How I Stay Healthy as a Doctor Using my Standing Desk

What is up guys? Karma medicic here and welcome back to another dose. If you're new to the channel, my name is Nasser and I'm a doctor and now surgeon in training living and working in London. And today I want to talk to you all about my desk setup. We're going to be talking ergonomics, posture, eye care, mental health, and more. So make sure you stay till the end to make sure that you're staying healthy whilst studying or working from your desk. This video is sponsored by Vernal. They're the ones who sent me this beautiful desk over here. And you'll find all details about the desk, including a discount code, YTKM, down in the description below, and I'll talk about them later on in this video. But this video is about how to stay healthy whilst working at your desk. So, let's get straight into the most important part of your desk setup, ergonomics. The ergonomics of your desk is central to staying healthy, and it directly influences your posture. You know, no matter how fancy your desk setup is, something like this, if it's not set up correctly, then it might be doing more harm than good for different parts of your body, like your wrist, your shoulders, your neck, and your back. Now, let's start with the foundations of ergonomics. Starting with the floor and working all the way up until our eye level. Now, the first thing that you want is a comfortable chair. Now, these can come in all shapes and sizes, but the important thing is that it is height adjustable so that your knee can be at a 90° angle or a level of flexion when your foot is making contact with the floor. Now, you can also get chairs that have lumbar spine support and all kinds of adjustments and things to inflate and deflate. And if that's an option for you, I'd say more customization is better. But for me personally, the most important thing is a chair that is height adjustable and has a full length back rest. And hopefully your desk is kind of like this where you've got plenty of room underneath to be able to stretch your legs and not hit your knees up against the frame of the desk itself. Now coming up to the elbows, you want these to be naturally rested at about a 90° level or a little bit further down than that. Just something that's comfortable and relaxed. What you definitely don't want is for your elbows to be raised so that your shoulders are in this kind of exaggerated position where they're up and causing lots of tension in your neck. Now, what I find really helps achieve this is having a standing desk because you can adjust the height of the table and then let gravity do the work to pull your elbows down into a nice and relaxed position. Now, with standing desks like this, you can raise and lower the height using a small control panel on the side, which even has memory buttons specific to the heights that you've set, which are optimized for your seated or standing position. or even if you have a partner or other people using the desk, they can have their own memory preset, which is what we have going on here. And that makes sure that the desk returns to its optimized kind of resting position for you, whether you're standing or sitting. Now, probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give you in this video is to get yourself a monitor or a screen with a wireless keyboard and mouse. This just unlocks an infinitely more comfortable desk experience over simply placing your laptop on the table in front of you where it's often too close to your body and you need to lean in and scrunch over to get your eye level down to the level of the screen, putting lots of additional strain on your neck and your shoulders. Now, your monitor should be set at about an arm's length away, kind of like this, because being too close can cause a lot of eye strain, which we'll talk about later in the eye health part of this video. And also if your monitor is too far, then it causes you to lean forward to kind of look into the content of the screen or bring it closer to you, which again puts you in this really bad set of posture where you're leaning forward, shoulders are rolled, and your neck is extended. This is especially important for people like me who have really large monitors where that poor posture can often be exaggerated and lead to significant neck and upper back pain. Now, this desk is plenty deep to give me enough space to put the monitor far away. I think it's at about 60 cm or so, but you can get them even up to 80 cm, which is even deeper. And this is something I'd strongly encourage you to think about when purchasing your own desk. Now, when talking about the height of the monitor, it should be raised so that the top part or the top kind of two to three centimeters or so are almost at eye level or within your eye level. Now, the reason for this is that you want your kind of resting neck position to be looking at the monitor and you don't have to look up to look at your monitor, which causes loads of strain and pain in the neck. And at the same time, you also don't want to be looking down cuz then you're using a lot of your neck muscles in order to maintain that position. You want to be in a neutral neck position where your eye level is at approximately the top of the monitor. Now, your keyboard and mouse on the desk should be far enough into the desk so that you can rest some of your wrist and forearm on the desk itself and not have them hovering in the air, which causes again a lot of muscle stress to be