I got RSI after a few years of steadily increasing computer time, culminating in a year of 14 hours per day at the computer, almost every day.
The first thing is that having never had RSI, there were signs that I ignored during that last year, notably that my nerves gave me small electric shocks in the armpits from time to time, which I interpreted as a quirky oddity. Then just one day it felt like my arms nerves were literally burning, and the pain just became unbearable.
After medical examination, my nerves were fairly damaged, so the specialists I saw advised to either worsen the situation enough to make surgery the only choice, or find a way to get better.
I chose the latter, which included every solution that can be suggested. More rest, more exercise, I tried a few device change, and most importantly changing posture.
It took almost 2 years before computer use become "generally not painful" again.
Device of choice did not make a big difference, except for one: having a secondary standing desk with a treadmill. I took that from an old Linus Torvalds interview, it's a small monetary investment, but a big health one. The biggest downside is that it takes a lot of space. In my case, the main problem was linked to prolonged pressure on a few key points, a problem that doesn't really occur when moving.
Before that, I used to have a laptop so that I could spend the work day in different postures, move to a couch, etc.
Regarding the article, I can confirm that pain was in different modes during these different periods, but that also matches the risk of physical damage.
I feel that as long as you're just doing a half-hearted effort that is just an attempt to deceive your body, pain will only worsen.
It's only after you learn to listen to the pain that the real progress is made.
badc0ffee · 10h ago
I remember carpal tunnel syndrome being a big thing 25+ years ago, and I had friends with wrist braces.
You don't hear much about it now. Is it because treatment improved, or we use keyboards with much less travel, or there's better general awareness of ergonomics, or that there's more mouse/trackpad use mixed in with typing now? Or is it something else?
therealfiona · 5h ago
I wear waist braces at night. Switching my keyboard layout to Colemak was the #1 improvement. #2 was ditching the apple mouse and apple track pad for a track ball mouse. The braces help with cubital tunnel syndrome.
It sucks. But my body could be broken in other ways. I'll take this inconvenience. Hopefully it doesn't get worse before I retire.
wonger_ · 4h ago
The article matches my experience and that of many others. It also mentions some key ideas that I haven't seen in other RSI/pain-epiphany writeups:
- It may take a variety of resources to accept the idea that your pain doesn't mean injury (see the first image). Like, you might hear about Sarno's mindbody connection and think it's total quackery because of the language. Maybe it triggers the BS detector in a lot of us. So listen to the same ideas from other perspectives. The author links to Schubiner's talk on chronic pain, which I heartily recommend as the right balance of rigor and tone: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0VyH1laOd2M. Curable helped me too: https://www.curablehealth.com/clara/. Click through until you get to the audio sections and give them a listen.
Testimonials from tech people may help break the old mental model of pain, or at least point convincingly to resources that do. Josh Comeau, the CSS guy, has a post that links to further testimonials: https:www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/mindbody
- The second half of healing is calming down the nervous system. The author accomplished this with different therapies, equipped with greater awareness and tools. Others fix their default stress state by leaving the stressful environment, i.e. changing jobs. Either way, the pain goes away.
Kudos to the author for presenting everything clearly.
codethief · 10h ago
As someone who had RSI for years, my one recommendation (which resolved things for me in the end) would be: Get your neck and posture checked. Chances are your problems are coming from up to chain.
In my case it took me a good 5-6 years to figure this out. Then I started working on my overall posture, and my issues virtually disappeared over night. A friend of mine, who was also struggling with RSI a couple years later, ended up following the same protocol and he, too, is 100% painfree these days.
tomjen3 · 10h ago
Your comment is extremely interesting but it leaves me with so many questions. For example,
Where does one get one's posture checked? I'm 100% serious is this something a doctor can do?
Second, if we assume my posture is terrible - which well, I basically walk looking down at my feet all the time - so you can think of me as the human equivalent of the Leaning Tower. How do you go about fixing it? I mean, I can walk straight which feels weird, but I'll forget about it in 5-10 seconds and go back to being the human equivalent of the Leaning Tower.
What did you do to fix your posture?
codethief · 22m ago
As the sibling said, a good physiotherapist should be able to point you in the right direction in terms of which areas to focus on and what muscles you need to work out (i.e. which ones are too weak). In my case, I had done boxing for many years and I had the typical boxer's posture (shoulders tilted forward, round back etc.), and it also surely didn't help that I was sitting the rest of the day. Now, while boxing is great for your body overall, it does train the muscles on the front of your body a bit more than on your back, and to make matters worse the stance you take in boxing is asymmetrical, so that's where my issues where coming from: My bad posture was basically putting excessive pressure & stress on the nerves responsible for my arms & hands, which led to the latter constantly cramping up, being irritated & hurting, tingling, and so on.
So they had me focus on my traps, rear deltoids, neck musculature, and all the smaller back muscles in order to get me straight again (straighten my back, pull back my shoulders and head, et cetera).
