A BRIEF SUMMARY OF COMFORT AT YOUR COMPUTER
Have you ever experienced discomfort in your neck, eyes, back, arm, or wrist after working at the computer or keyboard? If you have, you are not alone and could be one of the many people who have experienced repetitive strain injury. Modern technology has helped to make the workplace more efficient but has also created physical hazards for users of the technology.
Whether for fun or work, we all spend a lot of time at our computers, and many of us will experience stress, fatigue and pain from incorrect work habits or workstation setup. However, there are some simple ways of making computer use much safer and much more comfortable.
I wrote Comfort At Your Computer: Body Awareness Training for Pain-Free Computer Use1 as an owner’s manual for the human body, and I conduct Comfort at Your Computer workshops to provide direct training in computer safety. The book and the workshops focuses on helping people develop a practical understanding of how the human body works and how to apply that knowledge to avoiding computer-related injuries.
The three key rules for safe computing are: (1) Use your body in a way that is relaxed, alert, balanced and efficient. (2) Never adjust yourself to the requirements of the computer. Always adjust the workstation to the requirements of your body. (3) Do not spend long periods of time sitting still typing. Make sure to do non-computer work to break up long periods of computer use, and make sure to take periodic rest and movement breaks.
BODY AWARENESS
If you sit wrong and work wrong, the best equipment in the world won’t make you comfortable. But once you know how your body works and what your body needs, you will be able to work comfortably at your computer, and you will know which equipment will help keep you comfortable.
Body awareness is the key. Most people do not have enough knowledge about the anatomical structure and functioning of the body to be able to figure out safe, strain-free ways of working for hours at a keyboard. Body awareness is something that can be learned in a fairly simple and easy way. Here is an example of one body awareness exercise, which focuses on a key skill for comfortable computer use.2
Sit on a chair with a flat bottom. Sit far enough forward so that your back is not touching the backrest. Notice the position of your head, neck and back. Notice where and how your weight falls to the chair. Are you sitting up straight? What do you understand by the term "sitting straight"?
Now slump. Let your body collapse downward. Let your back get round and your shoulders roll forward. And come back up to sitting straight. What do you do to sit up straight? What body segment initiates (creates) the movement of slumping or coming up straight? How does it feel to sit up straight? Is it comfortable? How long would it remain comfortable?
Most people believe that they sit up straight by straightening their backs or throwing their shoulders back. Is that what you guessed?
Slump again, and notice that when you slump, your pelvis rolls backward, the stack of vertebrae has no foundation on which to rest, and it curves and falls down. (The pelvis can be thought of as a bowl which contains the guts, and "backward" is the direction in which the bowl would rotate to spill out the guts behind the body.) Notice that when you move up to an erect sitting position, your pelvis rolls forward, which brings the spinal column into an upright position.
Contrary to what most people believe, straightening up from a slump is accomplished by rolling the pelvis forward not by throwing the shoulders back or by straightening the back. If you aren’t sure about this, slump and feel how your pelvis rolls back. Now, without moving your pelvis at all, try to sit up by moving your shoulders or your back. It can’t be done. Try sitting up out of the slump by puffing out your chest, throwing your shoulders back, and straightening your back. Notice that these exaggerated movements of your chest, shoulders and back are extra movements, which use muscles unnecessarily and waste energy. Most people tense their chests, shoulders and backs to sit up "straight," but they don’t sit up that way very long because the tension is uncomfortable.
However, maintaining a comfortable sitting posture depends not only on moving the pelvis to the right position but on using the right muscles to get it there. To understand that, consider that you can roll a ball forward by pulling the top of the ball forward and down or by pulling the bottom of the ball backward and up. In the same way, you can roll the pelvis forward by pulling up on the back edge of the pelvis or pulling down on the front edge. However, the two ways of initiating the movement use different muscles and lead to different qualities of body use and movement.
Try moving the wrong way, pulling up on the back of your pelvis, using the extensor muscles along the spinal column. Arch your back by pulling your back pants pockets and your shoulder blades together. Notice that the movement takes place in your back around your waist. Notice also how tense this makes your lower back and your neck.
The better way to move will be very low in your body, deep in your pelvis, around your hip sockets. Do you know where your hips are? Touch your hips. Most people will touch the bone right below the waist, near where they wear their belts. That, however, is not the hip. It is the top lip of the pelvic bowl. The hip socket is a joint -- the leg’s equivalent of the shoulder joint. As you sit, put your hand on the fold on your leg at the top of the thigh. The hip socket is deep in the leg, by that fold.
