longer be noticeable.
Your posture, which is the most common symptom of the indented chest condition, will also improve.
Enjoy the endorphins after each workout session. Reward yourself with enjoying your hobbies (video games, fishing, attracting members of the opposite sex), after each successful day working out.
Make yourself proud.
2. Improve Yourself Each Day
The happier you are with yourself, the healthier your relationship with your concave chest condition will be.
Having pectus excavatum is just one genuinely tiny aspect of you. The more you improve in other areas of your life that you’re proud of, the hollow chest will have a smaller impact.
Self-improvement is vital if you’re suffering from pectoralis excavatum on a psychological level.
Learn to attract the members from the opposite sex without caring about your looks too much. Scientifically it is proven that confidence is the most critical attractiveness trait. Don’t base your self-confidence levels only on your looks. You’re much more than your looks.
Continuously improve yourself with knowledge. Every single successful person reads books.
Make it a habit to read at least 20 pages of a book a day. After a couple of months, you’ll be impressed with how many books you’ve read because of this.
Check out this fantastic book that changed my whole perspective about my concave chest. This book changed my life!
3. Focus on The Things You Love About Yourself
Everyone has a part of themselves that they love a lot.
Install a gratefulness app and record one thing that you like about your physique, every day. Make sure you don’t repeat the same recording for the next thirty days.
You’ll start to appreciate your physique a lot more. Understanding that concave chest isn’t what determines you as a human is the most important thing to configure.
You’ll feel much happier after a couple of weeks of doing this.
This has even been scientifically proven to work.
Additionally, you can be motivated by famous celebrities with sunken chests. Observe how confident they are showing their irregularities to the world.
Even though they are also sufferers from the condition, they still became one of the most idolized people that ever walked on this earth.
4. Don’t Put Too Much Focus on Your Looks
Believing about how unattractive you are is a slippery terrain, especially if you’re a perfectionist or prone to pectus excavatum anxiety or depression.
Don’t spend too much time comparing yourself to other people. Stop judging the beauty of different males and females. Break the habit of scrolling Pinterest on celebrity pages for hours.
Understand that celebrities post images that have been edited in Photoshop by the world’s best graphic designers. Even famous people and supermodels are anxious about the way they look.
Finally, stop hanging out with people who underappreciate your appearance and make you feel about it. Kindly tell them that you love hanging out with them because of their character and not looks.
Don’t let anyone make you feel wrong about you concave chest deformity. If you are critiqued or made fun of because of that, smile and go on with your day.
5. Don’t Avoid Your Concave Chest, But Don’t Focus On It
This is very contradictory, I understand. But there’s a happy middle ground.
If you feel uncomfortable about looking at your indented chest every time you pass a mirror, then you must do something. I’ve met some people who even avoided checking mirrors.
Don’t treat pectus excavatum like it is a shameful secret. Don’t avoid things that you would typically do if you had a shirt on.
Always tell your friends to go to the pool parties in the summertime. Be the first one to take your shirt off. Show how confident you are about the abnormalities of your connective tissues. That’s how people will see you as a person overdosed with confidence.
Every time you pass a mirror, make it a habit to stop for a minute, and use affirmations. Tell yourself in the mirror that you’re happy about how your body looks and that it could be much worse.
I’ve seen paralyzed people live a happier life than people who have hollowed chests.
Stop obsessing about how indented chest looks or how “unattractive” it makes you.
Monitor how you feel about the condition. If your relationship with your caved in chest gets very uncomfortable, take your time and write a comment below. I’ll make sure that I respond.
6. Remember That It’s always a Bigger Deal to You
You may feel that people focus all their attention on your concave chest. Surprisingly they don’t. They are all focused on their insecurities and try to hide them by any means necessary.
Observe the body language of everyone at the next pool party you’ll attend. Before they get drunk, they are all uncomfortable while taking their clothes off.
Believe this, and don’t avoid situations involving other people witnessing your caved in chest.
Progressively you’ll notice that other people don’t genuinely care, which in turn will make you careless.
You’re the only person that makes it a big deal about your deformity.
Even if nobody loves you because of that, your family will still have your back. At the end of the day, your family will stay with you forever.