Ergonomicsssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 24 hours ago I could not tell you what ergonomics was. Things have changed. Last night I spent a couple hours completing the Office Ergonomics Module based course. 10/10 would recommend. This course was simple yet effective in teaching me what honestly felt like common sense yet me and I am sure many many others fail to do when working at a computer. Posture, desk height, key board and mouse position and even how I control my eyesight all can have long lasting affects on my health.
To recap what I’ve inquired, I’m going to start with posture. To start the module confirmed what my dad has been telling me for years being that my posture sucks when I am sitting down. The course breaks down posture into 3 sitting positions with separate benefits that you should rotate between in order to minimize stress on your joints. These positions are reclined sitting which reduces stress on your lower back, Upright Sitting which maintains the natural curve of your spine and Declined-Thigh Sitting which decreases pressure on the hips.
On top of the 3 sitting positions there is 4th way to reduce stress on your body while doing computer work. Simply standing which evenly distributes pressure across discs and soft tissue. These 4 positions give a wide variety of options to situate yourself while working a computer.
I myself have been failing at putting myself in any of these positions. My current posture has been some weird sort of slouch where my back is arched forwards which provides 0 benefit toward my spine or any other joint in my body.
The hoodie I am wearing does a good job at hiding it actually but my back is not straight. However, this will be the last time I am ever caught sitting like this. Even as I have been writing this I am practicing the 3 new sitting postures. This change in posture actually excites me quite a lot as I do try hard to take care of my body. Lately I have been running close to 60 Kilometers per week and because of that I’ve started yoga to heal my joints every night. Despite my commitment to keeping my body stress free the idea of my posture needing a fix never actually occurred to me. I am confident that these fixes to my posture combined with my nightly yoga will pay off in 20 years from now when I am not 18 and invincible.
While I would love to go over each and every aspect of Ergonomics I have learned so far, I want to focus on one more topic to really emphasize the importance I believe it has. I really like my eyesight. Our eyes are what let us take in the beauty in the world and are so important to everyday life. Valerie brought this up in my Digital Literacy Lab yesterday evening and it really got me thinking. If my eyesight is so important to me why do I take such little care to protect my eyes from screens? While I don’t actually keep track of these statistics, I am sure that I will go hours at a time daily without taking my eyes off of a screen. Valerie mentioned just looking into the distance every 20 minutes when you’re locked in on work.
I was very invested in the benefits of this practice so I conducted some research and here are my findings. We should be following the 20-20-20 rule which is every 20 minutes while working on a screen one should look 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This works so well for many reasons. When staring at a screen you blink 50% less and they stay locked at one distance. There are muscles in our eyes, and constant stress with no break is going to cause them stress. With less blinking our eyes also become more dry so the 20-20-20 rule also prevents ones eyes from drying out. On top of this this rule reduces screen related headaches by reducing tension. What this means is taking a short 20 second break to look away every 20 minutes can help you achieve long term success and reduce fatigue over time. To me this trade-off is worth it and from now on I will be following the 20-20-20 rule when I am locked in.
Now that I am in the know with ergonomics I will be taking action to help prevent stress across my body. There are even more changes I am committed to making that I didn’t cover in this post that I am sure I will be thanking myself for making decades from now.