If you have read my posts before you may know I am a big advocate for Ergonomics AND Physical Activity. A recent study involving 198 computer-users with freq neck & shoulder pain found that 2-mins of arm exercises offered considerable relief.
Participants used elastic tubing and performed 2 minutes of lateral raise exercises where they lifted the arms out from the side stopping at a horizontal position at shoulder-height. Interestingly, a similar 12-minute routine didn’t help much more than a consistent 2-min session!
The article also notes the importance of proper placing the monitor eye level or lower.
Ease office neck pain with two minutes of daily exercise

Air traffic controllers and lack of sleep has been in the news recently. It turns out that many of us also suffer from sleep deprivation. The National Sleep Foundation reports that the average American gets 6.9 hours of sleep most weeknights.  New research highlighted in a recent NY Times article shows that this is not enough.
Lack of sleep has been associated with increased stress hormones, weight gain, and host of physical ailments including; achy muscles, depression, headaches, increased blood pressure,  diabetes and weight gain.
This new summary shows that what many of us consider to be adequate sleep is actually insufficient and affects cognitive function causing delayed responses, errors and re-work such as having to read a passage several times.
8 or 9 hours of sleep allowed test subjects to maintain high psychomotor performance over the two-week test period. 7 hour sleepers showed a decrease in performance that stabilized after a few days and then held steady.
Those who slept 6 hours or less showed steady declines in recognizing and responding to the test stimulus. Their performance decreased over the two-week period and ended up with their thinking as impaired as a legally drunk person.  A number of the 4 hour test subjects couldn’t even stay awake while performing the computer testing.
For your health and performance make sure you turn off the tube and get enough sleep!

Here is the link to NY Times How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?

Eye strain/ neck pain? Your monitor is probably too high! 60-70% of all users report these problems, and not surprisingly, most have the monitor too high. The visual system works best in the “normal reading position” or chest-height as we’ve done for thousands of years. With the advent of the PC in the 1980′s we somehow moved our reading material up too high. Maybe it was the pictures depicting erect upright seated postures, maybe the big computer box took up so much desk space that the monitor had to go on top! See www.Office-ergo.com for more tips on healthy computing. Be well, gene.