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Reduce Workplace Pain And Become More Productive | Dr Euan Lawson

Dr Euan Lawson is a General Practitioner and author of The Healthy Writer. Lots of us sit at desks for a significant proportion of our lives, but a typical work station is severely unhealthy for body and mind. Expect to learn how to optimise your work station to reduce physical strain, fight RSI, improve sleep, turbo charge productivity and benefit your mood. This one is an absolute belter packed with amazing advice from Dr Lawson, get your pen & paper out! Follow Dr Lawson online: http://www.blokeology.io/ Buy The Healthy Writer: https://amzn.to/2LHkf1U - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Chris WilliamsonhostDr Euan Lawsonguest
Jun 12, 20181h 12mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 15:00

    (wind blowing) Hello, hello, hello.…

    1. CW

      (wind blowing) 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. Ewen 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 Blokeology 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, um, 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 Yusef, you have to go online. Head to YouTube and search Modern Wisdom Podcast. It'll 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. Ewen Lawson. Enjoy, make some notes, and hopefully you will wake up tomorrow with a fresh set of eyes before you go to work. (upbeat music) Dr. Ewen Lawson, welcome to Modern Wisdom.

    2. EL

      Hello, Chris.

    3. CW

      How are you?

    4. EL

      Very well, thank you, and yourself?

    5. CW

      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, uh, 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.

    6. EL

      (laughs)

    7. CW

      Um, and yeah, the, the problem of working at a desk and sitting looking at a computer seems to be so widespread, and it was, it was a real, a real shock to me just how many people are, are, 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-

    8. EL

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      ... however many years ago would have been, "Oh, well, you know, this is just, it's just a, um, an issue that comes along with the particular chosen industry that I'm in." Um, 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?

    10. EL

      Um, I, I guess the whole kind of... I, I think you're right, it's a bit of a modern plague, isn't it? There are people that are absolutely just getting increasingly aware of their, the pain it's putting them through. Um, it... 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, us, you know, it's a bit, 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, 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?

    11. CW

      Yeah.

    12. EL

      And so that, 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 it have quite caught up yet, perhaps.

    13. CW

      Yeah. No, I think that's, uh, I think that's definitely, definitely an issue, that you've got the industry being ahead of the-

    14. EL

      Yeah.

    15. CW

      ... the research to a degree, or at least the, um, distribution of it and people's understanding. So hopefully today we can start to, uh, mitigate some of those problems, and people-

    16. EL

      Yeah, sure.

    17. CW

      ... may, people may, uh, be waking up tomorrow with a fresh set of eyes as they go into work. So can you-

    18. EL

      (laughs)

    19. CW

      ... um, can you give us a little bit of background to yourself please for the listeners who don't know who you are?

    20. EL

      Yeah. So, um, uh, I'm a, I'm a doctor. I'm, I'm a GP, so a general practitioner. And for those of them, those of you people not based in the kind of UK or Australia, New Zealand, other places, the GP is just a kind of like a, a specialist in family medicine, so it's cradle to the grave stuff. We see people before they get to hospital, from children to adults to kind of, uh, palliative care, end-of-life stuff as well. So-

    21. CW

      Yeah.

    22. EL

      ... very much kind of the full spectrum of health problems.... and we also spend a lot of time looking after people and just prevent, there's a certain element of preventative health and managing people, helping people with, um, lifestyle things like obesity or other, smoking, other related factors like that. Um, I have, um, I was in the army a few years ago. I've always had an interest in being physically healthy, of course. But, uh, like everybody, I've had my own set of, you know, tr- wrestling with these kind of problems. That's spending too much time sitting at a desk or trying to lose a little bit of weight, trying to be active in a world that is determined to get us to eat more all the time.

    23. CW

      Yeah.

    24. EL

      And that's one of my big moans about the modern world is how it's constantly, certainly in the Western world where you know, the society is pretty much trying to ram food down our throats-

    25. CW

      Yes.

    26. EL

      ... 99% of the time. Wrestling with all that, trying to keep fit, trying to kind of maintain family life, not trying to get burned out, um, trying to stay fit and well. So that, that's my own personal interest, um, and my, it obviously aligns with my personal and my professional life as well as a, um, as a doctor.

    27. CW

      Yeah.

    28. EL

      And I, I was involved in writing a book last year with, um, uh, Joanna Penn, a kind of well-known, uh, creative entrepreneur, non-fiction fiction writer, um, a book called The Healthy Writer, where we, and it was very much written for writers and for that group of people, but I think probably a lot of the stuff in there is applicable to anyone who finds themselves parked in front of a computer for their working life or-

    29. CW

      Absolutely.

