Take care of yourself
If you ever find your self in a situation where your back is hurting you, you’re constantly aching, you’re getting frequent headaches, or just constantly having eye discomfort, it’s most likely due to the fact that you’re probably staring at a monitor/laptop for far too long without breaks in between. I know developers or just anybody who works in front of a screen all day experiences this, especially if they’re not taking care of themselves.
Consequences of staring at a screen for too long
There are many consequences for staring at a monitor for far too long and not taking frequent breaks. One of them being, and probably one of the most important ones, is that simply staring at a screen for far too long causes your eyes to strain. Staring at a screen for a long period of time without any sort of break will cause your eyes to dry up, causes itchiness, blurred vision, difficulty focusing, and most of the times, and personally for me, brings upon me a headache. To prevent these mishaps from effecting you in your daily life experience, here are some things to do:
- Taking more breaks. Breaks are so effective because not only does it bring less strain upon your eyes, it can also prevent you from becoming less productive (another consequence of staring at a screen for too long), also gives you a recharge if you’ve been working for too long, and just need to slow down, reflect on what you’ve been doing, and then brainstorm some better ideas.
- Monitor position. Position your monitor at least 20 inches away from your eyes — about an arm’s length distance. If your monitor screen is larger, then you’ll want to further the viewing distance to reduce the amount of stress on your eyes
- Adjust your monitor display. Adjust your monitor’s brightness so that it’s the same as your surrounding workstation. Adjust your colour temperatures, and reducing the amount of blue light displayed throughout the display screen.
Consequences of sitting down for too long
Sitting for far too long without any type of movement, for any type of job, is putting you at risk for many types of health risk. To name a few, that’s especially linked with just being sedentary for most of the day without any type of movement at all, are: raises your risk of heart disease, diabetes, destroys your back and gluteus muscles, increased chance of stroke, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, etc. That’s just a few. Here’s a few tips you could do to help prevent these risks, and just help your overall fitness lifestyle:
- Build more activity into your lifestyle. Some ways that you can improve your overall lifestyle is by incorporating some type of physical activity. Such activities can include: Weight-training, walking/cycling, using the stairs instead of the elevator/escalator, or walking up the escalator, walk during lunch break.
- Stretching. Stretching keeps the muscles flexible, strong, and healthy. Sitting a chair all day can result in tight hamstrings and just tight muscles overall, which can result in making it more difficult to properly stretch them, and when those tight muscles are called upon some strenuous activity, they may become damaged from suddenly being stretched.
While we may be unaware of what goes on when we are sedentary for most of our day, and what type of risks are waiting to happen to us while we think everything is okay, we will hopefully understand why we should incorporate these types of routines into our daily life. Hopefully these tips will help you fit in a more active lifestyle that will drastically improve your overall lifestyle and will hopefully prevent these types of injuries in the near future.
