Touchy Back

The body is a hell of a thing.. we do something for a while and it ends up adding to a little bit of a difficult scenario and eventually we notice it!

It's interesting, one of the things that I was doing to seemingly increase my comfort level when I was working from my home office was to simply add a pillow to my office chair. It is a decent office chair already but it doesn't have enough of a cushion for my liking, and one I will eventually be rectifying but for the time being, I was making it what I thought was a little more comfortable.

Then the back pain started a few months back. I was very confused as to what the heck was going on! I am 5 or 10 pounds over my normal weight so I figured that it wasn't me just getting out of shape and getting fat, although it's certainly not impossible these extra few pounds would make a difference in that regard. Still, though, I was trying to figure out the root cause of it all. I knew I may be sitting for work a little more than I should and I had gotten rid of my homemade standing desk, so I was working while sitting constantly.

I know that I had occasionally bad posture where I was sitting on one of my legs under my butt. That is horrible for your spine and alignment of your pelvis and stuff but it kind of felt good haha. I eliminated that pretty quickly and easily! I catch myself doing it every so often and have to immediately get my leg back onto the ground.

I did get a formal standing desk and I actually really like it, because it gives me a lot of good benefits and added things like extra space and monitors and stuff. That was a solid win for me! I still had some back pain though.. and this was really starting to annoy me haha. I was sleeping okay, had mainly laid on my back and sometimes my side with a tiny pillow between my knees (I hate when my knees are touching when I'm sleeping for some reason lol) but the damn thing was still a little painful!

It was literally this week, after several months, when I was thinking "is it the pillow I'm sitting on causing this issue????" so I said fuck it, let's try it. I removed the pillow from my seat and worked sitting down for two hours. Do you know what? My fucking back didn't hurt like it did the day before from sitting LOL. Son of a bitch!

Thinking holistically about the situation, it makes sense. The office chairs that they have been selling are popular for a reason, because they are often decent for ergonomics and our back health. The chairs are designed to scoop under your butt so that it supports and evenly distributes weight and all that jazz. Adding a pillow to that seat creates this weird change to your spine and pelvis to move it off kilter. Seats in a car are very similar where it scoops your butt downwards and towards your back so that your legs are angled upwards a little bit.

I was ignoring my body for a while when I would sit down and it was telling me everything I needed to know about the situation in order to fix it. I for sure know that we tend to ignore some things that are pretty basic and I am sad but fortunate to say that I failed at this one, but also recognized that I could troubleshoot my way to a better situation eventually! It's only been a day since I started this so there's no guarantees that this was the complete solution but it was a promising work day of minimal back irritation from sitting in my chair! I hope I can get this figured out because it's been not only annoying me but changing my habits a little bit and reducing some of the things I like to do which is horrible!