    30. EL

      ... they're not getting active enough and they just wanna do something about it.

  2. 15:00 – 30:00

    Yeah, that works well.…

    1. CW

      eyes level with the top of the screen, right?

    2. EL

      Yeah, that works well. If your eyes are level with the top edge, then actually you're- you're just looking very slightly down at the screen itself. Um, that's a- that's usually a good way to do it. Um, and that just stops your neck muscles having to work e- as hard when they're- when you're in a n- normal position, so that's highly likely to relieve a lot of, um, problems and discomfort. And you got to remember, even things like, you know, tension headaches, if your neck's in the wrong position and you're under a bit of stress, then a lot of headaches that we- certainly we see as a- as a GP, a lot of headaches are tension headaches, and that's all related to muscular tension in the back of the neck and all the muscles-

    3. CW

      Where do, um- where do- where do tension headaches manifest?

    4. EL

      Uh, well, they're usually- the classic description is that they're a band, uh, sometimes around the front of the head, sometimes around the back of the head.

    5. CW

      Okay.

    6. EL

      And they- they tend to be very- they tend to be much more constant, not easily relieved by medication, uh, as a general rule.

    7. CW

      I'm looking at two points that I've got in my notes from messages I received earlier on. Headaches across brow and lower/back of skull.

    8. EL

      Okay, so that- you know-

    9. CW

      (laughs)

    10. EL

      ... that is almost, yeah. So, that- there- there you go. And n- we didn't rehearse that at all.

    11. CW

      No, we didn't (laughs) .

    12. EL

      But yeah, kind of, and that has come- that's exactly a classic description of a tension headache.

    13. CW

      Okay.

    14. EL

      And you have to remember that there are mu- most, if you- you kind of, you only got to have a briefest glance at the anatomy of the head and neck to see that there are muscles that, you know, they interlock all the way up around your forehead, the side of your head. All those muscles interlock and if you have, y- the- the muscles in your neck are under tension, there's often a knock on effect that those muscles across the front of your head and your forehead are under tension and you end up getting headaches.

    15. CW

      Okay.

    16. EL

      So, actually getting your screen position right can often deal with chronic headaches and- and kind of tension headaches, which is incredibly useful.

    17. CW

      So, I suppose if you've gone Bluetooth keyboard-

    18. EL

      Mm-hmm.

    19. CW

      ... and let's say that you are working at a notebook, that allows you-

    20. EL

      Yeah.

    21. CW

      ... that allows you then to y- you could get anything. You could get a stack of books, you could get some-

    22. EL

      Yeah.

    23. CW

      ... you could get a- a proper stand, I suppose, that you can put-

    24. EL

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      ... your- put your laptop on, but freeing yourself up with keyboard and mouse from being attached to the notebook also enables you to get the screen up in the air as well, so you kill two birds-

    26. EL

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      ... with one stone.

    28. EL

      Yeah, exactly. They're the two big things. If you get an external keyboard and raise up your laptop, and you're right, you can buy notebook risers and all that and spend money on it. I don't have one of those. I use- I- I use, I've, it's when I'm in my office, I would just use three or four weighty medical textbooks-

    29. CW

      Yeah.

    30. EL

      ... go underneath my laptop and that just does the job very nicely. I have an old keyboard from an- an ancient iMac that I have plugged in with a USB connection-

  3. 30:00 – 45:00

    Uh, th- you know,…

    1. CW

    2. EL

      Uh, th- you know, taking a break does not mean pushing the chair back-

    3. CW

      (laughs)

    4. EL

      ... you know, slop-

    5. CW

      Moving further away from the screen or closer to the screen.

    6. EL

      Yeah. (laughs)

    7. CW

      Or looking at your, looking at your phone, looking at a different screen instead. (laughs)

    8. EL

      Yeah, looking at your phone and checking, you know, checking Instagram-

    9. CW

      Yeah.

    10. EL

      ... and Facebook-

    11. CW

      That's not a break.

    12. EL

      ... while staring at another screen while you're kind of slumping j- and in your, slump in your chair. That's really-

    13. CW

      I'll, I'll take a break.

    14. EL

      That's not an effective break.

    15. CW

      I'll take the br- I'll take a break from my newly refined posture to slouch in my seat, put my, my head at a 90-degree angle to the floor, and sneak a quick look at my phone instead.

    16. EL

      Yeah, exactly. So-

    17. CW

      That's not, that's not what we're prescribing here.

