How To Care For Your Body While Working A Desk Job: Part 1
Or: "The Physical Sensations in Your Body Mean Legible Things That Point To Health"
Hi, I want to see this problem resolved more than I want to gatekeep this class, so I’m posting this transcript for free. If you’d like to see a video version or simply to support my work (<3) you can purchase that here.
This is part 1, the post where I talk about the challenges. For part 2, click here.
Intro
Hi everyone! Thanks for joining. I'm Elena Lake. I used to be in deep quantitative academia, and now I’m a bodyworker. I spent four years at MIT studying math and physics and computer science, and two years at Facebook as a machine learning engineer.
But then in 2021, I went to massage school for fun, and also because I was looking to show up in the world more holistically, to build a more interpersonal skill. While learning massage and bodywork I found out there was so much for both my left and right brain to do in that field, so I stayed in it! Turns out, people’s bodies have all sorts of challenges for all sorts of interesting and resolvable reasons. So now I have a hands on private-practice, and I’m also teaching “How To Care For Your Body While Working A Desk Job.”
And why am I teaching this class? Mostly because, now that I know a lot of anatomy and have worked with a lot of people, I can see that desk work has particular ways that it taxes the human body, that I think are under-discussed compared to how common desk work is. Moreover, a good chunk of these body challenges can be mitigated with not that much extra effort.
Before-Priming Exercise
And, before I go on to say anything else that would prime you - let’s do an intro exercise, that gets to the heart of what we’ll explore in this content. It’s deceptively simple.
Exercise:
How is your body feeling right now? You’re in a body. You’re reading this, in whatever position you’re in.
Are you comfortable? Right now, at this moment?
Is there any way you could get more comfortable?
If you move around a little bit - do you find nearby positions that are more comfortable? Or some that are less?
Take a bit of time here to explore some shifts, do whatever you need to do to get a bit more comfortable. Maybe get some water, or a blanket - honestly anything. Spend around 90 seconds doing this.
Then take 10 seconds to really soak up the feeling that you’re now more comfortable. You have no task for these next 10 seconds except - enjoy! Feel the relief and the texture of the new comfort.
So, that seems really simple, but it gets at some super deep principles. The main things about it are: paying attention to what our body wants, taking it seriously, and remembering to actually feel the felt enjoyment of doing it well. With that last one, I’ve found that if you don’t take the time to *really enjoy* the felt sensation of feeling better, the inner compass that runs your subconscious movements gets all miscalibrated. Meanwhile, savoring those joy signals from your body helps your inner compass stay on track.
We’ll dig into that more deeply later! Speaking of what we’ll go over later, here’s an outline of how this content is structured.
Outline
This content was originally a 90 minute in-person class; there’s a lot to read and there are experiential and kinesthetic exercises too! So, in the spirit of your body mattering - if you ever want to change position, stand up, stretch, something like that, go for it!
So, my original course emerged out of me asking these two questions:
What would desk work look like if the physical health of our bodies was non-negotiable?
What would computer use have to look like to leave our health neutral-or-better-off, rather than decaying it?
Because the thing I’ve seen while learning a lot of anatomy, and working with a lot of people in my hands-on practice, is that desk work comes with particular challenges that stress bodies in particular ways, and in its current default form is highly likely to degrade the health of even people who are otherwise healthy. These problems are resolvable! I solve them 1:1 professionally, but there’s way more people facing them than I could ever see 1-1, so I’m expanding to teach, too.
Before I introduce the challenges, I invite you to reflect:
Do you, in particular, have known desk-related discomforts?
If you don’t, but you’re here for prevention and longevity’s sake, that’s fine too.
Here’s what I came up with after jamming on those questions. I talk about what I see as the top two main challenges of desk work, and also the method I advocate for resolving them.
The top two challenges I see are:
It’s dissociative. It incentivizes us to lose track of body sensations that would’ve let us know about physical structural problems before they worsen.
So, if you’ve got pain somewhere, most of it either comes from injury, or starts off way smaller and crops up over time. In some rare cases people are born with structural imbalances that cause pain, but even then, these initial imbalances tend to accumulate more imbalances if we don’t pay attention and resolve them in the flow of things.
Desk workers become “desk shaped!”
