A key part of self-awareness and self-care is knowing your limits and not exceeding them. For example, if you know that you can only sit and work on a computer for 8 hours a day before it affects your productivity for the next day, you should try to avoid working beyond that threshold. If you can work productively for either 8 hours a day consistently or 12 hours one day and only 4 hours the next, you might as well work for 8 hours each day.

When you work past your threshold, you may cause physical damage to yourself: like sports injuries, computer-related injuries can recur and haunt you over time. For example, once you develop wrist pain, you may find that you reach your pain point much sooner whenever you perform the same behavior, even after rehabilitation.

Know your limits and do not exceed them.

There are many types of computer-related/repetitive stress injuries (RSI). Some examples: tendonitis or “trigger finger,” carpal tunnel syndrome, thoracic outlet syndrome, and neck or back pain. Some injuries affect your nerves and are due to inflammation in your tendons or ligaments. I have personally had carpal tunnel, trigger finger, elbow pain, and chest/shoulder pain. At some points, using a computer became so painful that I could not use one at all.

Typically, these types of injuries do not creep up by surprise; in my case, these injuries had many warnings signs that I did not act on for several months or years. Some warning signs that you are developing a repetitive stress injury are musculoskeletal pain, numbness in your fingers, heat in your wrist, cracking noises in your wrist, and loss of grip strength or endurance. You may start to have trouble falling asleep because your body feels strange. Such insomnia tends to exacerbate the issue, causing you to become even more stressed out and less productive as your quality of sleep begins to suffer.

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