Tips to regain lost wellness and beat Text Neck in 5 easy steps

Resulting a harmful and dangerous physical condition on the human body, Text Neck is a leading health care provider for technology induced injury. Caused by excessive texting and overuse of all hand held electronic devices, specially Smartphones and gadgets, TextNeck, to explain the repeated stress injury to the body.

The term, and the health condition, is derived from the onset of cervical spinal degeneration resulting from the repeatedstress of frequent forward head flexion, while looking downat the screens of mobile devices and 'texting' for long periods of time. While 'Text Neck' is certainly a new medical term, the condition is impacting millions and is a growing critical global concern. 

Thus, would like to give you five effective yet impactfultips to beat this new lifestyle disease:

1. Get a chair to support your device
Steelcase’s survey reveals, over 11,000 workers across theglobe or 45 per cent used three devices (a laptop, a tablet and a Smartphone) and only 13 per cent used four devices.
    When offices fail to properly support technology use, people spend a lot of time bent forward, head dropped. While individuals may not give it much thought, working this way puts pressure on the neck and spine. An easy way to help offset some of the damage caused by sitting for hours at a time is to invest in a solid office chair.

2. Know your posture
Before we analyse solutions, it is important to understand and recognise one’s posture. Steelcase researchers saw workers hunched over texting and slouching to type on their laptops. Their global study helped identify nine new postures people were sitting in because of their technologies. Investing in ergonomically designed chairs could be useless, if, what you pick is not designed to complement these postures. Therefore, it is important to pick ergonomic solutions according to the specific posture that you find yourself working in the most.

3. Make it easier to assume different postures
Beyond encouraging movement, furniture that provides a palette of postures such as height adjustable, worktables, which allow you to stand and work or creating spaces that workers can ‘get away’ to without ‘going away’ during the day.

4. Make movement fun
Too often, people nervously equate the charge to ‘get moving’ with intense exercise like long-distance running or cross-training. However, staying active can start with simple changes like engaging your core while you work and firing leg muscles to maintain balance. Consider investing in a few ‘active seats’ to give yourself the option for incorporating more movement into your day.

5. Adopt a sit-stand-walk strategy
• Sit in a well-designed, ergonomically advanced chair that allows a full range of healthy postures for part of the day.
• Stand at a height adjustable work surface for between 1.5 hours and two hours per day.
• Walk and work for part of the day.

This article is written by Jason Heredia, VP Marketing, Steelcase Asia Pacific, as per his personal views and research.