In addition to controlling your stress, you can also take steps to minimize the stress you experience. First, you can avoid over-committing yourself. In college, I overcommitted myself by taking an internship during the semester that required 20 hours a week and lacked sufficient flexibility. Whenever school became more demanding, I felt quite stressed out, since I still needed to complete work obligations during a period of academic intensity. If I had had a flexible job that had allowed me to work fewer hours when I was busy with school, I would not have been as stressed out. Next, you can select a company or profession more aligned with the type of lifestyle you want to lead. For example, if you do not want to deal with large amounts of stress, you may not want to work in an emergency room; if you do not want to work long hours, you should not become a junior investment banker.
On the other hand, you can manage and leverage stress to your advantage. For example, I do not drink coffee or consume caffeine; however, I am alert when I am at work and am generally known for being intense. I accomplish this by satisfying my bodily needs for sleep and refreshment, as well as giving myself breaks when necessary. In addition, I embrace opportunities that require working quickly under stress, and do my best to let my body remain focused and attentive while not overly exerting or stressing myself out. I try to lead by example. I believe that in order to be good at managing human resources, you ought to be good at managing yourself. If you cannot motivate or compel yourself to work and achieve results, I don’t believe you will be good at motivating others. On the other hand, you must also understand that what drives you may not drive other people in the same way, and you may need to make adjustments.
You can manage and leverage stress to achieve improved performance.
Stress affects different individuals in various ways. For example, when you see a police car and you are speeding on the freeway, does your heart rate speed up? Can you imagine staying calm and not having this type of biological reaction when seeing a police car? In the long term, it could be better for your health to stay relaxed in more life situations.
Pain can be a manifestation of stress, and sometimes can be resolved by resolving stressful issues. An anecdotal example: a personal friend of mine, who introduced me to the work of John Sarno, developed chronic back pain that persisted through many types of physical therapy and medicinal regimens. By reading Sarno’s works and applying his techniques of writing down the aspects of her life that caused her stress and seeking to minimize or avert them, she was able to free herself from chronic back pain. Sarno’s approach is not intended to offer a one-size-fits-all solution for every patient with chronic back or body pain. If, however, your pain is caused by emotional stress, the best way to eliminate your pain may be to eliminate or manage the emotional stress causing your pain. The bottom line is that if you are experiencing pain, it may not be due to your physical environment or work habits. The root cause of your pain may be your reaction to emotional stress. You’ll want to keep that in mind when doing your root cause analysis.
Mental stress can manifest itself in physical pain.
As in sports and athletic events, your mental or psychological state of mind can have a big impact on the way you perform at your computer. Your state of mind can affect your performance in many ways. For example, under stress, you may press down on the keyboard harder, take fewer breaks, or type faster. Also, as described in the works of John Sarno, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection, you may develop pain in your back, neck, or any other part of your body as the physical manifestation of emotional stress. In addition to pain, your body’s natural responses to stress can cause the production of extra hormones such as cortisol that in the short term help you focus and work more efficiently but can cause your body harm in the long term, even leading in some cases to heart attacks or strokes. Consequently, a computer athlete takes steps to minimize the impact of stress so that he can be a healthy, happy computer user.
Under stress, many people change their work habits to become more efficient but cause themselves physical harm in the process. For example, when programmers are in the last throes of a project, they are sometimes said to be on a “death march,” also known as “crunch time” in other industries. During that time, employees tend to work longer hours under high amounts of stress. In some cases, companies have even prolonged crunch time in order to squeeze more out of their current employees. Whether or not such practices are fair, under demanding work conditions, you still have personal choices to make. You can become a computer athlete and avoid debilitating injury, or you can change companies. From my personal experience at a startup company, I know that stock options (aka “the golden handcuffs”) can keep you tied to your work in hopes of a big future payoff. In my case, I decided to focus on attaining pain-free computing.
Stress affects the way you work at your computer and impacts your body’s systems.
In order to become a computer athlete, you may need to condition yourself and engage in specialized training. The training you will require will depend on your goals and needs. If you want to be able to use the computer for 12 hours a day on a regular basis, you will likely need more training than someone who wants to use the computer for just four hours a day. Some types of conditioning involve making lifestyle changes, including changing your eating habits or learning to manage stress better. Other types of training include learning (or relearning) how to use your computer’s input devices in order to minimize the impacts of computer usage on your body.
Through training and by relearning how to use your computer, you can minimize the impact of computer usage on your body.
In addition to physical preparation, you can take steps to be mentally prepared for computing. First, as we will discuss later, managing and minimizing your stress and how you react to stress is extremely important. Second, by engaging in some physical activity, you will feel better in addition to all of the other benefits of exercise. Finally, in order to be able to focus and accomplish your goals, you need to have discipline. Whether you are at work or at home working on a side project, you need to manage your distractions and your tasks. You need to realize what you need to do yourself and what you can let others do, as well as when to ask for help. You need to train other people so that they can help you and share your workload with other people. There are many great books available that discuss how to get things done, as well as how to be persistent and overcome adversity. I have read several and have benefitted from the effort.
In conclusion, using a computer places significant demands on your body and mind. These demands can wear you down and lead to injury unless you take steps to deal with them. In order to deal with these demands, you can condition yourself through aerobic exercise, stretching, strength exercises, as well as by learning computer techniques and input devices as discussed in the Equipment and Usage section. As part of your mental preparation, you can devote time and energy to improve how you manage stress and focus on your objectives. In order to meet your strength and conditioning needs, be resourceful. You can work with a personal trainer, professional coach, join a team sport, or read self-help books such as this one.