There’s a general desk stress pattern that desk work slowly stamps on everyone over time, which tends to be: forward head posture, rounded-forward shoulders, tight pec muscles, and contracted hip flexors and loose glutes - those feed into a lot of back and neck and shoulder stiffness and pain.
Now, absolutely neither of those two challenges are something that has to happen, they’re just something that’s common nowadays. How can you stay out of them?
My solution has three parts. You’ll see here:
Interoceptive literacy
movement variety
and iteration
Essentially, my answer is: we have to learn to track, interpret, and resolve our physical bodily sensations. They are early warning signs that keep us out of pain and point us towards health, and it’s important to treat them as a real source of information. Those physical sensations - our interoception, which we’ll cover - evolved with us specifically to point us towards physical health. Most people don’t pay much attention to them right now, so adding them into our body care practices can be a real low-hanging fruit.
And once we’re in a practice of hearing those sensations, we have to introduce more movement variety than we’re used to, and that’s the thing that’ll keep us well-rounded rather than in the desk stress posture.
Also, the nice thing about bringing our own felt experience in as a source of information, is that feeling better feels better and is therefore self-motivatingly rewarding. But it can take a little while to get a hang of, since interoception is this whole new language we need to learn. It’s not immediately obvious which physical sensation wants what from us. Hence, this iteration step in my proposed solutions. We’ll need to try some things, see how they affect our physical sensations, and over time with repeated checking in and adjustment we’ll feel fluent in this new language of interoception.
What’s cool about this shape of the solution is you’ll see that it’s sort of a 1-1 map between problem and solution, and then the “iteration” piece tells you the timescale.
Desk jobs are dissociative?
The answer is to bring our attention back to our bodies, and develop interoceptive literacy to be able to navigate what they’re telling us about our health.
Desk jobs are stationary enough to mold us into a chair shape?
The solution there is movement variety, specifically anatomically-informed movement variety.
And then, iteration to adapt it to your unique self.
Oh also, last note! Body care is an enormous and developing field. Think of this as an orientation to How To Care For Your Body While Working A Desk Job. It’s the 101 version. There’s lots more nuance and detail you could learn to everything I’m talking about - and if that interests you, please do! But maybe simply reading this will be enough for you.
So, with all that said, let’s dive in!
The Two Main Challenges
#1 - Desk Jobs Are Dissociative
The first challenge I see to desk work is that desk jobs are dissociative. This is a unique piece of the frame I’m coming in with, and I don’t think this is talked about nearly enough. Once we resolve the dissociative bit, resolving the postural structural stuff gets so much easier because we can tell what’s working and what’s not, and we’re empowered to make up our own modifications when common ones don’t fit us for whatever reason.
This is a little tricky, though, because desk jobs put such high incentives on non-body ways of directing our attention. If we want to stay healthy, we do need a regular practice of directing attention back into our body, and reading its signals and then following them. Some people who don’t do that might stay healthy out of sheer luck, but that sounds risky to me, and it’s not something I recommend.
So, what is dissociation?
Since bodycare is an emerging field, lots of people mean different things by dissociation. Therapists have an emotion-related definition of it, but it’s also relevant to purely physical body concerns. In the general sense, dissociation is “not being present” - not picking up what’s happening around you.
For the purposes of this course I’ll talk about physical dissociation and its opposite that I’ll call - interoception!
Interoception is our ability to feel our body’s internal physical sensations, at positions localized in space. We will get much more into this when I talk about interoception specifically, later in this class, as one of the solutions, but for right now here’s the definition.
Interoception: Ability to feel your body’s internal physical sensations, at positions localized in space.
So, by contrast to interoception, dissociation is the inability to do this! Dissociation is - “body, what body? Do I have a body?” Or at least, not paying attention to it. Note, dissociation is related to numbness or general interoceptive murkiness, but it’s not quite the same thing. Dissociation is simply when your awareness does not include your body or sense of self-existing-in-space. IF your awareness is on your body, then numbness can be a genuine signal! Dissociation is more like, “woah I’m not even here at all!” “I don’t have a sense of the three-dimensionality of my existence!”
