How Sitting at a Computer Affects Your Spine
Hey, I wanted to ask you a question. Has this ever happened to anybody? You go to work, and you find yourself in front of a computer for most of your entire workday, right?
That, unfortunately, is about what we deal with here in America most of the time. A lot of jobs have started turning into these data-entry, in-front-of-a-computer jobs.
What we wanted to show you is: How is that impacting your spine? Ultimately, how is that impacting your health? And is there something that we can do to help make your work life a little bit more enjoyable so you have a lot fewer issues throughout your day?
The Effects of a Forward, Hunched Position
If you see here, this is probably a pretty common position for most people. We have seen this a lot, right? At the end of your day, or after you’re doing a few hours a day of this, you see he’s all hunched forward. We’re using our phones, right?
Now, let’s think about what this is doing to his spine. Remember, this is four to six hours of most people’s day, right?
When his head is jutted forward like that, we start getting a bunch of tension all up in here in the shoulders. These are the nerves that run down and go into the arms. If we’re stuck in this position, we can start seeing headaches. People get neck tension and neck pain. It can even go down into the arms.
We can start getting tingling and numbness down into the hands as this area gets tighter and tighter from hours and hours in a forward position.
If this stays like this for a long time, we can even start getting issues down in the lower spine and his lower back, just from constant pressure being put there over hours a day.
How to Improve Your Sitting Position
So, how do we fix this?
A good thing to do is to first sit up nice and tall, right? We want a nice, straight line and good, solid posture.
Now, what’s really important is making sure that the keyboard and the mouse are really close to your chest. We want everything—if you think of almost like four or five inches away from your chest. If you can keep the keyboard and the mouse in this position, it’s going to take stress off of the shoulders.
The head’s not going to be jutting forward, and you can see he’s here in a much better position.
Adjusting the Height of Your Monitor
The last thing that you can do is raise the monitor. When he’s sitting up nice and tall, if he looks straight out ahead of himself, he should see the center of that monitor, right?
We would want this to come up a good six or seven inches. If he’s in that position, he’s in about as good a position for working with data entry as he can be.
Protecting Your Posture Throughout the Workday
So, something to think about, you guys. Make sure you can kind of change the ergonomics here at your workstation, and it will go a long way toward helping you throughout your days to protect that posture.
If you are starting to notice that you’re having some neck pain or headaches, and you’re worried about what the ergonomics of your workspace look like, that’s a good time to give us a call.
You can come into our office. We’ll do a full evaluation. We’ll find out the actual impact your work posture is having on your spine.
If you guys have any questions, give us a call. Thank you so much for joining us.
Infinity Wellness Center.