able to hold them in that position. You also don't want them to be too close to you that you're kind of tucked in with your elbows like this, which can also be straining. So, yes, the advice is not too far, but not too close. Find a place that's comfortable for you. The actual height of your keyboard shouldn't be so high that you have to extend your wrist like this in order to type on it. Some of these keyboards have a really thick base and can be quite high, causing a lot of pain when you take this position. If your keyboard is like that, you can always get a wrist rest or something nice and soft to put underneath your wrist to hold them in a more neutral position or kind of straight when you're doing your typing and your mouse moving. Now, there's all kinds of products that you can find online to help deal with this, mostly cushions for your wrist to rest on. So, have a look if this is something that's been bothering you. Another thing to say is to keep your peripherals, you know, your mouse, your keyboard, your cup of coffee or whatever within reach. You don't want to be having to stretch over and extending yourself every time you want to use your mouse on the desk. You want everything to be kind of close. You know, I want a cup of coffee. Here it is. I want to type on my keyboard. It's right there. I want to use my mouse. It's right there. Don't put things far away from you. Set everything up on your desk so that it's within a comfortable reach. Another relatively small but I think useful tip is that you can turn up the sensitivity of your mouse so that with smaller movements, physical movements on the desk, your mouse cursor moves a much larger distance. And this prevents you from having to do kind of this when you're trying to move across the screen with the mouse. Instead, you can just kind of go a little bit left, a little bit right, and your mouse moves quite a lot. Then there's the small things that you can do like having a soft surface for your feet to rest on like a carpet or perhaps a supportive floor mat or cushioned mat. that can take a bit of the pressure off of your feet, which again takes the pressure off your knees and makes it a bit more comfortable to sit at your desk for long periods of time. Now, for me personally, I've had standing desks for the last 7 years or so, or 8 years that I've been living here in the UK, and personally, they're absolutely necessary because they unlock a completely different way of working or studying from home. The best part of this is that you can quickly switch between these two positions. And for me personally, when I sit at a desk for a long period of time, I get a lot of aches all over my body, in my neck, in my lower back. And moving into a standing position for an hour, getting that change, moving my legs around, and then coming back to a seated position is the only reason that I can, you know, sit down and work for such long periods of time like I do in all of my study with me videos. Having a motorized standing desk where the table lifts and lowers automatically is, you know, even better. I used to have a manual one that I would have to crank and that kind of increased the activation energy that I would need in order to move it into the standing position. So, I would do it less often. But with a desk like this where you just press a button and it simply lifts or lowers really quickly and easily, super stable at the top, it makes it a very easy decision for me to switch between the two modes. I usually alternate between an hour of sitting and an hour of standing, and it makes those long work sessions so much more doable. Now, regarding ergonomics, when standing at your desk, a lot of the same things that we talked about still apply. You still want your elbows at about 90°. You want to match the height of the monitor to meet you at eye level. And again, you can move the keyboard and mouse and adjust them as you need to keep them within reach. Now, posture is something that is all too often ignored. And if you don't pay serious attention to it, it can easily slip and lead to all kinds of muscularkeeletal problems. I'm definitely guilty of this, and so you know, this section of the video is just as much for me as it is for you watching. If you have good posture, then it helps you keep your back, knees, shoulders, wrists, and neck in check. When sitting down, your feet should be flat on the floor in their neutral position, not raised in plantar flexion, which is like this or in the other way, dorsif flexion like that, just rested nice and neutral on the floor. You should avoid crossing your legs as much as possible cuz this puts pressure on all the different structures in the lower limb or in the leg like your arteries, your veins, your nerves. And I'm sure you've all had that feeling where you sit down for some period of time and then you have a dead leg with your pins and needles. You want to try and avoid that. Keep yourself in a nice rested position. Try not to cross too often or sit on your leg for a long period of time. Another really important thing is that you want to avoid leaning into your screen. And I'm particularly bad at this. I think because I just get tired after sitting down or standing for long periods of time, particularly my neck, and I kind of slump into this forward position. Now, in this position, your neck is outside of its natural alignment with the spine, which is kind of like a top down string. And instead, your muscles are using a lot of energy and straining