    18. EL

      Yeah, and I think, you know, eh, most people listening will think, "Well, of course, I wouldn't do that," but, I mean, I've done it myself.

    19. CW

      No, I think you might do. Yeah.

    20. EL

      (laughs)

    21. CW

      I think you probably will.

    22. EL

      So actually taking- taking- taking a break is something most people know, but actually, it's putting it into action as well, isn't it, like all these things, and actually doing it properly so you give yourself a gen- a- um, um, an actual genuine chance of improving. I- I find if I do it, I can sustain much longer working periods, that 25 minutes, five minutes. I can do three or four hours of solid work in the morning and actually don't feel completely ruined by it.

    23. CW

      I agree. I think there's, um... It's a- a short-term sacrifice of work obviously by taking a five-minute break, but f- the total volume that you get, the total ti- effective time under the curve of work done by the end of the day will always be higher. Um...

    24. EL

      Yeah.

    25. CW

      It's interesting that you mentioned the Pomodoro Technique, which I am currently reading the illustrated guide to the Pomodoro Technique in a desperate attempt to try and make my work-

    26. EL

      (laughs)

    27. CW

      ... my work life a little bit more optimal. But Be Focused Pro, for anyone who's listening, is um, uh, an app for Mac which is very, very light and it does exactly that. It allows you to work on one task at a time. You set a timer for 25 minutes and then once it's up, it goes to a five-minute, uh, break and tells you, "Right, now go away for five minutes and then come back."

    28. EL

      Yeah.

    29. CW

      And I think, I think that... So during those five minutes, what are people doing? Walk to the water cooler, check the toilet, sort of, you know-

    30. EL

      Yeah.

  4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

    (laughs) …

    1. CW

      before you try and get ahold of melatonin or think that burning incense or getting a diffuser in your room is where you need to go, buy Matthew Walker's book, Why We Sleep. Or if you can't deal with the reading of that, if you want to listen to Joe Rogan podcast 1109 ... I know it off by heart because of how many times I've listened to him on it.

    2. EL

      (laughs)

    3. CW

      It's one of my favorites, and he is, he's absolutely fantastic. And the, the, um, (sighs) the summaries that he makes and the, um, conclusions that he draws about just how important sleep is to short-term and long-term health, longevity and all the rest of it, is, uh, they're terrifying. They're nothing short of terrifying.

    4. EL

      I, I'm, I, I think, I, I've, you know, if ... Moving is really incredibly important, getting more exercise, but, you know, there three pillars of going, being healthy are moving more, eating a bit better, however that is, but sleep is number, it's absolutely up there as that kind of holy triumvirate-

    5. CW

      Yeah.

    6. EL

      ... of being healthy. And if you're not getting your sleep right, everything else falls apart. And I've got three kids. They were like, they're now a little bit, they're now like 11, 12, and 13, but when they were one, two and three, I wasn't getting a whole lot of sleep.

    7. CW

      Mm.

    8. EL

      And I just, you know, my, kind of the difficulties of motivating yourself to do exercise, to cope with your normal work, the kind of, the, um, extra kind of anxiety it provokes and they're kind of-

    9. CW

      The difficulty level on everything's-

    10. EL

      ... meant-

    11. CW

      ... been turned up right.

    12. EL

      Meant- They're meant h- Oh, it just cranks ... And, you know, obviously, as a doctor, I've had some experience of sleep deprivation and in the army they were-

    13. CW

      (laughs)

    14. EL

      The army were quite keen on it as well at times.

    15. CW

      Yeah.

    16. EL

      So I've been through the pain of not sleeping, and life is just so shabby- (laughs)

    17. CW

      Yeah.

    18. EL

      ... that, actually, that's why I prioritize it. Um, and there's so many things you can do which don't require taking medication. The evidence for melatonin is really weak. There's a little bit of evidence in older people over the age of 55 that it can help you get to sleep a bit quicker and your quality of sleep's a wee bit better, but there's not good evidence it makes any difference in younger folk.

    19. CW

      There's potential for resetting circadian rhythms when traveling as well, right? I think it's a good way to hack jet lag, or at least Matthew Walker alludes to that in the book. Um-

    20. EL

      Is, yeah, they've certainly looked at it hard. I've, I, I'm not sure how good the evidence is for that either. There may be a wee bit. Yeah, I know that it's certainly been tried by a lot of people. Um, they-

    21. CW

      So rely on, rely on what we know works, which is digital sunset, reduce-

    22. EL

      Yeah.

