If desktops go on your desk, then laptops must go on your lap, though desktops on your desk are favorable to a laptop on your lap.

While using the Alexander Technique helps greatly, having a computer on your lap puts you in a very challenging position. Your eyes are way up there but the screen is way down

here.

One of the easiest and most common ways to look down is to collapse your chest and jut your neck forward, a perfect example of bad posture. This potentially harmful position could be called laptop neck, joining ‘computer neck’, ‘text neck’, ‘blackberry neck’, ‘cell phone neck’, and eventually ‘life-neck’. This forward neck posture and concurrent spinal compression often leads to back pain, or neck pain, or headaches.

Alexander Technique principles help greatly when we have to look down for prolonged periods.

The Alexander Technique and computer posture

 

Make use of the freedom of your eyes. Our gaze can be rigid and fixed just as our neck, shoulders, and breathing can be rigid and fixed. As you look at these words right now, peripherally see what is around the screen. Notice the range of your vision without even moving your eyes.

Move your eyes and notice how wide your vision can be both vertically and horizontally, without using your neck and moving your head.

If you put your index fingers in your ears parallel to the ground and imagine a rod connecting them, you’ve identified the height at which the spine and head meet. This is the place from which to pivot the head to assist in looking up or down. It’s much higher than we think.  If it doesn’t seem like a normal motion for you, it probably isn’t. But, developing the habit of looking down at laptops, cell phones, tablets, food, and drink in this way might spare you unnecessary discomfort, pain, and trips to the medicine cabinet or doctor.

Mark Josefsberg-Alexander Technique NYC

Mark@MarkJosefsberg.com

(917) 709-4648