and tensing in order to keep the neck in this position. Because if you were to relax, you would just fall like this, right? So, keeping your neck up like this forward is actually quite straining, especially over long periods of time. So, make sure you kind of always revert back to your natural neutral seated position. Now, if you have a full-length chair where you can rest your back and your head, I personally find it quite comfortable to rest my head slightly up against the headrest, which I think relieves a little bit of tension and stress up in my neck muscles. Now, a great tip that I once heard from someone on how to remind yourself to get into a good posture is to imagine that somebody has a string kind of attached to the very top of your head and they're pulling you up on that string from the top of your head. And that helps me get into this kind of relaxed neutral position, which is where my posture is much better than me just slumped over or leaning into my screen. Okay, now let's talk about shoulders. Please, please, please relax your shoulders. Okay, keep them nice and down. Roll them outwards. So, that's external rotation like this, not rounded. and internally rotated like this. Okay, you've probably seen people who spend too long at their computer like me have rounded shoulders where they're kind of hunched down looking like this. Shoulders nice and relaxed down rounded. Okay, and externally rotated like this. Just relaxed. Okay, none of this. This is the worst for posture. Now, I find this position extremely easy to do when I'm standing because I feel like gravity just naturally pulls my shoulders down and makes it a bit easier, but a little bit harder when sitting. So, it's something that I need to constantly remind myself to do. Now again, when it comes to posture while standing, most of what we talked about before still applies, but one key thing to take note of is your positioning of the feet when standing. You want to make sure that these aren't too close together. You can have them a little bit further apart to kind of evenly distribute your weight across both legs. Try and engage your core again so you're not kind of leaning backwards or leaning forwards. And avoid locking your knees entirely. You can keep them a little bit flexed. You can move around going from one leg to the other. Stretch your knees, you know, lift your legs up a little bit every now and again. get the blood flow going down there is that you don't have blood pooling towards your feet. Just move around a little bit. Another advantage of having a standing desk is you can kind of alter your movement and move around a little bit. Now, if you have one of those walking treadmills or anti- fatigue mats, this would be a great place to use them. Having any kind of movement in the legs while you're standing can really help with circulation and prevent blood from pooling down by the ankles. This can reduce fatigue and can help you stay working or studying at your desk for longer periods of time. Now, one tip that I find incredibly helpful to remember all of these different aspects of my posture is that I have an alarm on my phone or on an app on my computer that rings every 55 minutes. And it's just a reminder for me to check, am I slouching down into my chair? Am I leaning forward? Do I need to sit upright a little bit more? Maybe adjust some of the peripherals on my desk. It just acts as a little, you know, Nasser, remember to check your posture. You're here for a long time. You need to be able to stay healthy and stay here in a comfortable way. Now that 55minut reminder is also a great excuse for me to get up and move away from my desk, get a glass of water, a cup of coffee, whatever. And also a reminder to do some gentle exercises and movements which we'll talk about in the next section. Now sitting at your desk all day is tiring. And if you're anything like me, over time you start to get really stiff and tense sitting at your desk, particularly in your lower back, your shoulders, and your neck. And this makes it all the more important to introduce movement and stretching into your routine when you're working or studying from your standing desk all day at home. So, like I said, I have this timer that rings every 55 minutes that I've spent at my desk, and it's a reminder for me to do all of these things. Now, the stretches and movements that I do when my timer rings changes all the time. I don't always do the same thing. Just depends on how I'm feeling that day. But here are a few examples of the different kinds of movements and stretches that you can introduce into your studying or working routine, which are really quick and easy to do, but can make a big difference to your comfort at your desk. So, I think it's really important to stretch out your neck and you can move it from side to side applying a bit of gentle pressure with your hands. If you want to get that extra big stretch in, you can rotate your neck looking towards the left and looking towards the right. You can move your neck up and down having your chin touch your chest and also raising up your neck to look up towards the sky and do gentle neck rolls as well. You can do them half neck rolls like 180 degrees or full neck rolls in a 360 degree motion. Now for your spine, I personally find it really really relieving to crack my back and crack my spine, but I try and avoid it as much as possible and instead replace it with movements like this. So you can flex or bend your spine moving left or