Shifting the Trajectory: Undoing the Damage of Working in Front of a Computer Screen

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Georgios. I've been writing code for a very long time. I started when I was about 11 years old, probably like a lot of you here. And I'm here to talk about something that we don't often talk about in technical conferences or anywhere in our industry, which is the effect of our work to our bodies.

So let's start. You know, this is near the end of the day. You've been sitting most of the time. Just do a quick body check and just make a note to yourself on what are you feeling right in different parts of your body. So you might notice that your shoulders are a little bit stiff or your neck is a little forward and stiff or maybe your knees are hurting or your ankles. Those are things that I usually notice about myself. And it's good to take note of that.

The wake up call for me was when I was 28 years old. I'm 41 now. And I had some back pain. So I went to the doctor and he said, you need to go for an MRI. And I did. And the MRI showed that my spine already had some degeneration that you would expect from someone a little bit, a good amount older than me. So I was like, you know, that's odd. And then later on I had issues with my knees and that also showed somewhere there that was ahead of my age. And it really made me concerned. And then I started looking into it and I found that this is not really you know, I'm not special in that way.

I found that there is even a recent study that shows that 73%, that's like three out of four nine year olds have a bulging disc on at least one level, which means that at least on one level of their spine, right, one of the discs has degenerated. And we'll show what that is in a little bit. So the, you know, the issue is, is very prominent in our age, we know with electronic devices that we do this hunched position very much. And, you know, if nine year olds have it, that, you know, they've been sitting only for a few years, what's happening with us, I've been sitting for decades.

And the biggest lesson that I learned through all that experience was that pain shows up at the end, right. So at any point in time, our body responds to any situation, anything that's going on, it's compensating, right? So it will shift your weight, it will change the, you know, where you put the pressure. It has many ways of adapting to things that are going on that are making it, are making our body uncomfortable. And pain is at the end of all that, right? So at the time when the body has exhausted all of its resources, then it starts to hurt and say, this is, you know, this is all I could have done.

Now you need to take care of this. So in this iceberg metaphor, you know, we're only seeing the pain when it arises, but actually the, what led us there has been going on for years, if not decades. And I've also noticed that there's a little bit of a gap in that there's no assigned role in society for someone to tell us these things, right, to help us prevent this situation. So doctors, you know, we go to the doctor when we have pain. And by that time, it might be already too late, right? This might be some damage already that we cannot reverse maybe. And then, you know, trainers have a very athletic sort of point of view in what they do and how they instruct us. No one's talking about what's happening when we sit.

So what is happening when we sit? This is only scratching the surface. But these are very, three very distinct and important things to remember about what happens to our bodies when we sit. And the first one is that in about three hours, our arteries, which naturally are elastic, right? So as the blood flows through our arteries, they expand and contract. Depending on the blood flow, they lose the elasticity 2 to 4%. That might not sound a lot, but actually 1% change is correlated with 13% increase in heart disease risk. In under two weeks of sedentary behavior, right, so not moving very much, four and a half thousand genes change their expression, which means that they become inactive, right? The role of genes is to actually produce proteins that have different functions in the body. And when we say that they change their expression, they become inactive. They don't do that anymore. So just to put things into context, four and a half thousand genes, that's about 20 to 25 of all the genes that exist in your muscles.

And then, of course, for the spine, it's 40 to 90% more pressure on the individual parts of the spine when you're sitting versus when you're standing. Now, the good news, and I'm glad there are some good news, is that most of this we can probably reverse if we don't let it go on for too long, right? Because the body has the tendency to make things permanent, and then we have to do to work a lot harder to reverse the situation. And some of it might not be reversible. A good example is the spine, because this is something that we all kind of suffer from, you know, back pain, hernias, all those things. You might have heard those things. So let's look at what is actually happening.

