This effort also takes an enormous amount of energy and it doesn’t actually last we’re likely to slump again after a few minutes when we get tired. “If that becomes a habit - which it does for many people - then those tight, short muscles inhibit the blood supply in the area so now you have an anemic back and repair isn’t happening efficiently.” When we keep trying to sit up straight, we can ultimately alter our anatomy, she explains. When we tighten them, we shorten them, and that arches the back, and what that does is it loads the discs and jams the edges of the vertebrae against each other.” “What we end up doing is arching our backs by tensing up our muscles - the ropey ones that the massage therapist will tell you are tight. This advice, says Gokhale, sets us up in the wrong position. It actually starts with something we were all taught - incorrectly, as it turns out - starting in childhood: sit up straight, shoulders back. But no one in modern Western society is doing very well by their spinal discs, or vertebrae, or muscles or nerves.“ “It’s a cute soundbite to say ‘sitting is the new smoking’, but it’s very inaccurate to blame sitting. “You don’t need anything fancy if you know what you’re doing to your own body,” she explains.įirst of all, the problem isn’t with sitting itself, but how we’re doing it, says Gokhale.
It doesn’t mean buying an expensive chair, either.
Most of us didn’t have a home office space ready and waiting when we began to shelter in place, so if you’ve spent the past two months shifting around on a borrowed dining room chair with a cushion wedged behind you, you’re not alone.īut no matter our seating arrangements, there are some important things we can do to care for our backs, says Esther Gokhale, posture expert, acupuncturist and creator of the Gokhale Method. One of the side effects of working from home full-time because of the pandemic is working with a less than ergonomically ideal setup. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community browse through all the posts here.
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