I work outside on nice days, which is exactly what I was doing when an ant landed on my keyboard carrying something several times its own body size. It’s the end of summer, and it seems like the wind is blowing in the next season. Leaves, needles and seeds litter the ground around me. As I watched the ant, it looked confused, not sure where it was, what had happened and if it should resume carrying its item. After about a minute or two, it left what it was carrying and start

I'm currently reading Ready, Set, Slow by Lee Holden, a Qi Gong master and licensed acupuncturist who spends the whole book making a pretty radical case: you get more done, not less, when you slow down. I learned this the hard way. My body forced me to slow down, an actual hard stop that lasted years, on the heels of over a decade of hustle, the antithesis of slowing down. I always found it amusing when I asked patients and clients what they did for relaxation. "Relaxation?"

I met with a couple last week, both in their late 70s. They wanted to know what they could do to keep themselves safe in their home, and what they should be thinking about as they prepare for the next chapter of life. Nobody had fallen. Nobody was in crisis. They just wanted to think ahead. That kind of conversation is always more expansive than the alternative, and that's true whether I'm looking at a workstation or a home. Prevention gives you room to think something throug

Ergonomics is so much more than the chair you bought or the monitor arm you installed. It's how you actually use your body at your workstation, hour after hour, and most of that comes down to habit, not equipment. I say this as someone who has assessed thousands of workstations, and as someone who lives with sciatica. The equipment matters. But the ergonomic habits underneath the equipment matter just as much, and they're the part most people skip. Here are five. Small on the

Every August the back-to-school sales start, and everyone I know is out shopping for the essentials: shoes, backpacks, folders, whatever's on the list. What almost nobody is thinking about is whether the backpack itself, or the desk their kid does homework at, actually fits their kid's body. The pandemic put a version of this on full display, whether we wanted it to or not. Kids doing schoolwork at the kitchen table, propped up on a bed, hunched over a laptop balanced on a st

Every summer, we spend time in the mountains, and my phone has an app called Watch Duty running in the background the whole time. It tracks wildfires, and during fire season the alerts come in several times a day: a new fire, a change in size, an evacuation level. When we're in fire country, I check it every time I get a notification, which is several times a day. What doesn't make sense is that I catch myself picking it up to check on fires when I'm nowhere near them. That'

Back when standing desks first came out, there was a lot of hype. And they were really expensive. I remember it being hard to find one for less than $1,000. Now that they've come down in price, they seem like a no-brainer. But is it worth replacing your desk? It depends. I've been in a lot of offices, homes and businesses, and I've seen a lot of standing desks. It is both refreshing and rare to see someone actually using one the best possible way: pressing the button and chan

Tingling in your thumb, index and middle fingers at 2am. Shaking your hands to wake them up as part of your morning routine since…you can’t remember when. That dull ache at the base of your thumb. If any of that sounds familiar, your wrists may be trying to tell you something. Before you buy the "ergonomic" mouse everyone on the internet swears by, let's talk about what's actually happening there, and what may help. There is very little space in the carpal tunnel The carpal t

When most people hear "ergonomics," they picture a chair, a keyboard, maybe a monitor arm. What they don't picture is their brain. But your brain is doing physical work all day too, and the environment you've built around it is either helping that work happen or quietly fighting it. This is the ergonomics of thinking, the part almost nobody talks about, and it might be the piece that explains why you can have a perfectly set up desk and still end most days feeling wrung out.

Let me guess. Your back has been "a bit sore" for longer than you can remember. You've written it off as part of getting older, or maybe that weekend you overdid it in the garden three years ago. You've tried stretching. Exercise. Massage. Ignoring it. And yet, it's still there. Here's what I want you to consider before you get a new chair - it may actually not be the chair, but your position in your chair, which may be very fixable. What Gravity Is Actually Doing to Your S

TikTok has a workout for you. So does YouTube, Instagram, your coworker who just discovered calisthenics, and approximately every fitness brand that has ever existed. There is no shortage of content telling you to start a routine - HIIT, tai chi, mobility flows, the latest 30-day challenge. We are more bombarded with fitness information than at any point in history, and somehow that has made it harder, not easier, to know what actually matters. And yet. Most people who sit at

Here is something I have never seen at a coffee shop: a laptop stand. I have been in a lot of them, and what I see is a sea of people curled over their screens like question marks, tables at the wrong height, wooden chairs or benches with little back support, coffee going cold. It is the most visible version of a problem that shows up everywhere people work outside a well set up office. My actual setup on the back patio. A rigid garden chair transformed with an OPTP thoracic