Category: Life-Work Balance

Sandy Smith woke up to the annoying and familiar sound of the alarm clock. It was another day and the beginning of another hectic week. She rolled from her stomach onto her back and unburied herself from beneath the old, down-filled, pillows. Sandy reached over and pressed the snooze button in an attempt to steal five more minutes of peace. As Sandy stretched, she felt the pain, a stiff ache that had unfortunately loomed over her body every morning for quite some time.

Once out of bed, Sandy leaned over and tried to concentrate on making the perfect hospital corners. She slightly lifted the large, squishy mattress, and tucked the corners just right, trying to ignore her stiff muscles and joints. She shuffled into the bathroom and brought her toothbrush to her mouth. Hunched over the sink, trying to avoid the tired reflection staring back at her, Sandy brushed her teeth. Her motions were slow this morning, and she had no time to concern herself with a little pain.

“Here they come,” Sandy thought to herself as she heard the pitter-patter of four little feet running down the hallway. The kids were awake, eager to begin the day. Sandy threw on a skirt and sweater, pulling her brown high heels out from the back of the closet.

“Ow,” Sandy exclaimed. The pain in her back sent a sharp signal to her brain that the day was not going to run smoothly. She clomped down the hall to retrieve the hairbrush stuck in her daughter’s long hair, and her feet found Barbie. Her heels had little traction and she grabbed the banister for support.

Realizing she was late, Sandy bent over to scoop up her 2-year-old. Her back seemed to yell at her, and she suddenly realized her toddler was becoming heavier every day.

After cereal and burnt toast, Sandy marched her girls to the bus stop and waved good-bye as she turned toward her car, angry with herself for sleeping those five extra minutes. She would have to face Monday morning gridlock and suddenly felt the beginning of a headache that would stay with her all day.

“I love Mondays,” Sandy said to herself as she sat in traffic. She reached for her cell phone, cradling it between her neck and head. Her conference call would need to be conducted in the car, and her headache only worsened.

Thirty minutes later, Sandy pulled into her parking place. She sprang from her car, heaved her over-stuffed leather bag over her shoulder, and scurried through the office doors.

Monday Madness

Sandy’s Monday morning was filled with telephone calls and last minute deadlines. She tried to type and talk at the same time, constantly crossing and re-crossing the left leg over the right. She began breathing erratically when she realized her deadline would not be met. The lunch hour was approaching, and it suddenly occurred to Sandy that she had not taken a break all morning. Her computer screen appeared blurry and her wrists were stiff.

The remainder of Sandy’s day was much of the same, and she could not wait to take off her shoes. After skipping lunch and sitting through meetings, Sandy drug herself to her car, threw her bag in the back seat and started the stressful trek home. That night, after the kids devoured dinner, Sandy longed for a long hot shower. The girls were in the bathtub, and she winced as she reached over to carefully lift her toddler onto the floor. By this time, her neck and joints screamed in pain and Sandy wanted nothing more than to climb into bed.

It was eleven at night and Sandy was finally lying down. Her bed and pillows did not seem comfortable, and she felt for only an instant that her neck needed a little more support. She drifted off to sleep out of sheer exhaustion.

A New Day

Does Sandy remind you of anyone? The more stressful our lives become, the less we focus on the “moment.” When we aren’t conscious of how we sleep, breathe, stand, lift, bend or sit, our bodies can take a beating that results in lingering pain. We often avoid the early signs of discomfort we feel in our back, shoulders or neck until we are unable to ignore the pain. By reading the tips below, you can learn to make even the busiest days pain free.

• When you wake in the morning, start the day with a couple of stretches. Stand up and stretch your arms above your head. Do the “hug your best friend.” Wrap your arms around your body, and turn as far as you can to the left, then to the right.
• When performing everyday routines such as brushing your teeth, remember your posture. Do not hunch over the sink; stand up straight.
• Don’t bend from the waist when you lift a child. Squat with your back straight. Keep the child close to you and use your arms and legs to lift.
• Hold the telephone with your hand or use the speakerphone. Cradling the phone between your head and shoulder can lock up the spinal joints in the neck and upper back, eventually causing pain.
• While in the office, make sure your chair fits correctly. There should be two inches between the front edge of your seat and the back of your knees. The chair should tilt back so you are able to rest while reading from a computer screen.
• Many people suffer from tension headaches. Adequate lighting and document holders by your computer can help reduce the risk of a headache. Materials placed on a desk cause you to constantly raise and lower your neck while you’re typing at your keyboard.
• Do not wear high heels. The weight of the foot is not evenly distributed, which not only causes sore feet, but also added spinal stress.
• Do not carry a heavy bag with its strap over your shoulder, unless you place the strap over your head on the side opposite the bag. Wearing a shoulder strap over one shoulder unevenly places the weight of the bag on one side of the body, potentially causing shoulder and back pain. Or better yet, carry a bag with a handle rather than a strap.
• Do not consistently cross the same knee over the other. This habit can eventually cause misalignment of the spine.
• Even if you remain sitting for the majority of your workday, you deserve a break. Get up from your desk and move around, stretching arms and legs as much as possible to avoid postural and spinal stress. Try to practice deep and even breathing to keep yourself calm and keep adequate oxygen flowing through your system.
• Bath time can be fun for the kids but stressful on any parent. Make certain to bend from the waist and not the back when bathing your children. Use your legs when you lift your child.
• It is important to get a good night’s rest. Choose a comfortable mattress and pillow that adequately support the weight of your head and body.