right to get a bit of that big stretch into the big muscles of your upper back and side. Especially if I'm standing and studying, I will periodically stretch my legs. So you can stretch your hamstrings, which are your hip extensors, by doing this. You can stretch your quadriceps or your hip flexors by doing this. And that really helps release the tension down in my lower legs. And like I talked about before, prevents the pooling of blood around the ankles and the feet that you can get from standing for long periods of time. Now, like I said before, you don't have to do all of these stretches. Just introduce some movement and stretching into your routine so that you prevent yourself from becoming stiff and can stay working at your desk for longer periods of time. And then again, this timer is a great excuse to step away from your desk. Like we said, even if it's for something as simple as grabbing a cup of coffee or a glass of water, checking in on your girlfriend or whatever it is, just to get a bit of movement and change of position and posture away from your desk. Now, let's talk about something that I'm sure we've all long forgotten about, which is eye care. But seriously, we spend hours and hours staring at screens during our day. Whether it's, you know, these big monitors here or our phones, our TVs, computers, it's not great. But here are a few different things that you can do to protect your eyes and take care of them in the long run. First of all, if your computer or your monitor has something like a true tone setting, make sure you turn it on. It adjusts the colors, the brightness, and the intensity of the display to match your ambient lighting in the room so that the screen is more natural and comfortable for your eyes. This is particularly important at nighttime when your ambient uh environment is quite dark and you can have your bright white screen blasting all of these colors straight into your eyes. You can turn that on and it kind of adjusts things to make it more natural. Second, and very importantly, is every now and again you should try and look at something that is far away from your screen. When you're focused on an object or something that's in front of your face, your eyes do something called accommodation, which is adjusting of the muscles of the eye so that they can focus on the thing that's in front of you and bring that object into focus. Now, this is actually really tiring. And if you want to get a sense for just how tiring this is, you can do an exaggerated version of this, which is trying to focus on something very close to your eyes. If you put your finger right in front of your eyes and focus on it for just 5 or 10 seconds, you'll realize just how much your eye muscles are straining in order to keep that in focus. Now, your eyes are actually doing something very similar when you're looking at a monitor in front of you. It's just that they're a little bit far away, but they are still tensing and focusing on that object nonetheless. And so in order to break that and relieve your eyes of that tension, you need to look at something that's further away, far away from what's directly in front of you. This gives the muscles in your eyes a chance to rest. It allows them to relax, kind of reset, and then you can go back to staring at something that's a bit closer. And a very common rule of thumb or something to help you remember about this is the 20 2020 rule, which says that you should look at something that's approximately 20 ft away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. Now, admittedly, I don't do this. What I do is every hour when that timer rings and I do my different stretches and movements, I walk away from my desk to get something that also introduces me to look at something that's a bit further away. But if you have a window, you know, with a nice view behind your desk or if you can go and look at something that's further away, that's particularly helpful. Another thing that you can do is get blue light glasses or you can download softwares for your computer that are blue light filters, something like Flux. And this reduces the amount of blue light exposure that is coming to your eyes from your screens. Now, again, this is especially important in the evening and nighttime because blue light from the sun naturally is what tells your body to stay awake and what stimulates you throughout the day. So, if you're looking at your screens and receiving a lot of blue light, especially at night, it can disrupt your body's natural circadian rhythm, which makes it harder to fall asleep. So, if you've got those white bright hospital lights, you know, replace them with something that's a little bit more like this, a little bit warmer, yellower. Uh research has shown that it it can help you relax and improve your eye strain. Now everything that we've talked about so far in this video is, you know, really helpful from a practical point of view. But from a mental health and a sanity point of view, you know, having a comfortable working environment can be the difference between sitting or standing at your desk working all day in a happy mood or being the place or area that you go to which you really resent and you don't enjoy being there and keeps you uncomfortable for 8 hours or more depending on how long your working day is. And it's easy to forget your mental health as part of, you know, your working environment when standing or sitting at your desk. And it's just as important as your physical posture, especially