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Optimizing Your Home Office & Eye Health

(mellow music) So this is the standard position of many people in the modern world. And there's a beautiful opportunity here to start to integrate the movement practices that we've learned throughout this program and to start to integrate them into our lives, into the way that we work and the way that we communicate and into our offices in this scenario. So a few basic principles to start to pay attention to. One is sitting in chairs, there's nothing actually wrong with sitting in chairs. So there's a lot of headlines that go around of sitting being the new smoking. That comes from James Levine, actually, and someone that I reference in my book, "The Align Method". We've done many podcasts about this topic. So what I would suggest with sitting is the new smoking is it's not about the sitting itself, it's the way in which we're sitting that matters. So the big thing, just like we had been talking about in previous sections, getting your hips up above the height of your knees when you'...

re sitting on the ground, it's the same concept when you're sitting on a chair. So while I'm on this chair, this chair is quite low. It's pretty disadvantageous for having a healthy body to work on for an extended period of time. So I'm actually gonna take this just random device and put it underneath my bum while we're sitting here just to demonstrate. So I'm gonna raise the chair, the height of my butt up so that when I'm sitting down, ideally you just get a chair that allows you to actually, that raises you up so you actually have your hips above the height of your knees. But now from this position I have, my hips are pretty close to up above the height of my knees. If I had a ball, I want the ball to roll down my femurs. What that does is it stabilizes your pelvis and your lower back. So your L5-S1 vertebra, these lower vertebra in your lower back, in your sacrum, they are in the shape of a wedge with the bigger end of the wedge facing forward out your abdomen here. And so you actually want to have a slight tilt forward with the pelvis to be in a healthy orientation throughout the day. So ideally if someone's stacked weight through my shoulders, it would shoot straight down into my hips. Imagine almost like you're, the way to describe this in the "Align Method" book is, imagine your pelvis is kind of like the feet of your butt. So you wanna have good strong stack in the feet of your butt or in this case, they're called your ischial tuberosities, these bones in the bottom of your butt. Nice strong stack from there. Imagine you have a little string pulling your head up towards the ceiling. You can breathe into the side of the ribs. And this is a perfectly fine seated position. Next thing to tinker with if we are in this seated position is if we're looking at a screen, ideally the screen is slightly raised up. So as opposed to us continually being in this looking down position, which actually literally makes us feel more tired, when our eyes are looking down, our eyes are continuous with our central nervous system, our ocular muscles, it's literally neurological tissue. So the directionality of our eyes, whether we're blinking a lot, whether we're looking up, looking down, it literally affects us at a neurological, mental, emotional level. It changes our state, changes the way that we feel. So looking up starts to incite more energy, more creativity and more openness. Makes sense. So placing your screen a little bit higher would be great. This is maybe even a little bit overkill with the height so I drop it down just a little bit. And then placing your keyboard, if you are working on a keyboard, down lower so that your shoulders can relax. That would be the ideal situation. You can build a little shelf down like this or raise the screen up a little bit higher. However you do it in your own office. And have your shoulders drop down, work here from this position, looking up at the screen. This is a gorgeous working position. So next thing that I would recommend, I would say even still there is ways to sit better. I would still recommend either sitting all the way down to the ground and sitting on floor cushions or poofs. Get a comfy rug, like really have a nice, comfortable area to sit. Or standing. So if we are standing, we're going to first get up from the sitting position in the same way that we learned in the hip hinging section, in the Align Method program. So we're gonna drive our upper body forward, reach the hips back, plant our weight down to the ground, big breath, and wow. Standing up in a nice stacked, strong, stable position. So when we're in this standing position, same principles are applying. Ideally we'd have the screen even a little bit higher from here. So as I'm standing, I can kind of look up like I'm looking up in the trees or up into the clouds and then have the screen a little bit lower. So the screen would be down. So I can relax my shoulders down. Something that would be beautiful for you guys is to start to add some some steps or, here I have a foam roller. I have a slant board down here. You can change the heights of these guys. So you can go in different directions with that. Something like this would be a beautiful way to start to integrate more functional, in quotations, movement into your daily work experience. A foam roller would be another beautiful thing. Just anything, you could play with balancing on the foam roller while you're working, you could get a lacrosse ball, you get any kind of little balls or whatever things that you're into on the ground. So you can be exploring, opening up that tissue around the feet. And it's also very supportive for your mind and for your brain, that stimulation of the feet, there's 7,000 nerve endings in each foot. That stimulates your whole entire nervous system. It's not just a foot thing. So spending time alternating back and forth, stepping one foot up, back and forth like that every now and again, every minute or so or whatever feels good for you, that will take your lower back out of excessive extension. Next thing to pay attention to like we mentioned, your visual muscles, they are neurological muscles or a continuation of your central nervous system. So if we are myopically focused, myopic being like, near