Talk about posture, stretches, eye strain

[newswim]

This is something I feel is somewhat overlooked but can lead to pretty deleterious effects if not incorporated into daily life. I propose adding a section (maybe after the finger exercises) about some stretches you can do while sitting, when and how often to take breaks, resting/recovering eye muscles, maybe even general diet tips and links to explanation of spinal health habits (thinking something like The Alexander Technique).

[iteles]

@newswim This is excellent and I couldn't agree with you more.

If you already have some thoughts on this (and it sounds like you do!) and have a little time, please feel free to PR in an addition to the repo, would be awesome to have it here 👍 Even a start on this would be great to raise awareness ❤️

[muddlebee]

You can use something like this ( https://www.maketecheasier.com/protect-eyes-redshift-linux/ ) for eye protection. Take a look.

[newswim]

Nice link, @anweshknayak !

There's a similar tool for MacOS called FLUX, which I use all the time. https://justgetflux.com

@iteles I will work on this! I need to do a little more research to make sure we're recommending "standard best practice" things, and putting together a little YouTube playlist with some great exercises that I've already found. Here's a good example.

Watching this has made me very aware of my own posture issues 😬 --- Cheers!

[newswim]

Semi-related follow-up: I still need to write-up some instructions, but, [personal story] I've started going to a Chiropractor here in the states and in discussing this problem, particularly among people who have to sit in front of computers for extended periods of time, he's interested in collaborating on 😂 an app 😰 that would remind you to do these healthy practices.

It might involve video instructions, or "instructional animations". AFAICT you could enter 'work mode', have have a reminder every hour-or-so to get up and move around a bit. Yes, a glorified pomodoro.

As I'm researching this, and asking those Docs for advice, I should have some good material to add.

[nelsonic]

@newswim hope you recover swiftly from your desk-job-related ailment... 👍 have you seen/read: https://pragprog.com/book/jkthp/the-healthy-programmer There's an associated app: https://fnd.io/#/us/iphone-app/576258650-the-healthy-programmer-by-logichaus

We are building a health-related app for a client: https://github.com/healthlocker/healthlocker There is always room for more apps especially with intuitive/elegant UI! so we'd love to see what you come up with.

[newswim]

I hadn't, Nelson, thank you as always! THP will be perfect ramp-up material 🤓

[iteles]

https://github.com/notwaldorf/tiny-care-terminal So cute.

[YvesMuyaBenda]

Yoga provides a whole system of stuff to do related to stretching, and eye muscle exercises. Googling yoga for office workers would proabably get some interesting results. Other intersesting terms are "chair yoga", "seated yoga", "office yoga". Some of the stuff a quick bit of googling has turned up:

office yoga stuff

Eye exercises are pretty much canonical across the different traditions, where the idea is to systematically tense and relax the muscles around the eyes; within the Yoga tradition, the following is typical:

eye yoga stuff

@newswim I wish you a swift and succesful recovery dude!

[YvesMuyaBenda]

An interesting app in development centred around the practices of conscious breathing is: breath tech. Interesting to me, because, Dan Brule, who devoted his life to investigation of breathing practices, wrote one of the few books, where I was aha aha aha, so this is how everything connects together and can be applied! So it would be super interesting to see what him and his developer come up with.

From what I know of my own personal study of breath as a means to create, control, and sustain emotional states, and generally about the creation of certain emotional states for specific purposes, for those interested in mindfulness and breathing and meditation and stuff, this app might be a kind of shortcut:heart/breath coherence app. Some people might benefit for seeing how a conscious use of breath actually does affect the rhythmic patterning of one's heart beats.

[YvesMuyaBenda]

@newswim A good way to become more aware of one's posture, is the Feldenkrais method of body awareness exercises which are designed to create an increased awareness of one's body, for example, in one's posture, I am thinking awareness awareness of the spine, shoulders, neck, head, arms, hips all in relation to each other. Here is a typical sequence.

[newswim]

Thank you, @YvesMuyaBenda!!!

These are great! I'm particularly going to start doing eye yoga, there's even something called computer vision syndrome, which I didn't know about until googling this stuff.

Akin to Feldenkrais is another practice which is popular with people who do public speaking or play musician professionally, Alexander Technique.

I wonder which is more beneficial... a "regular" exercise routine of 30-45 minutes, with 20 minutes of elevated cardio, or brief stretching and a period of meditation throughout the day. I would assume that different people are going to be inclined to do different things, with the goal of doing some amount of physical care every day.

Thanks also for sharing your own experiences. Recently, I've started attending a once-a-week mindfulness meditation and the benefits and clarity of mind tend to stay present throughout the week. It also seems to help me make better choices throughout the week with how I use my time since I tend to be a bit more reflective.

Also, the apps you posted are really cool. I wanted to add a few more to the list:

https://insighttimer.com https://www.calm.com

If you're aware of Sam Harris or listen to his podcast, he's said recently that he's working on a new meditation app.

[YvesMuyaBenda]

@newswim No problem man! Mindfulness, meditation, stretching, and cardio could probably all be done at once within the sun salutation. I reckon a person can learn sun salutation, along with conscious breathing through the phases, increasing the tempo for cardio workout, and be done. I have narrowed down my yoga practice to perfecting the Sun Salutation (for example, one needs a certain hip flexibility to do the lunges with comfort and ease, so one can go of exploring hip flexibility, or just practicing increasing the staminia in one's thights) and keep my back flexible with a sequence that runs through triangular pose variations.

