Effects on posture of not setting up your laptop correctly

Are you reading this on your laptop? If so why don’t you have a think about your posture? Is your laptop setup correctly? Are you using a stand? How about an external mouse and keyboard? The NHS state that every year nearly eight million working days are lost due to back pain. We are all spending more and more hours at work, sitting at our desks and using our laptops for up to 10 hours each day. Therefore, it is enormously important to set up your workstation in the correct way in order to keep you comfortable, free of any back pains or injury and ready to work as hard as you can all day long. We all find ourselves using our computer for a huge portion of the day. Poor workstation setups and poor office layouts can contribute to injuries, accidents and illnesses in the workplace. Whist ensuring you have the correct chair height, good posture and the right equipment can make sure you remain comfortable and ready to work all day long. You might not realise it, but having your laptop setup incorrectly directly impacts your productivity. Sitting in an upright position and ensuring your laptop is set up at the correct height energises you. While slouching will make you feel more fatigued and less motivated to work. Making sure that you sit correctly at your workstation is so important. Setting up your laptop incorrectly negatively effects your posture, helps cause neck and back pain and helps making needless disruptions in the office. By ensuring your laptop is set up correctly you can help keep yourself focused and motivated to work, essentially making you more productive. Having a poor posture has been known to have a very poor effect on mood. Those who sit for extended periods of time, without a correct workstation setup show higher levels of depression. Slouching is extremely bad for breathing; slouching can often be down to not having a correctly adjusted chair and not having your laptop setup at the correct height. Bad breathing can have huge effects on the workings of the nervous system, which can lead to increased stress levels. A study by the British Medical Journal, showed that reducing the time that you spend sitting down at a desk by less than three hours per day could increase your life expectancy by two whole years, this just goes to show how having a poor posture can have devastating effects. As bad as back pain may seem, this could become the least of your worries if you have a poor workstation and you don’t set up your laptop correctly at your desk. Sitting at an upright position, looking straight ahead allows you to breathe a lot easier and also makes you feel a lot better which in turn can decrease stress levels hugely. In fact, having a poor posture while sitting has actually joined smoking, alcohol abuse and poor eating as a factor for chronic disease. Thankfully, there are only a small number strategies and exercises that can be used to ensure a good posture. By just setting up your computer on a laptop stand and using an external mouse and keyboard, you can improve your posture massively and keep yourself motivated and productive throughout the working day. If you work from home also it is very important for you to set up your home workstation to comply with standards as well. You are able to carry your laptop setup everywhere you go whether this be at the office, at home, in your local coffee shop or at your friend’s house so you can ensure that you always have a good posture. All employers of any size business have an obligation to ensure that staff have a safe working environment, in a comfortable surrounding, where they are able to work stress free. Poor posture at work has many effects on health including back pain and increased stress, which all result in lost time, poor levels of productivity, low levels of motivation and higher expenditure for the employer. In all businesses no matter what size the employees should be the most important asset. It therefore makes a lot of sense to ensure that employees can work productively, injury free and highly motivated. If issues involving bad posture and poor workstation setups are resolved right away then management time is reduced, productivity across the business is improved, staff turnover is likely to improve and there is a chance to attain an advantage over competitors who don’t decide to do the same.

For more information on Effects on posture of not setting up your laptop correctly talk to Relaxa Posture Group