when you're here for long periods of time. I've just gone through a multi-month studying period when I was preparing for a big surgical exam. And you know, making sure that my mental health was in check throughout that entire time was really important to me. In fact, without keeping my mental health in check, I wouldn't have been able to do the physical amount of studying that was needed to get done. And personally for me, I've always found that having a comfortable and happy working environment leads to me being able to study more, be more rested, be more focused, and be more energized in the work that I'm doing. This kind of spacious, cozy, organized, and neat desk is, you know, at the core of my happiness when I sit down here to work. And really, it makes a huge difference. Like I said, it helps me keep relaxed, focused, and motivated to actually work here and get things done as opposed to being a place that I just kind of resent going to and don't want to be in. I want to give a really big thank you to Vernal who, like I said, sent me this desk and have allowed me to build such a beautiful desk setup that fits everything that I want and I feel has really improved my mental health and happiness whilst working over here for such long periods of time. Building the desk was extremely easy. It came with pre-installed nuts everywhere. So, all I had to do was put the legs together, attach the legs to the desk, and then flip the whole thing over, and I was basically done. If you're particularly interested in my desk, this is a solid wood walnut desk that measures 160 cm in length by 80 cm in depth. But Veral has a bunch of different desk sizes and materials on their website that you can look at to find the desk that best suits you. Personally, I love having a big big big desk. This way I have, you know, space to put everything that I want on it in a neat way where it doesn't look cluttered. I've even got this desk shelf over here that gives me kind of two levels of separation and storage so I can put things underneath. And you know, having a big desk for me is a big part of my like mental health and happiness when studying, just that I have a comfortable and open space that I can work in. Now, if you didn't know, I'm a pretty tall guy. So, being able to raise this desk to a height that is tall enough for me to be able to rest my elbows comfortably is really, really great. With my old desk, I felt that I couldn't really get it high enough. So, the fact that this one raises as much as I need it to is really important to me. And having the memory buttons on that control panel on the side is just a game changer, making it super easy to switch between the standing and sitting position, which is really important to encourage me to do that multiple times in a big working session. And that's what allows me to stay at my desk studying or working for so long. It's the fact that I can change my posture. I can change my position, and it keeps me comfortable for much longer periods of time. The desk is also rock steady at its maximum height, which is great cuz it means I don't have to worry about knocking over or spilling my coffee or water glass while studying. And like I said, for me, being happy at my desk means having a neat and organized desk. I love that over here everything has its little place. You know, I've got my catch all for my wallet, my AirPods, my watch, my keys, things like that. My computer sits neatly under here. I can pull out this shelf over here, which has my notepads and stuff. I've got a little charging station back over there for my phone and things, speakers, camera, keyboard, and everything on this mat. All the rest of it, for me, having this neat and organized environment just really helps me be comfortable and happy at my desk. And part of this neatness and organization is that I've gone to great lengths to make sure that there are no cables visible on the desk. I mean, maybe you'll find one or two, but just ignore them. I'll show you the belly of the beast underneath so that you can see how I've achieved all of this. Vernal has a cable management kit that includes things like cable ties. It has the cable tray, these cable organizers that help keep everything kind of neatly tucked away underneath the desk. So when you walk into the office or when you're sitting or standing working at this desk, you don't see any of those cables and everything just looks like magic in my opinion. At the end of the day, as a doctor and training surgeon, I spend hours and hours studying and working here. And it's really important for me that my desk is organized, comfortable, and big enough to have everything that I need on it like this. Overall, I really feel like I've managed to build the desk setup of my dreams, which has everything that I could possibly ever want on it and is organized in the way that helps me stay comfortable working and studying here for really long periods of time. And that brings us to the end of this video. I really hope that you learned at least one new thing about how you can stay healthy whilst working or studying at your desk for long periods of time. Definitely check out Vernal in the description down below if you want to get yourself a beautiful desk just like this. And you can use my code YTKM, which is short for YouTube Karma, to get an extra discount at checkout. If you've got any questions for me, you can leave them in the comment section down below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.