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

Most people don’t think their desk is the problem. They think the problem is their back. Or their neck. Or their wrists, which have been doing something uncomfortable at night that can’t quite be explained. They’ve been to the chiropractor and had massage. They bought a new chair. They Googled “why does my shoulder always hurt” at 11pm and fell down a rabbit hole of stretches that helped for about four days. The desk, the actual physical setup of where they spend eight hours

Updated May 2026. Originally published August 2024. I got a call not long ago from someone who wanted to book a lunch-and-learn for her team. She asked if there was enough material to fill 30 minutes. I told her yes. More than enough. In fact, when I do these sessions they typically run 45 to 60 minutes - and could go even longer. Because ergonomics covers posture, equipment, setup, and habits. And all of those things matter. She was relieved, and a little surprised. Most peo

Here's something that sounds small until it isn't: lunch. It's an hour. You eat something, maybe scroll your phone, come back and get to work. Except that's not really what lunch is. And when ours got dismantled piece by piece, it wasn't the first blow to our team. It was just another one in a long line of them. I spent nearly two decades working in healthcare. Our department was full of dedicated clinicians who genuinely cared about their patients. For a long time, we had a

Positions of Tech (Text) Neck Let's do a quick experiment. Pull out your phone and hold it where you normally read it. Where is it? Somewhere around your lap or your chest, right? Now notice what your neck did to get your eyes there. That forward drop. That chin-to-chest drift. That is the position that physical therapists, chiropractors, and ergonomists (hi, that's us) are seeing turn into a growing epidemic. It even has a name now: tech neck. Also called text neck. And if y

Optimize your workstation to feel good and reduce your risk of injury.

Ergonomic Solutions for Computer Vision Syndrome