From Chasing Relief to Fixing the Root Cause: Enrico Mayor’s Gokhale Story

Entrepreneur Enrico Mayor sat down with Esther Gokhale to talk about his Gokhale journey and how his perspective on working at a computer for hours a day has changed.

Enrico Mayor spends several hours a day doing what many successful entrepreneurs do: sitting. Enrico is a computer science graduate, named as one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 young entrepreneurs, and a podcast host who interviews some of the most accomplished minds in tech and business. He has built his career the way many of his generation have — behind a laptop, sometimes coding for eight hours straight.

We first connected when I was a guest on his podcast, The Enrico Mayor Podcast. Our episode is called How to Sit All Day Without Destroying Your Back. It was a topic that interested Enrico not just professionally but personally.

For years before we met, Enrico experienced neck and upper back pain. It was worst on the days he sat the longest, and eased on the days he was out and about. The correlation was clear to him: more sitting meant more pain. Yet the standard advice he'd absorbed growing up wasn’t helping.

"If you just try to sit up straight how they teach you in school, it’s not going to work for you," he said. "I tried that for many years and it’s probably what caused a lot of my pain to actually become even worse."

Enrico and I filming for The Enrico Mayor Podcast. Note his slumped posture.

He turned for relief to a trusted massage therapist, with appointments almost every week. The treatments brought relief, but only for a few days. 

"I was very dissatisfied with the whole flow,” he reflected. “I felt almost like a drug addict, you know, running after the next relief."

It's a striking analogy, but one that captures what chronic pain can do to a person's relationship with their body. The body starts to feel like a problem to be managed, appointment by appointment.

For Enrico, it wasn't for lack of trying. He had tried sport, strengthening, stretching, a standing desk, walking meetings, and therapies of many kinds. Most brought some level of relief, but none addressed the actual cause of his pain — the way he was sitting, compounded by many hours a day at a computer. 

"I'm the kind of guy to really go to the root. Before I met you, Esther, I tried lots of things. I had probably every standing desk you can buy. I had these walking things on the desk. I had everything,” he said.

“But it boils down, I guess, to just understanding how the body should be, in its default state.

“You should tackle what you're already doing. For me, that was honestly the biggest unlock."

Enrico’s first aha moment with the Gokhale Method, showing him how to be relaxed and upright simultaneously.

I see this pattern often among driven, self-optimizing people like Enrico — founders, engineers, and other high performers — even those in their twenties. 

"In Zurich, where I live, and worldwide — in Silicon Valley — there's so many people sitting and having pain at a rather young age. Of course, people assume that as you age you’ll have pain (although I disagree with that now) — but especially at a young age, you should be able to move and sit and not have pain. I mean, it's the basics of life, you know?" he said.

What changed for Enrico wasn't another addition to an already crowded routine. It was closer to a subtraction: learning to sit, stand, and walk in ways that no longer generated the strain he'd spent years trying to massage away afterward. The appointments that had once punctuated what felt like a losing battle became a pleasure instead.

"I still, maybe now once a month, get a massage and it's still nice, I like it, but it's definitely not like before where it was once a week, you know — those times are gone.”

Enrico’s before (left) and after (right) photos from the Gokhale Foundations course he attended with his wife, mother-in-law, and a friend, taught by Julie Johnson. 

As Enrico put it himself, with characteristic understatement: "It sounds so boring but it actually worked." Now he is telling his fellow “tech bros” that it is possible to work eight hours a day at a computer and still be pain-free. Painful sitting does not have to be the price of a successful career.

"I didn't change so much after all, you know,” he said. “I just try to do my thing and it's a very little adjustment now for me — just 70 to 80 per cent of the time, I do [stretchsitting or stacksitting] and it's no big deal — and it worked."

Watch the full interview with Enrico and Esther

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