So on the left, you see this depiction of a spine, and you see the discs, which is the gel structure between the bones, the vertebrae. So that's basically a squishy structure, a structure that is strong, but it can take some pressure, and it prevents the two bones from touching, right? So in a normal situation, you see that the boundaries of the discs are exactly aligned with the bones, and it has a very uniform shape. Now, when it starts degenerating, it means that the gel starts to dry up, and if it dries up, then it's no longer as elastic as it was before. So that's the second sort of progression, the first progression. And then the bulging disc is when the gel starts pushing out towards the canal. So outside of the bones are a lot of nerves, so it starts pushing towards those. And then we say that it's herniated when the gel starts actually pouring out into the canal, potentially.

And then it can also thin, so the gel can reduce its volume, which can also be painful. And then at the end of that, the sort of last stage is when the body goes, well, this is going very wrong. I need to build bones so that I can protect whatever is left. So that's what the osteophytes in the last degeneration of the bottom are. And then on the right, you can see what those stages look like in actual tissue dissection. And unfortunately, this issue happens with all the joints, because in the joint, which is a typical joint, which is what you see on the right, there's two bones, and there's some structures, and there's some liquid in the middle. And that all prevents the two bones from touching each other, which would be very painful. And then also providing lubrication for them to move, right? And as we move our legs and our arms and our spine, the spine is a series, we can think of it as a series of joints.

Now, the issue there is that we mainly think of our heart and our blood system as the main delivering mechanism, but it doesn't actually go to the joints. So if we don't move, there's no way for the body to take nutrients to the joints or take away waste products from whatever it's doing there. And what I said earlier about the body making it permanent, the body neurologically has the tendency of trying to make everything efficient. So anything we do repeatedly, the body goes, well, this is happening a lot, this is what we're doing now, so I need to make this less costly. I need to make it more efficient. So it starts adapting, and it starts creating new structures over time that keep that position in an easier way.

So a very common one is the, there's even a name for it, the Tech Neck, right? So the forward neck here, which is what you see on the x-ray on the left, and on the right you see after it has been rehabilitated and restored to the top of the spine. So quite literally, when we sit too much, we become chair-shaped, right? So our body adapts to retain that shape easier and lays more structure to that effect. Now, when you add stress to that, it's even worse, because stress is obviously a very core part of our lives. You know, no one is without stress. And what you see here in this image is what's called the startled response, which is, they had this guy facing forward and then there was someone behind them who shot a gun, not at them, but just, you know, they heard the sound very closely. And of course they got afraid, and the reaction without them seeing the gun was like this, right? So you can see the head goes forward, the chest closes, and it's the body's primal neurological response to protecting the front of the body, which is more vulnerable, your belly, your heart, all those vital organs.

So in daily life, when we stress, this happens repeatedly, not to that extent that we can see this. This is obviously an extreme example. It's an experiment. But it happens in micro movements which we may not realize and contributes to that shape. So over time, this is what happens. And you might notice that this shape, the upper and lower crossed syndrome, as it's called, has a lot of parallels, a lot of similarities with the shape of sitting in a chair. So these are all issues that are not unique to any of you here. They're, you know, very, very common. And if you start conversating about them, people go, oh, yeah, me too. And it's just something that we don't talk about. You know, neck pain, back pain, tight hips. Most of us are not even aware of those, wrist and forearm issues, you know, from mouse use and a general body ache.

And the way that I got here to be speaking today is that, and I got injured in the first place, was a sort of series of events which in psychology they call a downward spiral. So I, before COVID, I was very fit and active. I was working out almost every day. And then COVID hit, I got worried about work. So I took on too much work. I was working, you know, 12, 14-hour days. So I was sitting more, no training, and then I started gaining weight. I injured myself. And then I started feeling worse about all that, which just triggered more of that sort of destructive behavior. And the point here is that this can happen to any of us, and we need to sort of fix our weak points, let's say. Because, you know, just putting a little bit of weight is not an issue, you know. It happens to everybody, and then we can go on a diet and lose the weight. But when two or three different issues happen at the same time, then, you know, they can quickly snowball.

