Good posture is crucial for more than simply maintaining an appealing physique. It also helps improve your health and overall well-being. Being mindful of how you stand and sit and making some other minor corrections to your lifestyle can help you reap countless health benefits.
In contrast, if you’re spending longer hours sitting at your office desk, you probably get so stiff that you have trouble walking. Of course, this isn’t simply because you don’t maintain an optimal posture throughout the day but also because of having a sedentary job.
Staying seated for longer periods of time is bad enough on its own, but its negative effects can exponentially increase if you don’t maintain a proper posture. If you keep scrolling through, we will dig a little deeper into why bad posture can result in a decrease in productivity.
Most Employees Aren’t Aware of the Consequences
Many workers who are responsible for standing in assembly lines or lifting heavy objects on a regular basis are mostly trained on how to align their bodies while on the job. Desk workers, on the other hand, don’t receive any such form of training and, therefore, have no clue what a good posture is.
This is why a number of forward-thinking organizations gifted their employees with posture trainers. When worn by employees, posture trainers keep them from slumping and maintain an optimal posture. Speaking of which, a survey conducted by one of these organizations found that as many as 85% of their employees had become more aware of their posture.
Unfortunately, the only way the average employee working in a desk job can know that they don’t have a good posture is when they start experiencing back or shoulder pains. Still, it isn’t too late for you to start making some positive changes in your posture.
Employees Aren’t Taking Enough Breaks
Research suggests that unless employees work somewhere where jobs are overseen by a labor union or where office timings include breaks, workers are bound to keep working without paying much attention to rest. This particular trait is usually seen among white-collar workers and managers.
Even when these individuals do set aside some time for breaks, they will remain seated on their desks and eat packed meals while checking their emails or performing work-related tasks simultaneously. This particular phenomenon also results in bad posture since they remain in a seated position for the majority of the day.
To counter this, you should try and adopt the habit of taking lunch breaks while walking around and inspiring your colleagues to join you.
Why Posture Matters For Productivity
Beside everything you read in this post, you’ve probably already heard a lot about how sedentary work can be harmful for your body. Well, one of the problems associated with work-related health problems is that most people don’t automatically relate them to sitting for too long. If they’re feeling discomfort in their body, they will start believing that it will just hurt at work and go away soon.
It is a fact that remaining seated isn’t a great way to spend the day. However, you shouldn’t ignore the possible benefits of being more aware of and fixing your posture. Most start to believe that their pain is just because of stress or their lack of rest.
That said, we’ve combined a couple of reasons why posture is important for productivity and what could happen if you don’t do something about it.
1. Improves Mental Health
If you have chronic depression, bad posture is bound to affect your productivity. Of course, posture is hardly a prescription for mental health problems but researchers at the University of Auckland found that when people with moderate to mild depression started sitting up straight, they experienced boosts in positive moods and their depressive symptoms weren’t as prominent.
In contrast, the study also concluded that slouching made the participants perform a lot more poorly while completing certain tasks and made them feel even worse about themselves. The people running the study asked participants to straighten their shoulders and backs, and look straight while working. You may also follow these instructions to experience the same benefits.
2. Improves Your Efficiency
Our bodies are built to be self-sufficient. When they are aligned properly, things that would have seemed otherwise strenuous, like standing, seem completed effortless. Specialists who help their patients achieve better posture are of the opinion that postural improvements in static activities, like walking or standing, can transfer enhanced efficiency to dynamic activities so that you feel less fatigued.
To restore the peak efficiency of your body, you should experience what it feels like to have an optimally aligned body in comparison to bad alignment. Try to use a mirror to tweak your stance and achieve the perfect posture.
3. Reduces Heartburn
You, like so many others, probably can’t wait until your lunch break and welcome it since it relieves you from being buckled down to your daily tasks. However, if you forget about your posture when you get back to work, your slumped position may interfere with your digestive system and cause heartburn. As a result, you may get distracted from work and be unable to get things done on time.
Experts recommend that you resist the temptation to lean against the back of a chair for at least half an hour. Doing so will result in producing good posture. If you’re having trouble staying in an upright position for half an hour, you might want to visit an experienced spine specialist.
4. Increases Your Lung Capacity
You might find it hard to believe that your posture can affect your breathing patterns, but experts have found that slumping can reduce your lung capacity by approximately 30%. This makes matter worse when your body doesn’t receive a healthy amount of oxygen, which causes you to experience side effects such as shortness of breath or difficulty thinking. Both of these factors are bound to compromise how you feel and get your work done.
Reduces the Likeliness of Back Pain
At this point, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that good posture reduces the risks of back pain. Often, people ignore the pain in their back because they fear treatment or receiving bad news. While there may be nothing major to worry about, in some cases, pain in the back is caused by health conditions and other issues. In most cases, however, back pain is pretty simple to fix.
Back pain can be caused by an unsupportive mattress, a purse that was too heavy, or even something as simple as wrongly-fitting shoes. As you may have guessed, all of these issues lead to bad posture, which exacerbates the pain. When the discomfort starts getting worse, the pain will become your focal point and, despite your best efforts, will affect your productivity.
What you need to do is to treat your back pain by scheduling an appointment with a professional as soon as you feel a repetitive pain in your back.
5. Improves Your Positive Memory
Moving further, German researchers published a study that shed some light on how a poor posture could lead to recalling bad memories. Theoretically speaking, this behavior has a tendency of getting more severe, which means you might find yourself fixated on your shortcomings as opposed to trying to control what you can improve.
6. Increases Your Assertiveness
Since most of us spend endless hours on our mobile phone on a daily basis, this also tends to have a negative impact on our posture. However, a preliminary study found that our posture while using these devices also affects our assertiveness.
In this study, researchers had asked their participants to use random gadgets for a predetermined period of time. Without announcing that the test was over, the researchers measured how long it would take for the participants to ask their supervisors whether they could leave.
It was found that those participants who were using a smaller device, had to hunch a little more to see their screens clearly. They were the least assertive about speaking up and checking to see whether they could leave the room.
Similarly, if this problem were true in the workplace, this would mean that you might take on more work than you could handle just because you couldn’t speak up to decline the additional work. As a result, your quality of work will decrease.
Does a Standing Desk Improve Posture?
A standing desk not only helps improve posture but also helps you get rid of all the negative health effects of a sedentary lifestyle. The Comhar All-In-One Standing Desk, for instance, has programmable height presets that can transition between standing and sitting with a single touch of a button.
Stop wondering, “Does a standing desk improve posture”, and get yourself a height-adjustable desk for your home office and take all of the above-mentioned tips into serious consideration. We hope this article helps you improve your productivity and allows you to maintain an otherwise impossible work schedule with ease.