At the same time, they also noticed a rather strong anterior pelvic tilt (which goes hand in hand with rounded shoulders), so I also worked on that through a number of core exercises (abs, lower back, glutes, etc.)
As you say, we can all try to focus on walking straight but we'll forget in no time. The solution to this is to train your muscles to remember for you. Now, to be clear, there's no magical memory in your muscles, it's simply about force balance: If your posture is skewed, some of your muscles are likely too weak, while others are too strong (and/or gravity is too strong), so your bones and joints get pulled in the wrong direction.
You say standing straight feels weird to you now. It did to me, too, because I had to overcome my weak muscles to stay straight, until my muscles became stronger and my new posture became second nature. Nowadays, I feel weird when my posture deteriorates again, so that's a clear signal to me then that I have neglected my exercises and need to put in more work again.
Finally, a word on the topic of ergonomic equipment, because I tried a lot over the years: Of course a decent desk setup (keyboard, mouse, chair, screen, …) is valuable and might help alleviate the pain but let's not kid ourselves: You are (or become) what you do most of the day, which among us techies likely is sitting. So passive instruments (sitting differently) rarely get you fixed 100% (likely not even 20%); we actually have to put in active work ourselves!
jagger27 · 3h ago
Yes, a physiotherapist can answer these questions and offer guidance for posture correction.
dingnuts · 10h ago
most serious companies provide an ergonomics assessment where a professional comes to your desk and adjusts everything to where you will have the right posture.
If you work for a large company and they don't provide this, well, they don't care about your health.
Maybe someone else knows how to get an ergonomic assessment done outside of the office
sgarland · 4h ago
I just ordered a ZSA Moonlander in the hopes it will help, because it’s been getting progressively worse for me. I have an Uplift desk (which admittedly I never use in the standing position; it’s just a great desk that I could precisely position), a Steelcase Leap chair, and every other aspect of ergo taken care of. I’ve been to physical therapy repeatedly.
What baffles me the most is that I can spend hours on my laptop, using its built-in keyboard, and be fine. Maybe there is something to the psychosomatic element – I’ve trained myself that my desk equals pain.
jagger27 · 3h ago
Try moving your desk to another spot in your room.
ajolly · 10h ago
Switching to a Svalboard has made a big difference for me. It took me a few years before finding this keyboard. The magnetic breakaway keys make it significantly gentler on my fingers than anything else I've tried. It's similar to the old data hand keyboards. https://svalboard.com/
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe · 6h ago
You might be interested in charachord, I think their product is called forge
ieie3366 · 9h ago
It’s probably anxiety. The brain is a strange beast.
Try a combination of heavy weightlifting, HIIT, and optionally SSRIs.
vunderba · 8h ago
I play multiple music instruments (piano, violin, guitar), play tennis, contact and pin juggle, and work as a software engineer.
The most important changes I made in my life which fixed RSI related issues (carpal, tendonitis, etc) permanently were:
- Proper ergonomic keyboard (consider a split layout)
I have a friend who struggled with RSI for years, tried every keyboard and mouse under the sun, and nothing worked.
Then he quit the job he hated, got a job he enjoyed (both coding), and his RSI went away in a week. Sometimes it really is psychosomatic (which doesn't mean the pain is fake).
Personally I've had mild wrist pain since college (10+ years). Decent posture, a reasonable keyboard, letting my arms form a natural angle, and floating my wrists above the keyboard seems to help. My hands cramp up after 20min of typing in a narrow airplane seat for example. But I can type for hours on my ipad magic keyboard in my lap or my ergonomic mechanical keyboard just fine.
cenamus · 10h ago
Yeah the laptop position works really well from a wrist/typing position for me, but of cource mouse and screen are still terrible with a laptop.
Maybe half a thinkpad would be a decent keyboard format, if it's wireless and a bit ergonomically formed to fit the legs?
I've had pain where the lateral head of my gastrocnemius attaches behind my knee for months. I just did that little press-pull-release thing and it was instant relief. I literally don't remember the last time I didn't feel that pain.
samesense · 10h ago
I’ve been controlling rsi with upper body mobility and strength training + typing breaks for years. This mind over matter approach sounds like bullshit.
frereubu · 10h ago
That's pretty dismissive for what seemed to be a thoughtful article. Do you think the person who wrote it somehow imagined the decrease in pain? Just because you sorted your out in that way doesn't mean other people can't manage it in different ways - as the doctor said, they don't really know what it is, so it could have a whole cluster of different causes that respond to different kinds of treatment.
Device of choice did not make a big difference, except for one: having a secondary standing desk with a treadmill. I took that from an old Linus Torvalds interview, it's a small monetary investment, but a big health one. The biggest downside is that it takes a lot of space. In my case, the main problem was linked to prolonged pressure on a few key points, a problem that doesn't really occur when moving.
Before that, I used to have a laptop so that I could spend the work day in different postures, move to a couch, etc.