So the TLDR, right? So what you need to remember from this whole section is that our body actually suffers if we sit for more than 30 minutes. And over time, it actually becomes permanent. So movement is required for the chemistry in our body to work properly, right? This is not some, you know, woo-woo stuff that's, you know, a metaphor for something. This is quite literal. And I like this motto, the rest is rust and motion is lotion.

Something easy to remember. And, you know, if we want to keep healthy, we're going to have to change some of our ways. So let's discuss that, right? It's not all doom and gloom. What can we be doing about this? So there's three main pillars. The first one is breaks, right? We need to be standing up and moving around every 30 to 50 minutes. We don't know the exact, you know, optimal time, but that's the kind of range we need to be working on. And then we need to have movement all throughout the day, not just in some part of the day, and be thinking about it as a compounding effect, right? So every little adds up, basically. And then we also need some high-intensity exercise, which stresses us for over 50% of our maximum heart rate. Now, every time I, you know, I'm in a group of people, and I say anything related to health, and kind of how that is sitting, someone will go, well, I have a standing desk. And it's, you know, it's great that they care about themselves to try and improve their working environment, of course. And, you know, standing desks are better than sitting because our muscles are more active, but it's not enough. And then other people think that, oh, if I walk in the morning or if I walk after work, then, you know, that's OK. I've done my walk. That's good with me. Then this is also not enough to improve all of our health markers. So we also need the intense exercise, which some people think that, oh, you know, if I go to the gym and I work out, then, you know, that's enough. But remember, we need all three of those things, right? So breaks, movement, and high-intensity training.

So I've been talking a lot, and I've been talking about movement. So let's just try something together while you're here, right? So let's just do a simple exercise. So what we need, what we're going to do is just put your hands here on the chest, and let's move backwards and forwards on the neck. I'm going to turn to the side so you can see this. So just like that, and you're not trying to go to the edge or do a stretch or anything. Just do the movements. And then after that, we go to the side, kind of Bollywood style. If it looks a little odd, it is. You get used to it. And then over time, you'll be able to put this in a circle. Now, if you do this just for 10 seconds, right, each way, so 30 seconds total. You'll just notice your neck feeling much better, right? And that was a minimum investment of time. So shifting the trajectory, what does that even mean, right? I chose the title of this talk because as I was doing all this research on the effect of sitting all day, I realized that the chances are against me that if I don't do anything now, the trajectory that I'm going to is towards some sort of disease, right? Whether it's going to be, I don't know, heart disease or diabetes or arthritis or something.

And of course, these can all happen independently, but I'm increasing the chances of that happening for myself. So I thought, what do I need to do to shift that trajectory, right? To have a more open space of what is possible for me. And from what we've discussed already, this is really a simple thing, right? It's not a complex situation. We don't need to solve this really hard equation, and we know what we need to be doing. And the difficult thing is to take action before we have to, right? So before pain shows up, before the blood tests show some sort of problem, by that point, you know, we're at a disadvantage.

The point is to act now so that we never get there because then it's much harder or even impossible to go back. And if you do this, you can expect more energy, better overall health, you know, reduce discomfort, and you're actually be, you know, more satisfied with your work. Now, I know for myself and for mothers that just change is uncomfortable. There's no way around that. And we've normalized this kind of behavior. You know, it's normal for people in our industry to sit for so long, right? No one blinks an eye. Over time, we've made that the norm.

And now we need to go backwards and start creating new habits that bring us to move and to motivate each other to be more active. But it's also imperative because if we want to be healthy and able to move when we're 80 and, you know, be able to maybe dance with our grandchildren or move around or even do some squats, if we have to, then we need to act now. Thank you very much for listening today. This was a brief talk. This is a never-expanding topic. There's so much to discuss. So if you'd like to know more of this and get some actionable insights, then please scan this QR code or visit this URL and sign up for the newsletter. Thank you.