Your Desk Is Killing You; How To Reduce Workplace Pain And Become More Productive - Dr Euan Lawson - #017

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, hello, hello. This week is an absolute belter. This genuinely could be the best podcast that I've done so far. Really, really happy with it. Dr. Euan Lawson is my guest. He is the author of The Healthy Writer, also a general practitioner of medicine in the UK, and the host of the Blochology podcast. Check that out on iTunes, Stitcher, all those good places. And today we are talking about what it's like working at a desk. So very, very high proportion of people will spend at least a significant period of their week sat down working at a desk, looking at a screen. What we try to go through today is, with the help of Dr. Lawson's expertise, is to break down exactly what is good and bad practice when it comes to designing your workstation. So we're talking from seating posture, height of screen, cranial angle looking down, angle for your wrists, what you can do about reducing RSI, what you can do about reducing stress on your eyes, improving your sleep, your work rhythms, how you can use some productivity tools and some productivity hacks to batch together your work into windows so that you're always accountable to yourself and so that you can improve your productivity. We go into journaling, we go into the health effects of sitting, of being sedentary. This really is absolutely jam-packed and I'm incredibly happy with it. Also, I have to say, the long-awaited Love Island podcast is now available and it will be a YouTube exclusive for the foreseeable future. So if you wanted to hear what it's really like living on Love Island with me, Johnny and Yusuf, you have to go online. Head to YouTube and search Modern Wisdom Podcast. It will come up. The response has been fantastic. We've broken through, I think, 3K views maybe already. Really, really happy with it. I've had loads of messages about it. So make sure that you head online. If you love the podcast on audio, every episode will be made available on YouTube as well now. And I'm going to be uploading video files for all of the old ones, including all subsequent episodes as well. Make sure that you head there, press subscribe and please support the channel. But now it's time for Dr. Euan Lawson. Enjoy, make some notes, and hopefully you will wake up tomorrow with a fresh set of eyes before you go to work.
Dr. Euan Lawson, welcome to Modern Wisdom.

**Dr Euan Lawson** (2:58)
Hello, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
How are you?

**Dr Euan Lawson** (3:00)
Very well, thank you, and yourself.

**Chris Williamson** (3:01)
Yeah, very good, thank you. So I put a post out on my Instagram earlier today, and I said, do you work at a desk? Do you suffer with any physical ailments or repetitive strain injury, neck pain, back pain, tight hips? And my inbox absolutely exploded. I think I could have announced that I was getting married or having a child and would have probably got less of a response.
And yeah, the problem of working at a desk and sitting looking at a computer seems to be so widespread. And it was a real shock to me just how many people are, for want of a better term, kind of suffering in silence, dealing with it as a byproduct of, well, this is work. And the same way as going down the coal mine, you know, however many years ago would have been, oh, well, you know, this is just, it's just an issue that comes along with the particular chosen industry that I'm in. Why do you think that the use of desk work is so widespread, but the optimization of it and the making of it to be a healthy environment doesn't seem to be?

**Dr Euan Lawson** (4:17)
I guess the whole kind of, I think you're right. It's a bit of a modern plague, isn't it? People are absolutely just getting increasingly aware of the pain it's putting them through. I guess the problems with ergonomics and things have been known for a long time, but I wonder if it's just a case of, you know, there's a bit of catching up to do. You're in that sort of phase where it's become the social norm to look at a computer all the time. And if you think about it, it's only, you know, it's only 10, 20 years ago, we didn't have little screens to look at. The iPhone was only invent, iPad only appeared, you know, a decade ago, whatever it was. It's a really short period of time, isn't it?

**Chris Williamson** (4:51)
Yeah.

**Dr Euan Lawson** (4:51)
And so that the health related consequences of doing looking at screens all the time, looking at computers, that screen time has just gone through the roof in the last few years. And I don't think the healthy kind of approaches to have quite caught up yet, perhaps.