I have heard of the Alexander Technique, but I have not yet explored it, though now I am super curious. The Feldenkrais method gave me something I was misssing when I was first started exploring yoga; namely, mindfulness, keeping the mind attented on the actions that are occuring.

As a software developer, with the associated kind of analytic mindset, I think I can get across what Feldenkrais mostly taught be by mentioning decomposition. When I started Yoga, I did not have the attention that broke down the the poses and sequences into fundamental elements. To see how far one can go into decomposing Yoga movements into elements, one might check out yoga brushtrokes. In that page, there is a simple exercise which would be good for building basic awareness of the spine, and it is within this kind of breaking things down to components (I am not suprised the guy had a technical engineering background), andd isolating attention on certain muscles, that I felt like I really began to understand but also concentrate on what I was doing. Neil Keleher is about the only person who talks about systematically feeling your own anatomy in such a systematic way that the approach could probably be turned into some kind of an app.

To summarises, if you become really aware of what you are doing, then the poses and sequences become something like a moving mindfulness meditation, with the increase awareness carry on through daily life activities.

[karinakozarova]

@YvesMuyaBenda Have you thought of creating a repository about all this? :) Or at least a markdown file?

[YvesMuyaBenda]

@karinakozarova Thank you very much for your kind interest! I have looked into a lot of things, but I am never ever sure out of what all the stuff I know and have experimented with, what folk will find most helpful. I was thinking that perhaps I look at stuff from a kind of analytic approach that might appeal to software developers, but I don't know. What has interested you the most of what I have said? What questions come to your mind? What would you experiment with right now? How does what I say relate to anything else you have read?

I was exploring a set of related ideas based on the theme of increasing awareness and mindfulness by becoming more mindful and aware of the body by training the mind to focus on small individual actions such as the tension and release in specific muscle groups, in isolation first, and then together. The idea is that one would have a much more detailed map of the body, that would be useful and applied in certain body-mind practices as wide apart as yoga, zen, feldenrakais, breathwork, alexander technique, mindfulness, concentration meditation, etc, etc; the idea is that awareness of the body is fundamental and acts as a foundation to all the other stuff.

For sure, I am thinking more and more of cataloguing stuff, which is why I find dwyl such an interesting and useful model.

[karinakozarova]

Personally, I think that if you create like a compilation of resources it will be most helpful for people. I don't know if you've heard about software like Iris? Maybe you could create like a list of that kind of software. Than some about postures. Another about yoga. Some eye exercises. And etc. It will be awesome if you create it,you definitely will have a star from me :wink:

[YvesMuyaBenda]

@karinakozarova I kind of enjoy the back and forth we have here in the dwyl issues, and without people askng specific questions, it is difficult for me to narrow down the scope of a topic; because in my mind, everything is connected to everything else; for example, @newswim asked a question about how to create a well blended routine of self-care, and I answered that the sun salutation with conscious breathing might on its own be enough. in that it combines stretching with cardio when done at a fast tempo, and if one adds in conscious breathing it becomes a moving meditation.

I will think about it for sure; it will be something like the old fashioned internet directories. In the meantime, feel free to ask any questions here, that you think are relevant to the issue. I was not aware of software like Iris (interesting piece of software), maybe you might tell me more about this kind of software?

[karinakozarova]

Yeah,sure, I knwo quite a lot for this specific software because a friend of mine is developing it. What it does is basically remove red color from your screen while not making it irritatingly obvious and also has a very beautiful pause that tells you it's a good idea to take a break. By the way, maybe you can tell us something more about breathing?

[YvesMuyaBenda]

@karinakozarova Thank you for the information. Do you know similar software that attempts to help the developers look after themselves?

On breathing, the basic reference I would suggest would be the Dan Brule book above. An interesting first step would be learning first how to breath to a constant slow rhythm.

If you want to research the simple practice more thoroughly then the googable term is "coherent breathing", as in coherent breathing.

You can start right now. Close your eyes and turn it into a concentration/awarenesss meditation (where do you feel the breath, movement of the abdoment, thorax, the bending of your spine, air current through your nose, do you hear your breath, is the tempo constant, etc, etc, etc?) similar to the practice of Vipassana in some variations of Buddhist mindfulness practices. You can use it as a short term boost, as to calm yourself down when distressed, to recover from an emotional shock, to take a break from repetitve negative thoughts, to mentally prepare yourself to focus in solving a difficult problem, or to sustain your stamina while in the middle of thinking something through, etc, etcc, If you want to you can turn it into an all day meditation/awareness exercise, in seeing if you can maintain the same slow constant tempo throughout the day, which would probably improve your general emotional stabilty.

As an introduction in feelling the body during breathing (this is often the missing part in the instructions), the best introduction I know of is breathing anatomy for yoga teachers. Oh, and it is probably most beneficial to focusing on abdominal/diaphragmatic breathing (the chest is still but the abdomen is moving in and out) at first while practicing the slow rhythm breath, though it is useful to more widely explore the many different sensations in breath.

[coudrew]

I'm no physiotherapist but at UPS, stretching while in a seat was strongly discouraged. I've pulled a few muscles myself doing that. Also, across every industry I've worked in (security, manufacturing, event services, transportation), you need 30 minutes of downtime for every 4 hours of doing anything, but it's best to take some kind of break every two hours. I'm finding in my new life here that 'office people' are not the best at taking breaks.