To make it clearer, let me tell an example story -
Usually, when I’m texting someone on my phone, I use voice-to-text and I talk into my phone so it can write down what I say. But it comes with a lot of typos and sometimes I’m just so into my text conversations that I type things out with my thumb. Eventually, after about half an hour of this, my thumb starts hurting just a little bit. I get a mild, tight pinching right in this spot here. So now, I check in with my body enough to know that oh, when that mild discomfort shows up, it’s time to take a break. I come to completion with my texting - no need to drop it like a hot potato, because I’ve heard the signal early enough that it’s not urgent - but, I do put down my phone. Then I organize my day so that if I’ve got anything not thumb-related to do, I go do that for a bit until my thumb feels better. Sometimes literally just taking space and adding movement variety helps, without any other interventions. You’ll know because the pain will be gone, and it’ll stay gone when you use your phone again until maybe half an hour later.
OR if my thumb’s hurting pretty badly, I’ll massage it for a bit. I’ll do a bunch of movements to shake it out (shaking’s really good).
You can imagine this story going differently. If I was too wrapped up in my text conversation, or didn’t have this practice of checking in and asking, “oh, how’s my body feeling? Am I comfortable? Do I need to change something?” I could have gotten four hours in and my thumb would hurt a lot, and be harder to repair. Repeat for months and years and that’s a big source of chronic pain nowadays!
Does this track any of your experience? Have you felt a sense that being on a screen for a while decreases your awareness of your bodily sensations?
#2 Becoming Desk-Shaped
Now we’ll move onto the second challenge, which is something I call “becoming desk-shaped.” Meaning, desk work is a poor design choice for the structural health of human bodies.
In my bodywork practice, I see a lot of people in chronic pain from desk work. There are two main categories. First, there’s the pattern that desk work slowly stamps on everyone over time, even people who were healthyish to start. That pattern I call “general desk stress pattern” and it I includes: forward head posture, rounded-forward shoulders, tight pec muscles, and contracted hip flexors and loose glutes.
The other category of desk chronic pain is more all-over the map and varied. It’s people who had already had some structural issues that desk work is now aggravating. It’s less clear to talk about than the first category. If you’re in this one, you’ve probably never found a way to sit that feels truly comfortable, and all those diagrams of ‘good posture’ feel terrible, or like straining, or like effort. Not like a welcome relief.
Both of those categories - the “general desk stress pattern” and the “unique stress underlying pattern aggravated by desk” - are detectable early, and resolvable! They cause low-level discomfort well before they lead to pain. We can learn to intercept them early, and stay feeling more healthy and comfortable than we otherwise would.
Let’s talk about anatomy a bit for some context!
The main thing to understand is that muscles and fascia (which is the wrapping that surrounds muscles) dynamically reshape to freeze us into the positions we’re usually in.
This is our body trying to help us, this is our body adapting! It’s our body getting better at whatever we usually do.
This is good news because it makes being in those positions easier, but it’s bad news because it also makes it harder to be in any other position.
How this applies to desk work is; if you spend 30 hours a week in a chair, or with your arms outstretched to type at a keyboard, your body will try to help you out. It’ll make your hips more chair-shaped, and make your arms more “always-in-front-of-you-and-a-foot-apart” shaped. This is where those tight hip flexors and tight pecs come from. Those are the muscles that get short to hold those postures.
If you find that you “just can’t get comfortable no matter what you do,” it’s likely that your muscles have contracted into some really specialized position, and now they’re stuck like that. This could be either via desk work OR something like acute injury. Luckily that stuck tissue can be unwound by the right movement, stretching, or visit to a skilled massage therapist or bodyworker. It might also require some strengthening somewhere else.
But for now the thing to know is: over time desk work will reshape your body into the shape of a desk, unless you move enough to break up the myofascial tendency to grow and stagnate into the shapes it’s usually in. This is a super rough heuristic and it’s not fully known but, it seems that after about 30 minutes of being in a static posture, your body starts adapting. See if that’s something you can interoceptively feel!
In my body I can interocept this process happening. If I spend a lot of time on a keyboard, I start to feel a slight ache in my pecs, and I know what that is. It’s this process of reshaping and contracture happening in realtime. I address it by - and we’ll talk about these more in the movement variety section - massaging it out in realtime until it feels more spacious. Or I counterstretch it, with a T pose.
The main takeaway I want to give you is the understanding that this process of becoming desk-shaped is something your body does automatically, and is also something you can feel and intercept in real time, via tactile input.
Movement can rebalance this process of texturally stiffening into the common positions.
