working from home

According to Dr. Tammy Chen’s NY Times column, dental patients are suffering from an “epidemic of cracked teeth” due in part to posture. How can we avoid a similar fate? Image courtesy Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.

I recently came across a New York Times column by Tammy Chen, DDS, a prosthodontist with a practice in Manhattan, describing the “epidemic of cracked teeth” she’s seen in her patients during the COVID pandemic. Dr. Chen names two suspected culprits: the slumped posture many people adopt while working from home with improvised furniture, and excessive anxiety and stress. Both of these culprits lead to jaw clenching and tooth grinding.

This man’s C-spine — an intensely rounded upper back and tucked pelvis — are all too common in people working from home and on laptops. As Dr. Chen pointed out, such postural habits can have deleterious effects on the jaw.

The dangers of a C-spine
While working remotely, people are slumping and hunching at their computers more than ever before. For many unaware of how to sit healthfully, lack of access to office workspaces (and in some cases, ergonomic furniture) has been difficult to adjust to. Anyone plagued by a C-spine — with an intensely tucked pelvis below rounded, hunched shoulders — is doing themself some real damage if they don’t learn new ways of using their body. I’m always calling out the unhealthy stresses this puts on discs, nerves, bones, and ligaments in the back and neck, but the consequences of poor posture don't stop there.

Gaming posture also often tends toward a C-spine, to the detriment of gamers’ long-term spinal health, as well as jaw health.

As Dr. Chen points out, nerves passing through the neck and shoulder lead directly to the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). TMJ dysfunction is a widespread problem in our culture and can lead to pain, clicking, and popping in the jaw. So it stands to reason (and I’ve seen in my decades teaching) that hunched, slumped posture in the upper body, including the neck and shoulders through which nerves pass, has detrimental effects on the jaw.

The temporomandibular joint (TMJ) connects the jaw to the skull. Original image courtesy Wikipedia user Jmarchn under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Healthier posture = healthier teeth
Thankfully, learning new and healthful ways of using the upper body while sitting and sleeping is within all of our reach. When sitting, the alternative to collapsing into a C-spine is to first fix the foundation of the spine, which is the pelvis. When the pelvis is tucked under, it provides a wonky base for the spine to rest on. Like a building with poor foundations, the spine is then distorted as a consequence, rounding out the back to then cantilever forward with the upper body. This obliges the muscles in the neck and shoulders to do overtime supporting the substantial weight of the head, creating tension and compression all the way through to the jaw.

The remedy is to learn to position the pelvis well by stretchsitting or stacksitting — so named because they either allow the spine to stretch out straight (stretchsitting), or for the bones of the spine to stack upright and relaxed (stacksitting). Both enable sustainable shoulder placement, and a well positioned neck and head. Bingo! Their harmonious arrangement of bones and soft tissues gives our nerves the space and pathways they need to function happily.

Our jaws and teeth are among the body parts where anxiety and stress most noticeably take their toll. Image courtesy Nhia Moua on Unsplash.

Anxiety and stress affect the jaw
Jaw clenching and tooth grinding at night while sleeping are typically the result of anxiety and stress, both of which are increasingly common in 2020. This added pressure and friction on the dental surfaces are another factor Dr. Chen suspects in the high number of cracked teeth she’s seen in her practice since June. How can posture help here?

Learning stretchlying brings our students a level of comfort and rest many have never experienced before. Image courtesy Minnie Zhou on Unsplash.

The luxuriously comfortable and relaxed postures we teach for sleep help relieve tension all throughout the body and improve sleep quality. Better, deeper sleep gives us a more stable footing on which to meet the day, even in stressful settings, and can help our mental health considerably. Why not take steps to improve our sleep quality if it can help our health, both mental and dental?

We recommend stretchlying on the back because it supports and gently tractions the body in ways that allow muscles that have been overworking to finally relax, releasing their grip on the back, the neck and, yes, the jaw. It may seem surprising to link healthy posture and dental health, but it actually makes perfect sense that jaw tension and teeth grinding can have positional causes.

If you’d like to revamp your understanding of comfort and perhaps invest in something other than your dentist’s next vacation, try an Online Initial Consultation with one of our online teachers. We also have a new Free Online Workshop all about how you can use posture to relieve stress! We look forward to supporting you (and your pearly whites) in these challenging times.

Working from home looks a bit different for our animal companions than it does for us humans. Image courtesy Bruno Cervera on Unsplash.

How are you faring? Here in California, we’re still squarely in shelter-in-place mode, perhaps settling into “normal-for-now.” Some people, whose professions allow it and who didn’t already work remotely, are still acclimating to the experience of working from home full-time. How can we optimize our home work environments?