Slump. Notice that when you sit slumped your pubic symphysis (the bone in front of your pelvis, just above your genitals) points upwards. Roll your pelvis forward by moving your pubic symphysis forward and down so that it points toward the floor. This uses the iliacus and psoas muscles (which are muscles deep in the front of the body) to pull forward and down on the top of pelvis. (Some people find it difficult to find this movement and need further information to succeed. For greater detail on this exercise, with photographs and diagrams of the process, you could look at my book.)
You will know you are doing the whole movement right when you move from the slump easily into an upright and solid sitting posture. Your chest, back and shoulders will not be actively engaged in effort but will move in a soft and relaxed way, simply as a result of the pelvic rotation. You will feel that you are not working very hard to achieve stability.
This sitting posture is actually very common. Who sits this way? Infants do. Think about the graceful, erect way that infants sit on the floor playing, without leaning back against anything. This is the anatomically natural way to sit, but most adults in our culture have forgotten it. As you have experienced, however, it can be relearned.
Here is a tip for maintaining comfort at your computer. You can reduce even the muscular effort required in sitting properly by using a rolled up bath towel to support your spinal column. You need to be sitting on a flat, fairly firm chair for this. The towel should go under your tail bone, but your two sitbones (ischial tuberosities) should rest on the chair. The towel will act as a wedge to keep your pelvis rolled forward into the proper position, and you will feel support all the way up your back. Most people find that this significantly reduces the strain felt in sitting tasks such as computer work. Pelvic support rather than lumbar support is the real key to comfort in sitting.
Another brief tip concerns breathing. If you watch infants breathing, you will notice that they breathe softly. When they inhale, their bellies swell outward, and when they exhale, their bellies soften and come back in. This is the anatomically natural way to breathe, but many adults have learned to breathe very differently. They tense their bellies and pull in their tummies as they inhale, raising their chests and working hard when they don’t need to. This is the way people breathe when they are startled or afraid, and our society has mandated that we all breathe in a tense fight-or-flight manner. Sitting properly upright and breathing softly down into the belly will create a state of relaxed alertness. This is part of working safely and comfortably at the computer.
ADJUSTING YOUR WORKSTATION
Once you understand how your body works, you will be able to set up your workstation to help rather than hinder your body. For example, if you sit with your back and head properly balanced on your pelvis, you will be most comfortable. But if your desk, your chair or your monitor is too high or too low, you will have to bend or stretch your neck and back to work at your computer. How high or low should the components of your equipment be? They should be positioned so that you neither have to bend down nor stretch up to use them. The dimensions of your body are the measure of your workstation, and by feeling your body you will know when your workstation is adjusted right. Comfort At Your Computer includes extensive analysis of workstation setup in relation to various tasks.
It is also important to consider the differences between desktop workstations, laptops, and standing workstations. For example, laptops are necessarily very fatiguing simply because you can’t simultaneously get the keyboard low enough to avoid arm strain and the screen high enough to avoid neck strain. So don’t spend hours at a time using a laptop. Make sure to take frequent breaks. Each different kind of workstation requires a different way of using your body.
Here’s a tip for using a laptop when you are at home. Plug in an external keyboard and mouse, and put the laptop itself on a stack of books. That way you can put the keyboard as low as you need and raise the screen up to proper height.
WORK BREAKS
It is important to take rest and movement breaks. The body simply isn’t designed to bear up under a constant load on the muscles. Working without rest breaks will eventually lead to physical damage and pain. The simplest rest break is nothing more than switching from computer work to some other kind of work that will get you up and moving, for example, filing papers. It is also important to take 5 second movement breaks every 10 minutes. If you do that, you will steal about 4 minutes from an 8 hour day, but the productivity you will gain from staying relaxed throughout the day will more than make up for the time you spend in movement breaks. Simple movements such as stretching, wiggling, twisting, and turning, done as you sit in your chair, will help a lot.
If you want movements that are more interesting, Comfort At Your Computer shows a series of systematic 5 second movement routines. It is also important to leave your computer every hour or two for 3 minute relaxation/stretching breaks, and if you want to feel as comfortable as possible, spending 20 minutes at home in relaxation and flexibility exercises will do wonders for you. Comfort At Your Computer also shows systematic 3 and 20 minute stretching routines.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The bottom line is that you can get more done more comfortably if you invest a bit of time and thought in your self. You are your own most important investment, and taking a few minutes to achieve comfort will pay rich dividends through the years you will spend working with computers. You don’t have to waste energy fighting your computer. You owe it to yourself to achieve comfort at your computer.
FOOTNOTES
- The book can be ordered through online retailers, through any bookstore, or directly from the publisher at orders@northatlanticbooks.com.
- For detailed instructions on how to do the basic breathing, body awareness, and centering exercises I teach, see the file A Downloadable Script for the Eight Core BIM Exercises on my website, www.being-in-movement.com.