#2.5 - Bodily Metabolic Processes Require Movement
But now also, we have bonus challenge 2.5 - I didn’t put it on the outline because it’s kind of a mouthful. Essentially, the human body was designed assuming that we’d be moving more than desk jobs ask us to, and this got pretty obvious once I started learning anatomy. The big systems that I know of so far that are directly affected by movement are: muscles, lymph, joints, fascia, and general hydration for every tissue. Other systems, like blood and nerves, are secondarily affected by movement. For example, nerves or blood vessels can get pinched by contracted muscles and fascia, causing general sluggishness or malaise or pain.
But luckily! You don’t need to take my word for any of this. The sensations in your body are all realtime sensors about the health of all your systems. You are your body, you have the inside view on it, so the various interoceptive textures of your experience are produced by how all those bodily systems are doing. If there’s dysfunction in one, you’ll feel it. If there’s good function in one, you’ll feel that too!
An example of this that you can probably tune into right now is muscle aches. This was revolutionary when a physical therapist first told me this three years ago. Healthy muscles don’t hurt.
It’s not that “living is inherently sort of painful,” which is something I really wondered 5 years ago. Healthy muscles don’t hurt.
If they do hurt, in the vast majority of cases that’s a sign that your muscles want some sort of change or remediation. If they don’t hurt, all is muscularly well - keep doing what you’re doing, and enjoy!
So that’s one example. And we’ll actually talk more about how muscles and fascia like to move, in the section that I do later on movement variety. BUT here’s three other examples of how our body systems were designed with the assumption that we’d be moving more than desk jobs ask us to.
1. Lymph
So, our lymph system - it’s a series of vessels, it looks a lot like our blood vessels, but it only flows one way. It flows from capillaries around extremities, inwards towards the trunk. It’s responsible for clearing waste from interstitial fluid, which is general tissue fluid that’s responsible for bringing oxygen and nutrients to our cells. Lymph also plays a big role in the immune system. And a quirk of our lymph system is, it doesn’t have a pump! It relies on our own movement in order to work. If we don’t move, lymph gets stuck. We’re stuck full of waste, which is hard to interocept directly, but downstream effects interocept as stagnation or bleckiness or general feeling inflamed or under the weather or generally not our best. If you ever get puffy face, that’s a lymph thing. Lymph stagnation can be a causal factor in pain - proper lymph circulation is a powerful preventative health measure.
A lot of lymph is superficial, within the first centimeter or so of our skin, so any skin stretches will work to move it. Walking will totally do it. The interventions are simple, it’s more a question of valuing them.
2. Joints
Joints are another body system with their own fluids - and like lymph, they also don’t have pumps. The movement itself is the pump. So, on one hand joints are wrapped in fascia, hydrated by movement as well; but also, lots of joints have a fluid of their own, called synovial fluid! This synovial fluid delivers nutrients to the joint cartilage, and flushes waste from the joints. And, movement plays a big role in circulation and even production of this joint fluid. We need enough movement to keep that joint fluid flushed and circulating and replaced. (For more detail, see page 205 of this book.)
And when I say joints - I even mean your spine. Your spine is a big string of joints! Spinal wave motions get in there and keep those joints well-hydrated, too. There’s even the atlantooccipital joint, between the top vertebrae and our skull.
4. General Hydration
Zooming out, you can see a theme; movement is one-half of the body’s hydration process. I was shocked when a teacher of mine put it so plainly, because it seems so important and I hadn’t heard it before. Half of the hydration process is “drink water,” and the other half is “move, so that the liquid gets from your digestion into your tissues”. If we do not move, that is not sufficient to keep our tissues hydrated. The mechanical stimulation of the movement does a lot for getting water into the nooks and crannies of our tissues, especially fascia webbing.
My source on this is my teacher Cat Matlock, who’s been doing corrective bodywork and sports massage and helping people out of serious physical pain for 30 years. She’s colorful about this! She says in no uncertain terms, “you can drink water all day - but if you do this while you sit on a toilet and don’t move, you’ll still feel dehydrated. The water will go right through you.”
She says gentle movements are especially good for this feeling of hydration. But I find vigorous works for me too, so, feel free to experiment with that.
That’s the end of Part 1 that discusses the challenges. The full transcript continues over in Part 2 - the solutions! Here’s a link to part 2.
Thank you for writing and sharing this. It’s a wake up call. Appreciate the gentle yet direct approach.
What a wonderful resource - thank you!