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Maintaining good health at a desk job (debugandrelease.blogspot.com)
39 points by bobblywobbles on Dec 11, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



While there's an argument to make for blue light blocking with regards to sleep and maybe eye strain, the article is wrong about UV protection: modern (non-CRT) screens do not emit UV.


I would read this article, it gives more explanation into UV light in screens (monitors): https://www.asus.com/Microsite/display/eye_care_technology/


The second point "20-20-20" is not only about your eyes, but even your spine, when you sit for a long time you are damaging your spine, you can notice you have reached the limit when you are not sitting straight but you have your legs crossed or on a side, going for a 20 feet walk and then sitting again is enough to make you go back to the correct position.

For the last point "walk", I personally love to walk, I used to go to work by bike but then I changed to just walking, my workplace is around 3 miles from where I live, so every day I walk for around 90 minutes (going back and forth), I noticed this helped me a lot, less back pain, more energy and also lost several kilos.

If you are not lucky enough to work so close to your workplace or you don't want to walk so much, I recommend going out of the bus/metro a couple of stops earlier, and maybe increase the number of stops over time.


Anecdote and warning to the younger devs out there:

I’m not sure about the UV light portion of this article, but I haven’t noticed eye strain since I’ve repositioned my monitor, which this also brings up. For a couple of years I would notice that occasionally throughout “crunch times” at work I would wake up (and go to sleep) with near-nauseating aches in the back of my eyes. Eventually I identified it to looking _down toward_ my monitor/phone rather than _forward to_.

Also, I was extremely active until my mid-twenties; skateboarding, running, resistance training, etc. but over time the passion for what I did became my sole priority and I gained a bit of weight as a result. That, coupled with poor posture at my desk (slouching for days), laid bare some old lower back injuries that I didn’t even know existed. After tolerating it for almost a year I got an MRI and confirmed my lumbar region was in a decent state of atrophy, which was leading to near-constant pain.

I had two options: maintain my current lifestyle or start moving around more and tighten up my lumbar region’s musculature to quell the pain. I chose the latter, lost weight, started a morning routine again, and now I rarely feel pain.

TL;DR: Eventually your body will find something wrong with your desk job. Be proactive and give it what it needs before you’re forced to.


This is good advice, thank you!




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