Most of us are plenty tired of having experts tell us we should do more exercise. Our chiropractors tell us. Our family doctors tell us. Friends who just started taking their first yoga class and aren’t really experts tell us. Celebrities tell us. Kid stars on Disney Channel tell us. Now even local television news anchors are telling us.

Intentionally or not, the result of all this “encouragement” is just more and more guilt. We already know we should be exercising. Hearing about it all day long really doesn’t help. We’re working hard at our jobs, keeping it together, taking care of the family, but as long as we’re not also doing our daily exercise we’re just not doing enough. We’re not being healthy and the experts are only too glad to recite all of the long-term consequences of our slothful behavior.^1,2,3

So what’s a person to do? On one hand, we can dig in our heels, deny reality, and desperately resist all those do-gooders. Some will bet their future on ancient family legends – “My grand-dad smoked two packs of cigarettes for 50 years, never exercised a day in his life, and died in his sleep when he was 92.” Others will simply leave things up to fate, taking their chances as well as the path of least resistance, doing the same old same old, and hoping everything will be OK.

There is another way. First, it’s very important to distinguish what I choose to do from what I should do. No one wants to do what they should do. Should means having to, should means having no choice in the matter. Should means someone else is telling me what to do, and no one really wants to do that. We want to do what we want to do. So telling a person they should do more exercise merely engenders resistance. People will only take the time and make the effort to exercise regularly if they want to do it, if they themselves choose to. Not because someone told them they needed to.

The secret of adding exercise to your life is discovering why you would want to do it. Discovering the payoff. Sure, the payoff includes being healthier, lowering your blood pressure, improving your metabolism, and lowering your serum glucose. But these are not really motivating factors for most people. If they were, everyone would be exercising. The real payoff, what gets people into the gym and out on the road walking, bicycling, and running, is that exercise is fun. You feel great afterward, often for the whole day. And pretty quickly, the more you exercise the more your body wants to do it. Your body takes over and your mind goes, “yeah, I’m going to the gym”.

So the secret is to make a choice, pull yourself together, grit your teeth, and go exercising a few times. Almost always you’ll discover that you actually do like it, that there’s a tremendous feeling of accomplishment and fun. And all of a sudden, to your surprise and astonishment, you’ve become a person who exercises.

¹Jordao MT, et al: Exercise Training Restores Hypertension-Induced Changes in the Elastic Tissue of the Thoracic Aorta. J Vasc Res 48(6):513-524, 2011

²Walsh NP, et al: Position statement. Part one: Immune function and exercise. Exerc Immunol Rev 17:6-63, 2011

³Lin GM, et al: Effects of aerobic and resistance training on hemoglobin A1c levels in patients with type 2 diabetes: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA 304(20):2253-2262, 2010

Not too many people would agree that “oh, yeah, my work is relaxing”. For most of us, work involves plenty of stress. If we’re in customer service, there’s always a seemingly never-ending stream of customers with an abundance of problems that need to be handled yesterday. If we work in an office, office politics adds an unnecessary layer of stress to the normal daily stress of the work we’re supposed to be doing. If we work for ourselves, there’s the ongoing stress of lining up the next contract, even while we’re dealing with the pressures involved in fulfilling the demands of the current project. And on and on.

If we work at a computer there are additional physiological stresses. Our bodies were not designed for prolonged sitting, nor were they designed for staring a computer screen for hours at a time. The highly complex and highly delicate structures of our forearms, wrists, and hands were not meant to be used for typing on a keyboard. Anyone can type for 15 minutes – that’s not a problem. But typing for most of the day, day after day, week after week – that’s definitely a problem.