    23. CW

      ... reduce the, or increase the melatonin response naturally-

    24. EL

      Yeah. I mean, there's, there's, there's-

    25. CW

      ... by not having blue light pouring into your eyes an h- 20 seconds-

    26. EL

      (laughs)

    27. CW

      ... before you go to bed.

    28. EL

      Yeah, well, I think that's it. I think my eyes would be jumping around a bit, um, if that were the case, if I were, if I did that, and I don't. My, my phone goes on airplane mode at night and happy days.

    29. CW

      Well, I think one of the ... Anyone who's listening will know what I'm about to say. One of my number one solutions for anybody is to charge their phone over the other side of the room-

    30. EL

      Yeah.

  5. 1:00:00 – 1:07:35

    ... which is, which…

    1. EL

    2. CW

      ... which is, which is pretty catastrophic, I imagine.

    3. EL

      Well, the only thing... Uh, well, I've got a couple of thoughts. So, so the first thing I'd say is, the simple fix for that is plant your feet on the floor, as I said earlier.

    4. CW

      Yeah.

    5. EL

      That kind of, that fi- that is the one hack that fixes that completely. Because you're right, it does put you into a really awkward position. The only thing I'd say is it's a slightly proxy marker, that. It doesn't actually tell you whether you'll get back pain or give you any problems.

    6. CW

      (laughs) Yeah.

    7. EL

      It's-

    8. CW

      Can you back deal with it? Yeah, fine.

    9. EL

      Y- Yeah, it's just measuring increase in pressure in one intervertebral space, actually doesn't necessarily mean it will turn into anything later on-

    10. CW

      Pressure doesn't equal-

    11. EL

      ... because actually m-

    12. CW

      ... uh, negative...

    13. EL

      Not necessarily. I, I, but I agree, it doesn't, I wouldn't wish to underestimate it. It's clearly a pretty rubbish posture-

    14. CW

      Yeah. Yeah.

    15. EL

      ... (laughs) as well. And, uh, likely to c- quite likely to cause you problems in the longer term. But I'm always a bit wary about... The, the problem with it, the, the research is you can, you, you see evidence like that but it, it very r- it's very difficult to translate it into people who get back pain by, you know, later on down the line so the real-

    16. CW

      Hm.

    17. EL

      ... sort of clinical endpoints that we're interested in.

    18. CW

      Interesting. Yeah, that is cool. So I wanted to touch on more of the outside of the day, outside of work and outside of writing, uh-

    19. EL

      Yeah.

    20. CW

      ... health. The more sort of general health, as we could call it. And I know that you are a fan of gratitude journaling, based on some of the bits that I've read about you.... I wanted to allow you to elaborate. We haven't touched on gratitude journaling almost at all yet so far, although I do do it. I wanted to hear your thoughts on it and, um, your experiences with it.

    21. EL

      Yeah. So my ... And one of the things we wanted to do with the book was just to point out that writing in particular wasn't all just catastrophically bad for your health. There was a slight danger that the book was just gonna be-

    22. CW

      Give up being a writer, it's going to destroy you.

    23. EL

      Right. Yeah, exactly. Stop immediately, it's horrific.

    24. CW

      Yeah.

    25. EL

      Um, and one of the clearest bits of evidence about writing was writing is... I mean, there's certainly some medical stuff about writing as therapy, um, and people with mental health problems and other things. But actually for, just thinking for people in general and, um, for the wider population, there's something everybody can do, gratitude journaling has a really pretty decent... has, has some decent evidence that underpins it. And it goes back to, um, some Californian psychologists, um, who looked into this, uh, Emmon and McCullough. Um, and they ... There was an experiment. It goes, I think it was back to 2003 or the early 2000s, sometimes like, sometime like that, and they, they ran one of these studies that psychologists love to do. Um, and they got the participants to write down just a few things they were grateful for every day, whether that was the, you know, the kindness of a friend or a, a beautiful sunset. And incredibly, they only had to write a sentence and they only had to do it once a week, so it was really not a big ask.

    26. CW

      That's low investment, right?

    27. EL

      Yeah, that is really... You know, the biggest problem with that would be remembering to do it because it's so low.

    28. CW

      Yeah.

    29. EL

      Uh, it's absolutely tiny. And, um, they found that it really seemed to... They, they stopped... They found some clear improvements in wellbeing for those people and that they felt better. But really inter- one of the things that really piqued my interest about that study is because I can be a little bit cynical about some of these psychologists, psychology studies. They're often got very low numbers and, you know, you've got to be careful about how far you draw your inferences with them.

    30. CW

      Yes.

Episode duration: 1:12:47

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