How To Avoid Body Aches And Pains While Working At Home
When the coronavirus first hit office memos in the United States, millions of workers were asked to pack up their laptops, abandon their cubicles and work from home for the foreseeable future.
For some, working from home seemed idyllic — greater flexibility, more time spent with family, no long commute. Dress clothes were ditched as couches became offices and dining rooms transformed into work spaces.
Fast forward nearly four months, and it’s possible working from home hasn’t been the walk in the park you imagined.
The danger from the coronavirus extends beyond contracting COVID-19. Working from home can also endanger your body.
Hunched over your kitchen table, you likely dismissed that nagging pain in your neck and shoulders as you struggled to salvage some iteration of a work routine. You ignored that unrelenting headache as you and your spouse battled over that one quiet spot in the house with terrible lighting while your kids played loudly underfoot.
Working from home isn’t easy. Working from home during a pandemic is harder.
Combined with the lack of a designated work space and poor ergonomics, the distractions, the noise, the interrupted routine, the blurred boundaries — it all tends to cause high levels of mental, emotional and certainly physical stress.
Before the pandemic, we could at least leave our homes to socialize and decompress without fear of catching COVID-19.
Right now, that’s not necessarily the case.
In the end, some experts say today’s work-from-home conditions have created the perfect recipe for chronic pain.
But it’s not too late to optimize your work-from-home setup, said Dr. Lori Rubenstein Fazzio, a professor at Loyola Marymount University and owner of Mosaic Physical Therapy in Los Angeles.
“We need to re-envision ‘working from home,’” Rubenstein Fazzio said. “With thoughtful planning, working from home can truly offer more free time, less stress and enhanced well-being.”
What Causes Aches And Pains
“Ergonomics” is a buzzword that deserves attention. If a space or item is considered ergonomic, it means it’s specifically designed for efficiency and maximum comfort.
Your home usually isn’t the best example of an ergonomic space. The lighting in most rooms is poor. The kitchen table is probably too high and the chair too low. Your couch, and especially your bed, don’t provide the best support for your spine.
Homes simply aren’t designed with ergonomics in mind, said Julie Dorsey, chairwoman of the Department of Occupational Therapy at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York.
If you're working from home long-term, this can take a toll on your body.
“Actually finding space is really the most acute challenge for people who suddenly find themselves working from home,” Dorsey said. “Where will I work? Where will I set up? What kind of chair will I sit in?”
Chances are we also lack ergonomic equipment in our homes. Perhaps the biggest offender is our laptops.
A laptop’s compact design, while convenient, forces users into awkward postures. When the screen is at the right height, the keyboard is too high. When the keyboard is at the right height, the screen is too low.
This creates an ongoing tradeoff between poor neck and head posture, and poor hand and wrist posture.
“Laptops were originally designed to be used for travel; but now, we’re using them for seven or eight hours per day,” Dorsey said. “Laptops aren’t meant for long-term use at a desk.”
It’s not just your kitchen table. Most work surfaces in a home are too high in relation to standard chairs. When a work surface is too high, it causes the shoulders to shrug up, your elbows to bend incorrectly and your wrists to overextend.
Finding a supportive chair is another challenge.
“If someone is sitting in a chair that’s not supportive — it has no lumbar support, it’s the wrong height, or the armrests might not be able to support their arms — it changes the entire alignment of your spine,” Dorsey said.
Environmental factors also shouldn’t be underestimated, experts say. It’s not just your work-from-home setup, but also what’s going on around you.
People often have a hard time setting boundaries while working from home, Rubenstein Fazzio said, and they also struggle to find a balance between working and other responsibilities at home.
Also, the general strain of the coronavirus pandemic is putting Americans under an overwhelming amount of stress.
Many are worried about their families and whether kids will go back to school this fall. Others are worried about finances and job security.
Having children and spouses at home only amplifies distractions, causing us to experience heightened amounts of psychological and social stress. In response, this stress takes a significant toll on our bodies.
More often than not, Dorsey said, the stress manifests as physical pain.
“We tend to hold our stress in our bodies,” she added. “People might tighten their jaws without realizing it. Others hold their tension in their lower backs. Our bodies absorb stress in different ways, but it will ultimately lead to more discomfort and an increased risk of injury.”
Tips On Reducing Our Aches And Pains
A Gallup poll conducted at the end of May revealed that 62 percent of Americans had reported working from home at least part time since the onset of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, some companies have seen a new opportunity amid the pandemic and are shifting employees to permanent work-from-home status. This includes companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Nationwide Insurance.