These few work scenarios are common. We can recognize ourselves in the descriptions. No one would describe such circumstances as relaxing. But this is how we live. How can we turn what might be thought of as “lemons” into lemonade? Are there tactics we can employ in an overall strategy of causing our lives to be healthy, satisfying, and meaningful, as well as fun and relaxing?

The answer is a resounding “yes”. But there is effort involved. We need to be creative and willing to take action on our own behalf. First, it’s important to acknowledge the conundrum each of us faces every day. We are required to work to obtain food, shelter, and clothing for ourselves and our families. But the work that we’re doing may not be our first choice. Or the second choice. Or sometimes even the third. Still, there it is. We need to work. This is where the creativity comes in.

Our work environment and/or our work itself may never be relaxing. However, we can actively choose to be relaxed. This is an ongoing process and occurs in the moment. For example, you can affirm “I am relaxed. My work is fulfilling and satisfying.” And then, pretty soon, something happens to which you respond with tension. As soon as you come back to yourself and remember that you want to be creating a relaxing environment, you reaffirm your intention. This is very much like Zen or other practices which focus on centering. In Zen, the student is reminded to pay attention, to believe nothing, and that nothing is personal.

These powerful reminders can help us greatly in our intention to have our work be relaxing.^1,2,3 The key is to take on the concept of practice. We are practicing centering. We are practicing self-awareness. We are practicing relaxing. And as we practice these things, our overall experience is one of being centered, relaxed, and self-aware, regardless of all the things that are going on around us.

¹Chiesa A, Malinowski P: Mindfulness-based approaches: are they all the same? J Clin Psychol 67(4):404:424, 2011

²Zeidan F, et al: Brain mechanisms supporting the modulation of pain by mindfulness meditation. J Neurosci 31(14):5540-5548, 2011

³Ledesma D, Kumano H: Mindfulness-based stress reduction and cancer: a meta-analysis. Psychooncology 18(6):571-579, 2009

Windows and Mac users actually do have one thing in common – computer ergonomics issues, namely, pain.^1,2 Beyond the usual hardware and software gotchas we deal with on a daily basis, the real bottom-line question is, “how to play nice with my computer”.

Doing computer work is a funny kind of work, a type of activity we’re still getting used to. It’s not physical work in the sense that there’s no heavy lifting going on, no truck-driving, no emergency services heart-pounding decision-making.

But computer work is still an intensely physical activity, although the work is pretty subtle. In computer work it’s the small muscles that are getting the workout, not the big muscles we’re used to thinking about.

Wrist muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Finger muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Shoulder muscles, Neck muscles. All of these are involved in ongoing repetitive tasks when you sit at a computer and one hour turns into two, two hours turns into three, and suddenly half the day is gone and you notice you’ve got a killer stiff neck.

Or, one day the tendons on the back of your hand begin to hurt, feeling irritated and inflamed. Or your shoulders and upper back are tight and painful.

Your hands or shoulders feel better by the time you go to sleep. But the next day, as soon as you start to type they act up again.

This is all very uncomfortable, because you’ve got to do your work.

What’s going on?

These various pain patterns in your hands, wrists, shoulders, and neck can be grouped together as a repetitive stress syndrome. Repetitive activities, done over a long period of time, can irritate and inflame the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that are involved in doing the work.

But computer work involves repetitive tasks. How can you avoid these painful problems?

The best approach is to prevent them in the first place.³ If such a syndrome does develop, relative rest is indicated. Reduced computer activity, in smaller intervals, is a good solution. A very useful work-around for right- or left-arm pain is to teach your non-dominant hand to use the mouse or touchpad. This training may take a few weeks – the valuable result is the ability to switch hands whenever you like, distributing the workload between the two sides. Much better.

The most important aspect of prevention is to take a quick, refreshing break once an hour. This is a critical habit to develop. Get out of your chair, walk around, get some fresh air if possible. Change your environment for a few minutes – talk to a co-worker for a moment, get a drink from the water-cooler down the hall, seek out a picture, wall-covering, or landscape you’ve never seen before.

These activities refresh your body AND your brain, and you’re ready to do another hour of productive, creative, healthy work. You’ll feel much better, you’ll be avoiding repetitive injuries, and your workday will be more enjoyable.

¹Keyserling WM, Chaffin DB: Occupational ergonomics – methods to evaluate physical stress on the job. Annu Rev Public Health 7:77-104, 1986.
²Computer Workstation Ergonomics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2000. http://www.cdc.gov/od/ohs/Ergonomics/compergo.htm
³Robertson MM, et al: Effects of a participatory ergonomics intervention computer workshop for university students. Work 18(3):305-314, 2002.