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine who’s a full-time writer: let’s call him “Steve.” Steve recently decided to have someone build him a new writing desk to specs, and was curious to get my take on how to make sure his new desk, and home working environment more generally, is supportive of healthy posture.

What’s the best desk height?
Steve: My first concern is desk height. My laptop is a smallish one with a 13-inch display, so the screen doesn’t extend very high up from a desk surface. My existing desk feels low to me and is 29 inches tall. Apparently the industry standard is 29-30 inches. Is 29 inches too low or do I need a taller desk, especially if I’m working with my relatively low screen height? If I have a smaller display, do I need a desk which compensates by being 31 or 32 inches tall?

Esther Gokhale (EG): as long as the screen doesn’t induce your upper body to curve forward, it’s fine to have your screen lower than your eye level. Your eyes are perfectly capable of looking down to that degree without causing strain. The key thing is not a number, but rather what is happening in your body. Some people use floor-sitting desks that are only 6 inches off the ground perfectly well because they have good form while doing so. A custom-height desk as tall as 31 or 32 inches off the ground isn’t necessary unless it’s for comfort.

Floor-sitting with a wedge lets me comfortably use my Bellicon trampoline as a low desk.

How high should my monitor be?
Steve: Is the screen being 2 or 3 inches below eye level a problem? With my current desk height, I have to look slightly down at my display while writing. Should I be worried about the possibility of neck and back strain if I’m looking down that much and for that long?

EG: That sounds perfect, actually. Think hunter-gatherer: the line of vision would slant down since you have to be looking for animal tracks, signs of buried tubers, and watching where you step. Our bodies are perfectly capable of this behavior as they’ve been doing it for many millennia.

90-degree knees?
Steve: I’m curious about knee angle. I’ve heard that my knees should create a 90-degree angle while sitting. Is this true?

EG: There’s no research I know of that says this. People like even numbers and just make them up, even if they rarely exist in the complexity of nature and biology — parallel lines, 90-degree angles, etc. This reminds me for some reason of how rhino horns are supposed to be an aphrodisiac.

Humans are skilled at pattern recognition, which sometimes predisposes us to make conceptual leaps not grounded in fact when we see patterns that aren’t really there (i.e. rhino horns being thought of as an aphrodisiac). Part of the cultural baggage of having looked so strongly to Ancient Greece during the “Enlightenment” era of European history is a somewhat reductive expectation for symmetry and geometry, not only in the field of mathematics, but also in the human body. (More on that in another blog post.) In any case, worrying about human knees always being at a 90-degree angle while seated is not really a concern of mine. In fact, externally rotating the legs is a more constructive goal, and one among many other posture nuggets you can learn to achieve in our online posture coaching courses.

It’s also worth mentioning that, for seated desk work, the chair we painstakingly designed is both conducive to good posture and extremely durable. I’ve had mine for around 10 years and it’s still in great repair.

Modifying my laptop height with books, coming in close to the computer, and keeping my shoulders in a healthy position help make this seated desk arrangement gentle on the body, as well as sustainable. And with my decade-old Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair, I can actually stretchsit while I work.

Keyboard placement: what’s the right distance?
Steve: How important is it that I be able to come in close to the keyboard?

EG: Very. Though your arms are certainly capable of reaching out to a more distant keyboard, this takes more muscular effort. If you have the choice, come in super close — the feeling wants to be almost like you're surrounded by your desk or as though you're in a cockpit. When the keyboard is further away, this can easily play into old habits of curving the upper back forward, craning the neck forward, or displacing the shoulders forward, all of which compromise the body.

Standing desks: what’s the best approach?
Steve: I want to fashion a standing workspace out of my new seated desk. I figure I’ll probably get an additional place-on-top appliance to make the desk work for standing as well as sitting.

EG: I use a simple wooden footstool on top of my massage table when I want a standing desk — I just place my laptop on the stool and work away.

This simple footstool on top of my massage table is my preferred standing desk setup.

Sometimes my Congolese drum can be useful too, but it’s not really stable enough. Whatever you use doesn’t have to be formal — just a nice height.

My Congolese drum is another option for a standing desk surface.

The home work space posts on the Twitter thread started by @julesforrest illustrate this nicely.

Whatever your creative desk arrangement, make sure you use healthy posture while standing — tallstanding comes to mind. Get creative and experiment: changing your work location and/or position can inject a fresh burst of energy into your day. Give it a try!

Back, neck, and joint pain may be flaring up for many of us, especially those who have come to depend on palliative interventions such as massage, chiropractic, and physical therapy.