If you’re still working from home but not in the best space or in the best way, chances are you will start to feel physical pain in your upper or lower back, neck, hands or wrists, and eyes. This can happen in the form of eye strain, headaches and general fatigue in parts of your body.
If unaddressed, this fatigue can turn into headaches, vertigo, hypertension or other chronic musculoskeletal disorders such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, or muscle and tendon strain.
It “doesn’t take long” for these disorders to develop, Dorsey said.
Many long-term effects are also tied to our posture, Rubenstein Fazzio added. When we slouch, our diaphragm is inhibited from moving, so our accessory muscles used for breathing will tense to lift the rib cage.
“We see this as ‘chest breathing,’ and this causes even more neck tension and overworking of the neck muscles,” she said. “Our neck and back muscles are our orienting muscles, which means they tense when we sense threat.”
That threat comes from our poor posture.
When we’re tense, our nervous system senses this and our bodies tend to shift into a sympathetic nervous system “fight or flight” state, according to Rubenstein Fazzio. Our breathing becomes short and shallow. Our blood pressure and heart rate increase. Muscle tension spikes. We become more reactive, and our immune response is suppressed.
If this persists, it can lead to long-term spinal dysfunction due to chronic muscle tension and compression. It can also result in compression of joints and discs, which may ultimately lead to degenerative disc disease, osteoarthritis, and even pinched nerves and facet joint arthropathy.
“Basically, any condition that has been scientifically associated with prolonged stress can be the worst-case outcome,” Rubenstein Fazzio said, adding that such stress is not exclusive to working from home.
But if you are working from home, it’s not too late to improve your setup by not only creating a comfortable space and reducing environmental stressors, but also by following a few other key tips.
First and foremost, figure out where you plan to work. Until you answer this question, you can’t address other issues, Dorsey said.
Next, do your best to establish a new routine with built-in movement breaks.
“One of the best things we can do is establish a new routine,” Dorsey said. “At the office, we remember to take breaks and go refill our water bottles. This got us out of static postures, but we’re not doing that at home, and it just contributes to the problems.”
A general rule for how much to move throughout the day is for every 30 minutes you work, spend 20 minutes seated, 8 minutes moving or walking, and 2 minutes stretching.
“Otherwise, you may not realize you need to move until you start to have pain,” Dorsey said. “Listen to your body.”
Dorsey also authored a list of tips and suggestions for ergonomically improving your work-from-home setup. She also offers easy hacks for using common household items to achieve this.
Here are a few highlights from the list with other suggestions from Rubenstein Fazzio:
Remember the 20-20-20 rule: For every 20 minutes of computer or other visually intense work, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
Use a comfortable chair with back support. Add pillows if needed for extra support, especially if the chair isn’t cushioned.
Make sure your feet are on the floor. If not, use a stool.
If you find it challenging to sit upright, use a seated wedge or spread your legs wide. This pitches the pelvis forward into a more neutral position and enables the spine to be relaxed in an upright position.
Set up your monitor height level with your eyes and 90 degrees from a window if possible. Don’t face the window, and don’t have it at your back. This cuts down on glare.
The ideal desk height for typing is lower than you think. You want your elbows greater than 90 degrees for blood flow and to get wrists in a more neutral position. Avoid bending your wrists upward, as this increases pressure in the carpal tunnel.
Keep the mouse as close to the keyboard as possible to avoid awkward shoulder movements.
Your arms should rest on a wrist pad that enables your hands to relax onto the keyboard.
Make sure the keyboard fits you. If you have small hands, use a smaller keyboard.
Lower overhead lights and use desk lamps over documents.
Vary your posture throughout the day. Work while standing for periods of time, if you can.
Don’t forget to take passive breaks as well. These help you make adjustments to your body before physical damage is caused.
Between Zoom calls, take your hands off the keyboard, do some deep breathing and do a body scan. Ask yourself where you’re holding tension, and if anything is hurting.
If you’re still experiencing pain or discomfort, speak to your doctor and possibly get a referral to see an occupational or physical therapist. It’s also possible to work with a physical therapist or other professional to do an ergonomics consultation at your home.
Early detection and optimizing your work-from-home setup will ultimately lead to improved health and well-being during this challenging time.
This is why paying attention to your body is so critical, Dorsey said.
“With all the distractions we talked about, people may not be listening to their bodies the same way they used to and won’t realize until the end of the day what’s hurting,” she said. “But by then, it might be too late.”
This article originally appeared on the Across America Patch
