Laptops Ergonomics @ Home- Save Your Back!

Oakland's Impact Hub communal workspace is home to a lot of hipster solo-preneurs working long hours on laptops. Like any public workspace, it’s an ugly site for the ergonomically minded and an absolute nightmere for the bodyworker within me. After years of chronic back pain that forced me out of a computer heavy career, my healing process required that I went 100% MacGyver. After years of research and retraining habits, I grateful that I stick out like a sore thumb.

My laptop is lifted to the height of my skull by either a laptop stand, books, yoga blocks or whatever I can find. I have a separate bluetooth keyboard resting on my lap and a bluetooth mouse at elbow height if I can swing it. Depending on the height of my chair, I’ve either placed a book underneath my booty or each foot so that my knees make a 90* angle as my feet rest squarely on the floor. Every 15-20 minutes a chime timer dings and I stand for 30-60 seconds to consciously breathe, stretch and reset my spine. Every hour or so, I place a book to balance on top of my head as a gentle, weighted reminder of the expansive posture that keeps my nervous system balanced and my brain clear. While these simple rituals may sound or look strange, the benefits far outweigh the time it takes to substantiate the habit.

Chances are I don’t need to tell you about the damaging and painful effects of sitting long hours in chairs and staring at screens. You feel it. We all feel it. When we ignore our computer posture we pay dearly, either tomorrow or in a few years, potentially taking many years off our life as the central nervous system along our spine gets pinched and shut down, resulting in, at best, a decreased sense of vitality and energy. At worst, numbness and debilitating pain resulting in disability and disease.

The picture of me above was not staged! I'm working away on my newsletter while my friend in the background has surprisingly great posture for someone on a laptop, but you can still see that her upper back is hunched and her gaze is downward.

There’s just two simple rules to follow to engineer your home desk to avoid excess pain in the low back, neck and shoulders:

1) Every major joint is close to 90* (except wrists)

The ankle joint, knee joint, hip joint, elbow joint are close to 90* while the relationship between the skull and the cervical spine (neck) is also perpendicular. However, avoid any angle at all in the wrists, finding a flat line from elbow to fingers to avoid damaging the carpel tunnel. The elbows can hang at a wider angle than 90*, especially if that facilitates more relaxation and less muscular engagement in the shoulders.

Of course, if you’re sitting in a meditation cushion on the floor (see image below) your lower body is exempt from this rule but not your hip crease- so make sure tome your luscious booty out of the way behind you so you can sit as close to on top of your perineum as possible.

2) Our body is stacked and engaged versus slouching

The entire surface of the feet is touching the floor while the ankle joint is planted underneath the knee joint. To make this happen, you may need to place books either underneath your hips or your feet. If your chair is short and/or you are tall, placed a lift under your hips that is soft enough to feel comfortable. A pillow towards the back of your booty tips the pelvis gently forward towards neutral versus it tipping backward and undermining the genius engineering of the low back curve, which, optimally, tilts slightly forward towards the belly button.

If the pelvis is tipped neither back or forward you will feel like you are sitting on your perineum, between your genitals and your anus, to be frank. It often helps to lean to one side then lift the lusciousness of one of your butt cheeks out of the way so that you are sure you are sitting just like you would standing with optimal posture. The tailbone is not tucked and the spine is one long line, stretching usefully towards an imaginary weight on top of the head with your perineum angled directly down like a tap root into the earth.

If we win in the placement of the hips we have a fighting chance above in the neck and shoulders. If not, we’ve lost the battle already, as shoving our shoulders back can create more tension in our body if we are working against the power of a curled spine.

Finally, we meet the shoulders, it takes conscious attention to continually smile the collarbone without forcing so we’re neither pushing the head of the arm bone forward nor shoving the shoulder blade down the back. The shoulder blades like to rest at the back of the heart and the barrel of the rib cage, like the pelvis, prefer to be perpendicular to the earth so that the lower front ribs are pooching forward, squeezing the low back nor are the lower back ribs sticking out, crunching the organs.

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My friend Dori pictured here has ongoing tension in his upper neck that occasionally leads to vertigo so he's become highly conscious of the importance of practicing healthy spine alignment while using his smart phone and sitting at his desk. Here’s the yogi’s home set up: close to the earth in a meditation posture, which keeps the hips and knees open, on a meditation cushion that tips the weight of his pelvis forward towards natural, serving as a foundation for the lengthening of his spine upward. The book he's carrying on his head helps his vertebrae stack so that gravity can translate directly downward as opposed to the usual foreword head posture (“text neck”) we take when we gaze at screens.

He knows that for every inch the head moves foreword out of alignment with his spine, that's 10 extra pounds of weight on the neck! His computer could be a bit higher so that the top third of the screen is at the level of his glasses. He could also be seated just a bit higher so that his elbows are at 90* but I'd give him an 8/10 (read more about healing your spine with head carrying but don’t jump right in to strength training the spine with books for longer than a few minutes at a time- like any strength building, we must build slowly over time).

I'll keep posting pics of my friends and I exploring a healthier relationship with gravity as we manage and heal our back pain. Please post your own pictures on Exploring Body-Mind Freedom's facebook page. Please post your desk set up pictures there or below so I can give you a huge virtual high five as a fellow explorer on the path of body-mind freedom.

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Resources:

Culture of Posture Blog Series: How can head carrying heal your relationship with your computer? How can we retrain ourselves out of cultural postural boobytraps?

Take two minutes to hear ancestral postural badass, Brooke Thomas, speak on how to sit for spine health

If you have 7 minutes, watch Ester Gokhale lay it down in this TED Talk

Brooke discusses the relationship between short hamstrings and sitting in this super readable article: Help for Shortie Hamstrings

Leaders in the field, Jules Mitchell, Dawn McCrory, Jillian Nichol, Brooke Thomas and Rachael Bernson discuss the health dangers of short hamstrings that result from excessive sitting and how to lengthen our hip muscles.

A must for every mom: Brooke Thomas on how to teach your kids to sit properly. Good for all of us!

Ruthie Fraser on Accessing Your Pelvis to sit well in a chair