Health is the most important asset even for wealthy people who don’t need to work long hours. If you are not yet wealthy, then your health is twice as important to you because you need to be productive and creative in your career to achieve your goals. During work hours, your body experiences a substantial amount of stress, which can be intellectual, emotional or physical stress associated with solving tasks, communicating with people with views different from your own, coming up with creative solutions to urgent problems, and many more. Here are a few useful tips that are based on solid medical evidence on how to maintain health in the workplace and ensure a fruitful and productive career undisrupted by diseases caused by work stress.
Preserving Your Vision Is a Vital Health Necessity at Your Workplace
Adequate visual “sharpness” or visual acuity is essential for your productivity, especially if you have a “desk” job that involves working on the computer, reading or writing. These types of close work require a significant amount of visual effort, and can cause eyestrain and headaches if you don’t use eye relaxation techniques. Nature did not design our vision for prolonged close work tasks because our ancestors were spending an important amount of time looking at distant objects, such as detecting an approaching enemy or threat, or looking for deer during hunting. Prolonged visual tasks such as reading, working on your computer or writing require a sustained effort from the small muscles that are responsible for visual adaptation for close work. After hours of looking at your computer screen, you may experience intense headaches, eye strain and loss of productivity. Moreover, these symptoms can generate substantial amounts of stress, which increase the risk for anxiety disorders or depression.
Alternate Close Work with Eye Relaxation by Looking at Distant Objects
There is a simple and very effective method of preventing eye strain for people who have office jobs. After about 10 or 15 minutes of work on your computer or reading, choose to look at the most distant corner in your office and examine the objects located there. Your eye muscles will instantly relax and will “regroup” for your next working session. It is even better if you can stand up and look through the window at cars in the traffic, trees or people. Some people might continue experiencing headaches and eye strain symptoms even after regularly using eye relaxation techniques. If you are one of them, there is a high probability that you may have a mild or moderate refractive error in one or both eyes, such as astigmatism. This is not a dangerous condition because it is easily corrected through eyeglasses or surgery, but it can be the cause of intense headaches, eye pain and stress-related disorders because everything appears a little blurry and requires more visual effort. Some people don’t even know they had a mild or moderate degree of astigmatism all their life until they are examined by an eye care expert and prescribed eyeglasses. Nearsightedness or myopia usually does not interfere with the ability of a person to perform office tasks.
Control Your Arousal Level and Stress through Breathing Exercises
For some reason, when we are engaging in slow, deep breathing instead of shallow, rapid breathing, our brain sends “relaxation” impulses throughout the body. You can reduce your stress even more by being aware of your breathing, or, in other words, observing your breathing or counting the number of breaths. This technique is effectively employed in meditation and yoga practices, which are well-known stress-relief remedies. However, it is unlikely that you have time for meditation in your workplace, so simply engaging in this simple and effective breathing routine can dramatically reduce stress and keep you more focused and alert when you are surrounded by stress and chaos.
Guest post contributed on behalf of FruitfullOffice.co.uk. Learn more about office fruit benefits.