Shelagh Aitken
Teacher of the Alexander Technique

A technique for living

Is Working a Pain in the Neck?

When I open my Ergonomics and AT workshops with that question, heads nod. When I then go on to ask ‘Who is in charge of your workspace, you or your computer?’, people look resigned. Work imbalance has been developing over the last couple of decades, and perhaps accelerating: those who have jobs work long hours, ending up like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, perpetually late and stressed; those without work become more marginalized.

People, I notice, answer phones reflexively. Because something is available, it must be used. Because laptops and notebooks and phones are mobile – always with us at home, at the weekend, on holiday – they must turned on and must be responded to. If you are waiting in an office or a shop, the phone takes precedence over the person (usually me, or the person ahead of me) standing at the counter. How often in restaurants do you see a couple waiting for their meal to arrive, each talking to or texting on their mobile, turned slightly away from the other to give the illusion of privacy? They’re either planning the future or rehashing the past. They’re not present to the surroundings or the person they are ostensibly with.

It takes discipline not to answer the phone or check email to see if anything has arrived. It takes discipline to leave the computer. Once we get up from the desk we’ll be distracted and we won’t get the things on our list done. There’s the fear that the idea will be lost – we need to trap it, get it down ‘on paper’ or on the screen before it vanishes. The person we need to talk to may be at their desk right now, but they won’t be in fifteen minutes. What we need to talk to them about is urgent. We need to do it now.

The reason that the computer and the mobile become dictators is because we let them. Now at this point, everyone shakes their head ruefully. They know, but what can they do about it? That’s the way life is.

Work, if we let it, can become all encompassing. It’s hard to find the balance between working life and personal life. Which leads us back to computers, chairs and ergonomics.

We spend more of our lives in chairs than any previous generation, and much longer than our bodies were designed for. We are descended from hunter-gatherers. We’re supposed to be out there hunting and gathering food, not sitting at a desk hunting facts and gathering data.

Ergon means ‘work’ in Greek; omics means ‘to manage’. So ergonomics should mean ‘managing work’. But it’s come to mean managing the physical workspace, specifically chairs. Or more particularly, the way people sit in chairs. There has been quite a lot of research into chairs in the workplace and public situations like cars, trains and airplanes(though much less on chairs at home – it seems we feel we know everything we need to about a comfortable chair to lounge in).

There could be some argument for saying that airplane and car seats in particular have been over-engineered. The goal is to try to keep the body immobilised, trapped in a quasi-foetal position. So the seats are soft in the centre so that you sink back and sink in, the edges are contoured to keep you in one place. It’s not possible, given one standard seat design for the model of car or the cabin class of the plane, to make allowance for the huge range of sizes and proportions of the human body. Instead, we’re stuffed into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ package, without room to fidget.

Many offices have the right idea at heart: they do the research, find the specialists, take the advice and buy the expensive, ergonomically designed chair – one for everyone in the company (except the directors, of course – theirs are bigger). But it’s the same problem we have with airplane seats: look good when the plane is empty, easy and rational to requisition and build, not adaptable to the individual.

In pretty much any chair, people wilt after a couple of hours. If it happens again and again over a long enough period of time, people adapt, at a price. The obvious price is back pain, shoulder problems, RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome, the list goes on and on. The indirect price is gradual decline in flexibility, in adaptability, in the ability to be present to what is around us. We deal with the discomfort by tuning it out, and gradually end up tuning out more and more of our environment.

When they relax, people often try to exchange one extreme for the other: from the tension and stress of work, they ‘de-stress’ by collapsing into an easy chair or onto the sofa. Or they may go to the gym, run, play sport – and then collapse.

Designer chairs pay even less attention to the body. With their legs and a back, they become a symbol for the human body. They look fabulous in photographs. They are whimsical, noble, austere or sensual. They make statements about the artists’ aesthetics, the artists’ relationship to materials, to life, to society, to philosophy – but rarely say anything about the artists’ relationship to the human body, their own or others. Or if they do, it is with the idealised body, the fashion model draped over or perched on the edge of their creation.

People react reflexively. They aspire to designer chairs because they look good and make a statement about the way they see themselves. Or they aspire to antiques: different style, same reasons. Then, because it looks good, it reflects the way they see themselves and want to be seen, they convince themselves that it must be comfortable. Once they’ve bought the furniture, it must be right: they don’t adapt it to the way they use it, they adapt themselves to it.

Try when you sit in the chair to just stay still for a second and think about what’s happening to your back, your legs, your shoulders. Then see if, instead of slouching back, a pillow between the shoulder blades might do the job, or a telephone directory as a footrest, so your feet are flat on the floor, not dangling in the air. If you’re in an office chair with arm rests, notice the effect they have on your upper arms and shoulders. They’re for resting the arms, not supporting them.

Try this and see what happens: just once, when the phone rings, think: Is it imperative to take that call right now? What’ll happen if I don’t? Is the world really going to end? Try setting a time to look at email, rather than responding to it as it arrives. You’ll probably still answer the phone, you’ll certainly spend longer on email than you’d intended, but at least it’s a conscious choice, not a reflexive action.

The only way you will regain the balance of control in your workspace is if you take control of the situation.

Excerpt from Sailing Your Own Ship

The channel – the road – that boats can use safely is marked by buoys. Most are huge green or red cylinders. If you see them on shore, you will find that the largest are twice the height of a man.[1] At sea, they miraculously dwindle until you can just pick them out on the horizon.

Buoys are a good metaphor for the idea of going up. There are three parts to the buoy: the cylinder which you see floating on the water; a massive chain; and an equally massive block of concrete which rests on the sea bed, keeping the buoy anchored in its location. You rely on the buoy to be where the chart says it will. If it’s not where it should be, you may well run aground. So the concrete keeps the buoy grounded (feet); the cylinder floats freely on the surface, buoyed up by the water (head); the chain (spine, hips and legs) connects the two flexibly.

To sail well, a boat is usually ‘heeled’: tipped on its side by an angle of between ten and thirty degrees or so. Moderately-sized sailboats with a single hull (i.e. not dinghies, cat- or trimarins) are designed to heel when sailing. With experience, you learn to feel when the boat is in the ‘groove’: the sails and the angle of heel are just right, and the boat cuts through the water. You can tell experienced sailors by the way they brace themselves comfortably against the heeling. It feels wrong when the boat is sailing without heeling. But for newcomers, the world is out of kilter. Everything is at an angle. Above decks, you have the horizon to give perspective. Below decks, it is hard to stay upright when everything around you is first of all out of alignment, and on top of that bouncing up and down, back and forth. The question of ‘where is up?’ is neither metaphysical nor theoretical on a sailboat.

How many times in my training have I been told that ‘you have to take care of yourself first’? The same is true on a boat. ‘One hand for yourself, one hand for the boat’ is really a way of saying take care of yourself: you always have one hand free to hold onto something, especially below decks, where a sudden lurch can be fatal.

This essay was submitted to the journal Conscious Control, a biannual publication devoted to the Alexander Technique, for the Mouritz Award. It won third prize and will be published in the journal in Spring, 2008. For further information on the Mouritz Prize, Conscious Control, or other Mouritz publications, go to http://www.mouritz.co.uk/.

Last updated May 2008   © copyright Shelagh Aitken 2006 - 2008  email Shelagh or ring 020 7722 2996