Regarding the article, I can confirm that pain was in different modes during these different periods, but that also matches the risk of physical damage. I feel that as long as you're just doing a half-hearted effort that is just an attempt to deceive your body, pain will only worsen. It's only after you learn to listen to the pain that the real progress is made.
You don't hear much about it now. Is it because treatment improved, or we use keyboards with much less travel, or there's better general awareness of ergonomics, or that there's more mouse/trackpad use mixed in with typing now? Or is it something else?
It sucks. But my body could be broken in other ways. I'll take this inconvenience. Hopefully it doesn't get worse before I retire.
- It may take a variety of resources to accept the idea that your pain doesn't mean injury (see the first image). Like, you might hear about Sarno's mindbody connection and think it's total quackery because of the language. Maybe it triggers the BS detector in a lot of us. So listen to the same ideas from other perspectives. The author links to Schubiner's talk on chronic pain, which I heartily recommend as the right balance of rigor and tone: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0VyH1laOd2M. Curable helped me too: https://www.curablehealth.com/clara/. Click through until you get to the audio sections and give them a listen.
Testimonials from tech people may help break the old mental model of pain, or at least point convincingly to resources that do. Josh Comeau, the CSS guy, has a post that links to further testimonials: https:www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/mindbody
- The second half of healing is calming down the nervous system. The author accomplished this with different therapies, equipped with greater awareness and tools. Others fix their default stress state by leaving the stressful environment, i.e. changing jobs. Either way, the pain goes away.
Kudos to the author for presenting everything clearly.
In my case it took me a good 5-6 years to figure this out. Then I started working on my overall posture, and my issues virtually disappeared over night. A friend of mine, who was also struggling with RSI a couple years later, ended up following the same protocol and he, too, is 100% painfree these days.
Where does one get one's posture checked? I'm 100% serious is this something a doctor can do?
Second, if we assume my posture is terrible - which well, I basically walk looking down at my feet all the time - so you can think of me as the human equivalent of the Leaning Tower. How do you go about fixing it? I mean, I can walk straight which feels weird, but I'll forget about it in 5-10 seconds and go back to being the human equivalent of the Leaning Tower.
What did you do to fix your posture?
So they had me focus on my traps, rear deltoids, neck musculature, and all the smaller back muscles in order to get me straight again (straighten my back, pull back my shoulders and head, et cetera).
At the same time, they also noticed a rather strong anterior pelvic tilt (which goes hand in hand with rounded shoulders), so I also worked on that through a number of core exercises (abs, lower back, glutes, etc.)
As you say, we can all try to focus on walking straight but we'll forget in no time. The solution to this is to train your muscles to remember for you. Now, to be clear, there's no magical memory in your muscles, it's simply about force balance: If your posture is skewed, some of your muscles are likely too weak, while others are too strong (and/or gravity is too strong), so your bones and joints get pulled in the wrong direction.
You say standing straight feels weird to you now. It did to me, too, because I had to overcome my weak muscles to stay straight, until my muscles became stronger and my new posture became second nature. Nowadays, I feel weird when my posture deteriorates again, so that's a clear signal to me then that I have neglected my exercises and need to put in more work again.
Finally, a word on the topic of ergonomic equipment, because I tried a lot over the years: Of course a decent desk setup (keyboard, mouse, chair, screen, …) is valuable and might help alleviate the pain but let's not kid ourselves: You are (or become) what you do most of the day, which among us techies likely is sitting. So passive instruments (sitting differently) rarely get you fixed 100% (likely not even 20%); we actually have to put in active work ourselves!
If you work for a large company and they don't provide this, well, they don't care about your health.
Maybe someone else knows how to get an ergonomic assessment done outside of the office
What baffles me the most is that I can spend hours on my laptop, using its built-in keyboard, and be fine. Maybe there is something to the psychosomatic element – I’ve trained myself that my desk equals pain.
Try a combination of heavy weightlifting, HIIT, and optionally SSRIs.
The most important changes I made in my life which fixed RSI related issues (carpal, tendonitis, etc) permanently were:
- Proper ergonomic keyboard (consider a split layout)
- Posture (Alexander technique, Taubman technique)
- Trigger point therapy (with a Knobble tool)
I can highly recommend this book:
https://www.newharbinger.com/9781608824960/the-trigger-point...
Then he quit the job he hated, got a job he enjoyed (both coding), and his RSI went away in a week. Sometimes it really is psychosomatic (which doesn't mean the pain is fake).
Personally I've had mild wrist pain since college (10+ years). Decent posture, a reasonable keyboard, letting my arms form a natural angle, and floating my wrists above the keyboard seems to help. My hands cramp up after 20min of typing in a narrow airplane seat for example. But I can type for hours on my ipad magic keyboard in my lap or my ergonomic mechanical keyboard just fine.
Maybe half a thinkpad would be a decent keyboard format, if it's wireless and a bit ergonomically formed to fit the legs?