2017-06-28 RSI
Recently I received an email by somebody who is developing pains in his fingers. Is it because of Emacs? The wrong keyboard? Bad posture? Carpal tunnel syndrom? Is it repetitive strain injury (RSI) imminent?
I know the feeling. Years ago, I had the same problem. And I was not alone. The Emacs Wiki RSI page has more stories. The short summary I wrote on my own page: I saw a doctor, started physiotherapy on 2002-02-05. I bought a Kinesis keyboard. I used little programs that forced me to take a lot of breaks. It didnāt help. I stopped therapy 2002-10-21 and decided to work less, get up more often, started practicing Aikido, and no longer work in long shifts. That helped.
Thereās a certain sadness that comes with all that. Hereās what I wrote back:
Hello again
I donāt think I can help you. I basically decided that Iād rather change my life than get my neck x-rayed in order to look for possible nerve issues (with the obvious implication that if we did find something, weād operate on it). So thatās what I did. I work a 60% job over the year with all Fridays off and a four month break in summer. I picked a sport to improve posture (I picked Aikido because I donāt like competitions). I felt encouraged to do this because I had noticed that the pain disappeared over long weekends and holidays. Obviously work was having a negative effect. These days it still comes back if I work for long hours or if Iām angry or both, when Iām angry about having to work long hours. I also noticed that the pain comes back quicker when I spend long hours at home at the laptop, and no fancy keyboard I tried actually helped. So I figured it must be something about the seating, the table height, or whatever. And so I cut back my coding at home, too. More running, more walking, more Aikido, more reading, playing an instrument, whatever it takes. A different hobby, to take my mind away from the only hobby I had for many years, code.
Wishing you the best of luck
Alex
ā#Life ā#Programming
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I successfully healed myself, so hereās my advice:
- Pay attention to everything you do on the keyboard. Are there any awkward moves that your hands have to do? Does anything feel especially painful? Are there any key strokes you can easily avoid? Listen to your body.
- If your pain is one-sided (e.g. just the right hand, or the pain feels different), then it may help you identify the problem.
- Once you have identified your causes, fix them. Or if you canāt, just do things differently. Vertical mouse? Higher mouse/trackpoint sensitivity? Better .emacs config? Maybe learn some shortcuts? Or remap some keys on your keyboard? Do something.
- You will feel the improvement quicklyā¦ a little bit. But the pain will continue for a couple of months.
See Xah Lee's RSI experience. He is describing a similar thing. That is, pay attention to the problems that may be the cause of your RSI, fix them, the issue will start to go away.
ā AlexDaniel 2017-06-30 12:39 UTC