Becoming a computer athlete requires strength and conditioning. On the one hand, using a computer for eight hours a day, five days a week does not require an extreme amount of strength or endurance. On the other hand, leading a completely sedentary lifestyle with no exercise will lead to muscular atrophy, poor posture, poor health, and pain. You don’t necessarily need to engage in special activities in order to become a computer athlete. You just need to satisfy your basic need for whole-body conditioning, including aerobic exercise, weight-lifting, and stretching, so that you can be a happy, healthy computer user. Smaller individuals with smaller frames (typical of many women) may need to focus additionally on strength training. In general, you can satisfy your needs through a variety of activities, including dancing, yoga, ballet, gymnastics, running, climbing, and numerous others. It is particularly important to make sure you work out your core, or stomach, muscles and your lower back in order to maintain good posture. Aerobic exercise offers many benefits as well, including increasing cardiovascular health and promoting blood flow, which can have assist in the healing process. Weight training can help relieve stress and develop muscles that might otherwise atrophy; in addition, weight training can provide the strength you need to suspend your arms and hands so that you do not need to rest them on a surface while using the computer.
One pitfall to avoid is focusing on one area to the neglect of others. For example, engaging in endurance training, such as running long distance exclusively and becoming extremely skinny, may cause you to develop pain while using the computer. I am able to meet my needs for physical conditioning by lifting weights three times a week, jogging, walking to work, and stretching in the gym. I have found that whenever I slack off on exercise, I begin to develop pain somewhere in my body.
In short, I advocate full-body fitness for the computer athlete.
Using a computer is akin to participating in an athletic event. Lengthy computer use requires long, grueling hours of focus, concentration, physical coordination, and work. The grueling nature of using a computer can be seen in the long hours of maintaining good posture, balance, and coordination it requires. Using a computer requires endurance of a kind similar to that required by athletic activities such as long-distance running, biking, or swimming. Just as with other physical activities, some movements work better than others—form is important. There is even a body of study dedicated to studying the usage of computers and other machines, called ergonomics. Ergonomics is analogous to kinesiology, which is the study of the anatomy, physiology, and mechanics of body movement, typically in reference to sports.
Using a computer all day can be a grueling and physically demanding activity.
I am not necessarily arguing that working on a computer all day is as difficult or rigorous as, say, running a mile in under four minutes. I would, however, argue that using a computer is a physical activity that induces fatigue and wear and tear on the body. Like any other physical activity, computer use requires preparation in the form of strength and conditioning, proper training, and special equipment suited to the needs of the participant. The notion of a computer athlete is based on the precept that using a computer requires special training, discipline, and skill, and that people who possess these attributes can indeed be classified as such. We can observe individuals and intuitively ascertain which one is the better computer athlete, just as we can compare two track athletes. Becoming a computer athlete requires investing time and perhaps money, energy, and discipline. The fruits of this commitment? Increased productivity and pain-free computing.
Becoming a computer athlete requires strength training and conditioning.
Here is a list of questions that you can use to evaluate your lifestyle and computing habits:
- Do you have healthy food and/or water within reach while you work?
- Do you feel that you get enough sleep?
- Do you have a keyboard with low key pressure and a reasonable activation curve?
- Do you have a good chair?
- Do you work out your entire body so that your muscles do not atrophy?
- Is your monitor at arm’s distance away?
- Do you context-switch frequently between programs to try to increase productivity?
- Do you pronate your hands in order to press Shift or Control and a key?
- Do you use your small digits (e.g. pinky finger) to press the arrow keys?
- Do you feel as though you mouse a lot?
- Does the position of your mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc. allow you to keep your arms and body in neutral positions?
- Do you feel that your mouse or keyboard is too far away or at the wrong height?
- How does stress affect the way you use your computer?
- How many hours a day do you spend on your computer?
- Do you feel that you have an ergonomic setup at home and at work?
- What could you do to improve your setup or habits?
Too often, computer users neglect the cleanliness of their work environment. Some individuals’ keyboards harbor more germs than their toilet. Many computer users notice that hair, skin cells, food, and bacteria accumulate into a brown grime on their keyboards. Few people, however, actually bother to clean their keyboard regularly by using alcohol swaps and removing all dust and debris from their keys and mouse. As well, computers’ screens and fans can become dusty over time; they need to be cleaned with a lint cloth or an air can, respectively. In order to maintain good health and maintain a professional, hygienic working environment, a computer athlete should regularly clean his or her equipment.
Computer Athlete Rehab
If you are injured and on the path to recovery, keep in mind some important principles. It is important to build gradually back up to your previous computer usage while paying attention to whether you are experiencing pain and adjusting your environment and habits until the pain dissipates. Many times, people want to get better faster and, in their zeal, make the mistake of over-stretching or doing too much physical therapy when their body actually needs some time to rest and recuperate. As I said above, make sure to identify and address the root cause of your pain and take steps to prevent the injury or other injuries from occurring in the future. Finally, it can be helpful to seek medical attention and/or take anti-inflammatories for a short period of time while you are recuperating.
While recuperating from an injury, it is important to build up gradually to your normal amount of computer usage.