Office Worker's Health

Working 8 hours a day in front of a computer exposes you to specific health challenges. This guide provides community tips on improving your health as an office worker.

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Fingers, arms and shoulders

Symptons

• The joints in your fingers hurt.
• The area between your thumb and forefinger is red and burns.
• Your fingers and hands are cold.

Possible solutions

• Blood is not running freely to your hands as your arms are always lifted halfway up in the air (at keyboard level). Take a break every hour and rest your hands on your legs for 5-10 minutes. You will feel your hands being warm when resting them, and you are ready for another round of sending your most important e-mails.
• Your fingers become overloaded by being used for too many consecutive hours. If you are working daytime don't also use a keyboard in the evening. Your brain can be used for other things than just writing stuff, so figure out how you can use your time effectively other ways.
• In between writing on the keyboard you are not relaxing your fingers. They instead stay prepared and tense to be prepared for the next words/code to be written. Remove your hands from the keyboard in all the small pauses or focus on relaxing them.
• Your arms have been in the 90 degrees angle for too long (maybe many years), thus your shoulders and arms are tense. You might not feel it, but try letting your arms hang along your body and relax as much as possible in your arms and shoulders. You will soon get a feeling that you shoulders can be much more relaxed than they usually are. Make an effort every day to obtain a more relaxed position in your shoulders.
• When you lie down to sleep at night make an effort to relax your arms, as they can probably obtain a more relaxed position here as well.
• Using an integrated keyboard in your laptop may not be a good idea. The keys have "soft press" style causing your fingers to never be allowed to rest upon the keyboard in between typing. An old fashioned keyboard with hard keys makes it possible for your fingers to better rest upon the keys.

Eyes

Symptons

• Your eyesight are becoming worse.
• You need 1-2 seconds to refocus after removing your eyes from the monitor.
• You feel an itching around your eyes and an urge to rub your eyes with your hands.
• It is hard to focus or your vision gets blurred
• Your eyes dry out

Possible solutions

• You forget to blink by focusing to much on the stuff you see on the monitor. Look out the window from time to time. You will feel you eyes being more relaxed (and you might experience new ideas and energy flowing to your brain as well).
• You simply spent to much time looking at a monitor 50 cm away. Human eyes are not build for this distance. Try spending fewer hours working. After all your health is more important than work and money.
• If your eyesight has already gotten worse, you might need to see an optician to check if you need glasses or your current glasses adjusted.
• Take a rest from your smartphone. It might not only be a problem with you computer monitor, but the combination between working by the computer monitor and then relaxing by surfing twitter leaves your eyes in a never-resting situation.
• Blurred or distorted vision, typically in one eye, might be central serous retinopathy. Also called stress eye. See an eye doctor and take a vacation!
• Monitors come in different qualities. Framerates, types of panels and color-schemes matter. For instance, the Dell Ultrasharp is gentle on the eyes.

Back

Symptons

• The lower of your back hurts.

Possible solutions

• You need to change working position. Change multiple times a day between sitting on a chair, standing and maybe sitting on a fitness ball or similar.
• Use different stretch exercises multiple times a day. The effort needed is not big in the light of the gain.
• Use an external keyboard that can be moved freely from the monitor. That allows you to position your body in the best possible way instead of being forced down to the monitor and screen.

Symptons

• The upper of your back hurts, because you are leaning softly over your desk to come closer to the monitor.

Possible solutions

• You are possibly compensating for bad eye sight by subconsciously moving closer to the monitor.
• Your monitor position could be adjusted, so that you are looking slighty downwards.

Legs

Symptons

• Your shins hurt at night.
• You are having troubles walking smoothly the first meters after you get up from your chair.

Possible solutions

• Make sure you don't keep your feet under your chair throughout the day. Keeping your knees in a position under 90 degrees in multiple hours prevents the blood from running freely.
• Use a height adjustable table and switch between standing and sitting position multiple times a day. Remember, the best working position is always the next!
• Use different stretch exercises multiple times a day. Making it a habit each morning and evening will drastically help after a few weeks.