Dr. Brett Hill - Eat Think Move Chiropractic

Are you aware that the very desk that you sit at might be stressing you out? I'm not talking about your job, that annoying person you have to sit next to or even your strung-out boss. I'm talking about the actual desk!

Ideally our bodies are designed to be standing and moving around throughout the day, but your boss may not agree. One of the most prolific stresses on our bodies in our modern day lives is our posture at work. If your posture isn't right, these stressors will build up hour after hour, day after day, week after week and year after year - becoming bigger than the more obvious stressors we tend to think about. These physical stressors have also been shown to accelerate the stress response in your brain, leading you to feel emotionally stressed and even ill.

The best way to avoid this is to keep moving. Ideally you won't sit in the one place for longer than 20 minutes without moving - even if all you do is get up, do a lap around your chair and sit back down again. But for some people, even that small amount of movement is impractical. So if your job necessitates that you remain seated for lengths at a time, here are a few simple rules to help reduce your work stress. Firstly, sit up straight. This means sitting with your feet touching the floor, your knees bent to 90 degrees, hips bent to 90 degrees, and elbows at your side at 90 degrees.

The set-up of the contents of your desk is also vitally important to the stress that you put on your body. The middle of your screen should ideally be at eye-height to ensure that your head is not bent forward, and the keyboard at elbow-height to avoid strain on your shoulders. For most people this means that the chair needs to be raised or the keyboard lowered, and the screen needs to be quite a bit higher. You may also need a footrest to ensure that your feet still rest flat on the floor.

This advice can be hard to follow if you are a laptop user. If you use a laptop, get a spare keyboard for when you are in the office. Put the keyboard at the appropriate height and use the laptop as the screen. Elevate it on some phone books or a stand so that it is at the correct height.

You may not be able to do anything about the workload or the high strung boss but at least there are some work stresses that are manageable.