vision focused in on a point, that is actually a state of contraction for the muscles around the eye. Reason being, when you're looking up close like that you need to refract that light to be able to actually have a clear image, much like the aperture of a lens 'cause that's what your eye is. And so you're literally in a state of tension when you're holding your eyes in that position of looking at something close. So the recommendation is put your screen near a window. So I have a window back here. So I'd be able to oscillate every, whatever, every five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever, would depend on how you're feeling. Just looking out the window for a second. And also spacing out with your eyes. So oscillating in and out of myopic focus, we're focused in, into this panoramic view. So it's not that I just am looking into the distance through the window, but I'm also oscillating in of, I could be looking at different points. I could look at this tree that's close by. I could look at the house that's further away. I could scan left to right. I could space out and try to take in the whole entire room. I could look up quickly. I could look down quickly. And really just taking my visual muscles through a full range of motion just like I would do with my body if I went to a weightlifting class or a yoga class or a dance class. So start to kind of plant the seed of awareness that your visual muscles, they are, just like any other musculoskeletal system in the body, they want to go through a full range of motion just like anything else. So those range of motion, it's up, it's down, it's left, it's right, it's darting in different directions. It's myopic focus. It's panoramic focus. It's closing your eyes, darkness. It's opening your eyes wide. You could start to stretch open the connective tissue around the eyes as well. So when we're just staring into a screen all day, I'm sure folks have experienced, maybe you get like tension headaches or you just feel kind of like, ugh, like bogged down. We need natural light exposure on our eyes and we need to go through a full range of motion with our visual muscles. This is so crucially important, I can't state it enough how important it is that we start to think of our eye muscles like the rest of the muscles in our body. It's so easy for us to think of going through all the range of motion of our hips and our shoulders and our spine. We can do it with our eyes as well, crucially important. Next thing I have a set of parallettes on the ground. So this is kind of maybe a wacky thing for some people, but it's just an example of something you could bring into your life to start to get a little blood flow and a little pump in while you're working. So something you could do is maybe set a timer, say every 20 minutes or so or whatever works for you, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, hour, whatever's good for you. I'd say like 20 to 30 minutes is a great timeframe. And in between that, take a break, you know, have a concentrated work session and then take a break. You could come down, you could do some pushups on the parallettes. I also have here a slack block is what this is called. I have no affiliation to any of this stuff. It's just something nice to kind of have around. So this is, you know, something that's kind of working on my balance a little bit. It's almost like having like a little slack line around. You could have resistance bands, that's another really amazing tool. So we have the align band or the strength kit that we also have on the website. That would just be a great thing to have in your visual field. So at any moment you could grab some resistance bands, do some exercises, balance on the slack box, do a little stretch on the slant board, do some pushups, just keep the body moving. And then next thing that'd be very crucially important would be taking walking breaks with great regularity. So anytime you have a meeting, take it outside, invite people. If you have a coffee meeting, you're gonna go sit in a coffee shop with someone, why not just say, hey, let's go get coffees and go for a walk. And while you're walking, you can start to implement all those same exercises that we were talking about with your eyes. You could be actively looking up into the sky, looking up into clouds, looking up into the trees, essentially all the things that we all did as kids. So coming back, reenlivening those parts of ourselves as we're working. And these are things like, you know, people like Steve jobs, for example, found walking meetings to be incredibly valuable. Most of the smartest people on the planet in our history got their ideas while they were taking a bath or swimming or sailing or taking a walk. It's because your brain is a continuation of your body. So a moving body is a moving mind. A sedentary, stagnant body is that in the mind. So this stuff, hopefully it's landing how deeply important it is. Not just for muscles or for eye health, specifically in the eye or specifically in the muscles or the spine. But it's really like your vitality as a person and your spirit and your creativity, and like deep down who you are and who you feel, you know, who you can be. So it gets kind of a, it's quite meaningful. The way that we move in our body really is, it's the way that we relate in our relationships, the way that we relate in our business, the way we relate in our thoughts. And so while we're working, it's a great opportunity to tap into our somatic selves, to draw that creativity into what we're putting onto the canvas or into the screen. And then the last thing, we don't have it set up here but it'll be sitting down on the ground. And so you can check out, the Align Method book has a full breakdown of that. The other Align Method program that we did has a full breakdown of how to effectively be on the ground. I have tons of videos on YouTube and on the Instagram as well as my podcast so we can go deeper into the topics. Don't have the setup for it here right now, but you just jump over the Align Method program and you can see all of that, of how to do that. And all the same principles will apply, high screen, low shoulders, have a window nearby, take regular breaks, simple recipe. So I hope that is supportive to your work environment. And let's move on to the next section.