We spend so much time on our computers, writing papers, taking notes, surfing the internet, spending hours a day looking at our laptops, but instead of thinking about the harm we’re doing for our eyesight and even our posture, what about our hands and wrists? Leaving our arms in that position for a long period can’t be good, so I’ve decided to look into if so-called keyboard posture is bad for us.
Hands and wrists and arms that become numb can all be contributed to prolonged use and the same movement of hands in this position. A build up of fluid in the wrists can cause a cyst growth, or even tendonitis. In this article, if you experience any wrist pain, make sure to take breaks while typing for long periods of time, moving your wrists around to allow some muscle movement and to not allow your wrists to get cramped up. It is also recommended to move your keyboard in different positions to maintain that changing of wrist positions.
Do your wrists ever hurt from sitting at your computer for too long? What other ways can you help the strain of your wrists? Will sitting at this position for long periods of time hurt our health in the future for arthritis and carpel tunnel?
Typing is something that should be a commonplace thing to learn now in the digital age of computers and keyboards. When you think about it, it is pretty much an essential skill to the growth of humanity now since a lot of things now depend on proper typing skills. Of course there is a right way to type and a wrong way which leads to aching wrists, but one thing I think that I see is everyone learns how to type differently and sometimes the methods, hand position, and posteriors for typing vary from person to person. It’s just a matter of what way works best for the person typing and what way is most comfortable for the person that is typing.
There needs to be a class teaching kids to type. What a life skill that I never learned and still need to use one figure per letter. I think if this was a class offered in middle school and high school we could save both the wrists and time of many around the world.
The topic you bring up in this blog is very alarming and prevalent to our 21st century workforce. You had mentioned the computer routine of the average college student, but how about the other 86% of Americans that sit all day at their job. According to this article the awkward posture created from sitting at a computer all day is a leading cause of headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome, lower back pains, and tendonitis not only limited to the hands, fingers, and wrists, but shoulders and elbows. Bad posture is a direct causation to a poor musculoskeletal health, thus suffering from the previous listed disorders. Although building wrist strength while at the computer is vital, it is best to prevent these problems with a proper posture. To help with posture, adjust your computer workstation to eye level, and when using a laptop, set it upon a raised surface to avoid a slouching posture. This article advises that if you are using a laptop for more than three to four hours daily, to purchase a laptop stand, external keyboard and mouse to avoid poor posture. I don’t believe there’s a student at PSU with such devices and perhaps this is the leading cause to the concern in your article regarding college students.
Hello Jamie,
I actually really appreciated this article and related well to it because I have felt intense pain in my wrist recently after a long period of time on my laptop. My grandmother even jokes about the parallel of carpal tunnel with this generation-induced wrist pain, but however, according to WebMD, this is fortunately not the case! According to the article, a new study suggests that typing on a computer for more than 20-25 hours per week does not increase the risk of tingling, numbness, and pain in hands and arms associated with the carpal tunnel syndrome. Hooray, our hours of blogging and attempting to do homework won’t hurt us in the long run, but will texting?
According to ABC News, the carpal tunnel syndrome can indeed be a cause to teenagers having carpal tunnel syndrome. 16-year-old Annie Levitz, for example, who sent 13 texts per every hour she was awake, began to feel the pain in her wrists, and later had to brought under the surgeon’s knife.
Is there really that much of a significant difference between texting and typing? Could these studies have flaws contain any sort of false positives that are blurring the lines? Either way, this problem is definitely growing and will keep growing since the generations are becoming more and more technology reliant.