Why do we suffer aches, pains, injuries and
stress despite the most up-to-date, expensive "ergonomic" furniture?
The problems we deal with daily in staying comfortable
and therefore productive, are not new. They have, however, been
highlighted and intensified by the advent of computer technology.
Computers are, of course, here to stay:. Ergonomic considerations,
eg furniture, heights, angles, etc. have a bearing and it is important
to get these easily adjustable external elements correctly organised.
However, these external considerations clearly
do not answer everybody's needs. After all, we all already know
about the desirability of good posture, relaxation, and the absence
of tension.
Rather than looking at the problem from the
outside, in terms of "good chairs", the "right position", or the
"correct way to lift", what about considering the more fundamental
internal aspects of how we organise our balance and co-ordination?
These are the things which influence how comfortable we stay, how
tired we get, how alert or mentally "sharp" we are and how prone
to injury or stress we become. They are also the elements over which
we can learn to have a direct and instant personal control. Here
is what FM Alexander said in 1910 (!):
"...I am continually being asked, both by
friends and unknown correspondents, for my opinion concerning
the correct type of chair, stool, desk, or table to be used in
order to prevent the bad habits which these pieces of furniture
are supposed to have caused .... In my replies I have tried to
demonstrate that the problem is being attacked from the wrong
standpoint.
Let us consider the problem in the light of
common sense. Suppose, for example, that there is an ideal chair,
some wonderful arrangement of perfect angles, hollows, and supports
that will almost magically rectify or prevent every fault in [a
person's] physical mechanism. Suppose further that the [person]
finds great ease and repose when seated in this ideal chair. How,
then, can he avoid suffering the tortures of all that is uncomfortable
when he rides in the cars, or sits down in his own home, or visits
a friend, or goes for a picnic on the river or in the woods? I
see nothing else for it; when that ideal chair has been found,
our[person] will have to carry if about with him wherever he goes.
In the second place, how is it possible for
this ideal chair to be miraculously adaptable to every age and
type of [person]? Are we to treat [people] as plastic lumps of
clay to be fitted to the model insisted upon by the lines of our
ideal chair...?
No, what we need to do is not to educate our
.... furniture, but to educate ....[people]. Give a [person] the
ability to adapt himself within reasonable limits to his environment,
and he will not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits,
whatever chair or form you give him to sit upon. I say, "within
reasonable limits," for it is obviously absurd to expect a Brobdingnagian
[person] to use a Lilliputian chair. But let us waste no valuable
time, thought, or invention in designing furniture, when by a
smaller expenditure of those three gifts we may train [a person]
to win [his] own conscious control, and rise superior to any probable
limitations imposed by ordinary .... fittings." (my italics).
FM Alexander's observations, made over a century
ago, on how we respond to stressful situations, have stood the test
of time. He identified the basic patterns of good "Use of the Self";
that is, how to optimise performance and minimise the risk of suffering
a range of musculo-skeletal injuries. Alexander has left us a simple
method for self-maintenance, which anybody can learn to use.