Does it seem to anyone else like the ribbon of life just tangled dramatically? It makes sense to feel this way — we’re living in a rapidly changing world with new information coming our way all the time. One way we may be physically experiencing that change is in our daily pain levels, which can increase due to myriad reasons: working from home on unfamiliar furniture, stress manifesting as tension in the body, eroded sleep quality from anxiety flare-ups, childcare we are suddenly having to do unassisted. Now, more than ever, we are forced to visit the root of the problem because our usual methods for temporary relief — such as massage therapy and chiropractic — are unavailable or inaccessible. These are marvelous interventions, but now we have an opportunity to address things ourselves. What do we do when we can’t physically visit our massage therapist or chiropractor or physical therapist and our aches and pains are spiraling out of control?

Massage is a worthy therapeutic intervention, but largely inaccessible during shelter-in-place restrictions. Posture re-education, on the other hand, is something you can learn online and put into practice immediately.

This is actually the perfect time to learn, revisit, and refresh skills to relieve your own back, neck, and joint pain without relying on recurring treatments from outside professionals. In the new world of COVID-19, the ancient wisdom and Primal Posture of the Gokhale Method are even more relevant than usual. We’ve had these tools on our side for decades, and our ancestors and forebears have had them for countless generations. Let’s now put them into practice with the goal of self-sufficiency.

To help with this, we’d like to remind you of our no-cost offerings which you can regularly access from your home. Here’s an example to introduce (or re-introduce) you to the fundamental Gokhale Method technique of stretchsitting, a way to gently lengthen your spine through traction and take pressure off compressed discs, nerves, and tissues. You can use equipment already found around your house, such as a rolled-up towel, or a Stretchsit® Cushion if you have one available. If you are even more fortunate, you own a Gokhale Pain-Free™ chair. Even if you’ve learned stretchsitting previously, refreshers are great at a time like this.

In the coming weeks, we’re further expanding our online offerings to include practical new material you can access from the comfort of your own home. Join us for new free teleseminars, posture workshops, online consultations, and online lessons to improve your quality of life without putting others or yourself at risk. Due to high interest, our next free teleseminars (taking place today, April 2, 2020) will revisit the topic of exercise breaks for calm and productivity. Each of our teleseminars is offered multiple times on the same day for ease of scheduling. Coworkers, friends, and family are welcome!

Social distancing can be a perfect time to learn some practical new posture skills alongside those in your household.

We also hope to support many of you with one-on-one online posture sessions, where our qualified teachers can provide personalized coaching on leading a pain-free lifestyle. Email our Customer Support team today so they can connect you with Gokhale Method teachers experienced with online teaching. Your body and mind will thank you, long after restrictions have been lifted. Consider it a gift to your future self and to future generations. Wishing you good health!

We’re all in this together. Hang in there!

Coronavirus is a quickly-developing story, and one we’re doing our utmost to address.

We’ve all had a rough week. The spread of coronavirus has led to major disruptions in our existing routines. Schools in many locations are closed and parents are navigating homeschool and childcare without as much support from teachers and caregivers as they are used to. Students and workers, whenever possible, have had their environments shifted from the physical to the virtual classroom and workspace. Countless workers in the service industries and in the arts are facing the sudden dissolution of their livelihoods with minimal safeguards. And healthcare workers are on the frontline of the fight to slow and contain the spread of COVID-19.

While we minimize contact with others, it can be tremendously helpful to optimize our new environments and changed routines and find a way to make our limitations more healthy and sustainable.

Working, attending class, and socializing only through a laptop is a new experience for many people. We’re finding and sharing ways to help you do these activities with less pain.

If you’re newly working or studying from home, you may have found that you’re having trouble settling into your new surroundings comfortably. Working hunched over a laptop can be a quick road to neck and back pain. Different table or desk heights and chairs than you’re used to can make a major difference in how you hold your body.

Similarly, if you’re suddenly faced with days structured very differently from the routines of your usual workplace or campus, you may find yourself sitting in one spot for hours at a time and not changing posture or moving. Or, if you find yourself temporarily unable to work as your workplace has shut down, you might fall down the Netflix wormhole. Hours can pass without noticing, and this is an easy way to end up with stiffness, pain, and even emotional issues like feeling lonely and isolated.

Higher-than-usual screen time can spell trouble for our mood and energy levels. Thankfully, there are healthy interventions available.

In light of these unique challenges, we are proud to debut two special teleseminars, both free, designed to combat cabin fever and help people settle into a new, healthy routine. There are two topics we’ll address:

• How to Set up Your Home Office in a Healthy Way, and
• Stir Crazy? Exercise Breaks for Calm and Productivity.

We hope you can join us today, March 20, for How to Set up Your Home Office in a Healthy Way and on Monday, March 23, for Stir Crazy? Exercise Breaks for Calm and Productivity. Each will be offered a total of 5 times over the course of the day. You can learn more and register here.

We look forward to making your new routine a more pleasant one. Please stay tuned for further upcoming streaming exercise offerings in the near future to help you stay active and healthy.

Some family members may be especially happy to have you home more than usual.